An unexpected re-enactment - a story from the fjords

 

In a recent blogpost, I mentioned that I have been writing short pieces on local history for the parish magazine of my municipality. This is a very satisfying way to dig into the history of my native village, and it has helped me to think more carefully about certain aspects of the local past. One such aspect has been the way people from my village had to travel when going to church. In the period c.1600-1876, my village, Hyen, had no church of its own, so the villagers had to row all the length of one fjord - about eight to nine kilometres -, then half the length of another fjord, and the across that second fjord in order to get to church. And then they had to return the same way. Last year, when doing some research about this watery church road, I accidentally re-enacted part of the voyage. 

It all started when I was talking with a neighbour about these church voyages. As no one alive today has any personal recollection of having to travel back and forth on this arduous journey, I was curious about he - who comes from a hamlet sitated along the fjord - had heard any stories passed down from previous generations. He mentioned that there is a promontory a bit over halfway along the fjord where the churchgoers would lie to, drag their boats ashore, and take a break - especially if the wind was blowing hard against them. This place is called "Kyrkjesvora", or "Kirkjesvøra" in my local dialect, and the name translates literally as "the church ravine". This combination of elements is common in names of promontories here, as there is typically a ravine that terminates at a promontory, and which has brought the materials by which the promontory once came into being. As the ravines are more visible from afar than the promontories, it makes sense to use the ravines in the names of the promontories rather than the other way around.  

When my neighbour told me about this place, I was immediately excited and decided to go and see whether I could find any indications about these past voyages - something like an assemblage of stones to serve as a simple quay or anything that could indicate human activity and that might date from before 1876. I was given directions, but it turned out that I had misunderstood and came ashore one promontory too early, at a place called "Bøasvøra", or "the field promontory", a name possibly indicating that people harvested grass for winter fodder in this place. 

Bøasvøra - where I ended up going

Kirkjesvøra - where I should have gone (about one kilometre further out)

courtesy of norgeskart.no

Even though the research trip ended up being a failure in the sense that I came ashore at the wrong place, it did have some historical value after all. And all things else aside, it was a lovely trip which was pure balm for the soul. The day was cloudless and warm, which made it a perfect opportunity to get out on the fjord in a boat with an outboard engine, and feel a slightly cooler air against the skin. The fjord is particularly beautiful this time of year, as uninhabited western side of the fjord is covered in trees, a belt of forest that is only cut through by brooks and rivers tumbling down towards the sea. It is one of my favourite places to be in the world.   

After about half an hour, I came ashore at the promontory which I thought was the one my neighbour had mentioned. I had brought with me my youngest sister's dog, some reading material, some food, and I spent the next couple of hours exploring, reading, and swimming in lovely shallows just beside the shore. Even though the fjord is never really warm, these shallows do get warmed up by the sun, even on high tide. I had calculated my journey so that I would reach the shore at a time when the waters would be deep enough for swimming. 

My exploration of the area yielded no tangible evidence of human activity that could be ascribed to the historical churchgoers. However, since the landscape was largely unchanged since that period in time, I nonetheless managed to get a sense of how things must have appeared to my antecessors who travelled this way several times a year, and in much more demanding conditions. The view towards the mouth of the fjord, for instance, would have been just as familiar to them.

Looking out towards the mouth of the fjord from Bøasvøra

After a couple of hours, it was time to head back. The sun was still shining, but it was slowly retreating behind the western mountains, leaving the western shore in the shadows but most of the fjord still in its warmth. I got everything back into the boat, pushed away from the shore, and started pulling the starting mechanism of the outboard engine - which, as the reader might remember, had worked perfectly on the way out. This time, however, the engine refused to start. It was not the first time I had had problems with this engine, and it was particularly annoying since it was a new purchase of the summer, and I was beyond furious. Not that I remember them now, but I am pretty sure that my dominant choice of words would have been offensive to my churchgoing antecessors. I cursed and shouted to no avail, however; the engine still refused to start. 

