Nordic Literature: A Comparative History. Volume I: Spatial Nodes 902723468X, 9789027234681

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A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXI

Nordic Literature A comparative history Volume I: Spatial nodes

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia

NORDIC LITERATURE: A COMPARATIVE HISTORY VOLUME I: SPATIAL NODES

A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF LITERATURES IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES SPONSORED BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION HISTOIRE COMPARÉE DES LITTÉRATURES DE LANGUES EUROPÉENNES SOUS LES AUSPICES DE L’ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL DE LITTÉRATURE COMPARÉE

Coordinating Committee for A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Comité de Coordination de l’Histoire Comparée des Littératures de Langues Européennes 2016–2019 President/Président Karen-Margrethe Lindskov Simonsen (Aarhus University) Vice-President/Vice-Président Mark Bennion Sandberg (University of California, Berkeley) Secretary/Secrétaire César Dómínguez (University of Santiago de Compostela & Sichuan University) Treasurer/Trésorier Vivian Liska (University of Antwerp) Members/Membres assesseurs Helena Buescu, Massimo Fusillo, Dirk Göttsche Margaret-Anne Hutton, Patrizia Lombardo, Helga Mitterbauer, Birgit Neumann, Thomas Pavel, Galin Tihanov, Anja Tippner, Dirk Van Hulle, Robert Weninger Past Presidents Marcel Cornis-Pope (Virginia Commonwealth University) Margaret R. Higonnet (University of Connecticut) Randolph D. Pope (Charlottesville) † Henry H.H. Remak (Indiana) Mihály Szegedy-Maszák (Bloomington) Mario J. Valdés (Toronto) † Jacques Voisine (Paris) Jean Weisgerber (Bruxelles) Past Secretaries Svend Erik Larsen (Aarhus University) Daniel F. Chamberlain (Kingston) † Milan V. Dimić (Edmonton) Margaret R. Higonnet (Storrs) † György M. Vajda (Budapest)

Volume XXXI Nordic Literature: A comparative history General Editors: Steven P. Sondrup and Mark B. Sandberg Volume I: Spatial nodes Edited by Thomas A. DuBois and Dan Ringgaard

NORDIC LITERATURE A COMPARATIVE HISTORY General Editors STEVEN P. SONDRUP Brigham Young University MARK B. SANDBERG University of California, Berkeley

VOLUME I: SPATIAL NODES Edited by THOMAS A. DUBOIS University of Wisconsin–Madison DAN RINGGAARD Aarhus University

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2017022878 (print) / 2017024105 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 3468 1 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6505 0 (e-book) © 2017 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com

Table of contents

List of contributors

ix

List of figures

xi

Preface

xv

General project introduction Steven P. Sondrup and Mark B. Sandberg

1

The framework: Spatial nodes Dan Ringgaard and Thomas A. DuBois

19

Scapes

31

Landscapes Dan Ringgaard

33

Point of contact: The intricacies of Snæfellsjökull Ástráður Eysteinsson

43

A guide to Gurre, temporary landscape Jan Rosiek

56

Utopias as territories of Swedish modernism Sylvain Briens

70

Jutland and the West Coast as liminal spaces in Danish literature Wolfgang Behschnitt

80

“Far higher mountains”: Mountains in Danish and Norwegian romantic poetry Louise Mønster

95

South of the South: Literary Capri Arne Melberg Waterscapes Dan Ringgaard

109 123

The tale of a thousand lakes Pirjo Lyytikäinen

130

The island in Nordic literature Lisbeth P. Wærp

146

Table of contents

vi Archipelago Henrik Johnsson

163

There must be a periphery Bergur Rønne Moberg

173

The seven seas: Maritime modernity in Nordic literature Søren Frank

186

Cityscapes Dan Ringgaard

201

Through the land of lagom in literature: Passing small towns in middle Sweden Anna Smedberg Bondesson

208

A city awakens: Literary Helsinki at the turn of the twentieth century Lieven Ameel

220

Walking the city: Female pedestrians Tone Selboe

234

The limits of the unlimited: Gunnar Björling’s wordscape Anders Olsson

247

The history-accumulator: Berlin as a foreign metropolis Thomas Mohnike

262

Poets in New York Anne-Marie Mai

275

Lightscapes Dan Ringgaard

289

Myth and meaning of foreign lightscapes in Nordic literatures 1: The imaginary elsewhere Svend Erik Larsen

291

Myth and meaning of foreign lightscapes in Nordic literatures 2: The geographic elsewhere Svend Erik Larsen

314

Qualities of light: Interfacing lightscapes in Eino Leino, Hella Wuolijoki, and Arvid Mörne Pia Maria Ahlbäck

338

Glocalizing the light of Norwg-West: From inner light to the light of labor Per Thomas Andersen Millenniumscapes Dan Ringgaard

348 361

Table of contents Toxic places: Chernobyl and a sense of place in Nordic literature Christopher Oscarson

vii 366

This site is under construction: Mediating the Øresund region around the millennium C. Claire Thomson and Pei-Sze Chow

381

Cathartic moments or spatial liberty: Variations of the interplay between fiction, play, and place in computer games Bo Kampmann Walther

395

Practices

409

Introduction: Practices of place Thomas A. DuBois

411

Settling Thomas A. DuBois

413

“And the two shall become one flesh”: Forging familial ties to the New Land in Nordic-American immigrant literature Julie K. Allen

420

Taking land and claiming place in Nordic migrant literature Ingeborg Kongslien

432

Radical utopianism among Nordic immigrant authors Thomas A. DuBois

445

Dwelling Thomas A. DuBois Seasonal secondary dwellings Ellen Rees

455 478

“Worker ants on the lush bosom of Earth”: Cyclic patterns of life in the Finnish countryside Leena Kaunonen

486

By land, by sea, by air, by mind: Traversing externally internally via the trope of the bird in Finnish and Swedish poetry Kjerstin Moody

502

Exploring Thomas A. DuBois The literary Arctic Henning Howlid Wærp

519 530

viii

Table of contents

Dislocation and identity formation in the work of Isak Dinesen Susan C. Brantly

555

Absorbing places and the triumph of modernity: Hans Christian Andersen Karin Sanders

562

Northern bound: Exploring and colonizing the Nordic Far North Thomas A. DuBois

572

Sacralizing Thomas A. DuBois

587

Niðaróss cathedral Steven P. Sondrup

603

Nation and sacrifice: Abraham and Isaac in modern Scandinavian literature Elisabeth Oxfeldt

615

Legend and liminality Timothy R. Tangherlini

628

Liminality: The uncanny bog Karin Sanders

641

Worlding Troy Storfjell

651

Fishing for meaning on the Deatnu River: Sámi salmon harvesters, tourist anglers, and the negotiation of place Tim Frandy

662

De-framing the indigenous body: Ethnography, landscape, and cultural belonging in the art of Pia Arke Kirsten Thisted

672

Works cited

687

Location index

735

Person index

741

List of contributors

Pia Maria Ahlbäck, Åbo Akademi University (Finland) Julie K. Allen, Brigham Young University (USA) Lieven Ameel, University of Helsinki (Finland) Per Thomas Andersen, University of Oslo (Norway) Wolfgang Behschnitt, Independent Scholar (Switzerland) Anna Smedberg Bondesson, Kristianstad University (Sweden) Susan C. Brantly, University of Wisconsin – Madison (USA) Sylvain Briens, University of Paris – Sorbonne (France) Pei-Sze Chow, University College London (England) Thomas A. DuBois, University of Wisconsin – Madison (USA) Ástráður Eysteinsson, University of Iceland (Iceland) Tim Frandy, University of Wisconsin – Madison (USA) Søren Frank, University of Southern Denmark (Denmark) Henrik Johnsson, Aarhus University (Denmark) Leena Kaunonen, University of Helsinki (Finland) Ingeborg Kongslien, University of Oslo (Norway) Svend Erik Larsen, Aarhus University (Denmark) Pirjo Lyytikäinen, University of Helsinki (Finland) Anne-Marie Mai, University of Southern Denmark (Denmark) Arne Melberg, University of Oslo (Norway) Bergur Rønne Moberg, University of Copenhagen (Denmark) Thomas Mohnike, Université de Strasbourg (France) Kjerstin Moody, Gustavus Adolphus College (USA) Louise Mønster, Aalborg University (Denmark) Anders Olsson, Stockholm University (Sweden) Christopher Oscarson, Brigham Young University (USA) Elisabeth Oxfeldt, University of Oslo (Norway) Ellen Rees, University of Oslo (Norway) Dan Ringgaard, University of Aarhus (Denmark) Jan Rosiek, University of Copenhagen (Denmark) Mark B. Sandberg, University of California, Berkeley (USA) Karin Sanders, University of California, Berkeley (USA) Tone Selboe, University of Oslo (Norway) Steven P. Sondrup, Brigham Young University (USA) Troy Storfjell, Pacific Lutheran University (USA) Timothy Tangherlini, University of California, Los Angeles (USA) Kirsten Thisted, University of Copenhagen (Denmark) C. Claire Thomson, University College London (England)

x

List of contributors

Bo Kampmann Walther, University of Southern Denmark (Denmark) Henning Howlid Wærp, University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway (Norway) Lisbeth P. Wærp, University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway (Norway)

List of figures

Figure 1:

Global view of the Nordic region. The highlighted areas include Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands (circled), Svalbard, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. Map: Creative Commons.

8

Figure 2:

Map of the Nordic region emphasizing the Baltic Sea (altered to b/w version). Author: Nzeemin, NordNordWest. Creative Commons: https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Relief_Map_of_Baltic_Sea.png. License: https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

23

Figure 3:

Topographic rendering of the Nordic region, emphasizing the North Sea. Image: Anton Balazh/Shutterstock

24

Figure 4:

Auguste Mayer’s lithograph illustration of Snæfellsjökull seen from Reykjavík at midnight (1836)

44

Figure 5:

Carl Emanuel Larsen’s 1845 illustration, a more romanticized depiction that expands the size of the glacier and emphasizes the height of the peaks.

45

Figure 6:

Book cover for Leyndardómar Snæfellsjökuls

51

Figure 7:

Drawing by Christian Beyer, presumably from around 1870, imagining H.C. Andersen in the Gurre landscape. Image from C.M. Smidt, Gurre. (København: Gyldendal, 1948), 2.

63

Figure 8:

Contemporary view of the modest ruins remaining at Gurre: the demise of a literary place? Photo: Steffen Hoejager/Shutterstock

68

Figure 9:

Illustration from Christian Richardt’s geographical poem Vort Land.

81

Figure 10: Lithograph by Emil Bærentzen showing the coast near Bovbjerg in West Jutland, from the 1856 illustrated album Danmark.

87

Figure 11:

Illustration of Skagens Odde by C. Neumann that accompanied an early serial preprinting of Goldschmidt’s travelogue in Illustreret Tidende in 1865.

90

Figure 12: View from the National Tourist Route at Aurlandsfjellet in western Norway. Photo: Daria Medvedeva/Shutterstock

102

Figure 13: Cultivated, undulating landscape in Jutland, Denmark. Photo: kimson/Shutterstock

104

Figure 14: View from the Villa San Michele on Capri. Photo: Berthold Werner/Creative Commons. Adjusted to b/w version. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-sa/3.0/deed.en

110

Figure 15: Juxtaposition of two views of the Blue Grotto: (top) view from a painting by Friedrich Thøming, The Blue Grotto, Capri (1833) Oil on canvas, 13.1 x 21.5 cm. Image: Creative Commons; (bottom) contemporary tourist photo of the Blue Grotto, Capri, Italy, Photo: Gimas/Shutterstock

112

Figure 16: Shoreline of Saimaa Lake in southeastern Finland. Photo: Aleksey Stemmer/ Shutterstock

131

Figure 17: Frozen waterscape in Finnish winter. Photo: marcela novotna/Shutterstock

135

xii

List of figures

Figure 18: View from Landsort in the southern Stockholm archipelago, a Swedish “uttermost, barren isle” that substituted for the coastline near Grimstad, Norway. Photo: Arild Vågen (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

153

Figure 19: The fishing village of Sør-Gjæslingan on the Norwegian coast. Photo: Kenneaal (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

155

Figure 20: The island of Hasslö in southern Sweden’s Blekinge archipelago (altered to b/w). Photo: Andreas Faessler. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ deed.en

161

Figure 21: Cottages in the Stockholm archipelago. Photo: anse/Shutterstock

170

Figure 22: Faroese waterscape. Photo: Anette Andersen/Shutterstock

175

Figure 23: Map showing the Norwegian coastline’s interface with the sea. Photo: Peter Hermes Furian/Shutterstock

188

Figure 24: The Marieholm governor’s residence in Mariestad, Sweden. Photo: author’s own

216

Figure 25: Panorama of Helsinki, seen from the top of the St. Nicholas’ Church (currently the Helsinki Cathedral). Photographer: Signe Brander, 1909/Helsinki City Museum

226

Figure 26: Emil Bønnelycke’s “Berlin” poem, as published in the journal Klingen 1.9–10 (June – July 1918): [183].

269

Figure 27: New York City’s Madison Avenue, pedestrian view. Photo: author’s own.

283

Figure 28: Manhattan high-rise buildings. Photo: author’s own.

284

Figure 29: Hans Hertervig, Borgøya (1867), oil on canvas, 61.5cm x 69.5cm. National Gallery (Oslo); photo: Jacques Lathion. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ legalcode

349

Figure 30: Condeep oil platform being hauled out to sea in 1974. Photo: Leif Berge/Norsk Oljemuseum.

355

Figure 31: European lightscape at night, with small pricks of light showing in the North Sea oil fields as well. Image: stockmdm/Shutterstock

356

Figure 32: Total Cesium 137 Deposition from both nuclear tests as well as the Chernobyl accident as of 1998. With courtesy of De Cort et al. (1998).

367

Figure 33: Still image from the opening sequence of Jarl’s Hotet/Uhkkádus showing the sudden intrusion of a train into the landscape.

373

Figure 34: Still image from Hotet/Uhkkádus showing the slaughtered corpses of contaminated reindeer being helicoptered away for disposal.

375

Figure 35: Cover from Ingrid Storholmen’s book Tsjernobylfortellinger, representing the spread of radioactive fallout from Chernobyl up over Scandinavia.

377

Figure 36: View of the Øresund Bridge seen from the south on the Swedish side. Photo: kimson/ Shutterstock

382

Figure 37: Still image from Sossen, arkitekten och det skruvade huset (2006). Regional memory under contruction in the shape of Calatrava’s Turning Torso building in Malmö.

390

List of figures

xiii

Figure 38: Still image from the opening credit sequence of Bron/Broen (The Bridge), Season Two.

392

Figure 39: Screen shot of the opening, schizophrenic sequence in Blackout.

402

Figure 40: The caterpillar structure of Blackout (© Michael Valeur).

403

Figure 41: Screenshot from the game Max Payne.

405

Figure 42: Manuscript page from the first draft of Johan Turi’s Muitalus sámiid birra, written in Finnish in 1910. This passage describes reindeer roundup techniques. Photo: Author’s own.

414

Figure 43: View of Borgarfjǫrðr in Iceland. Photo: CoolKengzz/Shutterstock

416

Figure 44: View of the Þingvellir plain in Iceland. Photo: Oleksandr Lipko/Shutterstock

417

Figure 45: Detail map showing the island of Gotland off the Swedish coast. Photo: Artalis/ Shutterstock

418

Figure 46: View of the South Dakota prairie landscape, whose vast expanses have no close corrolary in the Nordic region. Photo: pzig98/Shutterstock

422

Figure 47: The “round, fertile hills” of the Nebraska farming landscape. Photo: Weldon Schloneger/Shutterstock

427

Figure 48: One form of “settling” – taking land – in the cultivation of the South Dakota prairie. Photo: pzig98/Shutterstock

435

Figure 49: Another form of “settling” – claiming place – in the Nørrebro neighborhood of Copenhagen.

442

Figure 50: Title page of Aakkosia Sosialistien Lapsille (Socialist Alphabet for Children), published by Finnish-Americans in Massachusetts.

446

Figure 51: Detail map showing Bornholm’s location relative to Copenhagen and the southern Swedish coastline. Photo: Serban Bogdan/Shutterstock

469

Figure 52: Illustration of Hlíðarendi in Collingwood and Stefansson, p. 30.

476

Figure 53: Traditional seter milieu in Norway, with a primitive cabin in a high-altitude summer pasture. Photo: Max Smolyar/Shutterstock

480

Figure 54: A modern Norwegian cabin in the area north of Oslo shows the evolution of the secondary seasonal dwelling. Photo: Paul D. Smith/Shutterstock

484

Figure 55: Map of the provinces of southern Finland, including the regions of Savonia and Ostrobothnia. Photo: Maria Egupova/Shutterstock

487

Figure 56: Map of the transnational Sámi language areas that constitute Sápmi. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_ License)

511

Figure 57: The Oseberg ship at the Viking Ship Museum on Bygdøy peninsula outside Oslo. Photo: valeriiaarnaud/Shutterstock

520

Figure 58: Exterior of the Fram Museum, seen from the water of the Oslo fjord. Photo: Nanisimova/Shutterstock

521

Figure 59: Woodcut illustration from Giuseppe Acerbi’s 1802 travel account.

525

xiv

List of figures

Figure 60: 1947 Norwegian postage stamp commemorating Nansen, Amundsen, and Arctic exploration. Photo: Slava2009/Shutterstock

528

Figure 61: Topographical visualization of the Arctic area north of Norway, including Svalbard (center top) and Eastern Greenland (left). Photo: Anton Balazh/Shutterstock

531

Figure 62: Position of Svalbard and Franz Josef Land in the Barents Sea/Arctic Ocean. Photo: Serban Bogdan/Shutterstock

537

Figure 63: Map of Greenland, with a straight white dotted line added to the southern portion to show Nansen’s approximate crossing route. Original photo: Serban Bogdan/ Shutterstock

541

Figure 64: One of Blixen’s most famous literary places – her African farm – as it appears today in the form of the Karen Blixen Museum in Nairobi, Kenya. Photo: TheLearningPhotographer/Shutterstock

556

Figure 65: A plateau landscape in the far North of Norway. Photo: Maksimillian/ Shutterstock

573

Figure 66: Olaus Magnus’s 1539 “Carta Marina” map, the visual predecessor to his literary “mapping” of the North in the 1555 Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus. Photo: Public domain from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carta_Marina.jpeg

579

Figure 67: Helgafell in Iceland, showing the visual “centering” of a sacralized place. Photo: Alexey Stiop/Shutterstock

589

Figure 68: Burial mounds at Old Uppsala. Photo: Sophie McAuley/Shutterstock

594

Figure 69: Side view of the Nidaros Cathedral during the period of disrepair in the 1800s. Photo: Riksantikvaren.

611

Figure 70: Contemporary view of the Cathedral. Copyright: Finn Bjørklid/Creative Commons

612

Figure 71: Tower at the restored Cathedral. Photo: Finn Bjørklid/Creative Commons.

613

Figure 72: Jens Peter Pedersen (1836–1900), lathe turner and storyteller from Ilbjærg in northern Jutland. A prolific source of local legends, Jens Peter lived alone in a small house near the town of Sæby. (Photograph used by permission of Dansk Folkemindesamling)

630

Figure 73: Railroad crossing in Ry, Denmark, ca. 1908. Photo: Knud Nielsen Baunsgaard/ Ry Lokalarkiv

631

Figure 74: Danish bog. Photo: Dhoxax/Shutterstock.com

642

Figure 75: Fisherman wading in the Deatnu (Tana) River in Northern Finland/Norway. Photo: Alexei Novikov/Shutterstock

662

Figure 76: The Three Graces (1993). B/w photograph of cut-up and reassembled photograph.

677

Figure 77: Krabbe/Jensen (1997). Photographic collage.

679

Preface

The present volume is the first in an anticipated set of three devoted to the history of the literature of the Nordic region – Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland as well as the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland. Collectively these volumes represent the fourth in the recent series of regional literary histories inaugurated by Mario J. Valdés and Linda Hutcheon, published under the auspices of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), and overseen by its Coordinating Committee for the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages (CHLEL). Perhaps the principal distinguishing feature of these volumes is that rather than focusing scholarly consideration on the literary culture of one nation, in one language, or one period as has been typically been the case, they draw attention to a region defined by geographic proximity and allied but not necessarily identical processes of literary production. The initial impetus for this series was an observation made by Mario Valdés that the Coordinating Committee would look very favorably upon a proposal focusing on the literature of Scandinavia, a region whose literature has all too frequently been marginalized in surveys of European literary culture. The editors of this project express sincere appreciation for his interest in the Nordic region and very helpful advice and support during the early organizational phases. The literary output of this region is often understood only through its most canonical authors  – Hans Christian Andersen, Kierkegaard, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) – and of those, not in a comparative regional context. It is also hoped that the presentation of Nordic literature within the critical framework embodied in the studies in this series will open revealing vistas and highlight new dimensions and relationships. These volumes are the result of collaborative work of several scholars from many parts of Scandinavia as well as Europe and North America. The general editors for this three-volume series recruited a team of two editors for each of the volumes. The editors of each volume selected contributors with a view to eliciting comparative perspectives that have not been typical of literary scholarship of the region. The contributions are written from various points of view and embody a broad range of critical approaches. Thus the fundamental goal has never been encyclopedic coverage, but rather syntheses drawn from exemplary selections. Although introductory material to each of the major sections has been provided, no effort has been made to level differences in approach by the individual contributors. Their essays involve expertise in several languages and various cultural traditions, some closely related, others best characterized by contrast. During the preparation of this series numerous colleagues from various parts of the world have graciously shared their expertise in many different but always constructive ways: Ástráður Eysteinsson, Margaret Clunies-Ross, Thomas A. DuBois, Niels Ingwersen†, James Knirk, Nathaniel Kramer, John Lindow, Lars Lönnroth, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Malan Marnersdóttir, James Massengale, Finn Hauberg Mortensen†, Andrew Nestingen, Christopher Oscarson, Dan Ringgaard, Linda H. Rugg, Karin Sanders, Stephanie von Schnurbein, George Schoolfield, Tone Selboe, and Tim Tangherlini. doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.01.pre © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Preface

The assistance of students at both Brigham Young University and the University of California, Berkeley in electronic formatting and source checking has been invaluable. They have worked diligently, patiently, and with great care. Appreciation is expressed to Molly Jacobs Bauer, Ben Bigelow, David Delbar, Jason Francis, Ida Moen Johnson, Nicholas Rampton, Jenny Webb, Ben Welch, and Jonathan C. Williams. Generous financial support came from several sources. A significant three-year grant was provided by the Nordic Council of Ministers’ Coordinating Committee for Nordic Studies Abroad to support this literary history project and promotional public outreach events at University of California, Berkeley (UCB), Brigham Young University (BYU), and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Support for student contributions to the project came from several Orca and Mentoring Grants from the College of Humanities (BYU) as well as Research Assistantships in the Humanities provided over several summers by the UCB Committee on Research. Funding has also come from the Barbro Osher Chair for the Department of Scandinavian (UCB) and the Loftar Bjarnason Fund (BYU) for planning symposia and workshops, translations, and the final preparation of the manuscript. Sincere gratitude is extended to each without whose assistance the completion of this volume would not have been possible.

General project introduction Steven P. Sondrup and Mark B. Sandberg

Nordic Literature: A Comparative History provides an examination of the various literary traditions and practices arising in the area extending westward from Finland across Sweden, Denmark, Norway, continuing on to the islands in the North Atlantic, to Iceland and Greenland, and from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the German border and southern shore of the Baltic Sea. It is comparative in that it strives to examine the region’s shared processes of literary production and communication without minimizing their diversity.1 This geographic area has several distinct yet often mutually intelligible languages as well as indigenous languages and cultures that are not closely related to the others. At times, the dominant literary cultures have been remarkably coherent in spite of various contemporaneous differences. At other times, national or social borders have created more independent literary cultures that have developed according to their own logic. Literary histories to date have typically concentrated on one nation or a seriatim portrayal of one country after another.2 Literary histories conceived in that way have remained largely congruent with the histories – indeed the progress – of their respective nations and have tended to be exclusionary in their preference for tendencies that sustain the rise of a national consciousness, a particular literary language, and a sense of identity – what Linda Hutcheon has called a “telos of cultural legitimation” (“Rethinking” 5). Even those relatively few literary histories treating the Nordic region as a whole have by necessity either limited themselves to a shorter time period or a more specific group of authors (such as women writers), or have traded detail for synthetic overview in order to maintain a traditionally chronological and relatively comprehensive logic.3 Nordic Literature: A Comparative 1.

The conceptualization of this project, like that of the several other regionally comparative literary histories sponsored in recent years by the International Comparative Literature Association, owes a debt to the pioneering work of Mario J. Valdés in the design and publication of the series The Literary Cultures of Latin America. The two most recent projects carried out under these auspices are Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (2004–10) and Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Anxo Abuín Gonzalez, and César Domínguez Prieto, eds., A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula (2010).

2.

An early series of national Scandinavian literary histories in English was sponsored by the American Scandinavian Foundation. See Beyer (1956); Gustafson (1961); P.M. Mitchell (1971), and Ahokas (1973). A subsequent and now standard Scandinavian literary history reference series written in the seriatim national model is the five-volume sequence published by the University of Nebraska Press between 1993 and 2007. See Sven H. Rossel (1993); Harald S. Næss (1993); Lars G. Warme (1996); George C. Schoolfield (1998); and Daisy Neijmann (2006).

3.

For an example of a comparative approach to a shorter time period, see Sven H. Rossel’s treatment of a century of literary history in A History of Scandinavian Literature, 1870–1980. The Nordic women’s literature project developed in the 1990s demonstrates how the choice of female authors allows for a manageably comprehensive, encyclopedic treatment. See Elisabeth Møller-Jensen et al., ed., as well as the project’s well designed and informative website http://nordicwomensliterature.net/. (This project’s nationally doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.01son © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Steven P. Sondrup and Mark B. Sandberg

History adopts a different strategy. It examines trends and shifts in figural practices as they manifest themselves across the entire area and range from the medieval period to the present day but without using organizational principles of comprehensive coverage or teleological national development. Instead each of the three volumes will concentrate on new ways to model literary historiography through spatial, figural, and temporal frameworks, respectively. Although broad historical perspectives are provided in each introductory section, the genre of each individual contribution to the volume is the essay rather than the encyclopedic article. The volumes have been organized according to concept and not necessarily by principles of subject coverage, and in this way the logic of each volume is intentionally metonymic. There are several consequences that proceed from this approach, and one might well ask whether it is possible to write literary history without devoting the bulk of the attention to the large, synthetic categories of genre, literary period, authorship, and schools of writing that have typically been used in such endeavors. The organization of this project around an essay format asks the reader instead to understand the examples provided by contributors to this volume as incomplete yet representative or otherwise significant. The essays are emblems of literary historical trends, a description and analysis of certain nodal points to be found among other possible choices. By not aspiring to completeness, the project’s structure is thus intended to inspire and evoke future essays on adjacent or analogous topics and in that way generate further literaryhistorical research. Perhaps more than the encyclopedic approach, the essay method assumes literary historiography to be an ongoing process of narrative reframing. Each of the three volumes of this project is therefore intended to be read alongside the others with the understanding that the variation in their interpretive frames will produce different but complementary emphases and perspectives. Nordic Literature: A Comparative History is furthermore not imagined to replace or supersede previous national and regional literary histories (indeed, these should also be understood as foundational to the present work), but instead to build on them by investigating the ways in which new framings of literary-historical material can coax forth new perspectives. That is, if the chosen frame for one particular volume does not accentuate a certain well-known author or canonical literary work to the degree that the informed reader might expect given the usual prominence of that topic in existing literary histories, that result might say something interesting about historiographic framing as an experimental method, about how the choice of the interpretive question shapes the resulting historical narrative. For example, an author who has been central to the development of the national literature paradigm might appear less crucial when the national telos is not the primary concern of the literary historian. To see the effects of this reframing, one can simply look to the table of contents, indices, or list of works cited in each volume. Since the contributors were given the latitude to choose their literary examples for each of the given leading concepts, the practical apparatus generated by each volume provides a snapshot of the research knowledge and results of this group of scholars within each of the identified frameworks. The index of each volume will thus reveal different focused Norwegian offshoot, Norsk Kvinnelitteraturhistorie (Irene Engelstad et al., ed., 1988–90) actually demonstrated that the comparative Nordic model continues to exist in tension with the national.) For a Nordic comparative literary history in German, see Jörg Glauser, ed.

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places and names of emphasis depending on the topics assigned. The importance of a “literary place” will in other words vary according to whether one is thinking topographically, figurally, or temporally, as will the configuration of emphasis among the authors mentioned. (The effort put into creating a separate, synthetic list of Works Cited for each volume’s set of essays was undertaken in part to demonstrate these shifts in emphasis.) This healthy reshuffling of the canon and introduction of unexpected literary examples for each volume also reveals indirectly the ways in which a less visible (but still present) frame exists for canonical, encyclopedic literary histories as well. Relationships of scale between different kinds of literary output may also shift in emphasis because of new ways of framing the literary-historical questions. Readers of this project’s first volume will likely find the interest in Sámi literary culture and experience to be somewhat more heavily weighted here than is typical of national literary histories in which the implicit priority of the national idea cannot help but place this literary culture on the margins of the narrative. That result is inherent in the way the implicit research question is framed. Shifting from a national to a regional model in effect creates relatively more narrative room for literary cultures whose output may be much smaller in scale than those of the literary centers simply because the spatial frame creates a stronger imperative to account for all parts of the region in a more even-handed way. The turn from the logic of comprehensive coverage to a more essayistic method does not, however, relieve one of the challenge of portraying the linguistic diversity and the cultural determinants that impinge on writers and speakers, readers, and listeners across the time and space of the region. The task remains on the one hand to present them descriptively in as accurate, sensitive, and unbiased manner as possible while respecting the multifarious ways they have been figuratively engaged throughout the region. Contributors have been asked to stretch their expertise in order to ask more broadly “Nordic” questions, but there was no obligation to arrive at predetermined conclusions nor to confirm the existence of a coherent Nordicism. The interest here in Nordic literary voices is to find both their occasional harmonious blends as well as their sometimes dissonant contestations; the project does not take regional coherence for granted any more than it does national coherence. What, however, justifies a grouping of “the North” as a delimited region distinct and different from other conceivable collocations? Possible answers include both historical and methodological justifications. On the one hand, the cultural-political history of the North clearly entwines the emergence and development in each of the modern nations in complex and nearly inextricable ways. That history includes a pattern of shifting political territorial boundaries in the area that have at various times subjugated parts or in some cases the entirety of the modern Nordic nations under one another. The presence of three language families (Nordic IndoEuropean, Finno-Ugric, and Inuit), though not mutually comprehensible at the broadest level outside the lexical, grammatical, and semantic structures of each language family, nevertheless allows for a (sometimes substantial) degree of cross-language comprehension within the respective discursive communities. Although recognizing that points of intersection between the various national literary cultures of the North justifies a comparative analysis that is broader than that of national literature, one might nevertheless reasonably ask why the historian should stop at regional borders and

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limit this study to the North. That is, one might nudge the present analysis even further in the direction of global comparative literature. The decision to retain a regional focus instead is primarily a pragmatic decision. A multi-national region serves as one useful construct among others for the sake of telling a story about the complex course of literary-historical development within a reasonably delimited area. The stance is pragmatic in the sense that it recognizes that while a regional grouping is not utterly arbitrary, it also has no absolute, incontrovertible, and irrefragable viability. It is in the most simple terms a position from which a literary historian – especially one interested in testing the limits of national borders and language-specific accounts – can reasonably choose to speak while acknowledging that other alignments may be possible. The challenge is to examine the history of the production, mediation, and reception of literature – understood broadly as “figurative verbal discourse,” to borrow Mario J. Valdés’s inclusive formulation (“Rethinking” 100) – within a large geographic region spanning multiple nations and language groups, while still recognizing that all borders have an arbitrary aspect.4 The experiment implicit in this approach – its “essay,” to put it in literary generic terms – is to test the substance of the regional idea through comparative literary analysis, understanding that in many cases the regional perspective may not in fact provide the best explanation for the literary phenomena in question. In other words, a guiding question for this study is this: When reading the literature of this chosen territory, when does a viable idea of the “North” emerge, and if so, under what circumstances? And further, what kinds of internal barriers within the literary cultures in question limit the usefulness of that category? The attention to region as an explanatory space also highlights the fact that since the development of early nineteenth-century historiography, questions of linear, cumulative temporality have exercised a hegemonic domination over spatiality in historical discourse. The narrative intent of a focus on spatiality has heretofore often been little more than simply the specification of the terrain on which a narrative – veritable or fictional – plays itself out. Spatiality has in this way been seen as a subordinate concern, a mere setting for literary-historical developments. One current challenge to narrative temporality as a critical historiographic construct is the integration of insights about the topographic, geographic, and broadly spatial aspects implicit in literary practices. In endeavoring to redress this long-standing inequity, the current project seeks a contextualization that is not only temporal but spatial as well, i.e. one that acknowledges not only temporal sequences, but also the networks arising from spatial configurations like adjacency, proximity, and contiguity that relate the unfolding historical record to the human transformation of space into place. The methodology proposed in all three volumes of Nordic Literature: A Comparative History is moreover not just a spatial contextualization per se but rather a literary-critical procedure that stresses network (or “nodal”) structures that in various ways accentuate spatial synchronicity along with sequential development. Rather than being built around and therefore determined by chronologically rigid sequences of discrete events,

4.

Valdés uses the term “figurative verbal discourse” in order to expand the criteria for defining “literary culture” beyond written expression alone to include oral and intermedial forms of verbal and popular culture. This is but one consequence of the desire to loosen the national and single-language models of literary history.

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the essays endeavor to map narrative sequentiality onto the material terrain of the region and thereby cultivate a methodological balance between temporal and spatial concerns. Ultimately such a regionally based approach helps address the unasked questions and exclusions of national-teleological historical narratives and also allows for a narrative presentation that is admittedly and unabashedly open rather than artificially foreclosed by attention to the achievement of communal/national goals or rigid sequentiality. This approach as noted obviates the very frequent and widely accepted temptation of identifying national, social, economic, and political progress with the trajectory of literary development. While acknowledging the undeniable continuing functions of the individual nation and the development of specific literary languages, the regional approach deployed here looks beyond nation and language as self-evident foundational constructs. Instead, it endeavors to trace the developmental course of the larger cultural dynamics within which national agendas function. The obvious challenge of such an approach centers on how the region is defined. Attention to the similarly porous and contested regional borders in culturally hybrid zones (territories only temporarily under the sway of Nordic countries during certain historical moments, for example, or perhaps other non-Nordic countries that share the Baltic region) is one way of preempting an automatic substitution of the concept of region for nation. One might, for example, point to perfectly viable but different framings of region, such as that chosen by Michael North in his economic history of the entire Baltic region (including northern Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Russia along with the properly “Nordic” countries); in that work, the chosen frame foregrounds the developments governed primarily by shared access to a body of water, namely the Baltic Sea. Similarly, the recognition that parts of the Nordic region (such as Finland) can only be partially understood in their cultural overlap with the other Nordic countries (Finland’s interactions with Russia largely fall outside this Nordic regional framework, for example) helps to underscore the pragmatic and contingent status of the North as an explanatory rubric. While recognizing that each choice of a center creates a different periphery, the assumption of this project is that the value of that choice should simply be judged by its intellectual yield. As noted, the present literary history has been structured so as to highlight the importance of framing as a narrative choice. Each of the volumes has been organized around a series of nodes, i.e. important clusters in the practice of spatial representation, imaginative figural tropes of heightened significance, or resonant temporal turning points. Despite these differences in emphasis, the nodal idea linking all three volumes is one denoting a significant cultural junction, convergence, or negotiation, with narrative explanation devoted both to questions of development over time and extension through space. The narrative aspect of Volume 1 derives from its examination of the places and practices important to Nordic writers at home and abroad and to those visiting the region. The first section of this volume deals with five broadly defined “scapes” around which literary attention has clustered, places that are either particularly characteristic of the region or have been of special interest to Nordic writers. These places often have a topographic prominence in and of themselves, but have also attracted significant figurative energies and attention in the Nordic literary cultures as a sphere of meaningful action. Since the Nordic region is situated in high northern latitudes, geographic and topological features that are characteristic of that region stand out in

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contrast to the perhaps more familiar landscapes of southern climes, and correspondingly, the authorial world-views shaped by the experience of the North have also put the perception of foreign places in a somewhat different light. Furthermore, the geographic features of the North have had numerous implications for the way in which its literary traditions have developed and have also fostered an extended series of practices (highlighted in the second half of Volume 1) that derive from the places at the heart of the literary tradition as they are described, praised, lamented, or simply presented and given meaning in the world of human experience. In both sections of Volume 1, the narrative explanations concern the idea of literary place as a cluster of significance. In related ways the narrative strategy of Volume 2 is to foreground a model of figural nodes understood as tropes of affect, need, attachment, and characterization that have received sustained attention within the relevant literary cultures and been productive in terms of literary and cultural identity. The choice of figural nodes has been made with the recognition that each is defined by a dynamic interaction of perspectives both inside and outside the cultures in question and that these figural practices change over time; as in Volume 1, questions of “when” and “where” are used in diagnostic, essayistic ways to test the duration, repetition, and range of figural nodes within the tradition. Here too, the element of contingency in the choice of each figural node can be balanced with the claim that each is nevertheless well motivated because of its recognizable cultural resonance, even if other choices would of course be possible and even encouraged in subsequent research. Volume 3 of this project returns to the question of temporal modeling in historiography by keeping in mind the reframing made possible by the spatial and figural nodes in the previous two volumes. The introduction of temporal nodes as an approach to literary history endeavors to bring to bear a rich and nuanced conception of temporality that complements rather than occludes the heightened attention to spatiality. By embracing the logic of the network that is implicit in the nodal idea, the narrative strategy of the temporal node foregrounds conceptions of historical convergence and turning points but in a way that thinks beyond simple sequence and periodization. In fact, these more familiar linear models of temporality can be understood as functioning for temporal organization in much the same way as the national borders do for spatial approaches: as one rubric among many possible. Temporality can be modeled in other ways that allow perspectives of extension, resonance, and persistence to emerge more strongly. To this end, the temporal node is understood as both anticipatory and retrospective by gathering its significance from historical prefiguration, duration, and refiguration. For example, events or developments that resonate long after their initial moment or achieve symbolic cultural value even as they overlap with subsequent cultural shifts can be captured by the nodal model in a way that periodization cannot. To that end, an effort has been made to isolate particularly important junctures or turning points after which it would have been difficult to discuss the history of literature in the same terms. These turns in direction – these ruptures and disjunctions – are the points around which antecedent as well as subsequent events arrange themselves. Even so, the temporal nodes presented in Volume 3 are not intended to be an encylopedically complete; the openness of the nodal model requires only a plausible argument for the significance of a particular temporal node and not a continuous narrative.

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In sum, the nodal model of narration situates this and similar regional literary histories on a continuum between those using more familiar models of sequential periodization on the one hand, and those using more pointillist contextualization of dates on the other.5 More significant than the experiments with temporal modeling, however, are the added emphases on the spatial aspects of historical narrative and the multi-national comparative methods deployed in positing that regions, too, have complexly interdependent literary cultures. Is there such a place as Scandinavia? The regional model of comparative literary history receives a special inflection when the chosen region is the “Scandinavian” North, which perhaps represents a more recognizable category than does the “Nordic.” But in fact, cultural outsiders might find it surprising that the populations of the most northern countries in Europe might not primarily refer to themselves as Scandinavians or to the region they inhabit as Scandinavia. They have been known to insist that Scandinavia exists only in the offices of the Scandinavian Airlines System, or in the minds of a few North American scholars who call themselves “Scandinavianists.” The term, that is, coheres more obviously in the view from outside the cultures and nations in question than it does from the inside, to the point that it probably already fundamentally connotes an exterior view. Given the origin of the word, the reluctance of the region’s inhabitants to accept the appellation is understandable. The name is first attested in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia (4.96.5 and 8.39.4) where it appears without an n in the first syllable: Scatinavia in the former and Scadinavia in the latter. The n appears to be a medieval scribal addition in later manuscripts that has installed itself as the normative form (Helle 1). It is unclear what in Proto-Norse might have led to these Latin forms, but the best conjectures suggest it may have been something like *Skaþin-aujō or *Skaðin-aujō. The last part of the compound – related to the German Aue – means “land on water” or quite simply “island.” The first part is, however, an unattested reconstruction whose precise meaning is still uncertain. Many, though, have argued that it may have been derived from the stem *skaþan, “danger, damage” (German: Schade). The compound would probably, thus, refer to a “perilous land on water” or “dangerous island” (1). The danger in question appears to have been the hazardous sandbars and rocky reefs in the narrow Øresund passage between Denmark and Sweden. The inhabitants of the region typically refer to it, if they talk about it as a region at all, as Norden – meaning quite simply the North – to themselves as citizens of Norden, and to their most significant contemporary effort at regional political unity as the Nordic Council, or as it would be known variously in the Nordic languages, Nordisk Råd (Norwegian and Danish), Nordiska Rådet (Swedish), Pohjoismaiden Neuvosto (Finnish), or Norðurlandaráð (Icelandic). Although the origin and logic of Norden is more obvious than that of Scandinavia, it is as a geographic and cultural designation by no means without interest or challenges. As “the North,” it defines itself dialectically as opposed to “the South,” which from the Nordic perspective generally would 5.

Examples of the latter include Denis Hollier’s A New History of French Literature and David Wellberry’s A New History of German Literature.

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Figure 1.  Global view of the Nordic region. The highlighted areas include Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands (circled), Svalbard, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. Map: Creative Commons.

identify the Mediterranean region. Writers in the South – that is the Mediterranean world – knew something about life in the North from classical antiquity on. Homer writes of the summers’ long days (Odyssey 10.85) and short nights (Odyssey 11.19), and in lines 29–30 of the tenth Pythian Ode, Pindar explains that neither sailing nor traveling on foot can one find the marvelous way to where the Hyperboreans gather thus alluding to the mythological belief that the sun went from the west to rise in the east behind a mountain in the north. This contrast between the North and the South, however, is not exclusively topographic or climatic. Ever since the integration of the Nordic region into the rest of Europe (at least initially under the influence of its conversion to Christianity but more especially in the context of Renaissance humanism) that which was deemed of cultural value was taken to be of Mediterranean origin and was often seen as a contrast to the northerners’ unrefined, uncouth, and belligerent destruction of classical Mediterranean civilization. In the North, though, this identification of the people with the landscape became a very important concept. Landscape there has been understood not just as the land in an abstract sense, but a region including all of its natural features that formed an organic space coterminous

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with the reach of the customs and laws of the people (Olwig 16–20). Norden thus came to be understood as an ensemble of landscapes or domains and common customs and laws existing contiguously but also hierarchically nested within one another in ever-larger domains. Where this cultural imaginary has borne sway has varied considerably over the long-range history of the region, but a foundational conceptualization is to regard the North as the realm whose inhabitants see themselves in terms of an organic relationship with the space in which they dwell, which in turn is defined by a commonality of customs and laws. This concept stands in striking contrast to a competing southern conception deriving from the organization of the Roman Empire that is more abstract and linked to a grid or network of routes by means of which any part of the empire could be reached. This ensemble of perceptions formulated from within the Nordic region is ultimately grounded in the intrinsic view that Norden is on the edge of Europe and only partially implicated in broader European cultural norms. Although Nordic commentators have not typically gone to any conspicuous length to define the region, a sense of liminality has nonetheless frequently reasserted itself in extremely varied ways when the effort is made. It is indeed an arresting irony of the geography of the area that Norden as a self-referential concept has not been consistently fostered, nurtured, or appreciated. The first historical expression of something approximating a regional political entity came between 1397 and 1523, when Sweden (which at the time included Finland and various other holdings along the Baltic coast) was united with Denmark (which at the time included Norway, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland) in the extremely precarious and at best tenuous alliance, the Kalmar Union, so named because important negotiations leading to its founding were held in that city on Sweden’s southeast coast. The union, the first example of political alliance that might be called “Norden,” unraveled in 1520 when King Christian II – a Dane – went to Stockholm to receive an oath of fealty from Swedish nobles but instead, apparently on the basis of intelligence from the archbishop of Uppsala, had eighty of their number assassinated. The “Stockholm Bloodbath,” which aroused Swedish national feeling and led to the coronation of Gustav Vasa as the Swedish king in 1523, is but one early example of the tension and on occasion violence that prevailed during the early modern period between Denmark and Sweden, the two most prominent powers of the region and the clear population centers of the North from the Reformation through the eighteenth century. As the result of various military endeavors from the early 1600s through the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814, the internal and external borders of the Danish and Swedish empires waxed and waned, challenging the notion of the apparently constant national entities represented by the territory of each of the current-day nation-states of the North. Norway and Iceland remained under Danish rule after the breakup of the Kalmar Union, but in the early 1600s the Danes under Christian IV also controlled the southern provinces of present-day Sweden and Gotland, as well as parts of northern Germany. By the mid-seventeenth century, the pendulum of political power had swung over to Sweden, which reclaimed many of those same territories as well as other Baltic territories such as Swedish Pomerania, Estonia, and Latvia (or Livonia, as it was called at the time). A regional view of the history of Norden allows for these territorial flows to be understood as more than puzzling anomalies in an otherwise stable history of the nation-state, but instead as part of a constantly evolving regional dynamic.

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The outcome of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw Sweden and Denmark again aligned on opposing sides, entailed further major realignments of borders. Sweden lost Finland to Russia in 1809, and Denmark’s alliance on the losing side with Napoleon had in turn sent Norway under the control of the Swedish monarchy (albeit with a separate constitution and parliament) in a union that lasted until Norway eventually achieved complete independence in 1905. Nevertheless, the mid-nineteenth century can be seen retrospectively as another important moment of pan-national convergence in which “Scandinavianism” emerged briefly as a viable and interesting cultural project among some of the intellectual elite. Disillusionment with the political limits of that idea, however, soon followed in the wake of Norway and Sweden’s refusal to come to Denmark’s aid in the 1864 Dano-Prussian War. The subsequent periods leading up to contemporary times have largely been characterized by national differentiation. A direct corollary to Norway’s semi-independence throughout the nineteenth century could not be found in Finland under the Russian czar although the repeated attempts by Finnish cultural movements throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries eventually culminated in an independent Finnish republic in 1919. Iceland’s independence from Denmark in 1944 completes today’s familiar map of the main five nation states in the North, although the process of political negotiation and differentiation continues. The Faroe Islands have had self-governing home rule since 1948, though they currently remain part of Denmark with public opinion split on the issue of full independence. Greenland, a Danish colony since 1775, was granted home rule as a Danish province in 1979 and passed a non-binding self-government referendum in 2008, although that process is clearly still evolving as well. The indigenous Sámi inhabit the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, a cultural region that the Sámi people call Sápmi. Although this region has no single Sámi governing body and the various Sámi groups have significant cultural and linguistic differences, the efforts in the closing decades of the twentieth century to create independent parliamentary structures for the Sámi in Norway, Sweden, and Finland have led to increased cultural and political influence in each of these countries, despite demographic realities that place the Sámi population at no more than 1.5 percent of the population in Norway, the country with the strongest Sámi representation, and at significantly smaller percentages in Sweden (.2 percent) and Finland (.1 percent). Nevertheless, the increasing viability of a transnational Sámi identity and cultural sphere presents one of the most persuasive arguments for thinking beyond national borders in literary histories since Sámi literary cultures can best be understood only in a regional way. Since the 1950s various kinds of Nordic cooperation have arisen, ranging from the free movement of peoples and goods (Runblom 26), the sharing of political and military intelligence, and the coordination of transportation systems to some common environmental protection policies as well, but more as pragmatic exigencies than as natural derivatives of a widely held sense of cultural unity within the region. The Nordic Council, an inter-parliamentary body that has worked to reduce economic and cultural barriers between the five Nordic countries since 1971, represents the latest and perhaps most viable manifestation of a pan-national political identity for the region, although there too one sees some push and pull between the individual nations in the cooperative initiatives at the regional level and with respect to the larger pan-European interests of the European Union.

