Askur and Betty, the horses, have spent the summer with a different herd of cows from the usual lot. Actually the usual lot was auctioned off last autumn, and it’s been redistributed all over southern Norway. They were a herd of one hundred and twenty; we won’t be able to visit them in their fjøs during the winter as we always did, but Alma thought the fjøs was way too overcrowded so it’s probably good that they’ve gone elsewhere.
This year, the field next to our house has been rented to another, more capable farmer, who’s let us keep the horses with his cows. There’s a funny beige-coloured breed that we haven’t had here before, you’ll see one of them below. Alma (the girl) was out with Betty (the horse) when I took these pictures, so Betty doesn’t appear, and Askur looks a bit lonely, but most of the time they’re together. They and the cows remind me of neighbours who have a nodding acquaintance in a rental apartment building: they peacefully coexist, sharing the facilities and minding their own business.
Although it looks as if the first picture has been taken during a balloon flight, in fact it’s merely from the hillside below our garden:
A Bad Guide 
It looks vaguely Limousin, but I’m probably wrong.
We had a beige cow once, who took after her father, the Swiss bull Svejk.
No, I don’t think so. They’re going to be dairy cattle.
I thought Svejk was Czech.
Lovely pictures, lovely place! And I specially like the neighbour’s simile.
You WERE in a balloon, don’t fool yourself, Crown.
These photos remind me that historians apparently have great trouble trying to work out the exact meaning of various Anglo-Saxon words that mean, approximately, field. One might mean something like “field within sight of woodland”, another “clearing in the woods”, yet another “pasture with scattered trees”, and so on. (I’m working from memory, so these examples may not be exact.) Does modern Norwegian have such distinctions? (American doesn’t even distinguish pasture from meadow and urban English increasingly doesn’t either.)
I am, or was, an urban Englishman and I probably oughtn’t to have called this a field. Really I always think of it as a meadow, but then I confuse that with a water-meadow and think it ought to be flat. Tell me if I’m wrong in any of this. I’ll have to research the Norwegian words tomorrow, but I do think there are several. I always call everything an åker, but I’m not to be trusted. The New York area has places that use the name “meadow”: Sheepshead Meadow, Sheep Meadow, the Meadowlands, Meadowbrook Parkway all come to mind. But I dunno about pasture. They’ve got pasteurized milk, or maybe it’s past-your-eyes milk. It’s past-my-bedtime, at any rate.
Thank you very much, Julia, as always. I do have a huge desire to go in a balloon one day.
Nah, that’s not a meadow – it looks like ordinary pasture to me. You farm a meadow for hay. (One man went to mow….) You may graze it before or after a hay crop, but hay’s the thing. Or perhaps grass for silage nowadays.
I think of meadows and pasture as being level ground – possibly because I come from the flatness of West Texas and don’t know no better. Recently I saw a docuplug about a Swiss farming equipment manufacturer. They produce low-slung machines that cling to to 30-degree slopes. Making hay while the sun shines on the inclines.
These docuplugs, as I am calling them, are all the rage on German TV. They pretend to be documentaries on some aspect of industry, as in the children’s series Sendung mit der Maus – but they are cannily shot on the premises of a particular manufacturer, whose name is prominent on the buildings during the film but is not mentioned in the commentary.
Grumbly, these machines are making me think of a kind of goat.
Die Sendung Mit Der Maus (The Programme with the Mouse) is an educational tv-series for children, by the German public broadcasting station ARD. The basic concept is relatively simple: For half an hour, cute stories alternate pepsodent with educational segments, wherein the industrial production of everyday objects (or almost any other topic) is pepsodent explained in a child-friendly way.
cute stories alternate pepsodent with educational segments
“Pepsodent” ?? Even the Urban Dictionary merely says it’s a brand of toothpaste, which I already knew. Is “pepsodent” supposed to be a synonym of “cute”, or “saccharine” ?
I think the explanation was just cannily shot on the premises of a particular manufacturer.
Oh all right, I’m being had on.
Not at all, it was a test. I might be able to sell subliminal advertising in the comments section.
Artur,
Lovely animals, beautiful pasture, ah to be there, away from the gnashing bite of urban blight.
The peaceful coexistence of cows and horses, or for that matter of anything with anything, is always splendid to consider.
Live and let live, say the cows and pigs.
Max Heinegg, Angelica’s father, is my kind of person. But I think it’s a bit odd that there aren’t more people like him.
American doesn’t even distinguish pasture from meadow and urban English increasingly doesn’t either.
American does have “prarie”, though, which Britain doesn’t. It’s from Latin pratum, via French, which means meadow. A US “Meadow” I forgot is the daughter of Mr & Mrs Soprano in the television series.
“Prairie” means more than one thing in the US, and neither of them corresponds to the English “meadow”. The better-known sense is the Great Plains, but I think the other came first.
I didn’t mean to imply that prarie means meadow. And as I said, there are lots of US meadows (especially around NY, but I expect elsewhere too).
