This chapter explores the impact of modernisation on the Nordic region. We shall consider how technological change, industrialisation and urbanisation impacted the experience of (and anxiety about) an emerging, turbulent modern world in three case studies from Denmark, Norway and Finland. The focus will be on the tension between mobilities and immobilities, and we examine how, as Hannam, Sheller and Urry claim, there are 'places and technologies that enhance the mobility of some peoples and places even as they also heighten the immobility of others' (2006, 3). The three case studies selected for this analysis aim to demonstrate how 'mobility' − both in the form of travel and in the form of power − can be understood to be 'a resource to which not everyone has an equal relationship' (Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006, 3), and how the arrival of modernity in the Nordic countries is represented as a combination of new technological and socio-cultural mobilities and immobilities.

Known primarily for his popular fairy tales for children, Hans Christian Andersen (1805−75) was also one of the first Danes to experience train travel, and he recorded his resulting 'railway fever' in the travelogue *En Digters Bazar* (*A Poet's Bazaar*, 1842), which complements a series of his later tales that both celebrate and worry about the technological revolutions of his time – including the transatlantic telegraphic cable, the introduction of gas street lighting and travel by air. The view of modernisation represented in Juhani Aho's (1861–1921) comic novel *Rautatie* (*The Railroad*, 1884), on the other hand, is less enthusiastic than Andersen's. Here Aho engages with the impact that modern times had on rural Finland by representing an old couple's disappointing encounter with the railway. Lastly, the anxiety brought by modernisation and industrialisation is also the topic of 'Ved Akerselva' ('By Akerselva', 1910), a short story by the Norwegian author Kristofer Uppdal (1878−1961), included in his collection *Ved Akerselva og andre forteljingar* (*By Akerselva and Other Stories*). Industrialisation divided Kristiania, Norway's capital, in two areas: the poor East End (*østkant*), the industrial part of the city, and the wealthier West End (*vestkant*). This socio-economic divide is at the centre of Uppdal's text, which represents the results of the capital's economic stagnation after its dramatic industrialisation and urbanisation: since there were no jobs, immigrants who came to the capital from the countryside in search of employment ended up living at the edge of society, struggling for survival with no hope of joining in with the progress of modernity.

#### Embracing Modernity

Within the Nordic region, Denmark was a forerunner in the construction of a railway network, opening the first railway line between Kiel and Altona (part of the Duchy of Holstein) in 1844, and the second between Copenhagen and Roskilde in 1847. Yet in his travelogue, *A Poet's Bazaar*, the always restless Hans Christian Andersen recorded his first experience of travelling by train while on his journey through Central Europe, Italy and Greece to Constantinople (today's Istanbul) in 1840−1. This was a time when travelling over land by stagecoach on rough roads was an uncomfortable, exhausting and tedious affair. It was, therefore, with great anticipation that Andersen entered a new world of travel on 10 November 1840, when he took the train from Magdeburg to Leipzig in Germany.

The novelty of railway travel in the early 1840s is tangible in the opening lines of the chapter 'The Railway' in *A Poet's Bazaar*: 'Since many of my readers have never seen a railway, I shall try first of all to give an impression of one' (Andersen 1985, 39). Andersen not only goes on to provide an intimate and detailed record of the novelties of train travel for his readers at home, but also describes the psychological and somatic effect of his experience as a virtual 'railway fever' (*Jernbane-Feber*). This 'fever' resulted from the disorienting and exhilarating modern experience of speed, a concomitant new way of relating to space and time, the thrill of the commotion and jostling of passengers, the howling of machines and steam, and the danger and the magical wizardry of the engines, carriages and crisscrossing tracks. Exhilarated by the whole experience, he writes: 'And what a tremendous effect this invention has on the spirit! One feels so powerful, just like a magician of olden days. We harness the magic horse to our carriage and space disappears. We fly like clouds before the storm, as birds of passage fly' (Andersen 1985, 42). One might have expected the Romantic storyteller of fairy tales to have longed nostalgically for past modes of travel, but Andersen celebrates the poetic potential and comforts of the new railway:

I have heard many say that the coming of the railway would be the end of the poetry and romance of travel […] I am of the completely opposite opinion. It is in the cramped, overfilled stage-coaches and diligences that poetry vanishes. In them one becomes dull, and in the best of weather one is plagued by dust and heat and in the winter by bad roads.

(Andersen 1985, 42)

Throughout his literary career, which would become one of the most successful in the Nordic countries and the wider world, Andersen continuously explored encounters between the old and the new world emerging all around him. He sought to record his experience of the modern world and the complex experience of finding himself in the midst of great social and technological change. Paradoxically, he did this using the traditional form of the fairy tale: 'Our time is the time of the fairy tale', as he wrote in one of his later tales 'Dryaden' ('The Wood Nymph', 1868). Perhaps because his own life's journey presented itself as a modern fairy tale of mobility – at the age of only 15 he left his poor childhood home in semi-rural Odense by stagecoach to search for fame and fortune in the elite circles of cosmopolitan Copenhagen – physical and social mobility would become central to the settings and themes of many of his stories.

Andersen depicted the modern experience with a complex set of concerns: in his stories the modern urban world dramatises the conflict between old traditions and social hierarchies and the new, producing both pleasure and pain, anticipation and anxiety. Depictions of the changing social reality and technological advances instrumental to the formation of the modern city can be found throughout Andersen's work: in his 1852 tale 'Om Aartusinder' ('Thousands of Years from Now') he imagines transatlantic air travel on wings of steam forming virtual caravans of air ships that bring young American travellers to Europe; the new technology of electrified telecommunication, 'the electromagnetic thread under the world sea', is used as a character in 'Den Store Søslange' ('The Great Sea Serpent', 1871); and the impact of gas lighting on the city of Copenhagen is recorded in the tale 'Gudfaders Billedbog' ('Godfather's Picture Book', 1868). While such tales mostly present Andersen's wonder at the new world emerging all around him, other tales represent a desire for the new, infused with a sense of danger, with violence and destruction, and the loss of simpler times. In 'The Wood Nymph', for instance, masses of tourists arrive by train at the Paris World Exposition in 1867, 'the wonder of the world', where they trample down the young nymph, the 'child of the forest', whose life is withering away in the polluted Parisian air.

Perhaps most memorably, Andersen captures the marvels and dangers of modern urban life in 'Vanddraaben' ('A Drop of Water', 1847). In this short tale a drop of ditch-water appears to contain 'a whole town of savages' when viewed through a troll's magnifying glass, reflecting the chaos and violence of the modern city – probably intended to refer to London, the largest, busiest and most polluted metropolis in nineteenth-century Europe, which Andersen had visited in 1847. Through his many travels, Andersen encountered the attractions and horrors of urban life in the century's largest metropolitan areas such as London, Paris and Naples, and he would refer to these experiences directly in his tales to instil wonder in his Danish readers in the comparatively provincial capital of Copenhagen.

However, the population of Denmark also grew dramatically in the urban areas in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the 1840s, the movement from the country to the city took on proportions of a mass migration, stimulated by the early industrialisation. Until the 1850s, Copenhagen's city limits were still defined by the area inside the old fortifications, the ramparts, bastions and city gates, and as a result of this restriction the city became increasingly overpopulated. With its lack of a proper sewage system, the presence of a great number of household animals such as horses used for transportation, and an insufficient and polluted water supply, Copenhagen experienced terrible epidemics, such as the major outbreak of cholera in 1853. Cholera is a waterborne disease that had already ravaged London in 1831, and such epidemics highlighted the need for proper hygiene and sanitation, as well as the mortal dangers of life in the overcrowded city. While Andersen's drop of water may have appeared as merely a wondrous story in 1847, by the time of the epidemic in 1853, the terrifying reality of the overcrowded city depicted in the tale would seem an eerie premonition of the dangers of rapid urbanisation.

#### Fearing Modernity

The Finnish writer Juhani Aho shared Andersen's fascination with technology and how it forced its way through people's ordinary lives (Nummi 2012, 7). Several of his early works − such as his short story 'Helsinkiin' ('Helsinki', 1889) and his novellas *Yksin*, (*Alone*, 1890) and *Maailman murjoma* (*Ill-used by life*, 1894) − included references to new means of transport, showing how they shortened distances but also how, by connecting 'the remote, stagnant village idyll and the fast-paced city', they could bring change (Laitinen 1998, 92−3). Aho's first novel, *The Railroad* (see Figure 4.1), deals with this tension, presenting a comical representation of how the arrival of the railway in Finland was perceived by some people living in the remote countryside as 'a threat to their peace of mind' (Laitinen 1998, 93).

Today *The Railroad* is one of Finland's bestsellers; after a slow start, it became particularly popular thanks to the illustrations of the artist Eero Järnefelt (1863−1937), which appeared in the reprint edition of

**Figure 4.1** Cover of the English translation of Aho's *The Railroad* (*Rautatie*, 1884), featuring Matti and Liisa waiting for the train at Lapinlahti station, one of Eero Järnefelt's (1863−1937) original illustrations. © Norvik Press Ltd.

1892. By the time the book was published in 1884, twenty-two years had passed since the opening of Finland's first railway line between Helsinki and Hämeenlinna. The project was initiated by Tsar Alexander II (1818−81) and his government in an attempt to connect the capital to the rest of the country and, eventually, to the rest of the Russian Empire of which the Grand Duchy of Finland was then a part. Several more lines had since opened, but the one Aho writes about, namely the Savo railway extending to Lapinlahti, was yet to be built and would only be completed by the beginning of the twentieth century.

As the novel's subtitle states, *The Railroad* is quite simply 'the tale of an old man and an old woman who had never seen it before' (Aho 2012, 3). The main characters are Maatti and Liisa, an old childless couple living in a remote part of the countryside and earning their income in the form of subsistence, not money, through their labour as tenants of the parsonage. Having spent a whole spring and winter fantasising about the new railway built through the nearby village of Lapinlahti, they finally decide to walk to the station to see it for themselves. In his introduction to the English translation of the novel, Jyrki Nummi argues that Maatti and Liisa are '"genuine" rural Finns' (Nummi 2012, 12). They live their ordinary 'small-scale' lives most of the time isolated from the rest of the world, busying themselves with the same activities every day (weaving, milking the cow, chopping wood). Their existence depends on nature as they use traps to catch hares to eat, follow the natural rhythm of day and night (they do not own a watch and cannot tell the time) and even pay their rent to the pastor in grain. The arrival of the railway in their closest village, and their own visit to the station, break the monotony of their lives; however it also threatens their peace of mind and the status quo of their rural idyll (Nummi 2012, 15−6).

Throughout the novel Matti and Liisa are torn between curiosity and anxiety about the arrival of the railway, a reaction that is common in nineteenth-century representations of trains. The train becomes, in fact, a symbol of 'modern anxiety and potential freedom' (Fraser and Spalding 2012, x). While the rest of the village seems to have embraced the potential brought by this new means of transport, Matti and Liisa first attempt to join in this collective enthusiasm but ultimately refuse to let modernity become part of their lives. This becomes particularly clear if we observe their use of language. Matti and Liisa's resistance to change is mirrored by their struggle to adopt the new terminology and discourse of the railway.

As the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895−1975) states in his essay 'Discourse in the Novel' (1934−5), there are generally no neutral words, as language is steeped in all the contexts in which it has been used (Bakhtin 1981, 293). Language is always someone else's until it has been appropriated by the speaker who populates it with her own intentions (Bakhtin 1981, 293−4). When Matti first finds out about the railway from the foreman of the parsonage, who is about to take up the position of station man, and the pastor, he can only repeat what they say. Since he has neither seen nor heard of a railway or a train before, he has no vocabulary of his own to describe them (Aho 2012, 27, 30−1). Unable to picture the trains and the tracks, on his way home from his visit to the parsonage he is tormented by the haunting juxtaposition of the images the foreman and pastor used to describe trains (horsedrawn carriages, steam boats and rooms on wheels):

Each time he imagined it, it looked different. Now and then he would be on the verge of figuring it out, but then it would change again. First it was as if there were before his eyes a four-wheeled wagon with wheels both large and small, always wanting to look like the ones on the dead pastor's old carriage. And in front of the carriage there seemed to be two horses, with the pastor sitting with his wife under the hood, and opposite them, the young gentleman and ladies; in the coachman's seat sat the driver, hands outstretched, and, next to the driver, Matti, as a small boy, a little afraid and holding on tight.

(Aho 2012, 38−9)

Even when he finally visits the station at Lapinlahti with Liisa, still unable to use the 'modern' words he has by now heard so many times, he continues to refer to the train as 'the machine' or 'wild beast', and to the iron rails as 'logs' (Aho 2012, 100, 115). Although they cannot appropriate the language of the railway, Matti and Liisa cannot stop thinking about this modern contraption. In the first part of the novel Matti plays out a delicate balancing act between gaining more information about the railway from those who have seen it, such as Ville the waterman, and hiding his ignorance of it. When he tells Liisa about the railway, he attempts to repeat what he has heard but only manages to mix up all the information he has gathered. His statement that the railway can reach America, dismissed by the pastor during their earlier conversation, incurs Liisa's derision. While Matti attempts to come to terms with the railway, Liisa initially refuses to admit that such a thing could actually exist. It is only after her visit to the pastor and his wife that she comes back full of curiosity about the railway. As Matti cannot stand the idea that Liisa may now know more about it than him, he dismisses everything she says as lies, just as she had done with him. However, as the narrator points out: 'both of them thought of the railroad, even though they did not speak of it. They dreamed of it often and heard each other speaking of it in their sleep' (Aho 2012, 75).

