Nineteenth-century Norway Research Articles

Scraping the bottom of the barrel? Evidence on social mobility and internal migration from rural areas in nineteenth-century Norway

ABSTRACT We aim to answer whether expected occupational gains motivated rural-urban and rural-rural migration in nineteenth-century Norway. Human capital theory indicates that the higher expected gains, the more prone an individual will be to migrate. We use a micro-level data set of over 42,000 rural sons linked to their fathers based on 1865 and 1900 Norwegian censuses and employ a switching endogenous regression model controlling for the endogeneity of migration decisions. Our main finding is that the effect of expected occupational gain on the probability of rural-urban migration differs according to the rural sons’ destination and parental occupational status: the sons from low status families were migrating motivated by expected occupational advancement. Sons from families with higher occupational status were motivated by expected occupational gains only in the case of rural-urban migration.

The Technological Basis of Egalitarian Economic Growth

This paper offers an alternative to the view that high technology promotes development and low technology inhibits development. We differentiate between monopoly technology and accessible technology. Monopoly technology produces growth by producing monopoly rents. As a byproduct, it also produces substantial inequality, both within nations and globally. Accessible technology produces growth without monopoly simply by increasing the volume of production in a lucrative business. We illustrate this first with a consideration of successful agrarian-based development in the global North that was based on agricultural products that were not particularly monopolized. We then move to a detailed consideration of fishing in nineteenth-century Norway. Norway’s economic development depended on proceeds from fishing exports. Norwegian fishing had a distinctive technology that made it particularly low-tech and egalitarian. It produced substantial wealth for the nation while producing very little social inequality.

‘I will learn from it for as long as I live’ – religious reading and functional literacy skills

ABSTRACT Max Weber claims in his well-known book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that the emergence of capitalism had its roots in the Protestant work ethic. Becker and Woessmann’s seminal 2009 paper finds that the more likely relationship between Protestantism and economic prosperity runs via literacy. They claim that Protestants unintendedly acquired literacy skills that functioned as human capital in the economic sphere by adhering Luther’s call to learn to read the Bible on their own. In this paper, we investigate at individual level to what extent one by reading Holy scripts acquired functional literacy skills. By using unique individual-level data from nineteenth-century Protestant Norway, we are able to identify offsprings of families known to be intensive readers of religious texts. Our results indicate that the effect of religious reading on functional literacy was restricted: religious reading gave better skills to read easily understood texts, but did not give better skills to read more advanced texts. Our results give more nuances in our understanding of what role pre-modern Nordic religious reading played in economic progress in Lutheran Nordic countries.

Whose Tordenskjold? The Fluctuating Identities of an Eighteenth-Century Naval Hero in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Nationalisms

The naval hero Peter Wessel Tordenskjold (1690–1720) was one of the most celebrated historical figures in both nineteenth-century Norway and Denmark. This double national cultivation gave cause for an ongoing feud between Danish and Norwegian historians concerning his true fatherland. At the same time, the uncertainty surrounding his exact nationality offered a wealth of material for narratives of Dano-Norwegian, and even pan-Scandinavian rapprochement. This article explores Tordenskjold’s track record as a figure of national cultivation by treating him as a dynamic and transnational memory site (lieu de memoire). It will be demonstrated that the contestation surrounding the ownership of his memory formed an important motivation for the rich artistic cultivation of this national hero, while the symbolic meaning attributed to him was subjected to the ideological needs of the individuals and groups appropriating him. As such, Tordenskjold came to be alternately ingrained in Danish, Norwegian, Dano-Norwegian, and Scandinavian frameworks according to the relevant political and social circumstances.

The regional dispersion of income inequality in nineteenth-century Norway

This paper documents, for the first time, municipality- and occupation-level estimates of income inequality between individuals in a European country in the nineteenth century, using a combination of several detailed data sets for Norway in the late 1860s. Urban incomes were on average 4.5 times as high as rural incomes, and the average city Gini coefficient was twice the average rural municipality Gini. All high- or medium-income occupation groups exhibited substantial within-occupation income inequality. Across municipalities, income inequality is higher in high-income municipalities, and lower in muncipalities with high levels of fisheries and pastoral agriculture. While manufacturing activity is positively correlated with income inequality, the association is not apparent when other economic factors such as the mode of food production is accounted for. The income Gini for Norway as a whole is found to have been 0.546, slightly higher than estimates for the UK and US in the same period.

