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.






     

NazIKEA

Ingvar Kamprad--or, as I called him in my earliest notes, "the guy who founded IKEA"--has been a Scandinavian 81 candidate from almost the start. In a previous post, I mentioned the flatpack furniture tycoon in a discussion on influential Scandinavians with known ties to Nazism. In the mid-90s, Kamprad confessed to having had a teenage association with the SSS (the Swedish Nazi party). It was, he said, his "biggest mistake," a "youthful sin," resulting from "stupidity." He had deeply repented.

A new book claims that Kamprad's Nazi assoications were stronger, and went on longer, than he has admitted. According to author Elisabeth Asbrink, Swedish intelligence files demonstrate activities going well beyond "teenage confusion." Kamprad was an enthusiastic recruiter, says Asbrink, and seems to have been some kind of an SSS functionary. He also maintained ties with Nazi sympathizers at least into the 1950s, she says.

Kamprad spokesmen dismissed the allegations "old news." "The IKEA he created is based on democratic principles and embraces a multicultural society."

Ten or twelve days ago, I got around to ordering two books about Ingvar Kamprad. The first was Leading By Design: The Ikea Story by Kamprad and a collaborator. The second was The Truth About Ikea:The Secret About the World's Fifth Richest Man, by John Stenebo. It advertizes itself as an expose of the dark side of the IKEA empire by a long-time corporate insider. (The extent of Kamprad's wealth is disputed; according to Forbes he's "only" the 162nd richest human being.) These books arrived in my mailbox just a day or two before Ingvar Kamrad and his infamy were back in the news. A perfect example of the synchronicity that has frequently, though still-startlingly, attended to this project.