Subject Area: Scandinavia-Norway

A Comparative Study of Social and Religious Movements in Norway, 1780s-1905
 Furseth, Inger
2002 0-7734-7195-2 472 pages
This study includes three social movements: the Lofthus revolt, the Thrane movement, and the early labor movement; and two religious movements: the Hauge movement and Norwegian Methodism. The analysis examines how they mobilized resources to reach their goals, the external and internal factors that influenced their degrees of success and failure, and the interactions and exchanges between them. It uses a combination of resource mobilization theory and political process theory for analysis.

Price: $279.95


A Phonetically-Motivated Phonological Analysis of Syllable Weight and Stress in the Norwegian Language
 Lunden, S. L. Anya
2010 0-7734-3760-6 216 pages
Advances a theory of weight in which a syllable shape in a given position is only heavy if it, on average, is sufficiently proportionally longer than a CV (consonant-vowel) in the same position. While the analysis of weight is consistent with the basic tenets of moraic theory, a departure is made from standard moraic theory which takes moras to be prosodic units associated directly to segments.

Price: $179.95


Issues of Gender, Race, and Class in the Norwegian Missionary Society in Nineteenth-Century Norway and Madagascar
 Predelli, Line Nyhagen
2003 0-7734-6640-1 368 pages
With a focus on missionary women and men in the Norwegian Missionary Society in Madagascar and Norway, this study provides an in-depth examination of how gender relations are negotiated in a religious organization. The time period covered (1860-1910) coincides with colonial efforts of major European states. The book also discusses how aspects of class, race and sexuality must be taken into account in studies of gender relations in the missionary movement. It shows, for example, how marriage propositions and sexual relations between white missionaries and black converts were dealt with by the mission organization in Madagascar. Other topics include the attempts of Norwegian missionary women to impart a form of domesticity to Malagasy girls, their efforts to establish direct links with the broader feminist movement, and the gradual democratization of the mission organization both in Norway and Madagascar.

Price: $239.95


Norway's Greatest 19th Century Musician: The Extraordinary Life of Ole Bull
 Herresthal, Harald
2023 1-4955-1150-2 456 pages
This is a softcover book. The book is written for all readers and includes informative paragraphs inserted into the text to explain terms and offer biographical information of people mentioned. "This book tells the story of how a young boy from Bergen could become world-famous.... You will come with Ole on his concert tours and get to know many of the famous people he met on his way. At the same time, you will be on a journey in history and can learn a little of what it was like to be an artist and a person more than 150 years ago," (Authors' Foreword).

Price: $39.95


Norwegian Religious Pluralism: A Trans-Atlantic Comparison
 Hale, Frederick
1992 0-7734-9217-8 244 pages
This is a historical study of religious transition in Norway and among Norwegian immigrants in the United States and southern Africa. It traces the domestic and Anglo-American factors which by 1900 had changed Norway from a society almost uniformly Lutheran by law and deeply-rooted tradition into one in which many people had only tenuous ties to their established church while tens of thousands of their countrymen became members of nonconformist denominations. These copiously documented findings challenge assumptions which have been axiomatic among historians of Norwegian immigration throughout the twentieth century. They also undermine unproven generalizations about immigrant religiosity made by such prominent historians as Oscar Handlin and Timothy Smith and reproduced uncritically by many of their colleagues.

Price: $179.95


The 1820-1850 Religious Revivals of Hans Nielsen Hauge
 Langhelle, Svein Ivar
2022 1-4955-1013-1 152 pages
"This book will be discussing the implementation process of new ethical standards, caused by the comprehensive religious revivals of the followers of Hans Nielesn Hauge, which took place in South-Western Norway during the first hald of the 19th century. ...During the period from 1820 up until 1850, this part of Norway was in a special situation, being the only coherent region where the Haugian revivals were characterised as a larger part of the society. ...The overall question of this book, the "grand idee"...is to study the process of the modernisation of mentality." Svein Ivar Lanhelle, p.1, ch. 1

Price: $139.95


The Nobel Novelist Knut Hamsun During the Nazi Occupation of Norway: The Final Chapter That Was Omitted from Marie Hamsun’s Autobiography of Their Life Together
 Hamsun, Marie
2011 0-7734-3944-7 168 pages
This is Marie Hamsun's personal narrative from the years 1940-1952, i.e. from the invasion and occupation of Norway until the death of Knut Hamsun. She illuminates personal, psychological, and political facets of Knut Hamsun's character and traces the roots of his deep-seated Germanophilia and Anglophobia, respectively. Her insights are based on her forty-three-year marriage to the controversial Nobel Prize winning Norwegian writer and World War II Nazi collaborator. This edition is the first authorized English edition of Marie Hamsun's memoir, a work, which is indispensable to the understanding the life and works of Knut Hamsun.

