Thrice-illumined

 

Western Norway has been a grey castle this June, with mist and grey clouds being constant features throughout almost every day, and also bringing with them torrential showers or milder but more continuous drizzle. As summer arrives, I seek the balcony at the back of my paternal grandparents' house, enjoying its shade until the sun floats into view in the early afternoo, thereby making the place too hot for either work or leisure. This year, however, the rain and cold have induced me to use the porch at the front of the house as a temporary work space. I have done so in previous years, too, but lacking access to the balcony has meant that I have sought porch much more frequently, especially because the dark evenings have provided a good excuse to light the three-pronged candlestick which I keep there. 

Last night, there suddenly broke through a piercing silvery light from the moon as it was climbing the mountain range on the western side of the fjord of my native village, Hyen. This sudden illumination was a drastic change to the heavier light that had preceded it, and it caught my attention immediately. Looking out through the window on the side of the porch, I saw the light of the moon filtered by the clouds, powerful enough to be reflected in the creased surface of the lake behind the house, and I also noted that the window glass in turn reflected the flames of the three candles, as well as the reflection of of one them in the window glass on the front of the porch. It was a lovely moment that made me feel thrice-illumined, and it was a very atmospheric reminder of why I tend to sit in this little nook even when I need to wear a jacket and a blanket - these shifting skies mean that no two evenings are alike in this place. 

Timeslips in the fjords

 

A couple of years ago, I read an interview with the British novelist Alan Garner, known for his novels blending reality and folklore. He described how he had been walking in the mountains and suddenly did not recognise his surroundings even though he was in a part of the mountains that he knew well. Some friends of his working on quantum mechanics had attributed this to a timeslip, a sudden travel in time. I remain sceptical of the possibility to traverse the unfolding of time, especially as a historian who will happily concede that history rhymes but that it never repeats and that it is inaccessible save by whatever vestiges survive the vicissitudes of time and chronological progress.  

I was reminded of this interview earlier this year, when I experienced a phenomenon that is in many ways similar to a timeslip, yet which works very differently. This happened late in the evening at the verge of early spring, when there was no snow in the lowlands yet a sere, crisp frost that reminded me that winter had not yet relinquished its claim to the land. I was walking the dog, and we were on our way back from the other side of the innermost bay in the fjord, where there is a shipwright that can be seen in the pictures below as a stretch of light on the right-hand side of the photographs. All of a sudden, I felt that time had blended into itself, and that the world I was walking through contained all times at once as preserved in glass. It was a strange feeling, but a comfortable one, and something I have felt several times before when walking in the fjords.  

This was not a timeslip in the strict sense, and it was more similar to a déjà vu in that I recognised this time as something familiar. However, it was not that I felt that I had experienced this moment before, but more that I experienced times that I knew from stories and photographs, times from before my own entrance on the earthly stage.  

My sensation was, of course, entirely in my head, and the experience itself was very much rooted in a historical moment. I was walking a road that had not been completed until sometime in the 1920s, covered in tarmac that had not been applied until decades later, and the constellation of lights from streetlamps and houses could only stem from the pattern of inhabited and functioning buildings in the year 2026. My timeslip was internal, as it were, and brought on partly by tiredness, but also partly by that strange blend of chronological conglomeration that is typical of the Norwegian fjords. While several buildings are new, and while roadworks, machines and infrastructure point squarely to the 2020s, and even though the centre of my native village is radically altered from its appearance in - say - 1926, there are also numerous reminders of past times: Some errant stones brought by the ice thousands of years ago that have not yet succumbed to the dynamite of construction workers, a few houses that were built in the 1920s, the church from 1875-76, and the mountains that have looked the same in living memory. When I grew up here in the fjords, I noticed this conglomeration in the houses in which I grew up and the houses that I visited. There were keepsakes, furniture, pictures, textiles, and other items that had been passed down through generations, and that bore the stamps of their respective historical periods. 

It is against this conglomeration I see the sensation I felt that cold evening on the verge of spring. Because I have inhabited a world comprised of remnants from earlier times, it is easy to feel as if I know those times. I do not - the smells, the sounds, the tastes of those years have never reached me, however much and however vividly they have been replicated in handed-down clothes, in my grandmother's cooking, or in the dialect of my grandmother's generation that is so distinct from that of my own - like a chronolect lost to the passage of time. I suspect that this feeling of familiarity surged into my head that evening because of the feeling of timelessness that comes with the seasons, the recognition that it is almost spring because it always feels this particular way when it is almost spring. In this way, chronological boundaries slipped away, even though I remained where and when I was. And this, I believe, is the way timeslips work in the fjords. 

