For the past couple of weeks I’ve been taking the goats here every lunchtime. It’s our view towards Oslo twenty kilometres away, and the Oslofjord. The goats are eager to accompany the dogs and me; they want a last opportunity to forage for the remaining leaves and accessible berries before everything gets covered in frost, or even snow. This cloud cover gives you some idea of the recent weather, it’s been raining solidly for days.
(And here is an enlargement of the part of the fjord opposite the city centre that Trond is talking about in the comments, below.)
Here are the ripe rowan berries that the goats love.
Rowan grows up through the rocks at the outlook.
There’s the remains of a campfire below on the lower left. People come up here on summer nights when it’s light, like in an old Bergman film.
We clipped the wool on Vesla’s face, last weekend. Now she looks more like the others and less like a hedge.
A Bad Guide 
Their hair is amazingly long! How much longer does it get before you have to shear it?
It’s really only Vesla (= ‘Tiny’) who has such long wool and looks like an afgan. The others were sheared in October, but her wool grows slower and she gets so cold that we’ve started to do her only once a year instead of twice. It will be quite long when we cut it next April.
For the toponymically inclined: The slice of land across the fjord in the middle of the picture is Nesodden. On the tip of it, behind the tall spruce to the left, is the ferry quay turned suburban community named Nesoddtangen. This toponym is of some reknown for being compounded by three elements meaning the same, “piece of land reaching into a body of water”.
Nice! Haugen:
nes headland, promontory
odde headland, point (of cape or peninsula); spit of land
tange spit, tongue of land
Yes, well done. I didn’t know that. Actually, on a clearer day you can make out Oslo’s wonderful rathouse and other city landmarks.
There is similar amusement to be gained from the Scottish placename Ardtornish Point i.e. the point, point, point. Note that the “nish” must be from the Norse = your “nes”.
Zooming in I still notice some:
Straight above the tip of Nesodden, behind the first ridge, you can barely see the three 1960’s highrise buildings in the drabantby of Bøler on Oslo’s east side. They are the setting of Tove Nilsen’s adolescence novel and modern day classic Skyskraperengler. (My morfar lived the second half of his life just across the street, in one of those 1950’s 4-storey 3-stairway buildings that are so ubitiquous. (And, coincidentally, my mormor grew up just down the steep hill behind the spruces in the front of the picture.))
The giant brassiere floating midfjord to the left of Nesodden is Gressholmen. It used to be the only habitat of introduced rabbits in Norway, but according to Norwegian Wikipedia they were extinguished in 2007 after concern with their impact on other species in the nature reserve.
Apparently there are some rare plant species on Gressholmen that were being threatened, so the nature lovers got the County to kill off all the rabbits. The Society for the Protection of Animals in Oslo said sterilization would have been a better option, and I must say I agree.
One unusual feature of Norway is the hares. Elsewhere I’ve never seen hares, even when I knew they existed. Here I see them as often as I’d see rabbits in England.
Those islands in the fjord are very close to and facing the downtown waterfront of Oslo. It’s an extraordinary feeling to stand there looking at the city, so close. They’re completely rural, with lovely beaches. Some have small summer cabins. We nearly bought a beautiful house on one (Lindøya) when I first moved here, but it would have meant commuting to town in your own boat in winter, across the path of the ships and ferries, through the ice. Boy, am I glad we didn’t buy that house.
But what skyline photos we didn’t know we missed!
Nowadays, the further I am from all cities the happier I am.
the Scottish placename Ardtornish Point
It looks as if someone would prefer you to think it’s in sunny Florida.
This map of it has a place name with an allusion to your kin, Crown.
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/place/Ardtornish_Point_in_Highland_270611_853611.htm
the Scottish placename Ardtornish Point i.e. the point, point, point. Note that the “nish” must be from the Norse = your “nes”.
From poking around the map I gather that the use of ‘nish’ isn’t constricted to all-Norse names, so I surmise that it was borrowed into Gaelic as a topographic term. This seems even clearer with ‘sgeir’, and could even be the case with ‘vaig’. Also ‘eilean’ is an obvious loan (or so it seems to this strictly non-Gaelic speaker), but from English.
There’s a rule of thumb in Scotland that nearly all the Norse-derived placenames can be seen from the sea.
an allusion to your kin
What, you mean the Rubhas? Yes, they sold rubha goods, door-to-door.