International Religious Networks. Edited by Jeremy Gregory and Hugh McLeod. Studies in Church History. Suffolk, U.K.: Boydell, 2012. xxii + 298 pp. $70.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)International Religious Networks . Edited by Jeremy Gregory and Hugh McLeod . Studies in Church History. Suffolk, U.K. : Boydell , 2012. xxii + 298 pp. $70.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesUsing the theme of international networks, twenty-two historians and theologians fill this conference-originating book with careful studies of missionary projects, the reception of saints, women's societies and their role in sustaining missions, the place of friendships in the making of twentieth-century ecumenism, and much else. As the two British editors point out in their introduction, the contributors were encouraged to use network as a point of departure, always with the caveat that these be international. A common sense objective has yielded a set of essays that, in the editors' words, open up a number of questions rather than providing definitive answers (xx). As we approach the present (the essays are arranged chronologically), the emphasis falls on personal encounters and their consequences. Those that deal with the early modern period are more likely to connect life histories or local circumstances with large-scale events and, for this reason, seem more satisfying. The seven essays on the medieval period expose ecclesiastical and theological politics within the international, doing so in ways that are usually particular to a saint, a place, a person, or an archive.The 2005 conference that led to International Religious Networks arose out of an academic venture at networking, a British-Scandinavian Conference for Church Historians. Ten years after an initial conference in York, England, in 1995, a conference in Sweden yielded the papers that appear in this book. The Scandinavian connection explains why several of the essays are rooted in nineteenth and twentieth-century Norwegian, Swedish, and Scandinavian religious history. Dag Thorkildsen reminds us in Revivalism, Emigration, and Religious Networks in Nineteenth-Century Norway of the severe difficulties that arose when evangelicalism abruptly emerged within the Norwegian state church, and calls our attention to the very substantial mid-nineteenth century emigration States of Norwegians to the United (second only, he says, to the Irish), many of them evangelical in their orientation. In the only essay that focuses specifically on women, Cecilia Wejryd evokes the emergence of sewing circles in nineteenth century Sweden and their role in funding overseas missions; although much diminished in numbers since the 1970s, these circles continue to this day. Five essays deal in one way or another with the global visions of Protestant missionary movements circa 1910. For the Scandinavians, of particular interest is the way in which organizations like the Student Christian Movement sowed the seeds that flowered into the ecumenical movement of the late thirties and beyond, a story that touches on the struggle among German Protestants to define their situation vis-a-vis Fascism. To the question, did personal friendships formed in the context of the various missionary societies bring about mid-century ecumenism, the answer is both yes and no. As we learn from John Wolffe's essay on Transatlantic Visitors and Evangelical Networks, 1829-61, the sense of common purpose that united evangelicals who traveled between Britain and America was compromised by strong feelings of difference--over slavery, which the British could condemn at a moment when some American evangelicals were silent or apologetic, and over church and state, the Americans inflexible or myopic in favoring the voluntary principle. He concludes that, by the 1860s, connections had been disrupted. In the single essay that stands outside the Euro-American focus of these pieces, Shin Ahn tells the story of a Korean who converted to Christianity in his homeland in 1887. Thereafter, via studies in America and involvement with the YMCA here and in Korea, he witnessed the functioning of international religious networks and wrestled with their pertinence to his homeland. …

Multiple Modernities: A Tale of Scandinavian Experiences by Gunnar Skirbekk (review)

