The Bridge of Fire - a poem by James Elroy Flecker

 
To close this month, I briefly give you the short version of James Ellroy Flecker's wonderful poem "The Bridge of Fire", of which I was reminded one early Oslo morning following a fresh and heavy snowfall. 

The Bridge of Fire

Between the Pedestals of Night and Morning
Between red death and radiant desire
With not one sound of triumph or of warning
Stands the great sentry on the Bridge of Fire.
O transient soul, thy thought with dreams adorning,
Cast down the laurel, and unstring the lyre:
the wheels of Time are turning, turning, turning,
The slow stream channels deep and doth not tire.
Gods on their bridge above
Whispering lies and love
Shall mock your passage down the sunless river
Which, rolling all it streams,
shall take you, king of dreams,
Unthroned and unapproachable for ever
To where the kings who dreamed of old
Whiten in habitations monumental cold

- James Elroy Flecker 

The short version can be found here. 

The long version can be found here, together with the rest of the poetry collection The Bridge of Fire from 1907.

Reading-spots, part 2

 
In the previous blogpost, I began a new series of posts which consists of short presentations of spots where I have had memorable reading-experiences, or spots where reading has made that spot memorable. This blogpost is the second instalment in the series, and it continues from the first one, in that it records a reading-spot which I encountered during the quarantine in my native village of Hyen in June 2020. 

As I spent some time every day walking about in the landscape surrounding the cabin where I was staying during quarantine, and as I had no other immediate obligations that dictated the rhythm of my day, I decided to explore some parts of the area more thoroughly than I would do in ordinary circumstances. My family had told me about a cave - generously speaking, as it is more of an overhang - that had been carved out of the bedrock somewhere along the brook than ran close by the cabin. I went in search for this cave by following the brook on its meandering way, and I found a little nook, easily overlooked when passing by or when approaching from the wrong angle, which provided just enough shelter to merit the description. It was an open space more wide than it was deep, but which provided a small bed of medium-sized rocks and driftwood, large enough that I could lie down there and rest. It was not a particularly comfortable place, but the view, framed by the jutting rocks and the brookbed, was excellent, and the sound of running water made the experience even more atmospheric. Lying on this little spot of dry rock in the glorious summer day also made me more appreciative of the all the little details and signs of life that came into view from that angle: the rowan saplings that thrived through sheer endurance although they would never achieve the size or stature of rowan trees in less restricted locations, the ferns and flowers that seemed to thrive in the moist and dank atmosphere provided by the brook, and the great pine tree that had now become a dry, grey giant which had survived more winters than any human alive in the village. 

In this little cave-like hollow in the bedrock I read some poems by Raquel Lanseros, one of my all-time favourite poets, whose verses became something of a life-line for me in the darkest evenings of the pandemic. Her beautiful images and the sound her of poems became even more beautiful when read under that little overhang on a Norwegian summer's day. 

Reading-spots, part 1 - glimpses from a personal history of reading

As I have spent more and more time reflecting on reading, I have also begun to dwell more on the various other aspects connected to the reading experience. This means that I am not solely concerned with what I read, but also where, when, why, and sometimes even how. I think about these things solely because by doing so I gain a deeper understanding of how I draw pleasure from reading, and in so doing I learn to savour the reading experience more fully. For instance, I have a rather unscientific idea that if what I read does not have much to recommend it, something of the experience itself can be improved by those other circumstances. As a way to dig deeper into how reading stays in my memory, I will dedicate some blogposts to specific moments of reading that have an important place in my memory. 

 
The first reading-spot to be presented in this series is this grassy point that juts into one of the lakes of my native village, a lake called Skilbreivatnet, whose name roughly translates as "the lake that is broad as a shield" or "broad-shield lake". This lake is one of my favourite haunts whenever I am back home, and it has been an important part of my life ever since my childhood, but through my own experiences there as well as the stories told by my grand-aunt who worked as a milkmaid here in her youth. Due to the numerous nooks and crannies along the lake shore, there are also numerous new reading-spots to seek out, something I do as often as I can to gain a more detailed understanding of the landscape.  

To this date, I have only used this little point - which is part of a larger and broader promontory - as a reading-spot one time, but that was also a very memorable time, at least for me. This was in June 2020 and I had finally been able to return home after six months in Sweden during the beginning of the pandemic. For the first time in my life I had been unable to come home for Easter, and my homesickness was at times brutal. 

When I was finally able to return home, I was in quarantine in a cabin that we rent out to tourists, making sure that I had not caught Covid along the way. The eleven days I spent in this cabin were essentially a holiday, and one of the best times of my life. I spent much of my time walking, paddling and rowing, and on several of these occasions I brought books with me. 