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I would expend far less energy by starting to row homewards than I would in my failed attempts to get the engine going. Consequently, I brought out the oars, sat down on the thwart, and started rowing. As the sun was still beating down along the middle of the fjord, I had to stick to the shadow of the western shore to avoid giving the dog a sunstroke, which made the journey longer by far. It also did not help that the plastic boat I was using had not been made for rowing, and so the progress was far slower than what it would have been if I had used one of the wooden boats my antecessors used when travelling to and from church. In that moment - or rather, in that series of unending successive moments - I envied them. 

From time to time I would try to get the engine running. One time I went ashore to refill the water bottles and give the dog an opportunity to find a seat of ease somewhere. Aside from those times, however, all I did was stare straight ahead and row, and row, and row, and then row some more. Although I had travelled this stretch several times before, this was the first time I had done so without an outboard engine. Consequently, I now learned a lot more about the landscape - mainly for how long a certain section of the shore would curve before I got to a new promontory. 

I remember very little of the journey itself. My main recollection was that I kept staring at one particular ravine which cut through the greenery like a white wound, and which persisted in the vanishing point of my vision for kilometres on end. And I remember the elation I felt when i rounded a small island and lost that ravine from view - I then knew that I was quite close to home.  

I kept rowing. I was never in any danger, as I did have my phone with me, and there were other boats on the fjord whom I could hail if I got into trouble. Moreover, the water was perfectly still, and there was neither wind nor wave to hinder what little progress I made between the oar strokes. Because of these conditions, I decided to keep going as far as I could, to see whether I would be able to get all the way home before my strength failed me. And because I let go of my thoughts - at least any thoughts about how long I had been rowing and how long I had left to row - I was at a sort of peace. And the dog seemed to have the time of her life, as she was able to take in the many scents and smells from the life-laden forests along the mountainside. 

Three hours and about eight kilometres later, I pulled the boat alongside the pontoon from where I had started the voyage earlier that day. As I scrambled the short way from the pontoon to the main road, I was carrying a backpack, I was holding the dog on a leash with one hand, and with the other I was clutch the antler of a deer that I had discovered on my journey. It was around nine in the evening, and for the next few days my arms and - above all - my derriere would remind me of what I had been doing for those three hours. 

Yet I must also confess to a sense of pride that I had managed to complete the journey in this fashion. And I was glad that I had re-enacted part of the historical voyages that my antecessors had undertaken in order to attend church in the neighbouring fjord. While the conditions were very different - especially the fact that their boats were better suited for such travel - I could finally say that I had come closer to understanding this particular chapter in the history of my native village.    

Next time, though, I hope to use a wooden boat. 

The view home, on the way out

Saint Michael in Tønsberg, part 2 - the church on the mountain

 

Today, September 29, is the feast of Saint Michael and All Angels. In the Middle Ages, Saint Michael was an important figure in Latin Christian cosmology, as he was the one who would fight Satan at the end of the world, and as he was the one who weighed the souls of the dead. He was often associated with summits and high places, and many - but not all - of Latin medieval churches dedicated to him are found in such places. One example is the Church of Saint Michael in Tønsberg, which is located atop the crag called "Slottsfjellet" (literally, Castle Mount). 

The ruins of the Church of Saint Michael 

In the background is the Castle Mount Tower, built in 1888

The earliest mention of the church is the narrative account titled Profectio Danorum in Hierosolymam (The Journey of the Danes to Jerusalem), which describes a joint Danish-Norwegian failed attempt to travel to the Holy Land to participate in the Crusades. The reference is dated to 1191, but it is likely that the church had already been active for several decades. It was part of a small castle complex, as Tønsberg was one of the residences of the Norwegian kings. This fortified complex is mentioned in Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum (c.1206), concerning an episode dated to 1165. Despite the date of the episode, the later date of the account itself provides us no certainty about whether the church had been erected as early as 1165. It is, however, very likely, given that the church would have been a natural part of such a royal fortress as what we find in Tønsberg. The church is believed to have been destroyed during a Swedish attack in 1503

