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Norwegian Pride by Rel Davis February 7, 2007 My first in-laws were an inter-racial couple, of sorts. To hear them talk about it, the race of Swedes and that of the Norse were about as far apart as races could get. Jens, my father-in-law, was a Norwegian ship captain who earned his U.S. citizenship in World War II by taking merchant ships through the treacherous North Sea. His wife Edna was the daughter of Swedish immigrants who came over in the 1930s to work in the Florida tomato fields. I remember asking Jens one day about lutefisk and lefse. You see, my first job out of college was editing a weekly paper on an Indian reservation out in Montana. Most of the whites in the area were descendants of the Norwegian laborers who built the great railroad line that crossed the brow of our nation. The Norwegian Lutherans (called in those days "ELCs" -- short for "Evangelical Lutheran Church") had an annual lutefisk-and-lefse dinner each Christmas, a dinner observed with lavish religious devotion by all partakers, for it was an echo of a distant home that most had never seen but which was still filled with mythic import. Lutefisk is lye-treated fish, which means it is to seafood what hominy is to corn, or Maraschinos to real cherries. The only good thing about lutefisk is that it doesn't taste nearly as bad as it smells. Lefse, on the other hand, doesn't taste bad at all. In fact, it doesn't really have much taste. It's an uncooked potato bread rolled very, very flat and then folded up like a large flat napkin. To eat it you roll up a piece of lefse and dip it into melted butter. As a former Lutheran minister (he claimed he was kicked out of the Lutheran church for not liking lutefisk) told me: "If you like melted butter, you'll love lefse." So I naturally assumed that my new father-in-law would also like lutefisk. I was mistaken. He made a face and told me: "Only the poorest people in Norway would eat lutefisk." He was, I discovered, proud that his family had never had to stoop that low. A few years later, Eileen, my wife at the time, and I made a visit to Norway to visit her grandparents and other relatives. They lived in the coastal town of Haugesund, which literally means "Sound of the Mound," the "sound" being the channel (Karmsundet) between the coast and nearby islands. The "mound" wasn't just any hill, but "Haraldshaugen," the mound where Harold I (Fairhair) gathered together the Norwegian lords around the year 900 and formed the first nation of Norway (and where he is supposed to be buried). Haugesund, near the Norwegian port of Stavanger, is famous in America for another reason: Marilyn Monroe's father came from there. Eileen's family name was Haavik, which literally means "inlet of seaweed." This inlet was on an island across the sound, where the Haaviks had lived for many years. (It was, by the way, when I discovered that "vik" meant "inlet" that I realized what Vikings really were dwellers by the inlets.) We met all of Eileen's relatives, aunts, uncles, cousins, and, of course, her grandparents, bestemor (grandmother) Olga and bestefar (grandfather) Knud Haavik. Bestemor made lefse, I discovered, if not lutefisk. She took the large flat bread and spread it over the kitchen table. Then she covered it completely with butter, sprinkled sugar over this, and rolled it up into a tight cylinder. Starting at the end, she cut off thin wafers or pinwheels of lefse. And, as the former minister said, if you liked butter, it was delicious. The day we left Haugesund, bestefar pulled me aside and asked me to tell his son to come to Norway that coming winter. I told him I thought Jens was planning to come the next summer. "If he comes then," bestefar said, "I will no longer be here." Back in the States I told Jens that he must go to Norway immediately to see his father. "I can't," he answered, "we can't afford it right now." "I will pay your way over if you'll go before the winter is through," I told him. He turned angry, told me "no" and stomped off. Later, I was told I had hurt his pride by offering to pay. If he couldn't go home without accepting a donation then he simply wouldn't go. Early the next spring, bestefar died without seeing his son again. Pride is a strange and cruel phenomenon. It can keep us from experiencing the ancient cultures of our people, and it can keep us from reaching loved ones before it's too late. About the author: Retired Unitarian minister, living in the Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas. | | | |
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