SYTTENDE MAI

Next to our own Stars and Bars, have you ever seen a flag as stirring as that of the Norwegians?  I guess I am partial to the red, white, and blue.  Watch many international sporting events - The Winter Olympics, WRC rally races and something like the Tour de France come to mind - and you're sure to be able to pick out the Norwegial flags flying.  

Today is Syttende Mai, the seventeenth of May, Norwegian Constitution Day. One of my fondest memories is of returning from an eleven-day coastal cruise to Bergen on the ship Midnatsol - the old one, not the new one. The date was Syttende Mai, and we arrived to flags and bunads, the national costumes, and such color as I'd rarely seen before.  
So today we have our Norwegian flags flying outside and inside we'll have seafood au gratin to celebrate the day.

MY FAVORITE NORWEGIAN

ATLAS HUGGED



Oslo, Norway of course, one of my favorite cities



I’ve loved maps since I was about 9 years old, and in the fourth grade. We had to draw a map of the old Lincoln Highway, section by section, taped one to the other, and learn all about the areas it traversed. I can still see those eight by eight inch squares, pasted one to the next, until I had a long, fan-folded map snaking from Times Square to San Francisco. I wish I’d save it.  I can remember our sixth-grade study of South America and the map we had to make of its countries and products. Making maps was one of the things I liked best about grade school.

As I’ve mentioned before, when I was around 10 years old I sensed a difference in Jamaicas. I was born in a hospital in Jamaica, New York, but I’d heard of an island called Jamaica. I needed to find out what was going on there. It was then that I became interested in more than just the Lincoln Highway, and was introduced to what has become one of my favorite references: a world atlas. I’ve had several updated versions of them over the years. An atlas is one of the few books I can’t order on line. I have to go to the books store and look at the latest selection to be sure it’s one I like. There’s no describing how I make my selection – one of the available editions will just ‘speak’ to me.

My latest atlas

A new, huge volume now sits leaning against a floor lamp right by my rocking chair and I refer to it frequently. It is especially helpful for finding answers to geographical clues in my favorite NY Times crossword puzzles.  Yes, if I’m really stumped I look up the answers – how else can you learn? My motto is “when in doubt check it out.” 

Unless they are rare volumes of historical maps, worthy of a high estimated value on Antiques Roadshow, old, outdated atlases don’t seem to have much value beyond filling bookshelves or being used as sinkers. Libraries certainly don’t want them. It just about killed me to have to trash my last atlas. Even the recyclers wouldn’t take it unless I ripped off the covers and recycled just the paper. If anyone has suggestions for what to do with old atlases I’d love to hear them.



Europe around 1595.  Not easy to read - then or now.



What does have value is a good, individual historic map.  Early in the 1980’s, an antique-dealer neighbor of friends of ours in England suggested that we invest in antique maps.  For one reason and another we never acted on his advice.  Would that we could have: lately, antique maps have become collectors’ darling$. 

When we go driving I’m the navigator.  I’ve navigated us all across this country – and England and other European countries as well.  I like to do the job because I love to read the maps.  Some maps I’ve used, like the Ordnance Survey maps of England loaned to us for our travels there, or the Michelin maps of France, are on a very large scale, something like 6 inches to a mile.  You can’t get lost using those – well, you can if the driver is going too fast (oh #@%&, turn around, we just missed the cut-off to Stonehenge!) or if you’re absorbed in studying other bits on the map and lose your place and objective on the map, or if you’re fascinated by the scenery and forget the map altogether.  Done that!



Nice Côte d'Azur Airport.  It's easy to get lost here if you don't have a map.
Been there - done that!



My latest navigating tool is Google Maps.  I crank it up before a trip and have an aerial look at where we’re going.  I even get down to ground level for a look at the critical turns and junctions. (I’ve also used Google Maps to look at places I used to live or have visited. 

Things have certainly changed in my old neighborhoods!)

I love my atlas, I love maps: celestial maps, world maps, country maps, road maps, subway maps, airport maps, tourist and visitor maps to streets and attractions, even our SCCL handy-dandy neighborhood maps.  It’s nice to know where I’m at.



