I WONDER IF MY VIKING GRANDMOTHER MADE LEFSE

The History Channel series, “Vikings”--now entering its third season--has just as much violence and almost as much sex as “Game of Thrones,” with the added recommendation that it is a dramatization of real events.  And the even higher commendation that it is about my great-great-great-great-great grandfather and his wife, my grandmother, the Viking Shieldmaiden. (More about that later.)

Of course I must boldly underscore “dramatization,” but if the writers of the series have taken a bit of dramatic license, they have done so with the dusty books of history open before them.  The first season of the series is centered on the Viking raid of the monastery at Lindisfarne, England, in 793 A.D., which is also the year (and the event) that historians cite as the beginning of “the Viking era.” After watching the episode, I looked up the year 793 in the Anglo Saxon Chronicles; it was immediately apparent that the “Vikings” screenwriter had done the same:

on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter.

Further reading in these Chronicles even corroborates the detail, in the show’s story line, of how the Viking raiders had no sooner pulled their longboats onto the beach than they surprised and attacked the retinue of sheriff’s men who approached them, mistaking the invaders for traders.

And Alcuin, an English priest at the court of Charlemagne, writes to the Bishop of Lindisfarne:

Your tragic sufferings daily bring me sorrow, since the pagans have desecrated God's sanctuary, shed the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope and trampled the bodies of the saints like dung in the street.

And that is pretty much how “Vikings” depicts the action. It is skillfully written as gripping viewing for a 2015 television audience. Gripping, but, it seems, not exaggerated.

Viking leader Ragnar Lodbrok. (Those who know Caryl's
family will tell you that he looks a lot like a Nasby.)

The Vikings are variously described in the chronicles and history books as “Norsemen,” (Norwegians) and “Danes.”  Since these labels also define the lineage out of which Caryl and I have sprung, I have taken to playing a little game--while watching the series--whereby I identify a particularly strong (or beautiful) warrior (one who survives the battle, of course) and claim him or her as Caryl’s or my ancestor. The fierce farmer-King Ragnar Lodbrok, and his wife, the Shieldmaiden Lagertha—who have so far survived

The Viking Shieldmaiden Lagertha

to be the parents of many children—have thus been added to the ancient pantheon of our family: our great-great-greats. (The mathematics of heredity and genealogy show that, in terms of our relationship to real characters living at that time, this is most likely true.)

In claiming the heroes and winners as part of my own line, I am in good company. Robert Ferguson, in his excellent, scholarly, and very readable new history, “The Vikings,” points out that the annals of many early chroniclers, although a source of good general knowledge, are “prejudiced by the author’s inclination to exaggerate the importance of members of his own family in the commission of important deeds.”

Walt, an elderly member of the congregation I served in Anchorage many years ago, was a man of thoroughly Norwegian ancestry. He was a gentle, soft-spoken guy, but his eyes would actually gleam when he got to bragging about how the Vikings literally “seeded” all of western civilization. I, too, am fascinated by “family” tales of world-wide exploration and, yes, conquest. The Age of the Vikings that began in 793 continued until 1066, when—rather than coming to an end—it transmogrified into the conquest of the English by the Normans, who were somewhat more civilized (and Frenchified!) descendants of the Vikings by another name. Some historians suggest that the Norman Conquest was the most complete overturning of one people by another in all of recorded history.

Do you hear that? Like my friend Walt, I’m slipping ever-so-slightly into bragging. When seen through the swordplay-loving eyes of the armchair adventurer in me, it is easy to overlook the fact that, as many historians point out, the experience of being confronted by longboats filled with exotic, armed warriors coming out of the mist of the sea into the local cove or quiet river estuary to wreak "rapine and slaughter" was an experience of violence, fear, and, yes, terror.

The ancestral Scandinavian story with which Caryl’s and my generation are most familiar is that of our doughty great-grandparents leaving the beautiful but impossibly tiny or rocky crofts of Norway and Denmark to settle in the unbelievably vast (160 acres!) and rich prairie homesteads of the Midwest, and of the earnest young pastors they quickly summoned to bring their church to them--a church in which their descendants hold sacramental feasts of the holy food of immigrants and seafarers: Lutefisk and Lefse.

It’s a story that I love and that is in my blood. But I am grateful to “Vikings” and the History Channel for reminding me that--in addition to (and before) that of our pious pioneer grandparents Johan and Ellen and Ole and Beret--my veins also contain the blood of King Ragnar the Fierce. And the Viking Shieldmaiden Lagertha. "Grandma." 

The Sognefjord, in Norway, out of which the Vikings sailed
to invade England, and through which our grandparents
sailed in their journey to America.