This NY Times Style article on “the sleepy ski town of Geilo” ends with some amusing Swedish/Norsk mutual hostility (Swedes on Norwegians: “They’re lazy and think they don’t have to work”; Norwegians on Swedes: “We are people of nature. They are not”), but what I wanted to ask about was the assertion by Magnus Nyborg, “a 19-year-old snowboarder,” that “We do not call them fjords… We call it the sea because that’s what it is. Fjords is a nice exotic tourist name.” The shocking truth, or a smart-ass kid yanking the American’s chain?
TOTALLY a kid yanking. Norwegians call everything a fjord. Well, every large body of water that’s long and narrow, either inland or connected to the sea. Total bullshit, but how funny the Times bought it enough to quote it.
I think I said a few weeks ago that Geilo is where all the rich people from Oslo go to ski. So then there’s a whole other group who would never go there in a million years so as not to be taken for a Norwegian yuppie.
“We do not call them fjords… We call it the sea because that’s what it is. Fjords is a nice exotic tourist name.” The shocking truth, or a smart-ass kid yanking the American’s chain?
I know nothing of the lingo among 19-year-old snowboarders, but he’s definitely wrong that the word ‘fjord’ isn’t used by Norwegians. What he might be onto is that Norwegians may use the word ‘fjord’ with somewhat lower frequency than what he hear from English-speaking tourists, since the exact shape of the body of water — fjord, vik, poll, sund, whatever — is often not relevant. But even that will vary with region, age and urbanity. In my experience the farther into a fjord you are, the less likely it is to be mentioned in more general terms.
He may also be speaking of marketing. In some places local authorities and the tourist business may be selling their waters as a fjord even if they’re considered, say, a ‘sund’ by the local population.
Now I’ve read it, I understand.
Nyborg was a friendly and polite kid whose father develops rural land for vacation houses. (And I think it’s disgusting to ruin a beautiful landscape with ticky-tacky condos; but that’s a different subject.) He enjoyed what he considered my misconceptions about his country. ‘‘We do not call them fjords,’’ he said. ‘‘We call it the sea because that’s what it is. Fjords is a nice exotic tourist name.’’
Except for “Fjords is a nice exotic tourist name”, which he well knows is total bullshit, he’s right in a way. We live five minutes drive from the Oslofjord, but we call it “the sea” when we want to go down and swim in salt water in the summer. But other times we call it the fjord. It’s like sometimes you call it the Jersey shore and other times “the ocean”, one name doesn’t cancel out the other.
Och, they’re just a bunch of firths.
Did you know that there’s a “Firth of Thames” in NZ?
You swim in it? Do the natives do so, or does this brand you as an eccentric foreigner?
a “Firth of Thames” in NZ
It seems that there is also a firth, alternatively fjord, of Flensburg, with a Happytown on its shores. Not the same Glückstadt of recent LH comments, but a Glücksburg. Very different coat of arms. (What is that thing?) The place has a cheerful Prince, eager to earn a bit of money by letting people make cheerful use of his cheerful-looking castle.
After the death of Friedrich on 15 November 1863 in Schloss Glücksburg, the Prince was enthroned.
Sounds like he got his bottom wedged in a toilet. Perhaps they mean ‘crowned’, but anyway, in memory of his release they have “Happy and free at last” as the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg family’s motto and some sort of 3-d view of a manhole cover as their family crest (that Empty linked to, above).
In some places local authorities and the tourist business may be selling their waters as a fjord
So if someone carrying a plastic sample bottle tells you it’s “a Norwegian fjord”, just walk away.
Ok, I think I know what the manhole cover really is. Schloss Glücksburg was built on the site of a former Cistercian monastery, whose patron was St. Laurentius, also known as Lawrence of Rome. He was martyred – wait for it – on a gridirion. Wikipedia has this to say: “During his torture Lawrence cried out “This side’s done, turn me over and have a bite.” This is the legend often quoted explaining why Lawrence is the Patron Saint of Comedians, butchers and roasters.”
Full explanation of the coat of arms in German here: http://www.schleswig-holstein.de/LA/DE/06Wappenlandschaft/0604Wappenrolle/0604Wappenrolle__node.html?Aktion=Datenblatt&ID=232
Good heavens.
Yes, that is what the coat of arms represents. It is strange for a noble coat of arms (see “heraldry”), so it must have been the emblem of the monastery. and the monastery must have been quite famous for the rulers to keep its emblem for their own.
Early Christian martyrs seem to have been killed in a wide variety of gruesome ways, and they are represented in painting or sculpture carrying a model of the instrument of their tortures.
Actually, despite what I said above, this crest is only for the town of Glücksburg and it doesn’t appear anywhere on the coat of arms of the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg family (which is all swans and unicorns and nice happy Ruritanian things).