The Viking Countries

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31262, 7 January 1967, Page 4

The Viking Countries

The Viking Circle. By Colin Simpson. Angus and Robertson. 348 pp. Illustrations and maps. Both for the armchair traveller and the one who has his travel sickness pills already packed this is a delightful book. Mr Simpson’s enjoyment in visiting these northern countries is always apparent and he points out that if there is less criticism in this book than in his earlier ones it is because there was less to criticise.

Following tourist routes by normal tourist transport, Mr Simpson took every opportunity of getting to know local people and finding out about interesting customs which the tourist can see. There is sufficient historical background to allow the traveller—or the reader—to enjoy the area more fully, without dulling the edge of his descriptions. Mr Simpson made no attempt at unusual forays. “The Time to get off the beaten track,” he says, “is when you are on it or after you’ve been on it, not before. It has become beaten for darned good reasons.”

Beginning his journey among the delightful Danes, Mr Simpson visited, among other places, Hans Andersen’s home at Odense, Bornholm in the Baltic Sea—where the Danes go “to get away from it all”—and Hamlet’s castle. Because he is a journalist with an inquiring mind he unearthed more unusual facts that most tourists would—for instance, that Danish pigs have more ribs than other pigs—and it is this natural curiosity which makes the book so full of interest. From Denmark Colin Simpson went to Norway, where he found the liquor laws “inconvenient - to - exasperating,” and Sweden, where he learned that the Swedes do not have the highest suicide rate in the world—a fact substantiated by World Health Organisation statistics. Surprisingly, this stateemnt was put forward by General Eisenhower as “a warning of what happened to a country with a leftish government.” For all the Scandinavians their love of the sun is the key to their characters and this applies particularly to the Swedes; but it is obvious from the author’s observations that to consider the

I Scandinavians as a single people is a little like grouping together the New Zealanders and Australians Aborigines and Maoris included. There are many variations in temperament between the brown-haired, blue-eyed Norwegians, the gay Danes and the nomadic Lapps. Scandinavian drinking formalities, sex attitudes, sense of humour, and natural resources—all are observed and commented on with the unaffectedness of a friend giving a personal account of his experiences.

Finland, with its 500,000 private saunas and 62,000 lakes was the next country Mr Simpson visited. Here he spent Midsummer’s Eve. watching bonfires and fireworks and listening from a boat on one of the lakes as people on the shore sang Finnish songs, the music floating out across the water with an air of sadness because the sun would now begin its decline into winter. Because of its unfortunate name Iceland seems to have been neglected by the tourist, although the temperature is moderated by the Gulf Stream so that Reykjavik, the capital, is warmer in winter than New York. So unusual is the Icelandic landscape

that when the American astronauts needed training in recognition of probable geological aspects of the moon’s surface they were sent to Iceland. Erosion has denuded the country of almost all vegetation and there are practically no trees. Eruptions from the country’s thirty volcanoes combined with icy conditions create spectacular landscapes but add to the devastation of the land.

Mr Simpson’s final trip on this journey among the Viking countries was to Greenland, a new name on the tourist itinerary. Hotel accommodation is not luxurious yet but air travel is good and the boat journey on a sixty-pas-senger ship round the southwest coast was very congenial. Only the coastal fringes of the country are habitable—the inland area is a vast icedesert—and it is now thought that Greenland may actually consist of three islands beneath its icy covering. Icebergs of great beauty floated past the ship and are included among the many excellent coloured photographs. This is a long book, but one in which facts and figures, descriptions of places and people are so delightfully woven that it never becomes tedious.