Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North

by Robert Ferguson

Overview

“An engaging, layered look into a culture complex enough both to produce stylish rain gear and to embrace the foul weather that necessitates it.” —The New York Times Book Review

We fill our homes with Nordic furniture; we envy their humane social welfare system and healthy outdoor lifestyle; we devour their crime fiction. Even their strangely attractive melancholia seems to express a stoic, commonsensical acceptance of life’s vicissitudes. But how valid is this outsider’s view of Scandinavia, and how accurate is our picture of life in Scandinavia today?

Scandinavians follows a chronological progression across the Northern centuries: the Vendel era of Swedish prehistory; the age of the Vikings; the Christian conversions of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland; the unified Scandinavian state of the late Middle Ages; the sea-change of the Reformation; the kingdom of Denmark-Norway; King Gustav Adolphus and the age of Sweden’s greatness; the cultural golden age of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Munch; the impact of the Second World War; Scandinavia’s postwar social democratic nirvana; and the terror attack of Anders Behring Breivik.

Scandinavians is also a personal investigation, with award-winning author Robert Ferguson as the ideal companion as he explores not only the region’s society, politics, culture, and temperament, but also wide-ranging topics such as the power and mystique of Scandinavian women, from the Valkyries to the Vikings; from Nora and Hedda to Garbo and Bergman.

“A delightful history in which the author truly captures ‘the soul of the North.’ ”—Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781468314830
Publisher:	ABRAMS, Inc.
Publication date:	09/01/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	519
Sales rank:	379,829
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Robert Ferguson worked at a number of jobs including postman, hospital porter, deckhand on a trawler, factory worker, cook, driver etc before enrolling as a student at UCL, London in 1976 and taking a course in Scandinavian Studies. He graduated in 1980. In 1983 he emigrated to Norway and has made his home there since. He began his literary career as a radio dramatist, translating and adapting for radio works by Knut Hamsun and Henrik Ibsen for the BBC. He has also written eleven original radio plays and twice won the BBC Methuen Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Drama, in 1984 and 1986. His first literary biography was Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, which was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Best Biography Award in 1987. It also won the University of London J.G.Robertson Award. In 1996 Enigma was dramatized as a 6-part television series by NRK (Norwegian State Television) As well as literary biographies and a history of the Vikings, Ferguson has written two novels, published only in Norwegian.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Map of Scandinavia xiv

Prelude: A Season in Hell: Copenhagen 1969 xv

A Note on Scandinavian Languages xxii

1 Stones 1

2 The Conversion of the Icelanders 20

3 Amleth, Luther and the Last Priest: the Reformation in Scandinavia 35

4 The King of the Past: Frederik VII of Denmark 61

5 The Vasa Ship: Sweden's Age of Greatness 81

6 Abductions: The War Between the Danes and Algerians 106

7 The Short Sweet Rule of Johann Friedrich Struensee 132

8 Taking God at His Word: Søren Kierkegaard and Olav Fiskvik 157

9 The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Explorer 178

Interlude: Ibsen's Ghosts 211

10 The Emigrants 269

11 World War II: The Scandinavian Experience 299

12 The Power of Scandinavian Women 327

13 Dagny Juel and the Invention of Melancholy 350

14 Malexander 376

15 Oslo 2016 400

A Scandinavian Timeline 417

For Further Interest 431

List of Illustrations 439

Acknowledgements 445

Index 447

Editorial Reviews

In the delightfully free-roaming Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North [Ferguson] sets out to explore the link between a people and a mood…[Ferguson] is a sensitive guide through these Nordic pasts. He combines the expat's delight in the quirks the native might take for granted with his deep knowledge of the region…Gradually, the quirks and the knowledge cohere into an argument that makes sense of all that melancholy…This is not the book to read for glowing paeans to generous parental leave or the hottest new foraging chef or architecturally innovative bicycle bridges or any of the other things that have made Scandinavia the darling of lifestyle magazine editors the world over. Instead, it offers something rarer: an engaging, layered look into a culture complex enough both to produce stylish rain gear and to embrace the foul weather that necessitates it.

The New York Times Book Review - Lisa Abend

04/24/2017
In a free-wheeling love letter to the essence of Scandinavia, Ferguson (Life Lessons from Kierkegaard) takes readers on a leisurely jaunt through the collective, interconnected histories of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. This is not a dry, exclusively historical narrative; rather, it is part oral history and part a narrative of personal experience. The U.K.-born Ferguson interweaves tales from more than 30 years of living in Norway and professions of his passion for Scandinavia with accounts of prominent historical episodes and interviews he has conducted. This “isn’t, strictly speaking, a history so much as a journey, a discursive and digressive stroll through the last thousand years of Scandinavian culture in search of the soul of the north,” he explains. Whether he’s waxing poetic about the works and impact of playwright Henrik Ibsen, examining how differently each Scandinavian country acted and reacted during WWII, or contemplating the mystique and strength of Scandinavia’s women, Ferguson combines the factual and the intimate. This characteristic of the book keeps things from becoming too dry, though it also results in a work that is sprawling and overly broad. It’s as if in searching for the soul of the North, Ferguson’s writing lost its way. Passionate yet prone to distraction, Ferguson delivers an idiosyncratic look at Scandinavia. Agent: David Miller, Rogers, Coleridge, and White. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"A delightful history in which the author truly captures 'the soul of the North.'" ---Kirkus