The London Underground - The Tube.  I've an old map of this system in the form of a large, square scarf.
An earlier map of this system became the model for other cities' subway maps.



THE STATUE OF LIBERTY STANDS UP

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As a born and bred New Yorker it seems strange, but I’ve never been to the Statue of Liberty.  I may have seen it way off in the distance, if you can see it from the Brooklyn to Staten Island ferry, that is.  Even then, I was on the ferry only several times when I was about twelve years old, in the pre-Verrazano Bridge days. I probably wasn’t aware that the statue was there: the ferry trip was much more exciting. Typical New Yorker, I lived there but missed a lot. But then I remember that I wasn’t just sitting around twiddling my thumbs – I had a lot going on.  I did once get up to the top of the Empire State Building, but that’s another story.  On with the essay.

The eighteenth of this month marks the 125^th anniversary of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty.  First conceived in 1865, 145 years ago, it had a hard time aborning. Frederic Bartholdi first got the notion from a law professor who thought it would be a great idea for the French and Americans to get together to raise a monument to American Independence. Yes it was a great idea, but what with one thing and another, a war, design problems, and financial setbacks, the work on the statue didn’t begin until the 1870’s. 

By the first Centennial of American Independence, Lady Liberty’s forearm and the torch were on display in New York City’s Madison Square Park. Two years later, in 1878, the head was on display in Paris. After a bit of fuss gathering the funds in America for the base, the body and its parts were finally united and raised and dedicated.

We all know about the French connection, but here are some facts, some arguable, surrounding the statue that may interest many of you, especially if your origins are in:

        Egypt - the body of the statue was originally conceived by Bartholdi for a lighthouse to be at the entrance to the Suez Canal. Obviously, it was never built, but it was to be in the form of a robed Egyptian woman, holding a torch aloft.

San Carlo

Hermannsdenkmal

        Italy and Germany - Liberty’s 151 ft. construction, copper sheets hung as a curtain wall on an armature, is in the same method as the Colosso de San Carlo Borromeo, a 77 ft. statue of St. Charles Borromeo in Arona, Italy on the shores of Lago Maggiore (I've been to this one, and it is quite imposing.); and of the 87 ft. Hermannsdenkmal memorial to the ancient Germanic hero Hermann, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

       

Norway - The copper for the cladding was mined in Visnes, Norway. For a while this fact was in dispute because no records of the purchase could be found, but spectrographic analysis performed in 1985 confirmed it. Strangely enough, in 2007, a bike was commissioned from Orange County Choppers (O.C.C.) by the company licensed by the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation to handle commemorative items made from materials salvaged from the 1986 restoration of the statue. Among other salvaged pieces they used, O.C.C. had most of the bike plated in copper from some of the original copper saddles that held the cladding sheets to the armature.  I think this bike, after touring around the country, finally would up on display on Liberty Island. Nevertheless, I still file this one under "why wouldja?"

        New York and New Jersey - though the island where the statue stands is federal property, it is actually in New Jersey. Sorry, New Yorkers! Just the docks are in New York (close, but no cigar!), so transport to and from Liberty Island, formerly Bedloe’s Island, is handled by the City of New York. Starting in 1986, the 100^th anniversary of the dedication of the statue, New York began using the icon of the statue on its license plates. Though it was a minor faux pas, nobody minded much. They changed the design in 2001.

       

Way back in history when few people could read, symbols, like pictures, were worth those thousand words. In these days of big corporate logos and emoticons we regularly use only a few national symbols: the flag, and the bald eagle, and Lady Liberty herself, but nowhere near the symbols that are there to be deciphered on the statue and base. From the thirteen original colonies represented by the thirteen layers of granite for the base, to the seven seas and seven continents represented by the seven points on her crown, they packed in a whole lot of symbols.  Today these may strike some as being a bit hokey and contrived, but the meanings are still strongly representative of us and our history.

       

The full name of the statue is “Liberty Enlightening the World”.  The torch and arm was the first part Bartholdi built. Were it the only part built it would still be as strong a symbol for America as the entire statue is today.  Lady Liberty strides forth, her torch held high, to light the way for the world.

