The City and the Stril country

“The shore was choc-a-bloc with Saturday afternoon traffic. The country folk came in droves; halfway closing off the street, men and women with their arms round each other’s shoulders and wooden containers in their hands. They waddled forth with their short, stiff legs in their great sea boots, while the brown slush splashed up and to the sides and the reek of the country folk welled up amongst them. If anyone got in their way, they never made way and people had to look after themselves as well as they could. They bowled over women and small children who were not quick enough to leap out of the way and stepped over them unswervingly, without as much as dignifying the fallen with a glance. Latecomers from the Fana and Nattlands farmers trudged forwards, bent forwards, with buckets of cream in their hands, and on their backs, empty curdled milk containers; which reached from their necks right down to the tails of their white homespun sweaters … Servant girls with baskets on their arms, looking for warm bread for Sunday, when the bakers took a day of, stood in groups and shouted slogans and witticisms to their arch-enemies the country folk who, totally undisturbed, neither heard nor saw them.”

It is Amalie Skram  who has given us this incomparable, contemporary portrait of an exciting cultural collision, in her collection of novels on the Hellmyrs people. The relationship between Bergen and its neighbouring districts, normally known as “Strilelandet”, has, over the centuries, given rise to greater conflicts than the contacts between any other Norwegian city and its nearest hinterland.