As Ralph Roth and Marie-Noëlle Polino observe in their study of the relationship between the city and the railway in Europe, an interesting aspect of the rise of public transport from the nineteenth century onwards is that 'one can witness a diverse cross section of humanity travelling together side-by-side in these train compartments' (Roth and Polino 2003, xviii). People belonging to different social strata and geographical areas are enclosed together for the duration of their journey. During their eventual train ride, Matti and Liisa meet a 'man of the world', 'a journeyman' and, like anything else that does not belong to their ordinary universe, he represents a threat to their peaceful existence: the encounter has 'catastrophic' consequences for them as he gets Matti drunk, causing them to miss their stop and have to pay for an additional ticket. By the end of their disappointing experience, they attempt to re-establish their railway-free existence by trying to forget and avoid any conversation about it. In order to be carefree, it seems, Matti and Liisa's existences need to be railway-free. Aho presents this as a comical attempt to ignore modernity; yet while Matti and Liisa may manage to go back to their ordinary lives by the end of the novel, the world around them continues to change.

#### Surviving Modernity

There are no trains in Uppdal's 'By Akerselva', where unemployed factory and construction workers coming to the city from the countryside live in upturned boats and where economic growth and expansion seem to have reached a saturation point in Kristiania. The collection *By Akerselva and Other Stories*, of which this short story is one of twelve interconnected texts, appeared in 1910 and was Uppdal's first book of prose fiction. Similarly to Aho's *The Railroad*, the texts in the collection explore how 'the prosperity and stability of the village are replaced by uncertainty and the new power of industry' (Ostrauskaite 2004, 309). The stories are episodes from the life of Kal Østad, a man who, having moved from the countryside to the capital of Norway, has become one of the many victims of economic stagnation. In this first prose collection, Uppdal develops what would become his longstanding interest in the working classes (Mishler 1993, 221).

Throughout the story we get regular reminders that the city is divided, both socially and geographically: the 'world of shadows', the 'big city' and the 'fine houses' (Uppdal 1982, 92, 95, 96). The narrator of the story belongs to the 'world of shadows'; he is one of the modern 'trolls' living under overturned boats, afraid of the sunlight and of 'gaily dressed people' (Uppdal 1982, 97). There is no sense of camaraderie among the 'black shadows' who, having arrived in the capital in hope of work and a better future, are left, like the narrator, increasingly 'ragged and scruffy' (Uppdal 1982, 95). As the story opens, the narrator is kicked in the face by 'a newcomer', i.e. a new immigrant to the city, who has stolen his boat.  You'll find no better embrace, you'll find no better rest.  The narrator describes the capital's dramatic saturation by referring to the constant flow of new construction workers hoping to pick up a few kroner, while other workers, like Little Kalle leave again in search of new opportunities. The story sketches out how immigration, one of the city's most important drives towards industrialisation in the first part of the century, transformed into one of its most complex problems.

The initial flow of capital and human resources towards Kristiania was, in fact, one of the most important factors that triggered the industrial expansion of the city and its consequent urban and socio-demographical transformations during the nineteenth century. In particular, the building activities in the capital not only needed continuous investment, but also created new employment opportunities. The latter attracted a great number of immigrants who caused unprecedented demographical growth: between 1815 and 1900, the number of inhabitants living in the capital jumped from 14,000 to 228,000 (Myhre 1995, 25, 78−94). However, by the time 'By Akerselva' was written, economic growth had slowed down and the demand for housing had reached its peak. In 1899 alone, Kristiania had a surplus of 14,000 immigrants, and building companies, despite their efforts, were not able to plan and carry out the construction of new blocks quickly enough to satisfy the demand (see Figure 4.2). The situation was so critical that local authorities even reached the point of offering a travel loan to immigrants who were homeless and wished to leave the capital (Baltzersen 1977, 149−50; Myhre 1994, 372−4). The poor immigrants to the city, namely the 'black shadows' Uppdal represents in his story, are affected by poverty, alcoholism and prostitution. These three problems were all highlighted in the research by Eilert Sundt (1817−75), a Norwegian social scientist who in 1850 received a public grant to assess the living conditions of industrial workers in Norway (Baltzersen 1977, 77; Myhre 1994, 388−91).

It is not surprising that the narrator in Uppdal's story talks about his need to be intoxicated to numb physical and emotional pain, as excessive consumption of alcohol among the working class was related to social and psychological factors (Roberts 1992, 107−8). It is also not surprising that Sølvi, the girl from the narrator's village, who he meets at the end of the story, has ended up a prostitute. Explaining the reason behind her current situation, Sølvi states: 'I was working at a factory and earning five or six kroner a week, and I couldn't manage on that, so I began to walk the streets in the evenings' (Uppdal 1982, 100). Sølvi's condition was far from unusual: many women between 14 and 40 years of age were pushed to make the same choice for the same reason, especially since, besides earning only one third or half of men's wages for the work they did manage to find, they were often the first to be laid off in situations of crisis (Schiøtz 1977, 75−84, 158, 178 and Schiøtz 1979, 79).

**Figure 4.2** The river Akerselva seen from Hausmann bridge (Hausmannsbro) looking towards Christian Krohgs gate. Photograph taken by the Norwegian photographer Martinius Skøien (1849−1916) between 1880 and 1910. Source: National Library of Norway.

While the modern 'trolls' live their static existence under boats at the edge of society, the big city and those who are still part of its activities continue to pulsate. As a new day begins, the narrator observes the city waking up as factory chimneys start to puff out smoke, houses wake up and trams start whirring along. In the heart of the big city there are still people who can earn their living and participate in Kristiania's new modern experiences: 'there were young and old people who came out with a flask of coffee in their hands and a lunch pack under their arms, dock workers in leather breeches and blue sweaters and with a clay pipe sticking out from a stubby face, and the girls for the factories' (Uppdal 1982, 95). While the East End (*østkanten*) established itself as the poor, industrial part of the city, the city centre became the core of the capital's activities. Industrial buildings − initially mostly located along the river

**Figure 4.3** The painting 'Struggle for Survival' ('Kampen for tilværelsen', 1889) by the Norwegian naturalist painter and author Christian Krohg (1852−1925). Source: National Gallery of Norway.

Akerselva in order to make use of the available hydropower − spread further and further towards the city centre when steam engines and later electricity came into use, as here they could be closer to their distribution network, i.e. the harbour and the city's two railway stations, the West Station (Vestbanen, 1854) and the East Station (Østbanen, 1878) (Baltzersen 1977, 73−9). This in turn pushed the wealthier middle class westwards in the attempt to escape not only from the hustle and bustle of the industrial activities but also as far away as possible from the danger of the epidemics that regularly broke out in the overcrowded accommodation of industrial workers in the East End (Baltzersen 1977, 137; Moe 1972, 12; Myhre 1994, 92). *Vestkanten* is what Uppdal's narrator refers to as the 'fine houses' (Uppdal 1982, 96). This is where the 'black shadows' beg for food and are able to get 'bread crusts and other waste food' (Uppdal 1982, 96). In a conversation with other 'wretched tramps', the narrator discusses this common practice, immortalised in the painting *Struggle for Survival* (*Kampen for tilværelsen*, 1889) by the Norwegian naturalist painter and author Christian Krohg (1852−1925; see Figure 4.3). In fact, the whole of Uppdal's story is a representation of 'the cruel struggle for survival' (Uppdal 1982, 92), fuelled by the hope of social mobility, a hope that, despite the story's emphasis on immobility, is renewed at the end when the narrator and Sølvi decide to join forces in an attempt to make something of their lives.

#### Mobilities and Immobilities of Modernity

In the case studies dealt with in this chapter modernity equals mobility in the form of 'obligatory as well as voluntary forms of travel', and all the texts offer examples of how 'moving between places physically or virtually can be a source of status and power' (Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006, 10). Hans Christian Andersen's own social and physical movement from a rural province to cosmopolitan Copenhagen and from there into the wider world was reflected in his lifelong fascination with modern transportation and communication technologies and the liberating yet still angst-provoking experiences of rapid modernisation and urbanisation.

For Matti and Liisa, travel is not necessary in the sense that they have to move beyond their idyllic rural home, but it becomes necessary as a social obligation. The railway takes over their minds as, through their visits to the parsonage, they realise that it has become an integral part of the community to which they belong. When they visit Lapinlahti station they initially have no intention of boarding the train, but they are given tickets and are physically pushed into a carriage by Ville, the former waterman who now repairs railway tracks. Their disappointing experience will, however, discourage them from joining in the enthusiasm others seem to display towards this new means of transport which has created a tangible connection between rural Finland and the rest of the world.

Matti and Liisa are not the only ones to be disillusioned by their experience of modernity. For the narrator in 'By Akerselva' and all the 'black shadows' who, like him, chose to travel to Kristiania in search of upward social mobility, there is nothing but disappointment, anger and downward mobility. For now, their existence has become immobile as they are stuck under upturned boats while the rest of the capital continues to take part in the modern life of the city. Only by joining forces, as the narrator and Sølvi do at the end of the story, will the 'black shadows', 'By Akerselva' suggests, change the downward spiral of their existences.

#### References

Aho, Juhani. 2012. *The Railroad*, translated by Owen Witesman. London: Norvik Press.

Naess, Harald S., ed. 1993. *A History of Norwegian Literature*. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

### 5 The Nordic Welfare Model

Mary Hilson

The five Nordic countries are often imagined as a unit, especially by the outside world. As the final chapter in this volume discusses, external stereotypes of the Nordic region have been crucial in shaping the internal self-images found in the Nordic countries. Moreover, these external stereotypes have often – though never exclusively – been positive, or even utopian. From the 1930s, foreign observers praised the Nordic region as a stable and democratic 'middle way' between the extremes of capitalism and communism, while from the 1980s and especially since the turn of the millennium it has become common to refer to the Scandinavian or Nordic model (Jalava and Stråth 2017). The exact meanings of the term Nordic model are disputed. Most scholars would probably agree, however, that it refers to the similarities in social and political development in the Nordic countries, including, among other things, the stability of parliamentary democracy; the preference for consensual solutions to social conflicts, especially in the labour market; and the universal, tax-funded welfare state (Hilson 2008).

This chapter focuses on the welfare state as perhaps the best-known feature of the so-called Nordic or Scandinavian model. The organisation of the chapter is inspired by the large Nordic research network on the Nordic welfare states, NordWel, which operated in 2007–14 under the title 'The Nordic Welfare State: Historical Foundations and Future Challenges' (NordWel 2018). In the first section, I briefly examine some of the attempts to classify different welfare regimes, and ask to what extent it is justifiable to speak of a distinctive Nordic welfare model. In the second part of the chapter, I consider the historical foundations of the Nordic welfare states and the main influences on their formation. Finally, I examine briefly some of the future challenges for the Nordic welfare states.

#### Welfare Models

The welfare state is not a Nordic invention. All societies have had to make some provision to take care of individuals who for reasons such as youth, old age, illness or accident are temporarily or permanently prevented from looking after themselves. Different societies have also developed more or less elaborate schemes by which individuals can either make provision for themselves (insurance against future ill luck) or others (for example religious codes on almsgiving). In the Nordic countries, like elsewhere in Europe, until the end of the nineteenth century welfare was provided through a combination of informal networks of family and neighbourhood, private philanthropy and locally administered Poor Laws (Christiansen and Markkola 2006, 15).

This changed from the late nineteenth century, as states began to take a greater interest in the welfare of their citizens. Their interest was triggered by several factors. First, the much greater scale of poverty and hardship engendered by urbanisation and industrial capitalism placed older poor relief schemes under great pressure. It also triggered fears of the consequences of ignoring such problems, whether this was of social unrest and potential revolution, or of the decline in the health and vigour of populations required to undertake productive work and to fight for their states. Second, democratic reforms and the mass mobilisation of new political parties representing the working classes created new political demands for welfare reforms, though it was often other parties that actually passed the necessary legislation. It should be noted, moreover, that although many of the European welfare states trace their earliest roots to the legislation on old-age pensions and other forms of social insurance passed during the two decades or so before the First World War, these provisions remained very limited. They were often means-tested and were intended to provide only the very basic minimum of assistance.

