A year in reading - 2025

2025 began as a limbo. In January I was unemployed and without immediate prospects, but with several obligations to which I had committed myself when I still received a regular salary. As a consequence, although I theoretically should have plenty of time to devote to reading, the many duties that demanded my attention, the many things I had to prepare, and unexpected demands that came along the way, all combined to leave less time for doing the kind of reading I had hoped to do. My pace throughout the year became choppy, and I was unable to follow the parameters that ordinarily guide my literary forays within the calendar year. However, 2025 also afforded me several opportunities for travel, and many of the books I read this year were consumed en route to somewhere.       

Travelling by page   

Every year, I try to explore more of the world through the pages of its myriad literatures. As a bare minimum, I aim to read one book from every country in the world – including Palestine – and I have been chipping away at this goal since I began the project in 2017, inspired by the excellent work of journalist and author Ann Morgan.

In previous years, I have made good use of my access to university libraries and their inter-library loan systems, and although a similar system exists for public libraries in Norway, this year’s limited access to the holdings of universities with departments dedicated to the languages and literatures of other parts of the globe meant that I had to rely on my own reserves. Over the past two decades, I have accumulated a decent personal library with items for future reading, some of which are intended to help in my ongoing quest of travelling by page. However, since I did not know for how long I would remain unemployed, I decided to buy a couple of new books to ensure that I would still be able to keep travelling for a while.

The first book I finished was A girl called Eel by Ali Zamir, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. This novel is an exploration of society and gender roles in the Comoros, and provided an interesting and heartbreaking window into a country about which I know very little, and whose literature is not extensively available to non-francophone readers.

Ali Zamir, A girl called Eel (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)

In a bookshop in Bergen, I encountered a Norwegian translation of Scholastique Mukasonga’s 2008 memoir, La Femme aux pieds nus, translated by Agnete Øye as Den barbeinte kvinnen. I am always happy to see Norwegian translations of non-anglophone literature, and as I have been wanting to read something by Mukasonga for some time, I bought it and read its beautiful and harrowing chapters on and off for the subsequent months. As often is the case when I read books by African writers that describe the practicalities of the agricultural year, I was struck by the recognisable aspects of Mukasonga’s upbringing concerning the various duties pertaining to the keeping of crops and the ever-present concern about whether a harvest will fail or flourish. In other words, the book was yet another reminder that shared experiences connect people the world over, and we remain more similar than different in all our fundamental aspects. 

Scholastique Mukasonga, Den barbeinte kvinnen (translated by Agnete Øye)

New places for reading       

Aside from travelling by page, I also did a lot of physical travel, partly thanks to some plans that had been laid the year before, and partly thanks to a surprise short-term employment that brought me out of my village on several journeys. As a consequence, I was able to find several new places for reading this year, too. For instance, a three-week journey that included Hamburg, Bergen, Oslo, Madrid, and Salamanca in late March and early April meant that I could seek out several places in which to sit down and quietly peruse what I was carrying with me for that specific purpose. In a Latin American restaurant in Hamburg, for instance, I followed C. S. Lewis’ imagined Martian landscape in Out of the Silent Planet, while I was reading up on the cult of saints in medieval Italy and medieval England in the bars of Salamanca and of Madrid respectively. 

C. S. Lewis, Out of the silent planet 

Hamburg

Edward Schoolman, Rediscovering Sainthood in Italy 

Salamanca

Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to relate 

Madrid 

At home, I also found opportunity to read in new locations. In April, my family and I launched the rowing boat on one of the lakes in my village, as we do each year once the ice has drifted off over the waterfall and returned to liquid again. My first trip of the year led me to one of the promontories where I often go searching for blueberries – or what I have recently learned are technically called bilberries. Since most of my journeys to this promontory involves getting my hands dirty with the fruits of the harvest, I rarely bring any reading material with me, knowing that bilberry stains are hard to remove. This time, however, since it was long before berry-picking season, I brought with me a collection of poems by one of my favourite poets, Raquel Lanseros, and ventured up a brook to a waterfall and found a lovely spot for reading.

Raquel Lanseros, 'Ese lejos tan cerca'

In the summer, I took another boat for a ride, this time on the fjord, and went ashore on a small promontory. This journey was eventful, as I hope to explain in a later blogpost, but for the present purpose the main point is that I also brought with me a book to read. Strictly speaking, the promontory itself was not a new place for reading, as I had been here before, but this time the oppressive sun drove me and my youngest sister’s dog into the refuge of some shady foliage, and after a refreshing swim I lay down to read Old Norse chivalric romances translated into modern Norwegian. 

