THE people of the Middle Ages, who lived in a happy world of fairy stories, knew exactly how the Scandinavian peninsula happened to have got its queer shape. After the good Lord had finished the work of creation, the Devil came along to see what He had been doing those seven long days.He had been away from Heaven.When the Devil saw our planet in the first flush of its young loveliness, he lost his temper and got so terribly angry that he heaved a large rock at Mankind's new home.That rock landed in the Arctic Sea and became the Scandinavian Peninsula.It was so barren and bleak that it seemed entirely unfit for life.But the good Lord remembered that a little bit of rich earth had been left behind when he got through fashioning the other continents.These remnants he then sprinkled across the mountains of Norway and Sweden.But of course there was not enough to go around and that explains why the greater part of these two countries has always remained a home for trolls and gnomes and werewolves, because no human being could ever hope to make a living from such a poor soil.

Modern man has a fairy story of his own, but it is a scientific one based upon certain facts which he has been able to observe with his own eyes. According to the geologists, the Scandinavian peninsula is merely the remnant of a very old and very large continent which long before the era of the coal forests had stretched from Europe all the way across the Arctic Ocean to America.

We know of course that the present arrangement of our continents is of very recent origin—that the continents seem to be constantly on the move, like leaves floating on a pond, and that several continents, now separated from each other by oceans and seas, were once upon a time a solid mass of land. When the continent of which Norway and Sweden had formed a part disappeared from view, only the eastern-most ridge—the mountain-ranges of Scandinavia—remained above water.So did Iceland and the Faroe Islands and the Shetland Islands and Scotland.The rest now lies at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.Some day the roles may be reversed.Then the Arctic Ocean will become dry land and Sweden and Norway will be turned over to the whales and the little fishes.

The Norwegians do not seem to lose any sleep on account of this threat to their homeland. They have other things to worry them.The problem, for example, of keeping alive, which is by no means a simple one when you remember that in Norway less than four percent of the total area(only 4000 square miles)can be used for purposes of agriculture.Sweden is a little better off with ten percent, but even that is not so very much.

There are of course certain compensations. One-half of Sweden is covered with woods and one-quarter of Norway is covered with pine and fir forests.These forests are slowly being cut down, but lumbering is not the devastating business it is with us.It is done in the most scientific way imaginable, for both the Swedes and the Norwegians know that their country will never be any good for ordinary agricultural pursuits.That is the fault of the glaciers which once upon a time covered the whole of the peninsula, from the North Cape down to Lindesnaes.These glaciers scraped the soil from the rocky hillsides as completely and efficiently as a hound dog licking a plate.Not only did they deprive the mountains of their hard earned soil(it takes millions of years to make enough soil to cover such a vast stretch of land)but they carried it away with them and deposited it all over that great northern plain of Europe of which I told you in the chapter about Germany.

The scouts who went ahead of the great Asiatic invasion of Europe of forty centuries ago must have known this. When at last they crossed the Baltic, they found Scandinavia inhabited by a few nomads of Finnish origin.It was easy enough to drive them back into the fastnesses of northern Lapland.But when that had been done, how could the new settlers hope to make a living?

There were several ways. In the first place, they could go out and fish.The endless bays and fjords, which were really nothing but deep grooves dug into the rocks by the glaciers trying to reach the ocean, gave the country a coast-line almost six times as long as it would have been if the Norwegian coast had formed a straight line, as it does in Holland or Denmark.The Norwegians are still fishing.The Gulf Stream sees to it that all the harbors, even as far north as Hammerfest, remain open the whole year around.The nooks and crannies of the Lofoten Islands, on the brink of those cool, clean Arctic waters which the cod seems to prefer for breeding purposes, provide work for more than a hundred thousand fishermen and to an equal number of people engaged in the business of canning whatever the trawlers bring on shore.

In the second place, if they did not care to fish, they could turn pirates. All along the Norwegian coast there lies a row of islands and islets which account for seven percent of the country's surface and which are separated from each other by such a complicated system of narrows and sands and bights and straits that a steamer going from Stavanger to Vardö has got to carry two pilots who succeed each other every six hours.