From the Publisher

Denmark,
Norway, and Sweden must by several measures be the richest, happiest, and most successful societies the world has ever known; yet their inhabitants are famous for

melancholy . .
. Scandinavia is famous for hedonism and sexual freedom; yet the plots of
Scandi noir stories often turn not on crimes but on old sins: adultery, incest,
abuse. What causes these extreme clashes of light and darkness? Robert Ferguson tries to get to the bottom of it through a combination of personal memoir,
literary and cultural analysis, and episodic history. . . . Ferguson has brought them all back to life, and very engagingly so.

Times Literary Supplement

Ferguson’s prose has the crisp, deliberate crunch of footsteps on gravel; you can’t tell if he’s taking you to a Lutheran funeral or to Hamlet at the theatre.”

Max Adams

Scandinavians is essential reading.”

Sir Richard Eyre

There can be few outsiders who know as much about the Scandinavians as Robert Ferguson.

Liv Ullman

Told with deep knowledge and intoxicating passion.

BBC

Ferguson’s stroll through more than one thousand years of Scandinavian history offers an enchanting glimpse into the region’s political, economic, social, and cultural past.

Booklist (starred review)

[An] enormously entertaining, fact-jammed . . . enthralling read . . . For this, Ferguson deserves a medal or two.

The Norwegian American

A delightful book chock-full of surprises, fascinating anecdotes and insights into the region’s rich history and culture.

Associated Press Staff

Robert Ferguson’sScandinaviansis not a book for the beach, but it might well fit the bill on a distant northern shore, with the fog rolling in and memories of long ships stirring . . . beautifully written, it presents a historical narrative punctuated by reminiscences, conversations retold, snatches of autobiography, fragments of biography and stories. ”

The Wall Street Journal

A delightfully free-roaming exploration of the myth of the brooding Scandinavian. This isn’t the book to read for glowing paeans to parental leave or foraging chefs; instead, it’s a rarer offering: an engaging, layered look into a complex culture.

The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

A delightfully free-roaming exploration of the myth of the brooding Scandinavian. This isn’t the book to read for glowing paeans to parental leave or foraging chefs; instead, it’s a rarer offering: an engaging, layered look into a complex culture.

The New York Times (editors' choice)

Narrator Michael Page brings his full complement of language gifts to the task of narrating this wide-ranging audiobook. His ability to read Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish adds to the richness of his performance. The text mixes history, memoir, and personal reflection with numerous interviews and detailed descriptions of the region. Page’s English accent works perfectly in his emulation of the ex-pat author’s voice. By turns highly informative, speculative, and discursive, this audiobook focuses on how Scandinavia has come to represent what is good, bad, and mystifying about northern European liberal democracies. The author, who lives in Norway, is especially effective in answering why these prosperous countries produce such melancholy literature and art. He has particularly good profiles of Ibsen and Strindberg and offers insights on Greta Garbo. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2017 - AudioFile

★ 2017-04-04
An eye-opening history of a region and culture "vibrant with people, noise, chance, life."In this valuable study—not merely a recounting of the stereotypes regarding Vikings and their rampaging ways—award-winning writer and translator Ferguson (Kierkegaard: Great Thinkers on Modern Life, 2015, etc.) searches for the deepest soul of Scandinavia, traversing three countries (Norway, Sweden, and Denmark) once united under a single monarch. The author also includes Iceland, a former territory of Denmark, then Norway, and home of the purest form of their shared ancient language, Old Norse. Much of this lucid book unfolds like a series of short stories, tales told Ferguson by friends, literary connections, and even strangers. In 1969, at age 20, the British author took off on a lark to Sweden and Denmark, and, despite some misadventures, his love for Scandinavia was born. He moved to Norway in 1983 and has lived there ever since. Playing tour guide for his wife, Ferguson exuberantly relates his explorations. Searching deeper proves difficult, as many of the histories of Scandinavia were written by her enemies. The Vikings were in everyone's history books, of course, and while the classic portrayal of the Norsemen reflected a bellicose nature, the author rejects that view. The Vikings had great respect for the rule of law and strong rites to which they adhered faithfully. What Ferguson is really searching for is the essence of their psyche and how the idea of the melancholy, brooding man replaced the specter of the bloodthirsty conqueror. Different theories cross his path, such as the vast loneliness of the landscape; however, at the same time, that loneliness has produced so many geniuses in a variety of fields. Ferguson also astutely examines the idea that history isn't always what you think it was; it depends on the recorder, and the past can change its shape. A delightful history in which the author truly captures "the soul of the North."

Kirkus Reviews