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The current political organization of the countries in question represent notable contrasts: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are constitutional monarchies; Finland and Iceland have parliamentary governments; the Faroe Islands and Greenland have varying degrees of home rule after centuries of colonial relationships with Denmark. Historically the nations’ relation to one another has varied and shifted as the Nordic region has moved through a wide range of relationships with the rest of the world. The membership in international organizations, for example, has been extremely flexible since the end of World War II as the diverse and shifting relationship to NATO (which currently includes Iceland, Norway, and Denmark) and more recently to the EU (which includes Denmark, Sweden, and Finland) well illustrates. Even efforts to establish a cooperative political framework have shown an underlying sense of unity in that there is a long history of both broad and deep commonalities while at the same time manifesting admirable tolerance for differing national agendas and pervasive feelings of individuality. Cultural historians within the region, however, are generally in agreement that the construction of Norden as a cultural imaginary has been much more important for perspectives outside the region, for the most part in Germany, in North America, and more recently and with curious and often contradictory ramifications within the new Europe, i.e. the European Union. The case of the German formulation of a concept of Norden is vast and extremely complex. At this juncture, suffice it to say that it hinges on the German appropriation of accounts of a common Germanic mythological system that is preserved only in Nordic sources (for the most part in the Poetic Edda, the Snorra Edda, and saga narratives), an appropriation that has been put to extremely valuable scholarly and intellectual use as well as employed to support the most heinous of political agendas in the case of German National Socialism. Although the North-American formulation of the concept of the “Nordic” has been generally more benign, it is also a complex tale in part due to the emigration of hundreds of thousands of citizens from the Nordic region to North America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the American Midwest and Northwest, the sheer scale of this immigration has created an enduring overlap in the American imagination between those regions of the U.S. and the Nordic or Scandinavian cultures from which those immigrants came. This is more than an imaginative projection of ideology, as in the German case, but is rather the result of actively evolving outposts of the Nordic cultures themselves. This too calls into question the scope and scale of a regional literary culture if one follows the language and literature of authors on their international wanderings abroad, as is the case in the present study. When seen in this expanded way, Norden is no longer purely a territorial or geographic concept but rather a designation for language communities and extended cultural practices, practices that may be generated in part but not entirely by shared experiences of place. Currently, international consciousness of the “Nordic” or “Scandinavian” as a brand of crime fiction (Nordic Noir), a distinctive design style expressed in various media (Scandinavian Modern), or a political orientation centered on environmental protection, social equality, welfare-state economics, international peacekeeping, and attention to the rights of women has led to a resurgence of interest in the cultures of the North. Even though Norden is divided politically with regard to European Union membership, a widely held foreign perception of a Nordic agenda nonetheless obtains.

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If in fact the imaginary construction of Norden has to date largely taken place outside the region, its viability and usefulness as a narrative construct or framework is not necessarily compromised or diminished. In each of the volumes of this project, the perspectival nature of identities defined from both inside and outside the literary cultures in question has been the most interesting part of the research conversation, and as a result readers will find individual essays situated at different points along that continuum of insider and exterior views. It is similarly important for readers to be aware of the perspective that the narrative framework provides and to reflexively incorporate a cognizance of that position into their understanding of the region. Language and region To conclude these introductory remarks about the internal dynamics of the Nordic region, a brief overview of its linguistic diversity seems crucial as a point of departure for the essays that follow in all three of this project’s volumes.6 The relevant information about language use in the Nordic region has both a temporal and spatial dimension, with important historical shifts and geographic variation providing the basis for understanding the evolving literary cultures of the region. Centripetal forces of language normalization and standardization are of course central to the institutionalization of literary practice in religion, education, publishing, and mass media, but corresponding centrifugal forces of vernacular language variation have at various historical junctures also contributed to significant shifts in literary culture. Just as a national adjective like “Norwegian” or “Swedish” can hide real and important elements of population diversity, the uncritical deployment of those terms as monolithic language designations imposes more internal unity on language use than exists in reality (by ignoring the wide dialectal variation within each language or the way languages mix in contact zones). For example, the trap of equating “Norwegian” language with “Norwegian” literature makes it difficult to recognize the multi-lingual literary activity that is relevant to the geographic area now called Norway. Full recognition of a historical linguistic diversity can challenge the stability of both nation and region as much as do questions of shifting political territory. Although the Nordic countries are often held up as examples of unusually homogeneous societies, the language history of the North has always been marked by a certain degree of heterogeneity worth elaborating before one takes for granted the direct correspondence of a certain territory to Swedish, Finnish, or any of the other languages of the North. When seen from a pragmatic or descriptive linguistic perspective, the language variety that can be seen in both historical migration patterns to and within the North and in the recent proliferation of new immigrant language communities in the Nordic countries or in the widespread contemporary influence of English is not unprecedented in the history of the region. This project’s definition of Nordic literary cultures depends on two main assumptions; first, that the subject matter should properly consider all languages that have been used in the 6.

The following summary of historical language use in Norden has been prepared with the additional help and expertise of volume editor Thomas A. DuBois, whom we thank for his input concerning the final content of the following section.

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Nordic territories, and second, that it should include all territories in which the traditionally defined Nordic languages have been spoken and written in literary communities abroad. These two definitions are interdependent and also somewhat at odds, since one uses geography to define the boundaries of the subject matter, and the other particular language use. This hybrid spatio-linguistic definition of literary culture, however, seems best suited to tracing the complex dynamics of Nordic literary cultures in a way that neither essentializes a connection between language and geography nor ignores the literature in Nordic languages written abroad. Any understanding of the interrelationship between the Nordic languages must acknowledge both unusual similarities and differences. On the one hand the three mainland Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) have a relatively higher degree of mutual intelligibility than might be expected of many other neighbor languages, though the mutual comprehension percentages differ by language pair, by communication form (writing vs. speech), and by configuration of speakers since the comprehension rates are often asymmetrical (Uhlmann 2028–29). It is also true that the current mutual aural comprehension rates may be declining in proportion with the ascendancy of English as a contemporary lingua franca (2026). Even so, it is common practice for linguists to choose the terms “neighbor languages” for the three modern Scandinavian languages to describe their unusual proximity without conflating the relationship described with that of dialects. It is also common to refer to a “Scandinavian language community” (2025) or of “speaking Scandinavian” when describing intra-Nordic communication, despite the fact that technically speaking, an umbrella “Scandinavian” language exists only as a pragmatic communication construct and not as a meaningful linguistic category. The regional perspective also makes clear, however, that one should not rely too strongly on the linguistic qualities that concern only Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish (although these three languages are currently spoken as first languages by nearly 80 percent of the inhabitants in Norden)7 and ignore the several other technically non-Scandinavian Nordic languages that have equally deep roots in the region. These include Finnish (spoken by just under 20 percent in the Nordic region), Icelandic, the indigenous Sámi languages, the Inuit’s Kalaallisut language, and Faroese (spoken on the Faroe Islands), all of which present much more significant barriers to mutual comprehension across the region. The historical dynamics of center and periphery in Norden, in other words, derive from the unusual proximity of three of the languages, which in turn are set off from the others of the region by much stronger distinctions and comprehension barriers. One should also not look past the foreign languages that have played a significant cultural and linguistic role in the Nordic region for a more limited historical period, such as Latin in the Middle Ages and beyond (as the language of church and learning), Low German in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (as a language of Hanseatic commerce), French (the language of the eighteenth-century Swedish court), German (in the Danish court and other educational institutions of the same period), more modern forms of German in the contested area of Sønderjylland (Schleswig), English (in the post World-War II era, as a contemporary international research and business language as well as a vehicle of popular culture), and the languages 7.

The Nordic Council of Ministers has produced an overview of contemporary Nordic language on their website. See “Facts about the Nordic Region: Language.”

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introduced through immigration to the North, largely beginning in Sweden in the 1970s, followed by Norway in the 1980s, and Denmark in the early 1990s and beyond (Kongslien 35). A regional model of literary culture would have to include all of these as significant linguistic vehicles for “figurative verbal discourse” in the North if one chooses territory as the starting point for analysis. The oldest attestations in a Nordic language are to be found in the form of runic inscriptions on stone, metal, wood, bone, or similar surfaces. Runes are characters of uncertain origin in their ordered sequence known as the fuþark, named for the first six letters of the sixteencharacter series just as the word “alphabet” is named for the first two letters (α, β) of the Greek ordered sequence (Helle 132). With the conversion to Christianity around the millennium came the adoption of the Latin alphabet and writing on vellum. The western branch of Old Norse, the language carried from western Norway to various parts of the North Atlantic, to some outposts in Ireland, and most importantly to Iceland, is a language with a particularly rich medieval literature – one of the richest of any preserved. Medieval Scandinavians referred to the language as norrœnt mál (the northern way of speaking), and although strong regional variations existed, these did not hinder direct communication between people from as far afield as southern Greenland in the west and Gotland or coastal Finland in the east. For various historical and cultural reasons, western textual variants of this widespread language have survived better than the eastern: thirteenth-century speakers from Iceland in particular showed a great readiness to record texts in the vernacular and to preserve these either in monastic libraries or on prominent farmsteads across the island. Without their work, the corpus of medieval literature from the region would be greatly diminished and skewed far more toward ecclesiastical or legal texts such as survive from the same period in Denmark and Norway. It is striking in comparison how little survives from Sweden from this era although it cannot be told for certain whether to attribute this difference to a medieval Swedish rejection of writing in the vernacular or the inevitable loss of texts of all kinds stemming from the Reformation. In any case, the relatively few texts in Old Swedish that survive from the High Middle Ages show us a language that has already developed substantial differences from western varieties in terms of grammar and lexicon. All the continental Scandinavian languages show the linguistic influence of Low German, which was spoken by Hanseatic merchants and was an important idiom of trade and culture during much of the medieval period. The traces of Low German in Scandinavian languages attest in and of themselves to the importance of the entire Baltic area as a cultural and economic region. Thus, when modern Scandinavians refer to a city as a stad (cf, High German Stadt), or work as arbet/arbeid/arbejde (cf. High German Arbeit), their words reflect the Hanseatic economic and social phenomenon that transformed Nordic societies for much of the Middle Ages. Modern Icelandic holds a place of pride as the modern Scandinavian language closest to its Old Norse predecessor. A highly inflected language rich in grammatical challenges, Icelandic has over the centuries remained remarkably conservative. With little more than a few minor spelling reforms, it has remained essentially the same as it was at the time of the settlement of Iceland by the first Nordic inhabitants in 874. It has essentially no loan words drawn from Greek or Latin as other European language do in rich abundance and coins new words based on Icelandic roots to describe recent phenomena.

General project introduction

15

Faroese is the language that emerged over centuries from the language of the Viking – Old Norse – settlers on the Faroe Islands. From the time of the settlement until early sixteenth century, Faroese had an orthography that did not differ widely from that of Icelandic, but as a result of the Reformation, the use of Faroese as an official language was banned. It remained, however, a spoken language with rich oral traditions (especially notable are the kvæði, the famous traditional Faroese ballads accompanied by dance) until end of the nineteenth century when two nationalistic enthusiasts published a modern standard for Faroese. In spite of the Faroe Islands remaining part of Denmark, the language has continued to grow in prominence and has fostered a rich literary tradition that is respected far beyond those small islands. The assimilation of Norway into the kingdom of Denmark (1397) had profound implications for its language. Its affiliation with the most important aspects of West Old Norse gradually gave way to the adoption of Danish for official use throughout the region. Distinct Norwegian characteristics remained particularly in areas not prominently affiliated with the Hanseatic League or the Kalmar Union, but the language of commerce, law, and cultivation was Danish for more than 400 years. During the nineteenth-century efforts to achieve independence, the view arose that if the country was ever to be independent, it should have a distinct language of its own. The thought prompted Ivar Aasen to travel into the more remote parts of western Norway primarily to collect examples of the language that had been least influenced by Danish. In 1848 he published Det norske Folkesprogs Grammatik (Grammar of Norwegian Dialects) and Ordbog over det norske Folkesprog (1850; Dictionary of Norwegian Dialects) out of which a distinctly Norwegian language emerged, Nynorsk (New Norwegian). It was claimed that the resulting languages represented what Norwegian would have been like had it been allowed to develop along its natural course without the imposition of Danish. Aasen wrote poems and plays in Nynorsk, with major authors like Arne Garborg, Olav Duun, Tarjei Vesaas, and Kjartan Fløgstad eventually anchoring the use of Nynorsk as a significant literary language throughout the twentieth century to this day. Although the language is currently (2014) used as the primary written language by only around 13 percent of the population (mainly in western Norway), its contribution to the Norwegian literary tradition cannot be ignored. The continued official recognition and support of Nynorsk in governmental institutions and the education system alongside the majority language Bokmål (Literary Language), which itself has developed continually away from the more conservative written Danish through a series of language and spelling reforms, gives Norway its distinctive two-language system and literary culture. Aside from nineteenth-century developments such as those described above, most of the standard written languages of Scandinavia emerged during the Reformation, when literary production in non-Latin vernacular languages grew in importance due to the religious emphasis on Bible literacy. Language also became a means of nation building, with each country aiming to create a single national language that would unite and epitomize the country’s population. In contrast with English and French, however, in which this embrace of a standard led to a frozen orthographic system that soon lagged behind the spoken language, Scandinavian educators and intellectuals have periodically entered into systematic updating of their languages’ orthographic systems to reflect changes in grammar and pronunciation. In the case of Swedish, which is an official language of both Sweden and Finland (though currently spoken as a first language by only around 6 percent of Finns), authorities in the latter country have tended to adopt the

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spelling reforms of the former so as to maintain a single standard. Nordic language reforms reflect the long-standing cultural commitment to literacy in the region since the unity between written and spoken languages eases the process of learning to read and write. Perhaps as a result of periodic updating of this sort, the Nordic countries boast some of the highest literacy rates in the world. No written language is ever a complete mirror of the spoken, however, and marked differences exist between the languages as written and as spoken in everyday circumstances. These differences, as well as strong dialectical variation from locale to locale, become potential resources for literary artists, be they poets or prose writers. Although the languages that have been described in detail to this point have close linguistic affinity or a common historical source, there are other languages in the region that do not belong to the Germanic language family. Finnish and the various Sámi languages belong instead to the Finno-Ugric language family, a group of related languages that include Estonian, Hungarian, and a number of other languages spoken in Russia or Siberia. Archaeological evidence suggests that speakers of these languages arrived in the Nordic region perhaps as early as 4000 BCE. Finno-Ugric populations of the region eventually developed into two main varieties of Finnic: a western language spoken along the southwest coast and inland regions of modernday Finland, and an eastern variety, spoken in the area of modern-day Karelia and eastern Finland. The earliest extant text of either of these languages is a small fourteenth-century inscription on birch bark, recovered from excavations of medieval Novgorod in the twentieth century. Extensive textual representation of Finnish, however, began only with the Reformation, the most important historical impulse for the development of vernacular languages throughout the Nordic region. Finland’s first Lutheran archbishop Mikael Agricola produced a small reading primer and catechism in 1543. A lengthier prayer book, a translation of the New Testament, and several liturgical works followed soon after. Agricola used his native dialect of the southwest of Finland as the model for his writing, and western forms dominated the largely spiritual works written in early Finnish for the next two centuries. During this period, most other texts produced in Finland were written in either Latin or Swedish, but the Lutheran interest in the vernacular led to a concerted effort to produce edifying literature in the language of the country’s majority. Such a commitment did not occur in the Karelian language areas of Russia, where literacy rates remained extremely low and no standard written form of Karelian emerged until the twentieth century. With the transferal of Finland to the Russian empire in 1809, this linguistic situation changed markedly. Finland became an autonomous Grand Duchy with the Russian czar as its head. Eager to weaken Finland’s historical ties with Sweden, the Russian government encouraged explorations of Finnish culture, an undertaking further supported by the writings of Johann Gottfried von Herder and the burgeoning romantic movement of the nineteenth century. The fact that Finland and Karelia now belonged to the same state led to further adjustments of the borders, with a large portion of the Karelian Isthmus transferred to the Finnish Grand Duchy. These developments served as an important basis for the work of Elias Lönnrot, whose Kalevala (1835; now known to the world in the substantially longer and rather different 1849 version) helped create a putative history as well as a claim to national identity for the Finnish people. From a linguistic standpoint, Lönnrot’s work was important in introducing a conscious effort to merge western and eastern Finnic languages into a single new standard.

General project introduction

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The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migration of Finnish-speaking populations to the north of Sweden and Norway led to the development of distinctive languages there as well: meankieli in the Torne River Valley of Sweden, and kveeni in Norwegian Finnmark. Finnish dialects within Finland enjoyed a resurgence in the latter decades of the twentieth century and remain important idioms for literary undertakings, particularly in the areas of theater and poetry. The same tendency can be noted in dialect forms of Swedish spoken in coastal areas of western and southwestern Finland. The Finno-Ugric languages of northern Finland as well as much of Sweden and Norway belong to the Sámi language group. There are some nine closely related Sámi languages, falling into three main groupings. Of these, only two languages – Northern Sámi and Lule Sámi, both belonging to the central Sámi group – have populations in excess of a thousand speakers. Some of the smallest of the surviving languages number only a few hundred speakers, and some have as few as a dozen speakers or even fewer. The first written texts in any Sámi language were in languages of the southern grouping and somewhat predictably were also produced for use in Reformation-era liturgical and educational contexts. A prayer book in South Sámi dates from 1619, and a South Sámi rendering of Luther’s Catechism followed in 1633. It was some time before church authorities of Sweden-Finland and Denmark-Norway understood that South Sámi was not intelligible to Sámi populations further to the north or east. The first secular works written in a Sámi language were two poems written in the nowextinct Kemi Sámi by a young 17th-century minister-in-training, Olaus Sirma. Sirma’s love poems reference his native district of northeastern Finland and appeared in Latin translation in Johann Scheffer’s 1673 Lapponia. The first complete secular book written in a Sámi language was Johan Turi’s 1910 Muitalus sámiid birra (An Account of the Sámi). Widespread schooling in Sámi languages began only in the twentieth century and orthographic standards for each of the languages have been the subject of constant reworking and updating. The last principal language community of the broader Nordic region is Kalaallisut or West Greenlandic, which belongs to the Eskimo-Aleut family. Tunumiisut spoken in the east of the island and Inuktun in the north – the two other languages of any prominence – are not mutually comprehensible and are considered by many linguists clearly separate languages. Kalaallisut, though, is closely related to other Inuit languages spoken across northern Canada and more distinctly to languages spoken in Alaska and eastern Siberia. The written language owes its inception to the work of a German-Danish missionary Samuel Kleinschmidt, who wrote a grammar of the language in 1845 and developed the orthography that remained in use until the 1970s. It was a very complex system and a generally unsatisfactory representation of the language. The language moreover had undergone significant changes that made the older system even less viable. In 1973 a new orthographic system was adopted that contributed significantly to the general literacy of the populace. Greenland also is home to a sizeable population of Danish speakers – particularly in Nuuk, the capital – reflecting the country’s colonial history and the importance of Danish education and culture up until the recent past. As is the case with other Nordic countries, pride in their language has been an important aspect of national identity. Such was the case in Greenland. Since the first extensive colonization of Greenland in 1700, Greenlandic has been under pressure from the Danish language, most notably during the 1950s. In 1979 when Greenland achieved a

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degree of home rule, an effort to promote the use of Greenlandic was undertaken. More notably, when Greenland was essentially given its independence by Denmark in 2008, the first political act was to declare Kalaallisut the sole official language of the country. In addition to these various indigenous languages, the Nordic region contains a variety of smaller minority and migrant languages. These include the historically significant Yiddish, Tatar, and Romany. Refugees and immigrants have also brought their native languages with them to their new homes during the latter part of the twentieth century and beyond, and it is possible today to hear such diverse languages as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Vietnamese, Russian, Polish, German, Kurdish, Urdu, and Somali in Nordic urban neighborhoods and small towns. Region as an explanatory space The general introductory information presented here suggests both centers and peripheries within a region that itself has at times been understood as peripheral to Europe. The political and linguistic histories of the North do not so much confirm the real and enduring existence of Norden as they suggest constant historical movement along a continuum spanning periods of internal fragmentation or isolation as well as those of imagined regional coherence. These shifting affinities within the region make clear the advantages of thinking of convergences as historically contingent and temporary, which is to say, worthy of precisely the kind of comparative cultural analysis made possible by a concept-driven, essayistic, and nodal approach to literary history. The spatial nodes examined in this volume’s essays demonstrate a full range of the intraregional relationships possible along that continuum, from more isolated and specific phenomena to more widely resonant practices common to the entire region. Talk of centers and peripheries should not occlude the fact that for any participant in a literary culture the immediate milieu available for apprehending and expressing “figurative verbal discourse” is always in some sense the center of experience in spite of the institutional dynamics that might dictate other centers of power within a literary culture. Although the power structures represented by nation, church, educational institutions, and publishers have real effects on linguistic and literary practice and thus need to be recognized in any nuanced analysis, the assumption of this project is that there is also value in the reframing of centers that the nodal approach to literary history affords. While some of the nodes introduced throughout the three volumes of a Nordic Literature: A Comparative History will be familiar from previous literary histories dedicated to describing the most representative and dominant trends, other nodes will be sometimes unexpected formulations proceeding from the methodological shift in points of departure. This is the sense in which “region” can be used as an experimental and explanatory construct to reveal perspectives that might be hidden by the reproduction of the dominant logics of national literature, canonical authorship, and literary periodization. The choice of new kinds of “centers” to investigate – the spatial, temporal, and figural nodes – allows literary history to renew itself in sometimes surprising ways.

The framework Spatial nodes Dan Ringgaard and Thomas A. DuBois

This volume – the first in a multi-volume comparative history of Nordic literature – depends on a dialectical relationship between the spatial nodes around which it is organized and temporal nodes which might more readily be expected in a work more narrowly devoted to literary history. A temporal node represents a significant turning point in time, one that resonates both backward through history (i.e. transforming retrospectively the meaning and import of preceding events) and forward by altering in a continuing way the way in which a literary culture debates an issue. Such temporal nodes can be identified throughout the region although the reverberations of the literary phenomena that they describe may reach more remote corners of the North much later than where they originated. A spatial node, on the other hand, can be a significant location, a type of location, or a use of location that can assume the same sort of formative resonance within literary culture, but across history rather than within a single moment. If the primary extension of the temporal node is horizontal (i.e. through the dissemination of the effects of a particular historical event across the entire Nordic region), then that of the spatial nodes is vertical (i.e. through the spread of the effects of a given understanding of place over time). Understandings of place and of process become defined by writers, identified as meaningful, and then embedded, literally, within the landscape, where they can influence literary production and reception over time. By focusing on historical events – as in temporal nodes – one can track the geographic spread of ideas across the Nordic region. By focusing on places and practices of place, on the other hand, one can track the historical unfolding of an attitude or understanding connected with place as it evolves over the course of Nordic literary history. Together spatial and temporal nodes constitute what Mario J. Valdés calls the “cultural context” (104). The challenge inherent in this critical strategy has been to select significant places or kinds of places as well as their compelling uses in Nordic literary cultures as they emerge, consolidate, and vanish over time and space. In short, the aim is to explore the ways in which contiguity, adjacency, and proximity rather than just sequentiality have shaped Nordic literary culture by highlighting the role of place. The concept of place Place is intuitively regarded as a phenomenon that exists in both space and time thus lending itself to geographical as well as historical scrutiny. A basic definition of place notes its geographic position, its physical characteristics, and the cultural sense that adheres to it (Cresswell 7). It might be said that a locality has a position, a topography, and often a structure, and that once this locality is sensed and made sense of, place emerges. Place occurs, in other words, in the nexus of locality and subject. One might argue, as Heidegger does, that place is an occurrence doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.02rin © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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or an emergence (ein Ereignis).1 Place does not just change over time – it takes place in each meeting between a locality and a subject. Taking this idea one step further, Edward S. Casey has argued that place occurs in the interaction of a moving body and a geographical landscape: the temporality of place involves not only changing and occurring, but also a process of continually changing borders as place emerges between the epicentre of the moving body and the horizon. However, as Casey also notes, the body as well as the landscape are always already imbued with culture.2 So, in fact, place is a triangulation of body, landscape, and culture in which culture means whatever imprint human society may have had on the other two. Culture – a key concept of this literary history – is one of the reasons a place is recognizable no matter how singular, subjective, and mobile it might be. Not only the physical features of the locality and the perceptual apparatus of the body, but also the meanings bestowed upon both by culture lend a certain stability to a place. There is thus a production of meaning, or better, a production of sense (as a sensing and as a making sense of) at the core of the production of place. In La production de l’espace (1974; The Production of Space), Henri Lefebvre makes an influential contribution to the understanding of this making of place (36–46).3 Arguing against Heidegger’s view of place as an ontologically given occurrence of particular positive qualities, Lefebvre sees place as a biased product of the contingency of history and offers another triangulation: “la practique spatiale” (spatial practice), “les représentations de l’espace” (representations of space), and “l’espace de représentation” (representational space); or, “l’espace perçu” (perceived), “conçu” (conceptualized), and “vécu” (lived). Put very briefly, “spatial practices” are the spaces of everyday life, of routines, perceptions, and actions; “representations of space” are concerned with the space of knowledge, language, and ideology; and “representational space” is the space of culturally and historically determined images. For present purposes, Lefebvre’s triad shows the importance of practice as well as representation and imagination in the conception of place while at the same time criticizing dualistic definitions of place such as locality plus (a sense of) place as opposed to space.4 Lefebvre also goes much further than Casey in describing what culture actually does to place in gesturing toward an understanding of how literature, for instance, might work with regard to place.

1.

Perhaps Heidegger’s most important text about place is his 1951 lecture “Bauen Wohnen Denken.” For a discussion of Heidegger’s thinking on place including the concept of “Ereignis” see Malpas, Place and Experience.

2.

“Place is what takes place between the body and the landscape…. Both body and landscape are always already imbued with cultural determinants” (Casey Getting Back into Place 29–30). See also Heise (Sense of Place) and Casey (Fate of Place).

3.

Some confusion might arise concerning the use of the French espace and the English place. Espace often denotes a more abstract concept that is not necessarily precisely the same as space. In the case of Lefebvre, space is an abstract conception as well as a name for places existing in time and space. Marc Augé discusses the predicament within the French tradition in a critique of Michel de Certeau’s use of espace in Augé’s Non-lieux.

4.

In Thirdspace, Edward W. Soja has argued for a triangular as opposed to a dualistic approach to place, which both Lefebvre and W. J. T. Mitchell have also done, the latter in his introduction to the second edition of Landscape and Power.

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Following Lefebvre, a great many studies in a wide array of disciplines have investigated the relationship between culture, history, and place in echoing Foucault’s generous but determined dismissal of Gaston Bachelard and phenomenology in his lecture “Des espaces autres”: L’œuvre – immense – de Bachelard, les descriptions des phénoménologues nous ont appris que nous ne vivons pas dans un espace homogène et vide, mais au contraire, dans un espace qui est tout chargé de qualités, un espace qui est peut-être aussi hanté de fantasme…. Cependant, ces analyses, bien que fondamentales pour la réflexion contemporaine, concernent surtout l’espace du dedans. C’est de l’espace du dehors que je voudrais parler maintenant. (47) (Bachelard’s monumental work and the descriptions of phenomenologists have taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well…. Yet these analyses, while fundamental for reflection in our time, primarily concern internal space. I should like to speak now of external space). [2]

Among other things, the more practice-oriented views of place by these sociologically inclined writers further underscore the role of time and action in place thus making it evident that the nodes concerned with place in this volume cannot exclusively focus on places and kinds of places but must direct their attention towards the use of places as well. Place and literature Literature plays a part in the production of place, and place is a part of literature. Literature redistributes place, takes it, transforms it, and returns it. It helps a community conceptualize physical spaces and environments as cultural entities, locales filled with meanings that have been negotiated and contested by community members over time, particularly (although not exclusively) by formulations and portrayals in literature. Literature can reflect a community’s understandings and values with regard to place, but crucially, it also shapes them. One might assume that the particular places of a region influence its literature, and it can be safely said that literature has an impact on what particular places mean. Certainly the places of the region are the material at hand, and as such they will be used in literature. And no doubt, places that literature does not use run the risk of not being recognized as places at all. In discussing the relation between place in literature and place outside of literature, it might prove enlightening to distinguish between two modes of literary treatment and connect them to two different spaces. Casey and Lefebvre are among the theorists who describe the individual and collective manipulations of sensing and making sense of place in general although in very different ways. Following Frederik Tygstrup – and running the risk of confusing his concepts and Lefebvre’s – this distinction will be called a lived space as opposed to the represented space of literature (174–83). In the case of represented space, place is manipulated aesthetically with regard to the work of art. Literary rhetoric particular to time and place reconceptualizes a place that is already a product and a part of lived space. Literature not only transforms lived space into represented space, but by doing so it also changes the lived space as such. This dialectic calls for a rhetorical as well as a critical perspective.

Dan Ringgaard and Thomas A. DuBois

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The rhetorical perspective might be formulated by taking a cue from concepts slightly different from Tygstrup’s. There is space in literature and literature in space, Franco Moretti says in Atlas of the European Novel (3). On the one hand, there are places as they are represented in literature; on the other hand, there are places of lived experience from and between which literature is produced, distributed, and consumed. While bearing both in mind, we have tried to balance the words and images of the first with the cultural and historical circumstances of the latter. The critical perspective can be approached by way of another well-established conceptualization. The character of a place may be understood in terms of Michel Foucault’s triangular model of normal (existing) places, of utopia (non-existing places), and of heterotopia (existing but liminal places). The concept of heterotopia (cemeteries, brothels, asylums, colonies, ships, etc.) opens onto a spatial history of power thus encouraging a critical perspective on whatever spatial issue is at stake. It also emphasizes the impact of those processes on the verge of everyday reality that influence this reality. To Foucault a heterotopia is “la plus grande reserve d’imagination” (49) [“the greatest reserve of the imagination” (7)] without which normal places would be at a loss for meaning. This conceptualization suggests that literature itself might be a kind of heterotopia like the ship Foucault describes that transports what is foreign and unknown into the heart of society. But such a formulation also leaves open the possibility of seeing literature as a source of power and marginalization celebrating certain places while at the same time pushing others into oblivion. One example that calls for critical alertness is the central role of literature as well as place in the nation-building process of the Nordic region. Place and region Foucault’s concept of a heterotopia also suggests that the production of meaning that is part of the making of place cannot just come from within place itself. Place is also defined by what is outside it and by what it negates. This explanation is true of any place as well as for the particular kind of place referred to as a region. Writing a volume on place within the framework of literary history focused on regional grounds raises the question of boundaries, and autonomy becomes all the more acute. In his book Til: En litterær reise (2005; To: A Literary Journey) the Norwegian writer Tor Eystein Øverås finds himself in a bookstore in Oslo with the travel guide Scandinavian & Baltic Europe in his hand while gazing at a map of Norden: Hva er det jeg ser? Jeg ser et landskap, et geografi, den nordeuropeiske, som folder seg ut omkring et hav, et stort innhav, Østersjøen. Det er et landskap som med havet som sentrum kan betraktes som en lang snirklete kyst, et landskap preget av ensartet klima og lys, men gjennom dette landskapet går det grenser, nasjonsgrenser, og hva betyr det? Landskapet har landmasser som henger sammen, skoger som henger sammen, fjellkjeder som henger sammen, sletter som henger sammen, en lang sammenhengende kyststripe, vannet i havet som vugger mellom kystene. (7–8) (What do I see? I see a landscape, a geography, the north European landscape that spreads out around an ocean, a large lake, the Baltic Sea. I see a landscape that, having the sea as its center, can be considered one long scrolled coastline, a landscape characterized by a particular

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climate and light, but through this landscape there are borders, national borders, and what does that mean? The landscape has territories that cohere, has forests that cohere, has mountain ranges that cohere, and has one long continuous coastline, the water of the sea cradled between the coasts).

Øverås sees a region, not a cluster of nations, and he realizes that what holds the region together is the Baltic Sea. This means that Russia, the Baltic countries, Poland, and Germany become part of the region whereas Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland are left out. It also means that Sweden and Finland comprise the center, Denmark and Norway the periphery.

Figure 2.  Map of the Nordic region emphasizing the Baltic Sea (altered to b/w version). Author: Nzeemin, NordNordWest. Creative Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Relief_Map_ of_Baltic_Sea.png. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

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After this cartographic epiphany, Øverås chooses to make a tour of the region moving clockwise around the Baltic. Øverås, himself a citizen of Stavanger, a city on the west coast of Norway, might have found another focus had his eye caught the North Sea instead of the Baltic. Then another equally valid image of Norden would have appeared, one that includes the British Isles, the Netherlands, Germany, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands, even Greenland, but marginalizes Sweden and leaves Finland out entirely. Historically, it makes good sense to consider the sea – or seas – as the elements that unite the region. For present purposes the lesson to be drawn from Øverås’s cartographic meditations is that the boundaries of the region, as of any region, are permeable. The region is not simply defined by what is inside and what is outside of it: geographically as well as historically, it has no inside or outside, or even any center.

Figure 3.  Topographic rendering of the Nordic region, emphasizing the North Sea. Image: Anton Balazh/Shutterstock

What then makes it a region? First of all, the fact that the modern history of Norden is the history of two colonial powers ruled by the kings of Sweden and Denmark, who gathered the region today recognized as Norden around two imperial centers – Stockholm and Copenhagen. These

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monarchs imposed a degree of historical, cultural, and linguistic uniformity on a region already connected by Viking Age trade and medieval cultures. These historical realities function as a centripetal force holding the region together that serves as a useful corrective to any critical position that would assert the complete permeability of regional boundaries; at the same time, these realities help to emphasize the east-west orientation of the region. To that orientation the north-south alignment connecting especially Denmark to Germany and continental Europe could be added. In the far northeast the Scandinavian Peninsula should be distinguished from the Kola Peninsula and the cultural influences of Russia and the far north of Eurasia. In a post-national regional literary history, it is important to avoid relying too heavily on a model of purported “inside” and “outside.” The danger therein lies in succumbing to the same pitfall as traditional national literary histories face, in essence replacing the construct of the “nation” with the “region” as a kind of super-nation. This possibility, of course, becomes all the more acute in a volume based on nodes of place. But the theory of place offers concepts that can mitigate, if not altogether avoid, this predicament. It is not the intention here to enter into elaborate discussions regarding the theory of place. This line of thinking opposes more conservative views on place as a relatively stable and autonomous geographic entity constituted by the relationship of its subsidiary elements, organized in a geometry of center and periphery, and linked temporally (vertically) through a concept of shared history, memory, and customs. Different mixtures of this concept of place may be found in two of the founding fathers of place theory – Martin Heidegger and Gaston Bachelard – and is developed further by such contemporary writers as the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan and the architect Christian Norberg-Schultz.5 A post-national concept of place, however, imagines things differently. From this perspective, place is defined horizontally as a space transected by various global flows rather than vertically as that of a shared history, and shared memories and customs developed up through history. Geographer Doreen Massey has opted for the concept of place as a condensation of space. Space is not abstract but “the product of interrelations”; it is “constituted through interactions”; it is “the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist”; and it is “always under construction” (9). Such a concept of space blends Lefebvre’s idea of the space as production with Foucault’s idea of modern space as network and Arjun Appadurai’s concept of global flows. It is a view that loosens the sometimes-stark dichotomy between space and place by regarding places as condensations of space: If space is rather a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space. Their character will be a product of these intersections within the wider setting, and of what is made of them. And, too, of the 5.

A typology of place theory could be grounded on the various critiques of Heidegger’s underestimating or ignoring (1) the role of the body, (2) the contingency of history, and (3) the role of representation. The various types therein would consist of an onto-phenomenology based on the works of Heidegger, Bachelard, Tuan, Norberg-Schultz, and Malpas; a corporeal phenomenology with regard to which Edward S. Casey is the most influential theorist and a broad sociology of place including Lefebvre, Foucault, Certeau, and Augé. Branches thereof have developed into globalization theory (Massey, Heise), tourist studies (Urry), the vast heterogeneous field of cultural studies (Frank and Stevens), and ecostudies (Rigby, Heise). Finally one might point to a line of cartography that emphasizes the representation and particularly the mapping of place as in for instance Moretti, Piatti, Bulson, and J. Hillis Miller.

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non-meetings-up, the disconnections and the relations not established, the exclusions. All this contributes to the specificity of place. (130)

The nodal principle employed throughout this volume of literary history meshes well with this horizontal and global concept of place. Place itself becomes a node, a thickening of space created by what ever passes through it, but also, one must imagine, by a power of the place to attract people, money, goods and so forth. Place becomes a thoroughfare, a place of transit as opposed to a stable, delimited, and grounded home, and with that conceptual shift, the opposition between place and travel is turned into a mutual dependency. With place being, to some extent, a product of what travels through it, it becomes all the more important to regard the region as something that not only grows from its own past, but also constantly recycles the surrounding world. This view has been integrated into the present volume by adopting the following distinction: there are places in Nordic literature (including everything from the Earth to a Chinese pond) and Nordic places in literature (including those in non-Nordic literatures). These two categories are much to be preferred to the isolationist model of Nordic places in Nordic literature. Although the vast majority of the places or kinds of places in this volume are Nordic and described by Nordic writers, room has been made for a number of essays on Nordic texts about non-Nordic places, and contributors have also considered works on Nordic places by non-Nordic writers. Scapes and practices The nodal conception of place constitutes the basic premise of the volume, one that offers a contemporary and global perspective on place from which to examine history. The distinction between a horizontal and vertical concept of place – however relative it might be from case to case and from place to place – points in a historical as well as a methodological direction. The processes of de-territorialization in modernity (the deteriorating relationships with respect to family, land, work, and money within the complex contexts of industrialization, urbanism, and capitalism) have no doubt contributed to preference for the horizontal (i.e. spatial) over the vertical (i.e. temporal) model of place, as has the striking dissociation of activity and location inherent in globalization. The schematized opposition employed characterizes the present historical situation from which the history of literature is viewed. Methodologically, the opposition points to a crux in dealing with place as scape and place as practice leads to the conclusion drawn in the discussion of the concept of place, namely that the nodes of place cannot deal with places and kinds of places without also dealing with the use of places. For this reason, the nodes relating to space are organized in scapes and practices. Scapes deal with various places and kinds of places; practices with different uses of place. For the present purpose, the scapes are arranged in five groups: Landscapes, Waterscapes, Cityscapes, Lightscapes, and Millenniumscapes. The practices are divided into four groups: Settling, Dwelling, Exploring, and Sacralizing. The descriptions of each particular scape and practice are found at the beginning of each of the nodes of this volume.

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In the Middle Ages the word for landscape meant a human-made space of land. The intervention of man could be agricultural or legislative. Either way, something in nature was circumscribed and made subject to actions dealing with the internal conditions and relations of the particular piece of land. With the development of landscape painting, the term early on was associated with scenery and with scenery appropriate for viewing, distancing and framing. A rupture thus occured separating landscape as a geographic entity and as an artistic conceptualization. Recently, the term scape has expanded throughout the humanities in all sorts of combinations following especially Appadurai’s use of it in Modernity at Large. Appadurai combines the imaginary and relational element of the landscape with the idea of global flows by pushing it toward the metaphorical meaning of global frames of mind stemming from crucial practices of global society. In this volume, “scape” as in landscape is not metaphorical but is related to places or kinds of places. Along with the concepts of place that have been discussed, one may well concur with Appadurai’s emphasis on the imaginary element of the scapes as “the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups” (33). As to the relational element, the potential stasis of the landscape has been avoided by regarding place as the complex interplay of a number of elements as shown in the discussion of the concept and by understanding it as a circumscribed human-made space with its own internal dynamics. This second dynamic may be approached by yet another concept that impinges upon place, namely topography. Drawing on the thinking of Ptolemy, we regard place not as cosmography (the mapping of the general features of the universe), nor as topos (a literary commonplace) but instead as related to topography (the detailed mapping of a part of the world). As a mapping of a part of the world, topography holds the potential of describing an internal dynamic among the elements of the place. Furthermore, the distinction between topography and topos helps separate the nodes examined in this volume from the figural nodes that form the focus of the second volume of this literary history. The scapes included in this volume are not intended to be an exhaustive catalogue of the myriad and various places depicted in Nordic literature. Rather, they are meant to suggest some of the many ways in which authors have represented place and how those representations change across space and time. In the same way, the practices presented here are meant to suggest a much larger array of place-related activities depicted in literary works. Because these practices are often integrally tied to larger questions of economy and politics, the selection of texts examined here extends into nonfiction particularly so as to encompass narratives of exploration and reform. The avowedly nonfictional works included here, however, are examined not from the perspective of their current or past validity within the fields of science they helped shape, but rather as part of an ongoing Nordic discussion regarding place and the human experience of the world. The first section, “Settling” is the appropriation and the reconfiguration of an alien place that is already the dwelling site of another community. When one person’s site of settling is another’s site of dwelling – as in the multiethnic settling of Scandinavia’s urban south – the sense of disjunction and dislocation becomes palpable. “Dwelling” focuses on the imagined (but sometimes problematic) experience of the home place as static and known. It examines the activities that transform a given place into something familiar, domestic – domesticated.

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Dwelling implies security and contentment but also a longing for its opposite, for a desire to be reckless, footloose, or free. “Exploring,” invites attention to practices of traversing and exploring, as chronicled in the works of travelers like Hans Christian Andersen and (in a very different way) Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen, or in the texts of Arctic explorers medieval and modern. A pair of further articles from Greenlandic and Sámi perspectives examines the disjunction which occurs  – already noted in the essay on Dinesen  – when one person’s “wilderness” or place of exploration is another person’s place of dwelling. “Sacralizing,” looks at the investment of place with a sense of the supernatural, the uncanny, the awe-inspiring, terrifying, or sanctifying. Articles explore the ancient sense of the liminal and the arcane beyond the safety of home or village, as well as sacralizations in more recent texts, such as the sanctifying of place as “national” through the shedding of blood in battle. The aim of the framework The scapes and the practices with their respective subcategories make up the compositional framework of the volume while a number of the distinctions and concepts mentioned above constitute the conceptual framework. This dual framework meets several challenges faced in planning this volume: (1) to qualify place as a concept and as a node, (2) to cover the topography and the topographical imagination of the region, (3) to ensure that the volume would be reasonably unified despite its many contributors, and (4) to offer a framework that would be sufficiently flexible and inspiring to allow contributing writers to develop their own ideas. Writers were introduced to the framework and asked to write an essay on a specified scape or practice. Some of the essays span the region; others do not. Complete regional coverage in each essay was not requested, but overall the editors sought some comprehensiveness of coverage under each node and a reasonable balance in the volume as a whole. Essays based on a particular idea, a particular argument, or a particular story of interest with regard to place about the region and its literature were included as examples of research that might be done on that topic, but are not intended as an encyclopedic treatment of the subject. In framing a literary history in terms of place, two emblematic examples may prove helpful. First, it is nearly impossible to avoid the iconic narrative about Nils Holgerssons underbara resa (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils), Selma Lagerlöf’s famous geography textbook-turnedmoralistic-adventure of 1906–07. It relates the story of a naughty young Swede, a tame goose named Mårten, and their marvellous flight across the landscapes of Sweden, in the company of a stern wild goose Akka of Kebnekaise (named for Sweden’s highest mountain) and her flock of companion geese, bearing Finnish numerals as names Lagerlöf’s work constructs place as part of a Swedish national project by domesticating the landscape and claiming it in no uncertain terms for every school child and citizen of the state. The goal was to set aside that familiar image of place and its highly self-conscious portrayal in Nordic literature for another more subtle depiction contained in a more recent children’s book, Bodil Bredsdorff ’s Krageungen: Børnene i Kragervig (1993; The Crow Child: The Children in Crow Bay). In the opening scene of Bredsdorff ’s poignant and memorable novel, an image of a classic seascape of Danish Jutland is seen: a treeless, windswept coast, with a cluster of tiny, ramshackle whitewashed houses,

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where an elderly woman and her young granddaughter struggle to survive. While watching the interactions of the impoverished but loving pair, attention is also soon drawn to the girl’s activities: she forages for driftwood, collects sea kale, snails, and fish, cooks a meal and tea over the cottage’s open hearth, and eventually banks the coals in order to save them for another day. Scapes and practices intertwine in a work that – like so many stories in Nordic children’s literature – explores the complexities of voluntary kinship: situations in which characters overcome the hardships of their natal families to create new networks of support and love. Bredsdorff ’s tale could as easily be told in urban Copenhagen, yet it is not: instead, it locates its actions topographically along a small stretch of remote coastline in which human sorrows have been heaped one upon the other like driftwood after a long and relentless string of tides. The reader moves with the characters across that space, decoding it, appraising it, eventually appreciating it, both as an entity in itself – a scape – and as the site of a set of meaningful practices that make it liveable and loving. The aim of this volume is to explore such discursive constructions by unpacking for readers the historical baggage such imagery carries for the Nordic reader and exploring the ways in which this baggage has been developed and altered over time. Bredsdorff ’s image carries with it an archaeology of representation and resonance that can be recovered just as surely as does Selma Lagerlöf’s famous image of the young Nils touring the provinces of a united Sweden from the back of a goose. In the following pages, readers are invited to explore such constructions of place as presented in Nordic literary works and as analyzed by the various essayists of this volume. It is hoped that place will be found a meaningful and useful method of exploring the complex history of Nordic literary culture.