On the eve of Saint Peter's Chair - a pattern breaking?

 

Five years ago, I was living in my native village and I wrote a blogpost on how the feast of Cathedra Petri, or Saint Peter's Chair, on February 22 was regarded as a seasonal turning point in Norway. This year, I am once again living in my native village, and just as I did five years ago, I have been noting how climate change causes the old patterns to break. These were the patterns that allowed for such seasonal rules of thumb, where the deviations from year to year were not sufficiently significant that the pattern could be said to be incorrect. This year, however, winter has been unusual in the fjords. For a month - from early January to mid-February - we had no precipitation. The absence of snow caused waterways to freeze and huge ice formations took shape along the roads, where roadwork had cut through subterranean trickles and exposed them to the cold air. 

Yesterday, on the eve of Saint Peter's Chair, my youngest sister, her dog, and a mutual friend went for a walk on the ice during two hours of waning light. Recently the weather had changed and we got a few days of snow, followed by a downpour which turned the ice atop the lakes into slush. So far, this was according to the old pattern. It was said that Saint Peter would cause lakes and harbours to thaw, and this belief was illustrated by the saying that he tossed warm stones into the water to unfreeze it. For this reason, both the date and Saint Peter himself were referred to as Per Varmestein, Peter Warmstone.  

Walking on the ice after such shifts in the weather proved to be an odd experience. Before the rain had set in, strong winds had blown the dry snow into small drifts, meaning that some parts of the ice were covered in snow - which then turned to slush - while other parts were uncovered, leaving the rainwater to freeze into a top layer of the already thick lake ice. Consequently, when we walked on the ice, the top layer cracked - either rapidly or in a slow-yielding motion like a fleshy membrane, depending on how cold that part of the lake was - and it did sometimes feel like we were constantly on the verge of falling into the water. Then we would occasionally drill a hole into the ice to measure the thickness of the old layer, and this proved invariably to be somewhere between 40 and 50 centimetres. For reference, ten centimetres of ice is usually sufficient for walking safely.  

What made the experience even more atmospheric was that in the three-day period before the rain set in, the snow had caught the tracks of crossing animals - mostly foxes - and the rain had essentially fossilised these proofs of lives otherwise unseen. At one point, we could even smell the rancid, sickly stench of a fox - they are in heat at the moment, as one of them loudly made clear a few days ago - and the world around us was closer. This is also part of the old pattern. 

Today, as I write this, on the feast of Saint Peter's Chair, the weather has again changed. The thaw and rain we were promised has turned into snow, and I have recently been shovelling the driveway in anticipation of much more to come during the night. As I was shovelling, I met a friend and neighbour, who is also a fellow medievalists, and she remarked that she had not been on the ice because according to the old runic calendars, this was not a day when you could expect to be saved from the water if you went onto it. Normally, I would agree, but yesterday's experience combined with the ongoing snowfall made me hesitate. It does not look like we are losing access to the ice just yet. The question is whether this is the pattern breaking in a rather unexpected way, or whether we are just within that margin of deviation which means that the old pattern is still in place.

Ephemeral records of history - an example from the fjords

'Lads,' he cried, 'there's spoor here;' 

- John Buchan, Prester John 

In the right perspective, all records of history are ephemeral. However, there are certain records that are hostage not only to the passing of time but to the passing of seasons, and this becomes particularly evident in winter when frost, snow and ice preserve certain records just long enough to create an illusion of permanence. In a landscape where most of history has gone unrecorded, the tracks of various animals that appear after a snowfall or right on the verge of thaw serve as good representatives of what passes as history in these parts. 

Earlier this week, I came across some striking examples of this kind of illusory permanence. In my native village of Hyen in the Western Norwegian fjords, there is a lake in the centre of the village which froze a few weeks ago, only to loose its grip on land during a sudden and intense thaw. The ice on the lake, however, remained solid despite being unmoored from the shore, and when a cold period came a week later, the lake once more became available for human exploration. In that middle period during the sudden thaw, the ice had been accessible to animals, and I happened upon the track of a fox who had crossed the lake while the surface of the ice was sufficiently permeable for the weight of a fox to leave imprints. When the ice is frozen solid, a fox leaves no track at all. Consequently, when the ice later became solid again, we can be certain that this fox, and probably some others, too, have moved back and forth from shore to shore, but without any witness to the event. This one journey by a fox, therefore, is our only solid proof that the foxes use the ice as a shortcut. Although this only proves what we already know, it is nonetheless a reminder of both how little we need to assess patterns, and also how much happens around us that leaves no trace in the visible record. As a historian, I find the reminder very welcome.    

