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❖ 67 ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ Chapter 5 “Ar Du Svensk?”—“Norsk, Norsk!” Folk Humor and Cultural Difference in Scandinavian America James P. Leary I was born in 1950 and raised in Rice Lake, a farming and logging town in northwestern Wisconsin. Like some in the area, we were Irish, but the community also included Ojibwes, French Canadians, Germans, Swiss, assorted Slavs, Italians, and especially Scandinavians—Swedes aplenty but even more Norwegians. Like my dad who had grown up there in the 1920s, I have known the following comic folk taunt for almost as long as I can remember: Ten t’ousand Svedes [Ten thousand Swedes ran t’rough da veeds— ran through the weeds— chased by von Norvegian! chased by one Norwegian!] More than a half century ago, this rhyme appealed to me because of its playful reliance on a broken-English dialect that only slightly exaggerated actual speech I sometimes heard on the street from immigrants and their offspring. But the improbable image of hordes scampering from the onslaught of a single pursuer was just as intriguing. As an Irish American who, even then, knew something of Ireland’s struggle for independence from England, I began to wonder why an upstart Norwegian was tangling with so many Swedes. Peter Munch provided answers in 1960, although it would be twenty years before I read his classic essay, “Ten Thousand Swedes: Reflections on a Folklore Motif.” A Norwegian-born sociologist on the faculty of Southern Illinois Univer­ sity, Munch was well aware of “numerous wars between Denmark-Norway and Sweden,” of Sweden’s political reign over Norway from 1814 until 1905, and of long-standing Norwegian conceptions “of ‘the Swede’ as the traditional enemy” when he systematically investigated versions of the “Ten Thousand Swedes” rhyme, along with eight related origin stories gathered from tellers in Michigan and Minnesota for the Folklore Archives at Indiana University. All of the tellers shared legendary accounts linking the rhyme to an actual battle involving the rout of Swedes by outnumbered Norwegians. Yet despite such uniform claims, Munch provided convincing evidence that “Ten Thousand Swedes” emerged in the United States. Furthermore, he argued, it was likely an American adaptation 68 ❖ James P. Leary of an English-language taunt celebrating the English defeat of Irish rebels at the Battle of the Boyne in 1790: Ten thousand micks Got killed with picks— At the Battle of Boyne Waters. Munch offered a series of important observations about folk humor featuring Norwegians and Swedes in America, albeit from a Norwegian American perspective.1 Most significantly, Munch contended that as fellow immigrants Norwegians and Swedes in the United States were on relatively equal footing politically and shared common allegiance to their new nation. Hence actual “military achievements of the one group over the other were hardly meaningful anymore.” Indeed, as fellow Scandinavians, Norwegian and Swedish newcomers—sharing many linguistic, customary, religious, and other cultural practices—frequently relied on one another to establish community in the New World. At the same time, the immigrants could not forget relationships between their respective homelands, especially since, for example, the major periods of Norwegian exodus “in the 1860s and 1880s coincided with periods in which the political tension between the two countries was particularly high.” Consequently, “a milder form of expression of group differentiation, not entirely unfamiliar to the immigrant, was offered by the culture of the frontier in the deriding joke,” which had the advantage of being “obviously made up, with no pretension of relating to actual events.” Useful as expressive forms that were at once residual and transformed, at once of the Old World and the New, deriding jokes distinguishing Norwegians and Swedes in America not only served these groups but also provided a means to assert distinct ethnic identities contrary to larger American inclinations “to lump . . . Norwegians and Swedes together as ‘Scandinavians.’ ” The fourth volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English fortifies Munch’s final point with evidence that a jocular Americanized rendition of Scandinavian as “Scandihoovian”—alternatively Scandahoovian, Scandihuvian, Scandinoovian, and Skandihoovian—was circulating as early as 1901, particularly in association with Norwegian and Swedish loggers in the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest.2 Rich in insights, Munch’s landmark essay is scant regarding illustrative examples. The only joke he mentions involves a “Norwegian who was mistaken for a Swede because he had just gotten out of the hospital after a long illness.” Likewise his focus on the “Ten Thousand Swedes” rhyme, necessarily emphasizing the Norwegian American experience, gave short shrift both to the...

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