Reviewed by: Multiple Modernities: A Tale of Scandinavian Experiences by Gunnar Skirbekk Magnus Fiskesjö Multiple Modernities: A Tale of Scandinavian Experiences. By Gunnar Skirbekk. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2011. 232 pp. $45.00 (cloth). This book is an excellent historical review and theoretical discussion of the recent historical origins of what we may call Norwegian “model modernity.” And yet, strangely, one aspect that is not discussed is the implications for Norwegian modernization of the location of Norway, at the northern periphery of Europe. Let me come back to this issue in a moment. First, I must note the clear and forceful exposition and the highly interesting discussions in the book, which is a penetrating view of how the well-ordered, uncorrupt, rational, relatively egalitarian twentieth-century societies on the northern fringes of Europe came to be. It will surely appeal to all scholars interested in the plurality of modernity. Indeed, the publication by the press of the Chinese University of Hong Kong should ensure that it reaches an audience far beyond Scandinavianists and will influence ongoing scholarly debates. Publishing around the globe from Norway is clearly intentional; the author, Skirbekk, is a founder of the Marco Polo program for “comparative studies of cultural modernization in Europe and East Asia” established by the University of Bergen, Norway, and East China Normal University, Shanghai. Skirbekk rightly points out that the reputation of Scandinavian countries (or, better, Nordic countries, to include Norway’s intimately related neighbors Finland and Iceland, in addition to Sweden and Denmark) as “model” modern countries typically refers to the twentieth century welfare states. But, not as much has been written about their historical roots or the wider theoretical significance. Here, after an overview of the philosophical and sociological study of modernity, the author begins by investigating nineteenth-century Norway. He delves into the role of education and the nineteenth-century “potato priests,” the Enlightenment-inspired Lutheran clergy devoted to the agricultural and other forms of teaching of the common people, and the dynamics of this clergy and the popular movements rising in the same era and transforming and broadening national politics. Skirbekk identifies these developments as a “typical Scandinavian dialectics” of social democracy and modernity (p. 32) and underlines the formative societal and national-political significance of mass self-education and self-training in internally democratic civic organizational life of this era. Chapter 3 discusses how all this unfolded locally, including in the self-enlightening inner life of popular self-educational samtaleforeninger (farmers’ “conversation clubs”) in which locals organized debates on [End Page 707] the topics of the day, taking up opposite positions for the sake of mass self-education. (No hint of global-comparative discussion is included here, but one wonders how such a farmer’s club might be condemned and suppressed as heretic in more authoritarian societies like China.) Skirbekk proceeds to discuss developments up until the Nazi Germany invasion in 1940, focusing on engineers, teachers, and lawyers, but also unions and class issues—everywhere providing rich references to relevant literature. Thus arriving at World War II and the twentieth-century welfare state, Skirbekk then turns the clock back and delves farther back in history, first the eighteenth century, then again all the way to pre-Christian times and the early Norwegian kingdoms. He admirably discusses a wealth of pertinent factors (for example, the introduction of Protestantism, which is often seen as popular and anti-Catholic but in Norway was in fact imposed from the top down). Only in the last chapter does he return to more familiar post–World War II Norway. These bold rhetorical moves are admirably executed in a concise and clear manner, and together result in an original contribution, above all in the book’s deeper, richly textured view of Norwegian history as it relates to the broader issues of modernity. Despite this rich, sophisticated discussion of popular and institutional codevelopments, it seems to me that the book underplays the significance of the geo-cultural location of Norway and how Norwegian elites may have measured themselves against peer European nations. This aspect of competitive mimicry is a dynamic process in which local elites, prompted by the conditions of conceptual integration of a...

The ‘Floating Baroness’ and the ‘Queen of the Skis’

Recently women's ski jumping has attracted public attention because a group of female jumpers went to court to fight the IOC decision to exclude them from the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver. After almost nine months in court the jumpers lost their case, and maybe their story will disappear into nowhere again.1 Especially before the Olympics it was a worthwhile story for the media to report about. Thus not only the existence of women's ski jumping but also this case of gender discrimination was spread all over the world. For many people not involved in ski sports it was the first time they heard about women's ski jumping. However, ski jumping is not a new sport for women. First sources tell us about ski jumping women in nineteenth-century Norway. Not until the twentieth century do we hear about women performing this sport on the European continent and in North America. Throughout the history of this sport, there were always examples of extraordinary women jumpers. Two of them from different European countries, living in different periods, shall be the focus of this paper. The Austrian Baroness Paula Lamberg (1887–1927) from the famous Austrian ski resort Kitzbühel, and the Norwegian Johanne Kolstad (1913–1997), who reached international fame due to her long jumps in the 1930s. Considering the fact that ski jumping was and still is seen as a male-only sport, the questions arise, who were these women who lived in different parts of the world during different times and managed to receive recognition in a male-dominated sport? What were the social and cultural circumstances that made it possible for them to attain fame at a time in which women's participation in sports was very much restricted? Or were they simply a product of the rising emancipatory currents of the time? After an introduction to the beginnings of women's ski jumping and the arguments opposed to it, this paper tries to find answers to these questions and build a link to the image of the ‘New Women’ in the early twentieth century who also had some impact on women's sports participation.