Histories from home, part 5 - a transitory monument

 

Human history is difficult to preserve in the fjords. Most of the buildings constructed in the past were made of wood, and the stones of the foundations were often repurposed in new buildings once the main structure had fallen into disuse, disrepair, or been lost to fire or other disasters. There are few monuments to be found, and most remnants are scattered and overgrown, while some surviving relics stay put far longer than can be expected. Sometimes, moreover, you find examples of people leaning into the transitory nature of our efforts and make their marks in the landscape in the face of an overwhelming likelihood that what they build will be torn down within the year. This blogpost features one such example, namely a small cairn placed in a rather unlikely place. 

In my native village, Hyen, in the Western Norwegian fjords, we often find cairns in the mountains. These are long-surviving markers to guide shepherds or other travellers, and sometimes they are of more recent make, being erected for mountaineers and serving as a gathering point or a point of orientation. Some cairns, however, are made with a seeming desire to make a mark in the landscape, even in places where the landscape is too mutable to support any such long-term history. 

This summer, I found one such precariously positioned cairn in a scree in a promontory on the western side of the fjord of my village. The promontory is called "Bjønnasvøra" in the local dialect, which translates to "Bear gorge". The name is a testament to the bears that once roamed the mountainsides of the village before they were hunted into local extinciton about a century ago. Bjønnasvøra is one of the most mutable locations in the village, because the gorge that empties onto the promontory usually brings huge avalanches of snow into the landscape below. With the changing of the climate and the less snowy winters, the gorge often brings rockslides rather than avalanches due to flash floods. Every year, the first landing on this promontory is followed by a quick survey to see what has changed since last year. One of the most dramatic changes came in 2024, when rockslides caused the blocking of one of the two riverbeds on the promontory, meaning that the water pouring from the gorge was now redirected to the farther bay only. This situation was, in turn, altered sometime this year, when new rockslides enabled the hither riverbed to flow again.  

View from Bjønnasvøra towards the village centre

Bjønnasvøra, towards the eponymous gorge

It was in the ever-changing scree created by millennia of avalanches and rockslides that I came upon the aforementioned cairn. It was placed on a boulder which in turn was mostly drowned in smaller rocks, and consisted only of four large rocks stacked on top of one another. I do not know who erected it, but if they were locals they would be aware that the monument was bound to fall with the next major rockslide or avalanche. Yet I do understand the impulse of erecting such transitory monuments, and I have done similar things myself from time to time. Because such markers as this are made for one's own pleasure, practically in the face of the forces of change, just out of the curiosity to see whether it can survive, and with the ambition of making a mark on the landscape. This kind of structure, however, is a form of that ambition which has been channelled into a healthy impulse that does not destroy the landscape in the process, and which symbolises the inexorably transitory nature of history and human endeavour in the fjords. 

Knutsok - harvest season and the feast of Saint Knud Rex

 

Today is July 10, which is the feast-day of Saint Knud Rex, a Danish king who was killed in 1086. His cult was formally established in 1095 when his bones were translated to a new burial place after being tested in the fire. The feast of Saint Knud Rex was celebrated throughout medieval Denmark, and also reached Norway within a few decades. Although the cult of Saint Knud in medieval Norway is still insufficiently mapped, we know that the feast was important enough to be mentioned as a day of rest in the law of the Gulathing province - one of the four juridical units of twelfth-century Norway. This lawcode was written down around 1160 in the Norwegian vernacular, in which the feast of Saint Knud was known as 'knutsok', meaning 'knutsvaka' or 'the vigil of Knud'.  

July 10 was marked on late-medieval runic calendars with a rake or a scythe to signal the beginning of harvest season. This was when the Julian calendar was still in use, and so this date came slightly earlier in the agrarian cycle than it does today. Even so, the feast of Saint Knud continued to be a marker in the annual round also after the Danish-Norwegian Reformation of 1536/37. Well into the twentieth century, it was customary in my home village of Hyen that July 10 was the date when the cattle and the milkmaids moved to the summer farms - either on the day itself or the weekend nearest that date. (In some cases the milkmaids did not stay at the summer farm but only spent the nights and then returned tot he farms to participate in the harvest in the daytime.) While I never heard my grandparents talk about knutsok when growing up - as opposed to jonsok (Saint John's Eve) or pederstol (cathedra petri) - it is evident that the medieval practice of connecting harvest season with the feast of the saint-king was still alive several centuries after the formal introduction of Protestantism in Norway. 

