Assembling my Oslo library

 

Whenever I stay somewhere over a longer period of time, I tend to start nesting by assembling a little library, books that I like to keep within reach, or that I prefer to keep at home rather than at work, for various reasons. In September, when I moved to Oslo, I was fortunate that my apartment includes a quite spacious book case whose shelves I immediately began to stack with books that I had brought with me. Since September, some books have been added and some have been taken away, but there is one particular shelf that I have come to understand as the most representative of my time in Oslo so far. This shelf is a hodge-podge of different things: Books I have read before coming to Oslo, books I have read while in Oslo, books I have acquired in Oslo, books I have read and books that I plan to read (whether I read them in Oslo or not). Since I am a book-hoarder and an avid bibliomaniac, the selection does not follow any particular pattern and it does not reveal anything particularly interesting. Nor is it intended as a way to show off, because I have to admit that not all these books are mine, and not all these books have been read by me at the time of writing this blogpost. But this shelf is essentially the core of my Oslo library, which I will continue to alter and expand in the next three years of me working here.

Contrasts in a reading life

 
In a blogpost from last year, I touched upon the issue of contrasts that appear in the course of a reading life. Such contrasts are common in most reading lives, but when consciously seeking out books from every country of the world, some contrasts are perhaps bound to be particularly noticeable, particularly forceful. This Easter, I was struck by just such a contrast while staying in my native village, where I was finishing the novel Beka Lamb, written by Belizean author Zee Edgell, published in 1982 and recounting a turning point in the life of the teenage girl who is the novel's eponymous protagonist. The novel contains very vivid descriptions of the tropical life of what - at the time of the events in the novel - was a British colony on the edge of the Caribbean. Zee Edgell masterfully evokes the sweltering heat and the ways that the Belizeans deal with that heat, making it part of the backdrop for the psychological struggles that unite the universal aspects of being a teenager with the particulars of being a teenager in pre-independence Belize. 

The tropical climate of Belize was very far removed - both literally and figuratively - from my own situation as I was reading the novel. When I arrived from Oslo in the late afternoon of Palm Sunday, the snow had been falling, although not staying long on the ground, and while what snow had gathered in the valleys disappeared in the course of a few days, the mountaintops were still white and wintry, providing a backdrop as inescapable to me as the tropical heat was to the characters of Beka Lamb. The difference between the sweltering Caribbean greenery as described by Zee Edgell and occasional snow-chilled gusts of wind that met me whenever I would move out of doors served to fasten the tropical scenes in my mind, and I like to think that the contrast helped me immerse myself in the world of the novel in a way I might not otherwise have had. It is this function of contrasting surroundings that I have come to appreciate as an aide-mémoire when encountering an unknown or lesser known world through its literature. Since I, sadly, cannot travel and read every book in the location it describes, I sometimes have to find other ways of bringing those locations more clearly into focus. In part, this effort of vivifying the scenery of a distant land is helped by reading other books from the same culture or the same geography, making references to hallmarks of these regions more familiar, something that can quickly be connected to previous readings. However, sometimes this effort is helped by contrasts, such as the contrasts between sweltering Caribbean palm forests and the black-speckled mountains covered in a fiery white against the cloudless blue of a Norwegian April.    

The Eve of St. Mark - a poem by Geoffrey Hill

 
As today is the feast of Saint Mark the Evangelist, I present you with the sonnet 'The Eve of St Mark' by Geoffrey Hill. The sonnet is the twelfth and penultimate part of the cycle 'An apology for the revival of Christian architecture in England', whose title is taken from an architectural treatise by Augustus Welby Pugin, published in 1843. A digitised copy of the book can be found here. The sonnet cycle was published in Hill's poetry collection Tenebrae from 1979, and the entire cycle is available at poetryfoundation.org.


The Eve of St Mark 

Stroke the small silk with your whispering hands,
godmother; nod and nod from the half-gloom;
broochlight intermittent between the fronds,
the owl immortal in its crystal dome.

Along the mantelpiece veined lustres trill,
the clock discounts us with a telling chime.
Familiar ministrants, clerks-of-appeal,
burnish upon the threshold of the dream:

churchwardens in wing-collars bearing scrolls
of copyhold well-tinctured and well-tied.
Your photo-albums loved by the boy-king

preserve in sepia waterglass the souls
 of distant cousins, virgin till they died,
and the lost delicate suitors who could sing.

Saint George at Sanderum

 

Today is the feast of Saint George, the martyr most famous for his slaying of a dragon, and who might be one of the most famous saints in the modern cultural landscape. As I have explored in a previous blogpost, the motif of the dragonslayer - which has had an immense impact on post-medieval iconography - appears to have become the dominant rendition of Saint George sometime towards the end of the thirteenth century. Exactly what prompted this shift from focussing on his elaborate martyrdom to highlighting his victory over the dragon remains unclear. There are several explanations that might have contributed to this development, such as the impact of the crusader movement, or the establishment of chivalric orders. One factor that is likely to have contributed significantly towards this change in emphasis might be the legacy of Jacobus de Vorgaine's Legenda Aurea, a collection of saints' legends that was translated into several vernaculars from the fourteenth century onwards, and which brought the cult of Saint George more strongly into a non-ecclesiastical sphere. It is likely - although not conclusively established - that with segments of lay society having a greater impact on the cult of Saint George, the motif of the dragonslayer might have become more appealing than the image of George tortured on a wheel, his bones broken in the manner of an executed criminal. 

Whatever the reason for the shift towards Saint George as the dragonslayer, by the end of the Middle Ages this image was widely distributed and rendered by artists throughout Latin Christendom. For this year's feast of Saint George, I give you one late-medieval example from the church of Sanderum in Denmark, where a heavily-restored Saint George can be seen piercing his lance into the dragon in the arch dividing the choir from the nave. The image is most likely from the fifteenth-century, and the saint is shown in contemporary chivalric gear - albeit an idealised rendition. Saint George's cult in Denmark is most likely a consequence of impulses from Germany, where George was one of the most common members of the collegium of the fourteen holy helpers, although the constellation of this collegium was subject to local variations.