Revivalism, Emigration and Religious Networks in Nineteenth-Century Norway

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, state, society and church were almost identical units in Norway, and with the exception of guilds, minor rural fellowships and small groups influenced by Moravian piety, there was no civil society, in the sense of a sphere between family, market and public affairs.

In This Issue [Abstracts

Fabrizio Nevola considers the form, function, and significance of shops and the other commercial spaces contained in the ground floors of the Renaissance palaces of Siena, Florence, and Rome. Home Shopping: Urbanism, Commerce, and Palace Design in Renaissance Italy also investigates the social interaction between the private environment of the home and the public space of the street. Contrary to much that has been written about the palaces of the fifteenth century, their designers did not abandon botteghe (shops), nor more broadly construed commercial functions. The resulting buildings are hybrid structures in which the proud individual façades of private patrons' palaces were configured to serve the needs of trade. Today, urban space is largely experienced as a succession of shop fronts, and commercial activities overwhelm all other functions. Early modern Italy was not much different.Entering the architectural dialogue in 1830, the term néo-grec came to characterize the stylistic movement represented by Henri Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, but the meaning of the term was always elusive. Josephine Grieder analyzes the confusing record of remarks by architects and the subsequent commentary by scholars and historians, noting the difficulty of aligning the terminology with visible architectural phenomena. The Search for the Néo-Grec in Second Empire Paris turns to contemporary books and journals for testimony about the visual characteristics of the style and traces the subtle shift in its meaning as néo-grec became inextricably linked with the urban transformation effected by Napoleon III and Haussmann.Focusing on three nineteenth-century railroad lines in Norway, Mari Hvattum investigates the architectural and cultural significance of early railways. In Panoramas of Style: Railway Architecture in Nineteenth-century Norway, she argues that the seemingly frivolous historicism of mid-nineteenth-century railway architecture should be understood as an attempt to craft appropriate cultural associations for the new Norwegian nation state. Railway architects created an architecture that fused the local and the global, the modern and the traditional, into a new whole. They designed buildings with a mimetic and emblematic relationship to their surroundings, construing the railway journey as—to paraphrase the cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch—a “panorama of style.”The Spatial Practices of Privilege focuses on the children's cottage that stands on the grounds of the Breakers, in Newport, Rhode Island. Designed by Peabody and Stearns in 1886, the cottage was the first of several changes Cornelius Vanderbilt made to the property after he purchased it in 1885. While the main house (designed by Richard Morris Hunt after the first Breakers burned in 1892) has long been interpreted as the architectural reflection of the Vanderbilts' class status, the cottage has been ignored. Bringing together the methodologies of cultural landscape studies, performance theory, and the history of childhood, Abigail A. Van Slyck argues that the estate played an active role in establishing, maintaining, and enhancing the family's class status, and that children—and their spatial management—were integral to the process. In its form and content, the cottage evoked middle-class domesticity, but did so in the service of an upper-class identity that sought to distinguish itself from the middle class. Ostensibly a site of play, it was also a place of work, both for the Vanderbilts' servants as well as for the Vanderbilt offspring. Modeled on an almshouse and devoted to the homely skills of cooking and sewing, the building made claims to humbleness that were refuted by its size, expense, and its spatial arrangements that supported the Vanderbilt children and their parents in the performance of their privileged status.

Panoramas of Style

Focusing on three nineteenth-century railroad lines in Norway, Mari Hvattum investigates the architectural and cultural significance of early railways. In Panoramas of Style: Railway Architecture in Nineteenth-century Norway, she argues that the seemingly frivolous historicism of mid-nineteenth-century railway architecture should be understood as an attempt to craft appropriate cultural associations for the new Norwegian nation state. Railway architects created an architecture that fused the local and the global, the modern and the traditional, into a new whole. They designed buildings with a mimetic and emblematic relationship to their surroundings, construing the railway journey as—to paraphrase the cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch—a “panorama of style.”

Reading Societies and Lending Libraries in Nineteenth-Century Norway

During the nineteenth century quite a few reading societies, parish collections, and lending libraries were established in Norway. They were important components in the formation of modern Norway. Based mainly on printed catalogues from such collections, the article shows that during this period books became ubiquitous and Norwegian reading habits, as expressed in the selection of authors in these reading societies, mirrored other societal developments, such as secularization and a desire for entertainment. Although urban and rural Norway showed some difference in literary preference, the desire to raise everybody's level of information was a common goal. A comparison with the development in the other Scandinavian countries is also made.