In our time, the summer farm in my part of the village is mostly used as a recreational space. None of the byres that still stand are used for keeping animals, and the cattle are now mostly moving about freely in certain parts of the valley. The summer farm is a beloved space, and much of my childhood was spent here, learning about the natural cycle in this part of the village. Today, I went to the shieling that belongs to my family. I did this as an homage to the old ways, even though we only stay at the shieling for a few days at a time, and then only for the sheer pleasure of it. A few sheep were grazing in one of the nearby fields, and the scent of pines, ling and bog filled an air rich with moisture. It felt right to maintain this connection - however flimsy, tenuous and construed - with a tradition that is now lost to all but a vague collective memory deciphered by scholars, and it was a pleasant reminder that some things are worth doing if only symbolically. 

A ritual for fishing

 

Earlier this month, I went with my parents to set out fishing nets in a lake. This is an old practice, and a way by which we have harvested food for generations. There is a lot of skill involved, and as I am quite rusty I need to practice so that the mechanics of the various steps become engrained into my muscle memory. Several things can go wrong. For instance, it is important to start near land where the water is shallow, so that the fish is less likely to swim behind the end of the net. For the same reason, when the rower is moving the boat away from the shore, it is important to let the net slip off the hook swiftly and without too much tugging, lest the stone that weighs down the net in the shoremost end is dragged further away from land. 

Setting out fish nets is a practice that goes far back down the earlier generations, and this kind of continuity is part of what grounds me deeper in my native village. There is a timelessness to it, even though the nets we use today, as well as the boat, are both of a type that is decidedly modern, made with modern technology and from modern materials. In other words, fishing with nets is one of those things that remind us that we are always closer to the ways of the past than we are to the ways of an imagined, high-technological, techno-utopian future. 

We had five nets to set, and my father set the first one in a spot of his choosing. He stood in the aft end of the boat while my mother rowed, and he let the net slip off the hook with practiced ease. As the hook itself was the last part remaining, my father spat on it before sending it into the water. This is an old superstition meant to bring good luck, and people also do this with the fishing hook before casting it into a river or a lake.   

The next four nets were set by me while my mother rowed the boat straight ahead. As I am out of practice, I focused intensely on making sure that I didn't drag the net or the net didn't get caught in itself, as it sometimes does when it is a net that is old and frayed. But as the first of my four nets was about to leave my hand, I also leant forward and spat drily and unpreparedly on the hook before releasing it. I did the same with the other nets, and each time I felt an odd satisfaction. This is a ritual, a marking of a transition from one stage to the next, the releasing of the hook a liminal state, a threshold. As so many things in the current historical epoch is entangled in emptiness and destructive fantasies, this kind of ritual felt deeply satisfying, indeed wholesome, as it was an odd but harmless way to mark an important shift in the labour of the evening. I do not believe in such superstitions, but I do believe in the importance of rituals for human beings, however constructed they are. Some rituals are good to have, to retain, to construct, to invent, because these rituals are brief moments that ground us in reality and make us come closer to the interconnectedness of it all. 

I do not believe in such superstition. But the net that my father set was the one that caught the greatest haul.  

The Loon - a poem by Robert Bly

 

This morning, a pair of loons were frolicking in the lake behind the house of my late grandparents. While I am used to hearing their ghostly cry in one of the lakes higher up in one of the valleys - where their plaintive sound is more naturally at home - this was not the first time I have seen them in this little bay of the lake. And as always happens when I see or hear loons, I was reminded of Robert Bly's wonderful short poem.

The Loon 

From far out in the center of the naked lake

the loon’s cry rose…

it was the cry of someone who owned very little 

- Robert Bly

Eden in the Norwegian fjords

Yesterday, I wrote a blogpost on how medieval Christians in Europe connected themselves to the biblical past through typology. Typological thinking, however, is a phenomenon in many Christian cultures and periods, and today I was reminded of another case of Nordic biblical typology that is far removed from the twelfth-century baptismal font in Fiskbæk Church.  

I come from the small village of Hyen in the Western Norwegian fjords, and at the time of writing I am residing here while applying for jobs. Earlier today, I went for a walk which took me along part of the old main road which was used from time immemorial until the 1930s. In so doing, I passed an old stone which looks somewhat like a bed or a couch, which goes by the name of "Adam og Eva-steinen", the Adam and Eve stone. My paternal grandmother, born in 1912, told me about how she and her generation imagined that this was where Adam and Eve had their bed, and this idea was commonly shared at the time of her childhood. My grandmother also had an idea that I believe to be her own - at least based on how she told me about it when I was little - namely that the orchard of one of the farms in this part of the village was the Garden of Eden.  

