from the summer I spent in Samsø, Denmark, are mostly about its picturesque beauty. The island appears untouched by human hands—all windswept hills, silent beaches, shallows filled with languid purplish jellyfish waiting to be pulled back out to sea. The villages that populated it in the Viking Age have been swallowed whole by the land on which they once stood. The only things to have evaded the open mouth of the earth are scattered stone dolmens and passage graves—monuments too big, I suppose, to be metabolized in a mere thousand years. Gone are the days when Samsø served as