The Church of Saint Michael in Tønsberg raises some important questions about the general cult of the archanagel in medieval Norway. Was the church dedicated to Michael because it was placed on a summit, or should it rather be seen as an indication of Michael's importance to the secular warrior elite of twelfth-century Norway? Was the cult an elite phenomenon in the early phase, or was it always widely popular? The inimitable Professor Judith Jesch has reminded me that there are seventeen runic inscriptions that mention Saint Michael, ranging from Greenland to Gotland, and this points to Michael's wider popularity. Similarly, the sermon for Saint Michael and All Saints in the Old Norwegian Homily Book, probably written in Bergen c.1200, demonstrates that the story was available in the vernacular. Although the text was only available to the clerics for whom it was composed, the sermon itself could be disseminated broadly, providing the populace with the key details of Saint Michael's importance. But this, in turn, leaves us wondering whether the elite cult of Saint Michael - possibly represented by the church in Tønsberg - had a different focus than the popular cult. It has been suggested by Siân Grønlie - in her article '‘Ok er hann sannheilagr’: The Role of Saints in Remembering and Representing Iceland’s Conversion' from 2022 - that one of the strands in the cult of Saint Michael, his martial aspect, might have appealed especially to warriors and crusaders. The general populace, on the other hand, might have favoured his role as the weigher of souls. 

Model of the medieval Church of Saint Michael

A saint is a mosaic of qualities and the venerators might focus on a few or just a single one. Therefore, it is important not to generalise too much when trying to map the cult onto the social fabric of a historical period. The Church of Saint Michael in Tønsberg is connected to the king and his retinue, and the veneration of the archangel might here have been fuelled by his role as the leader of the Heavenly armies. But since there are other churches dedicated to Michael and placed on summites in medival Norway - one example being the church in the monastic complex of Selja in Western Norway - it is possible that the placement of the church in Tønsberg guided the choice of dedicatee rather than the other way around. 

View of Slottsfjellet from Tønsberg city centre

Authoritarianism, generative AI, and the war against reality

 

Quis evadet?  

- Hendrick Goltzius, 1594 

In the past three years, generative AI has infected daily life on a destructive scale. It is a topic that I do not like thinking about, far less writing about, but as so many other scholars working in the humanities, I feel forced into having more or less coherent opinions about why this is something I would rather avoid having an opinion about. There are many reasons, and given time and rage I could write lengthy expositions about each reason. The present blogpost is a rather short tirade, but it hits at one of the key reasons why generative AI both fills me with loathing and also why I feel the need to opine. 

As with so much contemporary technology, generative AI is a gift to perverts and authoritarians - a Venn diagram that is essentially a complete circle - in that it allows its users to bring their inner desires into some kind of life. With AI image generators, prompts can be used to put together collages of obsessions, whether it comes in the shape of apotheosising portraits of their heroes, or naked, sexualised images of individuals over whom they obsess. Typically, these generated images depict things that do not exist, and that cannot exist. This is in and of itself not a problem, since so much of the history of art does exactly that. The problem with AI generated images, however, is that the non-existent things depicted in them serve as weapons in the war which authoritarians are waging on reality. 

One of the key drivers in the promotion of generative AI in society at large is that it can give you things that are impossible. Did your favourite TV show get cancelled? AI can generate new episodes for you. Did your favourite author die? AI can generate new books in their style. Did a loved one die? AI can generate a digital simulacrum for your comfort. Do you want to have sex with a famous person? AI can generate proof that you have done so, with which you might end up convincing yourself that you really have fulfilled that particular fantasy in real life. 