           

                                               

ON LEIF ERIKSON AND SOME OTHER NORWEGIAN THINGS

“Ya vi elsker dette landet”

               “Yes, we love this country”

This is the first line of the Norwegian National Anthem

        

October 9th is Leif Erikson Day. Let us now celebrate the Scandinavian stalwart - and he had to be stalwart to sail in one of those open Viking ships - who, as far as we can tell, brought the first Europeans to North America.  You can set up a fine debate among those favoring the Celts or the Phoenicians or even the Israelites as being the first, but it is sure as shootin’ that Leif Erikson’s early eleventh century voyages beat out old Chris Columbus in the late fifteenth.

              Leif was born a Norwegian in Iceland, and was the son of Erik the Red, that consummate salesman who named a not-too-green land Greenland, to entice settlers there.   Unfortunately, Leif couldn’t do the same sales job for Vinland, and the settlement lasted only a short while.  If it had prospered, we’d all be speaking Norwegian today.

Well, as it happens, we speak a lot of Norwegian or Old Norse words today:  starting the alphabet we have aloft, anger, awe, bylaw, cake, egg, gun, husband (but not wife), knife, law, odd, race, run, lots of S-words such as saga, score, shirt, skill, sky, starboard, and steak, on to take, trust and, of course, Viking.  There’s quite a list if you care to look further.  They all merged with the rest of the contributors to our English language, making it one of the richest and hardest to learn in the world.

Truth be known, you could celebrate things Norse on almost any day of the year. October 9^th was chosen for Leif because on that day in 1825, the immigration ship ‘Restauration’ arrived in America from Stavanger, Norway.   One of the most wonderful people I ever knew emigrated from Norway.  She was my mother-in-law,  Mary Mortensen.  A lovelier, more gentle, giving woman there never was, unless, according to my husband, it was her own mother, Anne Tonnessen.   It was in honor of these two ladies that Frank and I ventured to Norway back in the eighties.   We visited their home in Ny-Hellesund, an island in off the southern tip of the country.  We visited the Statsarkivet, the state archives, where we researched the family and came upon some interesting entries.  Among them were the beautifully handwritten records of both their births.  

MV MIDNATSOL

We visited Stavanger, the home port of that first immigrant ship, and found it a bustling town.  It is now home to much of Norway’s off-shore oil industry.  They build the drilling platforms in Stavanger, and they are truly huge.   On our Norwegian trips we visited the coast from Oslo, down around the southern tip at Kristiansand, on up to Stavanger. Then further north to Bergen, port for the late-middle-ages Hanseatic League, and the home port of the Hurtigruten, pronounced hurtie rooten,  literally ‘the express route’ or hurry or hurtle route. (See, you could understand that!).

The Hurtigruten ships, ours was the MV Midnatsol, take an eleven-day cruise along the Norwegian coast.  Carrying the mail, passengers, and freight, they sail beyond the Arctic Circle to the northernmost town of Kirkenes and back again, stopping at wonderful towns along the way.  Before the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, it was eerie to be able to see over into Russia from Kirkenes.  It was also strange to realize that, far north as it is, Kirkenes is further east than Constantinople. 

The Gokstad Ship

Our stalwart Leif and his companions braved the seas in those very open long ships.  We saw the Oseburg ship and the awesomely beautiful Gokstad ship at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo.  The Gokstad ship has places for thirty-two oarsmen.  They say a ship of the same size usually carried around forty men, but could carry up to seventy people.  Can you imagine all those people on the cold Atlantic in an open boat?  It gives me the shivers just to think of it. 
The Norwegians have given us many things in addition to their contribution to our history and our language. There’s the aerosol spray and the cheese slicer, both very handy inventions.  Of course you know about the humble paper clip. Simple, but elegant.  

Simple, but elegant could also describe those great penny loafers we all wore way back when.  I’m sure you remember Bass Weejuns - that’s short for Norwegians, of course - still the best loafers around.

             

So now when you see that other beautiful red, white, and blue flag - the flag of Norway - remember Leif Erikson and the wonderful Norwegians.

 “Ya vi elsker dette landet”