Ghosts (review)

Reviewed by: Ghosts Christine Woodworth Ghosts. By Henrik Ibsen. Adapted and directed by Preston Lane. Triad Stage at Pyrle Theater, Greensboro, NC. 4 April 2009. Adapting one of Henrik Ibsen’s works is fraught, to say the least. Critics and scholars apply harsh scrutiny to any new approach to plays by the writer revered as the father of modern drama. The reviews for Christopher Shinn’s recent rendition of Hedda Gabler attest to this challenge. Numerous prominent writers—from Pam Gems to Christopher Hampton and Lanford Wilson—have reimagined Ghosts. Now Triad Stage of Greensboro, North Carolina, has premiered a new adaptation by artistic director Preston Lane. Lane paid homage to the broad scope of Ibsen’s writing style, deftly crafting a work that delicately balances on the knife’s edge between past and future, realism and proto-expressionism, and the spoken and unspoken. Through Lane’s evocative writing, the darkly stylized design elements, and the focused and precise acting by the ensemble, this production of Ghosts served as a fulcrum for the breadth of Ibsen’s canon. Ghosts ignited a critical firestorm at its 1891 London debut. At the crux of the controversy was Ibsen’s treatment of taboo subjects: venereal disease, incest, and euthanasia. Some critics renounced Ghosts on moral grounds, while others praised it for innovation and daring. Categorized as one of Ibsen’s “social problem” plays, Ghosts is often positioned alongside A Doll’s House and Enemy of the People; although these texts are among the most-recognized of Ibsen’s realist canon, the works from his early and late career verge away from realism. Lane’s adaptation of Ghosts preserves the starkly emotional and moral dilemmas crafted by Ibsen, while simultaneously hearkening back to the context of the verse dramas of Ibsen’s early writing and anticipating the high modernist experimentation of the playwright’s later works. This masterful adaptation pared Ghosts down to its essence. Each word was deliberate and either masked or revealed that which could not be voiced fully. Although Lane’s adaptation did not feature the expansive language or folkloric allusions of Ibsen’s early work, the language was decidedly poetic. The abominable truths of incest, adultery, and lust were never explicitly spoken, yet raged beneath even the most seemingly banal interactions. Every aspect of the production displayed a similar economy of representation. There was an overall sense that the design elements were stripped of excess so that each object in the performance space was symbolically resonant and utterly necessary. Additionally, Lane and his collaborators firmly entrenched the production in the mores and natural environment of nineteenth-century Norway, which entrapped the characters as much as their sordid histories. Howard Jones’s dark and damp scenic design cut across Triad’s thrust space. The glass-paned conservatory wall offered a window into the stark landscape, represented through abstracted projections. Writ large on the playing space, these projections reflected and refracted the inner turmoil of the characters. The stylized projections also operated in tandem with Stuart Nelson’s lighting design and David Smith’s sound design. This was especially evident in the moments when the specters of Mr. Alving’s sexual deviance haunt Mrs. Alving, both through Osvald and Regina as well as through her own memories. Smith’s soundscape underscored the tragic nature of the events, aurally exposing the fragile and tortured inner life of the play’s inhabitants. Even the more realistic elements of design intensified these tumultuous internal landscapes. The Alvings evidently reside precariously in their glass house, as the ceiling featured panes of glass covered in crystallized ice, which looked as if they could crack at any instant. The cold, gray stone floor featured pooled water that Regina (Rebecca Nerz) fruitlessly attempted to mop up. Stagnant and impossible to remove, the water served as a bitter reminder that they were all at the mercy of the elements. Layered and precise, Kelsey Hunt’s costumes similarly illustrated each of the characters’ battle with confinement and control. The women were restrained by corsets, bustles, and petticoats, while the men were trapped in their layers of clothing. [End Page 640] Click for larger view View full resolution Rebecca Nerz (Regina), Gloria...

Josep L Barona and Steven Cherry (eds), Health and medicine in rural Europe (1850–1945), Scientia Veterum, Valencia, Seminari d'Estudis sobre la Ciència, Universitat de València, 2005, pp. 372, €18.00 (paperback 84-370-6334-5). Orders to: Javier.crespo-crespo@uv.es; Publicaciones de la Universitat de Valencia/Llibreria, C/Aretes Graficas 13, 46010 Valencia, Spain.

