On Denmark

I'm prone to speak of one of Norway's neighbours - Sweden. If you have been following this blog for a while, you know all about my love-hate relationship with Norway's "older brother". Or rather, how I pretend to hate Sweden, while in reality I love it (except when it comes to sports. That's the only arena where my Swedenmosity is genuine...).

Our other close "relative", however - Denmark - I haven't spoken much about. Denmark is a little further away. You actually have to cross an ocean (albeit a narrow one). Also, Norway and Norwegians are strangely concerned about Sweden, while Denmark occasionally falls out of our conscience.

Even if we write Danish.

Even if our flag is the Danish flag with a blue cross in it.

Even if we imported our royal family from Denmark.

Even if practically every flight anywhere in the world to/from Norway goes via Denmark.

Even if they ruled us for 400 hundred years.

We forgave that...

I know I've previously mentioned how strange it is that while our union with Denmark was four centuries of absolutist rule, Norwegians are only bitter about the less than a century with Sweden in a much looser constellation where we had our own constitution, Parliament and flag. We like to think of Denmark as our protector, somehow. Perhaps not a brother or sister - more like an uncle, perhaps? The uncle that always is a little tipsy and brings you presents from abroad. That's Denmark to Norway. Slightly less close than Sweden, but infinitely more appreciated. Poor Sweden.

I've grown to appreciate Denmark more recently, though. First of all, some of the very excellent people I met in Tokyo were Danish. I've had Danish friends before - the first one was on a vacation when I was five, and I didn't understand a word she said. Language is a problem with Danes, you see. Despite the fact that our written language (or one of them - yes, we have two. No, they are not all that different. No, don't tell my Neo-Norwegian patriot friends I said that...) basically is a Norwegianified Danish, oral Danish is quite difficult to understand. Norwegians commonly think Danish people sound like they speak with a potato in their throats. Some of my Danish friends agree... With some practice, though, I can usually understand Danish if. They. Speak. Slowly. Slooowly. It cuts through the potato, then.

Written Danish, on the other hand, is not problematic for a Norwegian to read. Thus, it poses no particular challenge when I in my current job have to read a lot of Danish newspapers. In fact, by now I think I prefer reading Danish - it sounds much more poetic and elegant than Norwegian does! Also, the Danish debate I am reading up on is much more "spicy" than anything you'll find in Norway. While we consider the Danes to be mellow people, they certainly have much more zing to their public commentary than what we have. It makes for more interesting reading material, for sure.

They may be bold in their debates, but the Danes are also surprisingly polite. For instance, I was surprised to find myself addressed with "De" and "Dem" in an email in reply to some inquiries I had. We have this polite version in Norwegian too - it compares to the German "Sie" or the French "Vous" - but we never, ever use it anymore (I don't anyone has since the 1960s). I commented on this to my Danish friend, and he replied that it is not very common in Denmark anymore either, but that is is used for "customers, elderly people and Norwegians". Obviously, the latter was a joke, but it says something about the relationship between our two countries. In many ways I think Danes think of Norway as the prodigal son - they fondly awaits that we will come back under their influence once we've tried all this "independence" nonsense... (I might also add that another Danish friend commented that had I been Swedish, I probably wouldn't have gotten a reply at all... That says something about the relationship between those two countries, I suppose...)

Oh, it's all fun and games, of course. Norway, Denmark and Sweden - Scandinavia (and if we include Iceland and Finland we've got the whole Nordic family) - we're good friends. We begrudgingly vote for each other in the Eurovision Song Contest. We occasionally cheer for each others' teams in sports competitions (perhaps that is why we like Denmark better, by the way? We generally don't do the same sports...). We cooperate in politics and economy, we read each others' literature and watch each others' movies. We have similar values and ideas and systems. We get along pretty well, despite our historical differences. And we looooove to make fun of each other. As evidenced below.