Scapes

Landscapes Dan Ringgaard

In its broadest sense, the term landscape may be said to encompass the other scapes in this volume. Settlements and cities can be part of a landscape that may also include lakes, islands, and other waterscapes, and no landscape is complete without the horizon, the light, and the atmosphere, in other words without a lightscape. What distinguishes a landscape from the other scapes is, however, the dominance of land understood as cultivated nature. To narrow the concept even further, one may juxtapose geographical landscape to aesthetic landscape. A geographical landscape is a place where man and nature interact; it has its particular spatial and temporal rhythms, and it consists of various natural and architectural elements. It provides the conditions of life and is formed by ways of living. Geographical landscapes contain memories and myths, ideas of belonging and longing, of nation and identity. They are the landscapes that are inhabited and used. At a certain point in time, aesthetic landscapes came into existence as places of expansion, depth, and horizons that are contemplated from a distance and situated in the realm of leisure as opposed to one of use (Ritter). An aesthetic landscape can be divided conceptually into the vantage point of “self-consciousness,” the middle distance of a “socially-determined perception of nature” and the remoteness of the “world picture of cosmology” (Wamberg 1:7). The distinction between geographical and aesthetic landscape is by no means absolute. As the word landscape indicates, the land is always shaped by something, be it a polity, that is “lands with ancient laws rooted in the custom of the people” (Olwig and Jones xv), power (Mitchell), or the aesthetic gaze. Moreover since geographical landscape is to a large extent defined by its use, it will be omnipresent in the second half of this volume dealing with practices. Here in the nodes dealing with scapes, the aesthetic landscape will be our principle concern. Focusing on the aesthetic landscape has the further advantage of differentiating landscape from the overall subject of this volume: place. Generally speaking, place is something we are within, while aesthetic landscape is something external (Cresswell 10). But one may also regard landscape as a particular kind of relation to place, and as such it comes to play a crucial role in the history of place in Nordic literature. If place – as argued in the framework essay to this volume – is what results from the juncture of locality and subjectivity or the intersection of (geographical) landscape, body, and culture, then aesthetic landscape as the point where perceived locality encounters modern subjectivity becomes crucial to the development of a modern sense of place. Perceived in what sense? Modern in what sense? In Europe, landscape as an aesthetic category is a product of modernity understood as closely related to the advent of perspective in the visual arts and as such an expression of anthropocentrism (Wamberg 1:8–9). Taking Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (ca. 1818) as a full-fledged example of the modern European landscape painting, Jacob Wamberg writes in Landscape as World Picture: “The image now appears as a fragment, framing a view towards an endless and varied outside world; and the way in which this outside world presents itself within the frame of the image has become totally dependent on the vantage point of the beholder” (Wamberg 1:4). So perceived locality indicates “an endless and varied outside world,” as opposed to a symbolically doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.03rin © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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or conventionally ordered finite world, and modern subjectivity involves a dependency “on the vantage point of the beholder.” Wamberg dates this concept of landscape painting to the period between 1420 and 1900, after which perspective is challenged. If we are to bring this idea of perspectival aesthetic landscape from the history of the visual arts into literary history, a new sense of literary landscape will be located after the kind of literature in which time and place are not yet a significant force in the development of plot and character, in which man is not the perceptive and emotional center of the universe, and in which places are located within a fixed world order. It will be located before literature in which the city has conquered the horizon and the mastery of time and space has slipped away from a subject under attack from the overflow of perceptions that is often attributed to modernity. In Nordic literature, the period in which the aesthetic landscape dominates would thus be situated between the mid-eighteenth and late nineteenth century although considerable variation can be seen within the region depending on the speed and scale of urbanization and industrialization. This is the period upon which the essays of this Landscape node converge. Whereas geographical landscape always plays a part in the composition of literature by providing a challenge and an archive for literary choice as well as a material for literary interpretation, landscape in its aesthetic sense arose with landscape poetry, peaked during the romantic period, and later in the century played an especially important role in types of realist fiction. Aesthetic landscape as a locality perceived and framed from the vantage point of the beholder is by no means extinct, but it does not seem to have had any major innovative impact on twentieth century Nordic literature. In what follows landscape means aesthetic landscape unless otherwise indicated. Fourteenth century and on: Looking back from landscape This scape begins with two essays on mythic landscapes imprinted with medieval history, whose written literary history dates back to respectively the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Ástráður Eysteinsson follows the reimagining, rewritings, and recontextualizations of the volcanic glacier Snæfellsjökull outside of Reykjavík from Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss (c. 1300; Bard’s Saga) through Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (1864; Journey to the Centre of the Earth) to Halldór Laxness’s novel Kristnihald undir Jökli (1968; Under the Glacier). As a visually spectacular landmark hovering over the landscape surrounding Reykjavík, Snæfellssjökull has been a force of gathering and identity and at the same time a constant source of metamorphosis between man and place, the visible and the invisible, the local and the global, surface and depth, meaning and insignificance. Eysteinsson shows how the shaping force as well as the aesthetic attraction of the landmark makes Snæfellsjökull a vehicle of imagination from the beginning of Nordic literature. Jan Rosiek investigates the meanings ascribed to the medieval Danish castle of Gurre and the landscape surrounding it. Whereas Snefjællsjökull is a dominant landmark that has stirred the literary imagination and functions in different ways as a center and source of narrative and as a major symbol of Icelandic identity, Gurre is a minor and easily overlooked landscape around which national legends arose, but it remained to a large extent of limited nineteenth-century interest. This link between legend and place needed the art of landscape poetry as well as the

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impetus of nation building in order to be activated. In Rosiek’s application of Henri Lefebvre, Gurre was a mere “setting” (locality) until romanticism made it into a “landscape” (Lefebvre’s third term “territory” is close to what here has been termed “geographical landscape”). With the decline of landscape poetry and nation building, Gurre faded into oblivion. Reading texts from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries – among many others Søren Kierkegaard’s and J. P. Jacobsen’s – Rosiek considers Gurre an example of landscape as an outmoded literary category. Ironically, the best texts on Gurre explore eroticism, religion, and temporality without much interest in the actual landscape. Mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth century: The emergence of landscape In Nordic literature, the aesthetic landscape is closely allied with the decreasing use of topoi in the landscape poetry of the last half of the eighteenth century. The topos (Curtius 77–81) is part of the stable hierarchy of ancient, medieval, and classical rhetorical figures in a world in which everything is in its proper place. It is what Foucault in his lecture “Des espaces autres” (“Of Other Spaces”) terms a space of emplacement. So its abandonment is, in Foucault’s terms, an opening of a space of extension and movement. This development can be traced more precisely to the disappearance of two particular topoi: liber naturæ [the book of nature] (Curtius 323–29; Blumenberg) as the imprint of God and the locus amoenus [the pastoral landscape] (Curtius 202–06; Gifford). This is more than the regression of two particular topoi but is, rather, the decline of topoi as such and a break with the Christian and classical worlds with which they were associated. The two topoi resemble the two cultural figurations that Auerbach points to in Mimesis. There he recounts the history of Western literature as an exploration of reality by way of continual breaks with the prescriptive rhetorical styles and the symbolism of the figura (Auerbach 494–98). A new rhetoric of subjectivity made it possible to see through the coded pastoral landscape and the transcendental nature toward historical time and space in which modern individuals were able to articulate themselves. The search for this break with the past in Nordic literature draws the attention to the double monarchy of Denmark and Norway. In 1758 Norwegian poet Christian Braunmann Tullin wrote the pastoral poem “Majdagen” (A Day in May), which was soon translated into Swedish, Icelandic, Dutch, English, French, and German. As was typical at this time, the poem was written for an occasion: it commemorates a bourgeois wedding celebration that took place on an estate in Bogstad near Voksenåsen just outside Kristiania. A new sensibility toward nature had given the pastoral a new life in Norden just as elsewhere throughout Europe. A pastoral shaped by eighteenth-century French landscape painting and poetry is evident in Swedish literature in poems such as Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht’s sylvan meditation “Ensligheten” (1762; Solitude) or Gustav Philip Creutz’s “Sommer-Kväde” (1756; Summer Song), but these landscapes are highly formalized. Tullin challenges the rhetorical landscapes in this classicist tradition by adding an actual Norwegian landscape. Although in Tullin’s poem the obligatory disgust with civilization is indeed expressed in the first third of the poem in which the poet notes his longing to get out of the city, at that time a provincial town with approximately only 8000 inhabitants, and although in the third and last part of the poem, the bride and groom act as shepherds, the middle part of the poem introduces

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something new that made it popular beyond the small community of Kristiania, throughout the double monarchy of Denmark and Norway and parts of Europe. Although the Norwegian landscape is depicted as an Arcadia within God’s established order, it is more importantly a place in which individuality could emerge and express itself in an artistic praise of God and nature. Tullin described the actual landscape that he had before his eyes, but it was a landscape still glazed with the topoi of the pastoral and at no point and in no detail standing out as anything but an ideal landscape. It was a geographical landscape that already fit the genre perfectly with its picturesque slope down toward the Oslo fjord. Fame and sentimentality call for ridicule, and ridicule came from another Norwegian writer based in Copenhagen, the satirist Johan Hermann Wessel. In the fragment “Vaaren” (1774; The Spring), Wessel takes a classicist stand against any espousing of the thinking of Tullin. Provoked by “evindelige Sange / om Maji-Dagens Lyst” [recurrent songs / about the bliss of the days in May], Wessel takes a stroll outside the embankments of Copenhagen to see for himself and is thoroughly disappointed. As he clears his eyes of the dust blown into them by the fierce wind, what does he see? “Og [jeg] saae den grønne Mark – den var – ja! Herre Gud! / Man veed hvordan en Mark, naar den er grøn, seer ud” (40) [and [I] saw the green field, it was, well! What can I say! / One knows what a field, when it is green, looks like]. The birds that Tullin, following the convention, praises in several stanzas for their sweet music, is artless noise to Wessel. Nature, according to Wessel, is incomplete and coarse without the civilizing interception of man and culture. Tullin’s poem itself gives proof that Wessel is right: it is a poem that civilizes an already cultured landscape using the codes of the pastoral – in a gesture familiar to the genre – undermining its own critique of civilization. But it is also a poem that insists on a meaningful encounter between subjectivity and locality as it superimposes the Norwegian landscape with the locus amoenus. One of the ways in which pastoral landscape can be transformed into a more dynamic and less distant encounter with place as lived space is by walking into it. Tullin does not. He is situated, as he is supposed to be, at the top of it admiring the scenery. Wessel goes for a walk, but he explicitly avoids any connection with the landscape. In Danish poet Ambrosias Stub’s “Den kiedsom Vinter gik sin gang” (1771; The Tedious Winter’s Gone Its Way), the poet not only walks into a landscape, but also undoes the pastoral scene as he passes thus making a sense of realism shine through. He also self-reflexively addresses himself as “you” and finally projects his own miserable being into the landscape and particularly into the passing of the seasons. As the poet leaves his dreary corner by the stove and the depressing winter behind, he enters a pastoral natural setting where the peasant is hard at work and even the shepherd seems to be at work actually tending sheep. The disgust with civilization is not present as it had been in Tullin and in the pastoral tradition in general, instead vernal nature is contrasted to the deadly winter, and the poet expresses a feeble hope that his life may have some analogy to the cycle of nature so that he, for the time being, will be beyond the grasp of death. The poem has movement, realism, lyrical inversion, and projection – a whole range of inventions through which subjectivity, landscape, and place can emerge. The poem testifies to the intimate relation between the discovery of place and the lyrical breakthrough at the time, between landscape and subjectivity. Stub and Tullin both mention the book of nature in the special subordinate form of the book of God, but their use of it differs from the way it is used in the psalm tradition. The psalm

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was a dominant form of verse in Norden during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and the topos of the book of God is crucial to psalm-mapping. In Hans Adolph Brorson’s still very popular pietistic psalm “Op, al den ting som gud har gjort” (1739; Arise, All Things that God Has Made), there is an extended circumspection of nature and a strictly symmetrical mirroring of the terrestrial world of the first half of the psalm in the celestial nature of the second half. The highly sensual and at the same time inverted religiosity of pietism had a huge impact on the development of feeling and subjectivity in the literature of this period leading up to romanticism. In Brorson’s praise of creation, however, the topos remains unchallenged. In Tullin’s poem the obligatory praise of God at one point borders on the sublime; at another it is interrupted by the duet of the shepherds that obtrusively contrasts with the relatively autonomous and artistically self-conscious praise of nature. Stub is more radical as he turns the transcendental axis of God and man on its side and transforms it into an axis of man and landscape. The most far-reaching and original development of the topos of the book of God in the period in Norden and the one with the biggest impact outside the region, is the Swede Emanuel Swedenborg’s mystical doctrine of correspondences presented in Regnum animale (1744; The Kingdom of the Soul). Topoi tend to recur in landscape description, and the most obvious genres in which this recurrence can be observed are the national landscapes of nineteenth century in both literature and painting. The merging of landscape poetry and nation is mapped in Louise Mønster’s essay. She follows Norwegian and Danish mountain poetry from the mid-eighteenth century into romanticism showing how landscape and self are dialectically constituted in the poems of this period and how both self and landscape participate in a movement of secularization. The mountainous landscapes of the self and emotion, of the sublime as well as the secular, are transformed into sources of national identity in poems of homesickness as well as in the national anthems celebrating the mountains of Norway or the low rolling hills of Denmark. Nineteenth century: The dissemination of landscape The genre of landscape poetry is a pivotal manifestation not only of the concept of landscape but also to the concept of place. It is however also relatively short lived. So where does landscape go when it leaves landscape poetry? It wanders off in many directions. Mønster demonstrates two of them in her essay: the national and the sublime landscape. The first has already been described as a recurrence of topos. The sublime landscape can be described as rendering the gentle slope of the locus amoenus too vertically. Mønster focuses on Danish and Norwegian poems, but the Swedish examples are poems like Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s “Första Sången” (1775; “First Song” [The Morning] from Dagens Stunder: Poeme i fyra sånger) and Thomas Thorild’s “Harmen” (c. 1787; The Wrath). Here the poet is facing a vertigo that brings him outside of himself and renders the landscape unreadable. It is an annulment of self as well as of landscape, a metaphysical leap and a collapse of language. Another dissemination of landscape goes in the opposite direction by making it too horizontal. This is the poetry of everyday life, as in the mock pastoral city life described in the songs and poems of the Swedish troubadour Carl Michael Bellman. He will be examined more closely in the node on cityscapes and therefore another example can be taken up here: the Danish

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poet Adam Oehlenschläger’s Sanct Hansaften-spil (1803; Midsummer Night’s Play). Here life at Dyrehavsbakken  – a popular amusement park just outside Copenhagen  – is portrayed in a series of tableaux all coming together like a mosaic of stories and destinies within a safely cultured nature. Instead of the condensation of the sublime, one finds a dialogism of discourses heading towards realism. As in the case of the too-vertical, the map-like overview of the pastoral landscape is destroyed, and the poet is by no means in the center of the poem. Instead individuality is immersed in the texture of history and everyday life, and place becomes a matter of social interaction. A fourth means of dissemination in the pastoral landscape has already been mentioned. It has to do with the movement of the point of view as seen in the wanderings of Stub and the more famous peregrinations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or William Wordsworth. Walking into landscapes is an important element in the turning away from topoi. Be it the romantic wanderer in the fields and forests or later in the century the urban flâneur, they both move inside the landscape or the cityscape thus corporally blending with it. This change in focus is closely connected to a fifth means of dissemination that is the landscape’s transformation into prose. The prose breakthrough in Nordic literature happened in Denmark and Sweden in the 1820s and ’30s. The history of prose before romanticism is one of argument and story more than a history of description, which is a somewhat disruptive element in both. The depiction of feelings occurs in prose as well as poetry throughout the eighteenth century, but the lyrical description of landscape is a poetic contamination of prose. The landscapes depicted in the prose writings of the time tend to be liminal rather than pastoral. In his contribution, Wolfgang Behschnitt demonstrates the force of the liminal spaces  – in his case of Jutland (Denmark’s west coast)  – on the literary imagination of Danish nineteenth and turn-of-the-century literature, in particular St. St. Blicher, Hans Christian Andersen, Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, and Henrik Pontoppidan. Along the same lines as Rosiek, Beschnitt argues that the liminal landscape may be an exhausted literary subject. He points, however, to the temporal and spatial reorganizations of globalization as a way of revealing new liminal space, by again revealing, for instance, the west coast of Jutland as a place on the margins, not of the national but of the global. Again the nineteenth-century project of nation building triggers the development of landscapes of passage and transformation. As is the case in the other essays, the chosen landscapes are exemplary of what can also be found in the other Nordic countries. Behschnitt points to the liminal space of the Swedish skerries and the Norwegian fjords. Late nineteenth to early twentieth century: Inhabiting the landscape Being a widespread and unevenly populated region without any metropolis, Norden was up until the 1960s largely dominated by farming and industry related to natural resources such as mining and forestry. So one of the places where landscape thrived is the non-urban novel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The first Finnish-language novel, Aleksis Kivi’s Seitsemän veljestä (1870; The Seven Brothers), is a Kollektiv- and Bildungsroman, a tale of civilizing that follows the life of seven brothers from their exclusion from a rural community

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in the south of Finland because of their maddening and wild behavior. Gradually as a result of their determination and hard work in the forest, their reentry into society is assured. The novel is written in a conscientiously naïve and episodic style mixing the burlesque criticism of self-delusion in Cervantes with the carnevalesque and dialogic. Songs, visions, dreams, folktales, and biblical stories are coupled with rural mockery, fights, courtship, attacking cattle, and devastating fires distributed among seven character types thus creating a rich combination of discursive practices and attitudes. As the brothers overcome innumerable lapses in making the transition from the life of the hunter to that of a civilized member of the agricultural community – including learning to read and the introduction to Christianity – nature takes shape and becomes landscape. In the beginning of the book, the surroundings are described as extremely local and nature as magical and contingent. There is an inside and an outside of society and culture, but no mapping of either. As the brothers start to cultivate the land, nature becomes cyclical and ordered, and the novel permits a still more precise orientation. The landscape is cultivated and organized as a civilized opening in the wild, and as houses are built and fields are laid out, a landscape emerges around the human activities creating a place. In the novel, the proper view of place is that of the landscape as seen in Chapter 12 from inside the house. It is reinforced by the secure knowledge of what lies beyond and completed by a view of the landscape in the beginning of Chapter 13 that connects the family home with the new home that the brothers had built for themselves during their ten years of exile. This connection of locations in the landscape is elaborated by the conception of Finland that comes into view late in the novel. This is a construction of place that combines the corporeal and imaginary experience of the house as the center of the world, as described by Gaston Bachelard, with the otherwise abstract notion of the nation establishing Finland as an imagined community for which landscape is the mediator. Seitsemän veljestä is not a realist novel, but its sense of place is based on an agrarian use of landscape and an imagination drawn from landscape that makes it into a lived space and a place within a nation. Given the consciously naïve tone, the critique of self-delusion, the dialogic structure of the novel, and the centrality of a never-quite tamed body and imagination, place in the novel is never absolutely stable. Even so, it is a civilizing of inner as well as outer nature, of wild boys and of wilderness. The one cannot work without the other, and along the way they threaten each other. In the end, some kind of truce seems to have been reached between the two, between a once unrestrained individuality encompassing seven individuals and something that ended up as a geographical as well as an aesthetic landscape. Seitsemän veljestä may demonstrate that before place can become landscape, there is a wilderness, an amorphous material of nature as well as an untamed human nature to be overcome, which never quite can be. Twentieth century: Beneath, above, and beyond landscape Once the romantic wanderer strayed into the cities and became a flâneur, once the pastoral landscape became a horizontal and social matter, once it became prose and liminal, once it was no longer the vehicle of nation building, once the houses and chimneys of the city spread in the

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landscape and covered the horizon, and once the subject was no longer in perceptible control of the world that surrounded it, landscape became less prominent in literature. As indicated by the view from inside the house in Seitsemän veljestä, there is yet another possible dissemination of landscape: i.e. as seen through the interiors that may be understood as an inversion of the exploration of subjectivity that started out with landscape poetry. Interior architectural subjectivity is, perhaps, the most renowned feature of Nordic literature found frequently in the attics and the living rooms of Henrik Ibsen and the kitchens or the taped windows of August Strindberg. The interiors of Ibsen and Strindberg may be regarded as a critique of the Biedermeier interiors of the mid-nineteenth century. The Biedermeier interiors were in part created in the prose writings of female writers such as Fredrika Bremer and Tomasine Gyllembourg and were developed and criticized by the next generation of female writers, among others Camilla Collett, Amalie Skram, and Victoria Benedictsson. In Benedictsson’s short story “Ur mörkret” (1888; From the Darkness), a woman speaks through the darkness of an interior testifying to stigmatization of her gender in what might be considered an ur-scene of what much later – in the films of Ingmar Bergman – became the very essence of Nordic culture. The relation between gender and power in Benedictsson became all the more intriguing as it appears that her friend Axel Lundegård, who published the short story shortly after her death, made major changes (Larsson 179–97). To begin with this inversion of landscape in built interiors takes place under the guise of realism or symbolism, and later as we enter the twentieth century expressionism and utopian imaginations take over. In the poems of Finno-Swedish Edith Södergran, consciousness often takes the shape of a utopian landscape as in the poem “Landet som icke är” [“The Land That Is Not”], the title poem of her collection published in 1925 or of a radically transformed landscape as in the poem “Jag” (“I”) from Dikter (1916; Poems). Jag är främmande i detta land, som ligger djupt under det tryckande havet, solen blickar in med ringlande strålar och luften flyter mellan mina händer. Man sade mig att jag var född i fångenskap – här år intet ansikte som vore mig bekant. Var jag en sten, den man kastat hit på bottnen? Var jag en frukt, som var för tung för sin gren? Här ligger jag på lur vid det susande trädets fot, hur skall jag komma upp för de hala stammarna? Däruppe mötas de raglande kronorna, där vill jag sitta och speja ut efter röken ur mitt hemlands skorstenar … (29) (I am a stranger in this land that lies deep under the pressing sea, the sun looks in with curling beams and the air floats between my hands. They told me that I was born in captivity – here is no face that is known to me. Am I a stone someone threw to the bottom?

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Am I a fruit that was too heavy for its branch? Here I lurk at the foot of the murmuring tree, how will I get up the slippery stems? Up there the tottering treetops meet, there I will sit and spy out the smoke from my homeland’s chimneys…) [57]

Indeed a strange pastoral. Identity and consciousness are spatialized as a landscape flooded by the sea. The gaze is directed upward from under water, not downward through the air. The merging of locality and subjectivity is transformed to expressive, visionary inversion. Alienation from self takes the form of alienated landscape; the dynamic and ungraspable character of consciousness calls for a similarly floating and amorphous landscape. This flooding of landscape by consciousness and metaphor is one side of the modernist development of landscape; the other extreme is the rising above the landscape. In Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906–07; The Wonderful Adventures of Nils), Selma Lagerlöf’s geography primer about the bewitched boy Nils Holgersson, who diminished in size flies on the back of a wild goose from Skåne in the south of Sweden to Lapland and back, one might get a new sense of how topography as mapping functions as a release from the anthropocentrism of the landscape regime. The scale, the uniform structure of representation, and the connecting of provinces by way of the route all turn the relatively large and heterogeneous kingdom of Sweden into a graspable unit. In order to represent the singularity of each region and at the same time make it comparable to others, it is turned into landscape (Bladh 245–46). Each province looks different when seen from above since the narration focuses on specific places that are characteristic of a particular province. In this manner, Sweden is turned into one nation of diversity. In a remarkable passage (Lagerlöf 258), Nils perceives the movement of the landscape beneath him as if he himself were standing still. It seems to him as if the landscapes of the north that are beneath him, are pushed to the south and in that way mixed with other Swedish landscapes otherwise totally foreign to it. This is a space of relativity, one that is not dependent on the positioning of man but dependent on complex relations of position and movement. And of scale. Things can become small in rising above them and large when landing among them. This is the double vision of the text, and it makes certain that the perspective of the map is balanced with that of lived space or place (Oscarson) with landscape as the middle term. Lagerlöf makes use of the imaginary potential of the map and points to the fact that a map is much more than a means of orientation and control. Like any modern technology, it is deceptive, its stability is provisional, its objectivity intentional, its completeness a hoax, but nonetheless it is a unique tool for interpretation. It opens a realm of the imaginary as subjectivity immerses itself in it, and underneath its pristine and conventional surface anxieties, silences, and myths appear (Cosgrove 2). It is this dive into the boundlessness of place and landscape that Nils Holgersson takes on behalf of generations of Swedish schoolchildren but never without surfacing again to the level of the map. Unlike the movement into the landscape, the movement in and out of the map indicates that the point of view of the subject is no longer privileged. This technologically instrumental release of the anthropomorphism of place – accompanied by landscapes scarred by mining industry – points to new and more technocentric constructions of landscape and place.

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In his contribution to the Landscapes node, Silvain Briens shows other aspects of the technocentric turn that we have seen in Lagerlöf and of the utopian landscape that was also a part of Södergran’s way of dealing with it. Briens writes about the utopias of Swedish modernism in his discussion of the zone in between geographical and imagined landscape. He then turns his attention to the subject of utopia starting with two classical Nordic utopias: the first by the seventeenth-century Swedish author Olof Rudbeck and then the eighteenth-century Norwegian/ Danish author Ludvig Holberg. From here he differentiates the modernist utopias (be they utopias or dystopias) of the Swedish writers Ludvig Nordström, Harry Martinsson, and Karin Boye – ranging from the 1920s to the ’50s. In these utopias modernity is characterized by global technologies, and the literary effort aims at a reinterpretation of man’s relation to space, or in the words of Briens, a deterritorialization. Non-Nordic landscape No landscape outside of Norden has triggered the literary imagination of Nordic writers as much as Italy. In this case as well, we discover that the grand period of landscape was the nineteenth century. As was the case of German, British, and other North European literary cultures, Italy and especially Rome became the place any artist had to visit. Colonies of artists gathered around particular spots in Rome, and they travelled the conventional routes to and from the capital in the footsteps of Goethe and Madame de Staël. Numerous Nordic artists visited there in the period between the beginning of Danish sculptor Berthel Thorvaldsen’s forty-year stay, which began in 1796, and Henrik Ibsen’s return to Norway after spending much of that period between 1864 and ’91 in Italy. Italy functioned as a counterimage in northern-European nation building, while at the same time as the ancient source of European identity and something wonderfully exotic. To some like Thorvaldsen it was the place to be if one wanted an international career; to others like Ibsen it was a refuge from home. In his essay, Arne Melberg goes further south and looks at literary Capri from the inside and the outside of Nordic literature. Capri is as a “south of the south,” a place of erotic and imaginary freedom beyond the actual south. Melberg begins with Hans Christian Andersen’s use of the Blue Grotto in his debut novel Improvisatoren (1835; The Improvisatore), moves to the sexual decadence of a French aristocrat with the Swedish name Jacques d’Adelswärd Fersen, from there to the Swedish doctor Axel Munthe who lived on, built on, and wrote about the island, and ends with a contemporary Italian view on Capri. In this manner the Landscape node closes with a comparative analysis of the Nordic gaze on its imagined opposite.

Point of contact The intricacies of Snæfellsjökull Ástráður Eysteinsson

Snæfellsjökull, a volcanic glacier on the Snæfell peninsula in western Iceland, holds a special place on a number of cultural levels. It is one of the most prominent landmarks in that part of Iceland, visible from various directions – weather permitting. And even when it is in fact shrouded by mist or clouds, as it frequently is, its presence is nevertheless encrypted in local knowledge – it is still there, imprinted on the brain, a place beyond sight, precisely because it is a sight to see. It is discussed and perennially rediscovered as such by many. It is arguably one of Iceland’s most precious landscapes, even though it may be hard both to determine the kind of value involved or in fact to pinpoint the limits of landscape in the case of geographic formations. In fact, the concept of landscape in English may not square precisely with the equivalent concepts used in other languages. The Icelandic term is landslag (literally: land shape), and Snæfellsjökull is not only felt to possess a magnificent shape in itself, but to be a decisively shaping force in the landslag of a larger geographic domain. There is, for instance, no doubt that the glacier is a very significant part of the landslag visible from, and therefore also characterizing, the capital of Reykjavík, situated more than a hundred kilometers away, across the bay of Faxaflói. One geographer has argued that given the historical sources and uses of the term, landslag is “the name given to an aesthetic relation between humans and the inanimate natural world” (Waage 47). The way many viewers relate to Snæfellsjökull could certainly be termed aesthetic. The glacier has long been a popular icon of visual culture, an object of countless paintings and photographs and thus captured by both amateurs and professionals. Many have commented on its formal beauty – the shape already mentioned – one that poets have sometimes sought to paint with words, for instance Hannes Sigfússon in his poem “Ljóðræna” (1991; Lyrical Sentiment), presumably written when he lived on the west coast of Iceland in the town of Akranes. One of its streets turns into a telescope for him: Fyrir enda götunnar minnar      blasir við jökull í hvítu gullinsniði Ég reika um í sjónauka      með lýsandi glerjum þegar rúður húsanna þyrpast      að þessari himnesku mynd (37) (At the end of my street      A glacier plainly visible In a white golden mean I wander around in a telescope      With glowing glasses doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.04fys © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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44 When the windowpanes flock      To this heavenly sight)

But the majesty of Snæfellsjökull has historically inspired awe – and the sublime in that sense – as much as a serene sense of beauty. It is now known that its height is 1446 meters, which means that Iceland’s highest mountain (also a glacier) is more than 600 meters taller. However, due to the scenic dominance of Snæfellsjökull and its reflection of light in a way that makes it seem to hover over land and sea in the surrounding region, it was historically – into the nineteenth century – thought to be the tallest mountain in Iceland. One of the drawings made by Auguste Mayer, a member of the great French expedition in Iceland led by Paul Gaimard in the summer of 1836, depicts Snæfellsjökull as seen from Reykjavík at midnight. The comment accompanying the drawing states that this is the “le plus haut glacier qui existe en Islande” [the highest Icelandic glacier], and that “le cratère de ce magnifique volcan affecte à son sommet la forme d’une selle” (7) [the crater at the top of this magnificent volcano has the shape of a saddle]. Foreign eyes confirmed the local or native stature of Snæfellsjökull, sometimes called the king of Icelandic mountains, whose peak no one dared climb until two Icelandic explorers did so in 1753 very much against the advice of local farmers. On a different but possibly related level, this glacier has also played a cultural role as a magnet that some believe is suffused with energy at a higher stage than places in general enjoy. It may be hard to distinguish between those who find that Snæfellsjökull has a unique ambiance, a special glow and aura, and those who experience it as place of healing as well as spiritual and bodily enrichment, due, some say, to the fact that it is one of a limited number of places in

Figure 4.  Auguste Mayer’s lithograph illustration of Snæfellsjökull seen from Reykjavík at midnight (1836)

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Figure 5.  Carl Emanuel Larsen’s 1845 illustration, a more romanticized depiction that expands the size of the glacier and emphasizes the height of the peaks.

the world where there is an especially high concentration of cosmic energy or energy that flows through or along the Earth by way of certain ley-lines. According to Guðrún Bergmann, such a ley-line, or ray, extending from the Great Pyramid in Giza, runs through Snæfellsjökull, “which is by many clairvoyant people considered to be one of the seven chakras of Iceland and also one of the great energy centers of Earth” (14–15). The ray first passes through a lava field south of the glacier, “between Hellnar and Arnarstapi where nature has formed a gigantic altar…. At such places people are able to change their perceptions, even their understanding of the world and their own experience with prayers and meditation” (16–17). Some take this mystique to yet another level and believe that because the glacier is an identifiable center of a force field, it is a place where alien beings will alight when they come to visit Earth.1 Last but not least, Snæfellsjökull is a literary place. Its cultural significance comes in no small part from the ways in which it has attracted the literary imagination to be recast or rewritten in narratives and poetry. Authors have always been busy creating places and carving out spaces and locations in language, and this creative procedure is just as true when they adapt (or adopt) and rewrite an existing place – be it a city, an island, or a mountain. There is no need to downplay the significance of places that are the original creations of writers, “places without 1.

There have been predictions of such events, and on November 5, 1993 a large crowd gathered at the edge of the glacier to welcome intergalactic travelers (who did not show up). See a report in the Icelandic newspaper Morgunblaðið, November 6, 1993. See also my article “Snæfellsjökull in the Distance.” This article overlaps with the present essay in certain places, but it contains little analysis of any single literary work. It does, on the other hand, involve an autobiographical dimension, which may support and augment some of my literary observations in the present essay.

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which the world would be so much poorer” (xi), as Alberto Manguel adduces in the foreword to The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. But while imaginary places may seem to be the product of an inner vision, sometimes of the fantastic kind, they spring from travels and travails in the actual world. On the other hand, actual sites in the world are also places of the imaginary. Sometimes they come into literary texts laden with historical or symbolic significance (or feed into visual material), but such levels of meaning are also lent to them as they are recreated and recontextualized. In fact, the process of reimagining and rewriting places often elevates the awareness of the “constructedness” of any place. As soon as people begin lending meaning to a place, it starts to change, to be aligned with a number of existential and historical forces in life. The domain of Bárður Snæfellsás Like many of the so-called Íslendingasögur (Sagas of Icelanders, sometimes called Family Sagas – a central genre of medieval Icelandic literature), Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss (Bard’s Saga) opens with genealogical and historical details about the family in its previous place of abode before the protagonist sails to Iceland. The chieftain Bárður and his people pass along the south coast of Iceland and approach the island from the west: “Þeir sjá þá fjall eitt mikit og lukt allt ofan með jöklum. Þat kölluðu þeir Snjófell, en nesit kölluðu þeir Snjófellsnes” (109) [“They saw a great mountain covered all over with glaciers. They called it Snaefell (literally: Snow Mountain), and the peninsula Snaefellsnes” (240)]. The glacier is thus the first place mentioned in the part of the country where Bárður founds a new community, a settlement marked out by various other place names that gradually pile up around the Snæfell glacier, whose position at the center of the narrative and its geographic imagery is strengthened as the narrative unfolds, not least because of the ways in which Bárður himself is associated with the glacier. One can even say that the glacier collects both the region on all sides and the narrative around itself in much the same way that Heidegger, in his well-known essay “Bauen Wohnen Denken,” sees a bridge crossing a river as a determining element for the surrounding area: “Die Brücke versammelt die Erde als Landschaft um den Strom” (emphasis added 152) [“The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream” (150)]. However, the glacier is not a stationary center point in the saga, any more than the eponymous chieftain, who is in close contact with the glacier to the point of becoming one with it. When references are made to Bárður (in both written and oral traditions), it is frequently said that he entered or disappeared into the glacier, which would be consistent with several other totemic references to individuals who are said to have “died into” Icelandic mountains, for instance Þórólfur Mostrarskegg in Eyrbyggja saga (which also takes place in Snæfellsnes, albeit more in its eastern region), who is said to have entered Helgafell (holy mountain) upon his death. The case of Bárður, as described in the saga, is in fact more complicated. Following a furious act of revenge that killed his brother’s two young sons after one of them had pushed his daughter Helga onto an ice floe that then carried her away from the shore, Bárður turns silent and nasty, declaring finally that he cannot deal with normal people:

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Eptir þetta hvarf Bárðr í burtu með allt búferli sitt, ok þykkir mönnum sem hann muni í jöklana horfit hafa ok byggt þar stóran helli, því at þat var meir ætt hans at vera í stórum hellum en húsum, því at hann fæddist upp með Dofra í Dofrafjöllum; var hann tröllum ok líkari at afli ok vexti en mennskum mönnum, ok var því lengt nafn hans ok kallaðr Bárðr Snjófellsáss, því at þeir trúðu á hann náliga þar um nesit ok höfðu hann fyrir heitguð sinn; varð hann ok mörgum in mesta bjargvættr. (119) (After that Bard disappeared with all of his possessions. It is thought by people that he vanished into the glaciers and lived there in a huge cavern. His family was more likely to live in large caves than in houses, as he had been raised by Dofri in the Dovrefjell. He was also more like trolls in strength and size than like human beings. For that reason his name was lengthened, and he was called Bard the As (guardian spirit) of Snæfell because they practically worshipped him on the peninsula and called upon him in times of difficulty. For many he also proved to be a source of real help in need.) [244]

Bard’s Saga is particularly rich in the portrayal of the folkloric and the fantastic, more so than most of the sagas of Icelanders (it thus crosses over into another saga genre, the Fornaldarsögur). It is a story lined with witchcraft, trolls, and giants, but it is also a narrative about mountains and glaciers, ranging from Norway to Iceland and Greenland in such a way that Snæfellsjökull stands at the center of a vast northern region. Interestingly, however, the landscape incorporated into the text also draws on the porous lava fields surrounding the glacier, originally stemming from the volcano they embrace. The first place mentioned once Bárður has moored his ship in Djúpalón on the Snæfell peninsula is a cave: “Þar gekk Bárðr á land ok hans menn; ok er þeir kómu í gjárskúta einn stóran, þá blótuðu þeir til heilla sér; þat heitir nú Tröllakirkja” (111) [“Bard went ashore with his men, and when they came to a huge cave formed of jutting rocks, they made sacrifices for their good fortune. That is now called Trollakirkja (Church of Trolls)” (241)]. This and other caves in the saga are connected in some sense with the cave of Dofri in Norway where Bárður was raised. The cave – as landscape, or hidden landscape – is the counterpoint to the glacier in the saga, and both can be read as indications of habitat and habitus. There is a cavernous, migratory element to the saga that is antithetical to the organized settlement and social engineering depicted in the main sagas of Icelanders. Bárður’s daughter, Helga, survives her adventure on the ice, which takes her to Greenland in the early stages of the Norse settlement there. She later goes to Norway and then back to Iceland, where she becomes a restless traveler, moving about covertly, “ … var hon alls staðar með dul, en optast fjarri mönnum; var hon ok nökkurum stundum hjá feðr sínum. (24) [“Everywhere she went she hid her identity and usually kept far from men. She also stayed with her father now and again” (246)]. Her father does some secretive traveling of his own in the saga although he mainly stays close to his cave and his glacier, in animistic or totemic contact with nature and creatures of nature outside the social realm, the not-too-human, to put a twist on Nietzsche’s term. Bárður is himself a hybrid creature, at once tröll (troll), risi (giant), and man, sometimes emerging in times of crisis to lend a helping hand. His role in the saga is radically ambivalent; he is a force threatening civilization, so he decides to take his leave of it, but like Snæfellsjökull, visible or not, he remains in close contact. He is a fierce natural force turned guardian spirit.

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In some ways he would seem to embody nature itself in all its violence and benevolence. It has been suggested that unlike some or most of the chieftains in the sagas, Bárður may not be a historical figure at all, but rather a figure created from oral tales of a local spirit. But if this is the origin of his saga, it is also how the saga has delivered him to posterity, for there is a rich folk tradition of tales and poetry about Bárður, extending from saga times to modernity. The reluctant settler has in his way settled or taken charge of Snæfellsjökull and the surrounding region, personifying it and playing the role of the genius loci, the spirit of the place. Yet, as an ás or god of snow-covered landscapes, 2 glaciers and mountains, volcanoes and lava, Bárður also represents in a broader way the forces of nature with which the Icelanders have had to contend through the centuries. This fact is duly acknowledged in the novella “Hrakningar” (Travails) by one of Iceland’s most prominent modern writers, Thor Vilhjálmsson. It is the first of three novellas or “reports” comprising the book Folda (1972), a female term for Iceland.3 Each of the novellas satirizes an Icelandic form of travelogue, but while the first is humorous and ironic, it also pays tribute to a tradition of Icelandic stories about travelers suffering hardship when seeking to cross mountains or other areas in the uninhabited wilderness. The small group of travelers in the novella walks through a mountainous landscape looking for a woman who has gone missing in the dead of winter. They are gradually encompassed by nature in snowy forms associated with female shapes that erase all clear signs of direction. Vilhjálmsson’s novella is very funny, yet its Rabelaisian qualities are strangely poetic. The reader is thrown headlong into nature perceived, as it were, with the whole body exactly when place has turned into placelessness. But then one discovers that the travelers are in fact in the region of Bárður Snæfellsás; they climb his mountains, enter his caves and tunnels, and witness a feast of trolls in the midst of this white world where all bearings are easily lost. One can assume that Bárður, in his benevolence, decided to guide them back to civilization, and on their way back they find the woman they were looking for. Snæfellsjökull from afar How the saga and legend of Bárður leads to the internationally best-known work connected with Snæfellsjökull is somewhat difficult to trace. Some of the Bárður legends probably found their way, in one form or another, into foreign literature, including French travel accounts of Iceland. Much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel literature about Iceland is, perhaps inevitably, characterized by a kind of orientalism (which in this case should perhaps be termed norientalism or “Thuleism”). The traveling writers often saw either what they were already programmed to see or its antithesis: on the one hand, landscape that was strikingly bare in its lack of vegetation and yet mysterious as well as awe-inspiring in its geological formations and variations; on the other, social conditions that were largely “primitive” and inhabitants who were poor and dirty, and yet supposedly carriers of a rich cultural legacy. Such texts no doubt played

2.

“Ás” (plural “Æsir”) is the term for the gods in the Old Norse mythology.

3.

The noun “fold“ means earth or land.

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a part in the writing of Jules Verne’s novel Voyage au centre de la terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth), which appeared in 1864. Verne’s work of fiction is a travelogue with what could be called a stereotypical journey from one of the centers of civilization to an exotic place in a more primitive location. Once Professor Lidenbrock and his cousin (the narrator) have arrived in Reykjavík via Copenhagen, the administrative center of the Danish colony, the pattern repeats itself with a trip to the center of the volcanic glacier of Snæfellsjökull, and then again, more radically, when the two foreigners and their Icelandic guide enter the crater and find the route to a world under the earth’s surface. From that point on, the novel turns into a work of fantasy, a tale of adventure in a primeval realm from which the three travelers manage to escape through another volcanic crater, i.e. Stromboli in Italy. Jules Verne probably read several accounts of Iceland while writing his novel. Each of his narratives, as Herbert Lottman points out, “took as its point of departure accounts of other people’s real-life adventures, news of recent technological developments, both of which called for more than a little familiarity with the books and journals containing these accounts” (95). He almost certainly knew the multi-volume publication that came out of the Gaimard expedition, including the drawing of Snæfellsjökull already mentioned. The historian Sumarliði Ísleifsson has argued that one of the drawings by Édouard Riou accompanying Verne’s original publication of the novel is clearly inspired by a picture in Charles Edmond’s Voyage dans les mers du Nord (1857; Voyages in the Northern Seas), while Verne and Riou may also have drawn on Uno von Troil’s book on Iceland (1777) written in Swedish but translated into several languages including French: Lettres sur l’Islande (1781). Iceland had been a popular theme in travelogues for several decades when Verne wrote his novel. Ísleifsson finds that the descriptions of Iceland in this novel, written by an author who never had traveled to Iceland, are on the whole quite tempered compared to what was being written about the country in foreign publications. He finds moreover that some travel accounts of sojourns in Iceland – including visual material – do display a good deal more fantasy than Verne’s novel. But while the truly fantastic in Voyage au centre de la terre resides under the Earth’s surface, it cannot ultimately be severed from the novel’s general imaginary incorporation of nature, primitiveness, and cultural legacy, all of which pertain to Iceland. The entrance to the Earth had already been discovered by the learned Icelander Arne Saknussem, a famous sixteenth century alchemist, and his encoded instructions concerning the entry point on Snæfellsjökull are found on a piece of parchment that drops out of a copy of Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, one of the key works of Icelandic medieval literature, which Professor Lidenbrock happens to be reading in the original Icelandic. Thus Verne has modern scientific inquiry and ancient lore coalesce in the most natural manner, given the expedient dislocation provided by Iceland. Verne’s novel was not brought out in Icelandic until eighty years after its initial publication in 1944, the year Iceland became an independent republic. The translation – somewhat abridged and almost certainly based on an English translation – is entitled Leyndardómar Snæfellsjökuls (The Mysteries of Snæfellsjökull), with the subtitle För í iður jarðar (Journey to the Bowels of the Earth). There are some interesting blurbs on the back cover of the translation. The reader is told that Verne’s descriptions are clearly inspired by travel books about Iceland and that the author obviously did not know this country himself. “Eins og við er að búast er þar margt missagt

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og furðusagnakennt, en þó gætir hvarvetna hinnar mestu vinsemdar í garð Íslendinga.” [As one would expect, much is here told incorrectly and in a fantastic way, although everywhere one senses a mostly friendly attitude toward Icelanders.] The anonymous commentator adds: Með vaxandi sjálfstæði og sjálfsvissu hefir Íslendingum lærzt að verða ekki uppnæmir fyrir misskilningi og missögnum um landið, og vekur slíkt nú oftar kímni en gremju, enda ætti það eigi að verða annað en hvöt til Íslendinga um að kynna land sitt sem bezt að góðu einu. (With growing independence and a stronger sense of self, Icelanders have learned not to be disturbed by misunderstandings and false accounts about the country, and such things are now more often met with humor rather than anger, and they should only urge Icelanders to promote their country as best they can, and only in positive ways.)

A heightened Icelandic sense of self (but also, perhaps, its insularity, if not its renewed sense of inferiority) could be seen in the renaming of the novel with a focus on Snæfellsjökull as a center. It is as if Iceland were laying claim to this narrative by asserting that the peripheral location chosen by Verne is a center; in effect lifting the original “centre de la terre” to the surface, where Snæfellsjökull turns out to loom center stage. The cover in fact also stages a kind of historical and geographical centering of the Icelandic locus through an interplay of globe, glacier, and prehistoric animals. The novel itself does to some extent legitimate this pictorial manipulation. The subterranean journey is a trip to prehistoric times, to a place that is both there (underground) and in the past – a kind of heart of darkness. And parts of this subterranean world, for instance the island with the geyser, may appear as versions of Iceland: – Une île! s’écrie mon oncle. – Une île! dis-je à mon tour en haussant les épaules. – Évidemment, répond le professeur en poussant un vaste éclat de rire. – Mais cette colonne d’eau! – ”Geyser,” fait Hans. – Eh! sans doute, geyser! riposte mon oncle, un geyser pareil à ceux de l’Islande! (240) (“An island!” cries my uncle. “An island?” I reply, raising my shoulders. “Of course!” exclaims my uncle, bursting into loud laughter. “But what about the water column?” “Geyser,” says Hans. “Yes, obviously, a geyser,” responds my uncle, “like those in Iceland.”) [162–63]

It should be noted that not only does Snæfellsjökull figure in the Icelandic title of Verne’s work, but that all the fantastic elements of the novel are in some sense subsumed under the mysteries of the glacier (leyndardómar, which also means secrets). They are thus annexed to the “poetics” of Snæfellsjökull as a mystical place, a place which holds more in store than can be seized in one glance, indeed a place that extends widely because of its cavernous location. A new Icelandic version of Verne’s novel appeared in 2013, translated from the French by Friðrik Rafnsson. The title this time is simply Ferðin að miðju jarðar (The Journey to the Center of the Earth). The translation includes images by Édouard Riou from the original French pub-

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Figure 6.  Book cover for Leyndardómar Snæfellsjökuls

lication, as well as a new preface by Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, former president of Iceland, that underlines the significance of this Franco-Icelandic literary connection. Although Verne’s novel has made countless foreign readers aware of and curious about this glacier, it has not significantly altered the allure of this place as much as it has underlined Icelandic notions of this landmark tract of nature. In many Icelandic tales and poems about Snæfellsjökull and the surrounding area, the glacier has continued to signify a mystical presence and otherworldliness, and – moving into modernity and a new emphasis on natural

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beauty – the “divinity” of the glacier is, if anything, enhanced. At least two writers have described how the glacier literally travels across the bay and steps ashore in Reykjavík. In Steinunn Sigurðardóttir’s poem, “Snæfellsjökull gengur á land” (1979; Snæfellsjökull Walks Ashore), the speaker notes that the glacier was so lit up one Friday evening in May that now it was finally bound “að ganga á land til mín í eitt skipti fyrir öll” (58) [to step ashore to me, once and for all]. And so it does, albeit in a dream. With regard to elevated landscape, there need not be much of a difference between the romantic, the erotic, and the religious. In Ísak Harðarson’s short story, “Snæfellsjökull í garðinum” (1989; Snæfellsjökull in the Garden), María wakes up on a Sunday morning and discovers that Snæfellsjökull is in her back yard. Her husband, Jósef, notices nothing and demands to sleep on, but María’s experience is clear: “Ég opnaði augun, og ljósið frá Snæfellsjökli í garðinum flæddi um sjáöldur mín, fossaði inní höfuð mitt, inní innsta kjarna minn, um vit mín öll og sál mína einsog geislandi straumkast.” (113) [I opened my eyes and the light from Snæfellsjökull in the garden flowed through my pupils, flooded into my head, into my innermost core, through all my senses and soul like a gleaming surge]. Snæfellsjökull as medium While Snæfellsjökull keeps coming to many who live or travel through the neighboring regions and while it functions as a most prominent although only intermittently visible lighthouse for the capital of Reykjavík, the best known modern text about Snæfellsjökull in Iceland tells the story of a man who travels from Reykjavík to a farm under the glacier, a little like Professor Lidenbrock did a hundred years before. His mission may seem quite different from that of the German explorer, but the young narrator in Halldór Laxness’s novel, Kristnihald undir Jökli (1968; Under the Glacier), also loses his bearings once he has entered the realm of the glacier. Local legends as well as Verne’s novel form part of the background for this novel, in which Iceland’s most prominent fiction writer gives rural experience a new literary and cultural meaning in an altered society. The rural community appears here not as the self-sufficient world of old, but as a kind of estranging mirror held up to the outside world. Laxness actually reverses the traditional pattern: his young and inexperienced observer-hero comes from the city and loses his innocence in the mists of the countryside. He is sent by the bishop to look into and report on the (allegedly neglected) maintenance of Christianity in a parish at the foot of (or as they say locally, under) the Snæfell glacier. We never learn the name of this young man who functions as a reporter in the novel; he is simply the designated “emissary of the Bishop,” or Embi for short (Umbi in Icelandic). He conducts interviews with the local pastor, Jón Prímus, but has a hard time figuring out the replies and statements made by this priest, who no longer appears to be performing his regular duties and has even nailed shut the door of the church. Jón Prímus spends much of his time shuttling back and forth in the region, repairing tools and machinery while his own affairs, including his marriage, seem to be in disarray. It turns out that his wife eloped on their wedding day thirty-five years ago, with his friend, Mundi (or Dr. Sýngmann), who was to become an entrepreneur on a global scale while Jón has remained

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in the vicinity of the glacier, with which he strongly identifies, throughout his life. When Embi inquires about the church, which has been nailed shut, Jón replies: “Jökullinn stendur opinn” (81) [“The glacier stands open” (59)]. In fact, the glacier seems to have merged with his life, as it did in the case of Bárður Snæfellsás. The young emissary’s journey takes him in more than one sense to the center of the earth but also to the edge of his rational mind, whether in coping with unusual forms of religion or with the mysteries of the “Ewig-Weibliche” [eternal feminine], which plays a significant role in many of Laxness’s novels. Here this element emerges strikingly in the character of Úa, the pastor’s wife, whose return coincides with Embi’s stay. He is swept off his feet in her presence. Her former companion, Dr. Sýngmann, also shows up to perform intergalactic experiments using the unique force of the glacier. He brings along three strange hippie-like characters, the first of whom claims to be “Saknússemm annar, gullgerðarmaðurinn frægi, sá einn sem þekkir leyndardóma Snæfellsjökuls – endurskapaður í Kaliforníu.” (146) [“Saknússemm the Second, the famous alchemist, the one and only person who knows the secrets of Snæfellsjökull – reincarnated in California” (107)]. It seems like this quiet pastor’s residence on an island coast in the North Atlantic is turning into a sort of global village. The narrator’s bewildered attempts to document events and phenomena result in a narrative that involves a multiplicity of genres making it one of the most innovative novels of Icelandic modernism. The text is a report, but it is also in part a strange drama, and the narrator fears it may also be a book of dreams. Laxness mixes his Taoism with a good deal of playful skepticism, if not anarchism, a narrative strategy that allows him formally to incorporate a wide-ranging assortment of ingredients such as folk tales and myths, ancient and modern, together with humorous but often deep inquiries into theology and philosophy as well as into the nature of language and the various master narratives it is used to build. The reader is led spectacularly along the edges of mimesis and illusion as the narrative is threaded time and again through the concepts of center, circumference, and periphery, as well as that of metamorphosis (verubrigði in Icelandic). Nothing is quite what it seems, and everything has the potential to turn into something else. The different inquiries pursued in the novel – inquiries into different kinds of ideology including occult notions of cosmic regeneration – are interlaced with the presence of the glacier: it has the capacity to reflect everything, but when it withdraws, it also has the power to change and engulf everything. The strength of the glacier stems in part, even in large measure, from its erratic visibility (the fact that one knows it is there but cannot be sure when it is going to be visible), and this begs the question of what its invisibility means. What is projected into the emptiness, the black hole, the center left for the reader to fill? The glacier thus becomes the medium through which “communion” or “contact” (samband in Icelandic, a keyword in the text) is achieved or not achieved in the novel. The presence and magnetism of the glacier is manifested in the way Embi gradually establishes “contact” with it. He never seems to have taken a focused look at Snæfellsjökull from Reykjavík: “Undirritaður hefur ekki áður séð jökulfell þetta nema úr oflángri fjarlægð en átti nú eftir að kynnast því um skeið.” (75) [“The undersigned has never before seen this mountain glacier except from too far away, but was now about to become acquainted with it for a while” (54)], although in fact “Í raun réttri er jökullinn of einföld sjón til að heyra undir það sem kallað

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er fallegt og einginn veit hvað þýðir og hver og einn á við eitthvað annað en hinir” (75) [“the glacier is too simple a sight to appertain to what is called beautiful, which no one knows the meaning of and by which everyone means something different from everyone else” (54)]. So how does one begin to see and grasp this glacier? Fjallið minnir á leirílát á hvolfi, ögn bláleitt á glerúnginn ef svo ber undir, en stundum einsog gullbrytt kínapostulín gagnsætt, einkum ef sól er hnigin til vesturs yfir hafinu, því þá leika geislarnir um breðann tveim megin frá. Héðan er jökullinn orðinn dálítið stórgerður í sér einsog prentmynd sem ekki er nógu góð, breðinn víða regnskitinn að neðanverður einsog það segir hérna, og hefur tekið í sig rákir einsog kámað prent. Líklega þyrfti helmíngur jökulfannar enn að bráðna áðuren hægt sé að tala um sumar í landi. Einhver segull sem ég er ekki reiðubúinn að skýra dregur auga manns að tindinum. Sýlt er í tindinn og gnæfa upp jökulþúfur tvær alhvítar sveipaðar dáleiðandi ljósi mjög köldu. (75–76) (The mountain reminds one of an upturned earthenware bowl, the glazing a little bluish at times, but sometimes like gold-rimmed transparent Chinese porcelain, especially if the sun is low in the west over the sea, because then the rays play on the glacier from two directions. From here the glacier looks somewhat coarse-grained like a print that isn’t good enough; the ice is rain-sullied in many places in the lower regions, and has developed streaks like a smudged print. Probably half the snowdrifts on the glacier have yet to melt before one can say that summer has arrived. Some magnetism that I cannot yet explain draws one’s eyes toward the summit. There is a hollow on the summit, and two brilliantly white glacial crests rear upwards, bathed in an icy mesmerizing light.) [54]

It is remarkable how Laxness makes his reader come to terms with this landscape first in sculptural or handicraft terms as a large bowl or a transparent porcelain, then as two-dimensional visual art as a print (although apparently not a successful one!) that then seems to metamorphose into writing (with smudged printing). It is hard not to become conscious of the fact that the glacier is indeed being mediated via written discourse (whose smudged printing the reader tries to translate into visual terms while reading) and that language plays a significant role in the ways in which landscape in general is grasped and understood – while one also sees it in shapes and mental images that connect with both two- and three-dimensional visual objects. Embi continues to make contact with the glacier. He looks at it while talking with Jón Prímus, so there is a kind of dual conversation taking place: Sól skín á jökulinn. Hann hefur enn fært sig nær. Hann var æsilegur í morgun um það bil hann var að rífa af sér þökutröfin. Um hádegisbil var hann kominn allnærri og þó vildi maður gjarna að hann kæmi nær. En þegar hann er kominn eins nærri og núna, þá er líkt og maður sjái altíeinu svitaholurnar á stúlku sem maður hefur elskað í fjarlægð. Mann lángar ekki framar upp. (96) (The sun shines on the glacier; it has once again moved closer. It was tantalising this morning as it was tearing off the last shreds of fog; by midday it had come quite close, and yet one wanted it to come even closer. But when it is as close as this, it is as if one suddenly sees the sweat-pores on a girl one has loved at a distance. One no longer wants to go nearer).4 [70]

4.

