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'Supported by every traveler in Norway': Den Norske Turistforening, tourist infrastructure and transnational travel

By | Article
April 19, 2022
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A black and white photograph of a group of around 10 mountaineers walking up a steep snowy mountainside

Mountaineers ascending Galdhøpiggen in a snowstorm, October 1, 1910. Galdhøpiggen is the highest mountain in Norway and is in the Jotunheimen region. Galdhøpiggen was first ascended in 1850. Photo: Anders Beer Wilse

Infrastructure is a critical way for humans to engage with the natural environment in the Arctic region, as it facilitates access, connection, inhabitation, and productivity. The Arctic Institute’s 2022 series on Infrastructure in the Arctic investigates infrastructure as a critical point of analysis for considering human impacts and needs in the Arctic, especially in its role as a mediator, or as an interface, between politics, government, people and the natural environment.​

The Arctic Institute Infrastructure Series 2022

In 1904, looking back over three decades of mountaineering in Norway, William Cecil Slingsby (1848-1929) wrote that “the luxurious tripper of to-day can see from his deck-chair on the tourist steamer crags rounded and polished hundreds of feet above the water”.1) Slingsby, a prominent and prolific Alpinist, was described after his death as the “father of Norwegian mountaineering”2) and his popularizing of Norwegian routes and peaks played a significant role in the country becoming a popular site for mountaineering at the end of the nineteenth century. However, as the quote above suggests, Norway was not simply a destination for climbers. Norway was increasingly popular with travelers through the second half of the nineteenth century, especially from Britain, and the development of tourist infrastructure was a significant part of this. The steamships like the one mentioned by Slingsby made the north of Norway far more accessible, enabling faster, cheaper and more reliable travel. Slingsby himself saw these changes as a shift from a time of “poetry and hunger” to one of “prose and plenty”,3) but, for all his nostalgia, he undoubtedly played a significant role in making this movement happen. Moreover, texts produced by Slingsby and others in this period suggest an alternative form of infrastructure: the intertextual network of publications that recommended and reinforced Norway as a suitable destination for accessible and authentic mountaineering.

Norway became popular with British travelers for a number of reasons in the nineteenth century. One obvious draw was the landscape, which initially attracted sportsmen keen to hunt and fish, but thereafter drew a wider range of travelers from the 1860s, increasingly diverse in terms of class and gender. Mountaineering was just one aspect of this, but one which was particularly involved with reaching remote landscapes. British travelers also felt connected to Norwegian society, with elaborate claims of shared Viking heritage constructed, connected to both specific racial connections and supposedly shared values of martial and naval superiority.4) Moreover, British travelers were attracted to Norway as an apparently prelapsarian society, where archaic forms of social organization and relations had been preserved. As Kathryn Walchester has shown, British women in particular were attracted to this vision of “Gamle Norge” [Old Norway], which seemed a simpler and more equal society than nineteenth-century Britain.5) As with travel to the High Arctic and other spaces in the colonial world, these were imagined as journeys back through time as well as through space.

Norway’s other great appeal was the ability to experience the conditions of an “accessible Arctic”: the atmospheric phenomena like the aurora, the midnight sun and polar night, as well as ice and cold. British travelers at the turn of the century were fascinated with Fridtjof Nansen and the voyage of the Fram, making frequent references to him in their travelogs. Nansen was a transnational celebrity, but his appeal was connected specifically to Norway.6) Norway’s accessibility – increasing through the nineteenth century – made voyages north possible for regular travelers on cruises, allowing them to imagine themselves as Arctic travellers.7) Crucial to this were the perceptions of modernity that motivated British travel to Norway more generally. What Peter H. Hansen has called “performative modernity” in reference to mountaineering can be seen to apply here: the notion of the traveler both escaping the hostile modernity of home, in the form of industrialisation and urbanization, whilst also showing themselves to be modern once they arrive elsewhere, particularly in comparison to the people who live there.8)

Infrastructure encapsulated this tension. The steamships, railways and roads which opened up Norway for travelers were paradigmatically modern. Easy escape to a place where, in the words of the British travelers James A. Lees and Walter J. Clutterbuck, “civilized man can relapse as much as seems good for him into his natural state”9) relied on the technology and development they claimed to reject. A good example of tourism infrastructure which encapsulated this tension between development and escape was that constructed by Den Norske Turistforening (DNT) [The Norwegian Trekking Association]. Founded in Christiania (now Oslo) in 1868, DNT was created by urban Norwegians enthusiastic to make rural parts of the country more accessible.10) The infrastructure of cabins, roads, bridges and more put in place by the organization was soon being used by travelers from abroad. British travelers were particularly enthusiastic and wrote effusively about what DNT had put in place.

