Abstract

This paper considers the wealth of written material –particularly letters - preserved in Norway and the UK, which reveals the long-distance, numerically dense and long-term communication networks between Norwegian and English Friends in the mid-C19th, and especially between South West Norway and North East England, maintained in the main through regular written correspondence, the circulation of the same amongst Friends, and occasional visits over a relatively long period of time in order to preserve the initially tiny community of Norwegian Friends and also, arguably, to offer Anglophone Friends a spiritually inspiring window into a group of recent converts with the poverty and simplicity of the earliest English Quaker converts. The research from which this paper arises includes, then, analysis of a wider body of letters dating from the 1810s, when the first Norwegian prisoners of war, during the Napoleonic Wars, contacted English Friends to signal their interest in Quakerism, to the 1870s; several hundred have been transcribed so far. Key players include Stavanger teacher, translator and abstinence campaigner Asbjorn Kloster, stalwart Stavanger Friend Endre Dahl, Northumberland minister George Richardson, and Elias Tastad, former prisoner of war and very early Quaker convert.