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Our Country (1859)
By Bjørnstjerne Martinius Bjørnson
(See Note)
A land there is, lying near far-northern snow,
Where only the fissures life's springtime may know.
But surging, the sea tells of great deeds done,
And loved is the land as a mother by son.
What time we were little and sat on her knee,
She gave us her saga with pictures to see.
We read till our eyes opened wide and moist,
While nodding and smiling she mute rejoiced.
We went to the fjord and in wonder beheld
The ashen-gray bauta, that record of eld;
Still older she stood and her silence kept,
While stone-studded hows all around us slept.
Our hands she then took and away o'er the hill
She led to the church ever lowly and still,
Where humbly our forefathers knelt to pray,
And mildly she taught us: "Do ye as they!"
She scattered her snow on the mountain's steep side,
Then bade on swift skis her young manhood to glide;
The North Sea she maddened with scourge of gales,
Then bade her young manhood to hoist the sails.
Of beautiful maidens she gathered a throng,
To follow our daring with smiles and with song,
While she sat enthroned with her saga's scroll
In mantle of moonlight beneath the Pole.
Then "Forward, go forward!" was borne on the wind,
"With forefathers' aim and with forefathers' mind,
For freedom, for Norsehood, for Norway, hurrah!"
While echoing mountains voiced their hurrah.
Then life-giving fountains burst forth on our sight,
Then we were baptized with her spirit of might,
Then gleamed o'er the mountains a vision high,
That summons us onward until we die.
Extra Info:
TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN IN THE ORIGINAL METERS BY ARTHUR HUBBELL PALMER
Professor of the German Language and Literature In Yale University
Note.
OUR COUNTRY. Written for the celebration of the Seventeenth of May in Bergen in the year 1859. This is Norway's Constitution Day, corresponding to our Fourth of July, the anniversary of the day in 1814 when at Eidsvold (see Note 5) a representative convention declared the country's independence and adopted a Constitution. The celebration day was instituted as a result of King Karl Johan's proposals for changes in the Constitution during the years 1821 to 1824, especially in favor of an absolute veto. It was taken up in Christiania in 1824, and spread rapidly to all the cities in the land, was opposed by the King and omitted in 1828, taken up by the students of the University in 1829, and soon after 1830 made by Henrik Wergeland (see Note 78) the chief of Norwegian patriotic festivals. In 1870 Björnson conceived and put into practice the "barnetog" or children's procession on this day, when the children march also, each carrying a flag. Bauta, prehistoric, uncut, narrow, tall, memorial stone, from the bronze age.
Hows, burial mounds, barrows.
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