village,--three miles north and up. The buildings were huddled
together, some half dozen of them, in a haphazard sort of way, with no
attempt at order, no front, no back, and no particular reason for
approaching one way rather than another. Walls of hewn logs, black
with age; roofs either thatched, or covered with huge slabs of slate,
laid on irregularly and moss-grown; rough stones or logs for
doorsteps; so little difference between the buildings that one was at
a loss to know which were meant for dwellings and which for barns,--a
more unsightly spot could hardly be imagined. But the owners had as
quick an instinct of hospitality as if they dwelt in a palace. No
sooner did Sanna mention that I was from America, and wished to see
some of the Norwegian farm-houses, than their faces brightened with
welcome and good-will, and they were ready to throw open every room
and show me all their simple stores.
"There is not a man in all Vos," they said, "who has not a relative in
America." And they asked eager question after question, in insatiable
curiosity, about the unknown country whither their friends had gone.
The wives and daughters of the family were all away, up at the
sæter with the cows; only the men and the servant maids were left
at home to make the hay. Would I not go up to the sæter? The
mistress would be distressed that an American lady had visited the
farm in her absence. I could easily go to the sæter in a day. It
was only five hours on horseback, and about a half-hour's walk, at the
last, over a path too rough even for riding. Very warmly the men urged
Sanna to induce me to make the trip. They themselves would leave the
haying and go with me, if I would only go; and I must never think I
had seen Norwegian farming unless I had seen the sæter also, they
said.
The maids were at dinner in the kitchen. It was a large room, with
walls not more than eight feet high, black with smoke; and in the
centre a square stone trough, above which was built a funnel chimney.
In this hollow trough a fire smouldered, and above it hung an enormous
black caldron, full of beer, which was being brewed. One of the maids
sprang from her dinner, lifted a trap door in the floor, disappeared
in the cellar, and presently returned, bringing a curious wooden
drinking-vessel shaped like a great bowl, with a prow at each side for
handles, and painted in gay colors. This was brimming full of new
beer, just brewed. Sanna whispered to me that it would be bad manners
if we did not drink freely of it. It was passed in turn to each member
of the party. The driver, eying me sharply as I forced down a few
mouthfuls of the nauseous drink, said something to Sanna.
"He asks if American ladies do not like beer," said Sanna. "He is
mortified that you do not drink. It will be best that we drink all we
can. It is all what they have. Only I do hope that they give us not
brandy."
There was no window in the kitchen, no ventilation except through the
chimney and the door. A bare wooden table, wooden chairs, a few
shelves, where were ranged some iron utensils, were all the furniture
of the gloomy room. The maids' dinner consisted of a huge plate of
fladbröd and jugs of milk; nothing else. They would live on that,
Sanna said, for weeks, and work in the hay-fields from sunrise till
midnight.
Opposite the kitchen was the living-room,--the same smoky log walls,
bare floors, wooden chairs and benches. The expression of poverty was
dismal.
"I thought you said these people were well to do!" I exclaimed.
"So they are," replied Sanna. "They are very well off; they do not
know that it is not comfort to be like this. They shall have money in
banks, these people. All the farmers in Vos are rich."
Above the living-room were two bedrooms and clothes-rooms. Here, in
gay painted scarlet boxes and hanging from lines, were the clothes of
the family and the bed linen of the house. Mistress and maid alike
must keep their clothes in this common room. The trunks were ranged
around the sides of the room, each locked with a key big enough to
lock prison doors. On one side of one of the rooms were three bunk
beds built in under the eaves. These were filled with loose straw, and
had only blankets for covers. Into this straw the Norwegian burrows by
night, rolled in his blankets. The beds can never be moved, for they
are built in with the framework of the house. No wonder that the
Norwegian flea has, by generations of such good lodging and food,
become a triumphant Bedouin marauder, in comparison with whom the
fleas of all other countries are too petty to deserve mention.
