To-,Noroway O'er the Faem
By D. W. BROGAN UNLIKE Sir Patrick Spens, I was not off to bring a king's daughter home, and he skeely skipper might have thought a plane a poor way of entering a great seafaring country. But though I dislike travel and am preposterously incompetent at it, (who else has twice lost transatlantic flight tickets ?) I find myself often on the move. Like an Austrian general of the old school, I plan complicated movements in space and time, rely on what Americans call logistics, and sometimes arrive in time—just. So I had to fly to Oslo from Paris, and, apart from nearly getting left behind at Christiansand, arrived in the right place at the right-time.
• It is always to some degree exciting to visit a brand-new country of whose language you know not a word, and Norway was such a country. Of course I had spent a good many weeks in Minneapolis, and, more important, had spent three weeks at sea in a Norwegian coal-boat in the late winter of 1942, a dreary time of the year and the war. It was some comfort to be in the hands of such renowned sailors as the Norwegians and as much comfort to note that the Arosa had been built on the Clyde and that the pumps were by G. and J. Weir. But all this, plus memories, faint enough, of a saga or two and of Feats on the Fiord, was inadequate preparation for a visit: Even the reading of an excellent survey of modern Norway did not help enough, so that, for me, Norway was the country of an author whose texts I used to know well, Ibsen. It was with the expectation of finding that modem Norway was like or unlike Ibsen's Norway that I drove into Oslo, past the new houses and new flats, and that my first historical thrill was the sight of the National Theatre with its statues of Ibsen and Bjornson outside, Ibsen looking exactly as he should look, that is like the Ibsen of A Christmas Garland. -And the yellow brick parliament building, rather like an old-fashioned muni- ciOal casino, and some of the streets round the main square were exactly what I had expected and rejoiced to see. Even dinner in a lavish marble-and-mirrors dining-room did not shake my feeling of being at home, for surely that heavy, formidable man, drinking wine and then brandy, and chatting with obvious grace to a series of callers, was John Gabriel Borkman before the disaster. And the orchestra, alternating the old favourites, Offenbach and the like, with modem American masterpieces, reinforced my feeling of being somewhere I knew about.
The next day the Ibsenian impression wore off a bit, for modem Oslo is very modern, that is very American, full of new, shining buildings in what, without offence to a great company, I may call the Persil style, glass, steel, concrete, chromium. On the water-front, across from the old castle of Akershus, is the new Town Hall, vast and impressive outside and magnificent inside. It is the gesture of a Socialist muni- cipality and decorated with a superb disregard of municipal thrift ; some of the frescoes, indeed, are bold in more senses than one and would startle Labour voters as much as the splendour would the rate-payers. It completely dwarfs the Palace and the Storthing and reminds one that Norway, in a sense not yet attained in England, Is a social democracy. The casual solitary sentry, his tommy-gun slung under his arm, outside the -King's country place, makes the point again ; how unlike Buckingham Palace—or the Kremlin 1 The modem building that pleased me most in Oslo was the new radio headquarters to which, on the busman's holiday Principle, I was taken. Here are marvels 1 The great glass- walled rest-rooms for the artists with flowers, chaises longues and a view over the city and the fiord ! The music rooms, not one with a perpendicular wall and not one identical with the other, with squares, numbered and lettered. so that at the performance the musicians will know exactly where to sit. Then the effects room where, defying what is, I believe, the policy of the B.B.C., effects are produced by natural means. You lift a panel in the floor and there is a patch of gravel on Which you walk to give the effect of walking on gravel. There is a stair divided into wooden, marble and carpeted sections. You walk on marble if you want to give the effect of walking on marble. And there are, I think, three separate types of door for banging, a necessity, no doubt, in the country of A Doll's House. No, the radio headquarters is just as magni- ficent as its builders planned it to be.
But of all the things that pleased me or entertained me in Oslo one far outshone the rest, the collection of famous ships. Two of these ships are famous anonymously so to speak ; they are Viking galleys. No photographs prepare one for their beauty and impressiveness. Admirably housed, they strike terror and awe. This black war galley was the thing that terrified London and Paris ; from ships like these came the founders of Dublin. Back to these ships were driven the asqailing Norsemen by Alfred and Brian Born and Alexander III. (It will be necessary to remind a very small number of Spectator readers that Alexander III, King of Scots, defeated the last Norwegian invasion of this island at Largs in 1262). The " Queen's ship " with its beautifully carved prow, is even more terrible than the war galley : the two justify a journey to Oslo for themselves alone. But they are not alone, for there is the Fram, the Polar ship of Nansen and Amundsen, as piously preserved as H.M.S. Victory or U.S.S. Constitution. And there is the Kon-Tiki, the balsa raft that crossed the Pacific in a voyage more extraordinary than that of Melville's Pequod and whose whole course showed that the blood of the Vikings flows in the veins of the peaceful and civilised Nor- wegians of today. There were many things I didn't see ; there is the under- ground for instance. Oslo, like New York, Chicago, Moscow, Berlin, Madrid and so many other cities in this century, felt it needed an underground since London, Glasgow and Paris had them. And it has plenty of cinemas which enable one to play the game of guessing what American film is disguised under a Norwegian title. There are admirable bookshops where Anthony Hope and Sherlock Holmes are as well represented as Dr. Cronin and Miss Kathleen Winsor. But the natural setting of Oslo dwarfs even the great Town Hall. For the sea is nearly everywhere except where there are mountains. Behind you there is the great ski jump ; in front the fiord. There is the smell of salt water and that identity of all water fronts that links San Francisco to Genoa, Oslo to Liverpool. All around the city are the cottages and small country houses with the water at their doors, little arms of the fiord like the Gareloch or Long Island Sound. It is very much like an American suburb, but for one thing ; between one 'white wooden house and another there are fences, not the formidable iron barriers of a French provincial town, but barriers all the same, not the open lawns of Southport (Conn.).
And the people, if not nearly as uniformly blonde as I had expected, are vigorous and handsome. Is that sprightly youth with a girl on his arm the young Peer Gynt ? That lively co-ed outside the university, Hilda Wangel ? That man in a curious mixture of clerical and lay clothes, is he Pastor Manders or Brand ? What would Soilless think of the Town Hall ? It is time to go before any answers can be got to these questions. The fiords, the rocky islands, the forests, the mountains slide behind me ; there is the Texel, there is Amsterdam, chief city of another great seafaring people, but how different, man-made like the land it is built on, rich, splendid centre of a crowded country. The contrast is sharp ; there is something to be said for flying I
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