The United States of Medievalism by Tison Pugh;Susan Aronstein;

Author:Tison Pugh;Susan Aronstein;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Medievalism – United States, Popular culture – United States, United States – Civilization – Medieval influences, Europe – History – 476–1492 – Influence
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Next-Generation Vikings: Scandinavian Language Instruction and High School Mascots

As the years passed, Minnesota’s immigrant population become increasingly aware that the survival of their cultural traditions depended upon the education of the next generation. This preoccupation began in the late 1860s as the Norwegian church promoted the faith and sought to “educate Norwegian Lutherans to minister to immigrants,” and the church turned its attention to the common schools that provided education for all children.27 While lay Norwegians welcomed the common schools and funded them through taxes, the Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Synod’s leaders feared them, calling them “religionless” and worrying that they taught in English.28 This so-called “School Controversy” lasted for some twenty years, ending around 1880, with the synod accepting that parochial schools would be difficult to staff and that many prominent Norwegian Americans supported the learning of English in the common and high schools, seeing it as a commitment to their new country. However, as each successive generation became further removed from the mother tongue and old cultural traditions, Minnesotans became increasingly concerned with the loss of both. Beginning in 1900, there was a concerted effort to provide public school students with the opportunity to study Norwegian language, literature, and culture in school, most likely led by the Sons of Norway and similar organizations, which ramped up in the following decades.29 In Minneapolis, a petition was submitted to the school board in 1910 signed by some seventy-five organizations, requesting that high schools add Scandinavian instruction to their offerings.30 The school board approved this request, and by 1911 both South and East High Schools of Minneapolis offered Norwegian and Swedish. In 1915, twenty high schools in Minnesota offered Norwegian, eleven Swedish, and two Danish.31

With language instruction came instruction in history and culture. One of the first readers designed for Americans learning Norwegian was Carl Johan Peter Petersen’s Norwegian-Danish Grammar and Reader with a Vocabulary Designed for American Students of the Norwegian Language.32 To develop his readers’ appreciation for medieval Scandinavia, Petersen included selections from various sagas, at least one from Snorri’s Heimskringla, and poems written by later authors about medieval figures such as Canute. Petersen also presents readings about the discovery of Iceland and selections from Erik the Red’s Saga and Saga of the Greenlanders, emphasizing the Norse discovery of America. In “Biographical Sketches,” a later section of the book, students learn about Adam Oehlenschläger, the Danish Romantic poet mentioned above, who had read Snorri, won a prize for his use of Nordic mythology, and written poems and plays about the Norse gods, as well as prose texts such as Orvarodds saga and Hroars saga that are based loosely on Icelandic sagas.

Knud Throndsen’s two-volume reader, Norsk læsebog for bØrn og ungdom, published in 1873 and 1876, contains stories from Heimskringla; a list of the Norwegian kings starting with Harald Fairhair and his descendants; poems written by Romantic authors on various medieval Scandinavian subjects; stories about St. Olaf and his conversion of Norway; and material taken from Erik the Red’s Saga and Saga of the Greenlanders, called Amerikas Opdagelse (The discovery of America).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.