The good-natured farmer opened his mother's box as well as his wife's,
and with awkward and unaccustomed hands shook out their Sunday
costumes for us to see. From another box, filled with soft blankets
and linen, he took out a bottle of brandy, and pouring some into a
little silver bowl, with the same prow-shaped handles as the wooden
one we had seen in the kitchen, pressed us to drink. One drop of it
was like liquid fire. He seemed hurt that we refused more, and poured
it down his own throat at a gulp, without change of a muscle. Then he
hid the brandy bottle again under the blankets, and the little silver
cup in the till of his mother's chest, and locked them both up with
the huge keys.
Downstairs we found an aged couple, who had come from another of the
buildings, hearing of our presence. These were the grandparents. The
old woman was eighty-four, and was knitting briskly without glasses.
She took us into the storerooms, where were bins of flour and grain;
hams of beef and pork hanging up; wooden utensils of all sorts,
curiously carved and stained wooden spoons, among other things,--a
cask full of them, put away to be used "when they had a merry-making."
Here also were stacks of fladbröd. This is the staple of the
Norwegian's living; it is a coarse bread made of dark flour, in cakes
as thin as a wafer and as big round as a barrel. This is baked once a
year, in the spring, is piled up in stacks in the storerooms, and
keeps good till the spring baking comes round again. It is very sweet
and nutritious: one might easily fare worse than to have to make a
meal of it with milk. On one of the storeroom shelves I spied an old
wooden drinking-bowl, set away with dried peas in it. It had been
broken, and riveted together in the bottom, but would no longer hold
water, so had been degraded to this use. It had once been gayly
painted, and had a motto in old Norwegian around the edge: "Drink in
good-will, and give thanks to God." I coveted the thing, and offered
to buy it. It was a study to see the old people consult with each
other if they should let it go. It seemed that when they first went to
housekeeping it had been given to them by the woman's mother, and was
an old bowl even then. It was certainly over a hundred years old, and
how much more there was no knowing. After long discussion they decided
to sell it to me for four kroner (about one dollar), which the son
thought (Sanna said) was a shameful price to ask for an old broken
bowl. But he stood by in filial submission, and made no loud objection
to the barter. The old woman also showed us a fine blanket, which had
been spun and woven by her mother a hundred years ago. It was as gay
of color and fantastic of design as if it had been made in Algiers.
This too she was willing to sell for an absurdly small price, but it
was too heavy to bring away. At weddings and other festivities these
gay blankets are hung on the walls; and it is the custom for neighbors
to lend all they can on such occasions.
The next farm we visited belonged to the richest people in Vos. It lay
a half-mile still higher up, and the road leading to it seemed
perilously steep. The higher we went, the greater the profusion of
flowers: the stony way led us through tracts of bloom, in blue and
gold; tall spikes of mullein in clumps like hollyhocks, and
"shepherd's bells" in great purple patches.
The buildings of this farm were clustered around a sort of court-yard
enclosure, roughly flagged by slate. Most of the roofs were also
slated; one or two were thatched, and these thatched roofs were the
only thing that redeemed the gloom of the spot, the sods on these
being bright with pansies and grasses and waving raspberry bushes.
Here also we found the men of the family alone at home, the women
being gone on their summering at the sæter. The youngest son showed
us freely from room to room, and displayed with some pride the trunks
full of blankets and linen, and the rows of women's dresses hanging in
the chambers. On two sides of one large room these were hung thick one
above another, no variety in them, and no finery; merely a succession
of strong, serviceable petticoats, of black, green, or gray woollen.
The gay jackets and stomachers were packed away in trunks; huge
fur-lined coats, made of the same shape for men and for women, hung in
the storeroom. Some of the trunks were red, painted in gay colors;
some were of polished cedar, finished with fine brass mountings. As
soon as a Norwegian girl approaches womanhood, one of these trunks is
given her, set in its place in the clothes-room, and her accumulations
begin. Clothes, bedding, and silver ornaments seem to be the only
things for which the Norwegian peasant spends his money. In neither of
these houses was there an article of superfluous furniture, not even
of ordinary comfort. In both were the same bunk beds, built in under
the eaves; the same loose, tossed straw, with blankets for covering;
and only the coarsest wooden chairs and benches for seats. The young
man opened his mother's trunk, and took from one corner a beautiful
little silver beaker, with curling, prow-shaped handles. In this the
old lady had packed away her silver brooches, buttons, and studs for
the summer. Side by side with them, thrown in loosely among her white
head-dresses and blouses, were half a dozen small twisted rolls of
white bread. Sanna explained this by saying that the Norwegians never
have this bread except at their most important festivals; it is
considered a great luxury, and these had no doubt been put away as a
future treat, as we should put away a bit of wedding-cake to keep.