Alfred Mockler-Ferryman, whose travelog and guide to the Hardangerfjord region of Western Norway was published in 1896, described DNT as “this excellent institution every traveler in Norway who leaves the beaten track must at one time or another be indebted, and it is not too much to say that without the Norske Turistforening more than half Norway would be a sealed book”.11) As well as opening up the country, DNT, in Mockler-Ferryman’s phrase, made life “smoother for the adventurer”.12) This took specifically gendered terms as well. Mockler-Ferryman noted, in somewhat patronizing tones, that the added comfort and security bestowed on mountain travel by DNT meant that you could by all means “let her [your female traveling companion] taste the delights of mountain travel”.13)

Mockler-Ferryman was far from alone in praising DNT. The guidebook was published by Thomas Bennett’s, a prominent travel agent in Christiania catering to British travelers,14) advertised DNT membership, believing the organization “ought to be supported by every traveler in Norway” and noting that “subscriptions are laid out in making paths to waterfalls, views &c., which would otherwise be inaccessible, and in building mountain hostelries”.15). The British mountaineer E.C. Oppenheim regarded DNT membership as “very important” and took advantage of the “very useful privileges” for access and accommodation.16)

Perhaps the British traveler closest to DNT was Slingsby himself. He praised their “excellent and useful” paths and maps,17) and, writing in the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club Journal in 1899, noted how the “luxurious log-built and boarded-floored Tourist Club huts” had transformed travel in the popular mountain regions of Norway.18) He was also particularly impressed by the efforts of the local Aalesund Turistforening to “open up the wildest glens and to cut paths through otherwise almost impenetrable brushwood to lead to some useful mountain pass… which are a great boon to mountaineers”.19) As his comments around the increasing popularity of Norway as a tourist destination suggest, Slingsby was ambivalent about the expansion in numbers of visitors. However, as Paul Readman has noted, he “wanted to see more people on the fells, not fewer”.20) He was pleased that he “broke new ground” in the Norwegian mountains himself.21)

It is important to note that DNT infrastructure was not simply used by British visitors. Established by members of the Norwegian urban middle class, DNT contributed significantly to discourses of Norwegian national identity. Rural Norway, including the mountain regions, seemed to offer a sense of authenticity. As Finn Arne Jørgensen puts it, “in nature and not in the urban they found the sources of a new and authentic Norwegian national identity after 400 years under Danish rule”.22) The Norwegian historian S.C. Hammer even felt that an interest in Jotunheimen in the plays of Ibsen “turn[ed] men’s’ minds towards the heights”.23) However, this often meant imposing new ideas of wilderness on rural areas, overriding traditions of land use in preference for an imagined sense of true Norwegian wilderness.24) Infrastructure was key to this. For the urban bourgeoisie to experience their supposedly national wilderness, it had to be accessible. Huts, roads, maps and guides became ways for Norwegians and tourists from abroad to experience the supposedly authentic.25) National identity came to be connected to places and spaces like mountain huts like hytter and seter.26) However, there were necessarily tensions around these representations of place and landscape, as well as questions around land use and the pressures of tourism.

The Norwegian interest in climbing mountains was noticed by British visitors. Mockler-Ferryman noted that mountaineering was “one of the most popular forms of recreation” for urban Norwegians.27) Moreover, British and Norwegian travelers in the mountains did not form two discrete groups. DNT was predominantly run by Norwegians, but its yearbook suggests that it was an organization with significant transnational connections. DNT membership lists, published in the yearbook, show both the increasing size and popularity of the organization, both in the steadily increasing number of Norwegian members, but also in the range of foreign visitors purchasing membership. These members came from across Europe and North America, with the majority coming from Scandinavia outside Norway, Britain and Germany. By 1890, the number of members just listed as living in England filled seven pages and included around 200 names.28) The Årbog [Yearbook] contained numerous articles in English, written by British travelers, and an increasing number through the final decades of the nineteenth century, as well as others in German, Swedish and written by Danes. Slingsby was perhaps the most prolific non-Norwegian correspondent, writing a series of articles, reporting his own climbs in Norway and recommending routes to others, and was published in the Årbog almost every year between 1875 and 1902. As such, Slingsby contributed significantly to the development of a transnational discourse of mountaineering in Norway. This was developed further in Britain, where Slingsby wrote about DNT’s work in British mountaineering periodicals such as the Alpine Journal. In the 1894-5 edition of the Alpine Journal, for example, Slingsby wrote a review of the 1894 Årbog, which praised the “admirable work” of DNT, as well as how their huts “provide most excellently for the wants of travelers”.29) This alternative textual infrastructure further confirmed DNT as an organization which made the Norwegian mountains available for international mountaineers.

