Evening in the North 297 



appellation — have a positive genius for either disregarding other lan- 

 guages or fractionating them or translating them in a way that has 

 practically nothing to do with the original native verbiage. Just as 

 they persist in calling the Hollanders "Dutchmen," and the Deiitsch 

 "Germans," they have always referred to the inhabitants of Norway 

 as "Norwegians" with glorious disregard for the usage and wishes of 

 its people. That country is called Norge by the Nordmenn who live 

 there. The "d" in the latter happens to be wholly silent, so the word 

 comes out as "Normenn," or "Norman," if properly pronounced, 

 which explains the age-old puzzle of why the French-speaking Nor- 

 mans who conquered England in 1066 a.d. turn out to be none other 

 than Norse, or Norsemen. We ought to have called both parties the 

 Nordmanni, which is the old plural form of the name for these peo- 

 ple, all along; have referred to their language as Norsk; and to their 

 country as Norge. There would then have been less confusion, and 

 we might never have encountered that ridiculous and quite unper- 

 missible practice of calling them "Vikings," which was never the 

 name of anybody but is the Norman, or Norse, word for "discov- 

 ery," or, more accurately, "expeditioning." 



Incidentally, this may be a good place to explain why Scandinavi- 

 ans sometimes appear to cross out some of the "oV in their writing. 

 The "0" is not an "o" at all, but quite another letter denoting the 

 sound "eu" as in the French pent or nearly as in the English "beauti- 

 ful." The really troublesome thing about this is that when written in 

 longhand, it is "o," with a little comma above it, but when printed, 

 it is crossed, thus: "0." The final confusion comes with the capital 

 in longhand, which is crossed out, "^," but in a very fancy way. 



The word Norse has now come into common English usage as 

 the name for the people of Norge up till about 1 200 a.d., and that 

 monstrosity Norvoegian for those people since that date. This may 

 serve to explain why we refer to the first Nordmann period of whal- 

 ing as that of the Norse, and the two latter-day periods as Norwe- 

 gian I and II, rather than simply calling them all Norman I, II, and 

 III, which we would sorely like to do. We would also like to write 

 T0nsberg, for the benefit of the English-speaking world, as Teuns- 

 berg! 



The biography of Svend Foyn has been chronicled most adequately 

 in several languages, and very thoroughly by his own people, but it 