My grandmother was born into a world of Lutheran piety, where the biblical frame of reference saturated a lot of popular culture as well as the schools and public gatherings. In this sense, Western Norway of the 1910s was quite similar to the Middle Ages, although the type of Christianity in those two eras were very different from one another. It was only natural that both children and adults would fuse their knowledge of the Bible and their immediate geographical horizon together in the way that led to the naming of the Adam and Eve stone. This case, then, points to how easily typological thinking can be infused into a cultural framework, and how human creativity can run with this kind of thinking and create very lovely and very endearing ideas.  

 

Plains and deep dells - contrasts of reading

 

As I have often emphasized when writing about reading, I do enjoy those occasions when the contrast between what is being read and the place in which the reading is being done, makes both the reading and the surroundings much more memorable. Sometimes, this contrast is serendipitous, as I noted when describing my reading of Orosius a few years ago, while other times it is deliberately orchestrated in the hope that the contrast will serve to etch the experience more deeply into my memory. I November, I orchestrated such a contrast, and it was a great pleasure. 

The occasion was a research trip to Poland, where I stayed for two weeks. Having been to Poland before, I was familiar with the landscape: largely flat, and sometimes very flat. I prepared myself accordingly, and brought with me a novel whose scenes would be a far cry from the Polish fields. The novel in question was Hubroen roper, 'The eagle-owl calls', which was written in 1971 by the Norwegian author Mikkjel Fønhus (1894-1973), famous for his descriptions of the Norwegian wilderness. The novel chronicles the events of a hamlet in the interior valleys of Southern Norway through the last years of a female eagle-owl. Hubroen roper is a lament of the decline of the eagle-owl population in Norway, a decline caused in part by an aggressive policy onn the part of the Norwegian government, which paid a bounty for any raptors and predators that were shot or trapped. Since the narrative follows an eagle-owl, much of the scenery consists of deep dells, ravines and crags - in other words, exactly the kind of landscape with which I am familiar from my childhood. 

The riven topography of the novel provided a pleasant contrast with my surroundings. I read a substantial part of the short novel while sitting on a train to the village of Teresin, about an hour northwest of Warsaw. It was a late November morning, and outside the fields stretched on to some fuzzy-looking treetops on the horizon, which in turn shone black against a muted sunlight. It was a peculiar day. Quite cold, and with clouds that filtered the sunlight in such a way that the sun itself seemed to have drowned, and it felt like sunrise and sunset at the same time, despite being neither. The November fields of Mazovia had little in common with the pine-covered, ice-carved mountains of Southern Norway, and for that very reason both the mountains on the page and the fields beyond the page took a much larger place in my consciousness than they otherwise might have done. The whole affair pleased me greatly as a reader. 

The affair also pleased me as a scholar and as a medievalist. I am currently hired as a postdoctoral researcher on a project aimed at comparing the medieval past of both Norway and Poland. This is a collaboration between the University of Oslo and the University of Warsaw. For the past two years, the project has engendered a lot of discussion concerning the art of comparing one and the same phenomena in two different areas. Poland and Norway have been chosen in part because they have many similarities as medieval polities, but they also have a lot of differences. One such difference is the very landscape. Although Poland does have mountains, a lot of its most important centres of religious and political affairs in the Middle Ages are cities located on the plains. Norway, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. Throughout this project, the importance of topography has been raised time and again, and the issue has provided a very useful yardstick when analysing how a phenomenon like the foundation of nunneries or the establishment of cult centres unfolded in both Norway and Poland. Sometimes, life and scholarship converge in pleasing ways, and this was one of those times.    

Reading-spots, part 4

 

Whenever I am home in my native village, I make it my quest to find new spots in which to read. This quest also applies outside of my village, but since I have spent most of my life among the mountains of home, finding new locations in which I have not yet read requires a bit more effort than elsewhere. Today I was reminded of one of these new places which I discovered in 2021, a year when I spent eight consecutive months at home, and when I spent many lovely hours canoeing along the shore of the lake just behind the house after my paternal grandparents.  

The place in question is a short stretch of stony beach where the shore is sufficiently even and sufficiently low to allow for disembarkation, and where it is also possible to find a comfortable place to relax with a good book. As can be glimpsed from the pictures below, this particular location also has the added virtue of being difficult to see from a distance, as old hazel trees are bending in arches over the shoreline, effectively hiding it from view, and creating a kind of canopy under which it is possible to seek refuge from light drizzles. I brought with me a volume of poetry by one of my favourite poets, Maribel Andrés Llamero, to whose poems I had only been introduced earlier that year. This book, La lentitud del liberto, is full of beautiful, melancholic meditations, and was an excellent companion under the greenwood trees by the lake. 

