Peeps at Many Lands: Norway

Norway exists at the edge of the world, where granite cliffs plunge into water so still it mirrors the sky and summer never quite ends. This early twentieth-century guide to the land of the Norsemen captures a country still wild with legend, from the saga kings who unified it under one crown to the fishing villages clinging to fjord walls like barnacles. A. F. Mockler-Ferryman leads readers through Harald Fairhair's bloody conquests, the martyr-saint Olafs, and the dramatic sagas that still haunted the Norwegian imagination. He moves from Viking battlefields to modern Oslo, from the southern plains to the western fjords reachable only by mountain path or coastal steamer. The Norway he describes still wore its past lightly: stave churches stood beside farms where grandparents spoke Old Norse, and the midnight sun painted the mountains in colors that had no name. Part of the "Peeps at Many Lands" series, this is vintage travel writing for readers who want to see Edwardian Norway through British eyes: curious, appreciative, and tinged with that peculiar romance of the remote.