Very irreverently the son tipped out all his mother's ornaments into
the bottom of the trunk, and proceeded to fill the little beaker with
fiery brandy from a bottle which had been hid in another corner. From
lip to lip it was passed, returning to him wellnigh untasted; but he
poured the whole down at a draught, smacked his lips, and tossed the
cup back into the trunk, dripping with the brandy. Very much that good
old Norwegian dame, when she comes down in the autumn, will wonder, I
fancy, what has happened to her nicely packed trunk of underclothes,
dry bread, and old silver.
There were several storerooms in these farm buildings, and they were
well filled with food, grain, flour, dried meats, fish, and towers of
fladbröd. Looms with partly finished webs of cloth in them were there
set away till winter; baskets full of carved yellow spoons hung on the
wall. In one of the rooms, standing on the sill of the open window,
were two common black glass bottles, with a few pond-lilies in
each,--the only bit of decoration or token of love of the beautiful we
had found. Seeing that I looked at the lilies with admiration, the
young man took them out, wiped their dripping stems on his
coat-sleeve, and presented them to me with a bow that a courtier might
have envied. The grace, the courtesy, of the Norwegian peasant's bow
is something that must date centuries back. Surely there is nothing in
his life and surroundings to-day to create or explain it. It must be a
trace of something that Olaf Tryggveson--that "magnificent,
far-shining man"--scattered abroad in his kingdom eight hundred years
ago, with his "bright, airy, wise way" of speaking and behaving to
women and men.
One of the buildings on this farm was known, the young man said, to be
at least two hundred years old. The logs are moss-grown and black, but
it is good for hundreds of years yet. The first story is used now for
a storeroom. From this a ladder led up to a half-chamber overhead, the
front railed by a low railing; here, in this strange sort of balcony
bedroom, had slept the children of the family, all the time under
observation of their elders below.
Thrust in among the rafters, dark, rusty, bent, was an ancient sword.
Our guide took it out and handed it to us, with a look of awe on his
face. No one knew, he said, how long that sword had been on the farm.
In the earliest writings by which the estate had been transferred,
that sword had been mentioned, and it was a clause in every lease
since that it should never be taken away from the place. However many
times the farm might change hands, the sword must go with it, for all
time. Was there no legend, no tradition, with it? None that his father
or his father's father had ever heard; only the mysterious entailed
charge, from generation to generation, that the sword must never be
removed. The blade was thin and the edge jagged, the handle plain and
without ornament; evidently the sword had been for work, and not for
show. There was something infinitely solemn in its inalienable estate
of safe and reverent keeping at the hands of men all ignorant of its
history. It is by no means impossible that it had journeyed in the
company of that Sigurd who sailed with his splendid fleet of sixty
ships for Palestine, early in the twelfth century. Sigurd
Jorsalafarer, or Traveller to Jerusalem, he was called; and no less an
authority than Thomas Carlyle vouches for him as having been "a wise,
able, and prudent man," reigning in a "solid and successful way."
Through the Straits of Gibraltar to Jerusalem, home by way of
Constantinople and Russia, "shining with renown," he sailed, and took
a hand in any fighting he found going on by the way. Many of his men
came from the region of the Sogne Fjord; and the more I thought of it
the surer I felt that this old sword had many a time flashed on the
deck of his ships.
Our second day opened rainy. The lake was blotted out by mist; on the
fence under the willows sat half a dozen men, roosting as
unconcernedly as if it were warm sunshine.
"It does wonder me," said Sanna, "that I find here so many men
standing idle. When the railroad come, it shall be that the life must
be different."
A heroic English party, undeterred by weather, were setting off in
carioles and on horseback. Delays after delays occurred to hinder
them. At the last moment their angry courier was obliged to go and
fetch the washing, which had not arrived. There is a proverb in
Norway, "When the Norwegian says 'immediately,' look for him in half
an hour."
