you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

I'm working with a book by a 20th century Norwegian scholar named "Eiliv Skard." Awesome name or awesomest name? I feel like he should be a guest character on Deep Space Nine or something. (In fact, he was he was also a resistance fighter during WW2 and survived three concentration camps; he wrote on Latin literature, Roman history, Greek history, European philosophy, and a bunch of other stuff (as far as I can decipher the Norwegian titles) and was writing against Fascism in the 20's. Those scholars back in the good old days, right?) And then I got distracted and started to read all about the Norwegian Language Struggle.

In 1911, the writer Gabriel Scott's comedic play Tower of Babel had its premiere in Oslo. It is about a small town in eastern Norway that is overtaken by proponents of landsmål who take to executing all those who resist their language. The play culminates in the landsmål proponents killing each other over what to call their country: Noregr, Thule, Ultima, Ny-Norig, or Nyrig. The last line is spoken by a country peasant who, seeing the carnage, says: "Good thing I didn't take part in this!"

There was at least one brawl in the audience during the play's run, and the stage was set for a linguistic schism that would characterize Norwegian politics to this day.

YESSssss.