On seeing the Norwegian coast as outlined on the map, what imagination can fail to be amazed at its fantastic contour—long tongues of granite, round which the surges of the North Sea are for ever moaning? Who has not dreamed of the majestic spectacle of these beachless shores, these endless creeks, and inlets, and little bays, no two of which are alike, and each a pathless gulf? Would it not seem as though Nature had amused herself by representing, in an indestructible hieroglyphic, the symbol of life in Norway, by giving its coast the configuration of the bones of an enormous fish? For fishing is the staple of commerce, and almost the sole article of food to a handful of men who cling, like a tuft of lichen, to those barren rocks. On a land extending over fourteen degrees of longitude there are scarcely seven hundred thousand souls. Owing to the inglorious dangers and the perpetual snow that these Norwegian peaks offer to the traveler—the very name of Norway makes one cold—their sublime beauty remains inviolate and harmonizes with certain human phenomena, which took place there—equally unknown, at least to romance, and of which this is the story.
When one of these inlets, a mere fissure in the sight of the eider-ducks, is wide enough to prevent the sea from freezing over in the rocky prison it tosses and struggles in, the inhabitants call such a little gulf a fjord, a word which most geographers have tried to adopt into their respective languages. In spite of the general resemblance of all these channels, each has its own individuality; the sea penetrates into all these breaches, but in each the rocks are differently riven, and their contorted precipices defy the terms of geometry: here the crest is toothed like a saw; there its sides are too perpendicular to allow the snow to rest on them, or the glorious clumps of northern pines to take root; further on, the convulsions of the globe have rounded off some soft declivity, a lovely valley furnished with stage on stage of dark-plumed trees. You feel inclined to call this land Marine Switzerland.
One of these gulfs, lying between Dronthjem and Christiania, is called Stromfiord. If the Stromfiord is not the most beautiful of these scenes, it has at least the merit of presenting the earthly magnificence of Norway, and of having been the background to the scenes of a really heavenly romance.
The general outline of the Stromfiord is, at a first glance, that of a funnel forced open by the sea. The entrance made by the waves is the record of a contest between the ocean and the granite, two equally powerful elements—one by its inertia, the other by its motion. The proof lies in some half-sunken rocks of fantastic shapes which prohibit the entrance of vessels. The hardy sons of the soil can in some places leap from rock to rock, undismayed by a gulf a hundred fathoms deep and six feet wide. Here and there a frail and ill-balanced block of gneiss, thrown across, joins two crags, or hunters or fishermen have flung some pine-trees, by way of a bridge, from one perpendicular cliff to another, where the sea murmurs unceasingly below.
This dangerous inlet turns to the right with a serpentine twist, where it meets a mountain rising three hundred fathoms above the surface of the sea, its foot forming a vertical shelf half a league in length, where the unyielding granite does not begin to split into rifts and inequalities till at about two hundred feet above the water. Thus the sea, rushing violently in, is no less violently driven back, by the resistant inertia of the mountain, towards the opposite shore, which the rebounding waves have worn into gentle indentations. The fiord is closed at the head by a cliff of gneiss, crowned with forest, whence a stream falls in cascades, forms a river when the snows melt, spreads into a lake of considerable extent, and escapes with a rush, carrying down old pine-trees and ancient larches, hardly perceptible in the tumbling torrent. Flung by the fall to the bottom of the abyss, these trees presently come to the surface again, and combine in a tangle, forming islets which are stranded on the left bank, where the inhabitants of the little village built on the Stromfiord find them splintered, broken, sometimes entire, but always stripped of their leaves and branches.
The mountain, which thus receives at its feet the assaults of the sea, and on its head the buffeting of the north wind, is the Falberg. Its summit, always wrapped in a mantle of ice and snow, is the highest in Norway, where the vicinity of the Pole produces, at a level of eighteen hundred feet above the sea, such cold as prevails elsewhere on the highest mountains on the globe. The crest of this cliff, perpendicular on the side towards the sea, shelves gradually away to the east down to the falls of the Sieg, by a succession of slopes where the cold allows no vegetation but heath and much-enduring shrubs. That part of the fiord where the waters escape under the thick forest is called Siegdalen, or the valley of the Sieg—the name of the river.
The bay opposite to the cliffs of the Falberg is the valley of Jarvis—a pretty spot overlooked by hills covered with fir-trees, larches, and birch, with a few oaks and beeches, the thickest and most variously colored hangings Nature ever affords to this wild northern scenery. The eye can easily distinguish the line where the ground, warmed by the sun's rays, first admits of culture and shows the first signs of the Norwegian flora. At this part the gulf is wide enough to allow the waters flung back by the Falberg to die murmuring on the lowest ledge of the hills, where the strand is softly fringed with fine sand, mingled with mica, tiny crystals, and pretty pebbles of porphyry and many-colored marbles brought from Sweden by the river, with waifs from the sea, and shells and ocean weeds tossed up by storms from the Pole or from the South.
At the foot of the Jarvis hills is the village, consisting of about two hundred wooden houses, inhabited by a population that live there, lost, like the swarms of bees in a forest, happily vegetating and extorting a living from the wilderness around them. The unrecognized existence of this village is easily explained. Few of its men were bold enough to venture out among the rocks to reach the open sea and attempt the fishing which the Norwegians carry on to a great extent on less dangerous parts of the coast. The various fish in the fiord partly supplies the food of the inhabitants; the pasture land in the valleys affords milk and butter; a few plots of good land allow them to reap a harvest of rye, of hemp, and vegetables, which they manage to protect against the bitter cold and the transient but terrible heat of the sun, showing true Norwegian ingenuity in this twofold conflict. The absence of communications, either by land, where roads are impracticable, or by sea, where only small boats can thread the watery labyrinths of the fiord, hinders them from acquiring wealth by the sale of their timber. It would cost an equally enormous sum to clear the channel at the entrance or to open up a road to the interior.
The roads from Christiania to Dronthjem all make a bend round the Stromfiord, crossing the Sieg by a bridge several leagues above the falls; the coast between the Jarvis valley and Dronthjem is covered with impenetrable forests, and the Falberg is divided from Christiania by inaccessible precipices. The village of Jarvis might perhaps have opened communications with Sweden by way of the Sieg, but to bring it into touch with civilization the Stromfiord needed a man of genius. The genius indeed came: a poet, a pious Swede, who died admiring and respecting the beauties of the land as being one of the grandest of the Creator's works.
Those of my readers who have been gifted by study with that "mind's eye," whose rapid perception can throw on the soul, as on a canvas, the most diverse landscapes of the world, may now readily conceive of the general aspect of the Stromfiord. They alone, perhaps, will be able to thread their tortuous way through the reef of the inlet where the sea fights and foams; to glide on its swell below the shelves of the Falberg, whose white peaks mingle with the misty clouds of a sky that is almost constantly pearl-gray; to admire the dented margin of the pretty sheet of water; to hear the falls of the Sieg, which drops in long streamers on to a picturesque medley of large trees tossed in confusion, some upright, some hidden among boulders of gneiss; and at last to rest on the smiling pictures offered to the eye by the lower hills of Jarvis, whence rise the noblest products of the north in clumps, in myriads: here, birch-trees, as graceful as girls and, like them, gently stooping; there, pillared aisles of beech with centennial, mossy trunks; all the contrast of these various shades of green, of white clouds among black pine-trees, of heath-grown commons in every shade of purple—all the colors, all the fragrance, the unknown marvels, in short, of this vegetation.