The final sentence translates literally as “One no longer wants to go up.”

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But later, on another occasion: “En næst þegar manni verður litið til, þá hefur líkaminn farið úr jöklinum og ekkert eftir nema sálin íklædd lofti” (193) [“But the next time one looks at it, the body has left the glacier, and nothing remains except the soul clad in air” (141)]. At certain times it is as if “fjallið taki ekki leingur þátt í sögu jarðfræðinnar, heldur sé orðið jónískt” (193) [“the mountain is no longer taking part in the history of geology but has become ionic” (141)]. And at night, “Að nóttu þegar sól er affjalla verður jökullinn að kyrlátri skuggamynd sem hvílir í sjálfri sér og andar á menn og skepnur orðinu aldrei sem eftilvill merkir einlægt. Kom dauðans blær.” (193) [“when the sun is off the mountains the glacier becomes a tranquil silhouette that rests in itself and breathes upon man and beast the word never, which perhaps means always. Come, waft of death” (141)]. Snæfellsjökull gives body to the imaginary world of the novel; it is the unquestioned center of the work’s setting, yet it is also a source of uncertainty and paradoxes and as such a white blank in the text’s structure of meaning. Through the roles of Snæfellsjökull in Kristnihald undir Jökli, Halldór Laxness sheds light on the myriad ways in which places can carry semantic and metaphoric weight – ambivalent though it may be – in any number of cultural constructs and social contexts, and on why and how a relevant place is an existential medium.

A guide to Gurre, temporary landscape Jan Rosiek

The place name Gurre refers to two different locations, both on the Danish island of Zealand. One is in the south, a small hunting seat called Lille Gurre, some miles north of Vordingborg; the other is situated in the north some ten miles southwest of Elsinore. It has been almost exclusively the latter, a royal castle surrounded by woods and lakes, that has caught the Danish literary imagination. Historically, King Valdemar Atterdag (who died there in 1375) is associated with the castle, which had its heyday between the 1360s and the 1470s. It was abandoned in 1535 as the financial benefits of the Øresund tolls made Kronborg in Elsinore the obvious choice for a royal castle in north Zealand. As the years went by, the area around the castle transformed into a small hill, which was then excavated from 1817 onwards following the 1807 commission to study ancient Danish history. These excavations have continued into the twenty-first century helped by the 1835 decision to preserve Gurre and its subsequent sale to the National Museum in 1949. The history of Gurre in modern times as well as in my narrative are well captured in Simon Schama’s methodological remarks in his book Landscape and Memory (1995), in which he writes of “an excavation below our conventional sight-level to recover the veins of myth and memory that lie beneath the surface” (14). It is sometimes unclear whether Gurre refers to the castle or to its surroundings (or to both). It is, however, linked inextricably to the legend of Valdemar and Tove, although some versions do without it. Several works situate the events primarily at the castle of Vordingborg, as is the case, for example, in B. S. Ingemann’s poem, “Paa Siølunds fagre Sletter” (1816; On the Pretty Plains of Zealand), and in his Scott-inspired historical novel, Prins Otto af Danmark og hans Samtid (1835; Prince Otto of Denmark and his Age) as well as in Ludvig Holstein’s symbolist, Maeterlinck-inspired drama, Tove (1898).1 In this essay, I shall deal only with works concerned with Gurre in north Zealand.2 In the nineteenth century, the Danes engaged in a romantic (re)construction of the Danish nation after the disasters of 1813 (state bankruptcy) and 1814 (the loss of Norway). History was mined in an effort to discover national places and symbols. As a king who tied the realm together in a period of many threats of invasion (as related in the historical novels of Ingemann), Valdemar Atterdag was a promising candidate as an icon of nation building. Yet at the same time, he was an unlikely role model due to the way his myth was coupled, unfairly, with marital infidelity and negligence of royal obligations. Legend had confused King Valdemar the Great and his pre-marital mistress Tove with Valdemar Atterdag, whose marriage with Queen Helvig 1.

See the excellent survey by W. Glyn Jones. Another brief survey, which covers all the important works until 1900, is Georg Brandes’s “Danmarks historiske Folkeviser” (on Valdemar and Tove 27–41). Neither survey shows any interest in the idea of landscape.

2.

In the period between the 1870s and the First World War, Gurre is used as the setting in a number of now forgotten works of little merit by authors such as C. Nordrup, Beatus Todt, Povl Hansen, and G. Dan. doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.05ros © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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was transformed into an unhappy marriage of political convenience in the process.3 As we shall see, writers often use the legend of Valdemar and Tove to articulate the great Wagnerian dichotomy of power and love, but I will discuss the political aspects only when landscape is involved. Landscape is an elusive concept that is used in a wide variety of discourses from geology to tourism. Basically it depends on a coupling of land (space and people) and scape (shaping, forming, unifying, even union). It is human intervention that makes it useful to distinguish landscape from the concept of (untouched) nature. Although landscape was not originally a visual concept, it is so in its most prominent modern uses, in which it can refer to both perceived real nature and pictorial representations. As Jacob Wamberg has shown in his magisterial Landscape as World Picture (2009), landscape emerges as a subject of painting after 1420. Through the intervention of Joachim Ritter, this visual emphasis has also dominated recent reflections in philosophy and aesthetics. His formula remains the most concise: “Landschaft ist Natur, die im Anblick für einen fühlenden und empfindenden Betrachter ästhetisch gegenwärtig ist” (18) [Landscape is the prospect (Anblick) of nature that is aesthetically present for a feeling and perceiving spectator]. Here landscape relies on a non-bodily yet spatially situated gaze of a more or less distant spectator. Ritter adds that views of nature are transformed into landscape “erst, wenn sich der Mensch ihnen ohne praktischen Zweck in ‘freier’ geniessender Anschauung zuwendet” (18) [only when a human being turns to them without pragmatic objectives in “free,” appreciative contemplation]. In Nature (1836), Ralph Waldo Emerson captures the gist of the matter in a memorable image: “you cannot freely admire a noble landscape, if laborers are digging in the field hard by” (42). To sum up the lesson of painting, landscape is a framed part of nature forming a panoramic and coherent whole viewed from a distance and apart from the context of natural resources or social practices. However, it is not possible to consider landscape merely as a matter of aesthetic contemplation. It is not by accident that landscape painting was born at the same time as the principle of perspective and that it has a similar objective of geometrical mastery of space. Recent writing on landscape has seen it as an ideological form in which subjective experience and pleasure mix with authority and possession as a way of seeing in which the male gaze masters a nature that is often feminized. What is interesting in landscape is, as W. J. T. Mitchell has remarked, “the way landscape circulates as a medium of exchange, a site of visual appropriation, a focus for the formation of identity” (2). He also presents the widest and wildest theory of landscape as ideology in his idea of landscape as “the ‘dreamwork’ of imperialism” (10). However, this idea of an inextricable link between landscape painting and imperialism is not tenable in a Danish context. The genre is at its zenith precisely in the period when the Danish empire was reduced through the losses of Norway in 1814 and the greater part of southern Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein in 1864. Yet if it did not contribute to empire building, Danish landscape painting did serve the cause of nation building.4 In the wake of the pioneering 1838 Charlottenborg exhibition, 3.

Taking a cue from the German Wedekind, Svend Grundtvig established the historical facts in his essay on the ballad about Valdemar and Tove, 20–53.

4.

As it did in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century and in England as early as the sixteenth century: “What was becoming make-believe through the use of scenic illusion was in large measure the imagined community of the modern nation-state” (Olwig 220).

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Johan Thomas Lundbye, P. C. Skovgaard, and other landscape painters played major roles in the formation of a Danish national identity. The history of Danish painting corroborates Kenneth Clark’s contention that landscape painting was “the chief artistic creation of the nineteenth century” (viii). In its classic guises, landscape disappeared from canonical art around 1900, perhaps not by accident, at exactly the same time that Gurre disappeared from canonical literature. When writing about landscape in literature, it is important to keep in mind that it manifests itself verbally rather than visually. Words cannot produce what paintings can: the typical panoramic views with many details. As Elizabeth Helsinger has remarked, much discussion assumes that “literary landscape … is primarily ekphrastic, whether of visual representations or of ‘the landscape itself ’” (qtd. in DeLue and Elkins 326). Landscapes in literature are often rhetorical and highly selective. Words may “evoke” perception, not directly but by representing the process of land-scaping: “it is less the place or space itself than the process through which it becomes meaningful, becomes, I would argue, landscape, that is the true subject of the poems” (328). In other words, rather than expecting broad vistas and detailed descriptions of natural phenomena, we shall look for ways of ascribing meaning to the various spaces in the works referring to Gurre. To gain further ground, it is useful to recall and expand Martin Lefebvre’s reflections on the varying meanings of territory, setting, and landscape (18ff and 53). The concept of “territory” highlights the practical relations between land and man, in which the latter views nature with an eye to pragmatic mastery and possession. Nature viewed as “setting” is a mere location, the space where plots and events unfold. Taking a cue from the history of painting, one may say that landscape proper begins to appear as it is emancipated from subservience to plot, from being a mere background for human figures and narratives. Wamberg calls this process in which landscape becomes an object of aesthetic contemplation “the autonomization of the concept of landscape” (140). Just as Gurre has attracted no descriptive poets creating anything remotely like autonomous landscapes, it has never appeared in literature as territory, as a wilderness to be mastered and civilized. It attracts literary attention only in so far as it can be connected to the Valdemar legend. Here it appears for the most part as a mere setting, but my focus will be on the moments when it becomes more than that, when space is transformed into significant place or landscape. Gurre appears in a double guise: as a cultural landscape, with the castle as center, and as untouched nature, if that is a fair description of a place used as a hunting estate. Although the legends make much of the havoc created by Valdemar and his ghostly train, the works associated with high culture only rarely touch on the agrarian life of the region’s inhabitants. Gurre, however, plays a role in the ideological constructions that landscape is prone to support. The literary versions of Gurre often deal with its significance, particularly in relation to the economy of human passion but also as revelations of national essence and of a secular paradise. At its most interesting, the poems and plays of Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Hans Christian Andersen, Carsten Hauch, J. P. Jacobsen, and Holger Drachmann succeed in transforming Gurre into a meaningful place, often in contrast to traditional bourgeois and Christian values. At the same time, one must admit that although Gurre had the potential, it failed to be a significant force in forging the identity of Danish people.

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Some elements of the legend are of particular significance. The central concern is often the issue of infidelity embodied in the rivalry between wife and mistress, namely Queen Helvig and Tove. Here the magic necklace or ring, most often given to Tove by her mother, is the charm that controls desire in a manner contrary to reason. It has also a power capable of overcoming the destructive power of time. Tove is killed by the Queen but as long as she wears the magic charm, King Valdemar refuses to bury her. However, a servant steals it and thus attracts the love of the King. He tries, successfully, to escape the King’s unwelcome attention by throwing the necklace into Gurre, which place-name etymologically means “bog,” “mess,” or “mire.” Whether magic or natural beauty is to blame, the King is inspired to his famous blasphemous outburst in which he gladly surrenders God’s paradise if he might only keep Gurre. Finding no peace in his grave, he is doomed to repeat his wild hunt in the haunts of Gurre until Judgment Day.5 The legend fits church ideology well in so far as it confirms that preferring this world to the other is punished by an afterlife bereft of peace. In so far as landscape, neglected until the eighteenth century, plays a role, it is inspired by the lakes and woods around the castle. In its strongest portrayals, the beauty of nature in Gurre depends upon its connection with the dead beloved in that it serves as a compensation for the loss of immediacy, love, and vitality. Before the variorum of tradition is taken up, a passage from Kr. Nyrop’s book on Toves Tryllering (1907; Tove’s Magic Ring) invites attention. Note that it was written precisely when Gurre had lost its power to inspire living art. Here the author mentions Gurre as “dette sted, hvor alle den nordsjællandske naturs ejendommeligheder mødes i et idyllisk hele af sjælden skønhed” (11) [this place where all the characteristics of north Zealand nature converge in an idyllic whole of rare beauty]. Nyrop also attempts to describe the particular mood of the landscape: “Der hviler et drag af tungsind og vemod over de hensmuldrende murrester” (12) [There is an air of melancholy and sadness about the smoldering remains of walls]. This somewhat contradictory foregrounding of a melancholy and sad idyll is an apt summary of the meaning of Gurre in the nineteenth century. As will be seen, Kierkegaard was the first to articulate this mood in his journal. The oldest written document concerning Gurre and King Valdemar is that of Christiern Nielsen Brun from 1586 (published 1878). The familiar plot is in place except that the magic necklace belongs to the unnamed and deceased queen. Arild Huitfeldt in Danmarks Riges Krønike (1595–1604; The Chronicle of the Realm of Denmark) presents the first account fusing Gurre’s Valdemar Atterdag with the story of Valdemar the Great and Tove, thus providing the basis for the ballads of the seventeenth century. But Gurre as well as any other signs of an awareness of landscape are almost totally absent from these two early narratives. Not until the version by Anne Krabbe is the ring thrown into the black earth, Gor, but she wastes no further words on the event (Nyrop 24). The ballads are primarily interested in the love triangle and in the glory of Tove’s clothes. 5.

Landscape, notably Ditmarsken (one of four Landschafts in Holsten), originally signified a democratic political system, sustained by yeomen: “Landscape as Landschaft was thus about the political belonging of the people of a place to the Landschaft and not to a distant sovereign” (Robin Kelsey paraphrasing Olwig in Delue & Elkins 205). One might regard Valdemar’s blasphemy as a displacement of this relation between people and King to that between royal man and Christian God.

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In C. F. Wadskiær’s Poëtisk Skue-Plads (1741; Poetic Stage), Valdemar’s sympathy is divided between Vordingborg and Gurre. Here a courtier steals the ring and throws it into “Moradsen Gurre” [the morass Gurre], after which the King’s love turns to the bog, “holdt sit Gurre for sit lille Himmerig” (Nyrop 27) [considering his Gurre his little Heaven], for which he would gladly renounce all claims to heaven. It is not clear whether Gurre refers to the castle or the bog. In either case, we are far from the beauties of landscape to which Wadskiær is in fact not entirely oblivious. But here they are located in Vordingborg and its surroundings, which are apostrophized as “du grønne May-Grævinde / som Skoven favner ret med Greene-Arme om” (Nyrop 26) [thou green countess of May / whom the forest embraces with branch arms]. The king is said to fall in love with “Egnens Engle-Lader / og ald den Yndighed det Sommer-Ansigt har” (Nyrop 26) [the angel-ways of the area / and all the graces of that summer face]. In the North, however, Gurre is just about to change its own face. The 1743 report of Rasmus Garboe to Erik Pontoppidan describes Gurre as a place in which “al naturens herlighed ligesom synes at være koncentreret, da af stædet sees intet andet allevegne … end vand, schov og marck” (cited in Etting, Hvass, and Andersen 200) [all the glory of nature seems to be gathered, since everywhere one sees nothing but water, woods, and field]. Here the inklings of a new sensibility emerge in which the absence of culture produces aesthetic pleasure in nature. Marck is not a tract of cultivated nature; only later in the century does its meaning change from free, open nature to a space of agricultural cultivation. However, Garboe is a lone forerunner. The great shift in the view of nature occurs with the advent of romanticism and in the case of Gurre with Christian Molbech’s report on his wanderings in 1810. He speaks of the woods of Gurre as being “den romantisk deilige Egn” (239) [the romantically wonderful area] and as having “et mere vildt og eensomt Præg” (238) [a more wild and lonely air] than the area around Lake Esrom. Without using the term, he also assumes the proper position of the spectator of landscape “på en Høi ved Søens Bredder, hvorfra man har en skiøn Udsigt over den hele Sø og en Deel af Skoven” (239) [on a hill on the edges of the lake, from which one has a beautiful view of the entire lake and a part of the woods], in fact where the castle is situated. The next writer who undertakes a sentimental journey to Gurre is Kierkegaard, who is, to my knowledge, the first actually to use the word “landscape” in describing the area. In an entry in his journal dated July 5, 1835 (published 1869), he notes the absence of culture and reads the landscape with a painterly gaze. Sensitive to its difference from other scapes (the sea, Søborg Castle), he searches for the best hour of day in which the quality of light allows forms to appear at their best and thus create det venlige Landskab [a friendly landscape], locus amoenus: “Omrids … hele vor Omgivelse [synes] at tilhviske os: Her er godt at være” (10) [“our entire surroundings seem to whisper to us, ‘It’s good to be here’” (6)]. Imagining the rushes as blonde maids who aande Bifald [breathe applause] and the sough of the trees as intimations of the wild hunt, he reads myth into the stille Veemod [calm sadness] of the landscape, which is compared to en Webersk Melodi [a melody by Weber] in contradistinction to et Mozarts Recitativ [a Mozart recitative] of the sea. The next entry of the journal ends on an interesting note. It concerns a more typical elevated Aussichtspunkt, Odin’s Hill in Hellebæk, from which one can gaze down at the sea. Here Kierkegaard feels disturbed by predecessors: “Den Udsigt er noksom anpriset og omtalt, hvorved desværre meget af Indtrykket forsvinder. At Folk dog ikke kunne blive kjede af at rende omkring saa geskjæftige for at paavise de romantiske Situationer”

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(11) [“This view has been more than sufficiently praised and discussed, whereby much of the impression regrettably vanishes. If only people could tire of running about so busily pointing out romantic settings” (6–7)]. One can only speculate whether the supreme ironist to come was aware that he was criticizing what his own text had just done. In any case, Kierkegaard’s point will be repeated in Jacobsen’s attack on “tourist poetry” that bars the self from its own authentic experience. It is perhaps not by accident that the two strongest writers to engage Gurre (not the strongest writers on Gurre) complain about the nuisance of preceding texts. Even in a peaceful excursion into landscape Kierkegaard’s agonistic will to priority will not lie still. Kierkegaard notes that excavations are in process. We have an extensive account of the first major excavations begun in 1835 and completed in 1839, which lay bare the remnants of the castle. A theology student, Kali Rasmussen, was asked by the board of the recently founded Den danske historiske Forening (The Danish Historical Union) to collect “af authentiske Kilder enhver paalidelig Efterretning” [all reliable information from authentic sources] and to disregard all “locale Folkesagn” [local folk legends] that are not “historisk beviislige” (467) [historically provable]. This change did not, however, deter the literary imagination that looked instead to I. M. Thiele, who codified the legend for the romantic age in his huge collection of folk legends (1818–23). The canonical authors of the nineteenth century all relied on Thiele’s version in which the King’s love for Gurre is based solely on the magic ring alone, not on the natural beauty of landscape. In these high-art versions, it is remarkable to see the degree to which they are marked by the subject rather than the object, bearing witness to the characteristic gestures and themes of the individual authors rather than to the inducements of the landscape of Gurre. Adam Oehlenschläger’s poem “Valdemar Atterdags Grav” (The Grave of Valdemar Atterdag) in Fyensreisen (1835; The Voyage to Funen) is the first fictional account integrating Gurre into a larger whole comprising love, landscape, and politics. The green woods of Gurre constitute an alternative to war and politics, not as a place of natural beauty, but as a hunting ground preceding eroticism. After Tove’s death, she is portrayed in a traditional heaven from which she sometimes descends to visit the King. She haunts “beautiful Gurre” as a spirit, in effect as memory traces of their common ecstasy under the beeches. Her ring is thrown into the bog as a token of her annual return synchronized with spring and its fresh forest flowers. Here the poetological sources of the poet emerge as Tove turns into the inspiring spirit of nature. The voice of the nightingale is her voice, the yellow grain her hair, the forget-me-not her eyes, and the rose her cheek. Climaxing in the apostrophe to the absent beloved: “Min elskte Toveliden!” (210) [My beloved little Tove!]. This fusion of nature and woman moving from simile to identity reiterates the central drama in “Simon Peder” from Jesu Christi gientagne Liv i den aarlige Natur (1805; The Repeated Life of Jesus Christ Yearly in Nature), in which Jesus melts into nature. In both cases, the fusion is a metaphysical token of the poet’s continued productivity. Oehlenschläger’s poem presents a general rather than a spatially specific poetics, but it no doubt helped make Gurre a privileged place in the romantic cult of nature and history. Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s romantic comedy, Syvsoverdag (Seven Sleepers’ Day) was premiered at a festival performance in 1840 celebrating the coronation of Christian VIII the year before. It is modeled on A Midsummer Night’s Dream in its grafting of a legendary dimension – the world of Valdemar – onto the bourgeois world of 1840. The play features a circle of merry Philistines from Copenhagen – including the two wards Anna and Balthasar – visiting the royal

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castle at Fredensborg. Valdemar’s world, including a number of spirits of nature, is conjured up by the guiding spirit and producer of the play, Phantasus. Among the legendary figures is the King’s poet, Thorstein, who is also a figure in the 1840s. The Philistines do not possess the aesthetic gaze that can transform nature into a landscape. For them, traversing Gurre on a nocturnal outing offers nothing but a scary and alien nature playing “hæslige Kunster” (Heiberg 316) [ugly tricks]. It produces not aesthetic pleasure but rather complaints about what they lose while there: their health and various pieces of clothing. However, for Phantasus and Thorstein, Gurre is the place of poetry. Phantasus calls it “det bedste Strøg i Danmarks rige Have” [the best part of Denmark’s rich garden], indeed proposing to name it “hiint Paradiis i Danmark” (200) [that paradise in Denmark]. It is not that the Philistines are blind to the pleasures of nature. As long as they are at the castle, they can look back at Copenhagen and civilization as a prison and appreciate Fredensborg as “den grønne Skov-Natur” (202) [green forest nature] that provides a harbor for the yearnings of the heart. Nature, in a dialectical relationship with man, is a vitalizing force, and the basis of social pleasures, of Wein, Weib und Gesang, rather than nature as a spiritual domain as envisioned, for example, in Oehlenschläger’s poems about Valdemar. Thorstein, who hopes to win Anna, plans to spend the night in Gurre seeking inspiration from nature (and from Valdemar, whom legend portrays as particularly active on the night following Seven Sleepers’ Day). In fact, Thorstein has already written his Valdemar song, inspired by his love of Anna, who sings it twice (Heiberg 228, 272). Heiberg’s distance from high romanticism – to which Oehlenschläger made a late poetological return in his 1835 poem – shows in his sad recognition that nature, despite its roses, stars, and dew, is incapable of aiding the king in overcoming the separation from Tove. Yet Gurre is presented as the refuge of the wards who seek to evade the marriage criteria (social standing, money) of their wardens. However, the encounter with the ruins of the real Gurre fails to live up to poetic expectations and leaves only disappointment and depression. The sublimity of Lake Gurre is unfavorably contrasted with the beauty of Lake Esrom, a reversal of Molbech’s preferences. As Balthasar and Anna fall asleep, it is time for literature to wield its magic. Phantasus evokes the past as present reality. What Thorstein’s song rejects as a possibility in 1840 becomes entirely possible in the realm of literature and legend. The King’s loss is ennobled and transformed into pleasure through song; in other “Hegelian” words, poetry delivers what nature cannot, the redemption of loss through sublation. Yet nature also becomes a charmed location full of protective spirits due to the ring in the lake. This magic ambience finally leads to the resolution of the conflicts of the comedy, the King’s problems with his senior advisor and his wife. Their complete reconciliation, political and marital alike, is prepared by the King’s susceptibility to the magic of place in the nocturnal hunt. His hymnic response at dawn looks back on the most beautiful night ever and exalts Lake Gurre as the brightest mirror of the brightest heaven. He proceeds to celebrate the spirits of nature who have united to transform his Gurre into “et Paradiis paa Jorden” (Heiberg 306) [a paradise on earth], as always, one that inspires him to leave the traditional paradise to God. The magic of place now recreates the harmony of marriage and state affairs. Phantasus recovers the ring from the lake and places it on Thorstein’s finger as he returns to the world of 1840; thus natural magic is transposed into the true dreams of literature, another sublation in the Hegelian spirit. In the 1840 world, too, conflicts are laid

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Figure 7.  Drawing by Christian Beyer, presumably from around 1870, imagining H.C. Andersen in the Gurre landscape. Image from C.M. Smidt, Gurre. (København: Gyldendal, 1948), 2.

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aside as Anna gets her poet, Balthasar the inheritance denied to him by his ward. Heiberg’s lesson is that nature may reconcile the divisions of civilization, by the magic of natural beauty preparing the ground for social harmony helped by the powers of poetry. Andersen’s text, “Gurre: Aftenlandskab” (Evening Landscape), was first performed at a charity event staged at the Royal Theater in 1842 (Andersen 44–46).6 It is a brief scene: two choruses serving as a prelude to a romance in three stanzas with music composed by Henrik Rung. Set in the surroundings of Lake Gurre on a beautiful autumn evening, it begins with a chorus of peasants and farmers who mention hearing young men’s beautiful singing coming from the lake. They presumably belong to the young people from town, who go ashore and sing the chorus: “Jeg troer der er skjønnest i Danmark” (44) [I believe it is most beautiful in Denmark]! An echo from across the lake repeats the last four words, confirming that Denmark is indeed the most beautiful spot on earth. The romance dealing with Valdemar and Tove is unashamedly selective, a lyric emphasizing all idyllic features of the landscape while omitting all elements of conflict except the King’s preference of Gurre to God’s heaven. There is no trace of the dynastic and political complexities, of the strained relation between King and Queen, of Tove’s extra-marital status and her eventual death, nor of any problems the farmers might have with Valdemar’s entourage as living hunters or deceased revenants. The historical castle is mentioned, but Andersen concentrates on unfolding the genius loci of Gurre. One must acknowledge that the farmers, absent in all other versions, are present but, significantly, “i det friske Hø” (44) [in the fresh hay], during the evening after work. The Danish national landscape (shores, beeches, the calm lake, the summer’s day), known from Andersen’s “I Danmark er jeg født” (165; In Denmark am I Born), is compared to Egypt, whence two migratory birds recall it as a place of love “ … den dejlige Ø, / Hvor de vilde Skovduer kurre, / De duftende Bøge, den stille Sø” (44) [ … the lovely island / Where the wild wood pidgeons coo / The fragrant beeches, the calm lake]. At the end of the first stanza, the swallow quotes a Danish farmer singing the praises of Denmark already heard in the chorus of the townspeople, which becomes the chorus of both the romance and echo from across the lake. The same occurs in the last two stanzas, where the lyrical self joins in. Erotic loss is taken up in the spirit of Oehlenschläger’s high romantic animation of nature: “Naturen blev her til hende” [Nature here became her] (Andersen 45). Andersen attenuates the blasphemous dimension by letting God’s nature be the hyperbolical eulogist of Tovelille in Gurre. The third stanza presents an idyllic hunt, on a summer’s day with the woods in their magnificent glory (with no hint of ghosts or wild chases). The King’s traditional blasphemous outcry is not inspired by his memories of Tove but by the pleasures of this hunt linked to and protected by heaven and the stars shining on high. The last four lines modulate into a minor key evoking the enchanted night’s starry calm in which the thrush retells the legend of Tovelille. This idyllic substitute for the traditional wild hunt works with all the other elements in the affirmation by the final repetition of the chorus. By the end of the romance the King, the city, the country, and nature itself are united with the poet in extolling the superior beauty of Gurre 6.

The song is heard to best advantage in Aksel Schiøtz’s tenor version, which leaves out the initial choruses and the middle stanza of the romance but retains the final chorus and its echo.

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and Denmark. It must certainly have pleased the audience of Copenhagen’s socially high and mighty at the charity gala in 1842 to feel a part of this flawless national totality. Compared to Andersen’s effulgent presentation of the landscape, Gurre in Christian Winther’s poem, “Kong Wolmer paa Reisen” (1851; King Wolmer En Route), is of minimal significance. Its landscape is dynamic as the king rides towards Gurre, but the nest of the dove with the “divinely blessed arms” of Tove could be anywhere. Gurre is more important in Carsten Hauch’s romance cycle, Valdemar Atterdag: Et romantisk Digt (1861; Valdemar Atterdag: A Romantic Poem), one of the great works of Danish romanticism, which has enjoyed less than its proper due perhaps because of its incongruence with traditional schemes of literary history. It was published in the same year as the second edition of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal, which includes the famous Parisian cityscapes of “Tableaux parisiens.” The death obsessed “Valdemars anden Sang” (Hauch 176ff; Valdemar’s Second Song) has a melancholy as deep as Baudelaire’s, but it is expressed in the topoi of romantic medievalism rather than in striking metropolitan images, hence without a claim to future recognition, though not without a moving tone, which makes it a perfect embodiment of the knell of romanticism. Most of the action takes place in Vordingborg, and Gurre turns up only after Tove’s death as the place of privileged memories. One of his men tries to comfort Valdemar by referring to the possibility of celestial reunion with Tove, but the King is a staunch secularist: “I den jordiske Sommer min Lykke jeg fandt, / Alt Andet mig synes kun Daarskab og Tant” (Hauch 176) [In earthly summer I found my happiness / Everything else seems but folly and vanity]. Even on his deathbed, the king defiantly refuses to forgive his queen, regardless of the impending eternal damnation. He wishes only to relive the joy of earthly summer with Tove on the shores of Lake Gurre, where he dreamed “sin fagreste Drøm” (180) [his fairest dream]. Hauch provides the strongest and most beautiful version of the blasphemy topos in his evocation of a very attractive earthly paradise. In Gurre, Hauch has succeeded in finding, as Wallace Stevens would put it, what will suffice. In these years, tourism began to take a hold on Gurre, leaving little room for Hauch’s anti-Christian attitudes. Having visited Gurre the year before, J. P. Jacobsen in 1869 wrote an introduction to Gurresange, which he later discarded. Here he complained about the “Duft af Touristlyrik” (307) [odor of tourist poetry] in the well-known songs, the emotions encoded in written tradition, the programmed enthusiasm, which he wanted to put aside to satisfy his modern ambition to perceive the world anew. Jacobsen may have read Frederik AlgreenUssing’s tourist guide, Touristen i Nordsjælland (1865; The Tourist in North Zealand). This particular tourist has difficulties getting into the right mood as he stumbles through the woods to the ruins of the castle, which are located “ikke, som man skulde troe, paa en yndig Plet” (78) [not, as one would expect, in a lovely spot] but “paa en Hede” [on the moors]. He is disturbed by the blacksmith working noisily at the castle, so he advises the prospective tourist to bring his Heiberg and take it to the lake in order to enjoy “den dobbelte Nydelse; Naturens Ynde og de uendelig fredelige Omgivelser tillade her en ganske anden æsthetisk Nydelse” (79) [a double pleasure; the grace of nature and the infinitely peaceful surroundings here allow a quite different aesthetic pleasure]. This confirms Ritter’s theory of the aesthetic gaze at landscape as dependent upon a distance from work. Algreen-Ussing has no problem with the prior texts, claiming that he always hears a verse from Andersen’s song, “Husker Du Gurre?” [Do you Remember

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Gurre?], in “Svalernes Kvivit” (79) [the cheep-cheep of the swallows]. His sensory perceptions are happily drowned in recollections of poetic lines, a condition Kierkegaard had foreseen (and disliked intensely). Avid to avoid this belatedness and to make his own original impression on the landscape, Jacobsen in the years between 1867 and 1870 wrote Gurresange (Gurre Songs). His is internationally the most famous version of the legend of Valdemar and Tove, not because of its own merit, but because Schönberg used the poems in a German translation by R. E. Arnold for a cantata for orchestra, choruses, and soloists composed between 1900 and 1911 and premiered in 1913. Although nature is close to Jacobsen’s heart (and eyes), the particulars of Gurre do not stand out, since he concentrates on probing the psychological depths of the love affair. In fact the two first songs of Valdemar and Tove make nature disappear and replace it with selfreflexive interiority (Valdemar) or humble devotion (Tove). Valdemar celebrates the landscape of Gurre in a rhetorically complex version of the blasphemy topos and makes it clear that there is no hereafter. However, as he expresses his later complaint-cum-prayer to God (VII), Gurre is not even mentioned. Yet at one particular point, he resurrects romantic animation in the long multi-text section VIII. Valdemar’s first song imagines Tove bound to the glories of nature, and landscape is feminized in the classic fashion, but as a work of mourning, not as imperial conquest: “Sandserne jage for hende at fatte, / Tankerne kjempe for hende at samle” (71) [The senses hurry to grasp her / Thoughts struggle to assemble her]. Animated female nature is just out of reach, a historically adequate response in the late 1860s, as the spirit of the times prepares for Georg Brandes’s Modern Breakthrough. In fact Jacobsen allows nature itself to speak without human intervention in the end. The final song (IX), “The Wild Hunt of the Summer Wind,” enacts the resurrection of nature at dawn. However, Gurre is not mentioned in the text, which is formed as a historically obsolete folk ballad, including naïve personifications in the spirit of Mahler. The future of Gurre was already in peril, but it was to have one final glorious embodiment. Drachmann wrote a drama, Gurre, published in 1898 and performed at the Royal Theater in 1901 with incidental music by C. F. E. Horneman. The legend had a certain autobiographical resonance in that it lent itself to mythologizing his own failed relationship to his great muse, the cabaret singer, Edith, whom he blamed society for losing. Exploring places and moods he had already used for a poem called “Sommer i Gurre” (1879; Summer in Gurre), Drachmann begins the play with a metapoetic poem, “Aften-Landskab” (Evening Landscape), commenting on “Kvadet … om Gurre og Tovelille” (7) [The Lay of Gurre and Tovelille]. In this most evocative of meditations on Gurre in the midsummer night, Drachmann adopts Heiberg’s and Andersen’s hyperboles, celebrating “den fagreste Sø udi Nordsjællands Egn” (7) [the most beautiful lake in the realm of North Zealand]. In the final stanza he raises the stakes of this supreme among Danish legends by claiming that “der findes ej Sø paa den ganske Jord, / hvori saa usigelig Vemod gror / med Vandliljen op fra de døde” (7) [There is no lake on the wide earth, / Where so unspeakable sadness grows / With the water lily up from the dead]. Later, the poet in the play claims that the south may arouse man’s desire but Lake Gurre may provide “Lægedom for hans Vunder” [A cure for his wounds], in the quintessential symbolist trope of a tree’s “drømmende Billed / i den gudvelsignede Sø” [oneiric image / in the divinely blessed lake] (15–16).

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Gurre provides the setting for the central midsummer night’s nuptials of the King and Tove, presided over by landscape, not by a priest. In their lyrical dialogue Drachmann stresses her affinity to nature as a living woman, a motif legend and previous literature had only uncovered after her death. In Gurre, Tove speaks like “selve de Skove” (33) [the very woods] her King and master loves. Valdemar here encounters the essence of nature embodied in a female willing to sacrifice herself for his immortality. Drachmann’s secular gospel is not as bold as Hauch’s and Jacobsen’s full acquiescence to mortality; in fact he proposes the summer night at Gurre, and especially the innocence of Tove, as a promise of immortality that Valdemar perhaps only pretends to believe in. The sacred stamp of the erotic tryst in nature is unmistakable as the King raves against the anti-sexual dogma of the church and speaks of “Paradisets Port” (34) [the gate of paradise] opening. He reveals his idealization of woman in his kneeling in the summer midnight hour before Tove, this white hind who has chained him to the dear, well-known places. Nature favors this love, and as Tove yields, the King concludes: “Du er mit Gurre  – her er Himmerige” (35) [You are my Gurre – here is paradise!], no doubt the most daring religious celebration of the fusion of place and eroticism in the tradition. Tove is the mediator, the Christ figure, who makes paradise available and accessible, a function that Drachmann lets Valdemar recognize only after her death by means of strong seasonal images that recall and celebrate her gift for transforming the winter of the world into the flowery summer of Gurre. The place signifies a rise above nature in true symbolist fashion. Yet now the glowing summer is lost forever. Drachmann closes the door on the inspiration of Gurre in high art in his concluding scene, a fact which makes it even more poignant. After many years have passed, the King finds himself again in the charmed place of the summer night’s nuptials. More than half in love with death, the King hears music from the lake and imagines Tove calling him. Her voice presents herself as what he later terms his “Fylgje,” (86) the Nordic version of protecting and guiding genius. Once again, human love is presented as the single phenomenon that can overcome transience: “den, som har elsket her i disse Skove, / er evig … som Fuglen, der i tusind Aar / sang samme blide Sang for Søens Vove!” (83) [he who has loved in these woods / is eternal … like the bird, who for a thousand years / sang the same soft song for the lake waves]. Human love is the generator of immortality, helped by poetry that appears in the concluding metaphor of the bird, on the back of a vitalist celebration of time the nourisher and time the destroyer. Valdemar has only one wish, i.e. turning to the woods and asking them to show him his beloved Tove “saadan som her vi taled sammen sidst” (85) [the way we last spoke together here!]. Tove now appears in person coming like another Valkyrie to accompany Valdemar to paradise. Whereas she envisages it in biblical terms, as a place “hvor Evigheds Kilden udvælder!” (86) [where the source of eternity springs], he understands it in secular terms, as eternal wandering on earth. Drachmann’s intellectual confusion, his sometimes overblown rhetoric, his reluctance or inability to decide on the precise status of his paradise, should not deter readers from seeking out the many moments of pure song in his works, including this sometime wordy but nonetheless worthy drama. The architect-archeologist C. M. Smidt published some eight versions of Gurre between 1933 and 1966 as issues of the annual reports from work done by the Danish National Museum. One suspects he is endeavoring to get renewed financing for his excavations when he claims that “faa af vore historiske Bygninger … staar tydeligere i Folkets Bevidsthed end denne beskedne Ruin, og det er neppe muligt i Danmark at finde et Sted, der … er mere uløselig knyttet til en

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kendt historisk Personlighed, end Gurre til Valdemar Atterdag” (Smidt 5) [few of our historical buildings are more vivid in the popular imagination than this modest ruin, and it is hardly possible to find a place in Denmark that is more inextricably linked to a known historical person, than Gurre is to Valdemar Atterdag]. Historians have proved the legend unfounded, but Smidt sees thousands of people visiting Gurre, and every year hears Andersen’s song sung among the ruins. His claims do not get much support from a sample of topographical poems. Chr. Richardt’s Vort Land (1889; Our Country) includes a few verses on Gurre, but neither Valdemar Rørdam’s Sangen om Danmark (1923; The Song of Denmark) nor Kaj Munk’s Danmark, lidt om Folk og Fædreland fortalt de kæreste af mine Landsmænd Børnene (1946; Denmark, of Folk and Fatherland Told to the Dearest of My Fellow Countrymen, the Children) mentions Gurre at all. Recollections of two representative literary figures, the publisher Godfred Hartmann and the poet Frank Jæger, mention Gurre only to disparage its legendary meaning (Hartmann 148; Jæger 243). An option available to twentieth-century writers is to bring the high pathos of Gurre down to earth, which is what P. Sørensen-Fugholm does in “Mit Gurre” (My Gurre) and Halfdan Rasmussen in “Noget om kongelig elskov” (1953; Of Royal Love). It is no coincidence that Gurre gets no mention at all in Inge Adriansen’s recent comprehensive history of national symbols in Denmark 1830–2000 (2003). Here Jelling and Lejre are singled out as the major symbols of historically founded national unity.

Figure 8.  Contemporary view of the modest ruins remaining at Gurre: the demise of a literary place? Photo: Steffen Hoejager/Shutterstock

Moving ever further from its major literary manifestations, what is the literary status of Gurre? Not surprisingly, the library in Elsinore still makes numerous works treating the legend available, but elsewhere it gets little if any attention. The 2003 folder from the government agency for forest and nature (Skov- og Naturstyrelsen) focuses on history and archeology and mentions the

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legends but leaves out the literary accounts, as does the Elsinore Encyclopedia. King Valdemar has a cadre of friends, who in various events try to keep the medieval spirit alive with costumes and customs, but their website does not mention Tove. In a move that seems finally to bury the hopes of the nineteenth century, the place Heiberg, Andersen, and Drachmann regarded as the most beautiful spot in Denmark – even the world – is now sold as Swedish: “I Nordsjælland ligger en sø, der leder tankerne hen på Sverige på den anden side af Øresund” (Heisz) [In north Zealand there is a lake that makes one think of Sweden on the other side of Øresund]. In a catalogue for a 2008 exhibition of ruins, Birgitte von Folsach grants that Gurre is still “et yndet udflugtsmål” (49) [a favored place for an outing], but one must bring the romanticism oneself. She seems to disagree with the glowing tribute ascribed to “turistbranchen” [the tourist industry], praising Gurre as “en ren perle, der ånder fred, idyl og romantik” (49) [a pure gem exuding peace, idyll, and romanticism]. The author of these lines sides with Folsach. As far as Gurre is concerned, one can confirm Mitchell’s assumption that landscape is now “an ‘exhausted’ medium, at least for the purposes of serious art or self-critical representation” (3), that indeed Gurre has been exhausted since 1900. Anne Whiston Spirn presents a concise summary of the potential of landscape as a category of cultural history: “Through [landscape], humans share experience with future generations, just as ancestors inscribed their values and beliefs in the landscapes they left as a legacy, a rich lode of literature: natural and cultural histories, landscapes of purpose, poetry, power, and prayer” (DeLue and Elkins 150). Gurre only succeeded in becoming a landscape in this emphatic sense for a short period of time. Because of Valdemar’s inherent negligence toward matters of state in order to pursue his passion for love and hunting in the woods, his passion proved useless in the context of nation building. In the period of its major literary manifestations, 1840–98, the legend served as an alternative to the bourgeois order of sober reason and provided a temporary escape from the chains of civilization as well as from the Christian obligation to live for the afterlife. In Gurre, fictional figures and actual readers might entertain the illusions of belonging to a charmed place, a secular paradise. At the dawning of the twenty-first century, Gurre has yielded its last valuable literary fruits, but one should not forget that it did in fact inspire canonical works. The Valdemar-and-Tove texts of Hauch and Jacobsen are unrivalled explorations of eroticism, religion, and temporality, but one has to look to Heiberg, Andersen, and Drachmann to see these themes interwoven with the particular landscape of Gurre.

Utopias as territories of Swedish modernism Sylvain Briens

The question of the relationship that literature maintains with space is essential in the study of modernism. In “Des espaces autres” (“Of Other Spaces”), Michel Foucault defines modernity first and foremost with a certain conception of space. While time was the essential factor of cultural history for centuries, in the twentieth century space becomes a determining element of identity construction. And if literature can be considered as a full-fledged geography, that is to say, as a writing of space, it is above all a world creator. It claims for itself a certain space and thus provokes what Deleuze and Guattari call a reterritorialization, a capacity to create a new earth (Deleuze and Guattari Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? 66). According to Deleuze and Guattari, territory is the result of an experience, the outcome of a relationship between the individual and a space (see also Raffestin “Ecogénèse territoriale et territorialité.”). The author, in choosing a space for his story (the décor, the scene of the action, or even the protagonist), constructs a territory. The fictional writing of the space becomes henceforth tied to an activated territoriality. It is possible to complete this ethological or biological definition of territory as a place of ownership by a definition of territory as a symbolic space or as the medium for a writing full of meaning (Bonnemaison 249), by seeing the activation of territory as a way for the writer to relate to space. It is also necessary to understand or at least to question the practices and intentions that accompany the production of these territories. Beyond the development of a poetics of space – whether on the epistemological or phenomenological level  – and given Gaston Bachelard’s sense of it, modern writers have asked themselves the question about and played with the idea of the referentiality of literary territories (that is to say the spaces described in fiction) and places of lived experience. What is the relationship between the Stockholm of Röda rummet and the Stockholm in which August Strindberg lived? What is hidden behind the homonymy of the two cities in a fictional tale that is situated, by definition, in a fictional location? Does the projection of a place into a space imagined by the writer forcibly make it an imaginary place? In her book Die Geographie der Literatur (The Geography of Literature), Barbara Piatti offers a categorization of the spatial functions of fiction set in “importierte, transformierte und fingierte … Schauplätze” (137) [imported, transformed, and imagined spaces of action]. This categorization aids in understanding the way the fictionalization of sites transposes them into a performance space. In a similar reflection, Bertrand Westphal identifies three strategies authors use to link described space and real space: “consensus homotopique, … brouillage hétérotopique et l’excursus utopique” (169) [homotopic consensus, heterotopic interference, and utopian excursus]. To study the question of utopia in literature comes down to, among other things, questioning this referentiality of the described territories in relation to places that are experienced. Though the term utopia in contemporary speech commonly conveys connotations of the impossible, imaginary, or fantastic, “utopia” more accurately designates a literary genre pioneered by Thomas More with the ambition of describing an ideal world as a reversed image of doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.06bri © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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contemporary society. It is a question of a writer distancing him- or herself from the society in which he or she lives to critique it better. The method is to place this perfect world in an ou-topos, a place that does not exist, a non-place, an imaginary place. The Atlantis of Plato, the Eldorado of Candide (1759) by Voltaire, The City of the Sun (1602) by Campanella, or The New Atlantis (1621) by Francis Bacon, to name only the most famous utopias of the history of Western literature, designate imaginary places. It is important to note here that even if the writers are imagining these utopian spaces, they are seeking in some cases to reterritorialize them by proposing a common, shared reference for the location. Campanella places his City of the Sun on the island of Ceylon (Trapobana), while Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is on the island of Bensalem. In “Des espaces autres,” Michel Foucault defines utopias as: emplacements sans lieu réel … qui entretiennent avec l’espace réel de la société un rapport général d’analogie directe ou inversée. C’est la société elle-même perfectionnée ou c’est l’envers de la société, mais, de toute façon, ces utopies sont des espaces qui sont fondamentalement essentiellement irréels. (47) (Sites with no real place … that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. The present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.) [23]

Literary genres resort to utopias as a distancing strategy to criticize society and suggest alternative models. The initial inability to locate the utopia allows the staging of another referentiality, not geographical, but symbolic: the utopian world is a mirror of society in which the writer lives. Lars Gustafsson defines utopia by emphasizing this symbolic referentiality: “Det är utmärkande för en utopi att den ifrågasätter det existerande samhället och de existerande sociala relationerna genom att prestera ett motförslag som omfattar samhället som helhet. En utopi måste vara total” (117) [The distinctive aspect of a utopia is that it calls society and existing social relations into question by providing a counter-proposal that encompasses society as a whole. A utopia must be total]. It is therefore a non-place that cannot be found but which reveals its power through the very impossibility of its existence as a place. In a way, a utopia presents itself through its resonance with society. To Umberto Eco, it appears as a possible world superimposing itself on the “real” world of the reader’s encyclopedia (Eco Lector 126). And conversely, any utopian place becomes real when it is described in literature. Carlos Fuentes gives a useful illustration in Valiente Mundo Nuevo where he shows the political power of the utopia of More as a model for the construction of colonial cities. If utopia is a genre inscribed in a long literary tradition, how is it used in modernist writing that defines itself by, among other things, a willingness to break with the past? Is the concept of utopia updated and transformed in the twentieth century? What distinguishes the modernist utopia from the classical utopia? After the presentation of two classic Scandinavian utopias, this essay will develop some lines of thought by studying the utopias developed by three Swedish authors: Ludvig Nordström, Harry Martinson, and Karin Boye.

