On the Laps of the Snow Gods

They have been skiing in Norway, they will tell you, for 2,500 years; the Ski Museum above Oslo has Bronze Age scratchings to prove it. Telemark is the name of a Norwegian county where folk had their own notions of how to change direction. “Slalom” means “snaketrack,” and Norse farmers descending wooded hillsides left tracks of that sort long before it occurred to Sir Arnold Lunn to box the procedure within rules and make a competition of it. It is true that Gelande sprung is a but to leap about German word, on one’s poles smacks—does it not?—of Teutonic maladresse. The plural of ski (pronounced “she”) is ski (pronounced “she”). Down near the rim of the world, where the midnight sun never shines, idle Englishmen practice something called “Swiss skiing,” but that is mere decadence, being all downhill. The Swiss are said to abet this, but then the Swiss have no pride. They make cuckoo-clocks. The right way is to set out across the country, uphill and down, with one’s lunch in a rucksack, for a destination at least three hours away, and preferably eight, and in the afternoon (if the run has been three hours) or the next day (if it has been eight) to come back again, blizzard or no blizzard.

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Hugh Kenner

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They have been skiing in Norway, they will tell you, for 2,500 years; the Ski Museum above Oslo has Bronze Age scratchings to prove it. Telemark is the name of a Norwegian county where folk had their own notions of how to change direction. “Slalom” means “snaketrack,” and Norse farmers descending wooded hillsides left tracks of that sort long before it occurred to Sir Arnold Lunn to box the procedure within rules and make a competition of it. It is true that Gelande sprung is a but to leap about German word, on one’s poles smacks—does it not?—of Teutonic maladresse. The plural of ski (pronounced “she”) is ski (pronounced “she”). Down near the rim of the world, where the midnight sun never shines, idle Englishmen practice something called “Swiss skiing,” but that is mere decadence, being all downhill. The Swiss are said to abet this, but then the Swiss have no pride. They make cuckoo-clocks. The right way is to set out across the country, uphill and down, with one’s lunch in a rucksack, for a destination at least three hours away, and preferably eight, and in the afternoon (if the run has been three hours) or the next day (if it has been eight) to come back again, blizzard or no blizzard.

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