The Reindeer Hunters: A Novel by Lars Mytting - Five Star Review

Book Review - Five Stars

The Reindeer Hunters: A Novel by Lars Mytting

A great book, a tremendous history lesson, and an intriguing read.

Lars Mytting shows excellence in delivering a very memorable look into how little Norway went from the poorest nation in all of Europe to becoming the richest in less then half a century.

EXCERPTS:

I bought a ticket to just the next stop, but stayed on all the way to Lillehammer, and walked into Helleberg’s sporting and hunting shop, where he saw a Krag-Jørgensen. The Krag had been patented in 1894 by Colonel Krag and Gunsmith Jørgensen, and was manufactured by Kongsberg Våpenfabrikk just as the chamber charger had been, though a sea of craftsmanship and technical advancements separated the two. The Krag had attracted attention around the globe as the world’s most advanced and precise rifle, and it was Norwegian.

The projectiles were amazingly long and just 6.5 millimetres in diameter, with an muzzle velocity of an unbelievable 770 metres per second, so there was nothing on this Earth that moved faster than the bullets shot from a Krag, and it was said to be able to kill from a distance of 600 metres. All the bother of preparing the chamber charger to fire was eliminated with a little waterproof cartridge, and not just that: the Krag could take up to six cartridges at once! He had studied the mechanism closely.

On the train home he had sat in the gangway next to an old lady from Hundorp, the Krag clamped between his knees, and at each station more folk came over to take a look, all wanting to see if the magazine really flipped open as they had heard, and if the mechanism was really as smooth as everyone said, and the old woman said if they could make something that fine here in Norway, there were no limits to what the country could do when they got rid of the Swedes.

In Fritzner’s Old Norse dictionary and discovered that frjá did not necessarily mean “friend”. In an even older sense it meant “to love”.

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The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World by Arthur Herman - Book Review - Five Stars

 Book Review - Five Stars

The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World by Arthur Herman

The author of The Viking Heart, Arthur Herman, wrote:

“Her journey showed off many of the qualities that made her distant ancestors, the Norsemen Vikings, famous: physical and moral courage, determination and adaptability, a deep loyalty to family, and a commitment to cultural heritage, which for her included the Lutheran Church.

The only persons more revered in my grandmother’s house than Franklin Roosevelt were Martin Luther and Leif Erikson, the Viking discoverer of America.”

This book covers more than a thousand years of evolutionary history from a time when nation states had no defined borders, political leadership was roused by local chieftains whose religious beliefs had evolved and dated back in time to antiquity.

Discover who these real people were and the impact they have had in the past thousand years.

I loved this well researched, precisely edited, and fun to read book that moved along with no dull moments.

EXCERPTS:

Winston Churchill would write: “When we reflect upon the brutal vices of these salt-water bandits, pirates as shameful as any whom the sea has borne, or recoil from their villainous destruction and other cruel deeds, we must also remember the discipline, the fortitude, the comradeship and martial virtues which made them at this period beyond all challenge the most formidable and daring race in the world.”

Minneapolis. By 1903, it was the second-largest Scandinavian city in the world, after Stockholm

“the land of the free” was also the land where self-reliance came with a warning label: caveat emptor, or “buyer beware.”

After winning full independence in 1905, Norway followed a similar economic upturn as its government pursued what can be accurately described as free-market policies. It also became the first European country to give women the vote (Denmark followed suit in 1915, while Sweden’s women had to wait until 1919).

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Stand By for Action: The Memoirs of a Small Ship Commander in World War II

Book Review - Five Stars

Stand By for Action: The Memoirs of a Small Ship Commander in World War II by William Donald

This book is a ship commander's biographical account of WWII from the German invasion of Norway to the war years of bombardment, torpedoing, mining the sea and soil on Britten. It moves next to the Mediterranean and the bloody battle of Anzio, Italy, followed by The D-day invasion of Europe, and ultimatley on to Hong Kong and Japanese capitulation. The author was a part of it all, and he eloquently described his personal sediments. An excellent book that reads like a novel.

Excerpts:

29th November, 1941, after a fierce attack by E-boats on a southbound convoy, two ships being sunk, Asperity (699) and Cormash (2,848), a very similar action took place, with an interception off the Dutch coast. Though indecisive with damage and casualties on both sides, the knowledge that on every future sortie against East Coast convoys they were liable to be intercepted on the way home must have given the enemy considerable food for thought. Even so, in 1941, the E-boats sank twenty-three ships, total tonnage 48,888: five of these ships were sunk in one attack on March 7th.

