The How and Why Library/Geography/Section X
X. The Children of the Vikings
In winter I get up at night
And dress by early candle light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to bed by day.
If Stevenson had been a Scandinavian instead of a Scotch boy he probably would never have written that quaint rhyme about going to bed by day and getting up by night. The little people of Norway and Sweden—which together make Scandinavia—get so much night in winter and so much day in summer that it doesn't seem strange to them at all—this getting up by night and going to bed by day.
Scandinavia is so far north that in summer there are only two or three hours of darkness, in winter only two or three hours of daylight. In summer they spend most of the time outdoors. In winter they gather about the big fireplace, spin, knit, sing, play music and tell stories! These stories are about fairies and giants and Norse heroes who slew the giants and sailed those wild Northern seas. Sometimes when the stories are about big giants with ugly dispositions they get into one's dreams; and frightened little girls—I don't know about the boys—tumble out of their cots and climbing into bed with mamma, snuggle so close that, as a certain little American girl said, even the biggest giant couldn't "unsnuggle" them!
Yes, and they do have to climb;. for the beds of grown folks are built so high that you must use a stepladder as you do in a Pullman to get into the upper berth. Babies sleep in baskets hung from a pole fastened to the wall and have a lovely time teetering themselves every time they move.
The children have beautiful manners; never interrupt their elders and on getting up from the table say, "Thank you, dear father and mother, for the good food," and shake hands with them. From early childhood boys and girls learn to work. The hardest thing the girls have to learn is how to roll and bake the famous flat bread called knackbrode. It is made of barley meal rolled into sheets a half yard across as thin as paper and—the funniest thing—has a hole in the middle. For what do you suppose? So that mother can run a long pole through it and hang the bread from the ceiling. The boys tend the garden, catch fish, shoot game for the family table and drive the cows up to the high, glacier-fed meadows in the mountains. In winter they see that the winter wheat sheaf is kept hanging to the barn roof-pole for the birds and help father make useful things at the bench in the farm carpenter shop. But the Scandinavian peoples— boys and girls and all—play at their playtime as hard as they work in worktime. Christmas merrymaking lasts for three weeks and ends on Knut's Day, January 13. Santa Claus they call "Tomt."
It was one of the bold vikings of Scandinavia—Lief Ericson— who first discovered America, 400 years before Columbus, and the Scandinavians have been discovering it ever since. A fifth of all the Scandinavians in the world—including the Danes, who belong to the same race—are now in the States which have been carved out of the old Northwest Territory—Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa and northern Illinois. In later years a great many have gone to Washington and Oregon. In these northern latitudes they can have farms of a size undreamed of in the narrow mountain valleys of Norway or even the plains of Sweden and a climate not unlike that of the old home across the stormy sea. The Norwegians are mainly to be found outside the cities on farms, although there are many Swedish farmers also; because Sweden, being much more thickly populated than Norway, sends more immigrants to this country. Both Norwegians and Swedes being great sailors are found on the vessels of the Great Lakes and both are workers in the lumber camps. Swedes are workers on railroads and thousands of them come to the cities. The better educated hold high positions as mechanical and electrical engineers, as teachers in public schools and professors in colleges.