The unicorn on the wall - a Bergen mystery

 
On a recent trip to Bergen, I visited Håkonshallen, King Håkon's Hall, which was built on the orders of King Håkon IV of Norway (r.1217-63) following a fire that devastated a large part of Bergen. The hall was finished by 1261, and although it has been heavily restored in the course of the twentieth century, the hall remains one of the greatest examples of secular medieval architecture in Norway. As I was walking by the tall windows and along the many corridors and up and down the many stairs of the hall, I noticed a drawing on one of the walls which immediately caught my attention. The drawing in question clearly shows a unicorn, and it was very pleasing to think that it was a piece of graffiti that had survived the many calamities that have befallen the hall and come down to us through the centuries. However, my critical sense was not lost in tantalizing possibilities of the situation, and I did notice one particular detail that suggests to me that the unicorn is modern rather than medieval. Aside from the lines of the drawing being a bit too white to have survived the disasters of the past, it also looks very similar to one of Bergen's minor yet well known attraction. The attraction in question is a wooden unicorn that hangs on the front of one of the wooden houses at Bryggen, the old quay in Bergen. The figure is iconic, as it is both easy to see as one walks along the quay, and because it has been rendered with great anatomical detail. The two-dimensional unicorn in Håkonshallen, while significantly less well-endowed than its wooden forebear, appears to be a replica of the one in Bryggen, which in turn suggests that the graffiti is of a much more recent date than its placement in the medieval stone building would at first indicate. Despite the disappointment in not finding a medieval unicorn, I am nonetheless quite pleased that the practice of inscribing signs into the stones is a practice that has continued into our own times, a practice that adds additional sediments, however small, to the complex layered history of Håkonshallen.   

The Viking Troll - or, Adventures in medievalism, part 6

 
Being a Norwegian medievalist has made visiting souvenir shops in Norway a very complicated affair. On the one hand, I am always filled with intense embarrassment when I see how my fellow Norwegians market our country to visitors. The mixture of tropes and stock figures for the purpose of earning money and playing on a small register of globally known reference is deeply unpleasant. On the other hand, part of my job is to explore how we in our contemporary world make use of, and think about, the past. Consequently, such souvenir shops are ideal research arenas, because they provide great examples of how we present ourselves to the world, and what ideas about Norway and its past we can expect people from other countries to receive. I therefore do sometimes walk among the grim displays of tat and junk, and I do look closely at the various historical misconceptions brought together in a hodge-podge of confusion and poorly-conceived national pride. Let no-one say I do not suffer for my work. 

Two weeks ago, I was in Bergen and had the opportunity to visit some extraordinary remnants from medieval Norway, things that I hope to blog about later. Several of these remnants served to showcase the complexity and variety of medieval culture, and they also serve to remind the viewer that the Middle Ages cannot be reduced to a handful of stock figures - at least not if the aim is to present a faithful idea of the medieval past. Souvenir shops, and souvenir designers, however, do not use the Middle Ages in ways meant to be accurate, but rather to pander to the preconceptions and expectations of visitors who have been fed a simplistic diet of cultural key words. In order to maximize the effect of these preconceptions - at least so I presume - the various tropes are sometimes blended in ways that have little to with how the ingredients of this blend have had their places and functions in Norwegian cultural history.  

One example of this blend was the Viking troll, which can be seen below. This figure is an incongruous mixture of stereotypical features that are all frequently used in marketing of Norway, its landscapes, and its history. This mixture is also highly anachronistic. We have the troll, which is an old legendary being in Norwegian folklore, but whose depiction here has more to do with nineteenth- and twentieth-century re-imaginings of the troll rather than the more fearsome and downright dangerous visions of earlier generations. There is the Norwegian flag, which was adopted through parliamentary vote in 1821. Then there is the Viking helmet, internationally recognized as such, even though it is fashioned according to the fantasies of nineteenth-century scholars rather than historical reality. In other words, the horns have nothing to do with historical Norse people, but they have everything to do with how we imagine Vikings in our modern times. The helmet also carries the word 'fjord' on it, the quintessential Norwegian word, and perhaps the only one that has gained some sort of international recognition. The sword is presumably part of the Viking attire, and serves to complete the transformation of this lovable troll-boy into a loveable Viking, ready to be an ambassador for Norway, and ready to convince visiting tourists from around the world that they finally get something authentically Norwegian to bring home. What we see, in other words, is a fanciful condensation of elements scattered across the timeline of Norway's history, assembled to bring out the perceived essence of our country and its culture.    