During the winter of 1944-45, the East Coast convoys were virtually unmolested, except for a sudden flare-up in the early months of 1945, when five ships were sunk of tonnage 10,221. Several fierce battles were fought, but by April, 1945, the spirit of the E-boats was broken and all attacks ceased.

The size of the initial force to be landed made me gasp. Five divisions of men of a comparative strength of sixty per cent British and Canadian to forty per cent American.

One day the dawn would come when the Allied Armies set foot in France. For four years the enemy had held the whole Atlantic seaboard from Norway to Spain; for four years, aided by his U-boats, this awful menace had hung over us like a permanent black cloud; for four years, also, millions had waited, desperate for this dawn, the dawn that would lead to their liberation.

After four years, the dawn had come at last, and victory was ours; the day was won, the Army had landed on the shores of France. For whatever the future held in store, whatever setbacks there were to come, however hard the fighting might be, the first and hardest hurdle had been jumped that morning, D-Day, the sixth of June, 1944.

More Pieces to the Grimsrud Family Puzzle

More Pieces to the Grimsrud Family Puzzle

Grimsrud Name

Grimsruds are proud descendants of the Norse Vikings, among whom the name "Grim" was quite common. Various spellings are reflected by historical influences; 1401; Grimßrud,* German Hansa trading league occupation of Norway. 1593. Danish occupation. Grimsrød, 1668. Grimsrøed, Danish occupation, 1723 Grimsrued or Grimzrude, Swedish occupation. 1907 to date, Grimsrud.
*Note in the 1401 spelling of Grimßrud, the “ß” in the name comes from old German denoting a strong S, refereed to as eszett, it is in use to this day in the German language.

Fabled among the Norse Viking was the fierce “Skalla-Grim", whose exploits are described in the Chronicles of the Viking. Grim is, in fact, old Germanic meaning fierce. There are a number of localities in Norway with Grim as a noun, a prefix, or a suffix.

As to "Rud", also spelled in a variant Norwegian tongue as "Rød", it simply means a man-made clearance, whether in the forest, a hill, a plain, or whatever. Plenty of Norwegian names of places and families have the "rud" as a name or a suffix.

The best known "rud" in the United States is the famous Norwegian-American engineer Ejvind Rud, inventor of the outboard engines for boats. His name was, of course, changed in the United States to “Evinrud", which is the present brand of the outboard engines still being marketed today.*
*Note: Family names traditionally were taken from the farm where they resided.

First a brief history of Scandinavia:
The following are abridged excerpts from the book: Scandinavia: A History by Ewan Butler.
Norsemen...name for these marauders...applied to all three Scandinavian peoples. Normandy...reminds us of the Norse...and to this day Norwegians refer to themselves as Nordmenn. (The Norse invaders of Russia are alternately known as Varangians, derived from an old Norse word...meaning “confederate,” and Ruotsi, meaning the “rowing men” in old Finnish.)

Scandinavia fell victim to an invasion from England...The bubonic plague, or Black Death, had come to Europe... by infected rats from the holds of merchant ships...1349.
The pestilence spread to Norway and killed off two-thirds of its people...and spread to Sweden in 1350.

German traders brought the “hanse,” or League of Hanse Cities, a “protection racket” cities were expelled from the League for a breach of its rules.

Christianity took advantage to establish a monarchy in Denmark and quench Norwegian independence...Norway was a part of Denmark. Olaf Engelbrektsson, the last Roman Catholic archbishop of Norway, tried to lead an uprising.

1837...Ole Rynning published in Sweden and Norway a book entitled A True Account of America for the Information and Help of Peasant and Commoner. The book... inspired hundreds of families, especially in Norway, with dreams of settling in the New World. The first two ships sailed in 1825 and 1836...after the Civil War the American West settlement took off known as “the American Fever.”

1814, Norway was ceded to Sweden as a separate kingdom united to the Swedish crown. Denmark acquired in return Swedish Pomerania, Iceland, the Faroes, and Greenland.
Sweden’s Riksdag and Norway’s Storting - passed laws giving Norway full legal equality.

1905, the Norwegian government told Stockholm that Norway had the second largest merchant fleet in the world and was entitled to its own consular service worldwide...
The Norwegians stood firm... in June they issued a declaration.