Birgit Nyborg (ed. and trl.), Tre riddersagaer

Reading by lists       

Each year, I steer my reading in accordance with several lists. Aside from the ongoing attempt to read a book from every country, I also aim to read at least three books in four categories: a) academic books; b) books by Norwegian authors; c) books by Nobel laureates in literature; and d) books from a reading-list I put together during my first year at university.

Due to the pace of this year’s reading – dominated in large part by editorial tasks that tired my brain too much for reading as much as I would have liked – I was unable to complete this particular goal. However, some headway was gained in each of the categories. 

Raquel Lanseros, El sol y las otras estrellas 

Diktet om min Cid (translated by Eva M. Lorenzen)

The year started auspiciously with the completion of the Norwegian translation of Cantar de mio Cid, translated by Eva M. Lorenzen as Diktet om min Cid, which I bought during my BA studies and have been meaning to read for years. This was, however, the only book from my old to-read list which I was able to complete. 

When it came to academic books, I was much more fortunate, and I feel greatly enriched by the various titles I managed to read as I was doing research for various articles and mini-projects. For instance, Niamh Wycherley’s The Cult of Relics in Early Medieval Ireland was a particularly interesting foray into a part of medieval Latin Christendom that I keep feeling I should know more about, and this book was a joy to read. I was also happy to finally get an opportunity to read Audun Dybdahl’s monograph on the runic calendars of Norway and Sweden, Primstaven i lys av helgenkulten (runic calendars in light of the cult of saints). I was glad to be able to prioritise this book both because it is an interesting topic on a source type that bridges the medieval storyworld with the early modern one, but also because Dybdahl was one of my lecturers at university. As he passed five years ago, it felt like a fitting if belated tribute to his work. 

Niamh Wycherley, The Cult of Relics in Early Medieval Ireland

Dybdahl’s monograph also ticked the box for a third category, namely books by Norwegian authors. For much of my life, I have prioritised non-Norwegian authors, and as a consequence I feel I do not know the literature of my primary homeland as much as I ought to do. The upside of this neglect is that I now have an excuse to roam widely within the vast flora that is Norwegian literary history. To this category, I also added Olav Bø’s short monograph on Norwegian feast-days, Norske årshøgtider, which examines traditions and superstitions that have survived in some form or other since the Middle Ages. A third example from this category is Johannes Heggland’s Folket i dei kvite båtane (The people in the white boats) from 1962, which is a children’s book set in early Bronze Age Norway, and which aimed to bring a distant part of the Norwegian past to life to young children based on archaeological findings available at the time.

As for Nobel laureates, I only managed to read one this year: Albert Camus’ The Outsider, translated by Joseph Laredo. While a very interesting window into colonial Algeria from the vantage point of the colonising people, and a very easy read, it was also an annoying reminder of prejudices that should be of the past but which are still very much of the present.

Olav Bø, Norske årshøgtider

Johannes Heggland, Folket i dei kvite båtane

Binging sagas

Towards the end of October, I picked up pace in my reading thanks to an earlier discovery that a five-volume set of translations of Icelandic sagas into Norwegian has been made available online. Ordinarily, I do not like reading on a screen – and the fact that I have done so quite often this year is partly why my sense of my own reading is rather muddled. However, at the end of October, this particular medium suited me very well as I was travelling and had not brought enough books sufficiently small to make for suitable travel reading. Additionally, a lot of the sagas are rather short, so at a point when I was feeling hopelessly behind in my annual reading, these tales were perfect for catching up and I devoured fifteen in the course of two months, with a handful others having been finished in the course of spring and summer. This became a veritable binge, both because I read so many of them in such a short time, but also because I eventually could not keep track of all the plots and all the characters once I had finished a given saga, partly because of the speed but also because several of the plots of the sagas share many of the same features, and because there are numerous characters in them. Despite the overindulgence, it was also very satisfying because as a medievalist I have been in arrears with my saga reading for years, and it has been immensely rewarding to finally fill so many of these gaps. 

