Histories from home, part 6 - a quiet reminder

 

The centre of my native village, Hyen, is a hamlet called Straume. The name comes from “straum”, which is one of several words in Norwegian that mean “river” or “flow of water”, and refers to the short but salmon-rich river which flows past the farmstead which for a long time was the only settlement in the hamlet. The river in question is one of two rivers that separate the mainland from a small island, which is called “Straumsholmen”. “Holme” means small island, so the full name can be translated as “the small island by the river. In our time, this small island hosts the sole remaining shop of the village, the church, the school, the care home, the community hall, the gym, a football pitch, and a number of residential houses, including the one built by my paternal grandparents in the late 1940s.

 

At present, the residents of Straumsholmen are primarily middle class. No one on the island keeps animals any longer, and the old farmstead of Straume remains the sole farm in the area. This state of affairs, however, is a relatively recent shift, and the number of modern residential houses can make it difficult to grasp the slightly older history of this hamlet, a history in which wealth was divided among the farmers of Straume and the shopkeepers on the island. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, a few smaller farmsteads were leased from the wealthy farm, and eventually, over the next few decades, the hamlet of Straume became the home of several families who came to buy the land on which they lived. These families belonged to a type of rural farmers called “husmenn”, literally “housemen”, whose relationship with the landlord could be similar to that of sharecroppers or crofters in the anglophone world. The term is difficult to translate, however, because the social context of the Western Norwegian fjords is rather different in its hierarchies and practices than rural England or Scotland. Moreover, the housemen of the fjords are often referred to as “bygselhusmenn”, with “bygsel” meaning the act of settling through clearing the ground and erecting buildings. These families had some livestock, a small patch of ground, and supplemented their income through work either for the landlord or in other ways. Fodder for the livestock was often collected by helping out at other farms, or a family could be allowed to harvest from part of someone else’s land. 

 

Although my description of this rural class is rather brief and superfluous, the main point is that these new settlements that emerged both on the island and on the mainland from around 1900 onwards were inhabited by people who were often poor, whose social power was often dependent on local village elites, and who lived a much more precarious life than most because they initially did not own the land on which they lived – in short, their livelihood could be taken from them in a heartbeat. 

Straumsholmen, seen from the bottom end of the fjord

Today, the village centre does not contain many traces of this social stratification and the harsh reality of everyday existence that presided over the housemen. However, during daily dogwalks I have come to realise that there is one part of the area which serves as a quiet yet forceful reminder of this aspect of our village’s past. The part in question is the other river which makes Straumsholmen an island. This is a small river which does not always run, of a type which in Norwegian is called “løk” (not to be confused with the word “lauk” which means “onion”, which is commonly also spelled the same way in modern writing). In our dialect, both the river and the surrounding area is called “Løkjen” in our local dialect, meaning simply “the small, trickling river”. This small river is crossed by two bridges, and at the point of the second crossing the river appears mainly like a heap of boulders left from the Ice Age, lying inconveniently at the junction of fresh water and the fjord. A few buildings are located nearby, such as a well-kept boathouse and the local care home.

 

When you stand on the bridge, however, you will see that there are some stones that have been placed there by human effort, and there is a dent in the shore with logs of sallow-wood placed breadthwise across the bottom. Slightly beyond that dent can be seen the foundations of a torn-down house, foundations made from coarsely cut stones, which have probably been collected after one of the many erratic boulders that once littered the island had been blown up. This little corner contains an important clue about the earlier social stratification of the village, and of the plight of the housemen. 

Løkjen

As can be seen in the pictures, the waterway is not very convenient. The pictures are taken on high tide, and it is possible to navigate a rowboat through some of the rocks and into the fjord. When the sea is ebbing, however, it soon becomes difficult to get through, so all passage has to be planned carefully or one is forced to get ashore elsewhere and wait until the tide returns. In this place, however, four families were given the right to keep their boats, one of which was my paternal grandparents.

 

The white boathouse on the left-hand side of the picture is still in use, and it is well-kept, belonging to a family that bought the property from the housemen who first leased it from the main farm. The foundation of rough stone on the other side of the river belongs to my family, and supported the boathouse which my grandfather used, and which my family dismantled in 2023 because it was on the brink of collapsing. One other family kept its boat on that stretch of land – although I do not know exactly where, as the shoreline was altered when the main road was upgraded some decades ago. Another family has the right to store boats on the other side of the boulders behind my grandparents’ boathouse, but no storage facility currently remains.