On spruces

When I visited the National Zoo in Washington D.C. last August, most of my pictures were of animals. As it should be. One of my non-animal pics, however, look a little (actually, a lot since I am posting the actual picture and not a drawing of it...) like this:

I am sure we can all agree this hardly is a spectacular motive that deserves a prominent place in a photo album, but I still was very eager to get the shot. Why? Well, duh - the NAME of course. Prior to this, I had no idea that this tree was called "Norway Spruce". We don't call it that here - in Norway, it's just a regular spruce. Well, actually, it's a regular gran, but that's beside the point.

The point? There isn't much of a point, but the fact that I could read the name of my country way over in the big US of A felt like a little piece of fame for my home right there and then.

Speaking of fame and spruces, did you know that the world's oldest living tree is a Norway Spruce? It's called Old Tjikko, it is located in Sweden (but it's still called Norway Spruce - hah!), and it is - wait for it - 9,500 years old! That means that this tree already was 8,500 years old when actual vikings roamed its forest. When a bloke named Jesus was born (though not in Sweden, I should add) some 2010 years ago, this spruce still had been around 7,480 years (or so). The spruce had been around for more than 4000 years when the ancient Egyptian civilization formed as well. In fact, the first humans were just settling down for a life of agriculture as opposed to just hunting and gathering when this spruce was born.

So it's a really old tree.

On Swedish

Due to my recent declaration of love for Sweden, I feel the need to compensate by telling you something bad about Sweden. I am Norwegian, after all.

Thus.

The Swedish term for gift wrapping is "inslagning". Since many Swedes live in Oslo, I have often been asked "Får man slå den in?" [excuse my Swedish if I am spelling things wrong. It sounds much more convincing when I pronounce it...]. The thing is, "slå", "at slaga" means to beat something. Thus, when a Swedish person asks you to gift wrap the book they just bought, they are really asking you to beat the crap out (actually in, directly translated. "Beat in" is the exact wording of the Swedish expression) of it.

If that is how they treat their gifts... Just sayin'...

On Sweden

First things first. No, I am not Swedish. No, Norway is not the capital of Sweden. It’s not the capital of Copenhagen either. And no, it is not irrelevant whether you refer to any of the Scandinavian countries as Sweden, Denmark, Norwegia (it’s called Norway!), The Land of Snow and Ice, Mordor or Nordica. We are separate countries with separate cultures and very separate prides. So please try to remember which is which (for the record, I’m NORWEGIAN. Norwegian!).


A while back I had a comment from one of my lovely followers saying that she had Norwegian and Swedish ancestors, but that she wouldn’t speak with me about the Swedish ones, because she knew how Norwegians felt about Swedes. This struck me with a pang. Had we really become known as enemies, the Norwegians and the Swedes? This was a very foreign concept to me. Sure, I have been known to gloat when Norway beats Sweden in any kind of sport. And yes, now that you mention it I did announce loudly to anyone who'd listen that "I'm Swedish" at one occasion when I made a complete fool out of myself on the Parisian Metro... But this is all friendly banter. Norway and Sweden are like brothers – Sweden is the big brother, and Norway is the little one that wants to be just like his older sibling.

Let me explain it to you (prepare for a history lesson..) :

Norway and Sweden (and Denmark) have always had a lot of interaction. At one point we all had one king. At one point we all had one queen (which I believe is still the last reigning queen Norway has had). Then Norway and Denmark merged into a union (Denmark clearly ruled the party), while Sweden played superpower in the Baltic Sea. Norway was under Danish rule for about 400 years. Then came along a little fella named Napoleon. He caused a lot of havoc on the European continent (you may have heard about it). Unfortunately for poor, little Norway, the Danish king decided to side with Napoleon. If you know anything about ABBA, you know that Napoleon had to face his Waterloo (he couldn’t escape if he wanted to). Sweden, on the other hand, had picked the winning team. As a consequence, Denmark was sentenced (or blessed – depending on the point of view) to give up Norway in favour of Sweden.

