A. S. Byatt: Scandinavian North Knower or What? An Investigation

I was reading an old short story by Byatt yesterday, and I came across this — which is totally correct. It’s not that the people in the “Scandinavian North” (i.e., the north of Norway) are better at English per se — far from it — but the prosody of the dialects matches up with English much better than the sing-song dialects of the Scandinavian South. (And we’re not even going to mention the general unintelligibility problems that Danes have even when speaking their own language.) So I thought: “Finally, a woman of culture!” And also “Gee, the educational system in the UK is pretty good”. But then! It’s established that he’s from Tromsø, which is about 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle… so… er… that’s an odd thing to say. And then later, he talks about taking the train south, and there definitely aren’t any trains anywhere near Tromsø. But! It’s also established that he’s a liar! So my in-depth investigation into whether A. S. Byatt is a Scandinavian North Knower is…