Aside from the individual goals of such desires, this kind of marketing also speaks to something far darker - even though what I have sketched up here is dark as Hell already - and that is a refusal to accept the confines of reality. This technology thrive on the fact that there are some people - often rich, spoiled, and morally, emotionally and intellectually vapid - who do not accept the fundamental tenet of reality, namely that each and every created thing comes to an end. This is one of the great tragedies of human existence, but that is also precisely why the knowledge of things and people being transitory is such an important motivator for cultivating what one finds worth loving and treasuring. The trope from art history known as 'memento mori', a reminder of one's mortality, need not be a heavy load on one's shoulder, but can be channelled into an appreciation of all that is good and enjoyable in this life. But not being able to face mortality means that people try to cheat, escape or avoid their inevitable demise. Generative AI allows these people to think they can actually succeed. 

Not all those who are driven to use generative AI out of fear of reality can be called authoritarians. Some are just immature without the added emptiness of authoritarianism. But authoritarian projects are typically at odds with the fact of death, and so much of authoritarianism is fuelled by the idea that it is possible to treat death as something that happens only to other people. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why it is so easy for authoritarians to inflict pain, suffering and death on others. In any case, a mind unrestrained by the fear of ceasing to exist is dangerous because it is unbridled by an awareness of the confines of reality. Therefore, that mind feels free to unleash impossible projects that through their very impossibility are extremely destructive. Generative AI is such a project, but it is also the tool by which the project is carried out. By generating science-looking texts to support whatever one wants to have supported, by generating images that ultimately defy the very possibility of verification and creates a halfworld where truth and lies are irrelevant entities, by creating visual proof for oneself that what lives in the mind is also alive in the material world, authoritarians of the present moment are well placed for convincing themselves and those around them about the possibility and realism of their ideas and their projects. But ultimately, these generated things are all just parts of an ongoing effort to undo reality - if only in the collective mind and conviction - so that authoritarians have a free pass to do whatever their warped minds have become convinced of. 

This is just one of the reasons that I despise generative AI, but it is one of the most important ones. It is also one of the many reasons why this technology needs to be undone.  

Quis evadet (who escapes it)

- Hendrick Goltzius, 1594 

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, inventory no.: 51.501.4929)

Histories from home, part 7 - the shapes of history

 

This year, I have been working quite a bit on the history of my native village, Hyen, in the Western Norwegian fjords. While I have always been interested in local history, and while I have absorbed much of it in the course of my lifetime, this year marks the 150th anniversary for the consecration of the modern parish church (for more on this, see this blogpost). Due to this milestone, I have been writing pieces for the local parish magazine, looking at different aspects of our church history broadly understood.  

As a friend and I were on a mission to take some photographs for my next piece, I was once again struck by the shape that history takes in the fjords. Because I come from a small village - described in one medieval document as the poorest parish of the area - there are very few written sources that shed light on the numerous lives that have been lived in these valleys and along this fjord. As a historian, I am mainly used to written sources, often combined with a piece of art or a building, or some kind of archaeological remains. These are the familiar shapes that history takes in my work. But as I have immersed myself more in the history of a place where such sources are rare, I have had to look more carefully at other shapes as well. 

Since my latest piece for the parish magazine focused on how people travelled to church from 1876 onwards, I had to look at the roads that cut through the two valleys of the village. In one valley, the first road was built in the 1860s, just before the invention of dynamite, and this one was superseded by the current road which was built in the period 1923-40. We know the dates, and there are still some second-hand memories which have been transmitted orally down to the present. But to understand how everyday life in the village was affected by these roads, it is necessary to see them in the landscape, even though that landscape has often changed dramatically in the intervening years. In short, one of the shapes that history takes in my native village is that of a road. And I have spent a lot of time this year trying to become better acquainted with that particular shape of our past. 

The first plum harvest of the season

 

Two days ago, August 29, I gathered the first plum harvest of the season. Having grown up on a farm, all such first-fruits of any particular type of produce are significant, especially because they provide historical reference points to be compared with those of previous years. Farming has always entailed this kind of chronography. It is a kind that often goes unrecorded, and with the passing of years they tend to blur into one another, leaving only the most remarkable times - whether remarkably late or remarkably early - as fixtures by which to measure future harvests. 

