A year in reading - 2025

2025 began as a limbo. In January I was unemployed and without immediate prospects, but with several obligations to which I had committed myself when I still received a regular salary. As a consequence, although I theoretically should have plenty of time to devote to reading, the many duties that demanded my attention, the many things I had to prepare, and unexpected demands that came along the way, all combined to leave less time for doing the kind of reading I had hoped to do. My pace throughout the year became choppy, and I was unable to follow the parameters that ordinarily guide my literary forays within the calendar year. However, 2025 also afforded me several opportunities for travel, and many of the books I read this year were consumed en route to somewhere.       

Travelling by page   

Every year, I try to explore more of the world through the pages of its myriad literatures. As a bare minimum, I aim to read one book from every country in the world – including Palestine – and I have been chipping away at this goal since I began the project in 2017, inspired by the excellent work of journalist and author Ann Morgan.

In previous years, I have made good use of my access to university libraries and their inter-library loan systems, and although a similar system exists for public libraries in Norway, this year’s limited access to the holdings of universities with departments dedicated to the languages and literatures of other parts of the globe meant that I had to rely on my own reserves. Over the past two decades, I have accumulated a decent personal library with items for future reading, some of which are intended to help in my ongoing quest of travelling by page. However, since I did not know for how long I would remain unemployed, I decided to buy a couple of new books to ensure that I would still be able to keep travelling for a while.

The first book I finished was A girl called Eel by Ali Zamir, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. This novel is an exploration of society and gender roles in the Comoros, and provided an interesting and heartbreaking window into a country about which I know very little, and whose literature is not extensively available to non-francophone readers.

Ali Zamir, A girl called Eel (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)

In a bookshop in Bergen, I encountered a Norwegian translation of Scholastique Mukasonga’s 2008 memoir, La Femme aux pieds nus, translated by Agnete Øye as Den barbeinte kvinnen. I am always happy to see Norwegian translations of non-anglophone literature, and as I have been wanting to read something by Mukasonga for some time, I bought it and read its beautiful and harrowing chapters on and off for the subsequent months. As often is the case when I read books by African writers that describe the practicalities of the agricultural year, I was struck by the recognisable aspects of Mukasonga’s upbringing concerning the various duties pertaining to the keeping of crops and the ever-present concern about whether a harvest will fail or flourish. In other words, the book was yet another reminder that shared experiences connect people the world over, and we remain more similar than different in all our fundamental aspects. 

Scholastique Mukasonga, Den barbeinte kvinnen (translated by Agnete Øye)

New places for reading       

Aside from travelling by page, I also did a lot of physical travel, partly thanks to some plans that had been laid the year before, and partly thanks to a surprise short-term employment that brought me out of my village on several journeys. As a consequence, I was able to find several new places for reading this year, too. For instance, a three-week journey that included Hamburg, Bergen, Oslo, Madrid, and Salamanca in late March and early April meant that I could seek out several places in which to sit down and quietly peruse what I was carrying with me for that specific purpose. In a Latin American restaurant in Hamburg, for instance, I followed C. S. Lewis’ imagined Martian landscape in Out of the Silent Planet, while I was reading up on the cult of saints in medieval Italy and medieval England in the bars of Salamanca and of Madrid respectively. 

C. S. Lewis, Out of the silent planet 

Hamburg

Edward Schoolman, Rediscovering Sainthood in Italy 

Salamanca

Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to relate 

Madrid 

At home, I also found opportunity to read in new locations. In April, my family and I launched the rowing boat on one of the lakes in my village, as we do each year once the ice has drifted off over the waterfall and returned to liquid again. My first trip of the year led me to one of the promontories where I often go searching for blueberries – or what I have recently learned are technically called bilberries. Since most of my journeys to this promontory involves getting my hands dirty with the fruits of the harvest, I rarely bring any reading material with me, knowing that bilberry stains are hard to remove. This time, however, since it was long before berry-picking season, I brought with me a collection of poems by one of my favourite poets, Raquel Lanseros, and ventured up a brook to a waterfall and found a lovely spot for reading.

