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

Epilogue

 Epilogue The whole subject requires, of course, far fuller and more systematic treatment. . . . It is strange that this has not been done hitherto, but such is the case, notwithstanding the really important part which “ski” . . . have evidently played in the history of civilization. —Fridtjof Nansen, 1890 It is possible to attach too much significance to the history of a sport, but it is also possible to under-­estimate the social reactions of sport on national life.—Arnold Lunn, 1927 Looking over skiing’s six-­thousand-­year history, I am struck by the immense time span during which skis were purely of utilitarian value. They were an essential part of the folk culture of snowy lands. The bog skis and their modern counterparts used right up into the 1930s by an occasional outdoorsman hunting deer or fox, were instruments of necessity, as were those of the Finnish troops who dealt death to the Soviet forces frozen in the Finnish woods. Skis over the millennia changed shape only slightly, and the single pole remained in use into the twentieth century. Bindings varied according to usage, locale, and available material but remained more or less the same up to the time of the Finnish war. If the tools for skiing hardly changed, industrialism brought about a pro-­ found change in their use. A new urban sector of society took to skiing as leisure-­time enjoyment, as winter sport. Toward the end of the nineteenth cen-­ tury, the wealthy and urban bourgeois acquired their skiing skills from the folk skiers. Sondre Norheim and his fellow skiers from the remote Telemark valley displayed their expertise to the Christiania bourgeois, who were so enthusias-­ tic that they even joined a ski school run by these peasants. Norwegian immi-­ grants working as loggers in the mill town of Berlin, New Hampshire, showed the wealthy university men of nearby Dartmouth College how to jump. The bourgeois of Christiania also did something else—as did the university students in America—which is characteristic of modernization: they created a special skiing venue, Huseby; and when that proved unsatisfactory because of its inconsistent snow depth, they moved to Holmenkollen, and there, at the annual competition, Norwegian nationalism came to be put on view. Four 284 epilogue thousand miles across the Atlantic, one student founded an entirely new club—the Dartmouth Outing Club—from which winter sports, but especially skiing, spread to the nearby universities, then to the entire region. It made of one particular high mountain spot, Tuckerman Ravine, backed by a 900-­foot headwall, a spring pilgrimage destination—which it remains to this day. For over five thousand years the imperative for putting on skis was neces-­ sity: food, fuel, visiting, trading, and war. There was little change. The mention of a few names such as Arnljot, Trysil Knud, Lemminkainen, the Birkebeiner rescue, we owe mostly to nineteenth-­century romantic idealists. But as skiing became a sport, names of people who influenced the development of skiing (many of which have found their way into the present book) can literally fill up pages. From Norway: Angell, Huitfeld, Nansen, Nielsen (Bjarne), Norheim, Østgaard, Qual, Roll, Samson; from neighboring Sweden: Balck, Nordenski-­ old; from Austria: von Arlt, Bilgeri, Kleinoscheg, Resch, Schadek, Schneider (Hannes), Schollmeyer, Schruf, Sohm, and Zdarsky. The Czech Rössler-­ Orovsky, Poles Barabasz, Marusarz, and Zaruski and the Slovenian Badjura played leading roles. The Swiss Amstutz, Badrutt, Iselin, and Straumann and the Italians Ghiglione, Hess, and Zavattari would join the French contingent of Allais, Clerc, Cuënot, Duhamel, and Mlle. Marvingt. The Germans Frl. Cranz, Hoek, Luther, Paulcke, Rickmers, Rotter, and Schneider (Max) and the Englishmen Caulfeild, Lunn, and Richardson would also be on the list. Immi-­ grants to the United States like the Hemmetsveits, Hovelsen, Schniebs, Tellef-­ sen, and Thompson joined by the Americans Harris, Mrs. Kiaer (the former Mrs. Pennington and Mrs. Wolfe), and Palmedo were influential. Johansen in Canada, von Lerch in Japan, and Edwards in Chile would also be among this group. This might not be your list. All and more were extremely important in their own spheres, but three dominate in the creation of modern skiing: Fridtjof Nansen, Arnold Lunn, and Hannes Schneider. All three would have been disheartened at the turns that post–World War II skiing has taken. In their own lives, Nansen, who died in 1930, and Lunn, who passed on in 1974, both complained bitterly about modern developments. Schneider survived for only ten years after the end of the war, and it...