Price: $159.95


The Norwegian Armed Forces and Defense Policy, 1905-1955
 Thompson, David G.
2004 0-7734-6422-0 555 pages
After Norway gained full independence from Sweden in 1905, it faced the challenge of maintaining its sovereignty as a small state caught in the midst of rivalries and conflicts among the great powers. This book examines how the armed forces played an important part in this policy through the end of World War I, followed by the steep decline in Norwegian defense spending and capabilities in the face of economic depression and apparent absence of international threats in 1918, the Labor government’s taking office in 1935 with Norway still lacking any clear military strategy or unified defense policy on the eve of World War II, the German invasion in 1940, and then the apparent danger of a Soviet invasion in 1948 that galvanized the government to make defense a priority, Norway’s NATO membership in 1949 and participation in the American Military Assistance Program in 1950, both reflecting Norway’s choice of collective security over non-alignment.

Price: $319.95


The Norwegian Scots: An Anthropological Interpretation of Viking-Scottish Identity in the Orkney Islands
 Lange, Michael A.
2007 0-7734-5362-8 356 pages
Examines the role of informal narrative (casual stories exchanged by people in everyday interactions) in the process of creating and maintaining cultural identity in relation to the inhabitants of the Orkney Islands off the Northern Coast of Scotland. These narratives serve as the means by which a community negotiates and forms its self identity and, therefore, provide a suitable window onto this cultural negotiation process. Combining symbolic interpretive theory from anthropology with performance theory from folklore, this analysis illuminates narrative as a cultural tool used to construct various identities, concepts of communality and community. This analysis, being directed towards the Orkney Islands, seeks to understand Orcadian identity in both its own perception of its separateness from mainland Scotland and the way in which it draws heavily on a sense of Scandinavian identity.

Price: $239.95


Urban Multi-Culture in Norway: Identity Formation Among Immigrant Youth
 Andersson, Mette
2005 0-7734-5986-3 508 pages
This is a current prime political and scholarly issue in Europe and North America, the fate of migrant youth. Instead of seeing their precarious situation in simplified cultural terms, this book argues that an understanding of their situation has to rest upon an analysis of their everyday life situation. With a focus on the mechanisms of their outsidership and their ways of dealing with it, this book develops a generative model where the different ideal types of migrant youth social organization and mentalities are demonstrated. Resting on a solid empirical study of three migrant youth contexts, a street gang, a Muslim student association, and a sports club, the analysis demonstrates how they all represent specific soluti8ons to the problem of the spatial politics of recognition and misrecognition.

Price: $299.95


Viking Discovery of America, 985-1008: Greenland Norse and Their Voyages to Newfoundland - NYRB softcover price
 Vinding, Niels
2006 1-4955-0929-X 164 pages
This book provides an account of Leif Eriksson’s discovery of Vinland and other Viking voyages to Newfoundland. The most important contribution of the manuscript is the author’s contention that the Greenland Norse did not ballast their knarrs [freight ships] with loose stones, which might shift in heavy waves and imperil the shallow-draught vessels. Instead, they cut large stone blocks, beveled at one end to roughly conform to the shape of the hull, and laid them between the ribs. When loading the ships with a heavy cargo such as timber, the Norse would dump some or all of their ballast stones over the side. Therefore, it might be possible to detect a Norse site by locating a collection of distinctively shaped ballast stones on or near the shore. This hypothesis has apparently not been explored by anyone else involved in Norse research in Newfoundland.

Vinding had a life-long fascination with the dramatic voyages of the Greenland Norse and the unsolved question of the location of Vinland. His research led him to a careful analysis of two of the Icelandic sagas, the Greenlanders’ Saga and Erik the Red’s Saga. These sagas describe the same events, but there are discrepancies between them. Vinding compared the sources and created a plausible synthesized account of seven voyages of the Norse to Greenland and North America. Based on his readings, he hypothesized that Leif Eriksson’s first landing in North America was in Trinity Bay, and that Vinland was located on the Avalon Peninsula of southern Newfoundland.

Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century researchers published theories about the location of Vinland but without providing conclusive evidence. The theories suggesting locations far down the east coast of the United States have now been abandoned, in part because they demand that we disregard our primary sources, the sagas, which give precise indications of sailing times and distances. All authorities agree that the second of the three lands discovered by Bjarni Herjolfsson, called Markland by the Norse, is Labrador. There is only one area that fits the saga’s distances and directions from Labrador to Vinland, and that is the east coast of southern Newfoundland. No Norse artifacts have been found in that area except the ballast stones. Since ballast stones are likely to be indicators of Norse sites, they are markers of areas that deserve further archaeological exploration, be that a search for Vinland in Trinity Bay or a search for Hóp in St. Paul’s Bay.

Price: $29.95