The Culture and Sport of Skiing: From Antiquity to World War ll

Chapter 3. The Norwegian Thrust

chapter 3 The Norwegian Thrust A time will come without doubt, when the peoples of Europe will make good use of this instrument [ski], so useful and so cheap. —De Latocnaye, Promenade d’un Français en Suède et en Norvège, 1801 Skiing had become a truly popular sport in which a major portion of the city’s youth and a large part of its older population have participated in their search for health and a brisk physical exercise. —Tromsø Tidende, April 1843 A new era opened for a sport, superb at the same time captivating, and one looks in vain for something similar the world over. —Fritz Huitfeldt, February 1871 The Industrial Revolution changed the landscape, population, politics, and mores of Europe in the nineteenth century. From the Urals to Uruguay, from Kosciusko to Kobe, industrializa-­ tion molded much of the world into its modern mode of work and play. It had a profound impact on skiing as well. The change in skiing was no sudden break, and it did not happen, as industrialization did not happen, at the same pace or time all over the world. What had been part of a folk winter culture became recreational enjoyment for urban civilization, although the utilitarian use of skis continued well into the 1930s. The relationship of health to skiing took on an increasingly prominent role as sport became an interest of nation-­ alistic concern. Creating Norwegian nationalism was a major undertaking of intellectuals, who incorporated skiing into song, ballad, poem, play, and story. They literally inculcated a series of beliefs in the way folk with their regional traditions of dialect, clothes, and type of skis embraced national identities. This changing intellectual heritage provided the backdrop for the mass outpouring of enthusiasm on the return of Fridtjof Nansen from Greenland and, later, from his attempt on the North Pole. old skis in a modernizing world Hunting on skis continued well into the twentieth century. Cultural anthro-­ pologists have recognized that traditional means continue long into a period of the norwegian thrust 37 change. Modernizing societies are those whose traditional forms do not simply disappear. On the hunt, for example, besides the usual elk and deer, bear and wolves were often the prey. “You kill a wolf like this,” recounted Johan Turi about a hunt in mid-­nineteenth-­century Norway:1 The active and clever Lapp will ski after it when the snow is deep. . . . And when you have caught him up, you hit him with the ski staff on the head, or on the neck under the ear, or just on the black of the nose tip which is very tender; in other places he won’t feel anything however hard you hit. But the man must be quick . . . [for] a wolf is very quick at snapping at the staff with his mouth, and he snaps at the skis too, and shakes them till the man falls off them . . . then the wolf leaps upon him and bites him. To chase a wolf on skis is the very worst thing there is for ruining folks’ health. Then you must ski till the blood comes into your mouth, and you get so hot you must uncover the whole of your chest. . . . You sweat so that your clothes nearest the skin are wet, and you are so tired you can hardly manage to get back. This is from one who knows. Turi had given up reindeer herding for wolf hunting; the challenge was what counted. In the forest, in deep snow, not too hard and not too soft, as long as “you are not bitten you will catch him.” Draw-­ ings from the turn of the century give the eye a view of what it must have been like.2 The earliest extant Canadian-­made skis, from 1867, were used in wolf hunting in the Northwest Territories by an immigrant Sami who was reported to have killed over half a dozen while on skis.3 Hunting on skis among the tribes of nineteenth-­century Siberia is docu-­ mented too. The accounts vary only in the description of the skis. Most com-­ ment on the distances achieved in a day. The Yupitatze, a people who lived near the Amur, for example, were able to cover about 60 miles on the shortest winter day, while Samoyeds boasted of 35 miles a day without fatigue.4 In Kamchatka, skis were “an appendage of the highest importance,” reported Langsdorff, used for breaking trail however deep...