sgorse

The original home of most of the founders of Sons of Norway, Trøndelag county spreads across the central section of the country. Its 16,000 square miles are dominated by mountains, with slips of green valley tucked along its coasts, fjords and rivers. Its most notable natural feature is the Trondheim Fjord, which slices about 80 miles inland; first southward to Trondheim, then jagging northeast up to the town of Steinkjer.

Every spring, Vikings who wintered in settlements along the Otta River in south central Norway would gather together their livestock, pack up their sledges, and traverse snow-covered mountain passes through the Jotunheimen mountains to their summer farms at Neto, heading down again in the fall. Along the way, items would inevitably be lost or discarded.

Today, beautiful woolen sweaters are emblematic of Norwegian culture. However, the art of knitting is relatively new to Norway. Sweaters were originally a luxury imported from Europe until the early 1800s.  When faced with shortages precipitated by the Napoleonic wars, Norwegians embraced the challenge, grabbed some needles, and began entwining their own traditions into this formerly exotic art form.

A litter of charismatic Norwegian piglets and their mum are the break-out stars of a new film, “Gunda,” by famed Russian director Victor Kossakovsky. The film captures the daily lives of sow Gunda and her family as they sleep, snort and play on their organic farm in Undrumsdal, Norway, about 50 miles south of Oslo. The movie co-stars a plucky one-legged chicken and pair of cows.

Would you be happy to ditch your phone and the internet for a whole week? What if you were destined to spend that week completely isolated, marooned on a tiny windswept rock, barely protruding above the icy waves off the western coast of Sweden? To more than 12,000 film buffs from 45 different countries, this prospect sounded like an absolutely perfect way [...]