Josep L Barona and Steven Cherry (eds), Health and medicine in rural Europe (1850–1945), Scientia Veterum, Valencia, Seminari d'Estudis sobre la Ciència, Universitat de València, 2005, pp. 372, €18.00 (paperback 84-370-6334-5). Orders to: Javier.crespo-crespo@uv.es; Publicaciones de la Universitat de Valencia/Llibreria, C/Aretes Graficas 13, 46010 Valencia, Spain. - Volume 51 Issue 1

Norwegian Ecclesiastical Affiliation in Three Countries: a Challenge to Earlier Historiography

AbstractHistorians like Oscar Handlin and Timothy L. Smith asserted that international migration, especially that of Europeans to North America, was a process which reinforced traditional religious loyalties. In harmony with this supposed verity, a venerable postulate in the tradition of Scandinavian-American scholarship was that most Norwegian immigrants in the New World (the overwhelming majority of whom had been at least nominal members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Norway) clung to their birthright religious legacy and affiliated with Lutheran churches after crossing the Atlantic (although for many decades it has been acknowledged that by contrast, vast numbers of their Swedish-American and Danish-American counterparts did not join analogous ethnic Lutheran churches). In the present article, however, it is demonstrated that anticlericalism and alienation from organised religious life were widespread in nineteenth-century Norway, where nonconformist Christian denominations were also proliferating. Furthermore, in accordance with these historical trends, the majority of Norwegian immigrants in the United States of America and Southern Africa did not affiliate with Lutheran churches. Significant minorities joined Baptist, Methodist, and other non-Lutheran religious fellowships, but the majority did not become formally affiliated with either Norwegian or pan-Scandinavian churches.

The Wild Duck and Other Stories. The Discourse of Photography in Nineteenth Century Norway

(2005). The Wild Duck and Other Stories. The Discourse of Photography in Nineteenth Century Norway. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 74, No. 2, pp. 82-95.

Framing a National Narrative: The Legend Collections of Peter Christen Asbjornsen (review)

Reviewed by: Framing a National Narrative: The Legend Collections of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen Jennifer Schacker (bio) Framing a National Narrative: The Legend Collections of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen. By Marte Hvam Hult . Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003. 260 pp. In the disciplines of folklore and fairy-tale studies, the name Peter Christen Asbjørnsen is intimately connected with that of Jørgen Moe. As coauthors of one of the earliest experiments in folklore fieldwork and publishing, the classic nineteenth-century tale collection Norske folkeeventyr (1841), Asbjørnsen and Moe have heretofore stood inseparable, seemingly indistinguishable, in the annals of folklore's historiography. One of Marte Hvam Hult's prime objectives in her recent book, Framing a National Narrative: The Legend Collections of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, is to focus critical attention on Asbjørnsen himself and, more specifically, on his independent collection of Norwegian supernatural legends, published in 1845-48 as Norske huldreeventyr og folksagen. As Hult indicates early on, her study seeks to "'dust off' Asbjørnsen and his legend collection and position it as a text of great importance in the establishment of the Norwegian national narrative, a critical link in the development of the modern Norwegian novel, and a work relevant in its themes to modern Norwegian society" (15-16). Indeed, the strength of this book resides in Hult's attention to Asbjørnsen's textual practices, most especially his experimentation with narrative voice and the representation of Norwegian dialects, and his use of frame narration—attention that is sure to spark new or renewed interest in Norske huldreeventyr. Inspired by the Grimms' German translation of Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825), Asbjørnsen crafted his own work from composites of stories remembered, collected, or "contributed" by friends and colleagues. Hult argues convincingly that the framing passages Asbjørnsen developed for this work serve at least two significant functions. First, they draw readers into an imagined relation with a frame narrator—an urban Norwegian who serves as an educated, skeptical, and sometimes condescending guide to Norway's rural topography and people, customs [End Page 147] and beliefs, dialects and stories. Second, these highly descriptive and firmly localized framing passages give the work an aura of verisimilitude—using the same techniques employed by storytellers when narrating legends—to render this national metanarrative persuasive and believable. It is unfortunate that Hult limits the reach of her study by assuming from the outset that her readers are already familiar with both Norwegian literature in general and Asbjørnsen's corpus in particular. Despite the author's repeated declarations of Asbjørnsen's deserved place among the literary giants of nineteenth-century Norway, it takes readers a fairly long while to get a clear sense of what makes Norske huldreeventyr so compelling. Instead, the first two chapters of Hult's study would seem to continue the established tradition of marginalizing Asbjørnsen's solo efforts, engaging with, first, a survey of scholarship on nationalism in Norway and beyond, and second, the legacy of Asbjørnsen and Moe's collaborations. There is no question that these matters are relevant to the project as a whole, but the focus, thesis, and promise of the book lack clarity in these early chapters. One also begins to suspect that Hult's engagement with literary and cultural theory—particularly recent scholarship on print culture and nationalism, narratology and genre theory, folklore and critical ethnography—is not as deep or as nuanced as it could be. For example, Hult frames her study with clear statements of her commitment to textual analysis, on the one hand, and examination of "the cultural work" performed by Asbjørnsen's text "at the time of its reception and in the decades following" (194), on the other. Nevertheless, a number of self-contradictory statements (slips, perhaps) make it unclear whether the author herself views the print entextualization of oral traditions as an ideologically charged construct—a crafted representation of storytelling events intended to "reveal"/delineate national character—or as an unclouded mirror of culture. "It was to be Jørgen Moe and Peter Christen Asbjørnsen," she writes in Chapter 2, without a...

