Northern Travel: Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland

The Story

Bayard Taylor opens with a clear purpose: he is not writing a scientific survey of Scandinavia, but a travel picture, built from lived impressions rather than tables or statistics. That aim shapes the whole movement of the book. He begins on the Baltic in winter, leaving Lübeck by steamer and immediately meeting uncertainty, weather, and cold. The ship is driven into difficulty by ice and storm, and the journey becomes a first lesson in the North’s force: people lose a life at Ystad, the coast appears bleak and half-hidden, and arrival itself feels like an achievement. From Dalarö onward he enters Sweden by stages, with the first impressions of Stockholm and the practical work of preparing to go farther north. He has to think about money, sleds, clothing, routes, and the strange lack of knowledge that southerners in Stockholm have about the far North.

From there the book moves into inland Sweden in winter, where travel becomes both comic and severe. Taylor takes Swedish diligences and sleds, passes Upsala, and notices how the land changes from broad plains to wooded country and then to more remote and difficult districts. Along the way he records customs, houses, churches, stations, and the labor of horse-changing, as well as the awkwardness of language. At Gefle and beyond he meets the mechanics of official papers, post stations, and local dialects. The road north is not an abstract line on a map; it is a chain of inns, delays, misunderstandings, and weather. He and his companion, Braisted, keep moving through snow, moonlight, and darkness, discovering that the practical question is always whether they can get horses, food, shelter, and enough warmth to continue. The book repeatedly turns these hardships into vivid scene-painting: a midnight chase, frozen noses, a landlord who speaks Finnish, a station where they can scarcely communicate, and a sense that movement itself is part endurance and part adventure.

The middle of the book deepens this pattern as Taylor enters the Finnish borderlands and Lapland. The landscapes become more extreme, but also more beautiful in a different key. He notices how the cold reshapes appetite, how the travellers eat fat, butter, fried reindeer meat, pancakes, sausage, and milk almost as fuel, and how the temperature becomes an active force in every moment. He crosses into Finnic communities where language breaks down completely, and he has to rely on signs, gestures, fragments of words, and the hospitality of people who do not share his tongue. These episodes are among the book’s most memorable because they combine comedy with real physical strain: a frozen thermometer, a nose burned by cold, horses delayed by other travellers, and the daily uncertainty of finding a place to sleep. Yet these same chapters also show warmth in the human sense. The people he meets are often suspicious at first, but then curious, amused, generous, or simply practical. He is welcomed by an old gentleman in one place, sketched by a Lapp woman in another, and surrounded by ordinary domestic kindness even in places Stockholm had dismissed as desolate.

As Taylor pushes farther north, the book becomes increasingly reflective about climate, character, and the difference between regions. He moves through Norrland and the far northern districts with their long winters and sudden brief summers. At one point he pauses to describe the difference between the dark Arctic night and the memory of Egypt, a contrast that makes the North seem severe almost to the point of hostility. Yet he does not leave the region in hostility alone. He repeatedly describes the polar twilight, the strange brilliance of moonlit snow, the colored skies, and the delicacy of the Arctic summer. In one of the strongest stretches, he visits a Lapp encampment near Tromsöe and sees the land in spring thaw: birch groves, flowers, insects, fresh growth, and a whole season compressed into a race against winter’s return. Nature here is not leisurely. It works in haste, as though every leaf and blade must be completed before the cold takes it back. This section gives the book its broadest seasonal pattern, showing that the North cannot be understood only by winter hardship; its summer is brief, intense, and deeply tied to survival.

The later travel in Norway shifts the book westward and southward into fjords, mountain roads, and waterfalls. Taylor arrives at Christiansand in rain, then passes through districts where the roads, hills, and cliffs create both beauty and strain. At Jerkin on the Dovre Fjeld, he remarks on the practical and the picturesque at once: the station is famous, but the surroundings remain severe. The pass itself is easy enough for the road, yet the mountains are nearly bare, the weather bleak, and the whole scene a demonstration of northern realism. Later, in western Norway, he travels by boat through fjords of extraordinary grandeur. The Gudvangen Fjord, with its steep precipices, mirrored water, and shifting light, is one of the high points of the book’s scenic eye. He notes the quiet competence of boatmen, the stubbornness of the journey, and the way mountain and water become a single moving corridor. Then comes the trip to the Vöring-Foss, where the book reaches one of its climactic scenic passages. Taylor regards the Riukan Foss as perhaps the most beautiful cataract in the world, and he lingers over the black cliffs, silver spray, fading sunset, and the sense that beauty can suspend breath and pulse. The journey back from the waterfall is physically tiring but ends in a warm domestic scene at Ole Torgensen’s, with food, a daughter who embodies the local setting, and sleep after hunger and fatigue.

By the end, the book has become a sequence of completed impressions rather than a plotted adventure in the usual sense. Taylor has crossed Sweden, touched Denmark and Norway, gone deep into Finnish and Lapp territory, and returned through some of the grandest scenery in the North. What changes is not merely the route but the scale of his understanding. He begins by trying to see the countries; he ends by comparing climates, peoples, habits, social forms, and the pressure of nature on all of them. The final impression is not of conquest but of exposure: to weather, to custom, to landscape, and to the habit of moving through the world with attention. The book closes not with a dramatic resolution but with the accumulation of lived places, each distinct, each made legible by the act of travel.