The Viking troll is an interesting case study in cultural stereotypes, and it summarizes how Norway is perceived abroad, as well as how we, or some of us at least, wish to be seen by those outside our country. There is also a calculating logic to this amalgamation. A typically capitalist logic of more being always better, where the customer's attention is drawn to a blend of identifiable ingredients, where each of the individual ingredients is a finished product in and of itself. This is the fried chicken sandwich - where deep fried chicken fillets are used instead of buns - of Norwegian tourism, and just looking at it makes me feel weird. And, as is typical of such blends, the act of blending makes each individual ingredient lose some of their original meanings, as they are decontextualized and then recontextualized to serve different purposes than they originally did. The blending is, however, not my main gripe, but that this blending is purely done in order to boost sales. Had we Norwegians engaged with this blend as part of our self-understanding, I would have been used to it - it would be a kind of cultural evolution or adaptation that aims to serve its own people rather than capering to the tastes of others. In this case, however, we are dealing with the view from outside and those who seek to satisfy and titillate that view. And we see, then, yet again, how medievalism serves to make people reach for a fantasy rather than reality, and how the Middle Ages sell.  

Reading-spots, part 3

 
Nearing the end of my first week in Oslo after two months in the Western Norwegian fjords, I am reflecting on this summer's results in my ever-ongoing quest for finding new places in which to read, to find new reading-spots. While this quest is not limited to my home village of Hyen, it is perhaps especially here that my quest becomes increasingly challenging. Having lived there for the greater part of my life, and returning as often as time and work permit, there are fewer new reading-spots to be found for each passing year. However, as the Norwegian fjords are landscapes of great variety and with numerous nooks and crannies, there are still plenty of places left to find. In this blogpost, I will share one of these places, namely the mountain lake of Langevatnet, which literally translates as 'long lake'. 

Langevatnet is situated on a sort of plateau, although a very hollow plateau, which was carved by the ice millions of years ago. While well above the tree limit, it is not located at the top of the mountain, as the grey and snow-patched rock still rises and curves onwards above this plateau. Even so, it is a strenuous hike, and one that I have not undertaken since I was in my early twenties. Since I had not been there for several years, and since it was a place I came to love in my teens, this summer's hike was a kind of a pilgrimage. As a pilgrim, I was dressed in a hat and carried a stick, and I had brought with me a book of verses that means a lot to me.

When I came to the easternmost end of the lake, I camped in the meagre shadow of a large rock, which can be seen to the left in the picture above. The place afforded me a good shelf on which to sit, and a wonderful view of the lake as it stretched westward. Here, I sat down to read a poem by one of my all-time favourite poets, Raquel Lanseros. I had brought an edition of her collected poems which I had bought in Madrid earlier this year, and I read her poem 'Invocación', Invocation, which is one of my favourite poems, and one from which I find myself reciting whenever I come face to face with something lovely in nature. I selected this poem especially because it has a lot of emotional value for me, and it was one of the first poems I tried to translate from Spanish into Norwegian. (This translation can be found here.) Reading this poem was one of the crowning moments of joy on a trip so full of delight and happiness, and it imbued this reading-spot with a particularly strong sense of belonging.  

Similar blogposts: 

Reading-spots, part 1 

Reading-spots, part 2 

The non-existent manuscript - a brief note on fictional books and bibliomania

Bibliomania manifests in many different ways. One of those ways is to nurture an intense fondness for books that do not exist, save in some fictional universe. Reading about fictional books is a sheer delight to me, partly because I have a great love of the book as a concept and as a manifestation of humanity's creativity and drive towards beauty, and partly because of what the mere existence of such a book implies about the fictional universe in which it exists. To produce a book requires of human skill, necessitates material resources, and can only be done through some sort of infrastructure by which those resources and the skills are brought together. A fictional book, in other words, adds a greater depth to the complexity of a made-up world, just as a real book adds greater depth to the real world. This depth is especially great and wonderful when done with care, and when it serves as a vehicle for displaying the learning and the knowledge of the author of this double fiction of world and book. 