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 

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.   

What the walrus tells us - language, translation and identity-construction in Historia Norwegie

Today, August 30, I conducted a seminar in a half-term course for first-year students that I have designed myself. The course focusses on the cult of saints and history-writing in twelfth-century Norway, and one of the main intended outcomes is that the students will have an understanding of how Norwegian clerics formulated a Christian identity through the writing of chronicles.

In today’s seminar, we were examining aspects of the chronicle Historia Norwegie, an account of Norway’s geography and history which was composed in Oslo by an unknown chronicler sometime close to 1170. The work only survives in incomplete late-medieval transmissions. A good overview of its history can be found here, while an Open Access edition with translation and critical commentary can be found here.  

For the seminar, I had selected a handful of passages that could help to demonstrate how the anonymous chronicler shaped this book so that it both served a domestic and a foreign audience, in order for Norway to both adhere to the hallmarks of a Christian country, as well as stand out as something unique. This balance of conformity and uniqueness is a key element in identity formation. This was perhaps especially true within an intellectual culture as that of medieval Latin Christendom, where there was a divinely woven pattern in history, and where that pattern could be discerned by elements in new places – such as peripheral Norway – that resembled in well-established, central places – such as the Holy Land, Italy or France.  

Perhaps my favourite passage that highlights this balance between an interior and an exterior audience can be seen in the chronicler’s overview of the dangers of the Greenland Sea in Chapter 2. Here, the chronicler includes a list of sea creatures that inhabit these waters. Among these is the ‘pistrix’, a whale-like creature, perhaps a sawfish, that can be found together with the baleen whale in the Indian Ocean, according to Pliny’s Natural History (book 9, chapter 3). Here we see, in other words, how the anonymous chronicler has used a name familiar to the exterior audience, who are likely to – or at least expected to – have read Pliny. 

Following the pistrix, the anonymous chronicler mentions the ‘hafstramb’, a creature with neither head nor tail, and which dips up and down like the trunk of a tree. This is the earliest known reference to this beast, and to this day there is no consensus about what it is meant to signify. Shortly after, the reader is also presented with two other creatures, the ‘hafguva’ and the ‘hafkitta’, and these two are likewise not identified with any certainty. It is worth noting that the name ‘hafkitta’ can be understood as ‘sea-cat’ (from ‘haf’ meaning ‘sea’ and ‘kitta’ meaning ‘cat’ or ‘she-cat’), and that this is a common Norwegian name for the wolf fish or sea-wolf. It is unclear whether the anonymous chronicler had this particular fish in mind when referring to the ‘hafkitta’, and it is possible that reports such as that in Historia Norwegie has influenced the later appellation of this name to this particular fish.

What is notable in this passage, however, is that all these three beasts are referred to by their Norse names, whereas the pistrix is referred to by its Latin name. We see here, in other words, that some beasts are common to several places, e.g., the pistrix, whereas others are unique to Norway and its maritime zone. In other words, the chronicler balanced known and unknown, domestic and foreign, local and universal, Norse and Latin, in a way that served to cement the identity of Norway as a place with unique things and typical things.  

But then there is the walrus. And the walrus shows us the borderland between the known and the unknown for readers outside of Norway, at least according to the expectations of the chronicler. The walrus is presented as ‘equinus cetus monoculus’, the one-eyed horse-whale. This is a literal translation of the Norse ‘hrosshvalr’, which is the basis for the Modern English ‘walrus’ and the Modern Norwegian ‘kvalross’. The walrus is undoubtedly a beast typical of the Northern waters and well suited to demonstrate the unique aspects of Norway and its historical identity – in this case represented by natural history. But the name is not given in the vernacular, but is instead rendered as a literal translation, just as the name of its native haunt, Greenland, or ‘Virida Terra’. 

When the chronicler found it useful to employ vernacular terms for beasts typical of the Greenland Sea, why did he not do so in the case of the walrus? Or, for that matter, why did he translate Greenland? The answer is, most likely, that unlike the three other beasts, the walrus was not an unknown entity to exterior readers. By 1170, the walrus was the main source of ivory for the craftspeople of Northern Europe, and although the animal itself had not been observed by men and women who never ventured into the Arctic waters, they knew very well where the ivory came from. Consequently, the walrus was a point of reference that would register in the minds of the foreign readers of Historia Norwegie, and it would be something familiar, unlike the obscure and terrifying beasts such as the ‘hafstramb’. Through the walrus, in other words, the chronicler managed to showcase a unique aspect of Norwegian natural history that could resonate with readers who did not speak Norse. It was therefore useful to render the name of this beast in Latin. In this way, the walrus aided the chronicler in shaping a Norwegian identity.     

