Christian Krohg, Norwegian
“Land Ho! If Anyone Needs To Pee, I Suggest You Go Ashore. Or Be Prepared To Hold It For Another Five Months,” 1893
Oil on canvas
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Info, or links that point to more info, about this artist can be found here, here (archived if necessary), here, here, here, here, here, here (Google translated), here, here, here, and here (Google translated), perhaps in addition to what’s in his page (Google translated Norwegian Wikipedia page has more).
/// To the “New World” Leiv Eiriksson sailed;
reached America (and thus prevailed).
In five hundred years Chris
sailed from Spain hit-or-miss.
If Chris hoped to be first, he had failed.
/// Some Italians don’t want to admit,
that those Norsemen, with luck and with grit,
got to Newfoundland’s shore
such a long time before
Chris Columbus, but Vinland’s legit.
/// A longboat of men known as Norse
aimed for Greenland, but got blown off course.
Found a land, lush and fine;
(a great place to grow wine),
with no plans to make conquest by force.
/// Back when I was a student we “knew”
the events of fourteen ninety-two,
but what’s written as “History,”
can be shrouded in mystery,
so we’re never quite sure what was true.
/// A Viking, we learned, was a brute,
raiding villages in a fur suit.
His helm, he adorns
with a pair of cow horns,
but those “facts” are today in dispute.
…and we never learned of King Canute.
(or of Bjarni Herjólfsson, who sailed to North America 15 years before Leiv.)
/// Leiv had claimed that he’d sailed without knowing
just precisely the route he was going.
Now we now know that he’d planned
to set foot on the land
Bjarni sighted. (The crew helped by rowing.)
/// Every student of history tries
to weed out all distortions and lies.
Some books had, in the end, a
now forgotten agenda.
Hard to gauge after each author dies.
/// Nations vie for whose guy was premiere
claiming fame as first name who came here.
Someone cancelled poor Bjarni
and replaced him with blarney.
Leiv has ‘splainin’ to do, I now fear.