Travelling by page

One of my mother's uncles was known, at least in the family, for saying that he travelled on the map. He was a knowledgeable man who spent very little time outside his native Norway, yet who knew more about the world than most of his neighbours by virtue of having perused maps and atlases. The more common expression, of course, is armchair travel, but I usually tend to prefer the former expression, perhaps because it sounds more grandiose, or perhaps because its conceit imitates more closely the act of travelling. 

Even though I have travelled a bit, I have covered the greatest distances by pages, either in atlases or in texts, and I have loved this kind of travel ever since I learned to read. I have, however, noticed that now my opportunities for travel are very restricted and I am unlikely to go far this side of summer, at the very least, I seem to have gravitated towards travelogues of different kinds since the beginning of December. This appetite for vicarious travel has resulted in the following little selection, which includes historical sources, a monograph about a historical source, and a novel. What I find particularly fitting about this selection is that the historical travelogues - namely the accounts of Ibn Fadlan, Benjamin of Tudela and Odoric of Pordenone - were from their very beginning aimed at providing readers who themselves had not and probably could not travel these routs themselves a way to get a sense of the marvels and the sights in far-away places. That these books continue to serve this purpose about a millennium later is a testament to, among other things, the enduring pleasure we take, as human beings, in travelling by all means possible, be it by ship, by horseback, by airplane, or by page. While I have a different view of the world that the first readers of these historical accounts, as well as their authors, I feel an unmistakable kinship with those who moved through these lines and pages in order to live or relive journeys to distant and exciting places. It is clear to me that some things do not change, even in the course of a thousand years.   

 

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

Remembered readings

 

When I came home from Sweden in December and entered into a ten-day quarantine before Christmas, I was partly preoccupied with filling up a new book case that my parents had bought for me. It was a long-sought-after opportunity to empty some of the numerous boxes that had been lying around the house in storage after my five years in Denmark - the eclectic library accumulated in the course of a PhD. This brought back a lot of memories from a time that was very different from the constrictions of a pandemic, a time of travelling, and the reading that always follows on travels. 

As I read a few dozen books each year, there are several of them that fall out of memory and little of those particular reading experiences has stuck. Others, however, I remember vividly, and some I remember because of where I was when reading them. And a fair number of books from this latter category I remember precisely because of the incongruous pairing of reading material and the place of reading. For instance, I remember reading a translated collection of poetry by Léopold Sédar Senghor, the president of Senegal from 1960 to 1980, while staying at the family cabin in my home village. I remember reading short stories by Fijian writer Raymond Pillai in a small hotel room in Paris. I have vivid memories of finishing the devastating novel Eve out of her ruins by Mauritian writer Ananda Devi in a cold flat in Alicante one December evening, while on my way from Alicante back to Denmark I read a collection of poems from the Norwegian fjords by Wilhelm Bødal. These are combinations of location and reading matter that have become etched into my memory precisely because they do not fit, because they stand out in contrast to one another. 

Among these different contrasts, the type that I find perhaps most incongruous is that which happens when reading in an airport. To my mind, airports are distinctly modern half-worlds, pockets of reality that correspond very little with the reality outside them. In this way, it does not take much for airport reading to become incongruous, to become marked my contrasts, to be memorable precisely because something does not fit. One such reading came to my mind as I was organising the new book case, namely the reading of Orosius' Seven books of history against the pagans.       

I was reading Orosius in the course of the spring of 2018, as we were having a reading group at the university where I worked then, and because of its compact nature I read this book over several months. I no longer remember where and when I began reading it, and I do not remember where and when I finished it (although judging from my reading list this happened sometime in April-May). What I do remember, however, was an afternoon in March where I was on my way back to Denmark after my first visit to Istanbul. I was sitting by the departure gate for some time, facing a vista of planes taxiing across the tarmac and occasionally picking up the distinct and unexpected sounds of Icelandic teenagers talking somewhere within earshot. The scene was so very different from the reading, which was a seemingly excited recounting of the deeds of Alexander the Great, in which the Christian author Oriosius, who claims to abhor the violence wrought by the pagans of past times, appears to be relishing the opportunity to describe how the Macedonian king jumped over castle walls and single-handedly slaughtered a host of his enemies. It was an incongruous blend of place and reading matter, perhaps made even more congruous by this particular passage, which, in so many ways, stands out as an oddity in Orosius' narrative, conflicting, as it seems, with both his self-proclaimed intention and his vantage point. But incongruities can be memorable precisely because they are incongruous, and in this strange mix of ancient and modern - in which were blended the translated prose of a Spanish fourth-century historian, the view of the Turkish Airline planes, the occasional call over the loudspeaker in Turkish, the chatter in Icelandic along with various other impressions - the reading material fastened in my memory in a way I had not expected, and I have carried this with me for much longer than I spent reading the passage in question, and even longer than it took me to read the book itself.      
 