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Prelude: Two utopias in classic Scandinavian literature Rather than engaging in an archaeology of utopias in Scandinavian literature (Ljungquist), this analysis stops first at two utopias, that of Olof Rudbeck in Atland eller Manheim (Atlantica) and that of Ludvig Holberg in Niels Klims underjordiske Resje (Niels Klim’s Subterranean Journey), to identify the structure of the classical utopia. Professor of medicine at the University of Uppsala, Olof Rudbeck published the first volume of a very ambitious work, Atland eller Manheim, in 1679, which he only partially completed in 1702. It endeavored to situate the Atlantis of Plato and proposed, with the help of an illustrated volume that accompanied the first volume, an atlas placing the utopian city in Sweden. Atlantis was, therefore, only swallowed up in a symbolic way by its own withdrawal. This placement, which would put the temple of Apollo in old Uppsala, is one of the arguments for showing the links between the Swedes and the Hyperboreans, a people associated with Apollo according to Herodotus. It thus expresses the national pride of Sweden in its search for national identity and it establishes a certain “Swedishness.” It draws on the heritage of ancient Norse culture to show off the grandeur of the culture of the Swedish people by re-establishing its place at the center of European history. It was important, therefore, for Rudbeck to situate the mythical utopia so as better to praise Sweden’s out-of-the-ordinary geography and history. With the Indianiske bref (1770; Indian Letters) by Hans Bergeström, the utopian genre establishes its credentials prior to asserting itself in the Swedish literature of the nineteenth century in Platos stat i korrigerad bild (1876; A Corrected Picture of Plato’s State) by Nils Herman Quiding and Oxygen och Aromasia (1878; Oxygen and Aromasia) by Claes Lundin. In Denmark, the Danish-Norwegian author Ludvig Holberg wrote a satirical book in Latin, Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum novam telluris theoriam ac historiam quintae monarchiae adhuc nobis incognitae exhibens e bibliotheca B. Abelini (published anonymously in Leipzig in 1741, rewritten in Danish as Niels Klims underjordiske Rejse (Niels Klim’s Subterranean Journey). Niels Klim is a Norwegian student of theology who, while exploring a cave, falls into a well. He disappears for ten years during which he discovers other worlds including Potu, the name of which is an anagram of Utopia. Potu is a utopian society based on deliberation and gravitas. The university disputationes are a popular form of entertainment, and laborers – foster fathers of all citizens – are treated with the utmost respect. A minimal faith in one God, sovereign, creator of all things, unites the people. Freedom of religion, thought, and conscience are guaranteed. All rights attached to birth have been abolished in the name of a meritocracy that leaves the highest accolades to women. Behind the utopian exploration, Holberg criticized the society of his time while offering a universally accessible fable. Urbs, the utopian global city of Ludvig Nordström Modernist writers are interested in the technical developments and the emergence of communication networks (notably the train and the telephone). Networks call for a new way of being in the world by revisiting the idea that space is an arrangement of territories. Its nonlinear, dynamic, and elusive structure brings it close to the notion of the rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari

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(Mille Plateaux). Like the rhizome, the network weaves deterritorializations on many different levels. To what extent do the rhizomatic territories traced by the communication networks invite a new writing of utopia? Faced with the dilemma of a city that embodies the economic and industrial development and one that draws together all the hopes for harmonious and happy life, Ludvig Nordström creates in Petter Svensks historia: Världsstaden a utopian city, Urbs, a synthesis of both the paradise past and the industrial future. Urbs is characterized by the fact that it is connected by communication networks to the whole world and is thus at the center of trade. According to Nordström, communication networks are the fundamental actors of a new universal solidarity between men and participate in the creation of a social utopia, where the cities of the world are all gathered in the City of cities, that he thus names Urbs. This utopian city in the center of communication networks is a concept found in the writings of many other non-Swedish writers. Emile Verhaeren describes the birth of Oppidomagne, whose name, like Urbs, refers to the Roman civilization that assigned a central role to the city in its organization. In his works (especially in Mon plus secret conseil, 1923) Valery Larbaud describes cities located at the center of large technical systems and of economic exchange thus rendering them centers of the world. The Norwegian sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen describes in Creation of a World Centre of Communication (1913) plans for a global metropolis, an expression of the splendor of fraternal humanity. The “Tower of Progress,” the core of this construction, is linked to the rest of the world by telegraph. All these examples illustrate the similarity between Nordström’s reflection on technological and industrial thought and the universalist tendencies developed by intellectuals in Europe during the same time period. The sprawling modern city, in the words of Verhaeren, gives structure to a new harmony, both global and solidary. Urbs is the territory where humanity, connected by a global communication network, becomes one. If this techno-utopia of universal communication is an expression of a modernist belief in a better world  – a meshed network linking all human beings in a global community  – it resurfaces due to a long history of the ideas that Armand Mattelart traces in Histoire de l’utopie planétaire: de la cité prophétique à la société globale (1999; History of the Planetary Utopia: From the Prophetic City to the Global Society). Planetary utopias have driven thinkers of all sorts for millennia and are built around the jus communicationis, a right to free communication as a natural heritage. The reaction of Swedish writers to the advent of world communications also belongs to that long intellectual journey. Beyond any ante-Babel nostalgia, the concept of a universal society stems from the principle of humanity and the myth of the great family of man. In his description of the Agora, Plato opens with a foundational reflection of the construction of a planetary Utopia. The ideal representation of universal communication is also inspired by the “desire of world citizenship” of Erasmus, the “universal mercantile republic” of Adam Smith, of Immanuel Kant’s “cosmopolitanism of perpetual peace,” the “republic of universal science” of Condorcet, and “the universal association of manufacturers” for the development of trade as the organizing principle of the human species of Claude Henri de Saint-Simon. Whereas during the late nineteenth century August Strindberg and Verner von Heidenstam were debating the benefits of constructing communication networks, Ludvig Nordström swept away the ideological conflict of his predecessors and energetically affirmed the utopia of the jus

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communicationis by a philosophical and literary theory, i.e. “totalism.” As he explains in Döda världar i samhällsrymden (1920; Dead Worlds in the Public Expanse of Space), Petter Svensks historia: Världsstaden (1923; World Cities), or … och blev helt enkelt en människa (1932; … and Simply Became Human), the deployment of communication networks facilitates global trade thus creating a new international identity. The world becomes a world-state (“världsstaten”) governed by technologically minded people – either engineers or entrepreneurs – at the center of commerce and, thus, at the center of the world, acting as the overall direction of society. Comprising a veritable moral sect, adherents to technological progress contribute to the development of trade and hence to the welfare of mankind. The construction of communication networks is, in the eyes of Nordström, a project promoting global civilization, centered on the utopian conception of a communicational agora. With the tremendous expansion of communication networks, both material and immaterial, an enthusiasm arises among the political, economic, and cultural elite for “world citizenship” and the globalization of trade. According to Mattelart, a communicational utopia dating from the 1930s becomes a utopia of communicational egalitarianism (La Communication-monde 6). A correlation then develops between media communication and the affirmation of an ideology of progress that highlights social cohesion, democratic participation, and the dissemination of culture. Nordström opens his eyes in wonder at the dynamic man in harmony with the machine as he exalts the collective: the people of Urbs can communicate, share information, and do business with anyone in the world; they thus acquire a new citizenship, a global citizenship, and a new identity, cosmopolitanism (in its strictest etymological sense). The utopia of the planetary nomad of Harry Martinson In the footsteps of Nordström, the young Harry Martinson personally experienced the new nomadic cosmopolitan era of communication networks. Geographical and social universalism permeates all his work, including Resor utan mål (1932; Aimless Journey), which sings universal nomadism with a prophetic enthusiasm: Är det måhända vår tids uppgift att genombryta den första av de barriärer som skiljer oss från nomadframtiderna? Det Utopia jag ser: är det dynamiskt organiserande nomadlivet på jorden, växlingarnas människoprojekt. Utvecklingens slutmål kommer att bli den andligt och motionellt universale individen. (10–11) (Is this perhaps the task of our time to break the first of the barriers that separate us from future times of wandering? The Utopia that I imagine here is the dynamically organized nomadic life on earth, the alteration’s human project. exchange of human initiatives. The purpose of evolution will be the universal individual in both thought and movement.)

Nomadism is a way of life, but also a state of mind. The journey is for Martinson a reconquest of reality, a veritable philosophy of life that revolves around building a global solidarity. This is a reterritorialization of the proletarian individual at a time when the mastery of space becomes accessible to all and not reserved for a wealthy elite. The title of the book indicates that there is no destination: here, the journey without a destination is a utopic trip. Its goal is to encourage

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readers to open themselves to the world and its rich cultural diversity. The journey can save the world because it is the enemy of nationalism and provides a solution to combat intolerance and to prevent new wars. The hymn to technical progress here is a social utopia built around the new technical systems that bring people together throughout the world. In communication networks, Martinson sees the opportunity for new exchanges, both economic and interpersonal, and of a new solidarity. Martinson announces the birth, with the establishment of global communication networks, of a new man, a citizen of the world, at the same time a traveler and a communicator, compassionate and visionary. World communication sets up the basis for development of a new global society in which economy and trade could bring the peoples of the world closer. Artur Lundkvist asserted in several articles that this concept is at odds with the nationalism and colonialism of the past century. In Atlantvind (1932; Atlantic Wind), he analyzes trade in modern civilization, and concludes: En andlig och materiell världskommunikation är uppnådd, den intellektuella och emotionella korrespondensen nutidens människors emellan är uppdriven till en snabbhet och mångsidighet som under kort tid revolutionerat det mänskliga livsplanet och skapat en ny världsbild. (221) (A global communication has been established that is both spiritual and material; the intellectual and emotional exchanges between the people of today have been elevated to a speed and a diversity that have revolutionized human existence in a short time and created a new image of the world).

This collectivist credo of modernism joins the universal nomadism of Martinson. Communication networks are reshaping relations between men and allow them to rebuild the solidarity that was the engine of the rural community in past centuries. It is the rebuilding of a village, which is now a global village. Martin Kylhammar explains that this fantastic rise of nomadism promotes the birth of a utopia: Av världshandelns och kommunikationsteknologins materiella värld lyckades de [fem unga] skapa en lockande och vacker utopi om Världsmedborgaren som i Världsstaten genom Resan stod i en ständig allkommunikation med jordens alla folk. (111) (They [the Five Young Men] were able to create from the material world of global trade and the technology of communication an attractive and beautiful utopia of the world-citizens in the world-state who by means of travel were in constant and universal communication with all people of the earth.)

More than the journey itself, it is the unification of the world that remains central to utopia. These citizens of the world hope for the advent of a better future, nurtured by tolerance and cultural mix. The world, like humankind, has set itself in motion, and this trip is one of technical and moral progress.

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The cosmic dystopia of Martinson When Martinson wrote Aniara (1956), the hope for the advent of a global society and solidarity had been shattered by World War II, one of the deadliest world conflicts. It also marked one of the first major events involving global communication. The ambiguity of the communication utopia was revealed through this global conflict; people around the world had been able to communicate with each other since the advent of transportation networks and telecommunications, but the expression of this globalization of interpersonal exchanges was not, as had been hoped by intellectuals for thousands of years, one of universal peace. Instead, it resulted in the spread of violence in the world. True to his nomadic youth, Martinson’s adventure in Aniara is a journey. The cosmos, which had become accessible as a result of the advances in science and technology, is a new space to (re)territorialize after years of wandering on every sea and every continent of the world. Martinson once again sets the stage for universal nomadism in search of others and of life. Travelers installed on board the spaceship Aniara are emigrants fleeing the planet Earth destroyed by human folly. The earth has become a utopian planet because of its disappearance (here again is the myth of Atlantis) of which all that is remembered are the images stored in the spaceship’s computer, Mima. Mima is both a visual medium and deity in the cosmogony of this epic narrative. It can search any image in the universe with omniscience, it keeps everything in memory (hence its name), it analyzes the information with great rapidity, and it assumes its role as guardian deity in consoling mankind. A camera filming the cosmos without an optical filter, it shows all, tells all, and allows one to see pure reality, uncorrupted. Mima is both a universal consciousness and the global memory of the world. According to the poet, Mima draws its communicative energy from entropy. From the chaos of the universe, it manages to instill some order. Aniara is a journey to certain death in which the only consolation is an omniscient machine, Mima. Earthly nature is dead. What remains for man is space, considered as a blank, like a sea of the soul (“hav anden”) without substance. Love, the sole form of communication present in the epic, is a central hope in the thoughts of the narrator, as illustrated in song forty, “Rymdmatrosens Berättelse” (The Story of the Sailor in Space, 80–91). The journey in the spaceship describes a world where science and technology speak an artificial and sterile language. Just like the life on board that is governed by pilots, engineers, astronomers, and a machine, the universe, too, seems to have become dehumanized. The only hope is given by Mima, which relays the “sändning från en bättre värld” (57) [messages from a better world]. In its words and images the possibility of a virtual reality defining a dream space can be glimpsed. This virtual paradise is a form of utopia in its etymological sense: due to its virtuality, the paradise sung of by Mima is without a topos; it is in no place. The metachronic dystopia of Karin Boye Utopias are traditionally eutopic (ideal societies) as opposed to real, imperfect societies. But little by little in the twentieth-century history of literature, descriptions of dystopias appear in which

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the denouncing of society consists of the exaggeration of the evils as the story turns into a nightmare. We (1924) by Yevgeni Ivanovich Zamyatine, Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley, and 1984 (1949) by George Orwell are the most famous examples of these counter-utopias born from contact with a social engineering that has been subordinated to technocratic power. By using the inversion of utopia in the name of a happiness that mobilizes political violence, Karin Boye describes in her novel Kallocain (1940) the hell of loneliness in the modern metropolis, perhaps foreshadowing a postmodern crisis. As with Aniara, Kallocain is metachronic, according to the categorization of science-fiction worlds proposed by Umberto Eco (“Science et Science-fiction”). Boye proposed here the description of a world that may, in her view, be realized in the future. The society imagined by Boye in the novel is equipped with global surveillance systems that sustain powerful disciplinary mechanisms. In this dystopia, the dream of communication becomes a nightmare when networks prove themselves to be a formidable means of control. It warns that a communication-based society runs the risk of creating an environment of alienation and enslavement for the individual: a society of control threatens to emerge in which the machines might as well be omnipresent police officers. The dystopia lies in the areas of private life appropriated by the collective state: the truth serum allows for police control without limit. The geographical structure of the “world-state” (“Världsstaten”) is complex: while citizens should remain in their underground cells, only certain soldiers are able to move between different cities. The state seeks to control all forms of interpersonal exchange: the cities do not communicate with each other, mail is prohibited, and private communication between individuals is considered espionage. The world-state builds its power on the control of communication networks. In reality, the world-state is not the only place on Earth, despite its name. First, there is a neighboring state with which the world-state has gone to war. Another area gradually appears in the novel: during a plane trip, the hero goes through checkpoint after checkpoint to access this other area, that of the capital of the worldstate, which turns out to be exactly the same as its provinces. Finally, the protagonist Leo hears of a “desert city” (“ökenstad”) that exists on the surface of the globe in ruins. This is an area of refuge that can be everywhere and nowhere. The desert city, where nature is present, appears in the novel as the inverted image of the constructed and sterile city. It is a utopia that is the hope of many citizens for a better life because it is more human and organic. It expresses the desire to reterritorialize another country in which love and eroticism, intimate physical and emotional contact, are possible. This desire reveals the dream of a world where man is not hopelessly alone. Shipping: Heterotopias and the reterritorialization of modernism The utopias presented here are all structurally different from the real world. They anticipate progress history by exaggerating certain features of contemporary society. If the metachronic utopias of Nordström and of the young Martinson are eutopic, those of Boye and of the later production of Martinson manifest a dystopian identity. They are part of a general trend described by Claudio Magris: “L’histoire littéraire de l’Occident durant ces deux derniers siècles est l’histoire de l’utopie et du désenchantement, de leur indivisible symbiose.” (20) [The literary

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history of the West during the last two centuries is the history of utopia and disillusionment, of their indivisible symbiosis.] Beyond this philosophical difference (technical development is seen in the former case as a promise of progress, and in the latter as a threat), the geographical referentialities of these two types of utopias – eutopia and dystopia – are different. While the dystopias of Martinson and Boye respect the lack of geographical referentiality specific to the etymology of utopia (there is no attempt to locate the society described), the techno-utopia of Nordström and the utopia of the universal nomad of Martinson do not create any spatial distance: the world they describe is accessible and nearby. Nordström explicitly reterritorializes utopia when he situates Urbs in Härnösand, thus making Härnösand the center of the world. These metachronic eutopias offer topographic landmarks. Utopias thus appear in Swedish modernism as territories in which the writer seeks to assess the impact of modernity on the life of the individual. The principle of utopia is that of global communication in which the writers, the ideologues, see it as fundamental to society: this opens a global model of modernity and a revival of the patterns of behavior and universal values. In his geographic analysis of the contemporary world, Atlas (1996), Michel Serres emphasizes the fundamentally utopian character of communication networks: Comment cartographier ces mers inconnues qui éloignent et rapprochent les terres habitées et dont la représentation ne figure sur aucune carte? Cette bande, cet espace blanc, tiers lieu d’utopie…. Réponse: île ou lieu qui ne figure sur aucune carte, Utopie doit cette absence à la contradiction, logique et physique, dont le principe gouverne le lieu: elle gît là et, en même temps, n’y est pas. Nous y voilà! Ne contrevenons-nous pas sans cesse à cette loi, nous habitants du local et hantant le global, nous qui, par nos technologies conspirantes, vivons là mais ailleurs, donc sur une île sans lieu? … Tout réseau décolle des anciennes mappemondes pour représenter cet atlas d’utopie. (182) (How to map these unknown seas that separate and unite inhabited lands and whose representation is not on any map? This tract, this white space, the third place of utopia…. The answer: an island or place that is not on any map, Utopia is the lack of logical and physical contradiction, of which the governing principle governing is: it is there, and at the same time, not. Here we are! Do we not constantly contravene this law, we local residents, haunting the global? We who, by our conspiring technologies, live both there and elsewhere, thus on an island that has no place? … All networks come from the old globes when representing this atlas of utopia.)

It is now clear that the utopias of modernism are deterritorialization efforts, as the network grows and the world becomes global, and they give way to a dynamic mapping of rhizomes. In a reverse movement, there emerges a desire to anchor experience in a local territory. Utopia is relocated and moves toward heterotopia. Foucault coined the term heterotopia (literally “other place”) in order to define the physical location of Utopia. As has been discussed earlier in this volume, heterotopias are concrete spaces that host the imaginary and are either on the margins of society or serve within society as the negative. It is telling, then, that the paths of Martinson’s universal nomad traverse the seas of the world by boat, the location par excellence for a heterotopia according to Foucault. The spaceship Aniara is another example of heterotopia. A heterotopic third place for Martinson is the railway station. Martinson gives it a central meaning in his utopia: “Väntsalen är min barndoms

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bästa kyrka. Här har jag på mitt sätt inväntat något av det eviga. Och jag vet att man väntar än” (Kap Farväl! 121) [The station’s waiting room was the best church of my childhood. There, in my own way, I waited for something of the eternal. And I know that one is still waiting]. In Kallocain, the living spaces of the citizens take the heterotopic form of underground cells situated in towns that only communicate with each other through official couriers. Access to the open air is highly regulated for all citizens. The rumor of the existence of a desert city fuels the desire of some citizens for other areas: – Min chef, sade jag, det är en sak som har förvånat mig något. Under sprutan hade de en man häromdagen, en sammansvuren, som tillhörde en farlig sekt av dårar. Han utspred inte bara geografiska rykten av ytterst skadlig natur utan också en ohygglig sägen om att varelserna på andra sidan gränsen skulle vara av samma härstamning som vissa av våra gränsfolk. (Boye 167) (“My Chief,” I said, “there’s something that surprises me a little. The other day we had under injection a man, one of those from the gang, that dangerous sect of lunatics. He spread not only geographical rumors of utmost danger but also an insinuating legend that the creatures across the border were of the same race as some of our border people.”) [Boye 138–39]

It is remarkable that the ideological deviation revealed by the truth serum passes through geographical considerations involving a third place, that of the desert. Foucault is interested in another heterotopia, the hétérotopie de deviation [heterotopia of deviation]: the prison. The narrator of Kallocain finds herself, at the end of the story, locked in a prison and yet feels “friare än i friheten” (Boye 6) [freer than when at liberty]. Through a metafictional staging, the story of the book is told from this heterotopic place. This third place of which we do not know the location is thus described as a space of introspection: distance from society allows the narrator to tell his own story. The heterotopia becomes the territory of writing. For Martinson, the heterotopia of the station in turn becomes an interstitial space that allows for writing. Utopia closes where it began, in a station, when no train stops there and no traveler passes. Du kan sitta där och vänta förgäves ett helt år. Ingen kommer som skall i väg långt! Ingen flicka kommer oerhört finklädd in genom dörren för att resa till Nebraska…. Det duggar ett snålt regn. Luften är disig och stationen och pojken äro därigenom alldeles innestängda i byns cirkel. Ingen kommer sidenblank, drömväldig och frasande fram ur den våta fallande dimman för att resa till Dakota och Colorado Springs. (Kap Farväl! 121–22) (You can sit there and wait in vain for an entire year. No one will pass by on the way to some distant destination! No elegantly dressed girl will come through the door to travel to Nebraska…. It drizzles. The air is misty and the station and the boy are thus completely enclosed in the circle of the village. No traveler dressed in silk emerges dreamily and rustling from the moistly falling mist to go to Dakota or Colorado Springs.)

The world tour is complete. The trip has ended and finally finds its purpose and destination, for now the nomad, having completed the re-territorialization of the world, can become a writer.

Jutland and the West Coast as liminal spaces in Danish literature Wolfgang Behschnitt

The West Coast of Jutland stretches from the south Wadden Sea about 300 miles (483 km) northward to the tip of Skagen and is today a quite unspectacular region. Densely populated during a couple of months in the summer when vacationing Danish and German families move into countless summer homes and holiday camps, the region does not attract much attention during the rest of the year. Lacking big cities, large industries, and cultural attractions of more than regional interest, the coast represents the outer periphery of the centralized Danish state. Neither does the region seem to stimulate the literary imagination. The West Coast is a peripheral place in contemporary Danish literature as well. It has not always been like that. From the 1820s to around 1900, northern Jutland and its coast were discovered as a prominent region of national interest and widely represented in Danish literature. The region was animated by historical reminiscences as much as by hopes for modernization and economic development. Jutland was imagined as a place where the origins of the Danish nation could be recovered and, at the same time, as a place offering possibilities for Denmark to regain political and economic power. The central areas of the Jutland peninsula, the sandy and barren heath, inspired dreams of exploitation and fertilization put into practice after the disastrous German-Danish War of 1864 by the Danish Heath Society under the leadership of Enrico Dalgas. The slogan “Hvad udad tabes må indad vindes” [What is lost outwardly, must be regained inwardly] may not have been coined by Dalgas himself, but it expresses well enough the spirit of the enterprise.1 But the West Coast also became a place for national fantasies of modernization: the hero in Henrik Pontoppidan’s novel Lykke-Per (1898–1904; Lucky Per) nourishes dreams of a huge seaport and channel project which would outclass Hamburg as a center of commerce and restore Denmark’s position as a leading commercial power. And in Christian Richardt’s Vort Land: Et geografisk Digt (1889; Our Country: A Geographical Poem), starting with the emphatic invitation “Venner, seer paa Danmarks kort; / seer, saa i det aldrig glemmer” (unpaginated) [Friends, look at the map of Denmark, / look, so you never will forget it], the outline of Danish geography compared to a barge heading westward can be found: “Sammenknyttes Sted med Sted, / ligner Kortet lidt en Skude – ” [Connecting place with place, / the map resembles a barge – ]. These lines are a fitting picture in more than one sense: Copenhagen, the capital, sits at the stern of the boat steering the ship of state, but the Jutland coast forms the sail and drives the vessel forward. Until the mid-nineteenth century, however, the stereotypical description of the West Coast of Jutland evoked the picture of a wild, uncivilized, adventurous, and rather exotic space, a desert-like region with wide sand dunes, roaring storms, shipwrecks, and utterly poor inhabitants. This “frygtelige øde Sted” (19:137) [dreadful barren place] is in Steen Steensen Blicher’s 1.

The slogan and its attribution to Dalgas and his heath project is one of Denmark’s national myths. Originally, the slogan was coined by the author H. P. Holst on the occasion of the Industrial Exhibition in Copenhagen 1872 (see Nielsen). doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.07beh © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Figure 9.  Illustration from Christian Richardt’s geographical poem Vort Land.

Eneboeren paa Bolbjerg (1834; The Hermit on Bolbjerg) a dwelling place for remorseful sinners. Many of Denmark’s most renowned authors from Blicher and Hans Christian Andersen to Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, Holger Drachmann, and Henrik Pontoppidan contributed to establishing the West Coast as a place with such unmistakable features and an undisputable relevance in the literary imagination. However poor the region was in terms of earthly goods, it promised rich harvests for those doing commerce in tales and fantasies. Goldschmidt describes his expectations in the preface to his travelogue Dagbog fra en Rejse paa Vestkysten af Vendsyssel og Thy 1865 (Diary of a Journey on the West Coast of Vendsyssel and Thy 1865): “[Det] forekom … mig bag hine tavse Bakker som et Eventyrland, som et Siberien, hvor der hang novellistiske Herremænd paa Træerne og Sagn paa alle Buske…. Landet stod for min Fantasi, formedelst

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Længslen, som selve Poesiens Land….” (217–18) [It appeared … to me behind these silent hills as a fairyland, as a Siberia, where there hung novelistic gentlemen on the trees and tales on all bushes…. The land appeared before my fantasy, through my longing, as poetry’s own country]. The Jutland coast during this period appeared as an “other” space within the frame of the national territory, a liminal space to which fantasies, fears, and desires could be transferred. Drawing on ethnological theory (Van Gennep, Turner), one can note that liminal spaces mark an “outside” of society and everyday life. They constitute a threshold and are linked to rites of passage and initiation that secure transformations within the social order. As such, liminal spaces dissolve the given order of knowledge and of social differentiation and constitute a state that can be marked as sacred, or in modern times as aesthetic. They can cause fear and uncertainty, but they also give room to creative renewal. Instead of leading into chaos and final dissolution, their ultimate function is to restore the social order in a new way. During the nineteenth century, liminal spaces filled a crucial function for the invention of the nation and the imagination of the national territory. That a geographical space on the periphery of the nation – a hitherto marginalized region – moves to the center of attention is not a unique phenomenon in European literature: it was preceded by the discovery of Scotland as a core area in English literature due to Ossian and the historical novels of Walter Scott (Hertel 175f). It is paralleled by many similar discoveries in other European literatures, for instance Westphalia in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ’s works or the Bohuslän skerries in the hair-raising stories about smuggling and murder in Emilie Flygare Carlén’s early Swedish bestsellers. What can be observed in literature are the effects of fundamental shifts in the geographical imagination as a consequence of political, technological, and medial developments. The crucial political factor is the emergence of the modern territorial state as nation state in the eighteenth century. The shift from a feudal system, in which the unity of the state is provided by the personal integrity of the king, to the idea of the nation state as constituted by its common national culture, language, people, history, and territory has, with respect to this last aspect, led to an intensified strife for administrative appropriation and infrastructural development. At the same time, this new interest for the territorial dimension of the state is mirrored in new techniques of representation – in statistics and cartography – but also in the visual arts. Landscape painting flourishes while new medial forms as panoramas, dioramas, and stereoscopes contribute to the popularization of landscape images and the spreading of a new kind of geographic vision of the world (Behschnitt Wanderungen 54–89). The nation as “imagined community” (Anderson) is invested with a “geographical imagination” as well (Gregory): a conception of the national territory as continuous, homogeneous, and typical. With respect to Denmark, these developments were initiated by the Napoleonic wars and the fundamental changes they brought about in the political and territorial structure of the country. The losses of Norway in 1814 and of the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein in 1864 are the historical cornerstones of these developments. And Jutland plays a decisive role in the geographical imagination of the Danish nation as it unfolded in the fifty years in between.

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Denmark’s imagined geography With the rise of nationalism and the growing tension between the German and Danish parts of the United Monarchy, the southern part of the peninsula between the rivers Kongeå and Eider – the historical duchy of Schleswig or, as the Danes preferred to call it, Sønderjylland – became a violently contested area and the scene of two bloody wars that eventually led to the incorporation of the duchies and the city of Lauenburg into the German Empire. In present context, however, northern Jutland from the Kongeå to Skagen claims as much attention, since it obtains a central place in the collective imagination of the Danish nation. Aarhus historian Steen Bo Frandsen shows in his pioneering study Opdagelsen af Jylland (1996; The Discovery of Jutland) how northern Jutland politically and economically moves from the periphery to the center of awareness during this period with the attention reaching its climax before and around the military conflicts of 1848–50 and 1864. The disastrous results of the Napoleonic Wars, most visible in the state bankruptcy in 1813 and the loss of Norway the year after, led, says Frandsen, to a “growing concern for unity and the wish to regain control over at least most of the state …” (572). In order to repel German economic influence as well as territorial and cultural claims, northern Jutland should be tied as closely as possible to Copenhagen. At the same time, an image of the region emerged – precisely because of its remoteness and backwardness – that it was the part of Denmark where the national heritage had been best preserved and was untouched by the tides of modernity and civilization. Speaking of an “image” or an “imagined geography,” one must be aware of the fact that such images are not unbiased. In the case of Denmark, the national imagination was produced in Copenhagen and represented the metropolitan point of view (Frandsen 45). Thus, the prototypical Danish landscape could be found in the surroundings of Copenhagen, in northern Zealand or on Fyn. It is displayed in Andersen’s “Danmark, mit fædreland” (1850; Denmark, My Fatherland) and many other patriotic poems of the time, as Louise Mønster discusses elsewhere in this volume. It follows the ideal of the English landscape garden: idyllic beech groves, flowery meadows, apple orchards, and stately mansions, all embraced by the docile ripple of the Baltic Sea (Jørgensen). Jutland, in its turn, was assigned the role of a contrasting complement to this idyllic nature. In the beginning of Steen Steensen Blicher’s novella Røverstuen (1827; The Den of the Robbers), the narrator takes the reader on a journey from the Isles to the Jutland heath where the plot is about to take place. Once they approach the Jutland inland, nature changes: Men jo længere Man nu kommer ind, jo mere forandres Egnen: Dalene blive dybere; Bakkerne brattere; Skovene see ældre og mere affældige ud; mangt sivgroet Kjær, mangen med kort Lyng bevoxet Jordplet; store Stene paa de højryggede Agre – Alt vidner om ringere Cultur og mindre Befolkning. Smalle Veje med dybe Hjulspor og høje Balker i Midten hentyde paa mindre Færsel og Samqvem mellem Beboerne. Disses Vaaninger vorde mod Vesten alt slettere og slettere, lavere og lavere, som om de dukkede sig for Vestenvindens voldsomme Anløb. Ligesom Hederne blive hyppigere og større, blive Kirker og Byer færre og længere fra hinanden. Ved Gaardene seer man istedetfor Hæsse sorte Tørvestakke, istedetfor Frugthaver Kaalgaarde. (10:53) (But the farther one moves inward, the more the landscape changes: the valleys become deeper; the hills steeper; the forests look older and more frail; many a reed overgrown pond, many heather-clad spaces; big rocks on the steeply cambered fields – everything recalls lower culture

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and smaller population. Narrow roads with deep ruts and high ridges in between indicate less traffic and commerce between the inhabitants. Westward their dwellings become worse and worse, lower and lower, as if they cowered before the attacks of the westerly winds. As the heath becomes more frequent and larger, churches and villages become fewer and more distant. At the farms, one sees black turf stacks instead of haystacks, cabbage beds instead of orchards.)

The journey to the periphery of the nation leads back in time as well to a Rousseauian primeval society: “Intet Markhegn, ingen Pileplantning gjør mere Skjæl mellem Mand og Mand; Man skulde troe, at Alt endnu var i Fælledskab” (Blicher 10:53) [No fencing, no willow hedge yet divides man from man; one could believe that everything was still communal property]. Geographical and historical distances are correlated. Kenneth Olwig has made this point in his discussion of the Jutland heath and its representation in the collective imagination (“Jylland” 25). He also points to the fundamental ambivalence in the image of Jutland. With a reference to Andersen’s famous poem “Jylland” (also known as “Jylland mellem tvende Have” [1859; Jutland]) that mentions railways and tourism, Olwig shows how the imagery “can evoke passive romantic reveries stimulated by memories of the past that lie buried by the heath. It can also … prompt visions of Promethean modern changes, worthy of the ancient heathen gods” (“Jutland Cipher” 16).2 Blicher’s Jutland But still, there are nuances in the Jutland picture of the nineteenth century, and the most radical periphery is not represented by the mid-Jutland heath, but rather the West Coast. Røverstuen’s fictive narrator leads the reader from the Danish isles up onto the heath, but first in a later story, in Eneboeren paa Bolbjerg, Blicher conquers the coast as his literary territory. His campaign is preceded by some poems: his own about the most widely spread West Coast topos, “Skibbruddet” (1814; The Wreckage), and a couple of Andersen poems: “Malerie fra Jyllands Vestkyst” (1831; Painting from Jutland’s West Coast) and “Phantasie ved Vesterhavet” (1831; Fantasy at the North Sea).3 Still, Eneboeren provides for the first time an elaborate and characteristic picture of the Jutland West Coast, a picture which would fundamentally affect the national geographical imagination for years to come. Somewhat surprisingly, the story starts traveling eastward from Viborg to Randers and with the exhibition of a “smukke, ægte danske Udsigt” (19:124) [beautiful, truly Danish view] of the castle Fussingø. This castle reminds the narrator of Walter Scott’s tales and inspires him to tell a story that not only connects the gothic to the realistic, but also the idyllic and “truly Danish” landscape to the wild and barren West Coast. It is a crime-and-mystery story based on fragments of a diary in which the reader has to fill in the lacunae in the same way as in Blicher’s most successful novel Brudstykker af en 2.

The same H. C. Andersen uses the industrial development of Jutland as a plot in his novel At være eller ikke være (1857; To Be or Not to Be) where the emergence of the town Silkeborg around the newly founded paper mill juxtaposes the Bildungsroman of the hero.

3.

These poems are excellent examples of Andersen’s sensitivity to trends to come, but not for an authentic perception of a sublime landscape, since he knew the West Coast only from hearsay (Hertel 180).

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Landsbydegns Dagbog (1824; Fragments of a Parish Clerk’s Diary). The second part of the story is located on the West Coast where the mysterious hermit lives in his retreat atoning for his sins “med langvarig Anger og strængt Arbejde” (19:149) [with constant remorse and hard work]. The location is introduced by an extensive description highlighting its otherness: Gaaer Du ind iblandt disse [Sandbjergene], da finder Du en heel anden Natur. Det er som om Du vandrede paa en uhyre Kirkegaard blandt talløse Kæmpegrave eller paa Tomterne af en ødelagt Forverden. Derinde er Taushed og Roe, men allevegne Spor af Uroe, Forvirring og Elementernes Oprør. (19:134–35) (If you go in among these [the sand-dunes], you find a totally other nature. It is as if you walked on a huge cemetery among unnumbered barrows or on the sites of a shattered past. In there you find silence and peace, but all over traces of unrest, disorder, and the element’s commotion.)

In Blicher’s tale the West Coast very clearly represents a liminal space, a threshold between the familiar and the alien, life and death, order and chaos, both in its social and moral dimensions. But at the same time, the narrator’s realistic approach and thoughtful guiding of the reader – the topographical descriptions resemble a travel guide – make this liminal and sublime space accessible and manageable, as space to be filled with images and histories, to be measured and charted, to be appropriated as a part of the imagined geography of the nation. Blicher elaborates his picture of the West Coast two years later in the tale Marie (1836). This time a ship wreckage forms the central motif introducing thus a popular feature of all West Coast stories until the most successful Strandingshistorier (1901; Wreckage Stories) of Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, which are explicitly named “Skildringer fra jydske Vestkyst og Skagen” [Descriptions from the Jutland West Coast and Skagen].4 In 1839 Blicher published an actual travel report from the West Coast, Vestlig profil af den Cimbriske Halvøe fra Hamborg til Skagen (Western Profile of the Cimbrian Peninsula from Hamburg to Skagen). By then the literary picture of the West Coast was established. The travel report merely complements it by topographical, historical, and folkloristic descriptions. Hans Christian Andersen and the West Coast Andersen’s sensitivity to attractive scenes and places is well known. He was also the first author to give a meta-literary account of Jutland in the national imagination and of Blicher’s share in the new interest in the previously marginalized region. In his novel O.T. (1836), the protagonist Otto tells his friend Wilhelm some childhood memories from the West Coast: “‘Det maa være herligt!’ udbrød Vilhelm, og hans Øine funklede. ‘Jylland er dog den meest romantiske Deel af Danmark! Jeg har ret faaet Interesse for det Land, siden jeg læste Steen-Blichers Noveller. Jeg synes, det maa have meget tilfælles med de skotske Lavlande!’” (4:374) [“That must have been magnificent!” exclaimed Wilhelm, and his eyes sparkled. “Jutland is certainly the most romantic part of Denmark. I have become really interested in that country, since I read Steen-Blicher’s 4.

A new collection was published 1905 with the title Nye Strandingshistorier: Skildringer fra Jyllands Vestkyst. Today, Mylius-Erichsen is better known for his explorations of Greenland.

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short stories. It seems to me that it must have much in common with the lowlands of Scotland”]. Still, Andersen’s most important contribution to a literary history of the West Coast is his tale “En historie fra klitterne” (A Story from the Sand Dunes) written more than twenty years later – in 1860 – as a result of his first trip when he visited the coast in 1859. By then the characteristic features of Jutland were well established in the collective imagination both in literature and visual arts. The painter Martinus Rørbye was first to depict Jutland fishermen, their boats and dwellings, shipwrecks, and other coastal scenes. Interestingly enough, he and Andersen had been traveling companions on their first trip to Jutland in 1830 (Hertel 183). On later trips, Rørbye also was one of the first artists to exploit the picturesque qualities of Skagen, fifty years before the Skagen painters at the end of the century. Another landscape painter contributing effectively to the image of Jutland and the West Coast was Dankvart Dreyer who travelled several times to Jutland between 1838 and 1843 (Hertel 184). More important, however, for the proliferation and popularization of these landscape images was their reproduction in print which on a larger scale started in the 1850s. A comprehensive collection of lithographs was published 1856 at Emil Bærentzen’s institute in Copenhagen under the simple but ambitious title Danmark (see Behschnitt Wanderungen 308–15). The seventy-seven pictures were accompanied by explanatory topographical descriptions,5 which show clearly how scholarship, visual arts, and literature interacted in the making of a national geography. The texts are often enhanced with quotations from poems and literary narratives. Blicher is, as can be expected, still a highly esteemed source. The West Coast is represented by pictures of Fanø, Skagen, and Bovbjerg – the latter showing not only the sea in turmoil and the heavy pounding of the waves against the cliff, but also the obligatory ship wreckage, masts, and cargo floating on the water while fishermen have gathered on the beach to wait for the right moment to take action (Figure 10). It is such a scene that lies at the heart of Andersen’s En historie fra klitterne. The hero, Jørgen, is almost literally born from the sea. The beach is here the threshold between life and death: Jørgen’s mother is washed onto the coast from a wrecked ship and gives birth to the baby directly afterwards. But it is also a threshold between social classes and cultures: His parents being members of the Spanish aristocracy, Jørgen is to grow up among poor Jutland fishermen. Drengen trivedes, det adelige Blod holdt Varme og fik Kræfter ved den fattige Kost, voxte til i det ringe Huus; det danske Tungemaal blev hans Tungemaal, som Vestjyden taler det. Granatkjærnen fra Spaniens Jordsmon blev Marehalmens Plante paa Jyllands Vestkyst … (2:310) (The boy thrived, his noble blood sustaining warmth and gaining strength from the poor fare, as he grew in that humble hut; the Danish language, as spoken in West Jutland, became his own language. The pomegranate seed from Spain had become a sea-grass plant on Jutland’s West Coast …) [“A Story,” 550]

This description is about identity, national language, and culture as much as about social class (an eminent topic in Andersen’s work). But still more, it is about the core of human existence in so far as the author uses Jørgen’s story as exemplum in the debate about the immortality of the 5.

The texts were written by Jens Peter Trap, the country’s most renowned topographer and editor of the standard topography for the next hundred years, Statistisk-topographisk Beskrivelse af Kongeriget Danmark (1858–64; Statistic Topographic Description of the Kingdom of Denmark).

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Figure 10.  Lithograph by Emil Bærentzen showing the coast near Bovbjerg in West Jutland, from the 1856 illustrated album Danmark.

soul as a pillar of the Christian faith. A religious dimension is bestowed on the liminal space of the coast – not only Jørgen’s birth, but his fate up to his death is linked to the characteristics of the Jutland coast. Geographically his path of life leads from Nissumfjord to Skagen. There, he lapses into insanity due to a fatal accident in which he vainly tries to save his beloved from still another sinking ship. Finally, his life comes to an end when a sandstorm covers the old Skagen church that, in Andersen’s legend, is turned into the most beautiful sarcophagus. The church building links the story to contemporary reality since the ruin – only the tower extends up above the sand – was a must for every visitor to Skagen. But furthermore, the church represents another liminal and sacral space. The scattered bits and roots of Jørgen’s existence are united in the sign of immortality when the unfortunate hero leaves this world, together with his bride aboard the same ship whose wreckage once washed him to life and onto the Jutland coast: Og Skibet der hang i Choret dalede ned foran de To, det blev saa stort, saa pragtfuldt, med Silke-Seil og forgyldent Raa, Ankerne vare af det røde Guld og hvert Toug med Silketvinde, som der stod i den gamle Sang. Og Brudeparret steg ombord, og hele Kirkens Menighed fulgte med, og der var Plads og Herlighed for dem Alle. Og … Skibet løftedes og seilede med dem gjennem Havet, gjennem Luften. (2:333)

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(The ship hanging in the choir sank downward, in front of them, and grew vast and splendid with silken sails and golden masts, with anchors of red gold and ropes of silken twine, like the ship in the old ballad. The bridal couple stepped on board, and the whole congregation followed; there were room and enjoyment for all … The ship was lifted up and sailed with them through the ocean, through the air.) [“A Story,” 568]

The parallels to Blicher’s Marie are conspicuous; in both stories the liminality of the coast corresponds to a liminal state of mind. But precisely this liminality – a space excluded from rationality and civilization – exerts a fascination and provokes strife for appropriation and (internal) colonization. It is not difficult to see colonial motifs in the literary imagination of the West Coast. Oriental metaphors and comparisons  – to deserts, oases, or to the hospitality of the indigenous population – abound. And there is no description that would fail to mention the legacy of the continuous wreckages materialized in prows and planks transformed to doorposts and pediments. In his novella Ekkoet (1868; The Echo) Meïr Aron Goldschmidt mentions “de højst ufrivillige, men meget velkomne Gjæster, der i Taage eller af Storm drives paa Land. Folk af alle Nationer slynges ind paa denne Strand” (7:295) [the most involuntary, but very welcome guests who in fog or storm drift unto the shore. People of all nations are hurled unto this beach]. Thus, the West Coast exhibits a distorted picture of Denmark’s glorious past and present as an overseas trading nation. The Danish colonies in the West Indies and Denmark’s less reputable past as a slave-trading nation lurk around the corner of many west-coast stories. Goldschmidt: A Jewish writer’s Danish travels The case of Meïr Aron Goldschmidt is especially interesting in the literary history of the West Coast. Goldschmidt was, as is well known, a Jewish author. His life and work exhibited a neverresolved tension between his heritage and Danish cultural assimilation, which he never fully achieved. There were only a few times when this conflict at least momentarily seem to have been resolved, and one of them is associated with his accounts of the West Coast in the 1860s. In a review, Carl Ploug, the leading Danish national liberal, called the novella Ekkoet an enrichment of the national heritage, a judgment that made Goldschmidt finally feel acknowledged as a truly Danish author. In a letter to Ploug, he says that his life’s goal has always been “at blive fuldelig optaget i den danske Nation, optaget med uknækket Personlighed. Nu synes Maalet mig være naaet, Gud ske Lov!” (2: 165) [to be fully incorporated into the Danish nation, incorporated with unbroken personality. Now the goal seems to be reached, God be praised!]. Goldschmidt visited the West Coast in 1865 immediately after the German-Danish war. His journey resembles a rite of confirmation securing the Jutland peninsula for the national imagination. But at the same time, Goldschmidt takes personal advantage of the distinct national conception of space in order to inscribe himself as an author into the national discourse. He follows up well-established motifs, themes, and images, but not, however, without a slight self-reflective wink. Ekkoet spins a plot that, corresponding to the tradition, involves a love story and wreckers as well as a ship being stranded on the treacherous reeves. Thus, the coast is connected to a particular and, as we have seen, dubious “overseas economy.” But it is also

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presented as a moral outpost, a place of temptation and of salvation. Taking up the hermitmotif from Blicher, the narrator portrays the West Coast as retreat for those whose life has been wrecked, a place “for at i Stilhed at modtage Døden – eller måske finde Livet” (7: 297) [in order to silently await death – or maybe find life]. In Goldschmidt’s travelogue, Dagbog fra en Rejse paa Vestkysten af Vendsyssel og Thy 1865, the liminal character of the coastal space is highlighted (Behschnitt Liminale 73ff). The character of the place is “Usikkerhed” (uncertainty), says Goldschmidt, not only because of frequent storms, floods, and wrecks: “Usikkerheden gaar meget videre, Tingene flimre En for Øjnene, Skuffelse og behagelig Overraskelse skifte bestandig” (4:364) [The uncertainty goes much further, the things flicker before one’s eyes, disappointment and pleasant surprise change continuously]. Still more, the place seems to withdraw itself from all certain knowledge: “Imidlertid, umuligt at faa en Kjendsgjerning at støtte sig til; Alt bølgede og gyngede, som selve Landet syntes at gjøre, naar man saa ud til en af Siderne, til et af Havene” (4:367) [Anyway, impossible to get a fact to be based on; everything rocked and swayed, as the land itself seemed to do, when one looked out to one of the sides, to one of the seas]. Approaching “Grenen,” the uttermost point of the peninsula, the author falls into a liminal state of mind, his sensations and reflections blurring and dissolving. As if to reach solid ground under his feet and sort out his indistinct impressions, he takes recourse to a cartographic image of the place: “Det er det eneste Sted, hvor jeg har været, der ser ud som paa Kortet” (4:368) [This is the only place I have been that resembles the map]. But his certainty is immediately obliterated by the impression of something “aldeles fremmedartet” [absolutely strange]: Det Eneste, Kortet ikke kan give, er den hvide Brænding paa Revet udenfor Spidsen, og Søfuglene, som i stor Skare sidde derude. Da disse hvide Fugle pludselig lettede, gjorde det et Indtryk, som neppe lader sig beskrive. At sammenligne dem med Aander eller Spøgelser, vilde være trivielt og overdrevet; ej heller var det uhyggeligt, men aldeles fremmedartet, et besynderligt Bud om, at nu hørte Menneskeriget aldeles op, og Naturriget herskede ensomt og mysteriøst. (4:368) (The only thing the map cannot show is the white surge at the reef beyond the point and the seabirds sitting in big flocks out there. When these white birds suddenly took flight, it made an impression that is hardly describable. To compare them to ghosts or phantoms would be trivial and exaggerated; neither was it uncanny, but absolutely strange, a curious message that the kingdom of man ended here, and the kingdom of nature ruled alone and mysteriously.)

