Home Life in Norway (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1911. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... chapter xiv the peasant and his home A norwegian bonde is not a persona grata with the bymand. The Herr Grosserer will tell you that he is simply impossible. If you ask him why, he will further tell you, with a gesture of intolerance, that he is devoured by the chronic maladies of envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness, and that he will never permit anyone of his own class to attain to a higher social level without immediately pulling him down to his original bearings. His own young men, terribly in earnest, have to a great extent confirmed this description of him in their rather gloomy rhapsodies on the bonde home life as they have lived it. Herr Carl Nserup sums up the relative position of bymand and bonde as it appears in the leit motif of the novels of Arne Garborg--himself sprung from the soil, or rather the sand, for he is from Jaderen--as follows: "There are two peoples here in this country. The one, consisting of a fourth part, who dwell in the towns--officials, grosserere, etc.--an exotic race, with high-sounding names of Low German origin, and an elegant, if overbearing, demeanour. This is the dominant caste, which is in possession of " culture " and the powers economic. The other consists of bonderne, the primal inhabitants and allodial proprietors of the land, who speak their own old idiom of pride. And these latter are the cowed--the caste of the slave We see how" (in Garborg's Bondestudentar--peasant students) "this foreign culture thrusts itself into a Vestland bonde home, and spreads and grows until all is devoured: farm, land, the future, and all life's possibilities. And when the work of dissolution and destruction is consummated the country has gained a premature, clumsy creature " (the peasant student), "who can only muse as to how he may s...