Raquel Lanseros, 'Ese lejos tan cerca'

In the summer, I took another boat for a ride, this time on the fjord, and went ashore on a small promontory. This journey was eventful, as I hope to explain in a later blogpost, but for the present purpose the main point is that I also brought with me a book to read. Strictly speaking, the promontory itself was not a new place for reading, as I had been here before, but this time the oppressive sun drove me and my youngest sister’s dog into the refuge of some shady foliage, and after a refreshing swim I lay down to read Old Norse chivalric romances translated into modern Norwegian. 

Birgit Nyborg (ed. and trl.), Tre riddersagaer

Reading by lists       

Each year, I steer my reading in accordance with several lists. Aside from the ongoing attempt to read a book from every country, I also aim to read at least three books in four categories: a) academic books; b) books by Norwegian authors; c) books by Nobel laureates in literature; and d) books from a reading-list I put together during my first year at university.

Due to the pace of this year’s reading – dominated in large part by editorial tasks that tired my brain too much for reading as much as I would have liked – I was unable to complete this particular goal. However, some headway was gained in each of the categories. 

Raquel Lanseros, El sol y las otras estrellas 

Diktet om min Cid (translated by Eva M. Lorenzen)

The year started auspiciously with the completion of the Norwegian translation of Cantar de mio Cid, translated by Eva M. Lorenzen as Diktet om min Cid, which I bought during my BA studies and have been meaning to read for years. This was, however, the only book from my old to-read list which I was able to complete. 

When it came to academic books, I was much more fortunate, and I feel greatly enriched by the various titles I managed to read as I was doing research for various articles and mini-projects. For instance, Niamh Wycherley’s The Cult of Relics in Early Medieval Ireland was a particularly interesting foray into a part of medieval Latin Christendom that I keep feeling I should know more about, and this book was a joy to read. I was also happy to finally get an opportunity to read Audun Dybdahl’s monograph on the runic calendars of Norway and Sweden, Primstaven i lys av helgenkulten (runic calendars in light of the cult of saints). I was glad to be able to prioritise this book both because it is an interesting topic on a source type that bridges the medieval storyworld with the early modern one, but also because Dybdahl was one of my lecturers at university. As he passed five years ago, it felt like a fitting if belated tribute to his work. 

Niamh Wycherley, The Cult of Relics in Early Medieval Ireland

Dybdahl’s monograph also ticked the box for a third category, namely books by Norwegian authors. For much of my life, I have prioritised non-Norwegian authors, and as a consequence I feel I do not know the literature of my primary homeland as much as I ought to do. The upside of this neglect is that I now have an excuse to roam widely within the vast flora that is Norwegian literary history. To this category, I also added Olav Bø’s short monograph on Norwegian feast-days, Norske årshøgtider, which examines traditions and superstitions that have survived in some form or other since the Middle Ages. A third example from this category is Johannes Heggland’s Folket i dei kvite båtane (The people in the white boats) from 1962, which is a children’s book set in early Bronze Age Norway, and which aimed to bring a distant part of the Norwegian past to life to young children based on archaeological findings available at the time.

As for Nobel laureates, I only managed to read one this year: Albert Camus’ The Outsider, translated by Joseph Laredo. While a very interesting window into colonial Algeria from the vantage point of the colonising people, and a very easy read, it was also an annoying reminder of prejudices that should be of the past but which are still very much of the present.

Olav Bø, Norske årshøgtider

Johannes Heggland, Folket i dei kvite båtane

Binging sagas

Towards the end of October, I picked up pace in my reading thanks to an earlier discovery that a five-volume set of translations of Icelandic sagas into Norwegian has been made available online. Ordinarily, I do not like reading on a screen – and the fact that I have done so quite often this year is partly why my sense of my own reading is rather muddled. However, at the end of October, this particular medium suited me very well as I was travelling and had not brought enough books sufficiently small to make for suitable travel reading. Additionally, a lot of the sagas are rather short, so at a point when I was feeling hopelessly behind in my annual reading, these tales were perfect for catching up and I devoured fifteen in the course of two months, with a handful others having been finished in the course of spring and summer. This became a veritable binge, both because I read so many of them in such a short time, but also because I eventually could not keep track of all the plots and all the characters once I had finished a given saga, partly because of the speed but also because several of the plots of the sagas share many of the same features, and because there are numerous characters in them. Despite the overindulgence, it was also very satisfying because as a medievalist I have been in arrears with my saga reading for years, and it has been immensely rewarding to finally fill so many of these gaps. 

