by Frank Tverran - thanks to Cynthia who helped me with the translation.

In the district of Ringerike, Anna Colbjornsdatter is known as "the lady who stopped the Swedish soldiers in 1716". In another article I have told more about this incident. But at the end of the history lesson about Anna, it is hard to leave her alone. Who was she -- the girl, the woman and the vicar’s wife?

To find out some more, we must allow ourselves to draw a few conclusions based on a few facts. Nobody knows exactly how Anna looked. There is a portrait inside the Norderhov church, but the painters of that time were never very exact; they loved to beautify their models. But we can be sure of her dark eyes and dark hair.

Was it a miserable and oppressed 15-year old girl who arrived at the Norderhov vicarage in 1682 facing a forced marriage with the much older vicar Jonas Ramus? Hardly.

Jonas Ramus was a well-known person in Norway and Denmark at that time. Besides being a vicar, he was an author. But his poor career as an author probably explained why he was not a wealthy person.

Anna came from a large farm in Sorum, and almost everybody in her family was clergymen or public officials. Even as a little girl she was raised to be a vicar’s wife. She knew the routines and doings in a vicarage as good as any vicar’s wife long before her marriage to Jonas Ramus. In addition to a suitable sum of money, it is believable that she brought with her a female servant, probably a well-known member of her mother’s staff. In the new home, she would run the daily household on Anna’s behalf.

The history itself tells us that Anna had leadership abilities and a will of steel. The district Ringerike never had a richer person up to the present time. If we put her assets into today’s value, it would be several millions of US dollars.

But was Anna happy? She was 69 years old when she died in 1736. She survived her husband and all five of her children. She gave birth to a child every year from when she was 16 until she was 20. When her daughter Anna Sophie was born in 1687 the birth was so complicated that she could never be pregnant again. Even if her husband was an enlightened man, we must believe that birth control was unacceptable in the vicarage. Anna was probably required to give up sex completely, surely a hardship for such a passionate and temperamental woman.
 

© Copyriht : Frank Tverran RingeriksPorten. Kopiering forbudt uten samtykke.