It is thus not until the mid-twentieth century that we can really begin to speak of welfare *states* as such, with the emergence of systems where the state became a major or even the main provider of welfare. Such arrangements were usually seen as part of broader socio-economic policy, a 'virtuous circle' where a healthy and well-educated workforce would contribute to increases in productivity, which would in turn stimulate economic growth and lead to greater welfare (Kettunen 2011). Here, the Nordic countries seem to stand out among other European countries for the comprehensiveness of their welfare systems and the extent to which welfare was provided by public institutions financed out of general taxation. But although the nation state came to be the natural frame for the provision of welfare, its development was a transnational phenomenon. National debates on welfare legislation were informed by the transnational exchange of ideas, and especially the experiences of advanced industrial countries such as Germany and Britain. Notable examples include the social insurance legislation introduced by Bismarck in Germany during the 1880s, and the proposals for social security made in William Beveridge's 1942 report in the UK, which was widely discussed in Sweden and Norway (Åmark 2005; Kettunen 2011). Transnational exchange was also important within the Nordic region.

Although shaped by transnational events and debates that were broadly similar, national welfare states did not develop identically, but were also shaped by what scholars refer to as 'path dependencies', which is the legacy of nationally specific historical developments, as well as by specific political choices (Petersen and Åmark 2006). An extensive body of scholarship in the comparative social sciences has shown how welfare states differ, for example according to whether they provide only a basic safety net distributed through means-testing, or universal services available to all citizens regardless of need. In turn this is linked to how welfare is financed – whether through general taxation, compulsory social insurance or private philanthropy – and the extent to which the state has a role as the main provider of welfare services such as healthcare and education, or whether it shares these responsibilities with other institutions. Many such typologies are possible, but probably the most influential is that developed by sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990). According to Esping-Andersen, welfare states differed from each other in the extent to which they 'decommodified' social relations; in other words, the extent to which individuals were forced to rely on the market to meet their material needs (through selling their labour and buying goods and services), or were entitled to receive benefits and transfers as citizens. In turn, this meant that the welfare states were important in the ordering of social relations, with different types of welfare systems producing more, or less, equal societies.

Comparative analysis of data from 18 welfare states led Esping-Andersen to develop his famous 'three worlds' of welfare capitalism. In the liberal model, associated with the Anglo-Saxon countries, there was minimum provision of means-tested benefits, and social security systems thus tended to reproduce social stratification. In the corporatist or conservative model, associated with Central European welfare states, rights to welfare were linked to the status of individuals within the labour market through compulsory insurance schemes, and thus tended to reproduce existing social hierarchies. Finally, in the social-democratic welfare model, associated with the Nordic countries, social relations were highly decommodified; moreover, because benefits were universal, this reliance on the state rather than the market for welfare services also extended to the middle classes, so these states tended to undermine social hierarchies and produce more equal societies (Esping-Andersen 1990).

It must be noted that all attempts to classify welfare states deal in ideal types, and no welfare state can be expected to conform perfectly to the typology. Thus, even if the Nordic welfare states are considered ideal types in their provision of public sector, universal, tax-financed welfare, none of these characteristics is met entirely. The family continued to have a strong role in all of the Nordic welfare states, for example in the care of very young children or elderly parents. Nor were all benefits and services provided universally (Edling 2006). Klas Åmark's comparative history of the welfare state in Norway and Sweden found that welfare benefits tended to be directed towards male wage-earners in permanent full-time employment; other groups such as women and self-employed small farmers were much less well provided for (Åmark 2005). Esping-Andersen has been criticised for overlooking important aspects of the welfare state in his typology, not least the impact of welfare policies on gender relations (Emmenegger et al. 2015). The classification can also be criticised for emphasising social insurance and cash benefits as the main ways in which the welfare state functions, ignoring the goods and services that are provided in kind. The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is after all an example of the universal welfare state, delivering free healthcare to all citizens according to need.

Moreover, the development of the Nordic welfare states was uneven. Denmark and Sweden must be regarded as Nordic pioneers in the adoption of welfare reforms, especially neutral Sweden because of the exceptionally strong position of its economy after the Second World War. Norway, Finland and especially Iceland were less prosperous and remained largely agrarian societies until well into the post-war period, so that the major expansion of the welfare state did not take place until the 1970s. For this reason, welfare state historians have coined the phrase 'one model – five exceptions' to describe the Nordic welfare states (Christiansen and Markkola 2006). Nonetheless, there is a broad consensus that the Nordic welfare states do cluster as a group with certain shared characteristics (Hilson 2008). The idea of a 'Nordic model' of welfare may be understood in two ways. On the one hand, it functions as a heuristic device to shape comparative analyses of the welfare state and its development in the Nordic region. On the other, it has often served as a vision and a source of identity, shaping the exchange of policy ideas and the development of welfare legislation across the region.

#### Historical Roots of the Nordic Welfare States

What then is distinctive about the Nordic welfare states as they have developed in the twentieth century, in contrast to welfare regimes in other parts of Europe and beyond? The constraints of space mean that it is not possible to offer a comprehensive survey of the development of social policy in five countries, so instead the chapter explores two interrelated themes: first, the role of social democracy and other ideological influences; second, the importance of the state.

Is the Nordic model a social democratic model? The Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) claimed that it was, when in 2011 their application for copyright of the term was approved by the Swedish Patents Agency (Marklund 2013, 280). The designation carries two slightly different meanings. On the one hand, it reflects the notion that social democratic parties were the principal architects of the welfare state, through their influence on legislation and policy while in government. On the other hand, in Esping-Andersen's (1990) typology the designation social democratic refers more broadly to the impact of welfare policies on the Nordic societies, above all the historically relatively high levels of social equality. There are various ways to calculate inequality and relative poverty, for example based on the share of income or wealth concentrated in the highest or lowest income groups, but on most measurements the Nordic countries continue to be characterised as relatively equal societies (World Inequality Database 2018). In 2016 inequality in the five Nordic countries remained lower than that in the UK, the US and the OECD average, measured by the Gini index (OECD 2018). With the exception of Iceland, however, inequality had also increased during the decade since 2007, especially in Sweden (OECD 2016). According to Jørgen Goul Andersen, rising inequality in the Danish case could be attributed to changing policies and especially reforms that had made the tax system less progressive and redistributive (Goul Andersen 2018).

Historian Francis Sejersted (2011) referred to a 'social democratic order' in Norway and Sweden in the decades from the 1930s to the 1960s. The Nordic social democratic parties abandoned the Marxistinspired commitment to class struggle relatively early and embraced instead a vision of modernity that included, among other things, the belief that individual freedom rested on material security; tolerance of capitalist enterprise as a means to provide that security, especially in the export sector; trust in technocratic solutions to economic and other problems; and the coupling of social democracy with national integration (Sejersted 2011).

In Sweden, the social democratic vision of the welfare state was encapsulated in the concept of the *folkhem* or people's home, as a metaphor for the new society. The term was first used by SAP leader Per Albin Hansson (Prime Minister 1932–46) in a speech to the *riksdag* (the Swedish parliament) in 1928, though it was actually borrowed from right-wing political discourses in the early twentieth century (Dahlqvist 2002). The *folkhem* expressed the vision of a welfare state that took care of its citizens from the cradle to the grave, and where individuals could expect to be treated equally regardless of social status, and kindly without the stigma that had been attached to earlier recipients of welfare benefits. The *folkhem* was to be built not just metaphorically, however, but also literally in bricks and mortar, through the state's investment in housing and social institutions that were designed to reflect expert opinion with regard to hygiene and rationality (Saarikangas 1997). The culmination of this thinking came with the Swedish government's famous 'Miljonprogram' that saw the construction of 1 million flats between 1965 and 1975 in new suburban developments (Östberg and Andersson 2013, 36–40).

Many of the leading politicians associated with welfare reforms in the Nordic countries were indeed Social Democrats: Per Albin Hansson, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal in Sweden; K.K Steincke and Thorvald Stauning in Denmark; Einar Gerhardsen and Johan Nygaardsvold in Norway. For some of them, like Sweden's Gustav Möller, their visions of a humane welfare system were shaped by their own formative experiences of poverty and hardship (Tilton 1991). But the Nordic welfare states were not exclusively the products of strong social democratic parties. First, the model does not hold true for Finland and Iceland, where communist parties had a much larger share of the working-class vote, and where different political models thus prevailed (Jonsson 2001; Kettunen 2001). In Iceland the dominant party of government was the centre-right Independence Party, while in Finland governments formed of broad political coalitions were more common. Second, even in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, social democratic parties were often obliged to form agreements with or govern in coalition with bourgeois parties. Indeed, it was only after the negotiation of red-green – so-called because they were negotiated between social democratic (red) and farmers' (green) parties – political compromises in the 1930s that they were able to gain parliamentary majorities. The passing of welfare legislation always rested on a process of compromise, for example in 1958 when the Swedish supplementary pension reform was agreed in the *riksdag* (Hilson 2008, 43–4).

#### Lutheranism and the Nordic Welfare State

A 'historical turn' in welfare state scholarship has drawn attention to other ideological influences on the development of the Nordic welfare states, and especially to the ideas that shaped the trajectories of the Nordic welfare states before the influence of social democracy. For example, Peter Baldwin (1989) has emphasised the role of agrarian liberal parties in securing welfare reforms during the 1890s and 1900s in Denmark and Sweden, and in doing so establishing the principle of (partial) universalism, which was to endure in later legislation.

Scholars have also debated the influence of religious cultures on the development of welfare states, noting of course that the Nordic countries are distinguished for being largely mono-confessional and dominated by Lutheran Protestantism (Markkola and Naumann 2014).1 The Reformation created new understandings of poverty and established the principle that poor relief was a matter for collective responsibility. The evolution of poor relief systems after the Reformation was of course a long and complex process, but historians of Denmark in particular have paid increased attention to the influence of a specifically Lutheran morality through the early modern poor laws into the first universal welfare reforms of the late nineteenth century (Koefoed 2017; Petersen 2016, 2018).

An important legacy of the Reformation was the close relationship established between the state and the reformed Protestant church (Knudsen 2000). Responsibility for the poor laws rested with the state, but relief was administered through the local parish structures, with pastors inevitably playing an important role in this process (Markkola 2011; Koefoed 2017). It cannot be assumed that there was an unbroken continuity between the Reformation in the sixteenth century and the emergence of the modern welfare states in the twentieth. But it is often suggested that the general perception of the state as a largely benign institution, and a broad tolerance of its interventions in citizens' lives, is a peculiar characteristic of the Nordic societies that owes something to the Lutheran influence (Sørensen and Stråth 1997). Moreover, the Lutheran church has also been cited as an important influence on the curbing of corruption in the Nordic states (Frisk Jensen 2018), the legacy of which has been relatively high levels of trust in the effectiveness of public institutions. Some social scientists have also argued more broadly for the importance of social capital and trust at the micro level in explaining support for the universal welfare state in Scandinavian societies (Svendsen and Svendsen 2016), though this is of course extremely difficult to measure accurately in a comparative context. During the twentieth century, representatives of the state Lutheran Churches were often uneasy about or even openly critical of the welfare state, which they feared would undermine traditional moralities and family ties (Markkola 2014).

#### Critiques of the Welfare State

From the 1960s, new criticisms of the welfare state started to emerge. On the political left, a new generation of activists radicalised by the upheavals of 1968 criticised welfare policy for falling short in its aims to improve equality and undermine class differences, while those on the right argued that the welfare state stifled individual choice and entrepreneurship, 'crowding out' resources from the private sector (Einhorn and Logue 2003, 305–24). The immediate consequences of this were seen in the emergence of new political parties campaigning against high taxes and bureaucracy in the early 1970s (Arter 2006, 89), which foreshadowed the rising influence of neoliberalism in the 1990s and after.

Inspired partly by Michel Foucault's theorisation of the operation of power (Gould 2001), from the 1970s feminist scholars turned their critical attention to the welfare state, examining its role in the creation and consolidation of social norms (Hirdman 1989; Åmark 2004). The welfare state had undoubtedly helped improve the lives of women as well as men, but it needed to go further in reforming gender relations, in particular through interventions in family life such as support for parental leave and collective childcare. Such questions had been discussed earlier – for example by Swedish Social Democrat Alva Myrdal during the 1930s – but it was only from the 1970s that there was a substantial increase in support for the so-called 'dual breadwinner' model, that is families where both parents undertake paid work outside the home following the birth of children. There were also differences between the Nordic welfare states, with gender differences remaining stronger far later in Norway for example (Sainsbury 2001). It has often been noted that the Nordic labour markets remained highly gender segregated, so that in many cases women moved from unpaid care work in the home to paid care work outside it, in welfare state institutions such as nurseries and care homes for the elderly (Lewis and Åström 1992).

During the 1990s another historical aspect of the welfare state attracted public attention, namely the practice of compulsory eugenic sterilisation. Eugenics originated in nineteenth-century evolutionary science and was widely debated across Europe and North America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eugenics, or 'race hygiene', referred to the study of the influence of hereditary factors on the population and interventions to prevent the transmission of what were regarded as undesirable hereditary disorders between generations, with the aim of improving the quality of the population as a whole (Koch 2010, 34–9). There were two waves of eugenic thought: 'mainline eugenics' from the late nineteenth century was based on the idea of racial difference; 'reform eugenics' during the 1930s was informed by new thinking about genetics (Roll-Hansen 2005).