 

As might be clear from the photographs, this is not a good location for keeping boats, partly because of the lack of general space, and partly because of the difficult passage. Since the river carries so little water, those who are going on the fjord to fish or collect hay from the farms along the fjord are dependent on the movements of tide and ebb. This area was given to the housemen because the owners of the main farm were not interested in using it themselves, as they had access to the fjord elsewhere. Since housemen could not be choosers, they accepted the locations, and over the decades much effort was put into making it a useful and suitable working space. My grandparents’ boathouse was built in the 1950s, and it was still in use – although badly dilapidated – in the early 1990s. The white boathouse remains in use, but that use remains severely hampered by the erratic boulders left in the small river. 

The socioeconomic context in which these places for boat-keeping were established is now part of the ever-receding past. My family, for instance, has long since moved our boat for the fjord to a different place of anchorage, one independent of the tide, and so have most of the other families who once were housemen in the hamlet. This patch of the small river serves nonetheless to remind us – by its retained inaccessibility – of how social hierarchies were once much more severe, and how social class meant something different in the early twentieth century. This is part of my family’s history, and part of the histories of countless families in the western fjords, and we do well in not forgetting it. 

Synchronicities of reading, part 1 - garum in Lisbon

 

Life is full of synchronicitites, episodes in one's life that bear some kind of resemblance to one another, or that provide a sense of symmetry or of patterns. A reading life is particularly full of them, as the variables at play are much more numerous than in a life where reading plays no part at all, simply because reading allows a person to encounter more topics and travel by page to a wide variety of locations, which provides more elements that can be found to rhyme somehow. I have experienced quite a few of them so far, but I was particularly struck by one such synchronicity this Christmas, one which was centred on Lisbon and which involved garum. 

 

The Norwegian translation of Asterix album no. 41, Asterix in Lusitania

(Text by Fabrice Caro, or Fabcaro, art by Didier Conrad, translation by Svein Erik Søland)

This Christmas, I was reading the latest Asterix album, Asterix in Lusitania, by Fabcaro and Conrad. The biannual publication of the new albums produced after the death of Albert Uderzo in 2009 has become subsumed into the great Norwegian tradition of Christmas comic books, and the album was part of this year's haul. The story revolves around an attempt to prove the innocence of a wrongfully condemned producer of garum, a type of fish sauce, who is accused to trying to poison Julius Caesar. The climax of the scene occurs in Lisbon, and the cover of the album invokes a Lisbon view so characteristic that I was immediately brought back to my trip there last spring. And as I was reading the story, I was again brought back to Lisbon because of the garum. 

Lisbon streetscape near the Castle of São Jorge

View of the Tagus River

Translating the Relics of St. James, edited by Antón M. Pazos (2016)

While I was in Lisbon last year, I was reading up on the medieval cult of Saint James the Elder. I had travelled from Santiago de Compostela where I had spent five days as a kind of research-tourist, and I had brought a collection of articles with me on the journey. The collection included articles on the Compostelan cult, as well as a few texts that sought to elucidate the context of the historical James, the fisherman who became one of the twelve apostles. One of these articles delved into the fishing industry on the Sea of Galilee, part of which included the production of garum. This was not the first time I had heard of this fish sauce, but I had never read about it at lenght, nor had encountered it within the context of the wider Roman world. 

I read this and other of the book's interesting articles at what became my regular café during my brief sojourn in the Portuguese capital, where I drank black tea with lemon and devoured delicious local cookies - and where I was mistaken for the Portuguese politician Rui Tavares. It was therefore a surprising realisation as I was reading the latest Asterix album during the darkness of a Norwegian December that this was the second time in two years that the elements of garum and Lisbon had converged in my life. The great benefit of this particular synchronicity was that I could relive those lovely Lisbon days thanks to the memories spurred on by a key plot device in a comic book. 

Beer and climate history - a brief case study from the Western Norwegian fjords

 

This week, my parents and I have been brewing the traditional Christmas ale. It is one of my favourite parts of the Christmas season, because it is the continuation of old, traditional knowledge passed down and adapted through the generations, and because the end result tastes great. In Norway, brewing ale for Christmas goes back to at least the twelfth century, and might have its origin in pre-Christian practices. The ale that we brew nowadays, however, has little in common with the medieval product, and although the practice itself is old, the methods, the equipment, and the ingredients that we use now are very different from what we should expect to find in medieval ale. In other words, although I appreciate that this annual tradition maintains a link with previous generations, I cherish our ale for what it is now, not as a replica of a medieval product.  