In this liminal space, the human domain ends; rational control and civilization give way to the mysterious, strange, and indiscernible. But of course, the author keeps control in so far as he makes the other accessible in his writing. The liminal state is transitional, as in Victor Turner’s anthropological model of the rites of passage, which lead the individual back to the social. But transition also means transformation. One does not leave the liminal space the same as one entered. For Goldschmidt, his travels to the West Coast and Skagen mean a passage through a liminal space that transforms him into a national author.

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Figure 11.  Illustration of Skagens Odde by C. Neumann that accompanied an early serial pre-printing of Goldschmidt’s travelogue in Illustreret Tidende in 1865.

On the point From the 1870s onwards, Skagen became a popular retreat for artists. While modernization and urbanization accelerated in the rest of the country and the Jutland heath was quickly transformed into farmland and forest plantations, Skagen remains fairly untouched by modernity. An otherness and indiscernability can still be ascribed to the place, which bears a promise both of originality – the truly national to be rediscovered – and of transformations, a moral and spiritual renaissance that would redeem the country from the fatal defeats of the recent past. Ole Wivel, thus, links Michael Ancher’s realistic depictions of the fishermen’s life to the dominant mood of the period: “den autentiske skildring af Skagens fiskere nærede illusionen om en ny tid for gamle Danmark” (71) [the authentic depiction of Skagen’s fishermen nourished the illusion of a new epoch for old Denmark]. Holger Drachmann is the Danish author most closely related to Skagen. From the 1870s on, he spent many summers there, and in his later years, it was his preferred place of residence. Beside a number of poems, novellas, and the musical play Strandby Folk (1882; The People from the Beach Village), his short narrative Lars Kruse (1879) is a most interesting documentation of the value and meaning Skagen had acquired in the collective imagination. The text begins with a description of the area and its characteristic features. At first glance, there are many parallels to Goldschmidt and other earlier Skagen descriptions, most conspicuously that of “det

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uforklarlige, det forunderlige” (304) [the unexplicable, the astonishing]. Drachmann writes of “et saadant Landskab, som man ikke kan analysere Stykke for Stykke” (305) [a landscape of the sort one cannot analyze piece by piece], about “det usikre, skuffende Lys” [the uncertain, deceptive light], and he sees the dunes as “en fuldstændig Kirkegaard i Midsommernatsbelysning” (309) [a regular cemetery in the light of the midsummer night]. The central theme of the narrative is the fishermen’s courage and dedication to saving the lives of shipwrecked seamen. The prototype of these unpretentious everyday heroes is Lars Kruse, the head of the Skagen rescue team, who is also immortalized in a painting of Michael Ancher (1882).6 But more clearly than in Goldschmidt’s work, the otherness, the liminal state of the place makes Skagen for Drachmann the starting point of a possible national reawakening. This idea is foundational for Lars Kruse and the poem with which it begins: “Naar det stunder mod Slut, naar det bærer mod Fald / I et Folk, som en Gang var et stort” (301) [When the end is near, when the crash is approaching / In a once great people] – these opening lines put the nation’s future in question, but they lead up to the conclusion that redemption is possible. It lies in the people, the humble inhabitants of an area like Skagen. They do their duty heroically without questioning and restrain from patriotic pomp and big words. The poem endorses the credibility of this message by placing the poet in the liminal space of the beach: there he sits, a bewildered sibyl, and inquires of the sea after the nature in its otherness, after the future of his country. The sea does not grant him a clear answer, “jeg hørte des Mumlen, men intet Svar” (302) [I heard its mumble, but no answer] – but still, the poet’s voice mediates a message of national renewal: a renewal from below, by the common people of Skagen. The disillusion of the Danish Dream Around the turn of the century, Henrik Pontoppidan employed the West Coast topos in his novel Lykke-Per, a roman à clef and critical mirror of contemporary Danish society. Pontoppidan’s works clearly move the reader away from idealism and romantic ideas about the nation. Per, the novel’s protagonist embodies the ideals of technological progress and economic development. He is an engineer inspired by the idea of promoting the national wealth by building a seaport and channel system on the West Coast thus expanding the national dream of internal colonization that began with the fertilization of the heath and would extend to the whole of Jutland. In order to realize his plans, he allies himself with the Salomon family whose wealth is founded on their prominence in Jewish financial circles, earlier colonial investments, and overseas trade. Imperial dreams and colonial past are neatly aligned in parallel in this finde-siècle fiction. It is important to see, however, how both Per’s megalomaniac ideas and the Danish national delusions are undermined by a strongly ironic undercurrent in Pontoppidan’s narrative. The title Lykke-Per opens a whole mirror cabinet of Danish national ideas drawing both on Andersen’s novel with (almost) the same name (Lykke-Peer; 1870) and alluding to Aladdin in Oehlenschläger’s romantic fairy play (1805), whom Georg Brandes in his essay on Oehlenschläger (1886) had named the prototype of the Danish idealistic and self-sufficient 6.

Michael Ancher actually helped Drachmann with his book about Lars Kruse (Rubow II 30).

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mind (Oxfeldt 30ff). In Pontoppidan’s novel, Ivan Salomon is a dubious figure in the eyes of the hero, who names Per an “udpræget Aladdintype, et Lykkebarn” (1:48) [a distinct Aladdin type, a lucky fellow]. The final failure of Per is as much a verdict about an individual life built on presumptions as about an illusionary national project. That the West Coast thereby becomes part of a literary reckoning with Danish society and its self-image is interesting enough in and of itself, yet still even more interesting is the fact that the last chapter of Lykke-Per turns back to the romantic hermit-motif. An obvious Blicher-pastiche, the narrator leads the reader to a barren and deserted coast region where Per spends the last years of his life in humble service to the community: Naar man paa Vejen fra Oddesund til Thisted er kommen forbi Ydby med dens mange dystre “Kauer” og “Daase”7 og herfra søger vestover til den kønne lille By Vestervig med Liden Kirstens Grav og videre mod Nord, kommer man til et fattigt, vejrpisket Land … Det er en Klitog Sumpegn, ens af Udseende Vinter og Sommer, blaagrøn af Marehalm, rødlig af Skavgræsser eller Lyng, der alene modstaar Havgusens Saltlud. (2:331) (When one on the way from Oddesund to Thisted, has passed Ydby with its many gloomy “Kauer” and “Daase” and from here turns west to the pretty little village Vestervig with Liden Kirsten’s grave and further up north, one comes to a poor, weather-lashed land…. It is a dune and marsh area, uniform in appearance both winter and summer, blue green from beach grass, reddish from horsetail or heath, which alone resist the sea mist’s salty brine.)

No surprise, then, that the reader learns about Per’s last years from scattered fragments of his diary precisely as in Blicher’s Eneboeren. Thus, Lykke-Per concludes a century of Jutland and West-Coast images by citing and reusing bits and patterns from the collective imagination and building up an unmasked picture of misled ambitions and distorted dreams. The twentieth century does not put an end to these images; it seems, however, that Jutland and the coast by now have been appropriated and become familiar to the collective imagination to such a degree that they have ceased to exert the attraction of the exotic and liminal.8 The idea of the coast as a liminal space is not at all unique to Denmark, though it seems that here it had a peculiarly dominating position in the imagined geography of the nation. In Swedish literature, the skerries represent in a similar way the exposed and liminal state between culture and nature, morals and amorality, order and chaos. Strindberg’s novel I havsbandet (1890; By the Open Sea) may well be the prototypical example of sketching the breakdown of its hero, the scientist Axel Borg, due to continuous isolation among the skerries. This novel 7.

“Kauer” and “Daase” are local terms for different types of barrows. Pontoppidan not only adds some local color to his description, with all probability he also alludes to Blicher who used the terms frequently as can be deduced from Ordbog over det Danske Sprog, entry “Dos.”

8.

That Karen Blixen (alias Isak Dinesen) in one of her Syv fantastiske fortœllinger (1935; Seven Gothic Tales), “Syndfloden over Norderney” (“The Deluge at Norderney”), resumes the theme in an exemplary manner (though transferred from the Danish to the German coast) may just confirm this supposition. Like the other Gothic Tales, this narrative about four people in the loft of a flooded barn exploring with wit and charm the nature of love and death, self-denial, and deception, consciously employs the tools of romantic storytelling going back in setting, costume, and ideas to earlier periods.

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is discussed at greater length elsewhere in this volume (in an essay by Henrik Johnsson), but here it can be emphasized that the passage through liminal space is portrayed quite clearly in Borg’s trajectory: from the mainland to the skerries in the first chapter and out onto the open sea in the last, out to a final dissolution of rationality and male identity. Strindberg was not the first, though, to use the skerries as an ambivalent and dubious place. As early as the 1840s, the Swedish bestselling author Emilie Flygare-Carlén (1807–92) situated her gothic tales of smuggling, murder, and moral depravation in the exotic ambiance of the Bohuslän skerries with Rosen på tistelön (1842; The Rose on Thistel Island) being the best-known example. In Norwegian literature as well, there are examples of the coast as a liminal space. Here, it must suffice to mention the two foremost Norwegian dramatists: in Henrik Ibsen’s Fruen fra havet (1888; Lady from the Sea) the spatial opposition of inner fjord and open sea paves the way for a whole set of fundamental oppositions such as narrowness and openness, reason and fantasy, bourgeois society and freedom. Dreams and desires, but also fears and horrors are directed to the outer coastline. In several of Jon Fosse’s plays, too, the coast and the sea represent a space of vague longing, fatigue, and fear: a retreat that turns out to be a trap as in Nokon kjem til å komme (1996; Someone is Going to Come); or a place of dissolution and disappearance as in Eg er vinden (2008; I am the Wind). Though both the Swedish skerries and the Norwegian coast have been described as liminal spaces in the same way as the Jutland West Coast, their distinct traits and specific positions in the national imagination have still to be explored. The postcolonial West Coast The notion that Jutland and the West Coast today have ceased to be attractive spaces for the literary imagination seems to need a nuanced consideration in the light of Jamal Mahjoub’s novel The Carrier (1998). Oddly enough, in this post-colonial novel of migration and intercultural encounters, Jutland is still an uttermost periphery and the coast a place for wreckage. Mahjoub, a writer with Sudanese roots who lived several years in Denmark, tells the story of Rachid, an Arab scholar from the beginning of the seventeenth century, whose ship, disoriented by mist and storm, is washed onto the Jutland coast. On a second time level, we learn about Hassan, an expert on Middle Eastern culture, who is sent to an archaeological excavation site in Jutland to investigate a curious find, an Arab “geographical instrument used for orienting oneself at prayer times” (112). Spatial orientation is one of the core motifs of the novel. Arab astronomy meets Copernicus and Tycho Brahe; geocentrism meets heliocentrism; the religious instrument meets the telescope. The novel leads to the threshold of a modern worldview with the action triggered as much by the desire to know as by the desire for power and riches. The imagined geography of the novel not only exposes a sharp contrast of north and south, of Denmark and the Arab world, but also between metropolis and periphery. Copenhagen and still more Algiers are presented as meeting places of commerce, cultures, and languages: “The harbour, packed with vessels arriving from every conceivable point on the globe, rings to the tune of unfamiliar tongues in the breathless, incessant chatter of humanity and the turn of the tide” (1). Moreover, the narrator displays a whole range of Jutland topoi: apart from being a place for shipwrecks, it appears as an utterly backward region, an “obscure corner of the country” (207). In a neat

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reversal of colonial fantasies, Jutland in Mahjoub’s novel becomes a heart of darkness where reason, science, and humanism perish under the pressure of prejudice and narrow-mindedness that easily can be interpreted as metaphor for contemporary Danish nationalism (Moslund 292–93). For both Rachid and Hassan, their stay in Jutland becomes a borderline experience, a passage through a liminal space though the outcome of their transformation stays uncertain. It could be that renegotiations of cultural identities and national territories in times of globalization again draw the geographical imagination to those spaces that once, in the nineteenth century, were attributed a liminality to be used and exploited for the construction of national identity. Certainly, Mahjoub’s The Carrier rewrites the Danish literary discourse on Jutland and the coast. Even so, the liminal character of these spaces – the coast, the heath, the skerries – will not be restored easily. As geographical spaces, they have been mapped and appropriated long ago, and as literary spaces they have been exploited thoroughly and lost their attractiveness around the turn of the nineteenth century; it would need some fundamental displacements in time or in perspective, as in Mahjoub’s novel, to restore their liminality and to reuse them as spaces for creative renewal.

“Far higher mountains” Mountains in Danish and Norwegian romantic poetry Louise Mønster

Ascent Many people are attracted to mountains. Unmovable and majestic massifs – squeezed out of the earth’s core millions of years ago – they now stand raised above the flow of ordinary life speaking with an enviable calmness. In other instances, they prod the innate human urge to climb and conquer, leading to a struggle with nature and oneself in order to get up to where the path is least passable. The reward for the effort is an expansive view and a sensation of spiritual exhilaration and excitement – a feeling that one’s physical elevation is accompanied by a spiritual one. Mountains are beyond doubt privileged places. On top of the mountain, one can sense both the earth-boundedness of the body and the freedom of the soul. Here one’s thoughts can soar, but one can also be struck by vertigo or be caught by a fear of the abyss. In other words, mountains seem to introduce certain types of sentiments within, and, therefore, it is not surprising that they play a central role in poetic imagination and especially in lyric poetry. Even less surprising, is the fact that mountains hold an important position in Nordic poetry since as a whole, the Nordic countries constitute a mountainous region. The perception of mountains thus portrayed is neither universal nor timeless, however. Mountains have not always offered themselves as a mirror for man and spoken to his feelings and possibilities of individual development. On the contrary, it is a modern concept that is the product of the process of secularization whereby the Creator withdraws from the created step by step thus leaving nature and man to their own devices and to those of each other. It is a process whereby one goes from having seen nature as the book of God – i.e. something whose only purpose is to reflect a greater, predestined order – to seeing it as a book in its own right, as the book of the human family or as something to which one can turn when seeking a greater understanding of oneself. Within the Nordic context, this move away from Christian metaphysics guiding the perception of nature begins in the middle of the eighteenth century. A decisive change took place at that historical juncture, and as romantic poetry gained acceptance, nature poetry achieved consolidation as a separate genre. It is a genre that in its Nordic exposition assigned a notable role to mountains. Mountains not only offered the increasingly self-sustaining human with the possibility of sublime experiences, but were also a decisive factor in the establishment of Nordic identities. Nature poetry and national poetry often go hand in hand, which is evident when one focuses on the way in which mountains are depicted in romantic poetry. Here one can discern the diversifying process of liberation that took place during the last half of the eighteenth century, when the aesthetic, nature, the individual, and the nation all stood out as increasingly independent entities. There are pronounced differences, however, when one looks at the significance of mountains in Nordic patriotic poetry – differences, that have to do with the geography of the respective countries. This contrast is clearest when comparing Denmark and Norway. While Norway doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.08mon © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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has the largest mountain range in northern Europe, there is not even one mountain in Denmark. Therefore, mountains play a part in the relationship between Norway and Denmark because of their presence but also in their absence. Whether one (as in the case of Norwegians) has high peaks, deep fjords, and rocky coasts or (as in the case of the Danes) a gently rolling landscape with low hills, beech forests, and sandy beaches, these features become a defining factor in understanding the respective nations and national characters. This tendency is particularly clear in the first half of the nineteenth century when the nations of northern Europe consolidated their political and cultural positions. Notably in the case of Norway and Denmark, this course of events intensified with Norway’s separation from the Danish kingdom in 1814. Against this background, the mountain emerges clearly as a central topos in the process by which a concept of nature rooted in metaphysics and religion retreats, and the individual as well as the nation assert themselves. Centered on Danish and Norwegian poetry, this essay intends to demonstrate the manner in which the mountain is a central topos in this process. The essay begins with the poetry of the late eighteenth century, has its main focus on the romantic poetry of the nineteenth century, and concludes at the beginning of the twentieth century just as secularization is on the ascent. Here it is possible to find examples of poetry in which mountains do not suggest the elevated and heavenly, but rather quite the opposite: they lead man back to the earth from which he has arisen. On the hill: The self and the landscape In Nordic literary history, the publication of two poems in particular has been understood as the first step in a changed perception of nature (Bredsdorff; Mortensen; Sørensen): the Norwegian Christian Braunmann Tullin’s “Majdagen” (1758; The Day in May) and the Dane Johannes Ewald’s “Rungsteds Lyksaligheder: En Ode” (1775; The Pleasures of Rungsted: An Ode). These poems are characterized as being an extension of metaphysics sustaining nature in the sense that their delight in nature almost automatically constitutes a tribute to the Creator. They also point, however, towards more modern perceptions. This tendency is due, not least, to the fact that the lyric self in these poems asserts its own power and in doing so approaches the divine. Earlier literature was dominated by the concept of ἀγάπη [agape], which stressed the absolute difference between the Creator and the created and ascribed to God alone the power of redemption. Subsequently a new perception broadly based on ἔρως [eros] emerged emphasizing that the personal longing of humans together with the spark of the divine could lead man to a realization of his own inherent creative potential.1 That these poems belong in this latter context is linked to the fact that the new faith in the self in both poems is accompanied by a spatial elevation. When the I in Tullin’s poem liberates itself from the confines of the city described in highly negative terms and moves towards nature portrayed in strikingly positive terms, it settles on a hill. This course is also the path taken in Ewald’s poem, in which the speaker’s position on a hill at the inn of Rungsted is the point of departure for the depiction of nature. Here again, the hill enables the I’s enhanced belief 1.

For a more detailed account of the relationship between ἀγάπη and ἔρως, see Mortensen 56ff.

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in itself to connect with the possibility of a more expansive view. It is precisely this broader view, which allows one not only to see what is directly ahead but also to achieve an aesthetic distance and allow nature to be seen as a greater whole, that is the important development in relation to nature’s appearance as landscape. Hence, not only do the poems depict a process of awareness whereby the self becomes conscious of itself and its own capabilities, but they also unfold a landscape. While it could be argued that these developments do not have much to do with each other, Klaus P. Mortensen nonetheless suggests in Himmelstormerne: En linje i dansk naturdigtning (1993; Storming the Heavens: A Direction in Danish Nature Poetry) that the self’s emergence as the I and nature’s as a landscape are intimately connected developments (87). The conception of nature as landscape is addressed in Joachim Ritter’s book Landschaft: Zur Funktion des Ästhetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft (1963; Landscape: Concerning the Function of the Aesthetic in Modern Society). Ritter describes how nature becomes landscape when one enters it without any practical purpose thus allowing it to render itself present in a sensitive, sensuous manner. According to Ritter, the precondition for this experience is that the traditional and familiar relation to nature has disappeared. In other words, an urban culture must exist as a contrast, and Tullin’s poem clearly takes its point of departure in the speaker’s disgust with the city. At the same time, Tullin shifts the vertical structure of classical thought (in which the earthly and the celestial are contrasting elements) to a horizontal understanding in which the city and nature constitute the primary pair of opposites. Similarly in the case of Ewald, a preliminary distance from nature must be assumed for the poet to become so overwhelmed and aroused by its scenery. With few exceptions, such an aesthetic relationship with nature had not been evoked before. When Petrarch, for example, climbed Mount Ventoux in 1335, he was afflicted by moral misgivings and had to reject his venture as an expression of self-forgetfulness and a frivolous admiration of the earthly. This heavy religious mantle is cast aside in Nordic literature during the last half of the eighteenth century. In the poems by Tullin and Ewald, no moral torment can be observed in connection with their actions. Although the view of nature present in both poems leads to praising God, it also returns to the earthly that now appears surrounded by the enlightening glow of the celestial. In Tullin’s poem, one is not only presented with anticipations of a romantic, pantheistic way of thinking, but the poem also ends with the depiction of a wedding and, in its celebration of matrimonial love, heaven is brought down to earth in a very compelling way: Nu saae jeg Himlen smiled’, Jeg saae at Lykken selv fra Skjebnens Arme iled’, Og af en talrik Flok Velsignelser omringet, Just i det store Øjeblik, Da Ja mod Ja i møde gik, Sig ned til Dig og til Din Mage svinged’. (87) (Now I saw that heaven smiled, I saw that Joy itself hastened from the arms of Fate, And by a numerous flock of Blessings surrounded,

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98 Precisely at the big moment When Yes met with Yes, swung itself down to you and your beloved.)2

Likewise, Ewald’s praise of God is followed by an assertion of the power of humanity itself, “See Støvet kan bære” (89) [Look the dust can bear] he calls out euphorically along with a metapoetical comment celebrating the poet who also here brings the celestial down to earth: “Himle forsamles omkring ham; og Lyst / Udbredes i Menniskets Bryst” (89) [Heavens gather around him; and pleasure / Spreads within the breast of man]. He also replaces the formerly divine “Thou” with a more worldly “one.” At the end of the poem it is revealed that the real source of inspiration is not God, but a woman. First and foremost the lyric self addresses and wishes to capture his beloved whereby the earthly ἔρως [eros] clearly conquers the celestial ἀγάπη [agape]. On the mountaintop: The self and the sublime Following these two preromantic poets’ experiences with landscape, God, love, and their own individuality, experiences that were no longer conceived of in a rigorous hierarchical relationship, a consideration of the work of the romantic poets Jens Baggesen, Schack Staffeldt, Henrik Wergeland, Andreas Munch, and Johan Sebastian Welhaven is in order. As times change, the lyric I proceeds to the top of the mountain rather than speaking from the vantage point of a hill. Romantic poets travel further and further into nature, and as individuals stand ever more securely on their own feet, challenging their surroundings and their own position in Creation by speaking from ever greater heights. Nature, which previously had been considered useless and therefore unnoticed or even hostile, becomes a path to the elevated and sublime for the romantic poet (Wærp 14). The poets hereby demonstrate that it is exactly that which cannot be subjected to any consideration of utility or harnessed to some specific mode of production that can become aesthetically fertile. As Mortensen suggests, the sublime relates to “sindets mægtige løftelse ved konfrontationen med det ufatteligt store i naturen” (94) [the mighty elevation of the mind that occurs when one confronts the incomprehensible greatness of nature]. Mortensen describes how the feeling of dread, which is a complex emotion consisting of fear and exaltation that was originally directed toward God, is now transferred to the largest objects in the geo-cosmos (95). The sublime is an elevated, intricate sentiment, which is the feeling that mountains can evoke. In Danish literature, two important poems within the tradition of the sublime are Jens Baggesen’s “Paa Spidsen af St. Gottard” (1791; On the Pinnacle of St. Gotthard) and Schack Staffeldt’s “Paa Toppen af Mont-Cenis” (1804; On the Summit of Mount Cenis). These are poems whose titles accentuate an elevated position in nature. Here, the lyric I finds itself on the highest point of the mountain, a setting whose topographically extreme position corresponds to the emotional expression of pleasure tainted by dread, with which the lyric self senses both

2.

This and all subsequent translations are my own. I wish to thank Jette Nì Mhaolcatha for her help therewith.

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the greatness of the creation and the Creator and, more importantly, the power of his own ability to create. Baggesen’s poem depicts the poet’s journey from ordinary nature to divine nature. Here, the sounds of the world below vanish, and when confronting the greatness of nature, the lyric self also becomes silent. The sublime in this experience is framed by the oxymoron “den Helliges festlige Rædsel” (127) [the festive horror of the saint], and the overwhelming character of the experience takes its toll upon the language of the poem, which is marked by exclamation points, apostrophes, and broken syntax. However, the destruction and cessation of ordinary language also leads to the breakthrough of a more profound realization. Hence the eleventh line reads: “Ordet døde; men Aanden igienfødt levende svang sig” (127) [The word died; but the reborn spirit soared]. The impediments of the conceptual world dissolve, and instead “Ordenes Siel” (127) [the spirit of the words] is perceived. As a matter of course, the poem inscribes itself within a religious frame of reference, but it also shows how the self, driven by its own power, can rise to the acknowledgment of the divine. An artistic product, the poem bears witness to the poet’s ability to provide his sublime experience with an adequate linguistic expression – despite his allegedly falling silent. While silence strikes the poet in Baggesen, there is an almost infernal noise in Staffeldt’s poem. On the top of Mount Cenis, the poet experiences a tremendous onset of rough weather including a storm with thunder and lightning. Yet, he is not frightened by the rage of nature. On the contrary, he is encouraged, and in the middle of nature’s powerful demonstration he experiences the sublime, which as in Baggesen is depicted by opposing sentiments: “Hvilken bange Vellyst! liflig Gruen! / Orm og Guddom stride i mit Bryst: / Denne seirer – o Natur! din Truen / Kun mig ryster til en Seraphs Lyst” (383) [What frightened exaltation! delicious horror! / Worm and God struggle in my chest: / This wins – o nature! your threats / Only shake me to a Seraph’s pleasure]. The experience of nature’s drama acts as a catalyst for his own ability to create, and just as everything around him is uprooted, he feels that he himself remains firm. The self leaves the encounter even more confident in his own ability to create and in his capability to control the rage of nature with beauty. In comparison to Baggesen’s poem, it is also worth noting that the religious frame of reference is diminished. Staffeldt’s poem it is not about the greatness of God, but rather about the divine self. Here the hand of creation belongs to the lyric I. While Baggesen and Staffeldt are writing about their sublime adventures on mountaintops around the turn of the nineteenth century, similar expressions find their voice somewhat later in Norwegian poetry. That this is the case has to do with the fact that the breakthrough of romanticism occurred later in Norway than in Denmark. Important romantic poets nonetheless soar to the top of mountains here as well. Henrik Wergeland’s “Paa Skakastølstinden” (1825; On Skakastol’s Peak) is characterized by a dramatic depiction of nature including thunder and lightning similar to that experienced by Staffeldt. But in contrast to Staffeldt, the poet himself is not in the middle of the storm. On the contrary, he has risen above the anger of nature, and from this elevated position he reveals his commitment to traditional religious discourse. The poem unfolds as a continuation of a classical religious way of thinking in which the upper divine world that the poet meets on top of the mountain is connected with goodness while the lower world represents blundering injustice. Therefore, in this poem the mountain does not so much inspire the experience of the sublime – it only evokes a light dizziness in the thirteenth

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stanza – but rather represents a place for convalescence and refuge for a self that is plagued by the human world and bound to the earth and must, therefore, in the end descend to “mit Helved” (73) [my Hell]. Similarly, the I in Andreas Munch’s “Paa Fjeldet” (1848; On the Mountain) is an inhabitant of the earth. In this poem, the poet has climbed up the mountain with the expectation of a great experience: “Her skulde Sjælen kunne vides ud” (215) [Here, the soul should be able to expand]. The poet entertains the idea of the sublime of the earlier poets, but unlike Wergeland, he experiences no fulfillment on high. He is disappointed and wishes that he were down off the mountain again. Just at this moment, however, the world beneath disappears from his sight. Unable to find a home in either the upper or the lower world, a change of attitude takes place. He realizes that he himself is the only firm point of reference. As Wærp points out, “Oppstigningen og bevegelsen i diktet fører ikke til Gud, men til grensen, der diktjegets individualitet blir truet, og jeget blir kastet tilbake til seg selv som det eneste absolutte” (98) [The ascent and movement in the poem do not lead to God, but to the border, where the individuality of the lyric I is threatened, and the I is thrown back on itself as the only absolute]. While the language of the poem is characteristic of romanticism, it is very modern in its understanding of the autonomy of the individual. The tone in Munch’s poem is optimistic and as such is different from that in Welhaven’s “En Somnambule jeg stod paa Fjeldets Brink” (161) (1838; A Sleepwalker I stood on the Edge of the Mountain). Once again the poet has traveled up to the peak. As a sleepwalker, he is captivated by the spacious view and by the beauty of nature. However, the romantic mountain dream still fails to form a lasting refuge. The idyllic experience explodes as a voice full of pain calls the I’s name, and he plunges down to the bedrock – if not in fact then metaphorically. The happiness and joy evoked by the sight of nature are replaced by the melancholy and pain related to the world of man. Munch’s poem works with a traditional vertical structure. But in contrast to Wergeland, its primary antithesis does not consist in the difference between the heavenly and the earthly. On the contrary, it is primarily the dream of nature’s idyll that is juxtaposed to the painful reality of man. As a result, the reader also experiences the withdrawal of the classical metaphysics of nature in Welhaven’s poem and sees how poetry is increasingly centered around man. Whereas the Danish poems issuing from the top of mountains are written in foreign lands (in the examples cited, the Swiss and French Alps respectively), the descriptions in Norwegian poems are consistent with pictures of Norwegian mountains, and in the case of Wergeland, a specific Norwegian peak is pointed out. While Danes have to go abroad to experience the sublime feeling related to the exultant nature of mountains, Norwegians can do so at home. However, it is possible that the overwhelming character of Baggesen’s and Staffeldt’s experiences has been heightened by the fact that they are in natural settings that are foreign to them. Furthermore, in what follows, the confrontation with nature’s grandeur offered by mountains also gives rise to homesickness. It is a curious eighteenth-century phenomenon that mountains elicit this feeling (Gemzøe 272). Poems of homesickness can, thus, be seen as an intermediate stage between the sublime poems that revolve around the self and songs about the homeland whose descriptions have a general national aim.

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Poems of homesickness and longing In classical poetry about nature, metaphysical longing is vertically orientated in that it seeks a home in the divine sphere. In contrast, the preferred nostalgia of romantic poetry is of a more secular variety. Here, the longing for paradise and entry into the upper world does not dominate. Rather a more concrete homesickness focuses on one’s homeland and the landscape by which one has been shaped. This feeling is especially prominent when one finds oneself in unfamiliar surroundings. Seen from abroad, home appears more clearly, and patriotic feelings unfold in the juxtaposition of the familiar and the foreign. However, in this regard, significant differences can be observed distinguishing Danish from Norwegian poetry. That mountains awaken feelings of homesickness in both parties is clear, but they do so in contrasting ways: on the one hand mountains seem to evoke a feeling of alienation in the Danish romantic poets while on the other they give rise to a sense of recognition among the Norwegians. Adam Oehlenschläger’s “Hiemvee” (1805; Homesickness), Steen Steensen Blicher’s “Hiemvee” (1814; Homesickness), N. F. S. Grundtvig’s: “Langt høiere Bjerge” (1820; Far Higher Mountains), and H. C. Andersen’s “Jylland” (1860; Jutland) are all poems that demonstrate the way in which the theme of homesickness plays a central role in nineteenth-century Danish poetry. In addition, they all deal in the dualism between the home and the foreign. Both Oehlenschläger and Blicher stress the theme of homesickness in the titles of their poems. Furthermore, there are similarities between the two poems as they subscribe to a sentimental tradition in which the poet confesses his belonging to his homeland, which in turn is described in positive and feminine terms: not the fatherland, but rather the motherland attracts the poets. Oehlenschläger’s poem was written in Halle, Germany. In the poem, the lyric I has seen mountains and peaks under foreign skies but is unable to feel at home there. As a result, the poet breaks with the idea that only a rocky landscape can imprint itself upon the heart of the sensitive man and thematizes the view that a differently gendered and undramatic nature, such as that typical of Denmark, can also have an impact on the mind. In particular, he mentions missing the beech forest, which has assumed an almost emblematic status in Danish patriotic songs and is used as a frequent element in the depiction of nature (Conrad 206). While Oehlenschläger’s poem addresses the Danish nation, the feeling of homesickness acquires a more specific character in Blicher’s poem. The poem moves from a tribute to the motherland – which in this case also includes the Norwegian mountains – to an acknowledgment of his birthplace on the moor in Jutland. The moor represents a special natural phenomenon in Danish topography: its sandy earth often overgrown with heather makes it a worthy counterpart to the high and hard mountains of foreign countries. In Grundtvig’s “Langt høiere Bjerge,” the tribute to Denmark forms a similar contrast to what is found elsewhere and in the process a concept emerges that has become very durable. Although Denmark may seem externally small and impoverished in the eyes of a foreigner, its exterior qualities are entirely counterbalanced by its inward character. A positive smallness and down-to-earth quality are therefore advanced as typical Danish traits. Moreover in Grundtvig’s poem, another significant example of the important role played by mountains in Danish literature is clear, which is to say, as an absence. That there are no real mountains consisting of rock massifs in Denmark is also illustrated in the following lines from Andersen’s “Jylland”: “Vildt i

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Vest med Klittag, Sandet / Løfter sig i Bjerges Sted,” (320) [Wild in the west with marram grass, the Sand / Rises and takes the Place of Mountains]. These last two poems point to a change of focus from poems about homesickness to poems about the homeland, which are distinguished from one another by only a fragile demarcation since the poems about homesickness are also directed towards the motherland and the poet’s place of birth. The central task in the poems is that of turning something apparently negative to one’s own advantage. As Flemming Conrad suggests, this tendency is consistent with Danish patriotic songs in that they deal with the theme of “Little Denmark,” whereby “over for fraværet af materiel rigdom og ydre pragt sættes som noget mere afgørende de menneskelige kvaliteter, følelsen af hjemhørighed og de rige livsbetingelser, landet byder de (beskedne) indbyggere” (200) [in response to the lack of material wealth and outer pomp, human qualities, such as the sense of belonging and rich living conditions, offered by the country to its (modest) citizens, are put forward as being more important]. It is interesting to note that the absence of mountains – one of the most impressive and dramatic kinds of natural phenomena – comes to serve as an honor for the Danes. As formulated by Grundtvig in “Langt høiere Bjerge”: “Vi er ikke skabte til Høihed og Blæst, / Ved Jorden at blive, det tjener os bedst!” (Udvalgte Digte 62) [We are not created for height and wind, / Remaining earthbound, that is what serves us best!]. The situation is very different in Norwegian romantic literature in which mountains are naturally enveloped in sympathetic feelings and in a positive sense give rise to homesickness. Examples can be found in Johan Welhaven’s “Bergens Stift” (1838; Bergen’s Bishopric) and Aasmund Olavsson Vinjes’s “Ved Rondarne” (1861; On Rondarne). Both are linked to specific places in Norway that represent the land of childhood or youth in the minds of these poets.

Figure 12.  View from the National Tourist Route at Aurlandsfjellet in western Norway. Photo: Daria Medvedeva/Shutterstock

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As such, the poems are consistent with the tradition of connecting the homeland to sentimental conceptions of childhood’s sense of the outside world, which has been prominent since the end of the eighteenth century (Conrad 197). Welhaven’s poem is written from a physically and temporally nonspecific distance, “min Længsel følger / til de fjerne Bølger, / hvor min Barndom gyngede saa tidt” (159) [my longing follows / to the faraway waves, / where my childhood often gently bobbed]. The land of childhood, moreover, in the poem has a distinct western Norwegian topography consisting of valleys, rivers, fjords, forests, and, last but not least, the mountain heights. All of these play a central role and are described with their more appealing and dramatic aspects alike. One hears of the “lune, farverige Fjeld” (160) [warm, colorful mountain] along with the “vilde Jøkler” (159) [wild Glaciers] that split the clouds apart. Vinje’s poem, on the other hand, refers to the area of Rondarne, which is a mountainous region east of the Gudbrand Valley in central Norway. The poem was written retrospectively and takes the form of a poem of longing and remembering. Here, confronted with the mountainous landscape, the mature poet re-experiences the past in the clarifying light of acquired knowledge. The poem begins, “No seer eg atter slike Fjøll og Dalar / som deim eg i min fyrste Ungdom saag” (Stegane 308) [Now I again see such mountains and valleys / as those I gazed upon in my earliest youth]. Here the sight of the mountainous topography is highlighted as a decisive factor in the poet’s sense of continuity with the past. The mountains are depicted as natural phenomena, which, raised above the flow of time, awaken the same feelings that the poet had formerly experienced and bring him into contact with his youth: “Eg drøymer no, som fyrr eg altid drøymde, / naar slike Fjøll eg saag i Lufti blaa” (308) [I am dreaming now, as I always used to dream, / when I saw such mountain through the airy blue]. In stark contrast to the Danish poets who often felt alienated when faced with mountains, the I of Vinje’s poem only seems to feel completely at home in this setting. The mountain ambience lies as a watermark in the soul of the poet, which he will carry with him until his death. Songs about the homeland and national anthems Mountains serve contrasting functions in Danish and Norwegian national romanticism, and these differences are not diminished in the national anthems. As early as the poems of Tullin and Ewald, the variations between the Danish and Norwegian landscapes are obvious. Whereas Tullin’s poem focused on a larger landscape consisting of mountains, caves, ice, sea, and valleys, the aspects of nature in Ewald’s were smaller, not only in scale but also in dramatic effect. What could be seen here were the woods, the brook, the inlet with its playful waves, and the garden. A consistent element is that Danish national descriptions are more idyllic and consequently the eroticization and feminization of nature is a specifically Danish phenomenon absent in the Norwegian tradition (Wærp 393). Given that there are not many uncultivated areas in Denmark, it is not surprising that depictions of Danish nature often take a cultivated form. In that same way, the eroticization of the Danish landscape might also be seen as the effect of the soft and undulating curves of the land. This quintessentially Danish topographic feature undoubtedly lies nearer the conception of the feminine than do the steep Norwegian mountains and deep

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Figure 13.  Cultivated, undulating landscape in Jutland, Denmark. Photo: kimson/Shutterstock

fjords.3 In any case, the clear differences in topography play an important role in explaining the divergence in artistic expression witnessed above.4 A central feature in the poems about the homeland is that nature holds a strong position. Nature is something immediately present, widely shared, and can function as a sounding board for national sentiment. It is true that the previous group of poems also praises the homeland, but in poems written explicitly as songs about the homeland and as national anthems, the extolling of the specific characteristics of the land of birth becomes even more significant. In this case, the demarcations between categories are very tenuous, but nonetheless it is useful to define songs about the homeland in broader terms as a genre praising the motherland as opposed to national anthems, which are songs chosen to represent a country on ceremonial occasions. 3.

Henning Wærp also underlines the differences between Danish and Norwegian nature poetry in the appendix “Min natur og din natur: Natur og landskap i norsk, dansk og nederlandsk diktning” (379) in Diktet natur, where he compares two illustrated books on Norwegian and Danish nature, i.e. Slik er Norge (1982) and Malernes og forfatterens Danmark (1986). Similar results are reached, when Flemming Conrad compares the Danish collection of homeland songs Dan. Samling af Fædrelandssange (1820) with the Norwegian Norraena: En Samling af Forsøg til norske Nationalsange (1821).

4.

Yet another corroborating example can be found in the work of Norwegian poet Theodor Caspari. In his book Norsk Naturfølelse i det nittende Aarhundrede (1917; The Norwegian Feeling for Nature during the Nineteenth Century), he states, with barely concealed patriotism: “Tydeligere og tydeligere viste det sig, at det vidtstrakte Fjeldrige, som Danmark, det lille Sletteland, havde vidst at lægge under sig, dog var noget andet og mere end en Provins. At det forskjellig fra Danmark i Natur, Næringsveie og Levesæt, sluttelig ogsaa maatte søge andre Veie for Tænkning og Aandsnæring end dette Land” (1) [It became more and more clear, however, that the extensive mountain kingdom that Denmark, the small flatland, had tried to dominate was something more than a province. Different from Denmark in nature, trade and way of living, it finally had to seek other ways of thinking and of spiritual nourishment than those of this country].

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The interest in songs about the homeland is characteristic of the period from the middle of the eighteenth century and on through the nineteenth, and it must be seen in the light of the new ideas on nationality and the nation state.5 The emphasis of Herder (among others) of the specific character of different periods, cultures, and ethnic groups, which stands in contrast to the universalist understanding of history and the conception of general ideals characteristic of the Enlightenment, inspired the replacement of a cyclical way of thinking by an evolutionary one. Therefore the ideal is no longer ahistorical and universal; it is national, secular, and individual. From a Danish perspective, the interest in the national is further strengthened by a series of historic events: the battle at Reden (1801), the bombardment of Copenhagen (1807), the bankruptcy of the Danish state (1813), and the loss of Norway (1814) are circumstances that are often mentioned in explaining why an inner, cultural armament and increased nationalistic focus is established in Denmark at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Similarly, one can point out with regard to Norway that although the liberation from Denmark did not lead to sovereignty – since Norway was forced to enter into union with Sweden lasting until 1905 – it provided Norway with a free constitution and increased independence. Radical changes thus occurred in the status of Norway that are an important prerequisite for the blossoming of the Norwegian national romantic feeling. The fact that a contest was arranged in Denmark in 1818 with the view of finding the most appropriate national anthem is a remarkable sign of the emerging national sentiment that developed at that time.6 The competition was not a complete success, and the poems received were quickly forgotten.7 It nonetheless led to a sharp increase in songs about the homeland, often with prominent authors entering the arena. Subsequently, the national-anthem fever spread to Norway where in the summer of 1820 a similar contest was held. Here the winner was Henrik Anker Bjerregaard with the poem “Norsk Nationalsang” (1820; Norwegian National Anthem), which in practice, however, was replaced by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s “Ja vi elsker dette Landet” (1863/1870; Yes, We Love this Country). Both Ewald’s “Kong Christjan stoed ved høien Mast” (1779; King Christian Stood by the Tall Mast) and Oehlenschläger’s “Fædrelands-Sang” (1819; Song of the Fatherland) function as national anthems in Denmark. Oehlenschläger’s poem is normally referred to by its first line: “Der er et yndigt Land” (There is a Lovely Land) and can be characterized as a traditional poem about the homeland in that it not only praises the land of birth, but also Denmark’s history, language, the national character, the flag, the capital, God, and the king. In addition, it places nature in the center. The tone of the poem is idyllic in its description of nature observed during the summer’s green beech forests, blue sea, hills, and valleys. Nothing wild or dramatic is taken on. On the contrary, Denmark is characterized by a mild and fertile nature, which on the whole is depicted in the 5.

As Flemming Conrad writes in his discussion of the genre, the European songs that function as national anthems today were all composed during this period (150).

6.

The idea was advanced on the request of the Danish corps of officers and was hosted by Selskabet til de skiønne og nyttige Videnskabers Forfremmelse [The Society for the Promotion of the Aesthetic and Useful Sciences] (Conrad 153). See Conrad for a more detailed account of this contest.

7.

The winning song was Juliane Marie Jessen’s, “Dannemark! Dannemark!  – Hellige Lyd” [Dannemark! Dannemark! – Holy Sound].

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following way: “Et venligt Syd i Nord / Er, grønne Danarige, / Din axbeklædte Jord” (159) [A friendly South in the North / Is the green kingdom of Danes, / Your corn-covered soil]. All this makes Oehlenschläger’s poem an emblematic expression of the Danish homeland songs written during this period.8 Bjerregaard’s “Norsk Nationalsang” also has a broad reach in its mention of Norway’s former achievements, the greatness of antiquity, art, culture, king, homeland, national character, and nature. However, the depiction of nature here is not as idyllic as Oehlenschläger’s. Instead, it is filled with contrasts and drama, and the feminine view characteristic of numerous Danish patriotic songs has been left out in favor of a masculine frame of reference. The poem addresses “Sønner af Norge” [Sons of Norway], and in its first stanza, the masculine perspective is repeatedly underlined as the poem encourages the sons of Norway to let the music swell “Mandigt og højtidsfuldt” [in a manly and solemn manner] and uses words such as “Fædrenelandet” [the fatherland], “Fædreneminder” [memories of fathers], and “Fædrenestavn” [place of fathers]. Whereas round hills and feminine depictions of nature go hand in hand in the Danish tradition, the masculine perspective is thus accompanied by a focus on mountains in Norwegian patriotic poetry. In his investigation of the Norwegian branch of the national song tradition, Conrad observes that there is a general tendency to stress the connection between the rugged nature of Norway and the devotion to freedom in its people (216). This view is reflected here in the mountains as the guardians of freedom. In addition, the mountains gain an important position in the last stanza, which at the same time is the climax of the poem as it takes the form of the celebration of loyalty and love of the homeland: Elskede Land med de skyhøie Bjerge, Frugtbare Dale og fiskrige Kyst! Troskab og Kjærlighed froe vi dig sværge: Kalder du, bløde vi for dig med Lyst. Evig du stande, Elskte blandt Lande! Frit som den Storm, der omsuser dit Fjeld; Og medens Bølgen omsnoer dine Strande Stedse du voxe i Hæder og Held! (Bjerregaard 65–66) (Beloved country with the sky-high mountains, Fertile valleys and coasts abundant with fish! Fidelity and love to you we happily swear; Beckon and we will gladly bleed for you. Eternal you stand, Loved amongst countries! Free like the storm that whirls around your mountain! And while the wave wraps around your beaches, Continually you grow in glory and good fortune!) 8.

As Conrad notes, the key characteristics of these poems are that they give a central position to the depiction of nature and that they describe a constantly summery Denmark with its cultivated, fertile landscape and the beech as its most important wood species, not to mention that they highlight the sea (204).

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Once again, the contrast between the Danish and Norwegian descriptions of nature is evident as the respective absence and presence of mountains is one of the decisive factors in the depiction of nature as well as of national character. As the actual and mental geographies converge, the poets mirror the ideas of the interior nature in their descriptions of the exterior landscape, and imagining this exterior nature to be a mirror of national character, the myths and ideal notions of brotherhood and sisterhood among the two Nordic peoples are juxtaposed.9 Descent With this survey of the role of mountains in Danish and Norwegian national anthems, this investigation has completed a movement through four stages. First came the break with the classical metaphysics of nature that was initiated in Danish and Norwegian poetry from the middle of the eighteenth century as poets positioned on the hill unfolded a landscape and began to acquire a sense of their own power to create and to get closer to the divine. Second, in the first half of the nineteenth century poets took up higher and higher positions until they reached the top of the mountain and in doing so emerged as sovereign individuals. Thus the romantic artist was not only capable of controlling nature, but also of opening himself to the sublime and transforming it into artistic expressions. During this romantic period, the divine was no longer purely transcendental, but rather became imbued with nature and mediated by the romantic artist who expressed his talent much more freely than did his earlier colleagues. Apart from providing the basis for sublime experiences, mountains could evoke homesickness, and the poems dealing therewith were examined in the third phase of investigation. In those poems one finds Danish romantic poets who felt alienated when confronted with mountains and turned the lack of mountains in Danish topography into a positive conception of the small. This response to mountains was shown to be in stark contrast to the Norwegian poets of this period, who often voice a longing for the mountains, pay tribute to them, and feel at home in them. Finally, Danish and Norwegian songs about the homeland and national anthems along with their very different depictions of nature were investigated. Here again the idyllic description of a summery, cultivated Danish landscape stands in contrast to a wild and dramatic Norwegian nature in which mountains hold a prominent position. 9.

A funny attestation of a connection among the Nordic peoples, their geography, temperament, and literature can be found in Vilhelm Andersen’s somewhat outdated, but interesting book Nordboer: Litteraturbilleder (1919; Literary Images of Inhabitants of the North). Here Danish literature is described as epic in its essence, Swedish literature as poetic, and Norwegian as dramatic. Thus, when Andersen tries to take Danish poetry at face value he sees fields and sea, while Swedish nature evokes the sight of a lake, and Norwegian nature is connected with the opposition between fjord and fell, and between fell and valley, respectively. In Gudleiv Bø’s article “Natur og nasjonalitet: Naturomgivelser og ‘folkekarakter’ i norsk nasjonsbygging” (1999; Nature and Nationality: Natural Surroundings and the National Character in the Establishment of the Norwegian Nation) the antagonistic relationship between Danish and Norwegian nature and national character is underlined. Bø argues that since Denmark is horizontal, Norway had to become vertical, and that this is why the regions with fells and fjords came to be seen as “typically Norwegian,” and the western part of the country as more Norwegian than the eastern.

