The Viking Heart by Arthur Herman

Author:Arthur Herman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781328595201
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

This was not true of Duus’s parishioners, whose different Norwegian accents and dialects sometimes made communication among them impossible. This was another advantage to being in America: by learning to speak English, Norwegians could talk to Swedes, Danes, and even other Norwegians without difficulty—something impossible at home.

Otherwise, Pastor Duus found that, despite the hard land that demanded hard work from his parishioners as well as himself, there was something strikingly beautiful about life on the Wisconsin prairie and in its forests. “On Christmas Day I preached in a rather large house that stands on a stretch of cleared land with a wooded ridge on one side and a fairly large lake surrounded by a thick forest of oak, aspen, and pine on the other. It was like a lovely April day in Norway, clear, sunny, and so warm that the melting snow lay in wide pools of water on the frozen ground.”

But the weather wasn’t the biggest surprise that day. When he and the congregation were singing hymns, Duus noticed someone was listening at the window. It was “a tall, powerful young Indian in his tawny deerskin garb, with a motley headdress” and his rifle at his side. “He listened intently during the singing of the hymns as though wondering what could be the reason for this gathering and this singing. For an hour he stood there, engrossed. After a long time, when my glance fell on the window, I saw him, his rifle on his shoulder, vanishing into the near-by forest.”

Two tightly knit communities were brushing shoulders, one long settled in the land and one new to it. As for that new land, “I do not know anyone who does not live far better than in Norway,” the pastor added in his journal.

And the Norwegians knew it. They, and others from the older settlements, were busy expanding into Iowa, and then Minnesota. Meanwhile, a new wave had come at the start of the new decade, in 1860–61: the largest wave of immigrants yet. These newest arrivals were in for a double shock. They found themselves not only in a new country, but one plunging into civil war.

They didn’t know it yet, but the Viking heart in America was about to undergo its greatest test thus far.

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.