Chapter 36Norway JourneyNORGE-FAHRT
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
From Hiddensee I meant at last to go to Norway and Spitsbergen; on the way back, to the Björnsons. I had after all shamefully neglected the North until now. But just before Bergen a telegram from the Trondheim shipping line reached me, saying that shiftings of the ice had taken place (we were at the beginning of August) and the voyage to Spitsbergen must be dropped for this year.
But on the ship I came to know friends for life1, the philosopher Constantin Brunner and his wife. We attached ourselves to one another fairly quickly, and Brunner, who knew Norway exactly, then made me another travel plan, with which I was very content. — Whoever should think that after my great Indian journey I had become blasé and taken less joy in the less strange, but in themselves no lesser, beauties of Norway and its fjords and waterfalls, its snow mountains, even if so much lower and not so wildly jagged, is thoroughly mistaken. I had accustomed myself, in travelling, to compare little and to let the thing in itself work on me as directly as possible.
The light-grey soapstone cathedral of Trondheim is a magnificent Romanesque-Gothic building. And the stolkjerre drive to Fjeldsaeter, the sanatorium the German Kaiser has already visited five times, delighted me. Molde showered me with roses. In Romsdalen, in my summer boots-man [sic!] Lars Lied, who was at once poet and writer and in winter a gifted student of theology in Kristiania, I came to know one of the most prejudice-free of young Scandinavians. Through my prompting in German newspapers I was able to make possible for him, the next winter, a free table in Berlin and with it a Berlin term of lectures. That gladdens me still.
Much that was glorious I saw besides; most impressive to me was the days-long stolkjerre drive into the interior, with the stave church of Borgund. And Stalheim with the Stalheimsklev. Gudwangen with the little rock path along the water, from which I counted some twenty-five waterfalls across on the Nerofjord.
The Hardangerfjord and the Laatefoss pleased me too, only they were all too thickly occupied by tourists. Like locusts they sat in every corner. Truly a drawback of Norway, this dreadful modernity. With my new friend Constantin Brunner I met once more for a few days in Bergen, and we made wonderfully beautiful excursions together. Often we were also in Tyskebriggen, the ancient quarter of the German Hansa, which now, indeed, has fallen almost wholly a prey to the flames2. It is a crying shame.
Then it went again by stolkjerre, for days on end, through the mountains to the sanatorium of Mariastuen, and from there higher still, along grand-styled walls of rock, to Nystuen by the rugged Fielefjeld mountains. Towards evening, in the fog, my stolkjerre met a herd of reindeer. How these hundreds, which through the fog turned themselves into thousands, surrounded me like an immeasurable sea of reindeer, that is perhaps the greatest impression of my whole northern journey.
And then the view from the wild Tynsee across to the Jotun peaks! "Jotunheim," the home of the gods3 and in those days my goal of longing (which I was to reach as soon as the next year). Then the country gradually grew soft and lovely again. And via Fagernaes, Gjövik and Faaborg it went on to my old friends.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑friends for life — So here is where chapter 34's verdict on "Buddha" comes from: the friendship with Constantin Brunner (1862–1937) began on a Norway steamer in August 1907, and his praise of her poem grew out of it. "For life" held — she had ten years left. (Constantin Brunner)
- ↑fallen almost wholly a prey to the flames — The writing present again: the great Bergen fire of 15–16 January 1916 had lately levelled the city's centre when this was written. Strictly, that fire spared most of the old Bryggen — the Tyskebryggen, the Hanseatic "German wharf" — itself; "almost wholly" is what the German wartime papers mourned rather than quite what burned. (The wharf's own worst fire came only in 1955.) Either way the sentence is one more place where 1916–17 breaks through the surface of 1907, like the fallen d'Humières and the aired-out leopard skin of chapter 33.
- ↑the home of the gods — Her slip, kept as she wrote it: Jotunheimen is the home of the jötnar — the giants, the gods' adversaries; the gods live in Asgard. The range had borne the mythological name, given by the poet Aasmund Vinje, only since the 1860s. (Jotunheimen)