ABSTRACT
Heritage denotes everything we suppose has been handed down to us from the past. Although not all heritage is uniformly desirable, it is widely viewed as a precious and irreplaceable resource, essential to personal and collective identity and necessary for self-respect. Hence we go to great lengths, often at huge expense, to protect and celebrate the heritage we possess, to find and enhance what we feel we need, and to restore and recoup what we have lost. What comprises heritage differs greatly among peoples and over time, but the attachments they reflect are universal. They are expressed by peoples at all levels of technology and of every political persuasion. And heritage is everywhere implicated in what we think about, and what we do with, land, law and justice. How heritages of nature and of culture resemble and differ from each other is treated in the foregoing essays in a specifically Scandinavian context.