Finally, at noon, in despair of sunshine, we also set off: rugs,
water-proofs; the india-rubber boot of the carriage drawn tight up to
the level of our eyes; we set off in pouring sheets of rain for
Gudvangen. For the first two hours the sole variation of the monotony
of our journey was in emptying the boot of water once every five
minutes, just in time to save a freshet in our laps. High mountain
peaks, black with forests or icy white with snow, gleamed in and out
of the clouds on either hand, as we toiled and splashed along.
Occasional lightings up revealed stretches of barren country, here and
there a cluster of farm-houses or a lowly church. On the shores of a
small lake we passed one of these lonely churches. Only two other
buildings were in sight in the vast expanse: one, the wretched little
inn where we were to rest our horses for half an hour; the other, the
parsonage. This last was a pretty little cottage, picturesquely built
of yellow pine, half bowered in vines, looking in that lonely waste as
if it had lost itself and strayed away from some civilized spot. The
pastor and his sister, who kept house for him, were away; but his
servant was so sure that they would like to have us see their home
that we allowed her to show it to us. It was a tasteful and cosey
little home: parlor, study, and dining-room, all prettily carpeted and
furnished; books, flowers, a sewing-machine, and a piano. It did one's
heart good to see such an oasis of a home in the wilderness. Drawn up
on rests in a shed near the house, was an open boat, much like a
wherry. The pastor spent hours every day, the maid said, in rowing on
the lake. It was his great pleasure.
Up, up we climbed: past fir forests, swamps, foaming streams,--the
wildest, weirdest road storm-driven people ever crossed. Spite of the
rain, half-naked children came flying out of hovels and cabins to open
gates: sometimes there would be six in a row, their thin brown hands
all stretched for alms, and their hollow eyes begging piteously; then
they would race on ahead to open the next gate. The moors seemed but a
succession of enclosed pasture-lands. Now and then we passed a little
knot of cabins close to the road, and men who looked kindly, but as
wild as wild beasts, would come out and speak to the driver; their
poverty was direful to see. At last, at the top of a high hill, we
halted; the storm stayed; the clouds lifted and blew off. At our feet
lay a black chasm; it was like looking down into the bowels of the
earth. This was the Nerodal Valley; into it we were to descend. Its
walls were three and four thousand feet high. It looked little more
than a cleft. The road down this precipitous wall is a marvel of
engineering. It is called the Stalheimscleft, and was built by a
Norwegian officer, Captain Finne. It is made in a series of zigzagging
loops, which are so long and so narrow that the descent at no point
appears steep; yet as one looks up from any loop to the loop next
above, it seems directly over his head. Down this precipice into the
Nerodal Valley leap two grand fosses, the Stalheimfos and the
Salvklevfos; roaring in ceaseless thunder, filling the air, and
drenching the valley with spray. Tiny grass-grown spaces between the
bowlders and the loops of the road had all been close mowed; spaces
which looked too small for the smallest reaping-hook to swing in were
yet close shorn, and the little handfuls of hay hung up drying on
hand's-breadths of fence set up for the purpose. Even single blades of
grass are too precious in Norway to be wasted.
As we walked slowly down this incredible road, we paused step by step
to look first up, then down. The carriage waiting for us below on the
bridge looked like a baby wagon. The river made by the meeting of
these two great cataracts at the base of the precipice was only a
little silver thread flowing down the valley. The cataracts seemed
leaping from the sky, and the sky seemed resting on the hill-tops;
masses of whirling and floating clouds added to the awesome grandeur
of the scene. The Stalheimfos fell into a deep, basin-shaped ravine,
piled with great bowlders, and full of birch and ash shrubs; in the
centre of this, by some strange play of the water, rose a distinct and
beautifully shaped cone, thrown up closely in front of the fall,
almost blending with it, and thick veiled in the tumultuous spray,--a
fountain in a waterfall. It seemed the accident of a moment, but its
shape did not alter so long as we watched it; it is a part of the
fall.
Five miles down this cleft, called valley, to Gudvangen run the road
and the little river and the narrow strips of meadow, dark, thin, and
ghastly; long months in utter darkness this Nerodal lies, and never,
even at summer's best and longest, has it more than a half-day of sun.