The first glass the day after the bottling

The brewing of beer takes place over several days. This year, we started on a Tuesday when I went gathering juniper twigs higher up in the valley where my ancestral farm is located. The juniper is the main flavouring agent, and this year I was fortunate to find green and fresh twigs with a lot of berries on them. These berries enhance the flavour, and are always sought-after when brewing. That same evening, my father began to boil the fifteen litres of water that we needed for this year's batch. The next day, I went to the farm and helped my parents mix the various ingredients together, making sure to add the yeast at exactly 32 degrees centigrade, and to pour the liquid of boiled juniper twigs through a sufficiently thick cloth that we might filter out the needles and other debris. 

The juniper twigs after the liquid has been poured into the barrel

Each year, we do things slightly differently than the year before - usually not by design, but because there are enough variables that we might change things up without being aware of it. For instance, I do not remember whether we poured the sugar in before the malt extract last year, like we did this year. These differences do not impact the ale in any noticeable manner, so we do not keep too strict a watch over the minor movements of the process. 

However, this year we did one thing differently, and that was my father starting the boiling of the water the day before the mixed the ingredients, so that it would cool down in time. Normally, the water would be boiled earlier the same day. The reason why he did things differently this year, was a stark reminder of how such minor occurrences as brewing a batch of Christmas ale can reflect much larger historical contexts. When I first started learning how to brew ale, we would place the keg of boiled water in a snowdrift outside and wait for the temperatures to get sufficiently low. As my father noted, "now we don't have snow anymore". This was in the sense that we now no longer have reliable, long-term, steady supplies of snow in December, due to the climate change and global warming. Decembers are rainy and wet, with infrequent bouts of snow that is typically washed away by subsequent squalls. The climate affects how we do things, and the traditional practice came to stand in sharp relief with the new realities in which that practice was maintained. We have to adapt and prepare things differently, because the climactic reality in which we live has changed dramatically from what previous generations were used to. In this way, climate history can also be understood through such common, minor things like brewing ale. 

The ale fermenting

Collegium Medievale, vol. 38.1 (2025)

 

Normally, I only advertise my own publications on this blog, but the present post in an exception to the rule, because the publication in question is of particular importance to me personally. 

Earlier this year, I took over as editor-in-chief of the Norwegian journal Collegium Medievale, an interdisciplinary journal that publishes articles related to medieval studies across all available disciplines in both English and Scandinavian languages. The journal is in open access, and serves as an opportunity to bring together scholarship from both well-established scholars and younger talent. Ordinarily, one issue is published each year, although some years there is an additional special issue with its own guest editors. 

Four days ago, on December 12, the ordinary issue was published, namely Collegium Medievale, vol. 38.1. The issue marks the culmination of a year of editorial duties, and it is a labour for which I am indebted to my co-editors who are all seasoned and experienced members of the journal, and without whose effort I would have been unable to see this issue through the publishing process. 

The present issue, therefore, is a testament to the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, and I am very grateful to be able to present the first issue for which I have been responsible. Even though this is not strictly speaking my publication, I am nonetheless proud of what we editors have managed to put together. 

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. 

Secondary medievalism? - the case of Tex, The Demons of the North

 

so now the frickin' Mounties are involved 

- Dr. Bob Kelso, Scrubs S05E23

To study history requires the study of how history is being used in our own time. The basic principles of either the use of history or its reception - two similar yet distinct concepts - are largely the same independent of the period that is being used or received. However, distinct periods - as defined by later generations of scholars - require distinct parameters for researching and understanding how a given period has been represented, misrepresented, used, abused, received, or been conceptualised in later eras. For me, as a medievalist, I am naturally most interested in the reception of the Middle Ages, namely in medievalism. Within medieval studies, medievalism has emerged as a broad and rich subfield, and the last ten years have especially produced a number of important and interesting studies. 

As with all scholarly terms, its definitions are constantly under calibration, and it is necessary that we continue to discuss how to define or delinate the terms we use. The term 'medievalism' itself has been interpreted in different ways, and various sub-subfields have emerged along types of sources, along different postmedieval periods, and different applications. Some particularly valuable resources are the essay collections Medievalisms in a postcolonial world, edited by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul (2010), and  Medievalism: Key Critical terms, edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (2014), and the series 'Studies in Medievalism', currently in its 34th issue. 