From my blog Bing’s Buzz, October 26, 2017:
Excerpts from my blog post October 26, 2017, NORWAY, DREAMING OF THE OLD COUNTRY.
The Vikings: A New History by Neil Oliver, an amazing book, and the best and most comprehensive I have ever read regarding the Vikings, was published just before the 2017 discovery up the Hudson River in New York State of the Vinland, Norse settlement that was described in the Norse sagas.

In his book Neil Oliver wrote: “Archaeologists doubt that Newfoundland was the ‘Vinland’ reported by Leif Erickson. Instead L’Anse aux Meadows is usually interpreted as a sort of way station, a staging post used by people in transit to and from a more fruitful settlement further south. It seems Vinland itself still awaits discovery.”

In 2017, at Stony Point, New York, up the Hudson River at Minisceongo Creek between New York City and Poughkeepsie, the ruins of a Viking village dating from the 9th and 10th centuries was unearthed. The remains of six buildings containing an iron forage and carpenter shop were part of the village of up to one hundred habitats. This had to be the Vinland or wine land of Leif Erickson, described in the Norse sagas. New York, is definitely wine country and this thousand year old settlement has definitely been confirmed to be Viking.

My wife and I on the maiden voyage of our sailing vessel Dursmirg passed this very spot on our way to Florida in 1972. Our journey is described in our book Sailing Beyond Lake Superior: Travels of Dursmirg. Later in Florida we met Tex Downs who had sailed the Hudson River at Poughkeepsie, New York, and found there a strange coin that was identified as being Phoenician and nearly a thousand years old.

In the book The Vikings: A New History by Neil Oliver, the author describes finding coins used by the Viking in America. “The Scandinavian world had grown increasingly dependent upon Arab silver. From early on the Arab Durhams were identified as containing the purest, most desirable silver and during the decades and centuries to come millions of the coins were funneled west. Like a supply of oxygen, the flow of the silver helped energize the whole area, supplying the power to create nation states.”

At the time of the famous Norseman (Viking) Leif Erickson, the Vikings’ influence extended to Russia, Scotland, England, Spain, Greece, Italy, and France. Leif Erickson did indeed make it to America.

Over a thousand years ago, Lief Erickson, the best known Viking a renowned traveling man crossed the Atlantic, built settlements in Newfoundland [unearthed in 1960] and up the Hudson River between NYC and Poughkeepsie, [unearthed in 2017].
A little known fact about Lief Erickson; He became a Christian in Denmark and proceeded to proselytize in Norway.

Norway was the last Scandinavian country to give up it’s Viking religion.

A monument to that conversion still is in use to this day at Skoger, Norway. Up the Oslo Fjord it branches off into Oslo Fjord and Drammen Fjord. Skoger is a suburb of Drammen and has been since the Norse Vikings first went to sea.

From that monumental old church you can gaze across to the Grimsrud family farm, also still in use and occupied by my relatives...the Grimsruds.

To conclude: When I was a child my grandpa Christ started me on this lifelong journey by planting the seeds of curiosity. The jig-saw puzzle that followed rewarded me and whet my appetite for more.




Recommended reading:
Scandinavia: A History by Ewan Butler gives a historical overview of the impact, distribution, consequential effects and heritage of these unique stand alone people.

The Vikings: A New History by Neil Oliver did the most to bring this story together and the clincher was the discovery in 2017 of a settlement of Vinland up the Hudson River near Poughkeepsiei n New York.

Additional Reading:

Discovery of settlement in New York
https://m.thevintagenews.com/2017/01/05/new-ruins-of-viking-village-near-the-hudson-river-seriously-question-where-were-the-borders-of-the-legendary-vinland/



Gold Run: The Rescue of Norway’s Gold Bullion from the Nazis, 1940 by Robert Pearson.



The Life Of John Ericsson, Volume I and II, by William Conant Church



Cycling North: from the French Mediterranean to the fjords of Norway by bicycle (Eurovelo Series Book 5) by Steven Herrick



Defiant Courage: A World War II Epic of Escape and Endurance by Astrid Karlsen Scott and Tore Haug



Norway To America: A History of the Migration by Ingrid Semmingsen



The Shetland Bus: A World War II Epic of Escape, Survival, and Adventure by David Howarth



We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance by David Howarth



Norwegian Newspapers in America: Connecting Norway and the New Land by Odd Lovoll