The mountains rise in sheer black walls on either hand,--bare rock in
colossal shafts and peaks, three, four, and even five thousand feet
high; snow in the rifts at top; patches of gaunt firs here and there;
great spaces of tumbled rocks, where avalanches have slid; pebbly and
sandy channels worn from side to side of the valley, where torrents
have rushed down and torn a way across; white streams from top to
bottom of the precipices, all foam and quiver, like threads spun out
on the sward, more than can be counted; they seem to swing down out of
the sky as spider threads swing swift and countless in a dewy morning.
Sanna shuddered. "Now you see, one could not spend a whole day in
Nerodal Valley," she said. "It does wonder me that any people will
live here. Every spring the mountains do fall and people are killed."
On a narrow rim of land at base of these walls, just where the fjord
meets the river, is the village of Gudvangen, a desolate huddle of
half a dozen poor houses. A chill as of death filled the air; foul
odors arose at every turn. The two little inns were overcrowded with
people, who roamed restlessly up and down, waiting for they knew not
what. An indescribable gloom settles on Gudvangen with nightfall. The
black waters of the fjord chafing monotonously at the base of the
black mountains; the sky black also, and looking farther off than sky
ever looked before, walled into a strip, like the valley beneath it;
hemmed in, forsaken, doomed, and left seems Gudvangen. What hold life
can have on a human being kept in such a spot it is hard to imagine.
Yet we found three very old women hobnobbing contentedly there in a
cave of a hut. Ragged, dirty, hideous, hopeless one would have thought
them; but they were all agog and cheery, and full of plans for
repairing their house. They were in a little log stable, perhaps ten
feet square, and hardly high enough to stand upright in: they were
cowering round a bit of fire in the centre; their piles of straw and
blankets laid in corners; not a chair, not a table. Macbeth's witches
had seemed full-dressed society women by the side of these. We peered
timidly in at the group, and they all came running towards us,
chattering, glad to see strangers, and apologizing for their
condition, because, as they said, they had just turned in there
together for a few days, while their house across the way was being
mended. Not a light of any description had they, except the fire. The
oldest one hobbled away, and returned with a small tallow candle,
which she lit and held in her hand, to show us how comfortable they
were, after all; plenty of room for three piles of straw on the rough
log floor. Their "house across the way" was a little better than this;
not much. One of the poor old crones had "five children in America."
"They wanted her to come out to America and live with them, but she
was too old to go away from home," she said. "Home was the best place
for old people," to which the other two assented eagerly. "Oh, yes,
home was the best place. America was too far."
It seemed a miracle to have comfort in an inn in so poverty-stricken a
spot as this, but we did. We slept in straw-filled bunks, set tight
into closets under the eaves; only a narrow doorway by which to get in
and out of bed; but there were two windows in the room, and no need to
stifle. And for supper there was set before us a stew of lamb,
delicately flavored with curry, and served with rice, of which no
house need be ashamed. That so palatable a dish could have issued from
the place which answered for kitchen in that poor little inn was a
marvel; it was little more than a small dark tomb. The dishes were all
washed out-of-doors in tubs set on planks laid across two broken
chairs at the kitchen door; and the food and milk were kept in an
above-ground cellar not three steps from the same door. This had been
made by an immense slab of rock which had crashed down from the
mountain top, one day, and instead of tearing through the house and
killing everybody had considerately lodged on top of two other
bowlders, roofing the space in, and forming a huge stone refrigerator
ready to hand for the innkeeper. The enclosed space was cold as ice,
and high enough and large enough for one to walk about in it
comfortably. I had the curiosity to ask this innkeeper how much he
could make in a year off his inn. When he found that I had no sinister
motive in the inquiry, he was freely communicative. At first he
feared, Sanna said, that it might become known in the town how much
money he was making, and that demands might be made on him in
consequence. If the season of summer travel were very good, he said he
would clear two hundred dollars; but he did not always make so much as
that. He earned a little also by keeping a small shop, and in the
winter that was his only resource. He had a wife and two children, and
his wife was not strong, which made it harder for them, as they were
obliged always to keep a servant.