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Victoria's Relations. In preparation for the marriage, which will be held 19 days after Anne-Marie's 18th birthday, she is taking a recorded Linguaphone course in conversational Greek, a present from a Copenhagen record distributor. Meanwhile, since Constantine speaks little French (hers is fluent) and no Danish, they chat in English, which both speak well.
Anne-Marie, who belongs to Europe's oldest dynasty, is a distant cousin of her husband-to-be*,-and is also a descendant of Queen Victoria, Constantine's great-great-grandmother. They first met in July 1957, when she was not quite eleven and he was a naval cadet on a Greek training ship. The rumors started four years later. Anne-Marie, who was not overly bright as a student, attended two Swiss schools to learn French but got most of her education at the private coed Zahle School in Copenhagen. One day, startled by a piercing wolf whistle from outside, a Zahle teacher snapped in Danish: "Some kind of punk!" The whistler was Constantine, come to carry Anne-Marie's books back to Amalienborg Palace.
Two at the U.N. Scandinavia's royal families have played an influential part in the north's emergence from the traditional isolationism that ended with World War II. Since then, Norway and Denmark have bound themselves to Europe as charter members of NATO and EFTA, the Outer Seven trading bloc. Finland, Russia's only European neighbor that has not been plucked behind the Iron Curtain, has meticulously observed the neutrality agreement imposed on its government by Moscow after its valiant defense against the Red army. Nonetheless, the Finns are also associated with EFTA and have strong economic and emotional ties to the rest of Scandinavia.
Even Sweden, which last fought a war 150 years ago, is now determined to defend its neutrality, if necessary. Swedish troops performed ably as members of the U.N. peace-keeping mission in the Congo. Two Scandinavians, Norway's Trygve Lie and Sweden's Dag Hammarskjold, ran the U.N. creditably for 15 years. When Hammarskjold died in a 1961 plane crash, he had extended U.N. influence and broadened his countrymen's horizons. Younger Swedes, who previously showed little interest in world affairs, now generally support Western proposals for an ambitious Swedish foreign aid program in keeping with its affluence. "They used to turn instinctively inward," says Premier Tage Erlander. "I sense a great change."
Scandinavians are reaching out in other media. Ingmar Bergman's tortured film canon, topped by The Silence, has built a worldwide movie cult unequaled by any Scandinavian since Garbo's girlhood. Half a dozen Swedish singers, from Kerstin Thorborg to Birgit Nilsson, commute between Stockholm's Royal Opera and Manhattan's Metropolitan. Swedish Economist Gunnar Myrdal, author of a classic study of the U.S. Negro and his problems, who went on to become executive sec retary of the U.N.'s Economic Commission for Europe, is currently writing what promises to be the definitive work on solutions for the underdeveloped world.
For all their geographical proximity, there is only a partial pattern in the customs, the people, the cultures of Scandinavia.