‘94 WINTER OLYMPICS / LILLEHAMMER : Amid the Ice and Snow, Spirit Burns : Opening: A timeless simplicity marks the beginning of a special winter festival.

Four hundred twenty-five miles from the Arctic Circle, the XVII Winter Olympics began here Saturday with reindeer-drawn sleighs, fiddlers on the hoof and fanfare from rams’ horns, all on a far-as-the-eye-can-see fleece of snow. Let the giant Viking games begin.

His Majesty King Harald V of Norway, royalty in a parka, made the formal announcement, “I hereby declare opened the 17th Olympic Winter Games in Lillehammer,” after which his 20-year-old son, His Royal Highness Crown Prince Haakon, put the torch to the Olympic flame. They are the descendants of King Olav V, a competitive skier and Olympic sailor himself before his death in 1991.

In these, the winter carnivals that have introduced worldwide audiences to athletes as eclectic as Sonja Henie and Tonya Harding, as electric as the 1980 U.S. hockey team, as glamorous as Alberto Tomba and Prince Albert of Monaco, as triumphant as Rosi Mittermaier and Eric Heiden and as eccentric as a bobsled crew from Jamaica and a blind-as-a-bat ski jumper who called himself Eddie the Eagle, rarely has a setting seemed so natural and traditional as this.

Here, where by legend two skiers in 1206 carried the original Prince Haakon to safety from enemies of the crown, children have been known to ski before they can walk. The town of Lillehammer, population 23,000, pictures a skier on its coat of arms, something seen in no other city in the world.

Although adventurous Norwegians have journeyed by land and by sea--among them the actress Liv Ullmann and the explorer Thor Heyerdahl, who served as emcees of Saturday’s opening ceremonies--and have excelled at other games, as did the Norway-born football legend Knute Rockne of Notre Dame, this is a nation of skiers and skaters, of children whose first sleds mean as much to them as one did to the fictional Charles Foster Kane.

Twanging mouth harps and melodic violins were played by musicians of all ages who entered the Lysgardsbakkene ski-jump arena aboard wagon, sled and horseback, some on dainty “Dela” horses the size of Shetland ponies, bays with white manes and tails, so colorful that they looked like carousels come to life. Children garbed in Viking regalia danced around grandfatherly men who played willow flutes, ram-horn trumpets and lures, ancient bugles made from birch-tree bark.

The ceremony was far less avant-garde than the one staged two years ago in Albertville, France, where women crouched inside crystal-like globes and men swung from bungee cords or swayed atop 50-foot stilts. For these Winter Olympics, the first ones to follow so closely on the heels of another, the kickoff pageant featured woodland creatures and characters from fables, with few things so modern that they couldn’t have been seen in the 1952 opening ceremony at Oslo, 110 miles away.

What newness there was Saturday came in an appeal for peace in the former Olympic host city of Sarajevo by the president of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, followed by a minute of silence for the embattled citizenry there. Parachutists delivered the national flag and skiers the flame, one of them an eleventh-hour replacement for a ski jumper originally assigned to advance the torch, whose crackup during rehearsal will make him as famous here as the opening credits of American TV’s “Wide World of Sports” made famous another unlucky ski jumper many years ago.

Many of the athletes, too, were new, although familiar faces abounded.

Mingling with the many experienced Olympians in the parade of nations were such newcomers as Michael Shmerkin, a figure skater who is about to become Israel’s first Winter Olympian, and fellow skater Dino Quattrocecere, who, though born in Virginia, will represent South Africa as its first participant in these games in 34 years.

New flags galore flew before republics from the former Soviet Union, while athletes such as Carolina Photiades, a skier from Cyprus, walked alone, flag in hand, a one-man Olympic band.

At times spectators did need a program to tell which nation was which, as when several athletes marched into the stadium behind a banner identifying them as being from the nation of JOMFRUOYENE. This was, as it turned out, the Norwegian version of Virgin Islands.

DEN TSJEKKISKE REPUBLIKK was the Czech half of the former Czechoslovakia, TYSKLAND stood for Germany, STORBRITANNIA for Great Britain and, near the beginning of the alphabetical parade, strode the mighty team of the AMERIKAS FORENTE STATER, 157 cowboy-hatted athletes representing the United States.

Oh, for the curious, Canada was CANADA and Mexico was MEXICO.

The words that rang out in the Norwegian night, however, were these, spoken by Liv Ullmann to the thousands in attendance and the millions listening worldwide:

“Tap og vinn med samme sinn,” she said.

“Lose and win with the same attitude.”

It was something to embrace, something for everyone to carry with them or wrap around them, for now or for later, while sitting here on top of the world.