 

Science and fiction  

Another theme that emerged for this year’s reading was science fiction. This is another genre where I feel I have a lot of catching-up to do, but I have done so rather circuitously. Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra by C. S. Lewis are unsurprising contributions to this theme, seeing as they are classics, albeit not necessarily widely famous in the current age. A more unconventional choice was the 1945 Norwegian novel Atomene spiller (the atoms are playing) by Hans Christian Sandbeck, which describes the world of the year 2250, and which evolves into a meditation on the perennial nature of human violence. What fascinates me the most about this novel is that it was one of the first books to be published after the liberation of Norway on May 8, in a time of general shortage. Moreover, it provides a reflection on the horrors of nuclear warfare at a remarkably early date, seeing as it was published only a few months after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Hans Christian Sandbeck, Atomene spiller

Most of my reading within the theme of science fiction has taken place within a medievalist framework. I read E. R. Truitt’s excellent monograph Medieval Robots from 2015, which deals with automata in Latin Christian literary culture, and which provides several great examples of how the concept of immaterial objects with an agency seemingly of their own fascinated the imagination of medieval writers and readers. It was thanks to this book that I also picked up the collection of three chivalric sagas translated into modern Norwegian which I had purchased several years ago. I was particularly pleased with delving into these medieval manifestations of science in fiction, since the topic dovetails nicely with utopian thinking, which was one of the main themes of last year’s reading. 

E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots

Towards the end of the year, I also added two further books to my repository of science fiction. First up was Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons, which is a wonderful adventure story following a natural historian in a fictional world modelled on Regency and Victorian England. Secondly, I read John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes from 1953, which is both fascinating for keeping its flavour of its age without being dated and also an eerie novel to read in an age of advancing climate change. This novel is also delightful for having one of the most functional married couples of fiction, at least based on my limited experience.

Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons

John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes

A meeting in Salamanca

In March, I spent a few days in Salamanca for a conference. This is one of my favourite cities, and an important literary location. Aside from being the setting of Lazarillo de Tormes, typically regarded as the first picaresque novel, it is also the workplace of one of my favourite poets, Maribel Andrés Llamero. I have been in touch with Maribel for several years, and this year we were finally able to meet up in person. She kindly signed my copy of her previous poetry collection – Los inútiles (the useless ones) – which had bought the year before in Santiago de Compostela. As an homage to Maribel, I subsequently crossed the river Tormes – which I had never got around to do during my previous trips to Salamanca – and stopped halfway to read some of her poems with the city’s skyline as a backdrop. As Maribel’s poems have enabled me to connect more deeply with my native landscapes for several years, it was a particular joy to also weave my own history of reading more tightly to the city of Salamanca through her work. 

Maribel Andrés Llamero, Los inútiles

The river Tormes

Lazarillo de Tormes and his blind master

Sundry highlights    

Due to my bibliophilia, I encounter book- and reading-related highlights in many forms, and some of these are collected here to give a more expansive overview of this year in reading.

Book-buying in Hamburg, which included this German translation of an Italian Donald Duck parody of Der Nibelungelied. I bought the copy even though I have copies of this story in both Italian and Norwegian already.

 

Visiting the university library of Salamanca during the conference, and being shown a fourteenth-century copy of Legenda Aurea, as well as a fourteenth-century copy of Liber de Sancti Jacobi. 

My haul from three weeks’ travel. 

Discovering Bergen public library’s tribute to the author Tor Åge Bringsværd, who passed away in 2025, and who was one of the most beloved literary voices of the past fifty years.

 

Working on an article draft that allowed me to delve deeper into the cult of Saint James of Compostela.