 

Science and fiction  

Another theme that emerged for this year’s reading was science fiction. This is another genre where I feel I have a lot of catching-up to do, but I have done so rather circuitously. Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra by C. S. Lewis are unsurprising contributions to this theme, seeing as they are classics, albeit not necessarily widely famous in the current age. A more unconventional choice was the 1945 Norwegian novel Atomene spiller (the atoms are playing) by Hans Christian Sandbeck, which describes the world of the year 2250, and which evolves into a meditation on the perennial nature of human violence. What fascinates me the most about this novel is that it was one of the first books to be published after the liberation of Norway on May 8, in a time of general shortage. Moreover, it provides a reflection on the horrors of nuclear warfare at a remarkably early date, seeing as it was published only a few months after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Hans Christian Sandbeck, Atomene spiller

Most of my reading within the theme of science fiction has taken place within a medievalist framework. I read E. R. Truitt’s excellent monograph Medieval Robots from 2015, which deals with automata in Latin Christian literary culture, and which provides several great examples of how the concept of immaterial objects with an agency seemingly of their own fascinated the imagination of medieval writers and readers. It was thanks to this book that I also picked up the collection of three chivalric sagas translated into modern Norwegian which I had purchased several years ago. I was particularly pleased with delving into these medieval manifestations of science in fiction, since the topic dovetails nicely with utopian thinking, which was one of the main themes of last year’s reading. 

E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots

Towards the end of the year, I also added two further books to my repository of science fiction. First up was Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons, which is a wonderful adventure story following a natural historian in a fictional world modelled on Regency and Victorian England. Secondly, I read John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes from 1953, which is both fascinating for keeping its flavour of its age without being dated and also an eerie novel to read in an age of advancing climate change. This novel is also delightful for having one of the most functional married couples of fiction, at least based on my limited experience.

Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons

John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes

A meeting in Salamanca

In March, I spent a few days in Salamanca for a conference. This is one of my favourite cities, and an important literary location. Aside from being the setting of Lazarillo de Tormes, typically regarded as the first picaresque novel, it is also the workplace of one of my favourite poets, Maribel Andrés Llamero. I have been in touch with Maribel for several years, and this year we were finally able to meet up in person. She kindly signed my copy of her previous poetry collection – Los inútiles (the useless ones) – which had bought the year before in Santiago de Compostela. As an homage to Maribel, I subsequently crossed the river Tormes – which I had never got around to do during my previous trips to Salamanca – and stopped halfway to read some of her poems with the city’s skyline as a backdrop. As Maribel’s poems have enabled me to connect more deeply with my native landscapes for several years, it was a particular joy to also weave my own history of reading more tightly to the city of Salamanca through her work. 

Maribel Andrés Llamero, Los inútiles

The river Tormes

Lazarillo de Tormes and his blind master

Sundry highlights    

Due to my bibliophilia, I encounter book- and reading-related highlights in many forms, and some of these are collected here to give a more expansive overview of this year in reading.

Book-buying in Hamburg, which included this German translation of an Italian Donald Duck parody of Der Nibelungelied. I bought the copy even though I have copies of this story in both Italian and Norwegian already.

 

Visiting the university library of Salamanca during the conference, and being shown a fourteenth-century copy of Legenda Aurea, as well as a fourteenth-century copy of Liber de Sancti Jacobi. 

My haul from three weeks’ travel. 

Discovering Bergen public library’s tribute to the author Tor Åge Bringsværd, who passed away in 2025, and who was one of the most beloved literary voices of the past fifty years.

 

Working on an article draft that allowed me to delve deeper into the cult of Saint James of Compostela.

Myriam Moscona, León de Lidia

Trondheim

Nils Holger Petersen et. al. (eds.), Symbolic Identity and the Cultural Memory of Saints

Odense

Returning to old haunts in Trondheim and Odense. 

Researching a book bound in manuscript fragments at the Odense Cathedral School.

Working on descriptions of manuscript fragments at the University of Southern Denmark, the place where I got my PhD some eight years ago.

Breviarium Othoniense (1482) 

København Kongelige Bibliotek LN 29 4to

Breviarium Othoniense (1497) 

(København Kongelige Bibliotek LN 30

Abbo of Fleury, Passio Sancti Eadmundi

København Kongelige Bibliotek GKS 1588 4to

Researching at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. I was finally able to see the first to editions of the Odense Breviary – from 1482 and 1497 – in the paper, having pored over their pages digitally for years. I also revisited an eleventh-century manuscript containing a copy of Passio Sancti Eadmundi by Abbo of Fleury, as well as the earliest known copy of the liturgical office for the feast of Saint Edmund.

 

Returning to the University Library of Southern Denmark to work on a fifteenth-century collection of saints’ legends.

Mikael Manøe Bjerregaard et.al. (eds.), Royal Blood

Receiving the editor and contributor copy of the volume Royal Blood.