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In other words, the mountain is a decisive topos that reflects the upheavals of the time that left their mark on Danish and Norwegian literature from the middle of the eighteenth century up through the nineteenth. A metaphysical view of nature was abandoned, and the individual and the nation came to stand even more securely on their own feet. One must follow the trajectory to the beginning of the twentieth century, however, before finding the completion of the process of secularization. An important attestation of this tendency was offered by Johannes V. Jensen’s “Fusijama” (1907). In Jensen’s myth, the mountain does not point towards the heavenly; on the contrary, it points definitively back to earth, which is identified as the only stable foundation. A quotation of a central passage from Jensen’s text is particularly apt: Da jeg saa’ Fusijama, brast den sidste Drøm om en anden Tilværelse end den der er. Jeg begreb at den højere Verden vi stunder imod kun kan være netop den der er, men at vi aldrig i det givne Øjeblik er naaet op til den, at vi til daglig er blinde for den. Der lader sig ikke tænke frugtbarere Tanke. Det er i Grunden det eneste et Menneske kan opleve. (original emphasis; 80) (When I saw Fusijama, the final dream burst of a life other than that which exists. I understood that the higher world to which we are headed can only be exactly that which exists, but that at any given point in time we have not reached it, that we are blind to it in the daily scheme of things. There is no more fruitful thought to be thought. That is basically all that a person can experience.)

South of the South Literary Capri Arne Melberg

Nordic literary places as defined in this volume are not only to be found in the North – they are constructed by any sustained literary attention to place by Nordic authors around the globe. This non-essentialized view of place makes possible the consideration of other significant centers of literary activity to which Nordic authors have been attracted. Over the last two centuries, there have been important clusters of Nordic literary activity in cities like Rome and Paris at different points in time, and these Nordic artistic and literary communities abroad are perhaps the most familiar examples from existing literary histories of the region. The place discussed as a node of Nordic literary activity in this essay – the island of Capri – has not been typically mentioned in this regard, but works well as an example of literary place outside the North that has also been of interest to many other international writers, reinforcing the point that “Nordic” places – even those located in the North – are quite naturally also shared by others. The Nordic use of a place intersects with that of many different writers. There was and is something about Capri that feeds a literary imagination. Upon approaching the island, one sees the famous towering silhouettes invoke fantasies of dragons and sirens, a sense of extraordinary experience: more suspense, more violence, more lust. And even the earliest account about the island by Suetonius (about 130 C.E.) describes erotic fantasies about love and death during the time of Emperor Tiberius on the island. But during the nineteenth century, as a result of cultural tourism, Capri emerged as an island of myth and literature. In the beginning of the twentieth century, there were German, English, and Russian colonies on the island. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote Capri-poems in 1907; around 1920 the Englishmen Norman Douglas and Compton Mackenzie wrote huge romans à clef about the winter tourists of the island, people that seem to devote their time to drinking and to erotic – not least homoerotic – conspiracies; and around 1910 Maxim Gorky accommodated Russian refugees there. Walter Benjamin tried to finish his dissertation on the German baroque drama on Capri in 1924 while meeting with the Latvian Asja Lacis, who drew him seductively into Marxism – although she came to the island in order to meet Brecht. Graham Greene bought a house in Anacapri in the 1940s and regularly visited the island for forty years, because here he wrote “more in a month” than he normally wrote in half a year. The island also became a haven of refuge for Italians, who had difficulties with the politics of the mainland – Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Mario Soldati – all of whom wrote novels about love and death. Pablo Neruda was on the island for two months in 1952, also for political reasons, and devoted his time to the writing of passionate love poetry after having sent his wife back to Chile and was able to enjoy his mistress undisturbed. Capri has also invited the unusual combination of builder-writer. The Swedish physician and writer Axel Munthe, who first came to the island around 1870, built his San Michele in the 1890s, and ten years later the decadent count Jacques d’Adelswärd Fersen built his spectacular Villa Lysis at the other end of the island. Then followed the great son of the island Edwin Cerio, writer, politician, architect, and botanist. He built several houses around Capri and did doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.09mel © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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not hesitate to lease them to visiting writers. Finally there was Curzio Malaparte with his Casa Malaparte pointing like an arrow from a cliff. In addition to building, each also wrote. Cerio wrote hymns to nature and a history of Capri; Fersen wrote poetry inspired by Baudelaire and novels about beautiful boys; Malaparte wrote peculiar novels based on his experiences during the Second World War; and Munthe’s contribution was The Story of San Michele (1929). The success of the latter provided the island with a current of tourists: his villa was made into a museum and for some time was the only famous Capri villa that was open to the public (today it is also possible to visit Fersen’s Villa Lysis). Furthermore, in the 1950s Munthe’s San Michele offered refuge to Swedish writers and artists, much like an oasis of peaceful Swedish culture in the middle of the violent myths of Capri. And much of the best of contemporary literature on Capri – books by E. R. Gummerus, Göran Börge, Levente Erdeös, Ulf Peter Hallberg – has grown out of the Swedish setting of San Michele.

Figure 14.  View from the Villa San Michele on Capri. Photo: Berthold Werner/Creative Commons. Adjusted to b/w version. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Hans Christian Andersen in the Grotta Azzurra Mythical and literary Capri grew out of the dream of the South. In the eighteenth century, Germans, English, and Scandinavians went to Italy in order to meet the South. The literary standard for this meeting was given by Goethe, in his Italienische Reise (1816–17; Italian Journey) and Madame de Staël, in Corinne, ou L’Italie (1807; Corinne or Italy). Both writers located the border of European civilization in Naples, for in Naples one meets reminiscences of an earlier Greek civilization combined with a happy state of nature including exciting, erotic, and demonic elements. Goethe also passed Capri when sailing to Sicily. He believed Capri to be threatening

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and inaccessible. If one is on the very border of civilization when in Naples, one moved beyond this border when making one’s way into the bay of Naples and approaching Capri: South of the South! Such is the simple presupposition for the mythology that was developing in and about Capri during the nineteenth century, which lived on in the literature on Capri and has some life even today – almost untouched by the fact that the Capri of today is very much an integrated part of global tourism and capitalism. Modern cultural tourism began in 1826 with the “discovery” of the cave that came to be called the Blue Grotto, Grotta azzurra. A young German, August Kopisch, sailed to the island, heard some rumors about the remarkable grotto, and went on to examine it. Kopisch published his impressions in a tiny pamphlet in 1835 called Die Entdeckung der Blauen Grotte auf der Insel Capri (The Discovery of the Blue Grotto on the Island of Capri). Here he informs us that his host on Capri, who is also an important man on the island, told him about this notorious grotto, that not even the fishermen dare to enter because they are superstitious and believe that the devil lives there. Kopisch is of course tempted by this description and approaches the grotto together with a small company. After some preludes in gothic style, he swims in and finds himself in a blue heaven. He explores the cave and believes that he has found ruins and secret passages. When he comes out and is greeted by the anxious villagers together with his host, he decides to call his discovery Die blaue Grotte. Kopisch spread the story of his exploit in the German colony in Rome, but just as important for the launching of Capri in a literary mythology was Andersen, who made the Blue Grotto into the demonic center of his novel Improvisatoren (1835; The Improvisatore). Andersen was probably the first to establish the boundary of the South between Naples and Capri. Thus situated beyond Naples, Capri was beyond civilization, south of the South. This concept is fully elaborated in Improvisatoren and further articulated in his book En Digters Bazar (1842; A Poet’s Bazaar: a Journey to Greece, Turkey and Up the Danube) and in many letters. For this discussion, however, the novel is most relevant: though widely read in its day, today it is considered a rather obscure fantasy with a very exotic vision of Italy as the very different Other – in contrast to the North – and this exoticism increases in Naples and culminates on Capri. The novel actually ends with an invocation of the Blue Grotto: “Vi forlode den sælsomme straalende Hule, det store aabne Hav laae udstrakt for os, og bag ved den mørke Aabning til Grotta azzurra” (4:361) [“We left the singularly beaming cave; the great open sea lay outstretched before us, and behind us the dark opening of the grotto” (The Improvisatore 124)]. The reader meets Capri when the protagonist (the aspiring artist Antonio) leaves exciting Naples on an excursion in a tiny boat: “foran laae det romantiske Capri, hvor Tiber havde svælget i Vellyst og skuet over Bugten til Neapels Kyst” (4:273) [“Before us lay the romantic Capri, where Tiberius had luxuriated in joy, and looked over the bay to the coast of Naples” (90)]. Antonio believes he is approaching the mythical cliffs of the sirens – these were often associated with Capri. But he is also closing in on the magic grotto and learns from his native oarsman: “Det er Hexehullet … Derinde er alting Guld og Ædelstene, men man brænder op i Ildslue, kommer man derind!” (4:274) [“That is the Witches’ Cave … within, all is gold and diamonds, but anyone who goes in there is burned up in a fiery flame!” (90–91)]. As a confirmation of the dangers of the spot the boat is suddenly attacked by una tromba and “det blev Nat, Dødens Nat. Jeg følte kun eet, at Havet laae over mig; at jeg, at vi alle vare Havets, Dødens Bytte. Min

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Figure 15.  Juxtaposition of two views of the Blue Grotto: (top) view from a painting by Friedrich Thøming, The Blue Grotto, Capri (1833) Oil on canvas, 13.1 x 21.5 cm. Image: Creative Commons; (bottom) contemporary tourist photo of the Blue Grotto, Capri, Italy, Photo: Gimas/Shutterstock

Bevidsthed forlod mig” (4:276) [“It became night; the night of death. I was conscious but of one thing, and that was, that the sea lay upon me; that I, that we all, were the prey of the sea, of death; and further I was conscious of nothing” (91)]. When Antonio awakens, he does not know where he is: “Var det Dødens Bolig, GravCellen for min udødelige Aand! et jordisk Opholdsted var det ikke. I alle Overgange av Blaat lyste Enhver Gjenstand.” (4:276–78) [“Was it the abode of Death, the cell of the grave for my immortal spirit? An earthly habitation it certainly was not. Every object was illumined in every

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shade of blue” (92)]. He looks around and discovers treasures and in a small boat, the girl he loves, the blind girl Lara, who evidently visits the grotto in order to work miracles with her sight. At the end of the chapter, one learns that Antonio has neither died nor dreamt: “jeg havde seet, hvad først Aar efter blev opdaget og nu er Capris, ja Italiens skjøneste Eie: Grotta Azzurra” (4:280) [“I had seen that which not until some years afterwards had been discovered, and now is the most beautiful object in Capri, nay, in Italy, the Grotta Azurra” (93)]. In the final chapter of the book some years have passed. Antonio is happily married to Lara when they visit Capri again and together with friends make a visit to the grotto, but they enter it alone. “Den lille Aabning til Hulen lyste, som en klar Stjerne, den fordunkledes, og nu steg, som fra Dybet, de Andres Baade. De kom ind til os. Alt var Andagt og Beskuelse. Protestanten, som Katholiken, følte her, at Underværker vare til” (4:360) [“The little opening to the cave which had shone like a clear star was now darkened for a moment, and then the other boats seemed to ascend as if from the deep. They came in to us. All was contemplation and devotion. The Protestant, as well as the Catholic, felt here that miracles still exist” (124)]. The construction of literary Capri begins with this touch of the sacred in the context of the touristic and mythical Capri. The literary romantics, Kopisch and Andersen, though, were highly naïve. Capri’s foremost historian, Edwin Cerio, emphasizes in his publication that the grotto was obviously known to locals from time immemorial and certainly not “discovered” in 1826. Cerio suggests that Kopisch was the victim of a practical joke staged by his host: the naïve tourist being duped by the cunning native. It is part of a game that was played in the Capri of 1826: the tourist regarded himself as a member of the European cultural elite and regarded the islanders as beyond civilization, as superstitious and simple-minded, almost as a part of nature  – but also with vague connections to a lost antique culture. A visit to the famous grotto soon became an obligatory part of the Italian journey and the grotto still attracts crowds of tourists. The grotto has also been the object of several lyrical outbursts of doubtful literary quality. Some Danes have followed in the footsteps of Andersen. Tom Kristensen visits Capri in his Rejse i Italien (1951; Travel in Italy); the trip culminates with an enthusiastic description of the visual magic the traveler meets in the grotto. Lars Frost is much more prosaic. He concludes the novel Ubevidst rødgang (2008; Unconsciously Against Red) with an unexpected explosion in or outside a famous cave, which could very well be the Blue Grotto. The explosion comes as an exclamation mark after a detailed presentation of the history of Friedrich Alfred Krupp’s ammunition production conglomerate. This story provides an interesting detail into the Capri mythology in its account of the suicide of the German industrial tycoon in 1902. Krupp used to take time off from his office work in Capri so he could pursue his interest in marine biology. He took his life after a campaign in the press describing his homosexual excesses in scandalous detail. The campaign was politically staged and most probably had no basis in fact. This, however, has by no means prevented it from contributing to the Capri mythology: Capri as the place for easily acquired love and sex beyond all borders – south of the South!

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Capri at the turn of the last century gives the impression of having been a refuge for homosexuals of means, who had no difficulty in making contacts with the “boys” of the island. A prominent example is the English writer Norman Douglas, who was an eminent connoisseur of Capri and wrote fine works on the cultural history of the region, especially Siren Land (1911) and the novel South Wind (1917). He liked to entertain a local boy who was teased by his comrades as puttanella. As could be expected, this trafficking was embellished by Douglas’s biographer Mark Holloway: All his appetites were in excellent condition, and needed no prompting. His pleasures were simple and straightforward, but for the age in which he lived, one of them was unusual. In the Graeco-Roman world, it would have passed without comment…. In South Italy, on the other hand, where the concept of sin is scarcely more than skin deep, a more humane attitude prevailed. Everyone knew that boys went through a phase of homosexuality, and no one ever considered anyone else to have been the worse for it. (170)

Among the Capri pedophiles of literary interest, the French aristocrat Jacques d’Adelswärd Fersen has received the greatest attention. The names suggest a Swedish background; “Fersen” was added by Jacques himself since he admired le beau Fersen, a Swedish diplomat belonging to the intimate circles of Marie Antoinette. After an affair of “indecency” with minors in Paris in 1903, arrest, scandal, six months in a prison hospital (where he wrote a collection of poems: L’Amour enseveli), a trial behind closed doors, and a broken engagement, Fersen moved to Capri. Since he was immensely rich, he could buy land below the ruins where the Emperor Tiberius had lived during the first century C.E. The legends about Tiberius’s excesses were bound to excite Fersen’s imagination. Here he built Villa Lysis, an imitation of a minor palace in Versailles, complete with a paradise garden. In 1905 he moved in with his fifteen-year-old “secretary” Nino, whom he had picked up in Rome. According to legend, the Caprese were not happy about the couple, not because of Nino’s age but because he was an outsider. For many years, the villa was rumored to have staged decadent parties: the guests were met by the motto of the house “Amori et Dolori Sacrum” (devoted to love and pain), and they could ambulate from the marble terrace facing the Bay of Naples on the top floor down to the opium den in the basement. An extensive description of the house, its parties, and Fersen’s life and works can be found in Roger Peyrefitte’s biographical novel L’exilé de Capri (1959; The Exile in Capri): a mixture of facts, fantasy, and fiction (which seems to be the rule in Capri literature). We can for instance read a description of the “orgy” that led to Fersen’s temporary banishment from the island. It was a kind of ritual performed in the grotto called Matermania, where incense and opium surrounded the participants who were waiting for sunrise and Nino’s offering to the sun god on his twentieth birthday. According to Peyrefitte, Fersen imported two Singalese boys to act as slaves and give Nino twenty lashes on his bare bottom while the sun was rising. This ritual was (according to the same source) observed by a local girl who was picking herbs nearby. She told her father, who reported the indecencies to the authorities, who then took the opportunity to expel the unconventional foreigner.

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Fersen returned to Paris where he founded the journal Akademos with writers like Anatole France, Colette, and Maxim Gorky among presumed contributors. The futurist Marinetti was persuaded to contribute to one of the issues. Jacques himself wrote odes describing Capri as a proud island chosen by the gods and some erotic sonnets dedicated to Nino. One of them ends: “Jusqu’à ce que, semence humide et jaillassante, / Eclose puissamment de mes muscles vainqueurs, / La Puberté ruisselle en nos chaire pantelantes!” (Setz 123) [Until moist and sprinkling semen ejaculates out of my conquering muscles, puberty rattles in our panting flesh]. The journal did not last long, and Fersen returned to Capri, where his grand dream of Villa Lysis as a love temple disappeared in smoke and mists of opium; he died an early death in 1923, only forty-three years old, from an overdose that may have been a suicide. Fersen has left some literary traces that have had a tiny revival within the gay culture. He wrote two novels – Et le feu s’éteignit sur la mer (1909; And the Fire Burns Out Upon the Sea) and Lord Lyllian (1905). The former gives a somber picture of life on Capri; the latter is a kind of educational novel. It tells about a naïve Scottish lord being transformed into a depraved cosmopolitan on the modern decadent stage. Lyllian is an eternal Narcissus acting in plays written and produced by his master-teacher Harold Skylde, i.e. Oscar Wilde in disguise. The performances become tragedies, however, when a young woman kills herself on stage as Lyllian plays Adonis, when a young Swedish lover dies in his arms, and when Skylde is put in prison and takes his life. When Lyllian becomes infatuated with a young girl and believes himself to be cured of his homosexuality, he is himself shot by a former pupil, who feels deserted. Lyllian has betrayed the love of boys and must die. The “black masses” that are rumored to take place in Lyllian’s house are only reported through the gossip of servants and peepers. The author notes that black masses only take place in the imagination of narrow-minded people. According to a writer, that made his own life into fiction and thereby gave the impulse to further fantasy and fiction. Munthe: Capri paradise Axel Munthe, the Swedish doctor, builder, adventurer, and writer has recently had an extensive and seemingly complete biography by Bengt Jangfeldt devoted to him: En osalig ande: Berättelsen om Axel Munthe (2003; Axel Munthe: The Road to San Michele). One would think that there was nothing to add, but that is not the case: Munthe continues to provoke fascination as the German writer Thomas Steinfeld demonstrated in Der Arzt von San Michele: Axel Munthe und die Kunst, dem Leben einen Sinn zu geben (2007; The Doctor from San Michele: Axel Munthe and the Art of Giving Life a Meaning). Jangfeldt provides all of the facts, but Steinfeld broadens the perspective in order to reach, as his title states, the art of providing life with meaning. Munthe finds meaning, according to Steinfeld, by making himself into the “hero” of his own novelistic life. “Er ist die Kunst seiner selbst, er verwandelt sein Leben in eine Epopöe” (209) [He is himself his own piece of art, he transforms his life into an epic]. Steinfeld compares Munthe with two other writer-builders already mentioned: Jacques d’Adelswärd Fersen and his Villa Lysis and Curzio Malaparte and his futuristic creation built at the end of the 1930s that he called una casa come me (a house like me). The three houses are situated at different corners of the island and

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can be said to enclose both the island and the epoch – from about 1890 until 1940 – when Capri becomes popular among a more widely acceptable kind of bohemian: a refuge for homosexuals but also for some Italian intellectuals. The connection between the three master-builders has been pointed out before by Bruce Chatwin in an essay written in 1984. Chatwin begins: On the island of Capri there lived three narcissists who each built a house on the edge of a cliff. They were Axel Munthe, Baron Jacques Adelswärd-Fersen and Curzio Malaparte. All three were writers of the self-dramatising variety. All had a strong sense of Nordic sensibility. And all sought to expand their personalities in architecture. Their houses were thus acts of selflove – ‘dream houses’ where they hoped to live, love, and work wonders of creation, but which, despite idyllic settings, were infected by a morbid atmosphere akin to that of Böcklin’s Island of the Dead. (151)

Both Steinfeld and Chatwin seem fascinated by Munthe but keep their fascination at a critical distance. Steinfeld also situates Munthe in a cultural history by sketching his work as a society doctor in Paris and Rome and comparing him to all the other settlers on Capri. Munthe’s Capri appears as a haven or refuge inviting the dream of a paradise that has been lost and reborn, a kind of pre-modern idyll in modern Europe, a voluntary spot of exile liberating one from the efforts that, in Munthe’s case, were associated with life in Sweden, Paris, and Rome. But what about the writer Axel Munthe? The Story of San Michele is regarded as “mediocre” by Steinfeld who prefers to be fascinated by the man. Many sensitive readers share this opinion, and the Swedish literary history in six volumes (1989) does not even mention Munthe. Yet The Story of San Michele was one of the most widely read and broadly disseminated books during the twentieth century. Steinfeld probably touches on an important reason for Munthe’s astonishing popularity when he writes that The Story of San Michele embodies “Widerstand gegen die Geschichte” (210) [resistance against history]. Munthe gives a striking version of a figure that is recurrent among several writers who settle on Capri during this period. Europe is an artificial society in contrast to the natural community of Capri. Culture against nature, society against community. Modern society is infected by politics, corruption, haste, and modernity in general. Life on Capri is in contrast simple and natural: slow food, slow life. Capri is idealized as a refuge from modern unreality, as the real and the authentic. There is some historical irony here considering that Munthe presents this ideal at a time – 1929 – when Capri was becoming fashionable and nearer the touristic destination of today. But Munthe does not write about the new and real Capri. Instead he cultivates the dream about Capri that was aroused when he visited the island the first time in the 1870s, a dream that he tried to realize by building his house. Munthe was more than seventy years old when he wrote his book, he was almost blind, he looked inward and backward, and he gave us images from memory, pieces of biography, fragments of self-portrait, travelogue, even essay and aphoristic wisdom. In The Story of San Michele Capri is a place of hectic activity: in the first chapter Munthe remembers enthusiastically the strong impulse of vitality that struck him during the first visit to the island. Later on in the book, Munthe’s regular escapes from the life of a society doctor in Paris and Rome is described. He uses his magic hand in order to cure nervous ladies and, to

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work with his hands on the land he has bought in Anacapri in building what was to become San Michele. In an early chapter, the young Paris doctor is predicted to go far. His old incarnation, the narrator, comments: “‘Yes,’ thought I. ‘I am going far, far away, away from this humiliating life of humbug and deceit, from all these artificial people, back to the enchanting island … to clean my soul in the little white house high up on the top of the cliff.’” (48) Capri is even a refuge from the modern culture of money and literacy: “I was afraid of money, I hated it. I wanted to lead a simple life amongst simple, unsophisticated people. If they could neither read nor write, so much the better.” (The Story 330) The narrator Munthe, the old and almost blind man, remembers his youth as a time when eyes and body were working and when everything was possible. The book is full of wonderful episodes that are contrary to all probability if read literally but containing a poetical truth: the dream of invincible youth. They are often about speed: Munthe remembers how he runs down to the lighthouse in order to take a morning swim and is back to San Michele before the people of Anacapri have arrived for the morning mass (the distance is about two miles on a rough donkey path). He runs up the Blue Grotto with almost no effort to the peak of Damecuta (a severe climb). In the chapter on Sápmi (Lapland), he remembers covering enormous distance with seven-league strides. A chapter tells about a quick trip to Sweden, when Munthe accompanies a lunatic, steps in as the ghost in a performance of Hamlet, and leaves the party for the railway station: “Forty-eight hours later I was back to my work in Paris not in the least tired. Youth! Youth!” (275) What Munthe remembers is nothing less than a golden age and like all versions of it his is forever lost. The loss, with its accompanying melancholy, is conditioned by the position of the narrator and becomes obvious in the final chapter, where the passing of time is emphasized: “But it is true I do not like to go there [to San Michele] myself any more – I feel as if I were intruding upon sacred ground, sacred to a past which can never return, when the world was young and the sun was my friend.” (502) The popularity of the book was surely due to its striking tribute to youth and nature, as well as its resistance to the modernity that modernists love to regard as decay. Munthe puts himself in romantic positions as a chosen loner fighting history and that condition does not impede the way to success, nor do his gossipy and almost sensational (although unreliable) insights into society life in Paris and Rome at the turn of the century. But the success of the book is of course also due to its being excitingly narrated. It is written in fluent episodes that are easy to remember. Each chapter is organized around an anecdote, which is efficiently narrated. And maybe the relentless mixture of facts, fantasy, and fiction can arouse some new interest: thus, the English critic Thomas Jones concludes an article from London Review of Books in 2009 by promoting The Story of San Michele as “an accidental Modernist masterpiece.” With The Story of San Michele, Munthe works steadily with the purpose of writing the book of his life, although he declares the opposite. In one of the prefaces he writes: Jag är ingen författare och jag hoppas att aldrig bli någon. Boken om San Michele var resultatet av en ren olyckshändelse, tillkommen medan jag trevade mig fram i skumrasket bland tangenterna på min nyförvärvade Corona för att lära mig maskinskrivning. (Boken 23)

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(I am no writer and I hope never to become one. The Story of San Michele was the result of an accident, it happened while I was groping about in the dark among the keys on my newly acquired Corona in order to learn type writing.)

In another preface: “Novel writers, who insist on taking their readers to the slums, seldom go there themselves” (“Preface” xvii). Munthe wants of course to prepare his reader that he himself never hesitated to visit the “poverty alleys.” He actually repeats the preface from a much earlier book, Små skizzer from 1888 (Small Sketches), where he declares that “han, som skrifvit [denna boken], är för resten ingen författare” (Små Skizzer Preface) [he who has written (this book) is no writer]. He belongs to reality. Munthe’s recurrent polemics against writers who eschew reality mean of course that he promotes himself as the great exception: he stands on the side of reality against the writers as if he actually were on the side of nature against culture. This paradoxical position is constant in The Story of San Michele as well as in his earlier books and contributes to the image of Munthe recurrent among his critics and commentators: Munthe as a contradictory or “enigmatic” personality, posing actor and man of nature, a half blind worshipper of sun and light, and an asexual womanizer. He builds his San Michele in order to create a real home, and he leaves it as soon as it is finished. He is a society doctor using hypnosis and hands and words, but he is also the poor man’s doctor giving morphine for free as comfort. He is the doctor who is no doctor, the writer who is no writer, the worshipper of life who seems obsessed with death. Munthe is actually as contradictory as the island where he builds his San Michele: dangerous cliffs, friendly groves, civilization, depravation, and nature in ever-changing constellations. Such paradoxes, in Munthe as well as his book and his house and his island, excite continuous fascination. Paradise lost “Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus” (3:870) [The true paradises are the ones that are lost]. Those are Marcel Proust’s famous words in À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) about an experience confirmed by many literary testimonies from and about Capri. But even if Capri invites fantasies about paradise, most visitors return quickly to a more sober view of the phenomenon of Capri: the island can indeed be both frightening and wonderful, but it is also possible to live a perfectly normal life there. The topography of the island is violently dramatic, but that fact does not stop its population from working and living as on any flatland. Reflections on time and the way of the world can begin anywhere and be motivated by anything; still, it seems as if Capri invites such thinking. It may have to do with the sharp contrasts of the island between touristic life and domestic life, between mythology and reality, between an assertive presence of nature – the sea, the cliffs, the ground, the vegetation – and equally assertive and glamorous social scenery. Or, it may have to do with the fact that those who ponder the passing of time have the privilege of the visitor: they have withdrawn and sat down, on a terrace or a cliff or a café table, and they can contemplate people and life rushing by, close but still at a distance. Capri as an earthly paradise: this idea coincides with the discovery of Capri as the utmost version of the meeting with the South, that is with cultural tourism from about 1830 and a

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hundred years on. Reminiscences from this period, its mythology and its rhetoric are still to be found in touristic brochures, and one cannot exclude the possibility that even the contemporary one-day-tourist imagines catching a glimpse of paradise during the quick visit. But those that have been caught by this imagination so strongly that they settle down on Capri in order to live in paradise have to expect some disappointment. Everyday life interrupts. Time passes. Few visitors have been so well favored as Pablo Neruda, who, to judge from testimonies and poems, apparently lived his months on Capri in a constant transport of love and joy. Also the Caprese Edwin Cerio, Neruda’s benefactor and the personal cultural center of the island, stands out as an exception: during a long life, he seems to have kept his unflinching belief in Capri as the cradle and apotheosis of civilization. It is easier to find disappointed visitors. Three of the most prominent committed suicide: Friedrich Alfred Krupp, Jacques d’Adelswärd Fersen, and Norman Douglas. The reasons were of course quite different: Krupp was the victim of a media campaign that he could not handle, Fersen entered the mists of overdoses, Douglas could not bear the pains of his old age. But all three seem to have cultivated the dream of Capri as an earthly paradise, and all three became disappointed in different ways. Douglas also made the passing of time on Capri into a literary theme: from Siren Land (1911) until his last book, Footnote on Capri (1952), he commented on the decay of paradisiac Capri with unrivalled sarcasm. Also for Axel Munthe Capri became darker. After Munthe had finished building the house of his dreams, San Michele, he moved right away to a somber tower, Torre Materita; this move appears to be a symbolic act and an illustration of the logic of paradise lost. The fact that San Michele later became a museum, open for the public  – while Torre Materita is private and closed to all visitors – seems to demonstrate that the dream of paradise has become a museum piece. Or perhaps a product offered by the tourist machine. Finally, two Italian writers should be mentioned: Alberto Savinio and Raffaele La Capria. Like no other Capri writers, they observe the ambiguities and secrets of the island, while commenting on the passing of time. Alberto Savinio was an important contributor to Italian modernism in literature but also in music and the visual arts (although as an artist he could not compete with his famous brother, Giorgio de Chirico). His visit to Capri in the spring of 1926 resulted in some small texts that were put together after his death and not published until 1988; the book is simply called Capri. It is a charming text, indeed one of the most beautiful meditations on the phenomenon, making Capri in a remarkable way to hover between mythical time and present time. Savinio calls the occasional visitors “followers of Ulysses,” (6) eager listeners to the “non mai spento canto delle Sirene” (19) [“unending song of the sirens.” (6)] He calls in Ulysses’s seductress, Circe, as a talkative guide to the sights of Capri. Among mythical celebrities he also counts Tiberius with his stepfather Augustus: they are the patriarchs of Capri. The emperor Augustus is himself given the word: he gives a mighty lecture for Savinio and us about discovering Capri on his return from a campaign in Asia: “O la mia vita! la mia gioventù? Tornavo dall’Asia. Ero stanco, malato. Roma, la sua pompa, i suoi trionfi, al solo pensarci mi faticavano. Sostai qui: fiorita lettiga sul mare” (49–50) [“O my life! My youth! I came back from Asia. I was tired, ill. Rome, with its pomp, its triumphs, the very thought of it wearied me. Here I rested, on this flowering litter by the sea” (34)]. The paradise, however, disappears in smoke in the year 79,

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when the black rain from Vesuvius fell on “sui palazzo, sugli orti, sui giardini” (50) [“palaces, orchards, and gardens.” (35)] After that, “nient’altro che ruderi, ruderi, ruderi” (50) [“nothing but ruins, ruins, ruins.” (35)]. Savinio stretches his poetical freedom considerably: both Augustus and Tiberius had long been dead since the time of the famous eruption of Vesuvius. The emperor Augustus and the goddess Circe make operetta-like appearances in Savinio’s travelogue: they contribute to the deferments and doublings of the time of the journey and the reality of Capri. But the island goes even further back: This is the island “[dove] ognuno di noi rammenta di essere nato in una nascita non reale ma metafisica” (27) [“where each of us remembers having been born, a birth not real but metaphysical” (Savinio 14)]. The so called fisherman Spadaro, parading outside the piazzetta for the benefit of the tourists, calls attention to the fact that everything on the island has a meaning that goes beyond the banalities of today and approaches myth. Spadaro is more than a man, “Spadaro è il simbolo de Capri, Spadaro è Capri antropomorfizzata” (30) [“Spadaro is the symbol of Capri, Spadaro is Capri anthropomorphized” (17)]. Spadaro is of course no real fisherman, but he demonstrates himself as a legend. “Vero è però che in questa isola, tra leggenda e realtà, non è possibilie stabilire distinzioni precise” (40) [“On this island, however, it is impossible to make precise distinctions between legend and reality” (26)]. In spite of all his mythological imagination, it is possible to trace Savinio’s way from arrival up to the piazzetta and over to Anacapri and, of course, the Blue Grotto. At the piazzetta, he finds himself in “[il regno felice dei calzoni bianchi, dei calzettoni scozzesi, dei binocoli a tracolla, delle Kodak e degli idiomi anglosassoni” (39) [“the happy realm of white trousers, argyle knee socks, binoculars slung across shoulders, Kodaks, and Anglo-Saxon speech” (Savinio 25)]. He also visits the German meeting place Zum Kater Hiddigeigei, “[il caffè] più conviviale del mondo” (41) [“most convivial café in the world” 27], where all the nationalities of the world “siedono a gomito a gomito, nella fratellanza di un’apostolica cena” (41) [“sit elbow to elbow in the brotherhood of an apostolic supper” (27)]. In the Blue Grotto he is again taking a mythological guide: the godess Clio lectures and suggests finally that he should sit down in the boat and leave the island. “Così parlò la dea della Storia, e io seguii le sue parole. Uscii curvando il capo dalla Grotta Azzurra, e poco dopo, d’in mezzo il mare sconfinato, vidi l’alto fantasma dell’Isola di Ferro vanire lentamente nella notte. Addio! addio!” (72) [“Thus spoke the goddess of History, and I obeyed her words. I emerged, ducking my head, from the Blue Grotto, and in a short while, from the middle of the boundless sea, saw the tall ghost of the Iron Island vanish slowly in the night. ‘Farewell, farewell’”! (57)]. That is the end of Savinio’s little travelogue, making time and space floating and changing in modernist fashion. The passing of time is emphasized by the mythological and historical reflections. This is done in a playful way and there is no ruinous atmosphere even if Savinio makes the emperor Augustus grieve that his Capri has become “ruins, ruins” (35). Instead, Capri calls for the imagination that transforms the world and reality into legend: a story that moves freely in all seasons and therefore in an eternal presence. This is no euphoric presence: Savinio’s imagination is tempered by his irony. The result is that the reality of Capri dissolves into a kind of poetical universe with strands of surrealism. Savinio situates Capri in a context where one would not expect to find the old island: poetical modernism. Raffaele La Capria’s name is not the only thing he has in common with Capri. To judge from his book from 1991, Capri e non più Capri (Capri and No Longer Capri), he has had a

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sustained and affectionate relationship with the island, which started from the many visits in his youth and progressed to his later life when he returned to take a house at the foot of Monte Solaro above Marina Piccola. His book on Capri consists of fifteen separate essays, the earlier of which present the island, its legends, and prominent visitors. In the later chapters, La Capria develops the current theme: Capri as a paradise lost. Already the title of the book indicates that Capri of today is “no longer” the real Capri or the Capri of his youth, an elementary insight that strikes the author at every visit and provokes his “sottile malinconia” (136) [“acute melancholy” (110)]. One chapter starts with La Capria regarding the photographic documentation of Capri that he finds in Luciano D’Allesandro’s Vivere Capri (1988). He finds a leaden melancholy in these pictures, due to the fact that “che lui che viene a Capri da tanti anni sa che anche qui bisogna rassegnarsi all’Inevitabile e all’Irreversibile: sa che tutti i luoghi deputati della Bellezza tutti i Paradisi Terrestri sono stati scoperti manomessi e dissacrati e non c’é scampo” (102) [“whoever comes to Capri for many years knows that here too it is necessary to resign yourself to the Inevitable and the Irreversible. He knows that all places delegated by Beauty, all terrestrial paradises, have been found to be violated and desecrated and there is no escape” (82)]. I put the words about Capri as a “terrestrial paradise” in italics in order to emphasize that La Capria sides with this idea but also that he, perhaps better than anyone else, understands Capri as a paradise lost. The famous beauty of the island is too corrupt to be fully enjoyed. The decay of the island is no less than the decay of nature itself. We alone, “in tutta la storia dell’umanità” (136) [“in the entire history of humanity” (110)] have lived “ il tempo in cui la Natura (il mare, il cielo, la terra) era la stessa che è sempre stata per millenni, e il tempo in cui non è più quella, ed è malata, sofferente, disanimata come il fondo del mare” (136) [“from a time when nature (sea, earth, sky) was the same as it ever was, to a time when it is no longer like that, but is sick, suffering, discouraged like the ocean floor” (110)]. The reader understands that La Capria in his youth was an eager diver and therefore, today, has to observe the disappearance of fish and vegetation from the bottom of the sea, which is still illuminated by the special play of colors around Capri and the fraudulent transparency of the water. This decay, of course, also has tourism to blame. For at least the last hundred years, it has been obligatory for the connoisseurs of the island to complain about the invasion of tourists, and La Capria contributes with grim and bitter observations. At the famous piazzetta, he could, in his youth, experience a kind of fashionable elegance, but today he only sees disgusting people that make him think of the dissolved faces painted by Francis Bacon. Those on the piazzetta today have no manner or restraint. Questa piazzetta da parecchi anni ormai non è più un centro di mondanità cosmopolita ma un punto di osservazione dove è possibile analizzare in uno spazio piccolissimo, come sopra un vetrino da laboratorio, la degenerazione della società meridionale nella sua rapida inesorabile trasformazione da società civile in società criminale. (165–66) For many years now this piazza has not been the center of cosmopolitan worldliness but an observation post where it is possible to analyze in a tiny space, as on a laboratory slide, the degeneration of the society of the south in its rapid, inexorable transformation from a civil into a criminal society. (132)

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And when he looks from his terrace over the sea with all the touristic boats, he imagines Capri as a “povera lucertolina azzurra coperta da un esercito di neri insetti che ne divorano il cadavere” (180) [“poor little blue lizard, covered with an army of black insects that are devouring its dead body” (144)]. What Norman Douglas once called Siren Land – it was the coast of Calabria but especially Capri – has become wasteland. The utopia of Capri has become dystopia. La Capria is obviously ambivalent to Capri, a Capri that is “no longer” Capri. But this ambivalence has more dimensions than those of cultural criticism here observed so far. The double view of Capri has to do with the beauty of the island and its decay, its mythology and history in contrast to the present day, but also with a kind of inherent ambiguity. La Capria observes, like Alberto Savinio before him, the gulf between touristic Capri and native Capri: “Appena ci si allontana, ma soltanto di qualche metro, dal flusso turistico, ecco si scopre una Capri diversa, con una vita sua propria parallela e del tutto indifferente a quella dei suoi ospiti occasionali” (103) [“As soon as one distances oneself, if only by a few meters, from the stream of tourists, one discovers here a different Capri, with its own parallel existence, completely indifferent to that of its incidental guests” (83)]. This gulf goes deep into La Capria’s world: his melancholy is due to the insight that we are but “incidental guests” on this island, that is basically indifferent to our existence. We meet here a “la schiacciante sproporzione tra la Natura qui incombente e il nulla dell’umana presenza” (104) [“crushing disproportion between nature looming here and the nothingness of the human presence” (83)]. The stream of tourists and the decay of civilization are only dramatic mementoes telling us about an existential dilemma: the passing of time and life, the insignificance of the individual. This dilemma seems to be emphasized by the dramatic and massive nature of Capri, the unshakable rock in the shaky sea. La Capria is a Roman and his Capri is a dream of youth – as it was for Axel Munthe – and a spot for shorter visits. As it is for any northerner. La Capria is of course closer to real Capri than the day-tourist or the cultural tourist who settles on the island for a short while without learning the language and without any wish to adjust the view of Capri as the very different Other, as south of the South. Instead, he works with the ideas of Capri in a position that invites a melancholy that is also critical. His perspective is close to dystopia, but it is also about humility – humility as an answer to the discovery of Capri as a concentrated allegory of the short passage of beauty and one’s own insignificance.

Waterscapes Dan Ringgaard

Nu steeg Solen frem af Havet, Straalerne faldt saa mildt og varmt paa det dødskolde Havskum og den lille Havfrue følte ikke til Døden, hun saae den klare Sol, og oppe over hende svævede hundrede gjennemsigtige, deilige Skabninger; hun kunde gjennem dem see Skibets hvide Seil og Himlens røde Skyer, deres Stemme var Melodie, men saa aandig, at intet menneskeligt Øre kunde høre den, ligesom intet jordisk Øie kunde see dem; uden Vinger svævede de ved deres egen Lethed gjennem Luften. Den lille Havfrue saae, at hun havde et Legeme som de, det hævede sig meer og meer op af Skummet. (“Den lille Havfrue,” 1:174) [And now the sun came rising up from the sea. Its warm and gentle rays fell on the deadly cold sea foam, but the little mermaid did not feel as if she were dying. She saw the bright sun and realized that there were hundreds of lovely transparent creatures hovering over her. Looking right through them, she could see the white sails of the ship and rosy clouds up in the sky. Their voices were melodious, but so ethereal that human ears could not hear them, just as mortal eyes could not behold them. They soared through the air on their own lightness, with no need for wings. The little mermaid realized that she had a body like theirs and that she was rising higher and higher out of the foam.] (“The Little Mermaid,” 152–53)

This is (almost) the end of Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Little Mermaid.” It is the sea as seen from below by a daughter of the sea who has recently turned into foam and is now being transformed into a daughter of the air in order to become in due course a human being. This is a passage portraying a full-fledged literary waterscape rich with symbolism, a total metamorphosis, a passage of heightened perception. Andersen’s story is perhaps the most iconic example of the power of the waterscape in Nordic literature. The status of the term “waterscape” as used here is different from the term “landscape” in the previous node in part because it is not attested in the same number in historical discussions. Landscapes have attracted more critical attention than waterscapes, so their use here involves some analogical thinking with limits that should be made clear. Although one can reasonably claim that the waterscapes attract aesthetic attention for their own sake at roughly the same historical juncture as landscapes (i.e.in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), the differences in the human relationship to water prompt some important distinctions. A waterscape is not in itself an inhabitable space and thus does not offer the possibilities for ownership, dwelling, or domestication that landscape affords. Being at sea similarly does not allow for perspectival ordering of one’s surroundings into foreground and background or elevation and depression, which is why the idea waterscape makes most sense in the liminal spaces where land and water meet. Different though they may be, the concepts of landscape and waterscape both invoke aspects of power. In the history of Norden this observation applies to waterscapes even more than landscapes. Essential in making possible the pillaging of the Vikings, the intraregional colonisation of Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland, the Swedish colonies in North America and the Caribbean, and the Danish colonies in the Caribbean, on the West Coast of Africa, and in

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India, the sea has been a tool of expansion in long periods of this history. Perhaps the most canonical treatment of this aspect of the waterscape is Thorkild Hansen’s trilogy on the Danish slave trade between Africa, the Virgin Islands, and Europe, Slavernes kyst (1967; Coast of Slaves), Slavernes skibe (1968; Ships of Slaves) and Slavernes øer (1970; Islands of Slaves). Andersen’s story that does in fact imagine the boundary between life on land and in the water was written in 1837, the period during which many of the works analysed in this node also first appeared. They all concentrate on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, during which the range of literary treatments of waterscapes was considerably broader than during previous centuries. But what preceded that? This development can be seen in terms of the concept of mapping and delineated in two phases: medieval Icelandic literature and baroque topography. In Nordic literature, waterscapes primarily served a mapping function up until the nineteenth century. Medieval mapping: Landnámabók þeiri Í aldarfarsbók þeiri, er Beda prestr heilagr gerði, er getit eylands þess, er Thile heitir ok á bókum er sagt, at liggi sex dœgra sigling í norðr frá Bretlandi; þar sagði hann eigi koma dag á vetr ok eigi nótt á sumar, þá er dagr er sem lengstr. Til þess ætla vitrir menn þat haft, at Ísland sé Thile Kallat, at þat er viða á landinu, er sól skínn um nætr, þá er dagr er sem lengstr, en þat er viða um daga, er sól sér eigi, þá er nótt sem lengst. (31) (In his book on Times the Venerable Priest Bede mentions an island called Thule, said in other books to lie six days’ sailing to the north of Britain. He says there’s neither daylight there in winter, nor darkness when the day is at its longest in summer. This is why the learned reckon that Thule must really be Iceland, for in many places the sun shines at night there during the long days, and isn’t to be seen during the day, when nights are longest). [15]

This paragraph – the opening lines of Landnámabók (The Book of Settlement) – is the beginning of a record of the history of the European settlement of Iceland that began around 860. It is preserved in five versions of which the earliest dates to the thirteenth century. The point of view is that of the outsider – the learned European – and the place created by the book is in a maritime location. This fact becomes even more evident later in the prologue when Iceland is mapped in terms of the routes from Norway, Greenland, Ireland, and Svalbard. A mapping of time is also provided in order to preclude any of the exotic conceptions associated with the name Thule but instead to integrate Iceland into the Christian world. When it first appeared, the name Thule was immediately associated with Iceland, and at the time of the Norwegian settlement is linked to the papal genealogy. Thule was understood to be at the margins of the known world; Iceland, by contrast, was to be seen just as much a part of God’s creation as any other part of the world (Hermann). The next step in making Iceland into a place in the sense of a locality that has a meaning to a population is still dependent on the sea, but in this case the mere mapping of a location is replaced by topography and narration: Svá er sagt, at menn skyldu fara ór Nóregi til Færeyja; nefna sumir til Naddodd víking; en þá rak vestr í haf ok fundu þar land mikit. Þeir gengu upp í Austfjǫrðum á fjall eitt hátt ok sásk um

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viða, ef þeir sæi reyki eða nǫkkur líkindi til þess, at landit væri byggt, ok sá þeir þat ekki. Þeir fóru aptr um haustit til Færeyja; ok er þeir sigldu af landit Snæland, fell sær mikill á fjǫll, fyrir þat kǫlluþu þeir landit Snæland. (34) (The story goes that some people wanted to sail from Norway to the Faroes – a Viking called Naddodd, to name one of them. They were driven out to sea westwards, and came to a vast country. They went ashore in the Eastfjords, climbed a high mountain, and scanned country in all directions looking for smoke or any other sign that the land was inhabited, but they saw nothing. In the summer they went back to the Faroes, and as they were sailing away from the coast a lot of snow fell on the mountains, so they called the country Snowland. [16]

This passage is the first part of a long account of the settlement of Iceland in which the genealogy given in Landnámabók is not structured entirely in time, but perhaps more importantly in space based on the division of Iceland into four geographical sections. As a result, the text moves inland, but the sea continues to play an important role in that it was the means by which the settlers arrived and in many cases the element that determined the area at where they were to settle. “Þá er Ingólfr sá Ísland, skaut hann fyrir borð ǫndugissúlum sínum til heilla; hann mælti svá fyrir, at hann skyldi þar byggja, er súlurnar kœmi á land. Ingólfr tók þar land, er nú heitir Ingólfshǫfði (42) [“As soon as Ingolf caught his first glimpse of Iceland, he threw his highseat pillars, hoping for a good omen, and declared that he would settle wherever the pillars happened to be washed ashore. Nowadays the place where he landed is called Ingolfshofdi (20)]. Moving from the historical account of the settlement to a consideration of the later Icelandic sagas, a topographical sensibility and a more developed idea of narrative setting emerges. The sagas were written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries but deal with events set between the ninth and eleventh centuries. They can be understood as cultural memory dealing with the period when Iceland was settled and was independent of Norway, as seen from a time when Iceland later was subject to the Norwegian crown. Viewed from this perspective the sagas become a narration that partly answers the question, “Who are we?” with a “Where were we?” The answer is closely linked to spatial practices such as emigration, the taking of land, and the establishment of social structures thereon. The narration of these procedures functions as a retrospective semiotization of space, in fact a creation of place by way of writing history (Glauser 209–15). The narration not only gives the places meaning by locating them, naming them, and telling stories about them, but recounts the progress made in establishing a new network of routes that bind the places together as a nation and a region. Here the sea plays a prominent role. The mapping of the sagas is a matter of locating, naming, plotting, making routes, creating centers and peripheries, insides and outsides, and vectorizations understood as historically layered patterns of movements that can be recalled and repeated through writing (Ette 9–20). The sagas thus contain specific directions and figures of movement, as for instance sailing from Iceland to Norway and back, pillaging outside of the region during the summer and returning for the winter, or the crossing of borders between the social world and the wilderness. This mapping is integrated into a larger social pattern – a narration of civilizing – in which especially genealogy and law provide other vital structures. The sea is crucial: it is the huge, but in narrated time the largely unattended backdrop of the sagas, it is a matter of location, routes and sometimes disturbances of routes. The central precondition for the emergence of a literary waterscape as

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such – an interest in the aesthetic shaping of bodies of water as narratively significant spaces – seems not to have been fully in place in the medieval period, and the sea was mainly of interest for the way it gave access to land. Baroque topography: Nordlands trompet In moving on from the Middle Ages, it is clear that the mapping impulse continues to be a dominant way of dealing with place including waterscapes, but now the topographic imagination extends in a new way out to the sea. The literary mapping of place thrives on a tension between temporal and spatial structures. Topographies tend to be anti-hierarchical configurations circumscribing large as well as small elements of society and nature by organizing them within the spatial structure of the map and the temporal structure of language. In the introduction to the landscape node in this volume, it was argued that the locus amoenus and the libra naturae represented the classical and the Christian tradition in Nordic literature and that both led up to aesthetic landscape and the anthropomorphic turn during the second half of the eighteenth century. Topography is a third tradition that played a major role before this shift. All three traditions have a point of departure in the Latin literature of Norden. In the pastoral and the Christian tradition, place is either a rhetorical convention or a mirror of the divine. Being closely related to scientific description, by contrast, the topographical tradition instead points to actual localities and a space that is neither culturally mimetic nor transcendental. And the topographies are often maritime at the outset. In the Danish monk Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, (c. 1200; Deeds of the Danes), he described the Danes historically in the tradition of Vergil and Ovid in a continual movement from myth to recent history. This primarily temporal mode of organization contrasts with such early topographies as Olaus Magnus’s Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (The History of the Nordic People) published in Rome in 1555. Earlier in 1539 he had also published Carta marina et descriptio septentrionalium terrarum ac miralilium rerum in eis contentarum diligentissime eleborate (A Carefully Crafted Maritime Map and Description of the Northern Lands as well as of the Wonders Contained Therein). The most clearly maritime of the many written topographies is Nordlands Trompet by the Norwegian Petter Dass. Here he describes the northern part of Norway in verse. Although written in the last decades of the seventeenth century, it was not published until 1739. Nordlands trompet follows the Danish Hexaëmeron (1661) by Anders Arrebo and the Swedish Guds Werk och Hwila (1685; Gods Creation and Rest) by Haquin Spegel, both of which were foundational to the rise of vernacular literature in their respective countries. All three are encyclopedic descriptions of creation written in a baroque manner following Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas’s 1578 poem La Premiere Sepmaine. Dass differs from his Nordic predecessors by being worldlier and more topographical. He expands and loosens the topos of the libra naturae as the book of God from its baroque symmetry as his encyclopedic inclination goes towards describing the specifics of the geography of the northern half of Norway. In a digressive style, personal interventions, and a vocabulary specific to the things, actions, and creatures that he describes, Dass is place-specific.

