View From a Prairie Home

by Hege Hernfindahl, Columnist

Syttende mai is coming this Friday and I always write a column about it. Writing about how Norway struggled for 400+ years with being ruled by a foreign nation for us to emerge to what our nation is today, is one of my passions. I love stories about struggles that have a happy ending. I also love stories about how a people can gain their freedom. And I consider myself a Norwegian, having been born and raised and educated in Norway and moving to the United States as an adult.

Living here, I have noticed that people also often consider themselves a Norwegian or Swede or German or Italian or Irish or Mexican. The list goes on. That is interesting to me, because those people have lived in this country for generations. Sometimes, they will tell me with a chuckle that they have gone to ancestry.com and found where all their ancestors come from. The list of countries can be long, so they admit with a smile that they are basically an American. Which I am too, since I gained my citizenship in 2005.

At the swearing-in ceremony, a judge spoke. And his speech brought me to tears, because he said that even though we now were legally Americans, we should never forget where we came from. The legacy of so many nationalities, he said, made up our identity as Americans. Which, of course, discounted the native people of this great land, but that is a topic for another day. As the swearing-in began, he invited all the children to join him on stage and they came running, many of them wearing the national costume of their home country.

I was again reminded of national identity when I attended my grandson, Anders’ concert at St. Olaf the other day. The concert was held in the Boe Chapel with beautiful stained glass windows and awesome acoustics. The window nearest us had the motto of St. Olaf “Fram! Fram! Kristmenn, Krossmenn” (Forward! Forward! Men of Christ, men of the cross). I know that St. Olaf College has very strong Norwegian ties and traditions. Anders is now taking his third semester of Norwegian there and is able to have long conversations with me in my native tongue.

One of the conductors that evening was a Korean-American who introduced us to a piece by the Norwegian composer Geirr Tveit. The concerto “Three Fjords” featured a student playing the Hardanger fiddle, the national instrument of Norway. It’s similar to a violin but with four additional under-strings that resonate with the notes played above. The conductor introduced the piece with a smile saying: “only at St. Olaf will you hear a Hardanger fiddle.” And I was reminded of national identity and how the Hardanger fiddle would be played on farms and was part of a national movement in the 19th century that spurred the quest for an independent Norway.

As I have written before, Norway was under Danish reign for centuries until the Danes were forced to give Norway to Sweden at the conclusion of the Napoleonic war in 1814. But because of the rise of nationalism among ordinary people in Norway, a constitution was written and signed on May 17, 1814. This constitution (grunnlov) forced the Swedes to concede more and more to the rise of Norwegian independence until they had no choice but to grant it in 1905.

The celebration of Syttende mai was initiated with a children’s parade in 1870 by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, who also wrote Norway’s national anthem, “Ja vi elsker dette landet.” He and Peter Qvam, a principal of a school in Oslo, figured that no politician in charge would object to a children’s parade. Thus syttende mai became a day to celebrate the national identity of Norway with children’s parades and music and thousands upon thousands of Norwegian flags.