During the Middle Ages when there were no beacons and buoys and lighthouses(Lindesnaes is the oldest lighthouse on the Norwegian coast and even that is of comparatively recent date)no outsiders would come within a dozen miles of this dangerous coast. Although the story of the famous Maelstrom between two of the Lofoten Islands has been greatly exaggerated, no inexperienced skipper would venture into this watery labyrinth without at least half a dozen natives to show him the way.Those pirates therefore who made their own familiar fjord their base of operations knew that they had little to fear as soon as they were within sight of the home range of mountains and they made very good use of this natural advantage.They improved their ships and their fighting technique until they could venture forth as far as England and Ireland and Holland.Once they had discovered the road to these comparatively nearby places, they gradually lengthened their voyages until the people of France and of Spain and of Italy and of far off Constantinople began to feel uncomfortable whenever some returning merchantman reported that he had seen the dragon of a Viking ship some-where in the neighborhood.

During the early part of the ninth century they plundered Paris not less than three times. They sailed up the river Rhine and got as far as Cologne and Mayence.As for England, different tribes of Norsemen fought each other for the possession of that country as the nations of Europe of today will make war upon each other for a particularly desirable piece of oil land.

About the same time that Iceland was discovered, Norsemen had founded the first Russian state, of which they themselves were to be the rulers for almost seven entire centuries. Still later, a plundering expedition of two hundred boats(small boats which could be carried overland whenever necessary)had travelled from the Baltic to the Black Sea and had caused such consternation in Constantinople that the emperor of the eastern Roman Empire had hastened to take these wild men into his service, as a special sort of body-guard.

Entering the Mediterranean from the west, they had established themselves in Sicily and on the coasts of Spain and Italy and Africa and had repeatedly rendered the most valuable services to the Papacy in its wars upon the rest of the world.

What has become of all this glory of the ancient Norse nation?

All that remains today is a highly respectable little kingdom which catches and exports a lot of fish and engages in the carrying trade and fights bitter political quarrels about the language the people should speak—quarrels of which the world at large would never notice anything if the Norwegian authorities did not have the fatal habit of changing the names of their most important cities and railroad stations about once every two or three years.

As for those cities of Norway, most of them are merely overgrown villages where everybody's dog knows everybody else's dog. Trondheim(formerly Nidaros and then Trondhjem)was the capital of the old Norwegian kingdom.It has an excellent harbor and as soon as the Baltic is covered with ice, Trondheim becomes the port from which a great deal of Swedish wood is shipped to the rest of the world.

The present capital, Oslo, is built near the ruins of a very old Norwegian settlement which had burned down. It was built by the Danish King Christian　Ⅳand therefore called Christiania until the Norwegians decided to purge their language of all Danish souvenirs.Oslo is situated in the richest agricultural part of Norway at the head of the Oslofjord, which runs into the Skagerrak, the broad sound which separates Norway from Denmark and which is really a branch of the Atlantic Ocean.

Such cities as Stavanger or Aalesund or Christiansand only come to life when the whistle of the nine o'clock steamer blows. Bergen, the old Hansa settlement which looked after the commercial needs of the entire Norwegian coast, is now connected with Oslo by means of a railroad.So is Trondheim with a branch road that leads to the Baltic coast of Sweden.Further up north, well above the Arctic Circle, lies Narvik, the harbor for the Swedish iron ore from Lapland.Tromsô and Hammerfest smell everlastingly of fish.These names occur here because it rarely happens that one finds human beings living comfortably at latitude 70°.

It is a strange land. It is a hard land—a land that has driven hundreds of thousands of its sons and daughters away from its shores, asking them to shift for themselves as best they could, and that nevertheless has somehow or other managed to keep their love and loyalty.Take a boat sometime if you have a chance and travel northward.Everywhere it is the same.Some Godforsaken little village, clinging to a bit of grass, just enough for a single goat, and five or six houses and a few ramshackle boats and one steamer a week and people weeping because they see it again—because it is home—because it is their home—because it is part of their flesh and blood.

The International Brotherhood of Man is a noble dream.

It takes on queer aspects in Bodφor in Vardö,ten days away by steamer from nowhere.