In the Nordic countries, discussions of the 'social question' in the early twentieth century were connected to fears about population decline due to falling birth rates. What was unusual about the Nordic countries in an international context was that these ideas resulted in legislation allowing the compulsory sterilisation of individuals for whom reproduction was deemed undesirable, such as those with hereditary mental or physical disorders (Broberg and Roll-Hansen 2005). These groups were also prevented from marrying. Estimates of the numbers affected by these policies vary, but sterilisations were carried out on tens of thousands of individuals across the region between the 1930s and the 1960s (Roll-Hansen 2005, 263). Although Nordic eugenics legislation was not specifically based on the pseudo-scientific racial theories associated with Nazi Germany, certain minority groups such as travellers were nonetheless targeted, because they were perceived to deviate from desirable norms of behaviour for 'productive' members of society (Spektorowski and Mizrachi 2004; Broberg and Tydén 2005, 124–30). It should also be noted that women were significantly over-represented in the numbers sterilised (Runcis 1998, 277). Eugenic sterilisation was abandoned in all the Nordic countries during the 1970s, but the issue became headline news in Sweden in the summer of 1997, leading to public enquiries and the adoption of compensation schemes for the victims of eugenic sterilisation (Broberg and Tydén 1998).

#### The Future of the Nordic Welfare States

The early 1990s was a difficult period for the welfare state; one might even say a crisis. Several developments combined simultaneously. The fall of the Soviet Union placed neoliberalism in the ascendancy: across the world politicians referred to the need to roll back the state, tackle welfare dependency and introduce market reforms into public institutions. In Sweden and Finland, the effects of this paradigmatic shift were exacerbated by a very severe recession during the early 1990s, and in 1991 a new bourgeois government took office in Sweden on a platform of welfare retrenchment (Timonen 2003). This shift did not come out of the blue of course; as noted above, it marked the culmination of a political critique of the public sector that had been developing since the 1970s. But longer-term challenges were also mounting, not least the demographic problems – faced by societies across Europe – of an ageing population and rising dependency ratios (see Sejersted 2011, 388–430).

What was remarkable, however, was not the demise of the Nordic welfare model that some had predicted, but its apparent resilience. At the turn of the new millennium, social scientists largely concurred that the twin challenges of globalisation and European integration had not significantly undermined the distinctiveness of the Nordic welfare states in a European context (Kautto et al. 2001; Kuhnle 2000). Popular support for the welfare state remained high, and political parties on both right and left presented themselves as the defenders of the unique Nordic welfare systems. Historian Pauli Kettunen (2011) has noted the paradox of the Nordic model in current debates: on the one hand, it requires defending against the threats of globalisation; on the other, it also offers the key to successful competition in a globalised world, underpinned by global league tables indicating the success of the Nordic countries in various criteria. An exception was perhaps Iceland, where politicians embraced an extreme version of neoliberal speculative capitalism during the early 2000s, but returned to elements of a more recognisable Nordic welfare model after the crash in 2008 (Ólafsson 2011).

There seems little doubt that the welfare state is now established as an essential element of the regional and national brand in the Nordic countries (Marklund 2016). After the turn of the millennium, and especially following the global financial crisis which began in 2008, international attention once more focused on the Nordic countries, with *The Economist* famously proclaiming the region to be 'the next supermodel' in 2013 (*The Economist* 2013). Nonetheless, the discourse of the welfare state has changed fundamentally. Foreign politicians now look to the Nordic countries not only as an example of social-democratic paradise (or dystopia), but also for examples of how to successfully introduce market reforms and competition into the provision of services such as healthcare and education (Hoctor 2017). In societies which are by any measure prosperous, welfare is no longer merely a matter of material security but also of well-being, where the different Nordic countries compete with each other for the accolade of 'world's happiest nation', but at the same time publicly debate concerns about rising levels of anxiety and stress.

Two challenges seemed to be especially prominent in 2019. The first concerns transnational mobility and citizenship. Who is the welfare state for? Mass immigration might logically seem to provide a potential solution to the challenge of an ageing indigenous population, but it is rarely regarded as such. Instead, in common with the rest of Europe, the Nordic countries have seen a steady rise in support for populist parties campaigning on a platform of 'welfare chauvinism' and nativism (Jungar and Jupskås 2014). These parties argue that access to the welfare state should be restricted to those holding full citizenship, which is moreover increasingly likely to be conceived in terms of cultural exclusivity.

A second challenge is the prospect of environmental crisis and responses to it. During the post-war period the welfare state was based on growing material prosperity and rising consumption (Andersson 2003), which was in turn based on the exploitation of natural resources, especially cheap energy. The first major challenge to the expansion of the welfare state came with the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Norway was exceptional in this respect, where the discovery of rich oil resources in the North Sea contributed to the country's exceptionally high levels of prosperity and welfare (Halvorsen and Stjernø 2008, 147–50). But it is also widely agreed that this is not sustainable in the long term. A major challenge for all the Nordic countries will be the need to adapt economies and societies based largely on fossil fuels, while also trying to maintain the high standards of living associated with the Nordic welfare model.

Will there continue to be a Nordic welfare model? The term is used to refer to common patterns in the development of social policies in the Nordic countries during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – and even before – and the outcomes of these policies measured by social indicators such as equality. The Nordic countries are certainly not identical, whether in social policy or in any other field, but there do seem to be enough similarities between them to warrant analysis of them as a distinctive group in a European or global context. However, two observations may be made in conclusion. First, there was never a coherent blueprint for the development of the Nordic welfare states; as in other countries, social policy was formed piecemeal through a constant process of negotiation, conflict and compromise. Second, the Nordic welfare states are not, nor have they ever been, static constructions. The meanings of welfare and the policies needed to achieve it will doubtless continue to be a topic of heated debate for many years to come in the Nordic countries as in other societies.

#### Note

1. There are historical religious minorities in Norden, including small Jewish and Catholic communities, followers of the Orthodox Church in Finland and indigenous Sami religions, for example. From the eighteenth century the monopoly of the state Lutheran churches was challenged by pietism, with different consequences across the region. From the late twentieth century other religions such as Islam have also become more prominent. However, it would be hard to deny that at least until then the Nordic societies were religiously homogeneous to a much greater degree than most of the rest of Europe.

#### References

### Part II Texts

### 6 The Trial of Bróka-Auðr: Invisible Bureaucracy in an Icelandic Saga

Richard Cole

A philistine might say that the Sagas of Icelanders (*Íslendingasögur*) are some of humankind's most elegant stories, told by some of humankind's clumsiest storytellers. True, their prose style reads much better in Old Norse than it does in English translation. Nonetheless, even when reading them in the original language, one cannot fail to notice that the mainstays of the modern narrative voice are either sparingly used or entirely absent from most *Íslendingasögur*: descriptive simile is almost unknown, as is the direct reporting of characters' thoughts, feelings or stream of consciousness (Hallberg 1962, 70–1, 76–80).1 In contrast to modern literature, the maxim seems to be 'show, don't tell' – and even then, 'don't show too much'.

The object of our study, *Laxdæla saga*, is one of the *Íslendingasögur* most likely to be found on an introductory saga reading list, alongside *Egils saga*, *Hrafnkels saga*, *Grettis saga*, *Njáls saga* and, to a lesser extent, *Eyrbyggja saga* or *Gísla saga.* Written in Iceland around 1230–60, *Laxdæla saga* yields up more aesthetic treasures than the other six classics. As Magnús Magnússon and Hermann Pálsson put it: 'There is about it the air of a pageant – a style that luxuriates in descriptions of ornate occasions […] a surface glitter' (1969, 41). But we would have to concede to our philistine that in the description of the tale of Bróka-Auðr, even *Laxdæla saga* has left a space in between what it tells us and how we imagine the characters must have felt. Such lacunae present excellent opportunities for literary criticism of the sagas. In what follows, we will recount the career of Auðr's marriage, the infraction she supposedly commits and the revenge she takes, and consider her consequent 'trial' alongside another perplexing literary trial: the possibly more widely known one narrated by Franz Kafka in his novel of the same name.

#### The Life and Times of Bróka-Auðr

Auðr is first introduced in chapter 32 of *Laxdæla saga* as the wife of the dashing Þórðr Glúmsson. The introduction is not promising: 'Þórðr átti systur þeira Þorkels, er Auðr hét; ekki var hon væn kona né gǫrvilig. Þórðr unni henni lítit; hafði hann mjǫk slœgzk til fjár, því at þar stóð auðr mikill saman' (*Laxd,* 87), (Þórðr was married to Þorkell's sister, who was called Auðr; she was not a beautiful woman nor an accomplished one. Þórðr had little love for her; he had really got married for money, because there was a great deal of wealth there.)2 It could hardly have escaped an Old Norse-speaking audience that Auðr is also a noun, *auðr*, meaning 'riches, wealth, opulence' (Cleasby and Vigfússon 1874, 32). Her name underlines that Auðr is nothing more to her husband than a means of social advancement.

Þórðr meets Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir: 'hon var kvenna vænst, er upp óxu á Íslandi, bæði at ásjánu ok vitsmunum […] Allra kvenna var hon kœnst ok bezt orði farin' (*Laxd.*, 86). (She was the most beautiful woman who grew up in Iceland, both in appearance and by her wit […] She was the cleverest and most eloquent of all women.) Things must take their course, it seems: the beautiful people of Iceland are destined to be together (for better or worse, in Guðrún's case), at the expense of anyone who has the misfortune to be perceived as average. The saga author, withholding their own judgement in typical saga style (Jón Helgason 1934, 135–6), only comments that: 'fell þar mǫrg umrœða á um kærleika þeira Þórðar ok Guðrúnar (93). There was much talk of love between Þórðr and Guðrún'.)3

But the affair is not only complicated by Þórðr's marriage to Auðr. Guðrún is also married, to Þorvaldr Halldórsson. The marriage is doomed from the start – Guðrún is just fifteen years old, is not consulted beforehand and her father seems to have arranged the match exclusively for money. Nothing positive is said of Þorvaldr, and at least one thing is said which indicates that the saga author did not intend him as a sympathetic character: He 'talaði óharðfœrliga' (spoke uncombatively) when presented with outrageous financial demands from Guðrún's father, implying a degree of spinelessness. A turning point soon comes when Þorvaldr commits an act of domestic violence against Guðrún (an act which probably did nothing further to endear him to audiences then, just as now):

On the same evening Þórðr came there. Guðrún told him of this humiliation and asked how she ought to repay it. Þórðr smiled and said: 'I know a good piece of advice here. Make a shirt for him with the neck-hole so wide that it is grounds for divorce, and declare yourself divorced for this reason'.

(*Laxd.*, 94)4

The crucial detail here is that, in the world depicted by *Laxdæla saga*, if one's spouse cross-dresses, a divorce is to be automatically granted. (How far the world depicted by *Laxdæla saga* corresponded to the realities of late tenth-century Iceland is a different question, to which we will return.) Guðrún later suggests that the same legal principle be applied to Auðr:

then Guðrún said: 'Is it true, Þórðr, that Auðr, your wife, is always going around in trousers with a codpiece, with legbindings tied all the way down?'5 He said he hadn't noticed that. 'You're not paying her much attention then', says Guðrún, 'why else would it be that she is called Breeches-Auðr?' Þórðr said: 'I don't think she's been called that for very long.' Guðrún replies: 'The thing which will make more difference to her is whether she has this name for long from now on'.

(*Laxd.*, 95)

While Þórðr actually *did* wear a shirt with too much décolletage, albeit unwittingly, everything in the above passage suggests that Auðr does *not* actually wear trousers. Auðr's innocence has been recognised by several commentators on the scene (e.g. Jesch 1991, 193; Meulengracht-Sørensen 1980, 26; Wolf 1997). Saga narratives often deploy a wry tone and *Laxdæla saga* especially so. When the author has Þórðr say that he has not noticed his wife's supposed trousers, and that people could not have been calling her 'Bróka-Auðr' (*brók* means 'trousers') for long, these are signs that Guðrún is starting a rumour rather than pointing out reality (Wolf 1997, 679). In this regard, Auðr's experience differs from Þorvaldr's. He was made a cross-dresser by accident. She was made a cross-dresser by accusation. She *does* wear trousers when she rides to inflict her revenge on Þórðr, but that is after the marriage is undone. The damaging nickname is given a chance to percolate, before events take the following turn:

One day Þórðr Ingunnarson asked Guðrún what it would cost a woman if she went around in trousers like a man. Guðrún replies: 6 'If women go about dressed as men they get the same treatment as a man who has a shirt so low-cut that you can see his nipples. In both cases, it's grounds for divorce.' Then Þórðr said: 'What are you saying I should do, that I should declare myself divorced from Auðr here at the þing or in the district? And [if the latter] I could do so with the support of more people, because the sort of people who would consider this an offence are proud-minded.' A moment later, Guðrún answers: 'Time waits for no man.' Then Þórðr sprang to his feet at once and went to the Law-rock and named witnesses, that he was declaring himself divorced from Auðr, and gave as a reason that she wore seated-breeches like mannish women do.7 Auðr's brothers didn't like this very much, but stay silent. Þórðr rides away from the þing with the sons of Ósvífr. And when Auðr found out this news, she then said: 'It's good to know. I have been left all alone'.