In the mountains above the Sognefjord. The beautiful but
impossibly rocky Nesbo farmstead from which
Caryl's Great-Grandfather emigrated in 1878.

LAND OF THE FREE FOR ALL

Do you remember how, on the Statue of Liberty, it says,

"Give me your tired, your poor,

your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...?"

The trouble is, people did! 

                             ~ "Beyond The Fringe"

I am a fourth-generation American; my great-grandfather came from Denmark in 1889. The older I get, the more it seems as though I should put it this way: “I am only a fourth-generation American.” The 121 years of Jorgensen residency in this nation (my lifetime comprising almost exactly one-half of that time) seems like an inch on a yardstick as compared to the generations stretching back for hundreds or even thousands of years in the old country. (I’m going to do one of those National Geographic DNA swabs and find out just how far back.)

My point is not that I’m pining for the land of my ancestors -- just the opposite. I have felt and known myself to be completely American since the moment of my first rational consideration of the matter. Although I grew up with a sense of curiosity and, eventually, appreciation for my Danish and Norwegian heritage, I have never thought of myself as a Scandinavian-American, but simply as an American. (Although, I arrived in my current parish twenty-one years ago just in time to get a mention in the congregation’s history book. The mention? I am the congregation’s “first Danish pastor.”)

Like immigrant families today, my ancestors migrated immediately to established communities of their nationality and old-country language. The first generation (especially if they were over forty) never learned English; the next generation always did. For those who, like my father, were born here, Denmark may have been in their blood, but America was in their bones -- from the first. (My father, whose father was born in Denmark, never spoke or learned Danish.) So, to the charge, “Why don’t they speak English,” the answer is two-fold: 1) Your ancestors didn’t, either; and, 2) Give them a generation -- they will.

(I know that your ancestors spoke English if they came from England, but at least my Norwegian and Danish ancestors were legal. Those so-called Pilgrims who arrived in 1620 -- about 600 years after my Norwegian fore-cousin Bjarni Herjolfson, by the way -- definitely were not. Their very first act, by their own account -- when their clothes were still wet from their desperate landing -- was to steal a granary of Native corn. You’ve got to watch those borders!)

During our wonderful years in Alaska, I was amused to observe that an old Alaska pioneer was apparently someone who’d been there ten minutes longer than the next guy. Those politicians who play the immigrant/race-baiting game seem to forget just how recently they’ve arrived -- and that those who keep arriving are just as American as they are.

Of course this is an old story, emblematic of but not unique to the U.S. of A. It is because we wander and end up in new places that become our true home that DNA tests are eventually necessary to trace the wandering. Father Abraham traveled from -- of all places -- Iraq. Johann Christian Bach, son of the most German of German composers, became a Londoner -- a more famous composer in his day than his father -- and is buried in London. Our Korean-born daughter teaches the children of all kinds of Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachussets; and my dad -- who’s father was born on an impoverished Danish farm -- was playing saxophone in a swing band on a Midwestern college campus when he was twenty. Now that’s America! 

ONE WEEK IN NORWAY AND I'M A PHILOSOPHER

My trip with Caryl and her cousins to visit their ancestral Nesbo farm in the mountains of Norway last week was very much a pilgrimage for me, too – partly because my own heritage is Norwegian, and partly because for decades I have felt myself to be fully (and graciously) integrated into the Nasby clan.

The ruggedness of the farm’s setting – evoking scenes of back-breaking pre-industrial labor (not to mention the fact that only the eldest son inherited even that) – and seeing the harbor from which Caryl's Great Great Grandfather Assor caught the boat to America in 1870 caused me to reflect on the fact that every human being on earth is an emigrant, a refugee, or a wanderer; that those who are “settled” may be thought of as being settled only for the time being; and that longing for the old country is a fleeting thing until, with the passage of time, it becomes an object of historical curiosity and nostalgia. (I realize that for some there is no nostalgia, no curiosity, no interest in the old country. If I were to write a "part two" to this post, it would be to explore what it is that makes the difference.)

With all the interest in traveling to the place of one’s roots, it is perhaps ironic that the only generation to experience true homesickness for the homeland was the first one (like Beret, in “Giants in the Earth,” who curls up pitifully inside her steamer trunk) – the generation least likely to be able to go home. (And will we ever know how that homesickness must have ached at times – even in such a promising new land?) Then, with a wistfulness like that of the writer of Exodus, who says, “There arose in Egypt a king who knew not Joseph,” we might say, “There arose in America a generation that knew not Norway.”