Sweden, the other side of the mountain-range that remained after the great Arctic plateau had disappeared beneath the waves of the Atlantic, is a very different country from Norway. People often wonder why these two nations do not decide to form a single nation.It would mean a great saving in the cost of administration.On paper such an arrangement looks eminently practicable.But their geographical background makes it impossible.For whereas Norway on account of the Gulf Stream enjoys a mild climate with lots of rain and little snow(in Bergen the horses shy whenever they meet a man without an umbrella or a raincoat),Sweden has a continental climate, with long, cold winters and a heavy snowfall.Whereas Norway has deep fjords that penetrate for miles into the interior, Sweden has a low coast with few natural harbors none of which have achieved the importance of Gothenburg on the Cattegat.And whereas Norway has no raw materials of its own, Sweden is possessed of some of the most valuable ore deposits of the whole world.The unfortunate absence of coal still forces Sweden to export a great deal of these ores to Germany and France, but during the last twenty years the taming of many important waterfalls has made Sweden increasingly independent of coal while the forests that cover such a great part of the kingdom account for the enormously rich Swedish match trust and the far-famed Swedish paper factories.

The Swedes, like the Norwegians and the Danes(one might say like all nations of Germanic origin except perhaps the English)have unbounded trust in the potentialities of the human intellect. Her scientists are therefore given free scope and as a result her chemists have discovered and developed a large number of by-products which are derived from the wood industry and which otherwise would have gone to waste, such as celluloid and artificial silk.But her agriculture, although much higher developed than that of Norway, suffers from the unfavorable climatic conditions which are the result of being situated on the cold and exposed side of that high mountain-range which divides the Scandinavian peninsula so sharply into two halves.Perhaps that is one of the reasons why the people are so fond of flowers.The winters are so very long and dark.Every Swedish home therefore tries to keep bright with flowers and evergreen shrubs.

In a great many other respects also Sweden is different from Norway. In Norway the feudal system of ancient times died out with the Black Death—that terrible plague of the late Middle Ages which abruptly called a halt to all further Viking ambitions and activities.In Sweden, on the other hand, the continued existence of large land-holding interests has allowed the country nobility to maintain itself up to the present time.And although the country is now being ruled by a socialistic government(like the vast majority of all other European countries),Stockholm is still a city with an aristocratic background, in sharp contrast to Oslo and Copenhagen, where the utmost democratic simplicity is as rigidly maintained as courtly manners are practiced in the Swedish capital.

Perhaps this development too is a direct result of Sweden's curious geographical position. For whereas Norway faces the Atlantic, Sweden is essentially a country that looks out upon an inland sea and its entire economic well-being, together with its history, is interwoven with that of the Baltic.

As long as Scandinavia was still a half-settled wilderness, there was little to choose between the Norsemen of the western coast and those of the east. To the outside they were all of them“Norsemen”and the famous old prayer,“from the fury of the Norse, good Lord, deliver us”,was chanted without specifying what particular sort of Norsemen the humble supplicants had in mind.

But after the tenth century there was a change. Then there arose a great and bitter civil warfare between the Swedes of the north, of Svealand, whose capital was situated on the Malar lake on which the modern capital of Stockholm is situated, and the Goths of the south or Götaland.They were closely related, these two tribes, and worshipped their Gods near the same shrine, the City of the Gods, which was built on the spot where the town of Upsala rises today, the oldest and most important university town of northern Europe.These quarrels, which lasted more than two centuries, greatly strengthened the position of the nobility while at the same time weakening that of the kings.During this period too Christianity had made its entrance into the Scandinavian peninsula, and the clergy and the monasteries happened to take the side of the nobles(in most countries it was the other way around)until finally the Swedish monarchs became so weak that for a century and a half Sweden had to recognize the sovereignty of Denmark.

Europe had almost forgotten that Sweden existed when in the year 1520 the western world was shocked by the tale of one of the most ghastly and inexcusable murders that has ever disgraced the history of man. In that year King Christian　Ⅱof Denmark had invited all the heads of the Swedish nobility to a great banquet—a sort of love-feast which once and for all would settle all further difficulties between the King and his beloved Swedish subjects.At the end of the festivities all the guests were taken prisoner and were either beheaded or drowned.Only one man of any importance escaped.That was Gustavus, the son of a certain Erik Vasa, who a few years previously had been beheaded by order of that same King Christian.Gustavus had then escaped to Germany.When he received news of the massacre he returned to his native land and by starting a revolution among the ancient yeomen he finally forced the Danes to return to their own country, whereupon he himself was crowned King of Sweden.