(*Laxd.*, 96)

Auðr's verse is short and simple, lacking the ostentatious impenetrability of 'good' skaldic poetry. Perhaps this was intended to reflect Auðr's mediocrity, although its directness also gives us insight into her anguish – indeed, by speaking plainly, Auðr at this moment seems to be the only sane person in a society that otherwise is acting rather absurdly.8 Why have people chosen to believe a completely unsubstantiated rumour? Is the legal procedure nothing more than a declaration without investigation? Why do the people who should be sticking up for Auðr stay silent? Why are these transvestism laws in place anyway? We will return to all these questions, but for now the case of Bróka-Auðr continues:

The next summer the people of Hóll took to their summer pastures in Hvammsdalr. Auðr was at the summer pastures. The men of Laugar took to their summer pastures in Lambadalr […] Auðr asks the man who watched the cattle how often he met the shepherd from Laugar, 'and you must tell me, what people are in the winter houses or the summer pastures, and speak with Þórðr just as politely as you are supposed to.' The lad promises to do as she said. And in the evening, when the shepherd came back, Auðr asks him for news. The shepherd replies: 'I have found out some news which you'll like, that there is a wide landing between Þórðr and Guðrún's beds,9 because she is at the summer pastures, and he is plugging away putting up outbuildings, and Ósvífr is with him at the winterhouses.' 'You've done a good job nosing about', she says, 'now, get two horses saddled while people are going to sleep'.

(*Laxd.,* 97)

If the reader suspects that Auðr is up to something, they are right:

The shepherd lad did as he was told, and shortly before sunset Auðr mounted up, and she was certainly wearing trousers then. The shepherd lad rode the other horse and could hardly keep up with her, for she was spurring on her mount so fiercely. [Auðr arrives at Laugur]. She went into the kitchen and up to the bed-closet in which Þórðr lay sleeping. The door was drawn to, but the bolt was not. She got into the bed-closet, and Þórðr slept on, [turning out to be] sleeping on his back. Then Auðr woke Þórðr, and he turned over onto his side when he saw that a person had come in there. Then she drew her sword and struck at Þórðr and gave him a great wound which landed on his right arm. Then he was wounded across both his nipples. She struck so fiercely that the sword bit into the bed-stead.

Auðr makes her escape, and then:

Þórðr tried to spring to his feet when he got the wound, but it didn't work out that way because he was weakened from blood-loss. At this Ósvífr woke up and asked what had been going on, and Þórðr said he had been wounded. Ósvífr asks if he knew who had done this to him, and got up and bandaged his wounds. Þórðr said he thought it had been Auðr who did it. Ósvífr offered to ride after her, saying she probably did not have many men with her, and that she deserved retribution. Þórðr said it could not go that way. He said she had done what she had to do. Auðr came home at sunrise, and her brothers asked her where she had been. Auðr said she had been to Laugar and told them what events had occurred during her journey. They responded happily to that and said not enough had been done.

(*Laxd.,* 97–8)

#### Grounds for Divorce?

The law against cross-dressing which undoes first Þorvaldr and then Auðr is attested only in *Laxdæla saga.* Something reminiscent of it is found in the twelfth-century Icelandic law code *Grágás,* which is often understood to reflect elements of earlier jurisprudence: 'Ef maðr feldr ser til velar við kono […] varðar þat fiorbavgs garð […] Ef konor gerz sva af siða at þær ganga ikarlfötom eða hverngi carla sið […] varðar þat fiorbavgs garð' (*Grg*, 47). (If a man puts on a woman's headdress […] it is punishable by lesser outlawry […] If a woman makes it her custom to wear men's clothes or adopt any sort of manly habits […] it is punishable by lesser outlawry.)10 However, while an outlawed person might well struggle to maintain a romantic relationship, this is not the same penalty as instant divorce. It has been suggested that the law as presented in *Laxdæla saga* is a remembering of a pre-Christian law, perhaps coloured by Christian legal culture (Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1934, 94 n3). However, this hypothesis is complicated by the fact that, while medieval Christians often took a dim view of cross-dressing (Bullough 1982, 43–54) canon lawyers did not discuss the issue with regards to marriage. Moreover, to maintain that *Laxdæla saga* remembers a tenth-century law correctly would necessitate that *Grágás* is remembering it incorrectly, or that there were in fact two laws and *Grágás* has entirely forgotten one. This proposition is unappealing, given that *Grágás* is older than *Laxdæla saga.*

Auðr's predicament becomes still more suspicious when we consider that, although Þórðr was the first to mention the law that a man could not wear a womanly shirt, he apparently does not know about the inverse principle. Guðrún has to point it out to him, even though he is supposedly an accomplished lawyer (Wolf 1997, 677). Has the thirteenth-century saga author made up a tenth-century law? Or have Guðrún and Þórðr made up a law, and everyone else has accepted it? In the latter case, the lovers' social capital would be the best explanation. Both are young, attractive, quick-witted and from good families. Auðr may be aristocratic but is considered ugly and unremarkable. Whether the law she breaks was spurious or not, there is nobody who publicly argues her cause.

#### The Trial

Anything we would now recognise as 'due process' is lacking in Auðr's divorce. Þórðr has only to declare publicly at the Law-Rock (*Lǫgbergr*) his accusation, and the marriage is terminated. There is apparently no scrutiny of his claims at all. He does 'nefna sér vátta' (name witnesses), but this is in order to attest that he was 'segir skilit við Auði' (declaring himself divorced from Auðr) (see also Dennis et al. 1980, 252). The saga does not suggest that these witnesses are supposed to have seen Auðr wearing trousers. Nor does Auðr have any chance to defend herself. *Grágás* is an imperfect comparandum to the Sagas of Icelanders, but it is striking that in *Grágás* a fairly comprehensive degree of arbitration and investigation is required in cases of marital separation: indeed, the whole case must be examined before both the local bishop (although this would obviously not apply in the pre-Christian period) and the Alþingi (*Grg,* 42–3).

Bróka-Auðr's 'trial', however, happens in the court of public opinion. Guðrún and Þórðr have sufficient social status that their claims seem to be accepted without question. True, Auðr has wealth and a good family, but Guðrun and Þórðr also have wealth through their marriages, and they have what Auðr does not: beauty and charisma. The people who should have demanded scrutiny of the allegation do nothing: Her brothers 'stay silent'. One critic (Byock 1993b, 254) interprets this inaction as the brothers being unable to get support from *goðar* (prominent chieftains with the right to bring cases at the Alþingi). But the fact the author says they are silent rather than unsuccessful indicates that they never made any attempt in the first place. Meulengracht Sørensen (1980, 26) thus says of Auðr's later, trouser-wearing revenge that 'she fulfils the duty which her male relatives have neglected'.

Why do the brothers remain tight-lipped? It is unlikely to be out of indifference, unless the saga author is being disingenuous, because they are said to be displeased by the situation. It might be cowardice, though two young men of good background would have less reason for timidity than most. The explanation may be that *Laxdæla saga* depicts a society where all must play their part – and the part of fraternal defender/ avenger was not the only duty that fell to the brothers. The Icelandic Commonwealth was an unusual polity, in that it had a judiciary but no executive. There were no government agents of the sort one would recognise today, e.g. tax collectors, census takers, police, diplomats, etc. (Byock 1993a, 55–76). In a somewhat idealised model, it could be said that a society with policemen or bureaucrats pays 10 per cent of its population to fulfil those roles for 100 per cent of their public life. But in a world without officialdom, the need for the work officials perform does not disappear. Instead, 100 per cent of the people end up fulfilling those roles for 10 per cent of their public life (though it must be cautioned that even in highly bureaucratised states it is not just the bureaucrats who have to do bureaucratic chores; see Graeber 2015, esp. 45–66).

Similarly, Marion Poilvez has pointed out that, despite not having anything resembling a prison service, medieval Iceland became in effect a prison in itself: an island that an outlaw could not easily escape, with every single non-outlawed person whom they encountered becoming a potential warden (2016, 92, see also Foucault 1977, 231–3). I would suggest that something analogous is happening with the legal system as depicted by *Laxdæla saga*. The court room is not confined to the huddled conversations of the Alþingi: the whole society is the court room – and it is a corrupt one at that, charged not with upholding blind justice but with satisfying the desires of the people with the most social clout.

In this reading, it may be illuminating to draw a parallel between the trial of Bróka-Auðr and *The Trial* (*Der Prozess,* 1925) by Franz Kafka. Part of the horror of the 'Court of Inquiry' in Kafka's novel is that it is omnipresent in the world of Josef K, the accused. He can never quite grasp what is being done to him because anyone is potentially an official of the court. His own subordinates at the bank are mysteriously drafted in to keep an eye on him (Kafka 1968, 15, 33).11 Even his uncle might be involved, given his suspicious familiarity with the court's workings (96). His personal relationships are always at risk of suddenly being transformed into impersonal ones. To make matters worse, the rules are arbitrary: on the one occasion K gets the opportunity to consult the court's law book, it turns out to be a pornographic novel (52). The analogy with K's trial suggests a way to understand both the angry silence of Auðr's brothers and the mystery of Þórðr's initial ignorance concerning the law against women wearing trousers. For Auðr, the court is neither fair nor transparent – but it is omnipresent, and when the population are called upon to become its enforcers by unspoken social codes, they must obey. If a bureaucrat is someone who carries out their official duties while alienated from their own opinions and desires (e.g. Cole 2019), then Auðr's brothers have found themselves in the curious position of becoming bureaucrats in a country without a state. We need not be mystified by their dereliction of duty to defend their sister if we consider that Iceland's peculiar political system has given them a greater, diametrically opposed duty: to marginalise the unremarkable when they stand in the way of the rich and beautiful.

#### The Trial Continues

Modern readers occasionally find themselves as compelled by Guðrún and Þórðr's allegation as the ninth-century Icelanders the saga depicts. Sometimes, it is not clear whether critics are validating the initial accusation or acknowledging Bróka-Auðr's later choice of clothing, (see Waugh 2011, 318; Miller 1990, 354). There are a few cases where the charge of cross-dressing appears to have been accepted by modern scholars, e.g. 'as her name implies, Auðr was known to be a cross-dresser and by implication was viewed as abnormal, a man in a woman's body in a man's clothes' (Acker 2006, 706), or simply 'she illegally dresses as man' (Penack 1995, 65). Over the past thirty years, there has been a tendency for scholars to read the scene with an approving smile at Auðr's response to her situation – and to find a similar approval in the voice of the saga author or the minds of the saga audience (Clover 1993, 371–372; Jesch 1999, 199). When Bróka-Auðr bursts in to take revenge on Þórðr, one critic writes:

The narrator's sympathy seems to be with Auðr all the way, although he/she has introduced her as something of a ne'er-do-well ('ekki görvilig'). Auðr is mentioned twice later on in the saga, both times in unequivocally positive contexts: first as a convivial hostess for the fugitive hero Kjartan, and later as a special friend of Kjartan's mother […] But I maintain that even the first, and central episode in which she appears is meant to establish her as sympathetic […] She is presented to us as something of a likeable rogue: neither fair of face nor addicted to the work ethic, but ready for action when she feels her honor trespassed upon.

(Ballif Straubhaar 2001, 266)

Auðr's trial continues today. Only since the 1990s has she begun to get the cross-examination she deserves. We have seen that Guðrún and Þórðr's original charge is variously accepted or debated, but scholars also pose a new question: how far her retaliation against Þórðr constitutes an escape from patriarchal norms. Some have drawn attention to the fact that Auðr does not actually succeed in killing Þórðr, perhaps indicating that in a medieval Icelandic, patriarchal mindset, trousers alone do not a man make (Jochens 1996, 159; Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir 2013, 114, 151; Wolf 1997, 679). Importantly, Wolf points out that Bróka-Auðr, by donning male garb and picking up a sword is 'assimilating maleness, [and] accedes to male hegemony. This ambiguity or ambivalence in the portrayal of Auðr as a cross dresser […] points to the "darker" side of the "poetics" of transgression that often inverts in order to reaffirm societal norms' (1997, 678–9). Put another way, one might say that if the only way for Auðr to express her dissatisfaction with a male-dominated society is for her to become male, then the anti-patriarchal cause has not been much advanced. That said, we must hasten to add that it would be slightly unfair to conscript Bróka-Auðr into standing for all women. Her divorce from Þórðr is readily interpreted as being more about her personal honour – or even emotions – than a wider political cause (Clark 1991, 8–9; Motz 1963, 164).

