Travelling by page

One of my mother's uncles was known, at least in the family, for saying that he travelled on the map. He was a knowledgeable man who spent very little time outside his native Norway, yet who knew more about the world than most of his neighbours by virtue of having perused maps and atlases. The more common expression, of course, is armchair travel, but I usually tend to prefer the former expression, perhaps because it sounds more grandiose, or perhaps because its conceit imitates more closely the act of travelling. 

Even though I have travelled a bit, I have covered the greatest distances by pages, either in atlases or in texts, and I have loved this kind of travel ever since I learned to read. I have, however, noticed that now my opportunities for travel are very restricted and I am unlikely to go far this side of summer, at the very least, I seem to have gravitated towards travelogues of different kinds since the beginning of December. This appetite for vicarious travel has resulted in the following little selection, which includes historical sources, a monograph about a historical source, and a novel. What I find particularly fitting about this selection is that the historical travelogues - namely the accounts of Ibn Fadlan, Benjamin of Tudela and Odoric of Pordenone - were from their very beginning aimed at providing readers who themselves had not and probably could not travel these routs themselves a way to get a sense of the marvels and the sights in far-away places. That these books continue to serve this purpose about a millennium later is a testament to, among other things, the enduring pleasure we take, as human beings, in travelling by all means possible, be it by ship, by horseback, by airplane, or by page. While I have a different view of the world that the first readers of these historical accounts, as well as their authors, I feel an unmistakable kinship with those who moved through these lines and pages in order to live or relive journeys to distant and exciting places. It is clear to me that some things do not change, even in the course of a thousand years.   

 

Histories from home, part 2 - a bridge at a shift in time

 

Whenever I am home in my native village for an extended period, I gravitate towards the various historical remains that lie scattered throughout the landscape. These are not remains of great age or of any spectacularly unique importance, but vestiges of a past lifestyle that is receding ever more quickly from our own lived experiences. Because so much of what has been built in the fjords has been made out of wood, so little of it survive beyond a hundred years, with the occasional exception in the case of houses or barns. But the testaments to the old agrarian life, or the old patterns of working and living off the land, are often lost after a few generations, typically because they fall into disuse. 

An important stage in this process occurred in the period c.1950-c.1980, when Norwegian farming became increasingly mechanised, to the point where horses became obsolete. This change in equipment, so to speak, had wide-reaching consequences. The heavy machines required flat surfaces, so while previous generations had favoured slopes for harvesting grass for hay - since the grass could be rolled rather than carried - this kind of landscape now became impractical. Likewise, the old infrastructure became outdated, roads broad enough for horse and sled became too narrow for tractors, and bridges that could carry the weight of a full sled of, say, hay or timber were not strong enough as tractors began to gain weight and size. With the change towards a more mechanised agrarian life, scores of buildings, bridges, various solutions from the life before the shift turned into relics of a bygone past. 

This February, I visited one of these old relics, as my parents and I went hiking up a stretch of a frozen river. The stretch of the river is located where there used to be a summer farm until about 1950-60, which we now use as holiday houses. I do not know when the place was first used as a summer farm, but the starting point goes a long way back, and both sides of the river were used (as is only to be expected). We no longer know when the first river crossing was made across this stretch of the river, and I think it is fair to say that it has been long lost to time. For the farmers currently needing to cross the river, there is a new bridge in stone, concrete and supporting beams of metal, made sometime in the 1980s in order to accommodate new tractors and heavier loads. Before this one, however, there was another one mostly built in wood and stone, but with some concrete reinforcements from a repair job in the 1970s.

This old bridge crossed the river at a wider part of the river, divided into sections and crossing small islands on its way to the other bank. As it fell into disuse, it also fell into disrepair, and stones from its piers were taken away and used for other purposes. Today, only three piers remain - the least accessible ones - two of which are covered by a log with boards that still cling together in spite of time and weather. We rarely approach his historical relic any longer, mostly because now that the river is crossed elsewhere, there is little to attract someone to that particular part of the river. However, now that the river had frozen and we were passing right beside it on our journey upstream, we did get an excellent chance of seeing it up close, to get a sense of its materiality, the building techniques, and the vestiges of the repair job in the 1970s. It was a lovely opportunity, and a reminder of how low-key, yet no less wondrous, our historical monuments tend to be in the agrarian fjords, and how the vicissitudes of time have turned them into hidden or tucked-away little gems that require some efforts to find. 