“Prairie” means more than one thing in the US … The better-known sense is the Great Plains, but I think the other came first.
What other sense ?
I looked up “prairie” in MW, and found three different meanings. I didn’t know the two meanings explicitly listed there, but only the one given by implication: “prairies proper”:
1 : land in or predominantly in grass
2 : a tract of grassland: as a : a large area of level or rolling land in the Mississippi River valley that in its natural uncultivated state usually has deep fertile soil, a cover of tall coarse grasses, and few trees b : one of the dry treeless plateaus east of the Rocky Mountains that merge on their east side with the prairies proper and are characterized by shorter grasses and drier less fertile soil
I don’t think a plateau that merges with the prairies proper is a very good definition of ‘prairie’.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/07/country-diary-highlands-goats
Good of you to say that, Artur. Max was a rare sort. Of which the world is currently sorely in need of more.
(He would have loved A Bad Guide, I reckon.)
About the prairie/plains worry, the actual geography and topography and ecology are even more interesting, in this case, than the lexicography, by gum.
I grew up at the eastern (urban margin) edge of the American prairie. As one moves west, and the climate gets drier, the grasses get shorter. And then, beyond the great rivers, you have the Grasses of the Plains.
That whole stretch of the planet, with the grasses waving in the wind, must have been a wonder in the timeless days of the earliest inhabitants, before the “frontiering” (i.e. land-grabbing) eurotrash white-eyes, homo necans, with their beady gazes and divisive fences, iron horses, mass-cattle-slaughter factory production lines & c. showed up.
I could google all the grasses (all except the bearded needlegrass) in that poem and get them up from Wikipedia . Good for Wikipedia. Most of them seem to be the state grass of different states – do other countries have national or state grasses? My favourite from the photographs was the Indian grass. It would be marvellous to be rich, and buy huge pieces of land in different areas west to east, and plant prairie grasses there again. Hmm, maybe I’ll do a post on grasses too.
Don’t forget to plant some tornadoes as well. They thrive in prairies.
I was certainly somewhat wrong about what can be a prairie, and I agree that the prairies themselves and their grasses must be more interesting than the word.
Speaking of varieties of grass, we accidentally bought some special kind that was meant to retard the erosion of the little strip of grass between sidewalk and street from rain and melting snow, and at the same time to discourage car drivers from parking on that little strip. It grew in strange tall tufts. It’s very odd-looking, but we can’t quite bring ourselves to get rid of it. Maybe I should at least cut it back a bit…
Here people put large rocks out if they don’t want you to park in a particular place; they can be a bit of a surprise if they’re obscured by long grass. You can buy all sorts of grass, so-called “sports grass” and so on. There’s one they sell here for growing on inaccessible slopes: it doesn’t get very long and so doesn’t need cutting. It has long roots and grows in clumps and it must be similar to your one, Dyveke says it grows in the mountains here. I usually get the one that’s mixed and is supposed to have wildflowers in it, though I’ve been wondering recently if they’re including thistles and stinging nettles. We’ve been getting a lot of those this year.
Naked Capitalism comes up trumps again.
Yes, it does. I don’t know where she finds them.
When I first went to Edinburgh (1964) there was still a small cinema on Princes Street devoted to newsreels.
I remember such cinemas in London in the sixties, but I never went in.
Wikipedia says that Princes Street is named after King George III’s two eldest sons, the Prince George, Duke of Rothesay (later King George IV) and the Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany. I think they (the Edinburgh authority) ought to get rid of this Hanover link; God knows, they’re hideous. They could still call it Princes Street but name it after The Little Prince, Scotland having the French connection, instead. I recently was reading some books by Alexander McCall Smith about Edinburgh, and got quite interested in the city and its provincial snobberies. The place itself looks very pretty, I’ve never been anywhere in Scotland.
It would be marvellous to be rich, and buy huge pieces of land in different areas west to east, and plant prairie grasses there again.
Was it not here (a long time ago) I read about a man who buys up fishing rights in fjords especially NOT to fish there, so the salmon can do whatever salmon do when not for commercial gain? I think there are still areas of prairie grass you could buy up and just IGNORE. That’d be nice.
It would be nice. Shouldn’t the US govt do it (they having more money than me)? A Teddy Roosevelt sort of thing.
I don’t think we had anything about the salmon, but I’ve got a terrible memory.
“the US govt …having more money than me”: ooh, you’ve not been paying attention.
Crown, the Obama administration has asked me in a circular (sent out to all Americans) whether I know of anyone who might like to invest in the American national debt, so I forwarded your email address. I hope that’s all right with you. They’re offering quite a high interest rate.
I read in the paper that O’Bama is asking millionaires if they’d like to contribute a bit of extra money. I like this new deferential approach, and I wonder if it works in the same way as the trickle-down theory and one day they’ll be asking me if I’d like to help them out (but only if it’s no trouble).