Just like that – without anyone bothering to ask what the Norwegians thought – we were handed away like a gift basket you didn’t really want anyway.

At the time, this gift basket was a very poor, very rural, very “uncivilizised” country. But the winds that had been blowing on the continent (and in the US) for a while had reached Norway at last. Words like “freedom” and “democracy” were making you popular at parties. Because of these winds, the Norwegian people (or the social stratum that had money and education, but no noble blood) decided it was time to write our own constitution. They gathered at Eidsvoll in 1814, ate good food, drank wine, and in between wrote the document that ever since has been the guiding principle for legal matters in Norway.

Regardless of this, however, Norway was still forced to enter a new union with Sweden. Granted it was a relatively free union - we got to keep our Constitution, our newborn parliament (the Storting), and basically everything else we would have had as an independent state. Norway shared a king and foreign policy with Sweden, but that's about it. The union lasted for almost a century - in 1905 Norway finally gained its full independece.

We were in an absolutist union with Demark for 400 years. With Sweden we enjoyed much more freedom, and the arrangement lasted less than 100 years. And yet it is with Sweden we hold the grudge (we even picked a Danish prince to be the first king of the free Norway)...

Blame it on the relative recentness of the Swedo-Norwegian union. Blame it on Norwegian jealousness for Swedish (again, relative) success with music, industry, sports. Blame it on the fact that Norway always gives Sweden twelve points in the Eurovision Song Contest, while Sweden NEVER gives us more than eight... In the end it is impossible not to acknowledge that there is a certain something going on between Norway and Sweden. But I still maintain that it is of the friendly kind.

To underscore this, I will end this post with a list. A list about things I love about Sweden. It pains me to admit it, but there are certain things Sweden does better than Norway. Like potato chips. They have dill flavoured potato chips. That is almost impossible to get here. So, with no further ado:


Things I love about Sweden:

-Dill flavoured potato chips

-Music (ranging from my favourite band, kent, to ABBA, the Cardigans, Robyn, the Hives, Broder Daniel, Mando Diao and not to forget the immortal Cornelis Vreeswijk)

-Grocery shops

-Stockholm, which is a much more "continental" city than Oslo, and frankly, it's also a better place to go on vacation (I can't believe I just said that...)

Swedish: "house"; Norwegian: "palace"

-Their architecture. Sweden has a much larger tradition for nobility, and thus they have mansions and castles (but also charming, little cottages) everywhere. Is pretty. 

-Swedish. Their language just is prettier than ours. Norwegian and Swedish are closely related, so we can understand virtually everything Swedes say (but for some reason, they don’t understand Norwegian as well). Sweden used to be a big shot country in Europe, though, so their language is much more influenced by the language of the nobility, French. The boring Norwegian word for sidewalk/pavement – fortau, is more more exotic in Swedish: trottoir. Likewise our dull window (vindu) is fönster in Swedish. Also, I think Swedish sounds more lyrical than Norwegian. Ironically, the Swedes I’ve spoken to about this say that Norwegian sounds like we’re singing all the time…

-Swedish literature. One of my very favourite authors in the world is the Swedish children’s book author Astrid Lindgren. In addition to such memorable characters as Pippi Longstockings and Emil from Lönneberga, she’s written about Ronja Rövardotter (my favourite), The Children of Noisy Village, and many, many more. Both her books and the movies made from them (I highly recommend the English version of Mio in the Land of Faraway, with Christopher Lee and a young Christian Bale) have given me countless hours of entertainment. But Lindgren is hardly the only one. In addition to her, Sweden has fostered Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf, and more recently several top crime novelists, such as Stieg Larsson.

Basically, I love Sweden.

There. I said it. I still reserve the right to be thrilled when Norway kicks Swedish butt in the next Winter Olympics, though. Tough love is the name of the game between siblings...

The border between Norway and Sweden. Extra points if you can tell me which is which (I have no idea).