The day I came to this promontory I had begun reading the Norwegian translation of Jules Verne's L'Île mystérieuse, a novel I first encountered in an abbreviated form when I was six years old, and which has been an important point of reference for my cultural imagination. At last I was able to read an unabridged translation, and doing so in the Norwegian wilderness greatly enhanced the experience. While the island imagined by Verne, and the struggles of his protagonists, have little in common with the idyllic and, above all, familiar scenery of my native village, it was far easier for me to envision the exploration and the various episodes of the novel surrounded by the the quiet calm of birch trees and the ubiquitous movement of water from melting snow gorging the many brooks and rivers coming down the mountainsides. Lying in the grass by a well-known and beloved lake, being transported back in time through this nineteenth-century novel - both to an imagined past as well as my own childhood - and not having to think about anything beyond the here-and-now was one of the most wonderful reading experiences I have had. Granted, I only read part of the book there, but it is especially that spot which comes to mind when I think back to those days of carefree reading, and the little point on the larger promontory has become a treasured place of memory - to bastardise and misrepresent a concept by Pierre Nora. To put it differently, reading a part of Verne's novel in this spot has both enhanced my joy of reading the novel, and it has also strengthened my love of that spot.   

Technologies of memory - border markers in stone, then and now

 
Following the discovery of the Svingerud stone - labelled the oldest datable rune stone - my own fascination with runes has increased significantly, and I am using this opportunity to reflect more on the role of runes and their significance for medieval literacy and medieval cultures of memory - meaning the cultural structures that facilitated the maintenance, dissemination and even construction and forgery of memory. Due to the durability of their medium and the notable continuity in legibility, runic inscriptions are particularly fascinating, and serve to remind us of the nebulous spectrum of literacy, wherein written messages can be accessible to a much wider audience than we often expect.  

Since rune stones are technologies of memory, and vehicles for the maintenance of information and knowledge, they perform this duty to memory in many different ways. Some stones are commemorative, serving to remind future generations of individuals or of great deeds, or a combination of both. Other stones are more pragmatic in function, yet also important. One example of this latter type is the Nørstebø rune stone (c.1050-c.1100) from Oppland in Eastern Norway (Nørstebø means "northernmost field" in Norwegian). The stone is placed by the entrance of the humanties library of the University of Oslo. One of the many perks of visiting this library is to pass by this and two other rune stones, presented to the public as books in stone, a very apt metaphor. 

The Nørstebø rune stone is particularly interesting to me because of how it reminds us of the durability and longevity of certain technologies of memory. The inscription of the stone records, in James Knirk's translation, that "Finnr and Skopti put up this stone when they divided their land, Váli's sons". In other words, the stone is a border marker that serves to remind future generations where one property ends and the other begins.   

This kind of stone marker is a physical proof of the historical agreement that shaped the landscape for later generations, a kind of security against the future failing memory of individuals, and the loss of oral transmission of the event. Because of their tangibility as forms of evidence, border markers in stone remained an important technology of memory also in later centuries. In my own native village, Hyen, located in the Western Norwegian fjords, we often encounter such border markers in stone. Indeed, there is one right outside the kitchen window in my childhood home, and they can also be found in the middle of the woods. The border markers - known as "merkesteinar", marking stones - do not carry any inscriptions, with possible and very sporadic exceptions. They are significantly younger than the Nørstebø stone, and the ones we encounter in the woods back home are probably not older than a couple of hundred years at the most. 

The lack of inscriptions on these modern border markers from Hyen are interesting, because they remind us of how technologies of memory have changed. When the Nørstebø stone was set into the ground, there was no central store of memory, no archive or library which could provide confirmation about the ownership of land and of the significance of the stone. With the combination of more widespread literacy - although the runic inscription also points to a significant degree of literacy - and the centralisation of memory in the administrative expansion of the modern era, it was no longer necessary to write on these border markers. The stones were important because they provided physical, tangible evidence of an agreement concerning property, but the details concerning that agreement - names, price of the transaction, duration of the agreement and similar issues - are housed elsewhere, in a central archive. In other words, the modern border markers found in my native village exist in a memory culture wherein memory is sustained by other forms of technologies of memory, namely written documents stored in a centralised archive. Some aspects of memory culture expressed through the Nørstebø stone are thereby retained, while other aspects are replaced with other technologies. 

The combination of change and continuity is in and of itself not surprising, but we do well to remember that certain technologies are perfected at a very early stage, and continue to be used even though there are other ways to perform the tasks that these technologies were made to perform.   

The Nørstebø stone, University of Oslo, humanities library