#### Auðr's Plight: Freedom and the Kafkaesque in Medieval Iceland

In closing, I want to consider Auðr's plight from a perspective adjacent to her gender: her personal liberty (see also chapter 7 in this volume). In doing so, I will also touch upon what her story tells us about the prospects and pitfalls of reading the Sagas of Icelanders in general. As Rikke Malmros notes, the idea that Early Medieval Scandinavian women enjoyed a peculiar degree of liberty has been around for some time and has appealed to people of differing ideological hues: 'Since the Swiss Paul-Henri Mallet published *Monuments de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes* […] in 1756, European intellectuals have nursed the depiction of the proud, independent Nordic woman. She was originally also an inspiration for modern feminists' (Malmros 1998, 167; see also Jesch 1991 205–8; Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir 2013, 1–12). This presumption has been dispelled among saga scholars, but it remains prevalent both in other disciplines and beyond the walls of the university. Online searches will reveal both far-right 'Traditionalists' and eco-friendly anarchists who eagerly claim the identity of the empowered, Viking-Age woman. Indeed, an unfortunate perception of medieval Iceland as being particularly liberal, both for women and men, is a recurrent theme amongst novices to Old Norse.

The reasons for this persistent belief are mutifaceted (on the historic notion of 'Germanic liberty', see O'Donoghue 2014, 28–33; Zernack 2018). But one factor is probably that the Sagas of Icelanders are potent ideological concoctions. They pretend to depict the ideological currents of the tenth century where they are set. Sometimes they may be accurate in this, often not. But they also contain the ideological currents of the thirteenth century when they were written (Foote 1984; Harris 1986, esp. 213–6). They may intend to deprecate the Icelandic Commonwealth and tacitly support the status quo of the 1200s, or the inverse may be true. The reader must always keep in mind that not only are the sagas trying to 'sell' their ideologies to us, they are also detailed pictures of tenth-century people practicing ideologies of their own, which may be fictional as well as historical. Some anarcho-capitalists praise tenth-century Iceland for being bureaucracy-free – and even suggest our own society could be remodelled to be more like it (e.g. Friedman 1979, 414–5, who advocates for privatised blood feud agencies). In doing so, they are allowing themselves to be sold one ideological layer of the text while disregarding the others. A given saga character (imagined to exist in the tenth century) may not represent the saga author's own feelings (writing in the thirteenth century).

Auðr's story stands very much opposed to any notions of medieval Iceland's supposed freedom or fairness. It is not only that the characters of *Laxdæla saga* are not free to wear what they want without penalty. There is also an unpleasant, indeed Kafkaesque, sense of claustrophobia in the saga (and many other sagas, for that matter). In *The Trial,* K faces a society which pretends to have an extensive, transparent and ordered legal praxis. But in reality, power is exercised arbitrarily and inconsistently. In K's world, the principle of 'the people' before 'the law' is a fiction. Judge, lawyer, warden, citizen, courtroom, living room etc. have all become blurrily mixed: Everyone is so alienated that anyone can be called upon at a moment's notice to enforce rules they barely understand. Each one of these horrors faced by K is also faced by Auðr.

One might say that Auðr escapes her nightmare when she rides to inflict vengeance on Þórðr; that the story has an odd sort of 'happy ending' in that she gets revenge on someone who has shamelessly wronged her. But here we should remember Wolf's concerns about Auðr's participation in masculine norms. The retribution scene can only be read as emancipatory if we grant that Bróka-Auðr secretly desired to wear trousers and wield a sword all along. If she never wanted to be a man in the first place (and only Guðrún and Þórðr's allegation imply she did) then it is difficult to see how her performance of a male role in male costume could be considered liberating. If we think of the world of *Laxdæla saga* as a Kafkaesque setting, where all are obligated to play their part in a complicated pantomime, Þórðr's resigned statement takes on a different meaning. That 'she had done what she had to do' does not just mean that Auðr did what was right for her own emotional well-being, but that she had mechanically fulfilled the role allotted to a woman who had been arbitrarily turned into a man.

It is worth noting that Auðr does not disappear from the saga after her attack on Þórðr. Her final appearance comes immediately before the saga's climax.12 Kjartan Óláfsson and Bolli Bollason have become rivals for the affection of the same Guðrún who was the architect of Auðr's humiliation. Kjartan spends the night at the farmstead Hóll. In the dead of night, a smith called Án wakes, having had a terrible dream of being disembowelled and having his entrails replaced with brushwood by an ogress. Kjartan and his men make light of the nightmare. Then the saga author suddenly reveals that Bróka-Auðr was amongst them the whole time. It has been suggested that she was playing the role of a 'convivial hostess' (Ballif Straubhaar 2001, 266) though again, this is a matter of interpretation because the saga author does not say as much. She considers the dream to be a serious portent:

Then Auðr said: 'You needn't mock this so much. My suggestion is that Kjartan should do one of two things, that he stays here longer, or, if he must ride on, he rides with more men than he came with.' 'Perhaps you find Án Brushwood-belly perceptive, when he is sitting around all day chatting with you, and you find wisdom in everything which he dreams up, but I'm going as I planned to, regardless of this dream.' Kjartan prepared for his journey […] together with Þorkell the Pup and Knútr, his brother, according to Auðr's advice.

(*Laxd.,* 149)

Kjartan and his men pour scorn on Auðr's counsel, but they do actually follow it. The normal logic of the Sagas of Icelanders is that women might well have a role as inciters of violence, but their practical expertise in martial matters is generally disregarded (Jochens 1996, 158–61).13 One wonders if the reason Bróka-Auðr's advice is acted upon is that she was still regarded as male to some extent, even though this scene occurs many years after her divorce. Is she wearing trousers as she voices her opinion? The saga author does not say.

Few are satisfied by the end of the tale of Bróka-Auðr. Her brothers rejoice at her vengeance, presumably because it lets them off the hook and thereby resolves the tension between their role as fraternal protectors and their role as subservient citizens. Guðrún and Þórðr are happily married for a while, but Guðrún is soon widowed when Þórðr aggravates a witch, who conjures a storm to drown him while he is at sea. As for Auðr herself, the fate of being forced to live in a gender with which one does not identify, owing to a process which is wickedly unfair, cannot be seen as overly enviable. But it should not be overlooked that there is never a sense of docile resignation in either her words or actions. At the end of *The Trial,* K dies with a knife in his heart (Kafka 1968, 223–9). Auðr lives with a sword in her hand.

#### Notes

<sup>1.</sup> Other Old Norse genres – particularly hagiography and miracle tales – are capable of interiority, e.g. *MaS*, 881.

<sup>2.</sup> All translations are my own. Scholarship originally published in Danish has been silently translated for reasons of space.

#### References

Acker, Paul. 2006. 'Horror and the Maternal in *Beowulf*', *PMLA* 121 (3): 702–16.

Byock, Jesse L. 1993b. *Feud in the Icelandic Saga*. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Callow, Chris. 2017. 'Dating and Origins'. In *The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas*, edited by Ármann Jakobsson and Sverrir Jakobsson, 15–33. London: Routledge.

### 7 Nora: The Life and Afterlife of Henrik Ibsen's *A Doll's House*

Elettra Carbone

In Nordic literary history the time-span stretching roughly between the 1870s and 1890s is known as The Modern Breakthrough (*Det moderne gennembrud*). Coined by the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes (1842−1927) in 1883, the term is used to refer to the strong naturalist and social-realist movements that spread throughout the Nordic countries and beyond, particularly thanks to the works of Henrik Ibsen (1828−1906).

The lectures on the main currents in European literature given by Brandes at the University of Copenhagen in 1871, and his successive publication *Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature* (*Hovedstrømninger i det nittende Aarhundredes Litteratur*, 1872–75), are often the events used to mark the beginning of this period. Brandes stated that Denmark and, for that matter, the other Nordic countries had not kept pace with other European countries as far as literary trends were concerned. He therefore championed a socially involved literature that raised and discussed topical issues.

Taking as its starting point Brandes' cry for an engaged literature and Ibsen's renowned play *A Doll's House* (*Et dukkehjem*, 1879), this chapter explores how Nora, the play's iconic main character, and her slamming of the door have been central in debates on gender roles and on the relationship between the individual and society to the present day.1 As Ibsen wrote in the preliminary notes for the play in 1878, the drama sets out to investigate why a woman cannot be herself in his contemporary male-dominated society (Ibsen 1961, 436−7).

In the play itself we follow the crucial events that lead to Nora's final decision to leave her family in order to make something of herself. In Act I, Nora is blackmailed by Krogstad, a man who has secretly lent her the money to take Torvald, her once ill husband, on a restorative trip to Italy. Krogstad, who knows that Nora has forged her father's signature to obtain the loan, threatens to tell Torvald about her actions if she does not help him regain his job at the bank where Torvald is now the manager. Nora becomes increasingly distressed and, when it becomes clear that Torvald is about to find out her secret, she decides to commit suicide as she does not want her husband to publicly take the blame for her actions.

However, Nora changes her mind when Torvald, having finally found out about the loan and forgery, reacts differently to how she had expected: first he blames her for ruining his life and reputation with her scandalous actions, and later, once Krogstad has had a change of heart and returns the forged document, forgives her. Realising her husband's true character for the first time, Nora leaves him and her children.

This drama – which was controversial in its own time – raises several questions, of which three are considered below: To what extent does *A Doll's House* cast light on the family dynamics of the emerging middle class? What are Nora's roles in relation to her family within the play, and which ones does she decide to prioritise? The first part of the chapter will answer these questions while considering Toril Moi's statement that '*A Doll's House* is about Nora's painful entrance into modernity' as she transforms from generic family member (wife, daughter, mother) to individual (Nora) (2006, 258).

The second part of this chapter will then briefly examine the afterlife of *A Doll's House* and its main character, reflecting on how Ibsen's play has travelled across space, cultures and time. Nora's slammed door continues to reverberate 'across the roof of the world', but how did the play manage to achieve its international status? (Huneker 1905, 65). As Ståle Dingstad points out, 'Ibsen was not the most central agent in this success story', as he was helped by 'a variety of sources throughout several generations' (Dingstad 2016, 104). *A Doll's House* was translated and adapted immediately following its first publication and has been disseminated through numerous printed editions and performances. Besides being one of the most staged plays in the world, the play has also inspired and continues to inspire sequels speculating on Nora's and Torvald's 'post-slam' existences.1 Using the famous case of the play's so-called 'German ending', namely the alternative ending written by Ibsen himself for the German audiences in 1879, and examples of the play's recent adaptations and sequels, the chapter will conclude by reflecting on Nora's global impact.

#### A Daughter of Her Time

As Egil Törnqvist has argued, if Brandes was responsible for initiating the debate around social problems in the 1870s, Ibsen's plays *A Doll's House* and later *Ghosts* (*Gengangere*, 1881) were instrumental during the second wave of this debate in the 1880s, dealing with controversial topics such as gender roles and sexual morality (Törnqvist 1995, 5). Considered his second social play following *The Pillars of Society* (*Samfundets støtter*, 1877), *A Doll's House* is often referred to as a *titteskapsdrama*, a 'drama of the interior' where the reader/spectator is invited to gaze into the middle-class family home and examine the marriage at its centre, in this case that of the Helmers (Grene 2014, 16–7).

The setting is indicative of a key aesthetic shift in late-nineteenthcentury European theatre from 'a popular theatre of romantic spectacle to a theatre reflecting the everyday domestic life of the bourgeoisie' (Holledge 2008, 14; Moi 2006). The whole play is set in the living room, which, despite references to the rest of the flat and to the outside world from which the limited set of characters arrive, remains the focus and becomes the intersection between the private and social sphere (Grene 2014, 18). The ideal of the bourgeois family structure and dynamics sketched out in the opening scenes of *A Doll's House* is somewhat similar to that portrayed in the Danish artist C.W. Eckersberg's (1783−1853) painting *The Nathanson Family* (*Familien Nathanson*, 1818; see Figure 7.1), often considered a representation of the growing economic and political power of the middle class in the Nordic countries. In the painting, the children with the maid are gathering around the mother, who has just come home from a function. Although she has been out, she is clearly positioned within the living room, unlike her husband, who has one foot inside the room and one foot on the outside, symbolising his role as the link between the outside world and the home.

At the beginning of Act I, Ibsen's play strives to achieve an appearance of cosiness and neatness not just through the detailed stage directions but also through its references to the preparations for the Christmas celebrations and Nora and Torvald's initial interaction. Both Grene and Ørjasæter remind us in this respect that *A Doll's House* was used to indicate a cosy and neat home and not a house or home for dolls, a meaning it only acquires by the end of the play when Nora declares that she has been passed on from her father's hands to Torvald's like a doll (Grene 2014, 16; Haugen 1979, 103; Ørjasæter 2005, 29). The first extensive stage direction tells us that the play takes place in '[a] comfortably and tastefully, though not expensively, furnished room' (Ibsen 2016, 109).