The People

• Bayard Taylor is the central consciousness throughout. He wants to observe accurately, move through the North as its residents do, and turn experience into pictures rather than reports. What stands in his way is cold, language, fatigue, and the constant practical business of travel. By the end he is more than a tourist: he becomes a patient witness, able to compare climates, customs, and landscapes with a sharpened eye.

• Braisted is Taylor’s companion on several of the hardest northern journeys. He shares the discomfort, the hunger, the frozen noses, and the comic energy of trying to keep going. He gives the travel its social rhythm: two men improvising through a hostile season, sustaining one another through delays, delays, and worse weather.

• The landlords, postilions, and station-keepers appear in many forms, but together they represent the North’s practical human network. Some are suspicious, some cheerful, some exacting, some indifferent, but nearly all are part of the machinery that makes travel possible. They want payment, order, and clarity; Taylor wants horses, beds, and movement. Their interaction gives the book much of its energy.

• The Finns and Lapps Taylor meets are often drawn as startlingly distinct in language, habit, and physical setting. Some are curious about America, some amused, some wary, some generous. Taylor sees them as people shaped by severe climate and local custom, and they in turn respond to him as an odd arrival from a distant world.

• The women of the North are especially memorable in domestic and practical roles: the old Lapp woman Elsa, the women at stations, the female postillions, and the hostess figures who provide food and beds. They want to work, keep house, earn money, and survive the demands of the climate. Taylor notices both their labor and their directness, and often gives them some of the sharpest physical presence in the book.

• Ole Torgensen and his daughter at the end of the waterfall journey embody the book’s local hospitality. After wilderness, confusion, and fatigue, they stand for shelter, food, and the domestic order that makes the surrounding grandeur humanly habitable.

In Its Own Voice

Taylor’s purpose is stated plainly at the start, when he rejects all but the pictorial aim of travel:

“my object in travel is neither scientific, statistical, nor politico-economical; but simply artistic, pictorial”

When he reaches the far North, he remembers the fierce contrast between climates in a way that reveals the emotional strain of the journey:

“One day, however, was enough to satisfy me.”

At the end of a hard day in Norway, the book settles into relief and shelter rather than triumph:

“the peace of a full stomach and a clear conscience descended upon our sleep.”

What It's Really About

At the deepest level, the book is about how place shapes perception. Taylor does not treat Sweden, Denmark, Lapland, and Norway as names on a route; he treats them as different arrangements of weather, habit, labor, light, speech, and feeling. The central argument is almost painterly: to know a region, one must see how it looks under strain, under snow, at twilight, in poor inns, in domestic interiors, in forests, on fjords, and in the brief northern summer. The North is not one thing. It is a set of contrasts, and Taylor’s prose keeps returning to those contrasts in order to make them visible.

The book is also about the relation between endurance and enjoyment. Taylor often describes hardship in a spirit of relish, but not because hardship is trivial. Rather, he believes that cold, delay, and discomfort intensify perception. Appetite becomes vivid, beds become memorable, and a warm room feels like grace after a brutal road. This logic runs through the whole journey. The same is true of scenery: the harder the conditions, the more exact the eye becomes. A fjord, a pass, or a waterfall does not just look beautiful; it becomes beautiful in relation to hunger, fatigue, and the knowledge that the traveller has earned the view.

Another major theme is the tension between surface judgments and lived reality. Taylor repeatedly finds that places dismissed by others are better than advertised, whether in comfort, hospitality, or climate. He also repeatedly notes that outsiders misread the North because they do not know how people actually live there. The result is a quiet challenge to prejudice. He is not interested in political theory or statistics, but he is interested in the way common people adapt to severe conditions, create domestic order, and preserve cheerfulness under pressure. That social observation gives the travel writing its moral weight.

Finally, the book is about limits: the limits of language, of stamina, of season, and of human control. The Arctic landscape cannot be mastered; it can only be entered, crossed, and remembered. Taylor’s attention to twilight, snow, ice, and water reveals a world where beauty and danger are inseparable. Even the grandest scenes carry the sense that nature is not arranged for human comfort. That is why the book feels larger than a set of travel notes. It keeps asking how much of the world can be truly seen, and what kind of person the act of seeing makes.

Why Read It Today

Readers who like travel writing grounded in close observation will find a great deal here. The book feels alive whenever Taylor is moving: by sleigh, diligence, boat, or on foot in snow, rain, and mountain air. It is strongest when it turns practical difficulty into scene, and scene into reflection. If you enjoy writing that notices food, weather, local habits, houses, roads, and the exact look of light on water or snow, this will reward you.

What stays with you is the range of northern experience. Taylor gives not just one North but many: the Baltic in winter, Stockholm in formality, Norrland in isolation, Finnish border villages in uncertainty, Lapland in its compressed summer, and Norway in fjords and cataracts. The book’s best passages make climate feel like a character. Snow, ice, and twilight do not decorate the journey; they govern it.

It is also honest about difficulty. The book is long, highly descriptive, and sometimes slowed by period manners of observation. Taylor can be categorical in ways modern readers may resist, especially when describing ethnic groups and customs. Some of those judgments are sharp, generalizing, or shaped by nineteenth-century assumptions. The prose also moves at the pace of old travel itself: there are repeated delays, repeated meals, repeated horse-changes, and a great deal of practical detail. But those very repetitions create the book’s texture. It does not hurry past the world. It stays with it long enough for weather, habit, and place to leave their mark.