This book that may be of interest to Scandinavians. The book is Storied Landscapes: Ethno-Religious Identity & the Canadian Prairies by Frances Swyripa. It is advertised as a new history of Ukrainian, German, Doukhobor, Scandinavian, and Norwegian groups in Saskatchewan. It is available at your local bookstore or online retailer.

The Peace Prize is one of the five Nobel Prizes bequeathed by the Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel. It is awarded for outstanding contributions in peace. The prize is awarded by a committee of five people chosen by the Norwegian Parliament. Four of the five present committee members are women (Norwegian women).

Each year, the Nobel Committee invites qualified people to submit nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2010, there were 237 nominations, out of which 38 are organizations. This is the highest number of nominees ever.

The first woman ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize was Bertha von Suttner, in 1905. She was a peace activist and close friend of Alfred Nobel and may have influenced his decision to include peace as a category.

The Peace Prize is presented each year on December 10 (the anniversary of Nobel's death). The Ceremony is held at the Oslo City Hall in the presence of the King of Norway. The Nobel laureate receives a diploma, a medal and a prize worth about $1.4 million US.

Unlike the scientific and literary prizes, the Peace Prize is often awarded for recent achievements (rather than past) and is thus more open to criticism.

The Norwegain Military Tattoo is internationally famous for its quality and streamlined production. It has been held every second year since 1994 in the capital of Norway, Oslo. Since 1996 the shows were presented indoors.

You can view the 2004 Norweian Military Tattoo on YouTube at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gS7iq3S1ME

Renathe-Johanne Wågenes from the island of Askøy in Bergen has photographed graves. Always interested in history and genealogy, she came up with the idea in 2004 of collecting pictures of all graves in Norway in a special database. Nearly two million names have been registered so far, and more than 800,000 graves have been stored with photo on the web site. Since August 2005, more than 25 million searches have been made into the database. The goal is to collect a complete record of all graves all over the country’s cemeteries. The database can be found here.

In Norwegian culture, a person’s name day is a day of the year that according to an almanac is dedicated to their first name. The tradition of celebrating a name day comes from the early Christian church, evidently to reduce the significance of celebrating birthdays, which was considered a heathen practice.

Name days had little meaning in Norway during the 1900s, while growing in popularity in Sweden. This generated a certain amount of attention in the Norwegian media during the 1980s, and in 1988 a new calendar was published that included name days.

For every date in the year except January 1st, February 29th and December 25th, two names were chosen, based on statistics for names from the period 1900-1982. About 125 of the names from the old name day calendar were reintroduced on the same dates as before.

Today the tradition is well-known in Norway. You can look up your own name day here.

The Sons of Norway Foundation in Canada Post Secondary Scholarship of $600 is available.  For information, please phone Eldon Norum at 373-0148.