**Figure 7.1** The painting 'The Nathanson Family' ('Familien Nathanson', 1818) by the Danish painter C.W. Eckersberg (1783−1853), today considered a representation of a typical middleclass family in the Nordic countries in the nineteenth century. Source: Statens Museum for Kunst.

This is the heart of the Helmers' family life: it is a symbol of Nora's dream of security in the home and a space that she attempts to protect even at difficult times. The Christmas tree – a status symbol of the middle class – is an example of this: Nora continues to decorate the tree – brought in by the porter when she arrives home in the opening scene – even when she is preoccupied by Krogstad's blackmails and concludes '[t]he Christmas tree is going to be lovely' (Grene 2014, 20; Ibsen 2016, 137). Nothing can possibly spoil what appears to be a family idyll.

The initial interaction between Nora and Torvald also suggests that we are in the presence of a happily married couple, while at the same time reflecting the traditional gender dynamics between husband and wife. Nora's subordination to Torvald is made evident through his pet names for her: Nora is a 'song-lark' who chirrups, a 'squirrel' who rummages, and, most importantly, a 'spending-bird' and 'spendthrift' who fritters money away before Christmas (Ibsen 2016, 110−1). She is dependent on him for money as well as ethical and aesthetic principles. Torvald gives her money for housekeeping and expects her to share his ideas, such as his hatred of loans and debts, and his taste in furnishings (Ibsen 2016, 111, 182).

Nora is embedded in the typical spaces and family structures of the middle class. Following great economic growth in the course of the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie (or *borgerskap* in Norwegian) emerged and grew as a powerful and complex new class, defining itself against the supremacy of the *embetsmenn* (the higher civil servants), who had ruled Norway since 1814. The middle class was far from homogeneous as it encompassed a range of occupations including entrepreneurs, functionaries, artisans and shopkeepers (Myhre 2008, 240−1). As a newly appointed bank manager, Torvald belongs to the white-collar, middle-class functionaries who separated themselves from the working class by 'more long-ranging employment terms' and occupations that demanded education rather than training (Myhre 2008, 243). From a financial point of view, Torvald and Nora embody the hopes and fears of this class, which aspired to upward mobility and dreaded social descent (Myhre 2008, 245). We see this clearly in Torvald and Nora's initial dialogue when Nora says she is looking forward to being able to spend Torvald's 'big salary' and Torvald worries about the consequences of overspending (Ibsen 2016, 110). Their initial attitudes towards money also make the setting a 'sexualised economic space', which reinforces the dichotomy between male and female represented in Eckersberg's painting. As Anna Westerståhl Stenport has argued in her 'Sexonomics of *Et dukkehjem*', 'Production in the form of entrepreneurship […] became a male-gendered virtue', while 'female consumption is coded socially as an unnecessary luxury' (Westerståhl Stenport 2006, 343).

From the point of view of the composition of the drama, the set-up of *A Doll's House* is in line with Ibsen's use of the 'retrospective technique', according to which the past events leading to the climax are progressively unveiled through the words and acts of the characters in the course of the play. Plays employing this technique often start with a scene where the life of the characters appears 'normal and happy' before a 'discordant note' is introduced, often through the arrival of a stranger or an old friend, in this case Mrs Linde and later Krogstad (Haugen 1979, 64−6). Following the encounter with these characters, the real state of affairs behind the harmonious appearance − a state of affairs caused by events that have happened before the start of the play − begins to be revealed to the reader/spectator. This finally leads to the play's climax and leaves the main character or characters facing a dilemma, in this case Nora's choice to stay or leave (Haugen 1979, 64−6).

As the drama unfolds, it becomes evident that Nora is only pretending to be her husband's doll-wife in order to fulfil 'her ambition of creating a loving and well-functioning family' (Ørjasæter 2005, 29). In addition to secretly subverting the 'consumption-production pattern within the Helmeran domestic economy', Nora uses her power to save, as well as to manipulate, Torvald (Grene 2014, 20; Westerståhl Stenport 2006, 343). As we find out in Nora's dialogue with Mrs Linde in Act I, Nora has secretly borrowed money from Krogstad in order to take Torvald on a trip to Italy to save him from a life-threatening medical condition. To bypass the law, which would have prevented her from borrowing money without her husband's consent, she has forged her father's signature. In the eyes of the law, she has committed two crimes because, as Krogstad points out, 'the law doesn't ask about motives' (Ibsen 2016, 135). In her own eyes, she has simply done her duty towards her family, taking care of her husband's welfare and health (Ørjasæter 2005, 31). While doing this, she has also acquired a taste for entrepreneurial tasks traditionally associated with men (Westerståhl Stenport 2006, 344). She has become, as she states herself, 'a wife with a touch of business flair – a wife who knows how to go about things a little cleverly' and who knows about 'quarterly interest, and something called instalments' (Ibsen 2016, 121). In order to repay the money she owes Krogstad, she has had to put aside some of Torvald's housekeeping money but also to earn money by taking on copying work, something which has almost made her feel like a man. By the end of the play, however, Nora comes to the realisation that the family idyll she has continuously attempted to protect is just a charade.

The change in her attitude is represented in the shifting meaning of her use of the expression 'the miraculous thing' (or, in Norwegian, 'det vidunderlige', literally 'the wonderful thing'). At the beginning she uses this expression to refer to her expectation that upon finding out about her crime, Torvald will rescue her and take the blame. Throughout the play, Nora is both looking forward to and dreading this 'miraculous thing': on the one hand, Torvald's sacrifice would be a demonstration of his love for her; on the other, it would compromise his reputation and thus the future of the family, something Nora wants to avoid by committing suicide (Moi 2006, 264). As Nora is about to leave Torvald, the 'miraculous thing' has changed meaning: disillusioned by Torvald's reaction to her revelations, Nora declares that, if Torvald is to be more than a stranger to her, 'the most miraculous thing' would have to happen, namely that their 'living together could become a marriage' (Ibsen 2016, 188). 'Marriage' here stands for an 'ideal marriage', along the lines of the Norwegian writer Camilla Collett's (1813−95) definition of the term, namely a partnership where both husband and wife are committed to mutual growth (Ørjasæter 2005, 25). Nora's rejection of her identities of 'doll' and 'wife and mother' should therefore be seen as an exemplary case of women's rejection of a patriarchal and sexist family structure, which would otherwise see her tied to a man she does not love any more (Moi 2006, 278). While before Torvald's final reaction, Nora is prepared to leave her children motherless in order to spare them from the fog of lies she thinks she has created, by the end of the play she chooses to leave them because she has come to the realisation that she cannot educate them without educating herself first (Moi 2006, 278).

Throughout the play, Nora is represented as a product of her heredity as well as of her environment. Torvald and Mrs Linde both mention that Nora takes after her father since she has committed the same type of crime he once committed, a crime that Torvald has had to cover up. Her behaviour is, however, also clearly conditioned by the social norms of the environment around her. By making Nora aware of the role her father, her husband and, more generally, society have played in shaping her life, the play addressed the contemporary debate around women's consciousness and whether femininity was instinctive or a social construct (Shepherd-Barr 2015, 101).

#### Just a Human Being

Many scholars have discussed the question of Ibsen's relationship to feminism, both as a movement and as an ideology. As Giuliano D'Amico points out, Nora confronted 'the general values of the European Bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth century', encouraging the audience to consider and eventually challenge the family law that legally regulated the relationship between husband and wife and saw the woman as the losing party (D'Amico 2013, 81; see also Janss 2017, 17). *A Doll's House* was part of broader movements that attempted to cast light on women's rights. Nora's statement that she is not fit to be a wife and mother if she does not first fulfil her duty to herself echoes 'frontline figures of the women's rights movement such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Fredrika Bremer, Harriet Martineau and Camilla Collett' (Ørjasæter 2005, 21; see also Finney 1994; Templeton 1997). As Ørjasæter points out, Nora's struggles are embedded within the debates around women's capacity for reasonable thinking and the role of women in the family. These were only two of the main issues with which the early generation of feminists had to engage while battling Jean-Jacques Rousseau's established claim that women were naturally subordinate to men, and Hegel's definition of the family, which did not allow women to exist as self-conscious individuals (Moi 2006, 276−7; Ørjasæter 2005, 21−3). John Stuart Mill's (1806−73) *The Subjection of Women* (1869) was instrumental in spreading the view that the oppression of women was not based on any scientific ground and was therefore unjust (Janss 2017, 18; Ørjasæter 2005, 24).

Changing established views on these matters was, however, not an easy task. As Shepherd-Barr has observed, works like Mill's were 'countering culturally embedded biases shared by even the best-educated and most scientific men', including Charles Darwin (1809−82), who, while supporting the cause of women's right to education, argued that women were biologically disadvantaged compared with men outside the domestic sphere (Shepherd-Barr 2015, 95).

There is general consensus that Ibsen supported the women's cause, but that this was part of his broader interest in freedom and selfdetermination that cut across class as well as gender (Finney 1994, 89; Törnqvist 1995, 5−6; Ørjasæter 2005, 40−1). In a speech given to the Women's League in 1898, Ibsen stated that rather than having deliberately worked for women's rights, he had been preoccupied with human rights and with the task of describing mankind. Taking their starting point in this statement, a number of critics have dismissed or downplayed Ibsen's feminist agenda (Templeton 1997, 111). From the 1880s, Ibsen's Nora inspired a large number of essays discussing the 'woman question' in light of the play (Templeton 1997, 126). Ibsen himself was actively engaged in the battle for women's rights by, for instance, signing the petition by the Norwegian Women's Rights League, founded in 1884, 'urging the passage of a bill making obligatory separate property rights for married women' while also openly supporting the campaign for universal suffrage (Templeton 1997, 127).

As Ørjasæter has pointed out, Ibsen's declaration at the Women's League does not in any way diminish the powerful feminist message of the play, which takes important steps towards 'regarding women as dignified humans' (Ørjasæter 2005, 40). *A Doll's House* is the 'dramatization of the flowering of one woman's consciousness' (Templeton 1997, 141): in her final dialogue with Torvald, reminded by him of her duties to her husband and her children, she asserts the sacred nature of her duties towards herself adding that she is 'first and foremost a human being' (Ibsen 2016, 184). The play can thus be seen as representing an individual's attempt to challenge society as a whole, demonstrating that there is no opposition between 'humanity' and 'femininity' (Moi 2006, 275). Moi argues that this is particularly clear in the tarantella scene, which she sees as a display of Nora's humanity, 'a graphic representation of a woman's struggle to make her existence *heard*, to make it *count*' (Moi 2006, 269).

The scene was a late addition to the early draft in which Nora was supposed to sing and dance 'Anitra's Song' from Ibsen's own play *Peer Gynt* (1867) to the incidental music composed by the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg (1843−1907) in 1876 (Grene 2014, 26). Aware that her secret will soon be revealed, in the final version of Act II Nora rehearses the tarantella, the Neapolitan folk dance she had learnt during her stay in Italy, which is characterised by an upbeat tempo and usually accompanied by tambourines (see Figure 7.2). She is to perform the dance the following night at the Stenborgs' party. Nora's exotic and seductive dance becomes increasingly violent, to the extent that Torvald exclaims:

**Figure 7.2** Adeleide Johannesen performing Nora's tarantella scene in the first staging of the play at Den Nationale Scene (The National Stage) in Bergen in 1880. Source: National Library of Norway.

 Nora's immediate aim with the rehearsal is to distract Torvald from the mailbox containing Krogstad's letter by keeping him busy correcting and guiding her. Yet her performance may also be interpreted as a mirror of her state of mind, as, unable to keep up appearances any more, she displays her distress (Moi 2006, 269).

The tarantella scene has had mixed reactions and interpretations in the countless stagings of the play. Located in this tension between melodrama – a typically sensational dramatic piece well-known for prioritising action over character and designed to appeal to the spectators' emotions – and authenticity, with its display of the woman's dancing body, Nora's tarantella remains one of the most powerful scenes of the drama. In their comparative study of Ibsen performances worldwide, Holledge, Bollen, Helland and Tompkins have uncovered how this scene has either been substituted or adapted to reflect or critique specific views on the role and use of women's bodies within society (2016, 157−96). They refer, for instance, to the practice, common in productions in or for Islamic cultures, of cutting or transforming the tarantella into a 'social

**Figure 7.3** Photograph of Helmer and Svetlana, the Helmers' au pair, in *Helmer Hardcore − A Doll's House 2* by Jakob Weis (1970−). The play, which appeared in Danish in 2007, was translated into English by Paul Russell Garrett and produced by [Foreign Affairs] theatre company in 2015, featuring Krzysia Balin´ska and Will Timbers. © Camila França Photography.

dance', of exchanging the tarantella for other local ritual dances (such as the traditional *vimbuza* dance in the Malawi production) or of using images of film icons (such as Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft or Marilyn Monroe) to suggest how women are influenced by the media in some Western productions (2016, 166−77).

Ultimately, together with the ending, the tarantella scene reveals the potential present within *A Doll's House* as the text presents theatre directors with the challenge to 'reproduce and then break free of the conventions' used to represent 'the aesthetically desirable female performing body' in other cultures (2016, 190).