A view of the solstice

 

Today is the summer solstice, one of the great markers in the temporal flow of the year, and a day commonly held to be rich in symbolism. For me, this part of June - if not this specific day - has this year become a period of transition. The previous week I had my last day in a three-month employment, which I have briefly mentioned here, and I am currently in a kind of limbo in which I try to tie up loose ends and preparing for the future. Such transition periods are typical in the life of an academic, and from previous experience I know that they tend to be much more busy than anticipated, whatever their length might end up being. While there is a deep uncertainty in such periods that can be deeply unsettling, I have eventually learned to appreciate what moments of beauty may appear, and to enjoy them despite worry, care, uncertainty, waiting, and all the other manifestations of precarity. The summer solstice offered a lovely opportunity this year, as the combination of light, scents and colours provided vistas that conveyed a reassuring, if tenuous, sense of continuity and permanence, a sense that is to be enjoyed in full whenever possible. 

One month later

Towards the end of February, the ice on one of the lakes of the village was covered in what we call surface water, some of it rain, but most of it meltwater from the thawing bogs and mires, from which a sepia-coloured run-off gushed onto the lake and created a brown mirror of the world. Yet it was still safe to walk on the ice, and it was possible to go across to the other side of the lake. 

Today, however, one month and ten days later, the ice was in a much different state. The once-solid ice sheet has fragmented into smaller particles barely kept together, which dissolve as soon as it crushes into something, or as soon as you pick it up. A sheet of this ice still lies across parts of the lake, but great flakes are loosening from the main sheet and either run ashore or into the waterfall. The atmosphere is different, and it is a good measurement of how much change can be wrought in about one single month. 

 

Histories from home, part 2 - a bridge at a shift in time

 

Whenever I am home in my native village for an extended period, I gravitate towards the various historical remains that lie scattered throughout the landscape. These are not remains of great age or of any spectacularly unique importance, but vestiges of a past lifestyle that is receding ever more quickly from our own lived experiences. Because so much of what has been built in the fjords has been made out of wood, so little of it survive beyond a hundred years, with the occasional exception in the case of houses or barns. But the testaments to the old agrarian life, or the old patterns of working and living off the land, are often lost after a few generations, typically because they fall into disuse. 

An important stage in this process occurred in the period c.1950-c.1980, when Norwegian farming became increasingly mechanised, to the point where horses became obsolete. This change in equipment, so to speak, had wide-reaching consequences. The heavy machines required flat surfaces, so while previous generations had favoured slopes for harvesting grass for hay - since the grass could be rolled rather than carried - this kind of landscape now became impractical. Likewise, the old infrastructure became outdated, roads broad enough for horse and sled became too narrow for tractors, and bridges that could carry the weight of a full sled of, say, hay or timber were not strong enough as tractors began to gain weight and size. With the change towards a more mechanised agrarian life, scores of buildings, bridges, various solutions from the life before the shift turned into relics of a bygone past. 

This February, I visited one of these old relics, as my parents and I went hiking up a stretch of a frozen river. The stretch of the river is located where there used to be a summer farm until about 1950-60, which we now use as holiday houses. I do not know when the place was first used as a summer farm, but the starting point goes a long way back, and both sides of the river were used (as is only to be expected). We no longer know when the first river crossing was made across this stretch of the river, and I think it is fair to say that it has been long lost to time. For the farmers currently needing to cross the river, there is a new bridge in stone, concrete and supporting beams of metal, made sometime in the 1980s in order to accommodate new tractors and heavier loads. Before this one, however, there was another one mostly built in wood and stone, but with some concrete reinforcements from a repair job in the 1970s.

This old bridge crossed the river at a wider part of the river, divided into sections and crossing small islands on its way to the other bank. As it fell into disuse, it also fell into disrepair, and stones from its piers were taken away and used for other purposes. Today, only three piers remain - the least accessible ones - two of which are covered by a log with boards that still cling together in spite of time and weather. We rarely approach his historical relic any longer, mostly because now that the river is crossed elsewhere, there is little to attract someone to that particular part of the river. However, now that the river had frozen and we were passing right beside it on our journey upstream, we did get an excellent chance of seeing it up close, to get a sense of its materiality, the building techniques, and the vestiges of the repair job in the 1970s. It was a lovely opportunity, and a reminder of how low-key, yet no less wondrous, our historical monuments tend to be in the agrarian fjords, and how the vicissitudes of time have turned them into hidden or tucked-away little gems that require some efforts to find. 