For the time being

He was the surveyor of his own ice-world
- Geoffrey Hill, An order of service


With changing weather patterns, other changes follow suit. In my native village, Hyen in Western Norway, we see this in the way that the ice freezes on the lakes. The old patterns, familiar to me from my boyhood and recounted in the stories of my paternal grandmother when growing up, are now replaced by new ones, and we are re-learning the mechanisms by which the thickness of the ice develops. In conjunction with warmer and more abruptly shifting weather, this also means that there are two great uncertainties that preside over the winters: whether the ice will form, and, if it does, for how long it will stay. For the time being, it has stayed for the better part of two weeks, and I have made the most of it by taking almost daily excursions into this world of new perspectives and accesses, knowing that I am enjoying this for a limited time period, knowing that I don't know the extent of this time period in question. 

This uncertainty and this mutability currently overlaps poetically with changes in my own life. This week is the final week of my current contract, and after that I am again unemployed for an uncertain stretch of time, and one that hopefully is short. But until I know what my next step is, I am back home in my native village, and I will most likely spend the spring writing applications, working on articles, doing the kind of unpaid labour that is part and parcel of the academic life, even outside of the institutional payroll. For the time being, this is a rather pleasant prospect, in spite of everything. The past few months have been exceedingly hectic, as the normal demands of the working day has been exacerbated and amplified by the pandemic, leading to extra work and a student body more concerned and more stressed than they would be in a normal situation which is in and of itself stressful. I am now entering into a different pace, however, and while it is not void of deadlines or stress, it is a pace in which a significant part of my rhythm will be in tune with the landscape around me, it will consist of trips on the ice - if it stays - and the possibility of pressing pause to a greater extent than I could before. For the time being, this works, and then we'll see.  

The joys of aimless learning

 
As January draws to a close, I'm looking back on three-four weeks of very intense end-of-term work. In the Swedish university system - in which I am employed until the end of the month - the autumn term ends in the second week of January, while the spring term begins in the third week. Consequently, January is a month in which everything intensifies, because the grades of the latest exams need to be out of the way quicker than usual, and dissertations that I have supervised throughout the autumn are now being evaluated and graded, with all the extra admin and preparation work that this entails.

As January draws to a close, I'm looking back on the modules I have taught or to which I have contributed, I'm looking back on the dissertations I have supervised or evaluated, and I'm looking back on all the things I have learned as part of my preparation for my modules. I have learned a lot this term, also about myself, and almost everything I have learned has been for a specific purpose, be it a lecture, a conference, or for administrative reasons. On the one hand, this is of course a great boon - I know more going out of the term than I did going into it, and this is a good progress. 

However, when learning is as intense as it is in the Swedish system - each module runs for only five weeks, so the preparation time is mercilessly short - there comes a point when this learning starts to feel forced, like finishing a meal out of ingrained courtesy even though you are on the verge of sending it all back again. At this point, reading becomes a chore, and this in turn creates a strange emptiness to someone whose favourite pastime is reading. Since the second half of December, I have only finished reading one single book, and while I have started reading others, I have been unable to finish them, mostly because I have had very little mental energy left for these books, but also because these books are medieval texts and therefore pertain to my professional life. In this way, reading these texts bears some resemblance to the kind of chore work that I have been doing for large parts of the term. It is a mood that I have struggled to get out of. Fortunately, it seems that the tide is slowly turning. 

This week, as a greater part of the items on my physical to-do-list have been crossed off and I have slowly sunk into a state of what is either relaxation or carelessness, I have found a way to resume learning but without a specific aim for the learning in question. Before my return to Norway, I had ordered a booklet from the project Ancient European Languages And Writings (AELAW), hosted by the University of Zaragoza. These booklets provide introductions to now-extinct languages that survive in small corpora of inscriptions, and that - at least for the most part - are not yet understood in full. This is a subject that I find fascinating, but which I will never be able to employ in my own research, as this is well beyond my topic, and well beyond the period of my expertise. Moreover, since I am not teaching ancient history again anytime soon, this is not something that I am reading with the aim of incorporating it into a syllabus. I have therefore started learning again.       

Booklet 1 in the Ancient European Languages And Writings (AELAW) series
Published by the University of Zaragoza

This weekend, I'm drawn into the fascinating fragmentary world of the Celtiberian language, one of the several languages used in Iberia in the centuries before the birth of Christ, and one which survives in a range of fascinating sources. The booklet on Celtiberian has opened up a window into a world of tantalising little windows into a past not unknown but not as well known as it could have been, had we only possessed greater knowledge of its languages. It is the kind of reading that stokes the imagination, and that helps to give an even greater depth to the knowledge I have already accumulated about the period in question. It is the kind of learning that does not help my own professional life, but which gives my reading life so much more weight and pleasure, and that allows me to disentangle myself from the various chores and tasks presided over by looming deadlines and concerns about future employment. It is a learning that is aimless because it does not serve an immediate purpose, and it is exactly that characteristic that means that this is a joyful and pleasant learning, which might be aimless but in no way pointless.