#### Nora's Afterlife

*A Doll's House* was a great success as many recognised the explosive and subversive quality of the ending and the power of Nora's door slamming. On 23 January 1891, Ibsen himself wrote in a letter to his Russian translator, Moritz Prozor: 'I might honestly say that it was for the sake of the last scene that the whole play was written' (Templeton 1997, 120). The play premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen on 21 December 1879, only two weeks after it was published, and by the early twentieth century it had been performed in forty-six countries (Törnqvist 1995, 63; Holledge et al. 2016, 29). Dingstad reports that in the Nordic countries the play had an unprecedented popularity: published in three editions, it sold 13,500 copies in three months, was reviewed in all newspapers and performed multiple times in Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm, triggering extensive debates (Dingstad 2016, 111). The same was not true, however, of all the countries it reached. First of all, it is worth bearing in mind that, as D'Amico has argued, with the exception of Germany, England and France, many European and non-European countries did not receive the *Norwegian* Ibsen, but 'an already received, elaborated and domesticated *international* Ibsen' mediated through one of these three countries.

Moreover, the lack of a comprehensive copyright law protecting intellectual property meant that Ibsen's plays could be changed as publishers and directors pleased (Dingstad 2016, 114; Fulsås and Rem 2018, 67−71, 186−7). Unlike other European countries, Denmark − to which Ibsen's works legally belonged since he published them with Gyldendal in Copenhagen − did not join the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1886 until 1903 (D'Amico 2014, 23). The consequences of this lack of bilateral agreements became particularly evident in Germany, the first non-Scandinavian country into which Ibsen was introduced (D'Amico 2014, 11). Here unauthorised translations and performances were a common occurrence (D'Amico 2014, 23). Under pressure from a number of agents − including his translator Wilhelm Lange (1849−1907) − who feared the reactions of unprepared audiences steeped in conservative convictions, Ibsen reluctantly agreed to write an alternative ending for the play, known as the 'German ending', in 1879 in the attempt to make the play acceptable to German audiences while maintaining some control over his own work and avoiding further changes and intrusions (Dingstad 2016, 116; Janss 2017, 6−7, 9, 11, 20).

While it does not bring reconciliation between Nora and Torvald, the alternative ending rebalances the dynamics among Nora's different identities as mother, wife and human being since she decides to stay for her children's sake in order not to leave them 'motherless'. Torn between self-respect and the 'holy task' of motherhood, Nora chooses the latter (Ørjasæter 2005, 27−8). On the one hand, in this version of the ending Nora is attempting to give her children what she did not have – as she grew up without her mother. Worried about the consequences of a childhood without a mother, she expresses her concerns for her children earlier in the play when she asks the nanny: 'Do you believe they'd forget their mummy if she was gone altogether?' (Ibsen 2016, 142). The sacrifice she makes for her children by staying is justified within the play, particularly considering that, as Ørjasæter has pointed out, Nora's relationship with her children is portrayed in the play as much closer and stronger than what was expected of women in a similar social position at the time: despite hiring a nanny for them, Nora plays and spends time with her children and is concerned about their welfare (Ørjasæter 2005, 37).

 The dramatic change of the ending, which Ibsen saw as a 'barbarous outrage' against his own work and which was only one example of similar requests for softer endings made to Scandinavian authors, removes the most explosive element in the play, namely the slam that made Ibsen a champion of women's liberation (Dingstad 2016, 116; Janss 2017, 4). The conciliatory ending continued to be used and published side-by-side with the original ending both in Germany and beyond, but was never introduced in Scandinavia despite the fact that Nora's transformation at the end of the play was seen by some critics as 'psychologically unexplainable' (Janss 2017, 9−16).

As the project *A Global Doll's House* has recently concluded, a comparative study of performances of Ibsen's *A Doll's House* shows that Ibsen was right in imagining that, in the long run, the original ending would prevail (Holledge et al. 2016, 143). This does not mean, however, that Nora's departure from Torvald has not been subjected to any more changes and adaptations. The history of the play's performance showcases a wide range of interpretations, varying from endings which allow for the door to be left ajar − such as the 2006 Egyptian production directed by Gamal Yakout, which does not want to exclude Nora's return and Torvald's ability to change − to definitive endings where there is no hope of reconciliation − such as Thomas Ostermeier's 2002 German production, in which Nora shoots Torvald (Holledge et al. 2016, 143−4).

On the whole, it is difficult to establish which elements in *A Doll's House* have made it so successful across time and cultures (Holledge 2008, 17). Julie Holledge has suggested that in order to understand the popularity of the play as a global phenomenon, we should focus less 'on both aesthetic innovation and the audience's identification and empathy with Nora as the embodiment of a modernist female subject' and more on 'the sites of anxiety surrounding the abandonment of children and the masquerade of femininity' (Holledge 2008, 24). This is what, in Holledge's opinion, has allowed 'an infinite variety of cultures to explore the consequences of rupturing a gendered binary that supports and maintains an unequal distribution of social power', regardless of cultural particularities (Holledge 2008, 24). A number of adaptations and sequels have attempted to do this in creative and provocative ways.

In the 2003 production by Lee Breuer called *Mabou Mines Dollhouse,* all the male actors were less than four-feet-six-inches tall, while all the actresses were of average height. The miniature setting was shaped to fit the men but not women, who had to physically adjust in order to live in a man-sized world (Holledge et al. 2016, 187). Gender roles are also at the centre of the 2009 performance by Toneelgroep ADODVS, *Een Poppenhuis*, directed by Manon van Gelder, in which the genders of the characters were swapped as Torvald the house husband attempted to reclaim his masculinity from Nora the career woman (Holledge et al. 2016, 181). The question of masculinity is also addressed by *Helmer Hardcore*, a sequel to *A Doll's House* written by the Danish playwright Jakob Weis in 2007 (see Figure 7.3). Entirely set in the Helmers' bathroom, the play focuses on Torvald as we follow his hopeless attempt to live as a single father without his wife. Despite their different takes on Ibsen's text, what all these productions have in common is a claim to originality, possibly in the attempt to continue to shock and provoke their audiences in the same way that Ibsen did with his ending in 1879 (Holledge et al. 2016, 144).

#### Local and Global

By leaving Torvald, Nora sets off on a quest to find out who is right, society or her. As she admits in her final dialogue with Torvald, she does not understand the society that has transformed her into a doll by refusing to acknowledge her duties to herself. Nora finds society contradictory as, on the one hand, it requires women to sacrifice themselves for their families by 'putting other people's well-being above their own' but, on the other, punishes them when, like her, they do this without their husbands' consent (Ørjasæter 2005, 35). By portraying the struggle of a middle-class woman attempting to find her identity in nineteenth-century Norwegian society, *A Doll's House* addressed social issues of its time that were directly linked to the emergence of the middle class and women's rights, as Brandes had advocated. There is, however, no doubt that *A Doll's House*, its performances and responses quickly became, and continue to be, a global phenomenon, as they refer to and advance debates on modernisation and modernity that are relevant in different temporal, geographical and cultural contexts (Fisher-Lichte 2011, 3).

#### Note

1. The play ends as Nora shuts the door of her home behind her. Nora's slamming of the door has therefore become an iconic scene, which is essential not only for the interpretation of Nora's change within the play but also for the understanding of the impact *A Doll's House* as a whole on world literature and society.

#### References

Holledge, Julie. 2008. 'Addressing the Global Phenomenon of *A Doll's House*: An Intercultural Intervention', *Ibsen Studies* 8 (1): 13–28.

Holledge, Julie, Jonathan Bollen, Frode Helland and Joanne Tompkins. 2016. *A Global Doll's House: Ibsen and Distant Visions*. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Huneker, James. 1905. *Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists*. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Ibsen, Henrik. 1961. *The Oxford Ibsen*, *Volume V*, edited and translated by James Walter McFarlane. London: Oxford University Press.

Templeton, Joan. 1997. *Ibsen's Women*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Törnqvist, Egil. 1995. *Ibsen: A Doll's House*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

### 8 Nordic Noir

Anne Grydehøj

In the twenty-first century, Scandinavian crime fiction has become an international publishing phenomenon, generating an unprecedented number of literary translations, films and TV series from the Nordic region. It has concurrently become a research object for academics addressing the question of why there is such an exceptional interest in grim narratives from countries otherwise perceived as some of the most socially successful in the world. This chapter will explore what stories crime narratives tell of life in the Scandinavian countries, and advance some potential reasons behind the appeal of these narratives to an international audience.

Taking its starting point in a view of crime fiction as a genre which responds to and develops alongside shifting social conditions, the chapter will first provide a brief historical introduction to the Scandinavian variant of the crime fiction genre, from its consolidation during what is perceived as the golden age of social democracy in the 1960s to narratives from the early 1990s and onwards that depict welfare societies undergoing dramatic change. In the second part of the chapter, a closer reading of Swedish author Henning Mankell's novel *Mördare utan ansikte* (1991, *Faceless Killers,* 1997) will be used to examine in more detail key themes and features and their mediation of societal change in the (post-)welfare state. Of special interest is the role the novel plays in the depiction of relationships between the state and the citizen, geographical centres and peripheries, and of migration, racism and transnational crimes.

#### Origins

The origin of what was later to become known as Nordic Noir is undoubtedly to be found in the ten-novel series written by the Swedish writer couple Maj Sjöwall (1935–) and Per Wahlöö (1926–1975) between 1965 and 1975. This is not to say that crime fiction did not exist in the Nordic region before the 1960s – Sweden in particular had a thriving detective fiction industry with authors such as Stieg Trenter and Maria Lang in the 1940s and 1950s – but Sjöwall and Wahlöö conceived a modern template for the Scandinavian crime novel. This initial version took the form of police procedurals (crime narratives focusing on the investigative procedures of the police) with a strong element of social critique that radically broke with the earlier Swedish *pusseldeckar* tradition (whodunnits in the fashion of English golden-age detective fiction). This early tradition placed most of its crimes within the close confines of a bourgeois milieu to a large extent inhabited by characters oblivious to pressing societal issues.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö's series, collectively entitled *Roman om et brott* ('Novel of a Crime'), features detective inspector Martin Beck, who, with a team of colleagues in Stockholm, solves crimes which, by contrast, reveal fundamental social problems within the Swedish welfare state. A further important change from the golden-age novel is the shift in focus onto the investigative group's organic structure. While Martin Beck plays a central role in the novels, his colleagues – in particular Gunvald Larsson, Lennart Kolberg and Einar Rönn – are equally fully developed characters with private lives, who invariably take on both the narrative point of view and the investigatory lead. Sjöwall and Wahlöö emphasise this collective dimension in their literary manifesto article 'Kriminalromanens fornyelse' (The Renewal of the Crime Novel), first published in the Danish newspaper *Politiken* (30 July 1971): 'We do not believe that the so-called ordinary novel with its orientation around individuals is suitable for an analysis of our society. The crime novel has contrarily from an early stage been conscious of the fact that individuals belong to a group'.1

The legacy of Sjöwall and Wahlöö's series on contemporary Scandinavian crime fiction is still very much in evidence, and, albeit with certain modifications, the genre continues to employ a highly influential template: the police procedural with its team of investigators; Martin Beck as prototypical model for male (and, later, female) protagonists who struggle to maintain interpersonal relations in their private lives; the authors' use of a widely-copied variant of literary realism; and socially engaged themes which raise questions about and criticise society's malaises.

#### The Disintegration of the Nordic Welfare State

A great amount of scholarship has consisted of socio-historical readings of the Scandinavian variant of the crime fiction genre, and has seen its premise and development as according with the perceived dissolution of the welfare state (e.g. Nestingen 2008, Arvas and Nestingen 2011, Bergman 2014a, Stougaard-Nielsen 2017; see also chapter 5 in this volume). Andrew Nestingen, in his introduction to *Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia* (2008), promotes the idea that popular culture reflects a transformation of 'the background understanding of the Nordic welfare state' (2008, 5) and that it has increasingly 'become a forum for struggling over these changes by creating, discussing, and contesting the selfrepresentation of the nation' (2008, 7). In Nestingen's analysis, these changes are due to the introduction of neoliberal values and policies from the 1980s onwards, which caused a gradual dissolution of the postwar Scandinavian social-democratic continuum. An important premise for the relevance of studying popular culture, according to Nestingen, is the fact that the issues being debated by the public, media and politicians in the Nordic region since the 1990s are by and large the same as the issues raised in popular fiction – Nestingen mentions individuality, equality, heterogeneity, transnationalism and gender (9). The same synthetic conclusions are applied more specifically to crime fiction from Scandinavia in Nestingen and Arvas's introduction to *Scandinavian Crime Fiction* (2011), where the authors emphasise the political imperatives of the genre, arguing that it is 'one of the great popularizers of criticism of neoliberalism' (2011, 9). In light of the popularity of Scandinavian crime fiction nationally and internationally, the contribution of these socially engaged texts is significant for a debate about and redefinition of Nordic national identities.