For most of my life, the first-fruits of the numerous berries and other produce which we harvest in my family have not been recorded, at least not systematically. As the climate is changing, however, these various firsts and lasts of the agrarian year take on a historical weight they did not previously have, as the old pattern is now breaking and it remains an open question whether it will be replaced by a new pattern or something more of a chaos. 

The present blogpost, therefore, is simply to provide some kind of record for the present year - if only when it comes to plums, as there have already been numerous other harvests. As a historian, I am used to wading through sources in order to create sense of the past. However, the changes of the present time also reminds me from time to time that I should also be a historian in the non-academic sense, namely a chronographer. I have tried on and off, and I know myself well enough to suspect that the present blogpost will not be the beginning of an elaborate and important historical record. But as a historian, I also know that even such glimpses as provided by one such report can have significance and value. This post, therefore, is both a celebration of the first plum harvest, and a record for comparison in later years. 

The Midgard serpent on another planet - or, Adventures in medievalism, part 8

 

Space may be the final frontier, but it's made in a Hollywood basement 

- Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication 

I forget who first made this point, but the monsters of science fiction and stories about space travel are ultimately drawn from the monsters of the classical and medieval imaginations, transposed to a new frontier once the Earth had been mapped and all continents were known to the map-makers. As a consequence, numerous stories set in space contain recognisable elements from medieval narratives. A quick glance at the front pages of science fiction magazines, for instance, will show many variations on the theme of male hero rescues a woman from a monster. This is the typical damsel in distress, which had many configurations throughout the Latin Middle Ages, and the most enduring iconographical depiction came in the pictorial narratives of Saint George rescuing Princess Alexandra from the dragon. In its turn, this particular story also owed much to Perseus rescuing Andromeda, as well as other similar tales. Space medievalism, therefore, is a fruitful topic of study, and one that I hope will see much more focus in the coming years. 

Recently, I was reminded of this transposition of imaginary beings to worlds beyond our own planet. I have been reading the Norwegian comic book Ingeniør Knut Berg (Engineer Knut Berg), which was created in 1941, in the second year of the Nazi occupation of the country. The comic was written by Hallvard Sandnes (whose pen name was Vigleik Vikli) and drawn by Jostein Øvrelid (whose pen name was Ronald Stone). The series recounts the adventures of the eponymous protagonist, his fiancé Aima - princess of the utopian country Kalimanko located in East Central Asia - and their companions. Starting out as an earthbound picaresque narrative with elements of science fiction, the adventures were eventually brought into space. Notable sources of inspiration include Flash Gordon and Lost Horizon. 

The comic was - and still is - written in Nynorsk, a written language more often associated with traditional poetry, hymns, and lyrical descriptions of nature than with technological fantasies. To me - as a writer in Nynorsk - it is delightful to see what are now very old-fashioned words and turns of phrase used alongside robots and spaceships.  

This being a Norwegian comic, its world is necessarily described through the Norwegian cultural frame of references. Perhaps the best example of how this frame of reference affects the interpretation of the new discoveries on distant planets can be found in albums 14 and 15, which were published in 1956 and 1957 respectively. Here, Knut Berg's spaceship approaches the unknown reaches of the planet Uri, where he and his companions suddenly encounter a sea-beast rising its head through the water. In order to express the consternation of the interplanetary travellers, the narrator states that the beast looked like nothing on earth, and the closest would be the legend of the Midgard serpent. According to Norse mythology, this serpent - Jormungand - encircled the world, and would kill, and be killed by, the god Thor at Ragnarok. 

