Great Norwegians: from Roald Amundsen to Edvard Grieg

A look at Norway 's movers and shakers

Though Norway hasn't been the most fecund of mothers(the current population sits at four and a half million) she's forgone quantity for quality in her progeny. Their historical literary line-up sees Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, the Nobel Prize winning playwright near the top, overshadowed only by Henrik Ibsen. Considered the father of modern prose drama, Ibsen turned his back on the romantic style, and in plays such as Ghosts and Hedda Gabler he shifted the focus from plot to characterisation. Leif Ericson reached America nearly 500 years prior to the gold thirsty Spaniard Columbus, although the jury's still out on whether it was accidental or not. One school suggests he was blown off course, another that he was following up on a tip from a Greenlandic trader named Bjarni Herjulfsson.

Then there's the kooky Thor Heyerdahl, for whom the 8000km jolly form Peru to French Polynesia on a raft, the Kon-tiki, wasn't enough and he later went on to attempt to lend credit to his notion of anthropological links between Africa and South America. After a first botched attempt, he set out from Safi, Morocco, in Ra II, a 12-meter papyrus vessel. Fifty seven days later he found himself 6100 km away in Barbados, turning on its head the idea that vessels built prior to Columbus could not have crossed the Atlantic.

Other Norwegian cultural big guns on the site include the composer Edvard Grieg and Roald Amundsen - famed for leading the first expedition to reach the South Pole in 1911. It's rounded off with a 'black sheep' section, exclusively reserved for Nazi sympathisers and whistle-blowers. Altogether begging the question, with children like these just what sort of mother has Norway been?

www.mnc.net

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