Book Review: Issues of Gender, Race, and Class in the Norwegian Missionary Society in Nineteenth-Century Norway and Madagascar, Gender, Race, and Religion: Nordic Missions, 1860–1940

Book Review: Issues of Gender, Race, and Class in the Norwegian Missionary Society in Nineteenth-Century Norway and Madagascar, Gender, Race, and Religion: Nordic Missions, 1860–1940

William H Hubbard, Karl Pitkänen, Jürgen Schlumbohm, Sølvi Sogner, Gunnar Thorvaldsen and Frans van Poppel, Historical studies in mortality decline, II. Hist.-Filos. Klasse Skrifter og avhandlinger Nr.3, Oslo, Novus Forlag in association with the Centre for Advanced Study, at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, 2002, pp. 134, €22.70, Kr 182.00 (paperback ISBN 82-7099-360-3, ISSN 1502-9727).

William H Hubbard, Karl Pitkänen, Jürgen Schlumbohm, Sølvi Sogner, Gunnar Thorvaldsen and Frans van Poppel, Historical studies in mortality decline, II. Hist.-Filos. Klasse Skrifter og avhandlinger Nr.3, Oslo, Novus Forlag in association with the Centre for Advanced Study, at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, 2002, pp. 134, €22.70, Kr 182.00 (paperback ISBN 82-7099-360-3, ISSN 1502-9727). - Volume 48 Issue 3

The urban penalty: towns and mortality in nineteenth-century Norway

A decade ago, in a review of the field Roger Schofield and David Reher observed that ‘the basic demographic parameters of mortality decline are still far from clear’. And in spite of admirable analyses of mortality by authors ranging from Eilert Sundt in 1855 to Julie A. Backer and Michael Drake in the 1960s and Sølvi Sogner and Ståle Dyrvik in the 1970s, this observation also generally applies to Norway. Some of the lack of clarity is due to the limitations of the death data themselves, some to the orientation of researchers. For example, although almost every biography of a Norwegian town has its section on births and deaths, the study of urban mortality as a whole has not attracted much attention, perhaps because the situation seems self-evident. Towns were (and still often are) unhealthier places to live in than the countryside. Referring to the years 1831–1850, Sundt posited the laconic axiom that ‘Dødelighenden i byerne pleier være større end i landdistrikterne.’ From this starting observation, which was of course true at the time, I want to examine urban mortality in Norway in the context of state-wide mortality trends from the mid- nineteenth century to 1920. Ultimately I intend to study mortality on the individual/family level in the western coastal towns of Bergen and Haugesund during this period, using machine-readable nominative sources, censuses, and parish registers. However, to put these intended microhistorical investigations in perspective, I have delved into published statistics on mortality in Norwegian towns in general and in Kristiania (now Oslo) and Bergen in particular. These data are plentiful and readily available but they are not always in a form suitable for systematic analysis over a long term; they must be collated, organized, and to some extent massaged. In the investigative tradition of exploratory data analysis I am looking for patterns in the data and meanings in the patterns. A number of questions guide the description and analysis. How big was the urban–rural differential and how did it change over time? What were its components; or rather, who paid the ‘urban penalty’? The answers show that urban mortality was an important factor in the mortality transition in late-nineteenth-century Norway.