Excerpt from The Fjords and Folk of Norway

The geographical position of Norway, while affording all the grandeur and the stimulating rigour of the north, yet combines with it during the summer months, a mild and invigorating climate and a luxurious and varied vegetation unequalled in any northern country. It offers, too, a diversity of attractions. To the traveller and the nature lover, it throws open a region of natural as well as artistic beauty. On its mountains, and in its ice-carved valleys, the climber and the scientist find sport in plenty, and flora, fauna, and geological formation of the greatest interest and importance, while the fjords, lakes, and rivers offer unparalleled fishing possibilities. In the variety of its scenery may be observed nature in her severest moods: beautiful both under the stormy wind-swept sky or glorified by the sun; or the gentler beauties of green-walled valleys, rural homesteads, and the infinite charm of mountains, lakes, fjords, turbulent rivers, glaciers, forests, and the atmos pheric effects peculiar to these latitudes - factors which, with her nightless summers, combine in making Norway a land in every way ideal for holiday travel. Norway is to-day not only open to the traveller and the tourist, but it can ofier them a hospitality, a culture, and a civilisationwhich is of the most enlightened and advanced in Europe.

As already stated, the sea has been the supreme modifier and developer of Norway, and the sea is, therefore, the appropriate highway by which Norway should be entered, and it is to this Norway of the sea, with its great and beautiful coast region, and of those true-born sons of the sea who people its shores, that the succeeding pages are devoted.

Some association with Viking times is sure to confront the visitor to Norway's shores, and this, together with the increased, and increasing, interest in the civilisation of the Viking age, has been the inducement to dwell at some length on this absorbing subject in the historical section, and to add some notes of life in those times.

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