(This is the second instalment of an ongoing series. For the first part, see here.)

A change in the weather - Cathedra Petri as a seasonal reference point

Today is the feast of Cathedra Petri, or the Chair of St. Peter, a liturgical celebration about which I have written before (here). This feast belongs to the annual cycle as laid out in the liturgical year of the Latin Church, it is a feast that celebrates the legendary founding of the bishopric of Antioch by Saint Peter, and it serves to remind Latin Christians that it is Saint Peter who is the first apostolic successor, i.e. pope, and the forerunner to the popes of Rome. 

In the medieval annual cycle, liturgy and manual labour were intertwined in the church calendar, in which specific labours were assigned to specific months, following the rhythm of agrarian life. In this way, the feasts of the church year became important reference points for farmers to talk about the annual cycle, and the calendar provided reference points when making plans for the work that needed to be done. 

This coupling of the liturgical year and the cycle of labours on the land was disseminated across Latin Christendom, including Scandinavia. Here, the feast became known colloquially as Pederstol, a literal translation of the Latin name. This date, Pederstol, remained in the collective memory of Scandinavians even after the Protestant Reformation changed the framework of religious life and did away with the feasts of the saints. It is a testament to the potential for longevity contained in such deeply embedded cultural practices that even my grandmother (born in 1912) and my parents (born in the 1950s) grew up with Pederstol as a reference point in the yearly cycle. I first learned about this from my grandmother, and my parents are still, to this day, using the term as a way to orientate plants. 

In recent folk memory, as exemplified by my family, Pederstol is seen as the transition from winter to spring. It is not necessarily so that spring sets in at this particular date - it might still very wintry outside - but a change is beginning, and thaw might have started to work its power in spite of appearances. For this reason, some types of work that depended on snow or ice - like transporting timber or hay from the sheds far away from the farm - could be deemed to risky to undertake. The ice might not be trusted, and the snow might be found too soft and rotten to provide a solid foundation for the sled. It was not necessarily that winter was over, but that winter was less reliably wintry. 

In the present times, when weather patterns are changing due to global warming and the old points of references become superannuated, Pederstol remains a relevant feature. Yesterday, my parents and I went for a trip on the ice on the lake behind the house of my late grandparents. The thaw that had set in a few days ago had separated the ice from land, but once you got onto the ice it remained perfectly safe, as long as you are careful and pay attention to the patterns of change. When we got back, my mother commented that this could not be done after Pederstol, meaning that it would be too risky, and the ice would possibly be too weak, disintegrating from within with changes in the temperature. Today, on Pederstol itself, I woke up to a grey mist and a hard rain falling on the sheet of ice still lingering in its fought-for place, and even though it remains safe at least today, it would be very risky to try it. Pederstol is still a good point of orientation, therefore, for deciding what activities to do.  

 

Palimpsest landscapes

 

From the last half of January until the middle of this week, my native village has been held in the grip of temperatures between -10 and -16. This has been a period of no new precipitation and stable conditions, without any significant fluctuations in the weather. This stability has allowed most of the lakes and waterways to freeze solidly and thus allowed various animals to use them as thoroughfares. Mostly, these wanderings happen at night, and we are left with the various tracks and spoors in the morning, providing a detailed and legible chronicle of the past night to whomever chooses to go onto the ice and enter into this quiet world so teeming with half-visible life. 

Since no new snow has fallen, the old tracks do not get covered but collapse slowly, taking enough time for new tracks to be placed around them, which in turn allows us to extract a tenuous and vague chronology of our nightly neighbours. In this period, my family and I have explored several sections of some of the lakes and rivers closest to us, and these journeys have revealed to us landscapes where tracks old and new are scribbled across the snow in a continuous and poorly executed palimpsest. In some cases, we have been able to keep an eye on the changes, and note where new tracks have been added, while in other cases we see how the scribbles intertwine and erase the previous layer. This has been a perennial source of joy throughout the past month, and below are some examples from the palimpsest landscapes of the village, in which we see that although the valleys and riverbanks seem uninhabited from a distance, this is merely an illusion.  

Two foxes

The tracks of my kicksled to the left, foxes to the right

Tracks from a dancing crow, crossed by the tracks of a fox

Mostly hares, with the occasional fox

Tracks showing the stage for a boxing match between two hares

Tracks of a hare crossed by a fox

The slide of an otter, crossed by the tracks of a fox