Myriam Moscona, León de Lidia

Trondheim

Nils Holger Petersen et. al. (eds.), Symbolic Identity and the Cultural Memory of Saints

Odense

Returning to old haunts in Trondheim and Odense. 

Researching a book bound in manuscript fragments at the Odense Cathedral School.

Working on descriptions of manuscript fragments at the University of Southern Denmark, the place where I got my PhD some eight years ago.

Breviarium Othoniense (1482) 

København Kongelige Bibliotek LN 29 4to

Breviarium Othoniense (1497) 

(København Kongelige Bibliotek LN 30

Abbo of Fleury, Passio Sancti Eadmundi

København Kongelige Bibliotek GKS 1588 4to

Researching at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. I was finally able to see the first to editions of the Odense Breviary – from 1482 and 1497 – in the paper, having pored over their pages digitally for years. I also revisited an eleventh-century manuscript containing a copy of Passio Sancti Eadmundi by Abbo of Fleury, as well as the earliest known copy of the liturgical office for the feast of Saint Edmund.

 

Returning to the University Library of Southern Denmark to work on a fifteenth-century collection of saints’ legends.

Mikael Manøe Bjerregaard et.al. (eds.), Royal Blood

Receiving the editor and contributor copy of the volume Royal Blood.

Related blogposts (2025) 

Reading-spots, part 6 

A three-week book haul 

Reading-spots, part 7 

A lesson in similarities 

Reading-spots, part 8 

Reading-spots, part 9 

Synchronicities of reading, part 1 

Histories from home, part 6 - a quiet reminder

 

The centre of my native village, Hyen, is a hamlet called Straume. The name comes from “straum”, which is one of several words in Norwegian that mean “river” or “flow of water”, and refers to the short but salmon-rich river which flows past the farmstead which for a long time was the only settlement in the hamlet. The river in question is one of two rivers that separate the mainland from a small island, which is called “Straumsholmen”. “Holme” means small island, so the full name can be translated as “the small island by the river. In our time, this small island hosts the sole remaining shop of the village, the church, the school, the care home, the community hall, the gym, a football pitch, and a number of residential houses, including the one built by my paternal grandparents in the late 1940s.

 

At present, the residents of Straumsholmen are primarily middle class. No one on the island keeps animals any longer, and the old farmstead of Straume remains the sole farm in the area. This state of affairs, however, is a relatively recent shift, and the number of modern residential houses can make it difficult to grasp the slightly older history of this hamlet, a history in which wealth was divided among the farmers of Straume and the shopkeepers on the island. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, a few smaller farmsteads were leased from the wealthy farm, and eventually, over the next few decades, the hamlet of Straume became the home of several families who came to buy the land on which they lived. These families belonged to a type of rural farmers called “husmenn”, literally “housemen”, whose relationship with the landlord could be similar to that of sharecroppers or crofters in the anglophone world. The term is difficult to translate, however, because the social context of the Western Norwegian fjords is rather different in its hierarchies and practices than rural England or Scotland. Moreover, the housemen of the fjords are often referred to as “bygselhusmenn”, with “bygsel” meaning the act of settling through clearing the ground and erecting buildings. These families had some livestock, a small patch of ground, and supplemented their income through work either for the landlord or in other ways. Fodder for the livestock was often collected by helping out at other farms, or a family could be allowed to harvest from part of someone else’s land. 

 

Although my description of this rural class is rather brief and superfluous, the main point is that these new settlements that emerged both on the island and on the mainland from around 1900 onwards were inhabited by people who were often poor, whose social power was often dependent on local village elites, and who lived a much more precarious life than most because they initially did not own the land on which they lived – in short, their livelihood could be taken from them in a heartbeat. 

Straumsholmen, seen from the bottom end of the fjord

Today, the village centre does not contain many traces of this social stratification and the harsh reality of everyday existence that presided over the housemen. However, during daily dogwalks I have come to realise that there is one part of the area which serves as a quiet yet forceful reminder of this aspect of our village’s past. The part in question is the other river which makes Straumsholmen an island. This is a small river which does not always run, of a type which in Norwegian is called “løk” (not to be confused with the word “lauk” which means “onion”, which is commonly also spelled the same way in modern writing). In our dialect, both the river and the surrounding area is called “Løkjen” in our local dialect, meaning simply “the small, trickling river”. This small river is crossed by two bridges, and at the point of the second crossing the river appears mainly like a heap of boulders left from the Ice Age, lying inconveniently at the junction of fresh water and the fjord. A few buildings are located nearby, such as a well-kept boathouse and the local care home.

