The visit of Norway?s King Olaf and the sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) celebration of Norwegian immigration offers an opportunity to learn more about both. Harvard linguistics and Scandinavian studies professor Einar Haugen visited Concordia College where he was interviewed. He describes King Olav as democratic, friendly, not an intellectual, who hasn?t played a great role in political development because as king he?s a figurehead without veto rights over bills passed by Parliament. He?s primarily interested in sports, above all he?s a yachtsman, has won awards for sailing. Haugen responds to a question about why the Norwegians, from a mountainous region, settled on the prairie. He says the Norwegians who came in the early decades of immigration were nearly all farmers. Their first settlement was a somewhat mountainous region near Lake Erie, which they discovered was impossible economically as it would take several years before they?d get a crop. They didn?t have money to wait, they had to go where go soil was available. The U.S. was giving land away free in the West to sow a crop; this was much better than anything in the East where land was poor or expensive. In a sense they come not from the mountains of Norway but from the agricultural soil. They missed and loved the mountains of Norway.