Tuesday 28 March 2000

Pic of the day: Firda, November 2 1995: In a couple months we will be on Internet...

When my oldest brother met with me in the city last week, we spoke a bit about Internet. No surprise, since I live my life on the Net. My brother thought that I was quite selective about what I wrote in my diary, and that I surely exaggerated a bit too. Actually, I do not agree. Yes, the entries are long enough without me going into details about how long I cook my spaghetti and how many unwashed socks I have piled up, or descriptions of the scenery along the road to work. Perhaps some day. But if you read something that sounds incredible, chances are that it is true. Or at least nearly so. :)

Anyway, talking about Internet led us to talk about search engines, and my brother recommended FAST. (I have since tried it, and did not like it. But it is fast, I give you that. Now make it user friendly.) Anyway, he had found it from a homepage called Sogn og Fjordane nett no. (It won't tell you anything unless you read Norwegian.) "Sogn & Fjordane" is the name of the province where I grew up, and where my parents and brothers all live. My brother also mentioned that there was a link to Firda, the province newspaper and the largest newspaper in my native language, Nynorsk (New Norwegian).

Firda was the daily bread of reading at home when I grew up, on that small farm north of the Dalsfjord. (Not far from the infamous road that cost millions to build and then was abandoned, ending blindly in the mountainside. A monument to the ineptitude of provincial government.) Anyway, when I grew up, Firda was a small leaf of a paper, containing mostly notes from the meetings of the local municipality boards in Førde and its neighboring counties. Førde was at the time another small rural village among the others scattered along the fjords and valleys of this wild and rugged province.

Something happened. I may be wrong, but I think it was the electric car thing that set it off. Førde was appointed a "growth center", and it was reasonably well suited, lying near the middle of the province and accessible from the fjord or by road. The second Norwegian attempt at car-making was to be a lightweight car powered by batteries. At the time, the technology was not nearly ready for it, and it flopped grandly. But the investment in infrastructure in Førde remained, and people had noticed the place. Gradually the sleepy village grew to a small town, and the newspaper grew with it. Powered by lots of new ads, it could afford real journalists and soon built a net of reporters covering much of the province. I was quite proud of its quality in the end, and did subscribe to it myself after I left home.

But here on earth, good things come to an end. The newspaper was just about to launch its Internet edition a few years ago when the owners got a great bid from a media conglomerate called A-pressen. Formerly closely affiliated with the Labor party and the trade unions, the A-press must necessarily be of poor quality. The rust of socialism devours whatever it settles on, you know; that's why red is the color of socialism. Anyway, the Net launch was delayed by several years. In protest (and because I could not waste the money) I stopped subscribing to Firda, and has not seen it since.

Well, if the net edition is any hint, it has never regained its former glory. Still, it remains the largest New Norwegian newspaper in the world, at least if you don't include weeklies.

Now, while Firda was slowly sliding from being an oft-cited source on national broadcasting to its current hesitants steps onto the Net, its current role may be fading. Events are brought into play that may well eradicate the province as a political unit. This holds true for the institution of province in general, but doubly so for S&Fj, which is very sparsely populated, has no major cities and only a couple of noticeable towns, and has for generation exported its intellectuals to the parts of the country which offer higher education. Wages are low and the area is considered remote and unattractive by most who are not born there and quite a few who are. The main force that has fought for the identity of the province has been the local media, and foremost among them Firda. But it may have been too little, too late. When the map is redrawn, all of western Norway will probably be one province. I have recommended this years ago, but only if the new provinces get much more freedom.

Despite generations of frantic propaganda, Norway remains largely an artificial nation. From late stone age, three different cultures have coexisted within the territory that is now Norway. Most obvious is the Saami people in the north; their language is less related to common Norwegian than is Sanskrit or ancient Canaanite. No kidding. It is not an Indo-European language at all, but is closely related to Finnish and somewhat related to Hungarian. The Saami people may be descendants of groups who arrived at the end of the last ice age, following the retreating ice cap.

On the west coast of Norway lives a people that came north from Holland near the beginning of the bronze age. The invaders may have gradually intermixed with the native hunter-gatherers who arrived from the south at the end of the ice age: Genetically, the nortern part of western Norway stands out, most notably with a difference in what diseases are more easily resisted. For instance, people there are less likely to suffer heart diseases, but more susceptible to breast cancer and meningitis. Distribution of blood types is also different from eastern Norway, which was populated through southern Sweden. The same group of immigrants continued up into the middle parts of Norway, now known as Trøndelag, which like the eastern parts contain much flat arable land. The seafaring peoples of the west coast colonized the long thin coast known today as Nordland, plus the islands west of Norway including Iceland and (temporarily) Greenland. They also interbred somewhat with the Scots and Irish.

The nation of Norway from the Viking age onward was unstable and of varying size, gathered by kings by conquest on the battlefield or in bed. At no time historically did it have the size and shape Norway has today; this was mainly an accident, as the lines were drawn up by Sweden and Denmark after various wars between the two. There are no ethnic Norwegians; and if there were, they would not necessarily be inside its current borders.

Which is why I think Norway, tiny as it is, would be better off as a federation, or even a confederation. The cultural differences between western Norway and eastern Norway go deeper than between eastern Norway and Sweden, or even Denmark (which was populated from Sweden in the iron age, rather recently as Scandinavian history goes; the old inhabitants were largely displaced to Great Britain).

But enough of that. It may be too late already. The children who are born today may hear only English from their own children when those grow up, when all of Norway is only a remote province in the European Federation. That is, if we are lucky. It might be (though I doubt it) that they will learn only German in the Europäische Reich.