 

When you stand on the bridge, however, you will see that there are some stones that have been placed there by human effort, and there is a dent in the shore with logs of sallow-wood placed breadthwise across the bottom. Slightly beyond that dent can be seen the foundations of a torn-down house, foundations made from coarsely cut stones, which have probably been collected after one of the many erratic boulders that once littered the island had been blown up. This little corner contains an important clue about the earlier social stratification of the village, and of the plight of the housemen. 

Løkjen

As can be seen in the pictures, the waterway is not very convenient. The pictures are taken on high tide, and it is possible to navigate a rowboat through some of the rocks and into the fjord. When the sea is ebbing, however, it soon becomes difficult to get through, so all passage has to be planned carefully or one is forced to get ashore elsewhere and wait until the tide returns. In this place, however, four families were given the right to keep their boats, one of which was my paternal grandparents.

 

The white boathouse on the left-hand side of the picture is still in use, and it is well-kept, belonging to a family that bought the property from the housemen who first leased it from the main farm. The foundation of rough stone on the other side of the river belongs to my family, and supported the boathouse which my grandfather used, and which my family dismantled in 2023 because it was on the brink of collapsing. One other family kept its boat on that stretch of land – although I do not know exactly where, as the shoreline was altered when the main road was upgraded some decades ago. Another family has the right to store boats on the other side of the boulders behind my grandparents’ boathouse, but no storage facility currently remains.

 

As might be clear from the photographs, this is not a good location for keeping boats, partly because of the lack of general space, and partly because of the difficult passage. Since the river carries so little water, those who are going on the fjord to fish or collect hay from the farms along the fjord are dependent on the movements of tide and ebb. This area was given to the housemen because the owners of the main farm were not interested in using it themselves, as they had access to the fjord elsewhere. Since housemen could not be choosers, they accepted the locations, and over the decades much effort was put into making it a useful and suitable working space. My grandparents’ boathouse was built in the 1950s, and it was still in use – although badly dilapidated – in the early 1990s. The white boathouse remains in use, but that use remains severely hampered by the erratic boulders left in the small river. 

The socioeconomic context in which these places for boat-keeping were established is now part of the ever-receding past. My family, for instance, has long since moved our boat for the fjord to a different place of anchorage, one independent of the tide, and so have most of the other families who once were housemen in the hamlet. This patch of the small river serves nonetheless to remind us – by its retained inaccessibility – of how social hierarchies were once much more severe, and how social class meant something different in the early twentieth century. This is part of my family’s history, and part of the histories of countless families in the western fjords, and we do well in not forgetting it. 

Synchronicities of reading, part 1 - garum in Lisbon

 

Life is full of synchronicitites, episodes in one's life that bear some kind of resemblance to one another, or that provide a sense of symmetry or of patterns. A reading life is particularly full of them, as the variables at play are much more numerous than in a life where reading plays no part at all, simply because reading allows a person to encounter more topics and travel by page to a wide variety of locations, which provides more elements that can be found to rhyme somehow. I have experienced quite a few of them so far, but I was particularly struck by one such synchronicity this Christmas, one which was centred on Lisbon and which involved garum. 

 

The Norwegian translation of Asterix album no. 41, Asterix in Lusitania

(Text by Fabrice Caro, or Fabcaro, art by Didier Conrad, translation by Svein Erik Søland)

This Christmas, I was reading the latest Asterix album, Asterix in Lusitania, by Fabcaro and Conrad. The biannual publication of the new albums produced after the death of Albert Uderzo in 2009 has become subsumed into the great Norwegian tradition of Christmas comic books, and the album was part of this year's haul. The story revolves around an attempt to prove the innocence of a wrongfully condemned producer of garum, a type of fish sauce, who is accused to trying to poison Julius Caesar. The climax of the scene occurs in Lisbon, and the cover of the album invokes a Lisbon view so characteristic that I was immediately brought back to my trip there last spring. And as I was reading the story, I was again brought back to Lisbon because of the garum. 