Related blogposts (2025) 

Reading-spots, part 6 

A three-week book haul 

Reading-spots, part 7 

A lesson in similarities 

Reading-spots, part 8 

Reading-spots, part 9 

Synchronicities of reading, part 1 

Saint Catherine in Bergen

 

Today is the feast of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, one of the female saints who achieved broad veneration in the Nordic countries at a very early stage in the Christianisation process. In the law of the Gulathing province of Norway - which is roughly coterminal with the south-western seaboard and the western fjords - her feast was included in the list of holidays whose observation was required by law. This law was committed to writing around 1160, but it is likely that the feast of Sainth Catherine arrived much earlier in Norway. The evidence from the Gulathing law is particularly interesting because we have few other sources to the cult of saints in Norway prior to the mid-twelfth century, especially female ones. (One other example is Saint Cecilia, whose name was given to Cecilia Sigurddotter, born c.1155-56, but that is another story.)  

The cult of Saint Catherine gained even more popularity following the dissemination of Legenda Aurea, a collection of saints' legends and texts on liturgical feasts composed by Jacobus de Vorgaine around 1260. The dramatic events of Catherine's life and memorable details - such as her christomimetic debate with fifty philosophers and the torture wheel that miraculously broke into pieces - made her easy to depict in medieval art, and also easy to recognised. One of the surviving depictions of her from medieval Norway is the altarpiece of the Church of Saint Mary in Bergen. The altarpiece was made in Lübeck in the late fifteenth century, and its main saint is the Virgin Mary, but she is flanked by - going anti-clockwise from the top left - Saint Olaf, Saint Anthony of Egypt, Saint Dorothea, and Saint Catherine of Alexandria. She is wearing a crown, as she was believed to be of royal stock, and two of her main attributes - the wheel with which she was not tortured and the sword with which she was killed - make her easy to spot among the saints of the altarpiece.  

The altarpiece was commissioned by the Hanseatic merchants in Bergen, for whom the Church of Saint Mary was the main religious hub. Its selection of saints is neither particularly German nor particularly Norwegian, but rather reflective of saints whose popularity was high throughout the Baltic and North Sea region in the course of the 1400s. Saint Catherine's cult also benefitted from her frequent inclusion in the malleable collective of saints known as the fourteen holy helpers - the configuration of which was changeable according to local tradition - and she was one of the most important universal non-biblical saints of the Nordic Middle Ages.

The restored twin towers of the Church of Saint Mary 

The oldest part of the church date back to the twelfth century

Random resonances - the Law of the Gulathing Province and the First Book of Samuel

As a historian, I am trained to look for patterns and connections in history. Not in the sense of how the learned understood history in the Latin Middle Ages, which was founded on the idea that history was shaped by a divine creator, and that the patterns, symmetries and repetitions of history were part of God's plan. In modern academic history, we have thankfully lost this methodological principle, a principle that I believe to be both bad history and bad theology. In modern academic history, however, the patterns and connections have to do with detecting influences and offering hypotheses about how impulses and ideas might have travelled, and whether phenomena appearing in one part of the world is connected to similar phenomena elsewhere. 

In general, it is fair to say that people in my geography of expertise, Western Europe, have received and passed on impulses across a much larger chronological scope than we often tend to given them credit for, and that roads of trade, travel, pilgrimage and plunder have been established much earlier than the surviving sources allow us to ascertain. Yet despite the undoubtable un-reconstructable routes of contact, it is also important to keep in mind that some similarities have nothing to do with influence, but are rather random resonances. These resonances are such that they might allow one individual familiar with both ideas or impulses to recognize the similarity, but this similarity would be more of a surprise, something uncanny, perhaps, rather than the kind of recognition that comes from something familiar. 

The concept of random resonances was something that occurred to me as I was preparing a presentation for a conference on Mostertinget, the Moster assembly, which traditionally has been regarded as the place where Christian law was introduced to Norway in 1024. Modern scholars are doubtful about this narrative, at least when it comes to the claims about the importance of this assembly. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to accept that something important happened at this assembly, and that we are still unlearning a lot of the accumulated tradition in order to better understand the importance of this historical event.  

