Norway [antikvár]

Foreword This photobook embraces the whole of Norway, from Cape Lindesnes on the skerry-strewn south coast, up to the North Cape, and even beyond to Magdalena Bay on Spitsbergen, only i,ooo kilometres from the North Pole. The photographs were taken in the course of several trips to the north made at various times and at every season of the year. Thus, two of the plates show the bridge across the sea at Tromso, one in the course of its construction, one after its completion; and anyone who is familiar with the north will notice that the pictures of Spitsbergen, or Svalbard, were taken at the beginning of June and the end of August. In a series of photographs such as this, however, whose numbers must of necessity be limited, it is obviously impossible to reproduce all the outward geographical forms and features of this many-faceted country, and to do full justice to all the aspects of its economy and culture. A bare three per cent of Norwegian territory, excluding the Arctic regions, is agriculturally exploitable. But the Hving that is denied the Norwegian by the barren rock of his native soil is accorded him in abundance by the sea to the south, the west, and the north, for, as the poet says: ' boils the sea in rivers wide At depths profound about the rocks!' A book about Norway without a description of its economic backbone, fishing, and its world-wide shipping, would be unthinkable. These subjects are given the attention they deserve. The contributions made by Norway, Sweden, and Finland to the social welfare of the nomad Lapps, the roving aboriginal inhabitants of the extreme north of our continent, have also been considered with due interest and esteem. Norway was largely responsible for the fact that the Lapps were spared the fate of the native inhabitants of some of the other continents.