Monday, October 31, 2011

Axel Axgil

Axel Axgil, the gay rights activist instrumental in making Denmark the first country in the world to legalize same sex marriage (1989), has died. He was 96.

Originally named Axel Lundahl-Madsen, he and his partner, Eigil Eskildsen, defiantly amalgamized their first names into the shared last name of "Axgil." They were in prison for distributing pornography at the time. 

In 1948, Axel organized "the Association," one of the earliest gay rights groups, upon being terminated from his job for being a homosexual. Forty one years later, he and Eigil were the first gay couple to be legally married in European and, I presume, modern world history.



 

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Nordic 9/11

The government buildings that were ripped open in last July's bombing are still cordoned in Oslo. Nearby Utoya, the island where the bomber then slaughtered scores of children, remains riddled with hundreds of hollow point bullet holes. The scars of a devastating terrorist attack are fresh on the Norwegian landscape.

They're also fresh on the Norwegian national psyche. "We haven't got to the stage where people have gotten mad yet," said Norway's king Harald in a rare interview. "I think we'll go through that as well. That has to come and go before we finish with this. And we have to let that happen."

According to the New York Times, King Harald is widely percieved by his nominal subjects to have performed adaquately in the aftermath of the attack, giving a moving speech on television, and weeping at the national memorial service for the 77 victims Norway's homegrown, right wing Christian terrorist.

His Majesty referred to the attack, predictably, as Norway's 9/11.

King Harald, the first native born Norwegian king since the 14th century, is scheduled to arrive in these United States later this year, with his wife, Queen Sonja. The royal couple will visit Manhattan's ground zero for a second time, before heading off to Minnesota to address the American Scandinavian Foundation.

Friday, October 7, 2011

Swede Wins Swedish Prize

Swedish Poet Tomas Transtromer, 80, whose work "explores themes of isolation, emotion and identity while remaining rooted in the commonplace," according to the New York Times, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I'd never heard of him.

Here's one of his poems, "The Couple," also courtesy of the Times.

They switch off the light and its white shade
glimmers for a moment before dissolving
like a tablet in a glass of darkness. Then up.
The hotel walls rise into the black sky.
The movements of love have settled, and they sleep
but their most secret thoughts meet as when
two colors meet and flow into each other
on the wet paper of a schoolboy’s painting.
It is dark and silent. But the town has pulled closer
tonight. With quenched windows. The houses have approached.
They stand close up in a throng, waiting,
a crowd whose faces have no expressions.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Nansen

"I am an enigma to myself," wrote Fridtjof Nansen. After devoting months to reading about him, thinking about him, he remains an enigma to me. A year ago I hadn't heard of Nansen. That fact alone now astonishes me. How is it possible? This much I do know about Nansen: his name needs be known by everyone of Scandinavian ancestry; it deserves to be remembered by everybody.

My job is to convince you. To that end, I have before me a sheaf of notes from various sources, more pages than I care to count, many of them typed and amended. I have educated myself in the history and techniques of polar exploration, the histories of neuroscience and oceanography, the independence of Norway, and post-Great War diplomacy and humanitarianism--the diverse areas in which Nansen left enormous contributions. I have read two biographies of the man. I have read one book by him: Farthest North, his account of the unsuccessful effort to be the first man to the North Pole. I have also perused general histories of Arctic exploration, in all of which Nansen inevitably features prominently. I have reread all the chapters of my several general Scandinavian histories in which his name appears.

But I still can't seen to scale his heights, plumb his depths, or circumnavigate the range of his achievements.

But I retain a shred of hope, as usual, from synchronicity. Last Wednesday, I hiked along a stretch of Puget Sound shoreline with a friend. A bright, blustery cold day turned dark as the sun sunk behind the Olympic mountain range--a superior spectacle to most movies, and free. We visited the massive statue of Leif Ericson which, thanks to the Nordic Heritage Center, stands guard over a harbor full of creaky yachts in north Seattle. But even in the shadow of Leif, it was Fridtjof Nansen who I couldn't shut up about. What he did and what he didn't, and how, and why-- and what a fit I was working myself into by my inability to summarize him, or even formulate a good plan for describing him. I must have tested my companion's patience with my ranting. I can only hope he wasn't listening.

Later, we re-routed to his office, to wait out the southbound traffic and continue our conversation, which had mercifully turned to other subjects. I excused myself to the shitter, grabbed a magazine at random from the several that were available--Outside, as it happened-- opened to a page at random, and met immeidately with an article commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen's conquest of the South Pole (1911). Brief and breezy though it was, the article mentioned Amundsen's mentor, Fridtjof Nansen.

The gods, it seems, won't let my thoughts stray far.

***
Roald Amundsen, by the way, was also once a candidate for the Scandinavian 81. I consider him now a longshot, an honorable also-ran, impressive though his achievements were in every way. He has been overlooked, as the article claimed, in the English speaking world, because he of his British rival, Robert F. Scott. The two of them raced, with their teams, to be the first man to set foot on the South Pole. Amundsen and the Norwegians won by over a month. Scot arrived at the Pole to find a Norwegian flag planted triumphantly in the ice. Scott and his men had little time to regret their defeat--they all froze and starved to death on the return trip. They lost the race, and their lives. But Scott left a journal of the futile expedition. It was discovered with his body, and when published made him a national hero, a martyr to British imperialism, and the focus of national adulation.

Maybe it better for Scott to have died. While one Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, was destroying his dream to be the first man to the South Pole, another, the famous Fridtjof Nansen, was having an affair with his wife. Never in history can an Englishman have been more thoroughly ill-used by the sons of Norway! At least he was spared ever having to learn about it.