Slingsby had significant prestige in the Norwegian climbing community after his ascent of Store Skagastølstind in 1876, as well as numerous other first ascents. Transnational cooperation extended to his climbing practice; he made numerous climbs with his “fjell kammerat” Emanuel Mohn,30) a prominent member of DNT, as well the pioneering Norwegian female mountaineer Therese Bertheau.31) This cooperation was underpinned by Slingsby’s deep interest in Norway as a place and society, not uncommon in Victorian Britain. His interest took specific forms, particularly in shared connections and heritage, rooted in how he perceived the Viking past to be. This was reflected by his comments on people he met in Norway – he described a friend and guide named Thorgeir Sulheim as having “the blood of the Vikings coursing in his veins”32) – but also broader cultural trends. He believed that mountaineering had “reawaken[ed] the ancient adventurous spirit of the Vikings, which, though sometimes dormant, always exists in their descendants”.33) As Andrew Wawn has shown, Victorian discourses of empire and British strength often drew on “the old Northern values… that, in the eyes of many Victorians, underpinned the best of Britain at home and abroad – imperial power, mercantile prosperity, technological progress, social stability and justice”.34) Nineteenth-century Britain’s power was supposedly rooted in the Viking past they shared with Norway and visitors such as Slingsby attempted to reaffirm that connection through travel. 35)

It is worth emphasizing the role of these imperial imaginaries and their significance in shaping understandings of place. Slingsby himself was an ardent supporter of empire, politically conservative (and Conservative), and frequently adopted the colonial perspectives and behaviors of mountaineers, naming “new” peaks, surveying depopulated landscapes and depicting Norway as a “playground” for visiting outsiders.36) Whilst Slingsby’s interest in and cooperation with local people, as well as his work with DNT, perhaps challenges a view of Norway as a mere “playground” for him, despite the title of his book, imperial thinking here takes different forms. Invocations of shared heritage and racial connectivity bind Norway and Britain together for Slingsby, developing racial ideas which align Britain and Norway in the imperial world.

These preoccupations are important, as they shape this transnational construction of knowledge and place. Slingsby’s contributions enriched the understanding of mountaineering in Norway, changing how it was perceived by Norwegians and foreigners. However, understanding how Slingsby himself saw Norway is also crucial for examining his engagement with DNT. His interest in and connections to Norway were part of a broader worldview, one which intersected with urban Norwegians’ interest in discovering and constructing Norwegian wilderness. These relationships and understandings are significant for thinking about how landscape was perceived and how infrastructure enabled certain kinds of engagement with wild places. This is perhaps most apparent when mountaineers traveled to Northern Norway and their claims to know the land and landscape competed with Sámi understandings of Sápmi and its importance to them. Mountaineers like the British climber Elizabeth Le Blond, who visited Sápmi to climb several times in the 1890s, cast an ethnographic eye on the Sámi communities they met, and fell easily into colonial tropes of naming and depopulating when in the mountains.37)

Mountaineering was not the main form of tourism to Sápmi/Northern Norway and other forms of travel infrastructure were established, particularly around coastal routes for cruises. Sites like Nordkapp became popular tourist destinations, where travelers from across Europe could experience Arctic conditions and sublime landscapes on brief excursions from comfortable ships.38) Travelers also emphasized the modernity and connectedness of towns they visited like Tromsø and Hammerfest. Tourism infrastructure was a point of cocreation: of experiences, of competing versions of modernity and alternative imaginings of place. It could be a site of Sámi agency and control over how depictions of them were made, as well as a space to perform modernity, for both travelers and locals.39) As with DNT’s building of huts and roads, and publishing of guidebooks and maps, the picture that emerges of infrastructure is a more complex one, which forms around points of connection, commodification, colonialism and resistance, particularly in Sápmi.

The transnational aspect is also important to consider. The ways in which travelers saw Norway were influenced by the inhabitants; the tourist gaze was never clear and impartial. Travelers like Slingsby brought their preoccupations and perspectives with them and were also informed by the people they met and the way Norway was presented to them. Likewise, the national project of DNT, to discover authentic Norwegian identity in the hills, was one supported, drawn on and enacted by people from outside of the country, whose own ideas about Norway were quite different, but shared an interest in Norwegian landscapes and being in them. It is also important to consider the parallel, competing and intersecting versions of modernity imagined and performed, beyond a simple binary of modern metropolitan traveler arriving in pre-modern periphery, be that the relationship between Britain and Norway, Christiania and Jotunheimen or Tromsø and Nordkapp.

Den Norske Turistforening still exists today and boasts over 300,000 members.40) It still maintains huts, roads and other infrastructure which Norwegians and foreign tourists use to access rural areas of Norway. In many ways, it continues to be a project of nation building, as Gro Ween and Simone Abram have shown.41) Moreover, its history, the involvement of transnational cooperation, and the history of travel to Norway in the late nineteenth century all offer ways of thinking about the Arctic today, in Sápmi, Norway and the region more generally. Considering the ways in which landscape was accessed, constructed as a “wilderness” for exploration, and depicted, is important for how we now consider the Arctic, especially as we try to move away from dangerous colonial discourses of the Arctic as a blank space. Moving away from the racialised fantasies of Slingsby’s Victorian Vikings is also important for thinking about Scandinavia more generally. DNT’s expansion reminds us of the tensions of modernity and attempts to escape from it, as well as the necessarily constructed nature of wilderness. With Norway, Sápmi and the Arctic still appealing to tourists today, it is important to consider how best to both protect the landscapes and ecosystems of the region, whilst also respecting and prioritizing the lives of the people who inhabit it.

Christian Drury is a PhD student in the Department of History at Durham University and a member of the DurhamARCTIC Doctoral Student Training Programme.

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