a blog by Peter Leonard
  In the summer of 2001, while on vacation from Columbia, I participated in a Swedish Institute language
course in Värmland,
a rural province north of Gothenburg. Värmland is the home of the writers
Gustav
Fröding, Erik
Gustav Geijer and Selma
Lagerlöf, as well as the former Prime Minster Tage
Erlander. |
  There
were 38 students representing 18 countries in the program, held at the Geijerskola
folk highschool in a town called Ransäter. |
  Ransäter
was a rural area anchored by a church and two old manor houses. Horses grazed
nearby, and the sky was light for 21 hours every day. |
  Near
Ransäter was a town called Munkfors, a stop on the old pilgrimage route to Norway, and the site of one of the oldest iron forges in Europe. |
  We took a weekend trip to Oslo, a few hours away by train. The Viking Ship Museum there holds vessels 1,200 years old, excavated in the beginning of this century and remarkably well-preserved.
|
 We also visited the childhood home of Selma Lagerlöf, an estate called Mårbacka. When her books met wide acclaim, she purchased the home for herself and continued to live and write in it until she died. |
  Other highlights included a performance of Gösta Berlings Saga and a walk through the Finnskogan, a forest settled by immigrants from Finland hundreds of years ago. |
  Before the course began, I spent a few days in Stockholm. Built on fourteen islands and immune from the destruction that other European cities suffered in twentieth-century wars, Sweden's capital offers stunning views of nature and human habitation. |
| For more pictures from this trip, click here. For information on studying Swedish at Columbia University, click here. For information on studying Swedish in Sweden, click here. |