The peoples of Europe

by H. J. Fleure

Denmark at the Baltic entry, and linked to the life of that sea especially by its islands and the important passage of the Sound, makes with Norway and Sweden the Scandinavian sub-group in the Teutonic family of languages, and here nations and languages correspond reasonably closely.

Whereas Holstein, at the base of the peninsula of Jutland, became included in the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages, Slesvig remained outside that attempted organization. German speech and thought pervaded South Slesvig as far north as the fjord which has Flensburg at its head, but in spite of political effort, 1864-1914, North Slesvig remained steadily Danish in feeling, and has now been liberated to rejoin the little kingdom. The boundary chosen seems to show a fair-minded interpretation of the recent plebiscite, though there are minorities on both sides of the line.

Denmark has a very long story from the days of her prehistoric kitchen-middens onwards, and she owes something to the fact that Jutland was in some sort a north-western terminus of a belt of loess, heath, and sand-hill, stretching westward from the steppe border of South Russia. Along this belt came to her the pre-Bronze Age immigrants distinguished by their 'Beaker pottery', and the amber trade seems to have used a part of this route.

The Danes have thus long been a racial complex, but the fair Nordic type predominates on the whole. Denmark's share, especially in the organizing aspects of the great maritime movements of post-Roman times, is well known, but Petersson's view that this occurred during a period of favourable climate and ice-free coasts in the northern seas helps one to realize the connexion of that activity with a particular period. The association of Denmark and Norway in maritime activity was long continued, and when the latter fell on bad times in the Middle Ages, the domination of the former became very marked. The political aspect of the matter is outside our scope, but with the nineteenth century the weakening of Denmark under German pressure loosed the bonds, and circumstances gave Norway in the end a remarkable opportunity. It thus came about that in 1864 Denmark saw the end of her ancien régime, and began a new career. The name of her Bishop Grundtvig stands out in company with that of Abbé of Jena and a few others in the drab century of commercial imperialisms. He set out to re-educate the Danish people in co-operation and simplicity, and, with his high schools for the development not so much of the technicalities as of the amenities of life, he became one of those who builded better than he knew. The sheer financial success of the new agriculture of Denmark, thanks to skilled co-operative organization, is an outstanding phenomenon, however much may be due to the general increase of prosperity of the stock-raiser in the regions round the manufacturing centres. Copenhagen has become a centre for the wholesale marketing of butter, with train ferries and other communications making links with Esbjerg, with Germany, with Sweden, and across to the east side of the Baltic. Like Switzerland and Holland, Denmark contributes in no small measure to the intellectual life of Europe, partly through the opportunities her sons find in Berlin and other large centres of the big nations.

Of the first peopling of Norway comparatively little is known, but the population must have been sparse indeed until man was fairly well equipped to cope with that region's serious difficulties. It is a country of ledges along a broken coast, fantastically cut by fjords which are deep valleys of the edge of a high plateau modified by ice and then partially submerged under the sea. The partial submergence has converted outlying hillocks into a maze of islands, between which and the land there is, for long distances, a fairly open channel, an old longitudinal valley no doubt. The men of the fjords are in large measure of the tall, fair, long-headed Nordic type, but around the seaward ends of the southern fjords are dark broad-heads, who in this case are almost beyond doubt settlers from the sea. The physical geography of Trondhjem Fjord, on land and water, helps to make clear its special early importance, particularly during a period of good climate, but the whole of Norway suffered sadly in the fourteenth century from bad harvests and Hanseatic interference, and from that time onwards to the nineteenth century Norway's fortunes were low.

As in other lands of ancient poverty (note Finland and Switzerland) the nineteenth century brought the final merging of the old aristocracy in the people; the relation with Denmark was loosed and a temporary link with Sweden, partly under fear of Russian Tsarist aggression, did not take deep root in the lives of the people. Much importance must be attached to the linguistic and literary revival of which the famous Bjornsen is the central figure. Meanwhile British Free Trade, and especially the repeal of the British Navigation Acts (1849), gave the Norse sailor and shipbuilder a chance, and the country developed a great mercantile marine, which managed to maintain itself until 1914, in spite of the advent of the iron ship and steamer. During and since the war Norway has not managed to keep pace with other mercantile marines like those of the United States of America and Japan.

Internally, Norway was from far-off times till quite recently a people of fisher-farmers prizing individual property on the small cultivable ledges beside the fjords, and leading cattle to summer pastures on the high grasslands of the great mountain plateau. The practice of inheritance by the first-born son is traditionally associated with these little farms so difficult to subdivide, and the long-continued absences of much of the male part of the population (fishing) are another feature. The latter fact is said to be accountable for the unique power of women in Norwegian affairs, and the women have certainly contributed much to the modern development of Norway as a pacific, self-reliant democracy. In the twentieth century there has already been a great growth of industry based on the hydro-electric power available in such quantity in the fjords; the chemical industry, including the preparation of nitrates from atmospheric nitrogen, is a feature. Since the war the value of Norwegian currency has gone down with the slackness of shipping and the inability of Germany to trade as she used to do, but the depreciation is not very great, and may well right itself if the war-clouds clear. Fish and timber have long been, and are likely to remain, valuable commercial assets; the need of imported cereals is a permanent difficulty.

At the back of Norway, on the high mountain plateau, are the Lapps, whose seasonal wanderings disregard the international frontier between Norway and Sweden. Fortunately, therefore, when Sweden and Norway gave up (in 1905) their artificial and temporary union, it was mutually agreed, as became enlightened peoples, that the frontier would be entirely demilitarized. The separation coincided with a great development of Norway's trade, based upon the application of hydro-electric power to industry.

The Norwegian people centuries ago seemed to be giving up their language for Danish, but here, as in so many other countries (Bohemia, Serbia, Finland, Flanders, Catalonia, and Wales), the nineteenth century brought a resurgence of local speech, and the work of Bjornsen and Ibsen gave that speech a literary standard, and made its literature a power in the modern world, fortunately with comparatively little development of international antagonism, for by this time there was no language competing locally with Norwegian; Danish had retired and Swedish was too far off to matter seriously, though its pressure was at one time threatened.

The Western Scandinavians of late Viking times spread across the northern seas to Iceland, Greenland, and 'Wineland', which has been identified with the New England coast of North America. The connexion with America was lost, and that with Greenland almost, if not quite, lost as well, probably in the severities of climate of the fourteenth century, but that with the Faroes and Iceland persisted. In this way Iceland has become in some sort a repository of the Scandinavian past, and thence has spread in modern times a knowledge and appreciation of the ancient sagas of the Norse rovers, with elements embedded in them that date back far beyond Viking times. Icelandic and the literature embodied in it have thus become an important matter for students of European tradition and literary history, and the influence thence exerted on modern Germany, notably through Wagner, has been far-reaching and many-sided.