(This is the second instalment of an ongoing series. For the first part, see here.)

A change in the weather - Cathedra Petri as a seasonal reference point

Today is the feast of Cathedra Petri, or the Chair of St. Peter, a liturgical celebration about which I have written before (here). This feast belongs to the annual cycle as laid out in the liturgical year of the Latin Church, it is a feast that celebrates the legendary founding of the bishopric of Antioch by Saint Peter, and it serves to remind Latin Christians that it is Saint Peter who is the first apostolic successor, i.e. pope, and the forerunner to the popes of Rome. 

In the medieval annual cycle, liturgy and manual labour were intertwined in the church calendar, in which specific labours were assigned to specific months, following the rhythm of agrarian life. In this way, the feasts of the church year became important reference points for farmers to talk about the annual cycle, and the calendar provided reference points when making plans for the work that needed to be done. 

This coupling of the liturgical year and the cycle of labours on the land was disseminated across Latin Christendom, including Scandinavia. Here, the feast became known colloquially as Pederstol, a literal translation of the Latin name. This date, Pederstol, remained in the collective memory of Scandinavians even after the Protestant Reformation changed the framework of religious life and did away with the feasts of the saints. It is a testament to the potential for longevity contained in such deeply embedded cultural practices that even my grandmother (born in 1912) and my parents (born in the 1950s) grew up with Pederstol as a reference point in the yearly cycle. I first learned about this from my grandmother, and my parents are still, to this day, using the term as a way to orientate plants. 

In recent folk memory, as exemplified by my family, Pederstol is seen as the transition from winter to spring. It is not necessarily so that spring sets in at this particular date - it might still very wintry outside - but a change is beginning, and thaw might have started to work its power in spite of appearances. For this reason, some types of work that depended on snow or ice - like transporting timber or hay from the sheds far away from the farm - could be deemed to risky to undertake. The ice might not be trusted, and the snow might be found too soft and rotten to provide a solid foundation for the sled. It was not necessarily that winter was over, but that winter was less reliably wintry. 

In the present times, when weather patterns are changing due to global warming and the old points of references become superannuated, Pederstol remains a relevant feature. Yesterday, my parents and I went for a trip on the ice on the lake behind the house of my late grandparents. The thaw that had set in a few days ago had separated the ice from land, but once you got onto the ice it remained perfectly safe, as long as you are careful and pay attention to the patterns of change. When we got back, my mother commented that this could not be done after Pederstol, meaning that it would be too risky, and the ice would possibly be too weak, disintegrating from within with changes in the temperature. Today, on Pederstol itself, I woke up to a grey mist and a hard rain falling on the sheet of ice still lingering in its fought-for place, and even though it remains safe at least today, it would be very risky to try it. Pederstol is still a good point of orientation, therefore, for deciding what activities to do.  

 

Palimpsest landscapes

 

From the last half of January until the middle of this week, my native village has been held in the grip of temperatures between -10 and -16. This has been a period of no new precipitation and stable conditions, without any significant fluctuations in the weather. This stability has allowed most of the lakes and waterways to freeze solidly and thus allowed various animals to use them as thoroughfares. Mostly, these wanderings happen at night, and we are left with the various tracks and spoors in the morning, providing a detailed and legible chronicle of the past night to whomever chooses to go onto the ice and enter into this quiet world so teeming with half-visible life. 

Since no new snow has fallen, the old tracks do not get covered but collapse slowly, taking enough time for new tracks to be placed around them, which in turn allows us to extract a tenuous and vague chronology of our nightly neighbours. In this period, my family and I have explored several sections of some of the lakes and rivers closest to us, and these journeys have revealed to us landscapes where tracks old and new are scribbled across the snow in a continuous and poorly executed palimpsest. In some cases, we have been able to keep an eye on the changes, and note where new tracks have been added, while in other cases we see how the scribbles intertwine and erase the previous layer. This has been a perennial source of joy throughout the past month, and below are some examples from the palimpsest landscapes of the village, in which we see that although the valleys and riverbanks seem uninhabited from a distance, this is merely an illusion.  

Two foxes

The tracks of my kicksled to the left, foxes to the right

Tracks from a dancing crow, crossed by the tracks of a fox

Mostly hares, with the occasional fox

Tracks showing the stage for a boxing match between two hares

Tracks of a hare crossed by a fox

The slide of an otter, crossed by the tracks of a fox