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 In one valley, the first road was built in the 1860s, just before the invention of dynamite, and this one was superseded by the current road which was built in the period 1923-40.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.