“Well, either way,” I said.

“Exactly. We were a dangerous lot, Evan. And now we never go to war. We are peaceable and prosperous. All our citizens get medical care and education and a government that takes care of them from the cradle to the grave. Even the downtrodden, even those of us in southern Sweden, live a life the rest of the world would envy.”

We were speaking Danish. Harald was from Lund, in southern Sweden, but he did not consider himself a Swede, nor did he consider his homeland to be a part of Sweden. It had once been Danish – most of each of the Scandinavian countries had once belonged to or been a part of one or more of the others – and, as far as Harald was concerned, he and his neighbors and kinsmen were Danes still, and all that remained was for them to wrest control of their benighted province from the damnable (if benevolent) Stockholm government.

“It is difficult to stir up a rebellion against a welfare state,” he said with a sigh. “If we are successful, what happens to our pensions? Evan, I ask you. Would a Viking ask such a question?”

“It’s a problem,” I agreed. “You’ve got to get people to realize they’re oppressed before you can get them to revolt.”

“But you have some ideas.”

I did, and I began to run through them for him. For several years I’d been a member of SKOAL, an acronymic organization committed to restoring lost areas of Sweden and Norway to Danish control. (A fraction of SKOAL claimed Danish hegemony for all of Sweden and Norway, and for part of Finland as well, but I felt their claims were unjustified, and not terribly realistic.) I’d had some correspondence with members in Denmark and Sweden, but Harald was the first SKOALer I’d met face to face.

He nodded as I spoke. “You are truly committed,” he said.

“Absolutely.”

“And you believe you can get assistance from these other groups? The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization? The League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia? The Pan-Hellenic Friendship Society?”