My first published foray into medievalism was an article on the concept of 'urban medievalism'. Part of my argument is that we can talk about primary and secondary forms of medievalism, and perhaps also tertiary forms and so on. The difference is that primary medievalism is intentional, and those who use the past are aware that they use a medieval past instead of confusing it with, say, the seventeenth century. Secondary medievalism is incidental and unintentional. It is still the medieval past that is being used or received, but those who do so might not be aware of it. In these cases, the link to the medieval past usually comes through the use of the primary medievalism rather than the Middle Ages. Defining the border between primary and secondary medievalism might not always be straightforward, and discussions might have to be done on a case-by-case basis. In the present blogpost, I want to highlight how tricky it can be to spot secondary medievalisms because sometimes there is nothing medieval about it. 

Tex, Demonene fra nord, Norwegian Tex Willer vol. 548 (April 2011)

Text: Mauro Boselli; art: Giovanni Ticci; translation: Tone Dannevig

My case study is the 600th issue of the Italian Western comic Tex, which was published in October 2010. Tex was created by Gianluigi Bonelli and Aurelio Galeppini in 1948, and is currently one of Italy's most popular comics, or 'fumetti', with one monthly issue and various specials and spin-offs. The series features the eponymous Tex Willer, a Texas ranger and a Navaho chieftain, his son Kit, the ranger Kit Carson (inspired by but not identical with the historical figure), and Tiger Jack, a Navaho. Most of the stories run across two issues, and they are written in different genres, ranging from classic Westerns to the odd science fiction story. The comic is also big in Norway, and I have been collecting the monthly issues since 1998. The Norwegian publication schedule is a bit behind the Italian one, meaning that what was meant to be a special story marking the important milestone of 600 issues, was published as issue 548 in my home country. 

From here on, there will be spoilers. 

The story, 'I demoni del Nord', The Demons from the North, is written by Mauro Boselli and veteran artist Giovanni Ticci. The plot concerns a mysterious cannibalistic attack on a fort in the Northwest Territories in Canada, which turns out to be part of a series of raids targeting various First Nation villages. The perpetrators are the so-called demons of the mist, a tribe described as having retained cannibalistic practices from the Siberian tundra, who dwell in mist-covered mountains and have cannibalistic rites in a cave in a dormant volcano. Since it is a single-issue story, the plot is fast-paced and little time is spent on describing the tribe itself, but some attention has been made to mark the distinction between some of the First Nations that appear in the story, especially the Cree and the Dogrib peoples.  

What, then, does this have to do with the Middle Ages and its reception? The story operates outside the medieval timeframe, and arguably outside of the medieval geographical remit. It is an action story featuring rifles, dynamite, Mounties, and Canadian First Nations, and the desperate defence scenes are more reminiscent of Western films such as The Magnificent Seven. There is nothing medieval to be found. 

Except that the story is an adaptation of The Eaters of the Dead, the 1976 novel by Michael Crichton, which was adapted into the film The Thirteenth Warrior in 1999. Crichton's novel draws on both Ibn Fadlan's travelogue from his mission to the Volga Bulgars in 921, and on the poem Beowulf. The plot concerns thirteen warriors who fight to protect a Norwegian village against attackers that turn out to be relics Neanderthals living in caves in the mountains. The novel is a clear-cut case of medievalism, seeing as it uses several elements from the Middle Ages - a tenth-century Arabic travelogue and a poem  in Old English at least two centuries older - but also incorporating distinctly modern elements such as the idea of relict Neanderthals that reveal that this is medievalism and not medieval cultural product.  

I demoni del Nord is an adaptation of Crichton's novel, and although it is evident that the novel is set in a twentieth-century idea of the Middle Ages, the comic book writer, Mauro Boselli, has sought to adapt it to a Western setting in which the basic plot points are embedded within a different narrative universe. Such adaptations are common in both literature and cinema, and they showcase why genres are defined not just by periods or countries but by narratological features. I demoni del Nord is a Western based on a suspense story set in the Middle Ages, but a story that might also be said to contain features from twentieth-century cinema, where the Western has been one of the defining genres. Mauro Boselli's adaptation of the novel makes the comic book story into a case of secondary medievalism because it is incidental. The medieval setting of The Eaters of the Dead is of no consequence for the comic book, because the story could have been adapted in the same way had the novel been set on Mars or sometime in the deep future. And even though the medieval features of the original novel are completely removed, the story itself is recognisable, and it is possible to see that we are dealing with a work of art set in nineteenth-century Canada based on a work of art set in tenth-century Norway. Consequently, in order to use Crichton's novel to understand how the Middle Ages have been used and received in our own times, we also need to follow the trace onwards to both the film adaptation from 1999 and the comic book adaptation from 2010. Researching history means to understand how historical periods have been used and received in later centuries, and to fully understand this use and this reception, we also need to follow whatever echoes and reverberations that the primary medievalism creates further down the line. 

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