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national anthem God Save the Queen , a collection of battle hymns (Luther’s Ein’ feste burg; Gustavus Adolphus’s Battle Hymn; The Battle Hymn of the Republic; Cromwell’s ‘Battle Psalms’), hymns on the ‘warfare of life’ ( Onward, Christian Soldiers; Soldiers of Christ Arise; Forward! Be Our Watchword ) and missionary hymns ( From Greenland’s Icy Mountains; Jesus Shall Reign
This book analyses the contemporary politics of the nation states of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden and the Home Rule territories of Greenland, Faeroes and Åland that together make up the Nordic region. It covers Scandinavia past and present, parties in developmental perspective, the Scandinavian party system model, the Nordic model of government, the Nordic welfare model, legislative-executive relations in the region, and the changing security environment. The Nordic states have a shared history, common linguistic bonds and a common state Lutheran religion. Of the six Scandinavian languages, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are mutually intelligible, whilst Swedish is an official national language in Finland. Turning to a brief overview of nation-building and state-building in the Nordic region, an obvious distinction can be drawn between those 'stateless nations' which went on to achieve statehood and the territories that have not achieved independence. The book presents a brief chronology of events in Norden up to 1922, when Åland achieved autonomy. In Sweden the historic phase of party-building produced a basic two-plus-three configuration and a party system based on five 'isms': communism, social democracy, agrarianism, liberalism and conservatism. By 1930 there was a bifurcated parliamentary left and a fragmented nonsocialist bloc consisting of essentially town-based Liberal and Conservative parties and a farmer-based Agrarian Party. Whilst acknowledging the limitations inherent in the periodisation of party system change, the book focuses on the extent of party system change since the 'earthquake elections' of 1970-73.
the humorous side of things! This chapter, however, is not about eagles, still less hens; rather, it focuses on a particular swan – the eight-quilled swan of Nordic co-operation depicted in the logo of the Nordic Council and representing the five nation states of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, and the three Home Rule territories of the Faeroes, Greenland and Åland. It offers a broad introduction to the (changing) geo-politics of the Nordic region and views co-operation and, more frequently in an historical light, conflict between the member states in
connected with the process of industrialisation and the concomitant development of a national bourgeoisie. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that the mechanisation of fishing took place. Iceland was geographically distant from the European cultural mainstream and also, unlike Finland and Norway, physically removed from the imperial power, Denmark. In that respect it had much in common with the Faeroes and Greenland, along with Orkney, Shetland and the Hebrides. The contrast with the Northern and Western (Scottish) Isles, however, was striking, since
the far NW of Europe’.15 Although his wish was never to be realised, he did get as far as the North Cape of Norway in 1881 on a pleasure trip.16 Through the 1870s, he assisted a number of other British collectors who were travelling to northern Europe by putting them in touch with his business and scientific contacts; he was often repaid for his troubles with good bird and egg specimens on the travellers’ return. The birds of Greenland and Iceland were effectively dealt with by Dresser’s contacts in Copenhagen, notably Alfred Benzon and his acquaintances. Benzon
to redress the balance between these historical traditions, through focusing on a significant and coherent period of Arctic endeavour, an extensive geographical area and a range of representations. Inevitably some compromises have had to be made. Geographically the area studied has been restricted to the western Arctic of Greenland and Canada, because for most of the period that was the centre of
I used to look forward to falling asleep with the glacier in the evening. I also looked forward to waking up to it in the mornings. (Pastor Jón, Under the Glacier ) The mountain cryosphere, often overshadowed in the scholarly literature by the Arctic, Antarctic, and Greenland, deserves a place in the ice humanities. If the ocean is valuable to environmental humanists because it provides ‘a perspective that
From Iceland to the Americas, an anthology of thirteen original critical essays, is an exercise in the reception of a small historical fact with wide-ranging social, cultural, and imaginative consequences. Medieval records claim that around the year 1000 Leif Eiriksson and other Nordic explorers sailed westwards from Iceland and Greenland to a place they called Vinland. Archaeological evidence has in fact verified this claim, though primarily by way of one small, short-lived Norse settlement in Newfoundland, which may not even have been Leif’s. Whether or not this settlement was his, however, the contact associated with him has had an outsized impact on cultural imagination in and of the Americas. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, indeed, novels, poetry, history, politics, arts and crafts, comics, films and video games have all reflected a rising interest in the medieval Norse and their North American presence. Uniquely in reception studies, From Iceland to the Americas approaches this dynamic between Nordic history and its reception by bringing together international authorities on mythology, language, film, and cultural studies, as well as on the literature that has dominated critical reception. Collectively, the essays not only explore the connections among medieval Iceland and the modern Americas, but also probe why medieval contact has become a modern cultural touchstone.
Nordic records designate as the Western Hemispheric place where Norse travellers from Iceland and Greenland made land, encountered hostile indigenous peoples, and established brief settlements. Certainly in North America and probably lying more northerly than southerly, the precise location of Vinland, despite decades of research and the strong convictions of many researchers, may never be known, if only because, in accordance with Norse geography, Vinland never had a precise location. Thingvellir, the site of the annual Icelandic parliament and social gathering, very
. Yet, Broecker relied on the work of Danish ice core scientist Willi Dansgaard and his ice core data from Greenland in order to prognosticate the future of the world's climate. In the years following Broecker's article, ice cores began to appear in the company of other paleoarchives – deep sea cores, lake sediments, tree rings, corals – in order to temporalize the dynamics of the entire Earth system (Oeschger, 1985 ). These archives differed in many ways – they had different durations, qualities, materialities, and geographical boundaries – but were placed together