Wistful, perhaps, but it is, of course, just how it should be. Children are not the ones who look back. My idyllic boyhood in South Dakota was fully American (it wasn’t even Norwegian-American), even though there was only one generation between me and Trondhjem (and Copenhagen). As many have observed, our parents’ generation (or the first American-born) didn’t have the luxury of nostalgia – they were too busy building the very thing they were becoming: America. They succeeded so well that those of us in our generation and the next feel like we’ve been here forever, and so when we take the long look back, as we can, it is with a genealogical nostalgia for the old country that is based in fascination with a land and time receding into a story-book mist, gratitude for the doughty courage of the pioneers who became our grandparents, and an affectionate desire to meet our Scandinavian cousins of today. We don’t “wanna-be” Norwegian, but we acknowledge and celebrate that it’s in our American blood. So we are the generation who, in our wide-eyed discovery of our Nordic identity, have named our children Marit and Bergen and – a name I heard last week in Norway – “Skjalit.” (To our children, Beret and Anna, I say, “You dodged a bullet, there!”)

“Cousin” is the right word for this fond feeling of family affection across an ocean and across the years. And nostalgia is the right word, too: A positive but always unfulfilled yearning. Like any child who asks his parents to tell him “about the olden days,” we want to know how they lived, where they lived, how they did it. And we’re not just historically curious; we want to know it in our bones. We think we might discover something about ourselves by shouting “Who were you?!” into the past. And that’s where we hit a wall – solid as that black rock cliff that looms behind Nesbo Farm. All the traipsing around the “home place,” all the head-bowing moments at gravestones with dates like “1794” on them, all the conversations with our modern-day Norwegian cousins will not penetrate that wall. “Who were you?”

So we need artists, poets, writers. O.E. Rolvaag’s “Giants in the Earth” tells our family story better than all the rummaging I might do through old scrapbooks and trunks. Knut Hamsun’s “Growth of the Soil” and the film “Pelle the Conqueror” depict the life the emigrants left behind. The plays of Ibsen challenge the very conventions of homey domestic myths we may hold about our ancestors. The extraordinary Danish film, “Babette’s Feast,” set at precisely the time of the great Scandinavian migration, is a wry and touching rendering of the encounter between the strict piety of our grandparents and the pleasures of the emerging world.

What a beautiful and enticing place Norway is. I found myself more than once speaking back in time to those who had left their farms and headed off for the harbor and beyond: “What if you had stayed? What if you had stayed…?” But of course the “what if” is that my Norwegian mother would not have met my Danish father. In America.

Photo: New and old buildings on Nesbo farm, near Osterbo, above the fjords of Aurland, Norway. In America, "Nesbo" became "Nasby," my wife's family name. My forebears on my mother's side emigrated from Trondhjem, Norway; my father's from Denmark.

More photos of our trip to Norway may be seen here.

AND IS THAT THOR THROWING A THUNDERBOLT OVER THERE?

As Caryl and I prepare for a trip to our ancestral Norway, I have expected an anticipated nostalgia for the homeland; I didn't expect to be nostalgic for a volcano.

In an e-mail, I nonchalantly reported to my sister that we were headed to Norway "if the volcano allows," and with that casual line something in me stirred. At the risk of overstating, a sense of the wholeness of human history shuddered through me as I realized that a similarly nervous statement could have been made 15,000 years ago at the rise of civilization or (grunted?) millions of years ago at the dawn of humanity: "If the volcano allows."

Tolkien would have loved the Eyjafjallajokul Volcano, both for its name and for the way it stands tall and menacing athwart the flight of human progress. His friend, C.S. Lewis, would have embraced it for it's "northernness:"

A vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of the Northern summer, remoteness, severity... the twilight of the Gods... Joy....

(Lewis, in his odd but enchanting autobiography, Surprised By Joy, says that the sense of longing that this "northernness" engendered in him was the definition of "joy" -- a joy that was "the central story" of his life.)

What is thrilling about looking toward the volcano in 2010 is that it's not a metaphor; it's the real thing, as it has been for thousands of years: "If the volcano allows."

My appreciation for what my Scandinavian ancestors left behind to bring me to where I am -- and the tales I heard as I was growing up -- have produced in me my own yearning sense of northernness, and so it is almost as a Norse prayer that I hope the volcano will slumber and let us pass by.

And speaking of nervousness, the fire of Tolkien's Lonely Mountain is actually that of it's ancient resident dragon, Smaug. Where is Bard the Bowman when we need him? 

Explainer for non-nerds: Tolkien was a student and professor of mythology. His "Lord of the Rings" was an exercise in inventing an English mythology. Bard is the archer who slays the dragon, Smaug (who for centuries threatened Lake Town from his lair in the Lonely Mountain), in "The Hobbit."

p.s. A few days after posting this blog, the volcano did, indeed, delay our trip to Norway by one day.