Moster, an island south of Bergen in Western Norway, was part of the law province that is called Gulatinget, the Gula thing or the Gula assembly, which covered most of Western Norway south of Møre up until the implementation of a law of the realm in 1274. The rules of this provincial law were passed down orally until they were written down in the second half of the twelfth century. One of these rules lay out the proper and legal conduct for when a ship called out to defensive service in the event of an attack from the sea, is running out of food and needs to replenish its stores. This rule is found in the part of the law that Erik Simensen, in his 2021 translation of the Older Gulathing Law, has rendered as 'The book on the naval levy'. In his translation, the rule is as follows: 

Now they return northward and run out of food, then they should call other ships to witness and show them their food, that they have no more food than one month’s rate of each kind for two squads, then they may slaughter two head of cattle from a householder with impunity, and they should pay two aurar for a cow and the same (amount) for a three-year-old ox, and two and a half aurar for a full-grown ox; and they should leave the head, the hide and the feet behind; then they are free of guilt if they slaughter in that way. But if they take away the head or the feet or the hide, then they are liable to punishment. 

- The Older Gulathing Law, translated by Erik Simensen, 2021: 203

The rule is typical of the old Norwegian laws: detailed an eminently practical. The command that the head, the hide and the feet should be left behind is probably to be understood as a form of receipt, a physical proof of what a family had lost in the name of the kingdom's defence. Perhaps we might also see this as a way of leaving parts of the animal that would also yield some food in the even that the family in question were likewise in dire straits.  

The age of the Gulathing law is an unsolvable historical question, especially because it underwent changes across centuries, and even though it is a very conservative law - as most laws tend to be - it is far from as stable as some people might imagine. Consequently, when talking about the random resonance to this passage, some caveats are in order. The resonance I encountered - as randomly as is the resonance itself - comes from 1 Samuel, one of the books of the Old Testament that would probably have not been widely known in Norway by the eleventh century. I emphasise this caveat because we know very little about the transmission of the Bible in medieval Norway. Christianity is likely to have arrived in Norway much earlier than we traditionally think - which is the second half of the tenth century - but it is only in the eleventh century that a Norway-wide church organisation came into being. The transmission of the Bible, in this early period of Christianisation, was predominantly oral and conveyed through the sermons of the priests. Some books of the Bible might have been available at certain religious centres, but I very much doubt that any one-volume edition of the Bible ever existed in medieval Norway. This is all to say that big chunks of the Old Testament are likely to have been unknown to most medieval Norwegians until at least the twelfth century. 

Given the probability of the books of Samuel having had little cultural impact in the time when the section on the levy of boats in the Gulathing Law was implemented, I was struck by how someone familiar with the Gulathing Law might have reacted to the following passage from 1 Samuel: 

And the next day again, when they rose in the morning, they found Dagon lying upon his face on the earth before the ark of the Lord: and the head of Dagon, and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold 

- 1 Samuel 5:4 

  

The passage in question relates the destruction of the statue of the god of the Philistines following their stealing of the Ark of the Covenant, which was brought to the land of Azotus and placed next to the statue. The breaking of the head and the hands was the culmination of a series of signs that led the Philstines to return the Ark to the Israelites. In a way, the hands and head of Dagon can be understood as a kind of receipt, evidence for the stronger power of the god of the Israelites, and a manifestation of a certain hierarchy. However this was encountered, whether written, spoken or, which is unlikely, in pictures, to Norwegians familiar with the Gulathing Law, this story would perhaps have resonated in a particular way, seeing that the head and the feet - or the head and the hand - carried a specific legal connotation that also marked the trust to be placed in a higher authority, in this case the king of Norway. By bringing the feet and the head of the commandeered cattle, Norwegians had hope for restitution, a hope that in turn legitimised the government of the king over that of local lords. Norwegians might, therefore, have understood the importance of this display of power enacted on the statue of Dagon, precisely because their own culture had a similar symbolism that was also connected with the hierarchy of power. 

Of course, we do not know of any medieval Norwegians, at least outside the clergy, who knew of the fate of Dagon's statue. The juxtaposition has laid the ground for an entirely hypothetical scenario, but one that might be of some academic value nonetheless. Because the imagery of the head and the hands in the Bible is older than the Gulathing Law, but did most likely not influence the latter. The similarity between these two texts, that each in their own way pertained to the recognition of power and authority,  is an entirely random resonance - one that might have taken on a particular meaning to a particular audience owing to complete coincidence. Such resonances might affect the reception of the new, unfamiliar element of the juxtaposition. Consequently, even though we cannot assert any historical examples of such receptions, we might imagine that they existed, and by imagining this we might come closer to acknowledge how the patterns and similarities that we encounter in the study of history might be nothing but coincidence.  

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.