Lisbon streetscape near the Castle of São Jorge

View of the Tagus River

Translating the Relics of St. James, edited by Antón M. Pazos (2016)

While I was in Lisbon last year, I was reading up on the medieval cult of Saint James the Elder. I had travelled from Santiago de Compostela where I had spent five days as a kind of research-tourist, and I had brought a collection of articles with me on the journey. The collection included articles on the Compostelan cult, as well as a few texts that sought to elucidate the context of the historical James, the fisherman who became one of the twelve apostles. One of these articles delved into the fishing industry on the Sea of Galilee, part of which included the production of garum. This was not the first time I had heard of this fish sauce, but I had never read about it at lenght, nor had encountered it within the context of the wider Roman world. 

I read this and other of the book's interesting articles at what became my regular café during my brief sojourn in the Portuguese capital, where I drank black tea with lemon and devoured delicious local cookies - and where I was mistaken for the Portuguese politician Rui Tavares. It was therefore a surprising realisation as I was reading the latest Asterix album during the darkness of a Norwegian December that this was the second time in two years that the elements of garum and Lisbon had converged in my life. The great benefit of this particular synchronicity was that I could relive those lovely Lisbon days thanks to the memories spurred on by a key plot device in a comic book. 

Beer and climate history - a brief case study from the Western Norwegian fjords

 

This week, my parents and I have been brewing the traditional Christmas ale. It is one of my favourite parts of the Christmas season, because it is the continuation of old, traditional knowledge passed down and adapted through the generations, and because the end result tastes great. In Norway, brewing ale for Christmas goes back to at least the twelfth century, and might have its origin in pre-Christian practices. The ale that we brew nowadays, however, has little in common with the medieval product, and although the practice itself is old, the methods, the equipment, and the ingredients that we use now are very different from what we should expect to find in medieval ale. In other words, although I appreciate that this annual tradition maintains a link with previous generations, I cherish our ale for what it is now, not as a replica of a medieval product.  

The first glass the day after the bottling

The brewing of beer takes place over several days. This year, we started on a Tuesday when I went gathering juniper twigs higher up in the valley where my ancestral farm is located. The juniper is the main flavouring agent, and this year I was fortunate to find green and fresh twigs with a lot of berries on them. These berries enhance the flavour, and are always sought-after when brewing. That same evening, my father began to boil the fifteen litres of water that we needed for this year's batch. The next day, I went to the farm and helped my parents mix the various ingredients together, making sure to add the yeast at exactly 32 degrees centigrade, and to pour the liquid of boiled juniper twigs through a sufficiently thick cloth that we might filter out the needles and other debris. 

The juniper twigs after the liquid has been poured into the barrel

Each year, we do things slightly differently than the year before - usually not by design, but because there are enough variables that we might change things up without being aware of it. For instance, I do not remember whether we poured the sugar in before the malt extract last year, like we did this year. These differences do not impact the ale in any noticeable manner, so we do not keep too strict a watch over the minor movements of the process. 

However, this year we did one thing differently, and that was my father starting the boiling of the water the day before the mixed the ingredients, so that it would cool down in time. Normally, the water would be boiled earlier the same day. The reason why he did things differently this year, was a stark reminder of how such minor occurrences as brewing a batch of Christmas ale can reflect much larger historical contexts. When I first started learning how to brew ale, we would place the keg of boiled water in a snowdrift outside and wait for the temperatures to get sufficiently low. As my father noted, "now we don't have snow anymore". This was in the sense that we now no longer have reliable, long-term, steady supplies of snow in December, due to the climate change and global warming. Decembers are rainy and wet, with infrequent bouts of snow that is typically washed away by subsequent squalls. The climate affects how we do things, and the traditional practice came to stand in sharp relief with the new realities in which that practice was maintained. We have to adapt and prepare things differently, because the climactic reality in which we live has changed dramatically from what previous generations were used to. In this way, climate history can also be understood through such common, minor things like brewing ale. 

