Dr. Maren Johnson, Luther College’s Associate Professor of Nordic Studies and Torgerson Center for Nordic Studies Director, facilitates a monthly bokprat, discussing Scandinavian authors and Scandinavian life. Join us in Febuary as we discuss the novel Cabin in the Mountains by Robert Ferguson.
The hytte – or wooden cabin home – is a crucial part of the national identity of every Norwegian. It is turf-roofed and wooden-built, offering fresh clean air, peace, isolation, and the promise of a day’s wood-chopping, hiking, or snow-clearing amid landscapes of great beauty. In 2016, Robert Ferguson and his wife bought a piece of land high up in the Hardangervidda, the plateau that dominates south-central Norway, and on it they built such a hytte.
For Ferguson, the hytte represented the realization of a dream that first brought him to Norway from England more than 30 years ago. As the cabin takes shape, he learns, through conversations with friends and cabin-builders, the cultural history of modern Norway. He learns of the changing traditions attached to these cabin homes for native Norwegians as they try to marry their new-found urban affluence to their past as a tight-knit, impoverished, rural community-nation. Along the way he also describes the intense and mutually rewarding relationship that arose between the colonial Norwegians and their wealthy, imperialist British neighbors across the North Sea in the 19th and 20th centuries. He shares how the British “salmon-lords” showed them another way of looking at their great rivers and how English climbers introduced them to a new way of thinking about their mountains.
Registration for this free class is required. Sign up here.