The beast reminiscent of the Midgard serpent is a reminder that the new is typically interpreted or imagined through the old. In order to describe what has hitherto not been seen, it is necessary to fall back on the familiar images and names. It is this mechanism that has brought the names and stories of old worlds into new ones, and the reason why - for instance - there is a Pacific Island nation named the Solomon islands, or the figure of Santiago Matamoros became Santiago Mataindios in Latin America. Space. This kind of transposition - of filtering the information from one world through a frame of reference belonging to a different world - is both common and unexpected. But because it is so common, it is also easily forgotten. Consequently, we easily forget that we understand the new and the unknown imperfectly, because we force it into a framework that was not built for what we are encountering. Studying this mechanism means that we become less arrogant in our meetings with new information, and better disposed to understand that which is new on its own terms. 

The king shot an arrow - a runic inscription from Sogndal, Norway

 

Last weekend, I made a roadtrip through parts of Sogn, a district that covers both the northern and southern shores and inlands of Sognefjorden, the largest fjord in mainland Norway. This is an area which contains a lot of historical survivals that are of great interest to a medievalist, and in some upcoming blogposts I will write about some of the many medieval monuments encountered along the way. 

The first example is a rune stone from Sogndal, which currently is housed in a glass case. We do not know when the stone was first erected, and what it was meant to commemorate. The inscription is known by its ID number N 386, and a transcription and a translation into English can be found here. It is dated to around 1100, and reads "King Olaf shot between these stones". The text indicates that there once stood a second standing stone in the area, but this is now lost. 

The text does not give any indication of which king is referenced. By c.1100, there had been three kings of Norway named Olaf. Closest in time to the inscription is Olaf III (r.1067-93), whereas Olaf II (r.1015-28) and Olaf I (r.995-1000) had long since become legendary figures about whom many stories were told. Olaf II had also been recognised as a saint since 1031, the year after his death at the Battle of Stiklestad. 

The reference to a shot - presumably with an arrow - is difficult to explain. One hypothesis is that the king shot an arrow in order to decide on a place where a church should be built. The rune stone - or rather, the standing stone with a runic inscription added later - stands close to the location of Stedje Church, a nineteenth-century replacement for the stave church that stood on the same spot in the Middle Ages. Decisions being left to divine intervention or fate such as this one are a typical motif of folktales and medieval hagiography alike. Since both Olaf I and Olaf II were regarded as missionary kings, stories about the founding of churches were often attributed to them. 

What is particularly important about the runic inscription, however, is not whether it refers to the founding of a church or whether it has a different meaning. Rather, the inscription shows that already by c.1100, stories that connected famous but departed kings to a specific locality were already in circulation close to a century after the oldest of the three possible candidates. The story might have been based on old oral accounts, perhaps even an actual historical event, but decades - perhaps an entire century - had passed before someone saw the need to commit this story to writing. As a medium for this message, the carver decided to use an old standing stone that was central to the story, but which had not been erected for the sake of carrying the kind of monumental memorialisation that is typical for rune stones. In short, the inscription provides a glimpse into the evolution of stories that grow and develop outside centralised, authoritative text production, which by c.1100 was mainly overseen by ecclesiastical and monastic groups.  

The person carving these runes might have remembered Olaf III, and it is possible that it was this king who ordered a church to be founded. After all, new churches were built by both secular and ecclesiastical agents throughout the eleventh and the twelfth centuries. However, it is likely that the kind of church-building story most likely to be committed to written memory would concern a church erected in the early Christianisation period, i.e. during the reign of either Olaf I or Olaf II. If so, this would be an event taking place long before the carver of the runes had been born. In this case, the inscription shows the pull of stories, and how these stories - and perhaps also their implication for local identity - excite people and move them to become keepers of memory in one way or another. In this instance, by carving runes on an old menhir.

All in all, we can only speculate about the origins of this runic inscription. Its content suggests to us the importance of history and the desire to commemorate the past. Seen in the context of other written records from eleventh and twelfth-century Norway, we might understand this as a part of a growing concern with fastening history to the material world in order to preserve it for future generations. The inscription is, in other words, a testament to the importance of stories.  

The Stedje stone looking towards Stedje Church