The ale fermenting

Collegium Medievale, vol. 38.1 (2025)

 

Normally, I only advertise my own publications on this blog, but the present post in an exception to the rule, because the publication in question is of particular importance to me personally. 

Earlier this year, I took over as editor-in-chief of the Norwegian journal Collegium Medievale, an interdisciplinary journal that publishes articles related to medieval studies across all available disciplines in both English and Scandinavian languages. The journal is in open access, and serves as an opportunity to bring together scholarship from both well-established scholars and younger talent. Ordinarily, one issue is published each year, although some years there is an additional special issue with its own guest editors. 

Four days ago, on December 12, the ordinary issue was published, namely Collegium Medievale, vol. 38.1. The issue marks the culmination of a year of editorial duties, and it is a labour for which I am indebted to my co-editors who are all seasoned and experienced members of the journal, and without whose effort I would have been unable to see this issue through the publishing process. 

The present issue, therefore, is a testament to the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, and I am very grateful to be able to present the first issue for which I have been responsible. Even though this is not strictly speaking my publication, I am nonetheless proud of what we editors have managed to put together. 

Histories from home, part 5 - a transitory monument

 

Human history is difficult to preserve in the fjords. Most of the buildings constructed in the past were made of wood, and the stones of the foundations were often repurposed in new buildings once the main structure had fallen into disuse, disrepair, or been lost to fire or other disasters. There are few monuments to be found, and most remnants are scattered and overgrown, while some surviving relics stay put far longer than can be expected. Sometimes, moreover, you find examples of people leaning into the transitory nature of our efforts and make their marks in the landscape in the face of an overwhelming likelihood that what they build will be torn down within the year. This blogpost features one such example, namely a small cairn placed in a rather unlikely place. 

In my native village, Hyen, in the Western Norwegian fjords, we often find cairns in the mountains. These are long-surviving markers to guide shepherds or other travellers, and sometimes they are of more recent make, being erected for mountaineers and serving as a gathering point or a point of orientation. Some cairns, however, are made with a seeming desire to make a mark in the landscape, even in places where the landscape is too mutable to support any such long-term history. 

This summer, I found one such precariously positioned cairn in a scree in a promontory on the western side of the fjord of my village. The promontory is called "Bjønnasvøra" in the local dialect, which translates to "Bear gorge". The name is a testament to the bears that once roamed the mountainsides of the village before they were hunted into local extinciton about a century ago. Bjønnasvøra is one of the most mutable locations in the village, because the gorge that empties onto the promontory usually brings huge avalanches of snow into the landscape below. With the changing of the climate and the less snowy winters, the gorge often brings rockslides rather than avalanches due to flash floods. Every year, the first landing on this promontory is followed by a quick survey to see what has changed since last year. One of the most dramatic changes came in 2024, when rockslides caused the blocking of one of the two riverbeds on the promontory, meaning that the water pouring from the gorge was now redirected to the farther bay only. This situation was, in turn, altered sometime this year, when new rockslides enabled the hither riverbed to flow again.  

View from Bjønnasvøra towards the village centre

Bjønnasvøra, towards the eponymous gorge

It was in the ever-changing scree created by millennia of avalanches and rockslides that I came upon the aforementioned cairn. It was placed on a boulder which in turn was mostly drowned in smaller rocks, and consisted only of four large rocks stacked on top of one another. I do not know who erected it, but if they were locals they would be aware that the monument was bound to fall with the next major rockslide or avalanche. Yet I do understand the impulse of erecting such transitory monuments, and I have done similar things myself from time to time. Because such markers as this are made for one's own pleasure, practically in the face of the forces of change, just out of the curiosity to see whether it can survive, and with the ambition of making a mark on the landscape. This kind of structure, however, is a form of that ambition which has been channelled into a healthy impulse that does not destroy the landscape in the process, and which symbolises the inexorably transitory nature of history and human endeavour in the fjords.