Fictional books are very common in literature. The conceit of having found a lost manuscript from which your own fiction stems, is a playful way of creating a greater degree of verisimilitude in a story. The wonderful and at times wonderfully absurd toying with, and stretching of, the line between fiction and reality in Don Quijote, for instance, is partly done through the claim that the tale comes a manuscript written by Cide Hamete Benengeli. Similarly, Adso of Melk's account of his experiences together with his master William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco's Name of the rose is given a curious and unstable sheen of realism through the prologue of a found and then lost-again manuscript.  

There are many famous fictional books, and I believe it is no exaggeration to suggest that there are even more fictional books that are known to a much more limited number of readers, or that are known only for a shorter period of time and within specific readerships. Some fictional books do transcend the readerships of the real books in which they appear, perhaps because they are discussed and talked about by readers who also write, and thereby become more famous than the real book - the vehicle, as it were, of the fictional book. For instance, the fictional books of the real library of the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris included by Rabelais in the first book of Pantagruel, has been mentioned by several authors. These mentions mean that there are likely to be readers who will be familiar with the list, and might even know parts or all of it by heart, without actually having read Rabelais. Such famous fictional books are not rare, but there are probably more fictional books which are likely to remain known to a more limited group of readers, or what we might justly call the fandom of a book or a book series. 

What spurred on these reflections on fictional books and my intense delight in them was a recent issue in one of my favourite comic book series, the Italian Western series Tex Willer, which is very popular in Norway. The issue in question - number 708 in Norway, number 748 in Italy - is written by Moreno Burattini and drawn by Michele Rubini. The story deals with the appearance of a blood-sucking monster in Northern Mexico, a chupacabra, or goat-sucker. The title of the issue is 'La mesa della follia', which in Norwegian has been translated roughly as the crag or mountain of horror ('Redselsberget'). This translation, however, is likely to miss one of the points of the original, as 'follia' means madness - as shown by the in-text Spanish name of the mountain as 'mesa del locura', or the mountain of madness. The title is, in other words, a likely nod to H. P. Lovecraft's famous tale. 

The issue is the first of a two-part story, and the it begins with a bag of bones brought to one of the recurring characters of the series, an Egyptian scientist living in Mexico, who is known by the epithet El Morisco. The search of the animal of these mysterious bones leads the scientist to an old abbey, in which he is shown a manuscript who was brought by a traveller. El Morisco analyzes the book, notes that it is written partly in German and partly in Latin, he recognizes alchemical signs, and dates it to the fifteenth century based on abbreviations in the text which, as he says, are typical of that period. The last page of the manuscript, as seen below, shows a drawing of a horrible cat-like beast, with the subtitle 'bestia quae sanguinem sugit', the beast who sucks blood.           

What delights me about this fictional book is partly how it continues a long and wonderful literary game of verisimilitude through the conceit of the found manuscript, and partly how both author and artist are able to create added verisimilitude through details such as the dating of the manuscript based on abbreviations, and on authentic-looking renditions of alchemical signs. Such attention to detail which strikes a chord in a historian such as myself - having worked on late-medieval manuscripts and codicological puzzles - is perhaps especially delightful when we consider the medium, namely a monthly comic book. This statement is not to be taken as as disparaging commentary about monthly comics, I am myself an avid reader of this particular one. Rather, the point is that monthly comic books are often aimed at a month-long readership who will then move on to the next issue, and then the next. While the publishers no doubt expect collectors, and while we should expect that there are several readers who do re-read these issues several times, a comic like Tex Willer is sold in a short-term market where each issue is relatively swiftly replaced with the next. In such a market, attention to detail is no doubt appreciated by many readers, and might even be what attracts several of those readers, but these details are probably not seen as the defining factor of the success of the series. Instead, the success is more likely attributed to the creation of mystery, the gun fights, the heroism of the protagonists, and the setting, the Old West, which still retains such a forceful grip on the European imagination. Because such attention to detail is not necessary, it becomes all the more delightful. This attention to detail comes from some place of love, whether it is a love of literary games, of verisimilitude, of codicology, of authenticity, of the series itself, of creating such nods that only a part of the readership will recognize. And such acts of love that lies in this attention to detail is in itself a form of bibliomania, which in turn adds even more delight to the matter.