That was the beginning of that extraordinary era of national and international adventure which not only made this small and poverty-stricken land the champion of the Protestant cause in Europe but which turned Sweden into the last bulwark against the ever-increasing threat of a Slavic invasion. For the Russians, after centuries of oblivion, had at last gone on the war-path and had commenced that famous march to the sea which has not yet come to an end today.

Sweden apparently was the only country which recognized the menace. During two whole centuries all her energies were concentrated upon one single purpose—to keep Russia within bounds and away from the Baltic.In the end, of course, Sweden was bound to lose.The struggle completely exhausted her exchequer and it merely retarded the progress of the Russian steam-roller by a few decades.When it was all over, Sweden, which had owned the greater part of the Baltic Sea coast, which had ruled Finland and Ingermanland(where Leningrad is today),Estonia, Livland and Pomerania, had been reduced to a kingdom of the second rank, with an area of 173,000 square miles(something between Arizona and Texas)and a population slightly smaller than that of New York City.(Sweden has 6,141,671 and New York City has 6,930,446.)Half of this territory is still covered with forests, which in turn supply the timber needs of almost one-half of the European continent.These trees are cut down in the winter and allowed to lie around until after the beginning of spring.They are then dragged across the snow to the nearest river and are dumped into the gorge.When summer comes and the ice of the inland mountains begins to thaw, the rivers, turned into torrents, pick up the logs and carry them down into the valleys.

The same river which has thus far played the role of the railroad now becomes the source of power for the saw-mills, which pick up the logs and turn them into anything desired, from a match-stick to a four inch plank. By this time the Baltic has become free from ice, vessels can once more reach the different parts of the western coast, and the finished wood products, which thus far have cost very little, except for the wages of the lumberjacks and the mill-hands, are now entrusted to the steam-boats, which have continued to provide us with the cheapest form of transportation whenever time is not of primary importance.

These vessels serve a two-fold purpose. They would be obliged to go home empty unless they could pick up some sort of return cargo.Of course they cannot charge much for these return cargoes and as a result, Sweden gets most of its imports at a very reasonable rate.

The same system is followed in handling the iron ore which is of such excellent quality that it is in high demand even in countries which have ore deposits of their own. As the country is nowhere wider than 250 miles, it is always comparatively easy to reach the coast.In northern Sweden, in Lapland near Kiruna and Gällivara, there are immense deposits of iron which Nature for some mysterious reason has plunked down there right on the surface of the earth in the form of a couple of low mountains.In the summer the ore is taken to Lulea on the Gulf of Bothnia(the northern part of the Baltic)and in the winter, when Lulea is frozen fast, to Narvik in Norway which, due to the Gulf Stream, remains open all the year round.

Not far from these iron deposits lies Sweden's highest mountain, Kebnekaise(almost 7000 feet high)and there also stands one of the most important power houses of Europe. It is situated well within the Polar Circle but since electricity seems to be indifferent about geographical latitudes, this station is able to run both the railroads and the machinery of the surface mines at a very small cost.

The southern part of Sweden, which got a little of that soil scraped off by the glaciers of the north, is of course the most fertile part of the entire Scandinavian peninsula and therefore the most densely populated. It has a great many lakes.As a matter of fact, Sweden, next to Finland, is the“lakiest”country in the world;14,000 square miles of it are covered with water.By connecting these lakes with canals, the Swedes have provided that whole part of their country with cheap means of communication, which greatly benefits not only the industrial centers like Norrköping but also the harbors, of which Gothenburg and Malmö are the most important.

There are countries in which Man has submitted to the dictates of Nature until he has become her abject slave, and there are countries where Man has destroyed Nature so completely that he has lost all touch with that great living mother who forever must remain the beginning and the end of all things. And finally there are those where Man and Nature have learned to understand and appreciate each other and have agreed to compromise for their mutual benefit.If you want an example of the latter, go north, young man, and visit the three Scandinavian nations.