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The location of the narration is double: a poet narrator presents himself as a traveler who sails up the coast and into the fjords leading to whatever topic, big or small, he finds interesting. Life on the water, around it and in it is described in great detail. One aspect of this placespecificity has to do with the interrelation of the sea, mountains, and wind and demonstrates a sense of climate as an interlocking system, a balance of forces, making the waterscape more narratively interesting and intelligible as part of that system. Another aspect that testifies to a heightened awareness of place is lengthy discussions of family members lost at sea, passages that seem to demonstrate a highly anthropocentric notion of the water as a source of both sustenance and danger. The relationship to the sea also includes its devastating power as in this classic topos of waterscape contingency: “Her flyder en Aare, her Tiljer og Vrag, / Her Tofter saa mange som steener paa Tag, / Her Kropper og Legemer døde” (31) [An oar may be floating, a cross-board, a wreck / And row-benches many as planks on the deck / With bodies of victims among them (Jorgensen 20)] In Dass’s work the sea is the vehicle of the narrative. The route of the traveler and digressions are the matrix of the composition. This spatially formed interplay between man and nature can never be turned completely into allegory or narrative. This limitation means that the contingency of creation becomes apparent within the Christian world order (Rimbereid 79–146). The baroque style of Dass, however, has an arabesque flexibility and an undisturbed faith in God that makes room for this contingency within a higher order. However contingent the sensuous world may be, each element of the topography is part of the major scheme, part of a world of emplacement. Going inland: Finnish lakes The realism of Dass, its detailed knowledge, and its positioning of the narrator in the midst of the action leads toward the time when the range of waterscapes broadens. Dass also leads the reader inland as he sails into the fjords and describes the rivers that extend into the land and points to the geography of the region as the place to begin: Nordic waterscapes are lakes, fjords, archipelagos, rivers, creeks, wetlands, bays, and of course the sea: the North and the Baltic Seas that have held the region together but have also opened it toward the world. It was a region of farmers and nomads, to be sure, but importantly also sailors and fishermen. The ocean is the uncertain region that lies beyond the safe havens of the land, a place of pillage and trade, of movement and metamorphosis. The fjords and archipelagos shelter and provide reasonable conditions of life, but a shelter may also isolate its inhabitants from whatever lies beyond. Rivers provide infrastructure and energy; lakes seem to have their own bucolic as well as demonic energies. The essays collected in this node are organized to move in the reverse of the direction depicted by Dass. They run from the inside to the outside and from east to west, from Finnish lakes over Swedish archipelagos and Norwegian islands out onto the North Sea to the Faroe Islands and away to the Seven Seas around the world. Pirjo Lyttikäinen situates the lake in a geographical framework and in the context of other waterscapes before tracing the literary functions of the lakes as symbols of Finnish nationalism, albeit with erotic undertones as well as spiritual elevation in romantic, naturalist, symbolist, and modernist writing. She discloses

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the complex and ambivalent symbolism of the lake in works of, among others, Juhani Aho, Joel Lehtonen, F. E. Sillanpää, Aleksis Kivi, Zachris Topelius, Johan Ludvig Runeberg, and Otto Manninen. Just as Rosiek’s and to some extent Behschnitt’s contributions to the previous node characterize landscape as an exhausted literary topos, Lyttikäinen claims that the lake no longer holds any major literary importance due to the decline of nationalism, the influence of naturalism, and increasing urbanization. Archipelagos and islands Islands are even more prominent than lakes in Nordic geography. A particular kind of island topography is that of the archipelago, which plays a distinctive role as a liminal space in Swedish literature. In his contribution, Henrik Johnsson tells this story by way of August Strindberg’s canonical Hemsöborna (1887; The People of Hemsö) and then draws on more popular literature Emilie Flygare-Carlén’s Rosen på Tistelön (1842; The Rose of Tistelön) and John Ajvide Lindquist’s Människohamn (2008; Harbour). Geographically situated between the city and the sea, the archipelago is a place of constant negotiations between nature and culture, between the known and the unknown, but also in a more sociological sense a battleground between state and individual and in recent times between tradition and an intruding leisure culture. Lisbeth P. Wærp reads a number of Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish treatments of the subject within the last two hundred years. Using Gilles Deleuze as a critical point of departure and noting the role of the Robinsonade, she reads the literature about the islands as stories of departures, separations, and new beginnings related to the gaining or losing of identity. She also discusses a development in which the island, especially after World War II, loses its utopian potential and becomes a place-shattering experience of isolation. At sea One of the smaller literatures of Nordic region is that of Faroe Islands. In all aspects of life, the sea plays a dominant role. Bergur Rønne Moberg conceives of Faroese literary history in terms of a process of globalization beginning with J. H. O. Djurhuus’s early nineteenth-century poetry in which the islands and with them the identity of their people are portayed in images of isolation and material as well as mental poverty. It passes through the colonial contact zones established by the two canonical novels – Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen’s Barbara (1939; Barbara) and William Heinesen’s De fortabte Spillemænd (1850; The Lost Musicians), ending in the global networking of Gunnar Hoydal’s novel Undir Suðurstjørnum (1991; Under Southern Stars). In all this, the sea plays a fundamental role, first as barrier, then as facilitator, and finally as a counterweight to the non-places of globalization. If there ever was a literature immersed in the images and realities of the waterscape as seascape, it is that of the Faroe Islands. Against the backdrop of epistemic breaks and reoccurring figures of fascination, Søren Frank elucidates a wide range of maritime works from the mid-nineteenth century on in his reading, of among others Alexander Kielland, Jonas Lie, Pär Lagerkvist, Aksel Sandemose,

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Jens Bjørneboe, and Carsten Jensen. In choosing the mid-nineteenth century as his point of departure, he highlights the epistemic break in which anthropocentrism is challenged by techonocentrism and the sea is no longer a territory of expansion, but a disenchanted grid, a development that inaugurates the great period of maritime fiction. These narratives can be seen as a re-enchantment of the disenchantment of modernity, Frank suggests. He points out a particular trait of Nordic maritime fiction in discussing how women and domestic life have come to play an important role. He also discusses the functions of maritime fiction today, expanding the argument of re-enchantment to the period of rabidly growing globalization. Modernist techniques: Östersjöar The essays of Moberg and Frank both suggest contemporary ways to conceive of the waterscape, and both face westward in considering the North Sea and the Seven Seas. The other major seascape that has helped define the region, the Baltic Sea, also invites attention to literary modernism. In his long poem Östersjöar (1974; Baltics), the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer retreats from the sea and depicts it as the frame and the resonance of human life. The plural of sea, sjöar, is unusual and connotes large waves. Wave metaphors and other metaphors of pulsation call attention to the rhythm of the waves, of the sea rolling onto the coast as the omnipresent waterscape of the poem. This rhythmic structure together with the montage form renders the text spatial and posits an analogy of text and place. The poem must reenact the space that it describes in order to make it come alive. Matter shapes form. The poem is in a certain sense the waves. This understanding is expressed and problematized in the following metaphor: “ett långt brev till de döda / på en maskin som inte har färgband bara en horisontstrimma / så orden bultar förgäves och ingenting fastnar” (236) [a long letter to the dead / on a typewriter that doesn’t have a ribbon, only a horizon line / so the words beat in vain and nothing stays, 130]. The place eludes writing and memory as the poet attempts to write, not about the place, nor just at the place, but on the place. The metaphor of the horizon as a defective typewriter also points to another interference of technology that is wide spread in the poem. The poem begins “Det var före radiomasternas tid” (225) [“It was before the time of radio masts”(123)] thus emphasizing that the present as opposed to the past is a time of technology. The memory of a life close to the Baltic Sea is mediated by almanacs, gravestones, photos, and close-ups of nature’s details. The presence of the impulse of what might be called the modernist mimesis is sustained by the tension between the distancing of mediated place and the inadequacy of the technology of writing. On the one hand, the immersion into the heterogeneous material of the place is multifaceted and immense thereby making the poem anything but a map. On the other, the place seems to be anything but a ghost of itself. The sea, accordingly, is omnipresent, felt in the rhythm of the poem, and perceived in perfect detail, and at the same time lost or at least displaced in fragments of memory and language.

The tale of a thousand lakes Pirjo Lyytikäinen

Lakes as aspects of a pre-literary reality are neither evenly distributed nor geographically identical across the globe. More are found in areas like Fenno-Scandinavia and Canada where the great continental glaciers once dominated the landscape. The glaciers shaped the landscape by removing the sediment and exposing the bedrock beneath. Their melting waters carried gravel and sand thus creating chains of ridges that further contributed to the formation of lakes. The northern climate continues to give them their particular flora and fauna and subjects them to freezing temperatures and accordingly the formation of ice. In winter these lakes disappear under the ice and snow, but the northern summer provides luminous nights, which give a magic touch to their mirroring open waters so attractive to poets and artists. Even within FennoScandinavia, however, the number and character of the lakes – and consequently, their importance to the life and culture of the country – is quite variable. In Finland and Sweden alone lakes can be deemed more conspicuous than other waterscapes, but even in these two countries the geographical difference is great: Sweden is known more for its larger but relatively fewer lakes, Finland for the greater number. And Finland markets itself as the land of thousands of lakes. This cliché from the tourist brochures, however, is actually true: in reality there are over 180,000 lakes within the country. Only in certain parts of the country (inland, middle, and eastern Finland), however, does the abundance of lakes overwhelm the landscape at the expense of the otherwise prominent seascapes and the flat land with rivers and fields, to say nothing of the large expanse of hills and marshes of northern Finland. The representational value of lakes in the national literatures reflects the geography to a certain extent, but is by no means determined by it. It is quite a different matter to assess the literary character of lakes – lakes as cultural and symbolic features – than to view them as cold geographical facts. In literature, lakes are never just lakes: the realities in fiction are never innocent, never explainable as mere reflections of an external reality. A dialogue emerges between the literature and cultural concepts about the country; literary representations shape the reality they are believed to reflect. Lakes and other literary waterscapes A lake can be understood in distinction to other waterscapes. Although the symbolic functions of literary depictions are multiple (meanings and connotations being produced by various cultural or ideological contexts and in different tradition-laden modes and styles), one can nonetheless chart a crude, general map that distinguishes different waterscapes as subjects of literary representation. Thinking of lakes as opposed to the image of the sea emphasizes their more peaceful nature: stormy seas often contrast with idyllic lake scenes, and the infinite sublimity of the sea contrasts with the more limited, congenial size of lakes. Finnish lakes in particular tend to be small with their open waters segmented by numerous large and small islands, capes, and doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.11lyy © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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sinuous coastlines. Silent forests surround them, and their shores are strewn with well-worn rocks or dotted with small beaches, with the whole suggesting a closed and cozy atmosphere in contrast to the immense or boundless seascapes. They are more often depicted mirroring the sky than they are with foaming whitecaps. It is true, however, that the Baltic Sea and its archipelagos often present greater similarity with scenes of lakes than with images of the ocean. But the literary representations of this lake-like sea tend to emphasize, sooner or later, its openness to the rest of the world and to the seven seas, especially during the nineteenth century when ships were the dominant means of transport from the Nordic countries to western Europe and the only means to cross the Atlantic.

Figure 16.  Shoreline of Saimaa Lake in southeastern Finland. Photo: Aleksey Stemmer/Shutterstock

The peaceful quality of lakes also contrasts with the dynamism of streams and rivers but at the same time connects lakes with smaller bodies of water, with ponds and springs – topoi of classical literature. In contrast to dark ponds, however, light blue or silvery open waters characterize the lakes in literary descriptions. The Finnish authors who have contributed most to describing the lake district of eastern Finland use these distinctions in their works. Juhani Aho, whose

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major novel Papin rouva (1893; The Parson’s Wife) can be seen as a national “transformation” of Flaubert’s Mme Bovary with its amorous triangular drama, introduces the lakeside setting where the Charles Bovary-like character lives with his wife. When observed from the lake, the parsonage radiates an outward calm and idyllic impression. Situated on a picturesque bay of a great lake, its name confirms this impression: Tyynelä [The Place of Calm]. The tranquility is revealed, though, to have its sinister sides as well, but Aho’s naturalist play never amounts to a high drama with striking outward action. It remains instead an inner tragedy with a deadly surface calmness that reflects the naturalist tendency to see everyday life as stagnation or decay. But it is interesting to compare this depiction of a triangular drama with Aho’s later (historical) novel of female adultery, Juha (1911), which was inspired by the currents of symbolism and neo-romanticism and reflects the new turn to dramatic action emphasizing the dynamic forces of life. In Juha (known today also as the opera by Aarre Merikanto), the serenity of the lake is abandoned, and the more dramatic story of the ménage à trois is set on a river whose turbulence and rapids symbolize the torrent of passions sealing the fate of the characters. Joel Lehtonen – a prominent neo-naturalist author – contrasts a great lake (in his descriptions always Saimaa, the largest lake in Finland) with a dark pond as the setting of the action (or lack thereof) in his novel Putkinotko (1919). Bordering two sides of the destitute tenant farm Putkinotko (the name derived from the Finnish rendering of C. J. L. Almqvist’s story “Grimstahamns nybygge” (1839; Grimsta Harbor’s New Building)), these two waterscapes are given different symbolic functions in the text. The pond, apparently a part of the realistic setting, nevertheless refers to the dark side of the characters he describes and, ultimately as well, to the dark side of the Finns in general. Lehtonen emphasizes the primitive character of the common people in contrast to the national romantic views that idealized the “authentic” ordinary people of the countryside. Lake Saimaa, with its open waters, symbolizes the wider world and broader views. It is the great waterway to the outside world, to the town of Savonlinna, even to St. Petersburg, via a canal. It permits echoes of the modern world to enter Putkinotko, but it is, for Lehtonen, ambivalent in its connotations. In fact, the text distinguishes between two different images of the lake: Saimaa’s great open waters with their expansive freedom and open views and, on the other hand, the area of Putkinotko – the dwelling place of the primitive tenant family – where the lake narrows down to a maze of straits and passages strewn with small rocky islands and rugged capes. This dual symbolism reflects the primitive life of the Oblomovian family living in ignorance and poverty and having only the faintest and most erroneous ideas of modern developments, even though the nearest town, Savonlinna, situated on the more open waters of the lake, is not far away. In the straits surrounded by a wilderness with no roads where even the trees grow crooked, twisted, and stunted, human life imitates nature – or rather the nature Lehtonen describes is so constructed as to become a mirror image of the primitive life he finds or places there. Allegorical dimensions may also take over and the realistically mimetic aspects recede into the background, as in Selma Lagerlöf’s Gösta Berlings saga (1891). The Swedish Nobel laureate defines the landscape of her saga as a long lake, a fertile plain, and blue mountains. The description of the lake, moreover, is an allegory of the phases of human life beginning with the lake’s playful sources and ending with its old age and demise as its waters rush over the falls. The difference between Lehtonen and Lagerlöf is substantial: Lehtonen’s neo-naturalist

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descriptions foreground and multiply the description of credible details to hide any openly allegorical aspects, whereas Lagerlöf (in this particular description but not throughout the novel) foregrounds the allegorical to introduce the reader to the theme of her story – the vicissitudes of human life. What one can do with lakes in literature Raising the question of the role of specific landscapes or waterscapes in literature seems to presuppose a certain kind of literature. It is primarily in the national romantic and realist modes of literature that the particular geographic realities of a landscape matter, either as objects of nationalist enthusiasm or as settings for describing the life of the people. In this literary tradition, the particular character of the Nordic lakes or of a specific lake comes to the fore in detailed descriptions, even if these descriptions always carry symbolic and generalizing functions as well. Since the classical and neoclassical preference of general topoi gives way to various resonances of reality, from this point on it makes sense to interrogate the functions of these descriptions in geographic or national contexts or in terms of lived experience in particular places. When the waterscapes of particular lakes gain preeminence as national symbols or elements of national identity, this tendency enhances descriptions having idealizing inclinations and ideological connotations. Beginning with realist and naturalist prose of the 1880s, lakes often provide a more everyday setting for events while this fiction still focuses on the rural environment. This practice allows an emphasis on the significance of the lakes in the material life of the inhabitants, an aspect scarcely touched upon in national romanticism. Socio-economically, the lakes, which together with the rivers and canals joining them form long and important passages reaching from the innermost regions of the country to the coast and to the country’s centers of commerce, were important routes connecting diverse parts of the country more efficiently and quickly than roads. In the lake districts, the houses and villages with their churches were built along the lakes and presupposed that the people traveled by boat. The most common modern invention described in the nineteenth-century literature about lakes is the small steamer – the commercial vessels that had begun to traverse the great lakes. In the lake districts, they were the equivalent of railroads. Lakes, of course, also provide sustenance. Fishing was an important activity in the lake districts as well as on the coasts. Differences are evident in the peculiar freshwater fish and the often more leisurely nature of lake fishing (there were hardly any professional fishermen on the lakes). In literature, the specific ways of lake fishing, like the seining of muikku – a small whitefish comparable to sardines – are mentioned as a part of everyday life. In the lake districts, fish were important food of the poorer people, complementing the diet of bread, porridge, and potatoes (a novelty of the nineteenth century, which replaced turnips). Life in literature, once again, is different from real life. Aspects of everyday life are used as elements of reality effects, as the background against which the literary action takes place. Most often, they appear in the “folk descriptions,” a peculiar genre developed in the wake of nationalist interest in the common people, but which in the neo-naturalism and early modernism of the first decades of the twentieth century are, for the first time, given an artistically satisfying form.

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In Lehtonen’s neo-naturalist prose and in what has been called “rural modernism”1 (e.g. F. E. Sillanpää’s novels), the protagonists often belong to the poorest strata of the rural population. In these works, the everyday life on the lakes and lakeshores is drawn into focus in a way that has shaped the cultural memory relating to lakes. Idyllic summer lakes often associated with the bright summer nights are the lakes preferred by literature, especially by poetry, but the winter appearance of lakes is not entirely forgotten. A freezing autumn lake or a thickly frozen one with its winter roads as well as the spring’s breaking of the ice require their own representations and are given their specific significations. The fact that Nordic lakes are frozen and covered in snow for the greatest part of the year is a phenomenon that realistic literature cannot ignore. Wintery lakes are imprisoned waterscapes, which can be almost indistinguishable from fields when no ice fishermen are present or when the fir branches used to mark the winter crossing are not visible, but they appear in literature as symbols as well as reality effects. The 1939 Finnish Nobel laureate F. E. Sillanpää gives a picturesque description of a winter road in his novel Nuorena nukkunut (1933; The Maid Silja: The History of the Last Offshoot of an Old Family Tree) (as a preparation to an erotically laden encounter): Tosin jäiltäkin lumi oli sulanut, ja paikoin oli siellä niin runsaasti vettä, että tuulenpuuska nosti siihen hienon karelaineen. Mutta varsinaiset talvitiet – nuo ponnistusten, hien, toiveitten, rähinäin, pettymysten, väsymyksen muovailemat valtasuonet – ne kohosivat vanhoina ja kovettuneina kaikkien kevään aiheuttamien muutosten yläpuolelle. Siellä oli pohja kova ja kuiva. Varsinkin jalankulkijan oli sellaista tietä ihana astua, koska hän hevoskuorman vastaan tullessa aina saattoi sen verran väistää, ettei tarvinnut tien viereen vesihyhmään astua. Viitat seisoivat vielä pystyssä niinkuin vakuutena siitä, että tietä sopi kulkea. (168–69) (The snow had indeed melted on the ice, and in places the water on it was so deep that a gust of wind would raise ripples on it. But the regular winter roads on the ice, those main arteries molded by struggle, sweat, hopes, quarrels, disappointments and weariness, they still rose old and hard-trodden over all changes wrought in the ice by Spring. On them the going was hard and dry. Especially for one on foot was it delightful to be out on such a road, for if a load met him, there was always enough room to step aside without being forced to step down into the slushy depths. The boughs placed to mark the road still stood upright as though to guarantee that the way was open.) [143; translation slightly modified]

Sillanpää’s detailed description of crossing a lake in early spring does not prevent him from using these naturalistic scenes to evoke symbolic meanings. The symbolic functions and potentialities of lakes, already used in romantic poetry, were not neglected in naturalism and the symbolist movement brought them into the foreground in new ways at the beginning of the twentieth century. When attending to the great overall tendencies of “lake literature,” it becomes, in fact, clear that the use of one or more of three large-scale symbolic frameworks characterizes most of them: national symbolism, erotic undertones, or spiritual elevation.

1.

Karkama uses the term to characterize Sillanpää’s novels among others (Kirjallisuus ja nykyaika).

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Figure 17.  Frozen waterscape in Finnish winter. Photo: marcela novotna/Shutterstock

Lakes as national symbols Aleksis Kivi, one of the founding fathers of Finnish literature, wrote in a poem entitled “Suomenmaa” (Finland) that “siel tuhansissa järvissä / yön tähdet kimmeltää” (141) [there in thousands of lakes / the stars of the night glimmer] to describe his native land. This image points to the importance of lakes in the literary image of Finland. It was fashioned during the national romantic period: one of the most important projects of (any) nationalist literature and art was to define the “national” landscape(s)/waterscape(s), which were then presented as one of the objects of love to arouse national feelings. Thus the former enthusiasm for picturesque land- or waterscapes that emerged in the eighteenth century was transformed to serve national goals and to enhance patriotism. In Finland, where national romanticism and the development of written literature largely coincide, the lakes were invested with literary potential in this respect. Unlike the topoi inherited from classical literature and recycled in classicism, the romantic descriptions of nature try to capture the realistically particular and the national even if the general significance given to these descriptions tends always to be the same: the exaltation of the national “treasures” in view of the arousal of patriotic passions. Aleksis Kivi inherited from J. L. Runeberg the idea that the interior of the country with its lakes and forests is the truly national element (instead of the coast, for example) that defines Finnish nature. Runeberg, the first national poet, contributed much to the creation of the national landscape. Although born on the coast as a member of the Finland-Swedish community and thus rooted in the towns and archipelago of the southwestern coastal region, he preferred the inland landscapes with their lakes and islands. Despite this preference and some exalted lake descriptions in various poems, his most famous poem “Vårt land” (5:1–4) (1848;

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Our Country) – which later became the Finnish national anthem – only briefly mentions “the land of thousands of lakes” but, otherwise, does not focus on any particular aspect of the national landscape. In fact, Runeberg’s poem retains all the (neo) classical generality typical of the topoi in its descriptions while imbuing them with patriotic meaning and affective rhetoric. The most important nationalist poem concentrating on the description of lakes is Zachris Topelius’s poem “En sommardag i Kangasala” (1853/1860; Summer Day in Kangasala). Topelius was one of the prominent “Fennomans” writing in Swedish; he created a national history of Finland, glorified Finnish landscapes, and described the various people and landscapes in different parts of the country. His merits in the field of lyric poetry remained in the shadow of Runeberg, but this song, in which the lyric I of the poem is the bird Sylvia (from the family of beautifully singing warblers), was a success. As set to music by Gabriel Linsén in 1864 and in the Finnish translation by P. J. Hannikainen, it lives on – it is probably still one of the requirements of any school and for any choir. The poem is also the first of its kind to combine the topos of a view from a high place with a Finnish lakescape. The speaker, Sylvia, sees the scene from the highest branch of a tree on the highest ridge of Harjula (a place name invented by Topelius which means “The Place of Ridges” and refers to the characteristic landscape of Kangasala, an inland parish in a lake district): Jag gungar i högsta grenen Af Harjulas högsta ås; Vidt skina de blåa vatten, Så långt de af ögat nås. (204) (I swing on the highest branch Of Harjula’s highest ridge; Broadly shine the blue waters, As far as the eye can see.)

The poem names the lakes in view briefly mentioning their graceful waves or their silver and gold glimmer and compares one of them to the eyes of a beloved and to a childhood home: Och blå som en älsklings öga Och klar som ett barndomshem Den gungande Vesijärvi Sig stilla smyger till dem. Och hundrade öar simma Allt uti dess vida famn, Naturens gröna tankar I blåa vågornas hamn. (204) (And blue like a loved one’s eyes And bright like a childhood home The billowing Vesijärvi Quietly joining them all. And hundreds of islands swim In its vast lap, Nature’s green thoughts In a haven of blue waves.)

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The numerous islands so characteristic of most Finnish lakes are noted and the surrounding forests are described with reference to fields and meadows, obligatory in these picturesque panoramas. The last three stanzas of the poem then develop a theme of patriotism inspired by the scenery. The message is given: “O hur det fattiga Finland /Är rikt på skönhet ändå” (35) [O how poor Finland /Yet is rich with beauty]. The poem also emphasizes how Finnish songs (or poems) imitate the billowing (gungning) of the waves and the speaker’s wishful thoughts about being an eagle able to fly to God’s throne and beseech God to make “us” (the Finns) love “our” country: “O Herre, lär oss att älska, / O lär oss älska vårt land!” (465; in the 1960 version from 1860) [O God, teach us to love, / O teach us to love our country!] Topelius’s poem contributed to the vogue of national romantic pilgrimages to sites where lake panoramas were at their best. The new wave of tourism to Kangasala replaced the former type of tourism, which had been mainly to the healing waters of the region although pre-nationalist interest in the picturesque had brought to Kangasala even very famous visitors: King Gustaf III of Sweden and Czar Alexander I of Russia. Topelius himself landed there while fleeing a cholera epidemic in Helsinki in 1853, and his poem invested the place with patriotic significance. The discovery and redefinition of many other lake panoramas followed and increased the summer-pilgrimages to the lake districts in Finland. The topos of the high ridge or rocky hill with a panoramic view of a lake that invites the viewer to see an infinite continuum of glimmering lakes and dark forests finally disappearing into a blue haze thus established itself in literature, in the fine arts, in travel literature, and in the national cultural memory.2 The elements of rural habitation – fields, farm houses, and churches – are usually mentioned, but the wilderness that combines water and forest dominates. The corresponding cliché of Norway as a land of fjords combines fjords and mountains and prefers, as well, the presentation of these natural elements without much human habitation or with agrarian settings where the elements on modern life are rare. The new focus on descriptions of individual natural sites and particular places was retained although modified in the later realistic and naturalist modes of writing. The nationalist agenda and tendencies towards idealization were subdued in favor of naturalist plots, if not abandoned. In Finland, the lake remained a favorite setting for naturalist novels and stories, although naturalist plots and the naturalist mode of emphasizing the dullness and misery of everyday life in contrast to the idealism of earlier literature changed the character of the setting. But the national often retains its hold and competes with naturalism within the texts especially in Aho’s works. Finland’s struggle for national existence at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries also contributed to the fact that the descriptions of lakes regained much of their national romantic appeal. Erotic tensions on the lake Lake settings figure prominently in the most important naturalist novels that describe the fate of middle-class characters and concentrate on the intricacies of the bourgeois life of country 2.

See Laitinen 32–41.

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parsonages or small town inhabitants. This focus gives precedence to the aesthetic and symbolic functions of the lake setting. Furthermore, in these texts, lakes are the place for leisurely activities instead of work. Most importantly, they are connected to the erotic dimensions and tensions of the plots. The realist and naturalist authors treat lakes as part of the natural environment while remaining conscious of the national romantic tradition. The authors’ roots in the eastern lake districts often contributed to the prominence of lakes in their stories, but, more importantly, the recognized prominence of the lakes as part of the national landscape gives rise to new scenes on lakes during the period. The most important author in this respect is Aho, who brought Frenchstyle naturalism to Finnish literature while at once emphasizing the Finnishness of his scenery and characters. Papin rouva deserves a more detailed attention in this context. Its triangular drama involves a dull and comical parson, a handsome summer visitor to the parsonage with French elegance and womanizing habits, and the parson’s attractive romance-hungry wife, who has never loved her husband but under the pressure of her parents had nonetheless accepted him. The action takes place on the shore of the lake where the steamers circulate and distribute goods and summer travelers to the villages and towns along its coast. In Aho’s fictional worlds, these boats either take the male hero from his hometown or village to adventures in Helsinki and abroad, or bring the students and visitors from Helsinki to their rural homes or to enjoy the pleasures of the countryside. Aho’s novel presents the heroine Elli and compares her to the maiden Aino from Kalevala, who drowned herself to avoid an unwelcome suitor, the old Väinämöinen. Elli is a more passive character than Aino: she has accepted the repulsive suitor and lingers on in a dull and unsatisfying marriage even though she sometimes wishes for death. When Olavi, the former studentcomrade of her husband whom she had met briefly while still unmarried and with whom she had fallen in love and of whom she still dreams of after five years of marriage, comes to spend his summer in the parsonage, her spirits seem to revive. Her perpetual habit of dreaming by the lake (which recalls Aino’s last moments before drowning) has kept the memory of the young man alive. She has dreamed about his coming by boat to save her and now her dream seems to be becoming a reality. This older Olavi, who now arrives by boat, is not, however, the same enthusiastic student whom she once met and with whom she fell in love. His visits to Paris, which signify decadence in the Finnish literature of the period, have changed him, and it becomes clear to the reader, but not to Elli, that he has not given her a thought during the intervening years. The blasé young man writing a dissertation on women in contemporary French novels thinks of women only in terms of conquests and is quite experienced in real-life, short-term love affairs. An important scene on the lake, which also has some resonance of Kalevala, marks the development of the love affair between Elli and Olavi. The two row out to fish on the lake, which symbolizes, in a sense, the heroine: it is her place, the site of her private life and most intimate thoughts. She had the habit of staying out on the lake for long periods fishing or just rowing about to avoid the company of her husband. This occasion is the first time she has accepted company; the company that she desires and has dreamed of having. Here, as all along, the novel carefully shows the discrepancy in the two characters’ thoughts and the gap between what they say and what they think. Their fishing and conversation hides and, at the same time, reveals the

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emotional background of their playful remarks. The different species of fish they catch are given characteristics that reflect the undercurrent of their erotic tension. Elli catches an ordinary dace (särki), which Olavi disparages as a bourgeois fish, while Olavi lands a whole school of bleaks (salakka), which he describes as “fiery and passionate,” as well as some big perch, which he characterizes as the nobility of fish. Olavi’s discourse reflects his intent to seduce Elli and to break her bourgeois resistance, but he misinterprets the situation. While Elli, in the end, remains trapped in her bourgeois existence, it is, in fact, she who has the more passionate feelings and the more noble character. Olavi’s pretended passion is a product of ennui, self-deception, and enthusiasm of the moment, and he never seems to be honest with Elli although occasionally he sees through his own pretensions. Once the couple stops fishing, they remain on the lake, and Olavi paddles with one oar as the sun is setting. He gives his interpretation of what is, in fact, his idea of Elli’s feelings. Tässä yksitoikkoisessa ympäristössä, jossa ei ole juuri muuta eloa kuin se, minkä aurinko antaa, ja joka sen pois mentyä jää sitä kaipaamaan, juuri sentähden tulee onnen kaipauskin niin hillittömästi esille. Ja tällainen hiljainen ympäristö kai vaikuttaa siihenkin, ettei mikään estä tuota kaipausta kaikin voimin kehittymästä … se kasvaa kuin varjo yössä, ja kun tietää, että onni on niin lyhytaikainen kuin tämmöinen kesäinen yö, niin tuntuu se samalla mahdottomalta saavuttaa. (2:243) (In these monotonous surroundings, where there is no life except in the sun and agony when the sun goes away, the desire for happiness, for that reason, bursts out unbridled, and nothing keeps it from growing and growing …. It grows like a shadow in the night, but is accompanied by the knowledge that happiness is short like a summer night, this knowledge exiling happiness.)

Olavi gives vent to his poetic mood (though feeling himself that he is exaggerating) and refers to an important intertext, Runeberg’s poem “Svanen” (The Swan; 1:38–39). This poem – a glorification of the beauty of the North and its summer as well as of true love – sublimates the scene, and Olavi gives a Platonic interpretation to the feeling it describes: it is friendship, not erotic love. With complementary suggestions, they develop a concept of ideal love, which manifests itself in friendship and does not demand more. Elli is fascinated by this vision that alleviates her sense of guilt and her fears of adultery: she imagines that a Platonic friendship with her lover is not an infraction of her marriage vows and believes that Olavi’s fleeting poetic vision reflects his sincere thoughts. While Olavi analyzes Elli’s situation in a rather cold-blooded way and, at the most, feels mildly sorry for her, she believes that she has found a soul mate in him. Here, naturalist psychology casts an ironic shadow on romantic enthusiasm and targets the older idealistic literature as well. Although the novel is imbued with the beauty of the surrounding natural setting reflecting the inner drama of the characters, it is, at the same time, a story that pitilessly reveals the illusions as well as the deceitful and self-deceitful nature of their thoughts and feelings. Only the dull parson, completely unaware of the emotional turmoil around him, entertains his serene happiness based on self-gratifying illusions undisturbed by any doubts. His base nature, furthermore, prevents the reader from seeing in him the offended party. For a finer soul, like Elli’s, the parsonage – which is an outward idyll with its garden, the lake, the fields, and the forests – is a grave in which she is buried alive. The short moments of

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illusory happiness provided for her by Olavi’s seductive presence only lead to a greater despair once the illusion lapses. The culmination of the love story is the couple’s excursion to Elli’s favorite panorama of the lakes. She has named the spot her Temple Roof and this biblical allusion to the place where Satan tempted Christ pre-determines its function in Aho’s novel. The actual scene, however, evokes portrayals of seduction in naturalist texts. But the national romantic background is present as well: the vista alludes to the scenes first found in Topelius. The insistence on its Finnish setting modifies the theme of temptation otherwise comparable to Rodolphe’s seduction of the willing Emma Bovary. Elli’s amorous feelings that she has suppressed for years burst out in a moment of passionate embrace: she desperately clutches Olavi, but before he actually even realizes what is happening, she turns away saying that this was the first and the last time. The seducer is left in a merely passive role, and the shallowness of his own feelings as well as his reluctance to involve himself stand in stark contrast to Elli’s passion. In the end, her feeling remains controlled by the ideal of Platonic friendship, one that Olavi himself had pretended to entertain. In these nationally imbued surroundings, Aho seems to pay tribute to the moral superiority of his heroine compared to Madame Bovary by depicting Elli’s naïve innocence in the face of Olavi’s decadent manners learned in Paris. But it is not Elli’s bourgeois virtue that is praised: she might have broken the vows of marriage had Olavi in fact been the passionate and noble lover she imagined him to be. Though Elli is weak and passive and a perfect naturalist heroine in this respect, she is still capable of true feelings that are lost in Olavi and nonexistent in Emma Bovary. This ambivalence is symptomatic of Aho: his national romantic heritage and the role he was given as a prominent national author intertwine with his naturalism learned from the French, Nordic, and Russian authors of the time. Nature, the lake, and the heroine all seem to belong to what he would like to praise in national terms, but the unhappy consciousness of his blasé hero is the product of his assimilation of the cosmopolitan, decadent, naturalist, and pessimist currents which tended to undermine the national idealism so vital to Finland struggling for its existence under the pressure of Russian rule. In Sillanpää’s Nuorena nukkunut (1931; The Maid Silja), scenes on lakes mark important phases of the protagonist’s life. A lake is always present in the rural setting, but, at certain crucial moments, the description of the setting on the lake gains a special significance. The most startling scene is that of Silja’s mother’s death. Silja, a toddler at the time, is outside at the moment when her mother dies of tuberculosis inside the house: Hänelläkin oli siellä uusi elämys. Järveltä kuului näet tänään omituista keskeytymätöntä ritinää, ratinaa, kohinaa ja joskus oikein peloittavaakin ääntä. Se kuului ihan läheltä. Tyttöön se vaikutti niin, ettei hän juuri muuta huomannutkaan. Äidin ruumiin pois korjaaminenkin jäi hänen muistinsa ulkopuolelle. Vasta illalla myöhään hänelle sanottiin, että äidin oli käynyt samoin kuin Taaven ja Lauran siellä entisessä kodissa. Tällöin oli Siljalle jo paljon tärkeämpää saada varma selitys siihen, mikä oli ollut se ritinä ja ratina, joka oli järveltä kuulunut koko iltapäivän. (110) (She too was living through a new experience. From the lake came a strange uninterrupted tinkling, rattling, roaring, and occasionally a real frightening sound. The noise seemed to come from quite near. It affected the girl so that she was hardly aware of anything else. Even the

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removal of her mother’s body was unnoticed by her. Not until late evening was she told that mother had gone the way of Taave and Laura at their former home. Just then, however, it was more important for Silja to be told quite clearly what the tinkling and rattling was that had sounded the whole afternoon from the lake.) [91]

Her father explains the breakup of the ice in the spring and the different appearances of the lake during the seasons, and the child falls asleep: “Oli kuin lapsi olisi halunnut seurata noita läheisiä tuttujaan niiden kevyelle kuoleman tielle” (110) [“It was as though she had wished to follow those dear friends of hers along their easy road of death” (92)]. The author connects the fracturing of the ice – spring on the lake – to the story of Silja anticipating her fate, which premonition is clearly expressed in the Finnish title of the novel Nuorena nukkunut (Fallen Asleep While Young). Silja’s death is, in fact, narrated at the beginning of the novel in Sillanpää’s characteristic way of telling the ending before the story commences as well as avoiding any sentimental compromises. The child’s interest in the breaking of the ice at the moment of her mother’s death is one of the scenes significant in terms of the view of human life Sillanpää is conveying in his novel. Years later, Silja ventures onto the lake with her skis just when the ice begins to break. Her father manages to save her but death, which seems to lurk around Silja’s short life, manifests itself once more by means of the lake. Sillanpää’s lakes carry erotic connotations as well and the encounter on the ice road is only one example. The lake in the light summer night becomes a place of dreaming for the sixteenyear-old Silja. Vesi rantoineen ja saarineen lepäsi kuin jossain kuvassa, jommoisia hän oli nähnyt silloin tällöin. Veden alla kuvajaiset toistivat syvyyttä kohden kaiken sen, mikä veden päällä nousi korkeutta kohden. Kaikki mitä aistimet tajusivat, se ikäänkuin hartaasti vakuutti tajunnalle herkkää hyvyyttään, ikäänkuin kuiskasi tytölle, että jos sinulta vieläkin jotain puuttuu, niin emme sille muuta voi kuin tällä kaikella vaalia kaipaustasi. (133) (The water with its shores and islands rested as in a picture she had once seen. In the water the reflections repeated towards the depths all that rose to the heights on the banks. Everything the senses could grasp seemed to be gravely and eagerly assuring the consciousness of its goodness, to be whispering to the girl that if you still sigh for anything all we can do is to soothe3 your longing with what you now see.) [112–13]

Silja’s silent melancholy is connected to her realization that she is a woman and that she is now the guardian of her old father. Before leaving the shore, Silja sees a boat in which the rower is seemingly driven by the magic of the summer night: “Silja poimi kukan maasta, vaikkei ollenkaan ollut aikonut sitä tehdä ja katseli saapuvaa venettä sivuttain seisten. Soutajakin laski hetkeksi aironsa, niinkuin olisi tuohon tytön liikkeeseen vastannut, vaikkei hän varmaankaan vielä ollut tyttöä nähnytkään” (134). (“Silja gathered a flower from the ground, without intending to do so, and looked sidelong at the oncoming boat. The rower let his oars rest, as though in answer to the girl’s movement, although it was almost impossible that he could have seen her.” [113])

3.

The Finnish word that is here translated as “soothe” is ambiguous: it can also mean “preserve” or even “excite.”

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The youth seems to be a summer visitor from some distant villa, and Silja believes she has seen him in the village on a bicycle. This accidental encounter with its slightly erotic undertones foretells a love story, but the reader will realize it only afterwards. Before the fulfillment of what began there, Silja must endure hardships and disappointments, but she will meet her rower again. The summer-night dream comes true and is almost as brief as the dreamlike moment when Silja sees the rower for the first time. Spiritual lakes Using the common metaphor of place, there are vertical dimensions connected to lakes, meaning that the material reality of lakes is converted into something spiritual as well. A lake can be a place of epiphany where a connection opens to the heavens as well as to the depths. Fin-desiècle symbolic imagery associated with lakes gave rise to the metaphor presenting the poet’s mind as a mirroring surface of a lake where the swans, like dreams and ideas, swim and reflect themselves. In the context of this imagery, the surface of a lake is seen as the limit or interface between the engulfing depth of the submerged world populated by strange monsters (the unconscious) and the unreachable silent heavens where empty space has replaced divine benevolence. The older romantic strand of making lakes the scenes of epiphanies is represented by Runeberg’s poem “Kyrkan” (1842; The Church). The protagonist of this epic poem is a former farmer who lost his farm and everything else he owned and is spending his advanced years as a burden to the community on someone else’s farm. Living in a dark corner of the house, he is despised. On a midsummer day, when everyone else in the house is preparing to go to church, he, a profoundly religious man despite his bitter destiny, asks to be taken along to the church but is denied the privilege of riding in a cart; the owner of the farm, although seeing that the lake is covered with thick fog, suggests that he take the rowboat that no one else needs for the moment and try to find his way to the church by himself. The old man accepts this heartless suggestion trusting in God’s help. He rows into the fog without finding his way while hearing only the church bells from ever farther off. Already losing hope, he looks up to the gray sky but suddenly feels the boat striking a rock and discovers that he is on a familiar island in the middle of the lake. When the church bells ring for the last time to invite everyone to the church, the old man on his island sees a glimpse of light: the sun is coming out, the birds are beginning to sing, and the old man – singing a psalm – feels in communion with Christ. The world is re-created: “Udde efter udde dök ur dimman, / Ö vid ö stod fram; en värld av fägring / Växte sakta opp ur skuggans tomhet, / Tog begränsning, färger, glans” (1:350) [Cape after cape surged, / Isle after isle emerged from the mist; a world of beauty / Grew out of the shadow’s emptiness, / Took shape, colors, shine]. The old man is filled with inner peace, leaves the island, his church, bidding farewell to the birds – the congregation – and to the sun: Nu Guds frid med eder, …. fåglar alla, Unga bröder, systrar, Gud’s församling,

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Som med mig, i dag i samma kyrka, Honom prisat och Hans ära sjungit. Och haf tack, du tolk af himlens läror, Klara sol, som nu för oss predikat, Böjt vårt hjärta, att Hans godhet känna Och lagt ut Hans verk för våra ögön. (351) (May the peace of God be with you, …. birds one and all, Young brothers, sisters, God’s congregation, And with me who today, in the same church, Have praised Him and sung His honor. And thank you, you interpreter of heaven’s lessons, Clear sun who made the sermon for us now, Bent our hearts to feel his mercy, And laid out his works before our eyes.)

This personal variant of St. Francis’s sermon to the birds glorifies nature as a manifestation of God and makes the lake and the island a place of communion with God – even a more appropriate place than the church, it is implied. Symbolist poetry favored the motif of lakes, which also took into account the depth beneath the mirroring surface. Many memorable lake poems were written by Otto Manninen, one of the authors from the eastern lake districts. His poem “Joutsenet” (1905; The Swans), depicting swans on a summer lake, combines vivid description of lake scenery with symbolist themes. The magic of Manninen’s poem emerges from a combination of detailed and seemingly realist description with suggestive symbolism referring to phenomena of the mind. Although the title reveals the identity of the “protagonists” who swim on the lake at the early hour of sunrise in spring or early summer, the swans are never mentioned in the poem: they are referred to only as “they” and through metonymic expressions, like “Lumikaulat” (70) [snowy necks] and “unet valkeat ulappain” (71) [the white dreams of the waves]. The swans also blend with the white water lilies, the preferred flowers of symbolist poetry. These flowers, which have roots in the muddy lake bottom but raise their pure blooms on the surface, symbolize the roots of human ideas in the darkness of the unconscious and the intertwining of the dark side of the human psyche with its highest spiritual desires and achievements. In Manninen’s poem the swans seem, however, to be relatively free of this entwinement: they swim freely on the lake’s surface, on the surface of the poet’s mind. Like the swans in Eino Leino’s poem “Salojärven joutsenet” (1897; The Swans on a Forest Lake), Manninen’s swans are ideas, mental pictures or dream visions. They symbolize the beauty and the sublime desired by dreaming consciousness or the limpid surface of the mind. The lake – its image in the poem – hides the depths so as only to mirror the beauty of the swans and the serenity of the summer morning. Manninen’s swans are not the mute swans (which, in symbolist poetry, only sing at the moment of their death), but swans that sing their happiness. (Manninen uses the word joikua, which alliterates with the title of the poem and is a covert version of the suppressed name joutsen of the birds.) In its common use, the word refers to the singing of the Sámi people in Sápmi – their homeland – and can be

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associated with the real voices of Cygnus cygnus. But here the sound is compared to that of the bells of a remote chapel and, consequently, is set in a context of holiness and the sacred. The sounds are carried by the waves, and finally the swans themselves are assimilated by the waves as well as the rhythmic flow of the poem. Thus, the mental images generate the poem; the poem is the song of the swans or the product of the poet’s dreaming mind. Manninen’s swans fly away and their glowing wings leave a final image on the water that is freezing thus symbolizing the inconsolable state of the mind of the speaker. Newly frozen lakes, which offer quite another aspect of waterscapes, have attracted attention also from other Finnish authors. In Finnish, the expression yksiöinen jää [one night’s ice] refers to things that are insecure and still fragile and thus pertain to the real danger of drowning if such ice breaks under foot, but the magic of this phenomenon in literature emerges from the combination of danger, beauty, and pleasure. A very well-known short story by Pentti Haanpää called “Päntän äijän vajoaminen” (1947; The Drowning of the Päntä Geezer) depicts an old man who has an irresistible urge to go out onto a lake as soon as it is frozen. The new, still transparent ice with its dark waters visible under the glass-like surface tempts him to cross the lake with his kick sled every year. More often than not, the ice breaks beneath him, and the neighbors have to rescue him as best they can. Haanpää’s story represents the urge human beings have to test the limits and to take risks for the sake of fun and excitement, but it also seems to refer to the activity of an artist trying to explore the unknown. An earlier poem by Manninen sets a precedent: in his poem “Luistimilla” (1905; On Skates), the skaters are seduced to continue skating to the dangerously fragile ice over the deep waters of the human heart (67–68). Rewriting lake scenes Contemporary literature, with its tendency to focus on urban life or fantasy and to shun realist descriptions, does not readily accommodate descriptions of lakes. However, due to the prominence of lake imagery in older Finnish literature as well as the national imagery in general, lake scenes have become a target for parody and a playground of pastiches. References to drowning maidens recall Aino from Kalevala and all her later literary sisters, and setting on lakes and lakesides often bear resemblances to older scenes. One recent rewriting of the beginning of Genesis by Rosa Liksom in her 1996 novel Kreisland makes a lake setting prominent in the creation of the place called Kreisland and the primitive protagonist who represents the Finnish Man. The place name refers to a Finnish distortion of the English word “crazy” and is related to Elvis Presley’s Graceland as well. Alussa oli kirkasvetinen järvi ja synkkä yö liikkui veden päällä. Ensimmäisenä aamuna vedestä nousi tähtitaivas ja vaarojen ympärille loputon suomaa. Toisena aamuna vedestä kohosi kirkas valo, joka maalasi pakkaspäivän pilvet vihreiksi, mäntymetsän punaiseksi ja lumen siniseksi. Kolmantena aamuna järvestä sinkosi nälkiintynyt poro, neljäntenä sääskiparvi, joka ukkospilven tavoin peitti auringon. Viidentenä aamuna vesi synnytti lumihanget, paksun jään ja yöttömän yön, ja yö sulatti jään järven pinnalta. Kuudentena aamuna järven rannalle, sinne missä maa oli autio ja tyhjä, ilmestyi ikkunaton pirtti ja kinttupolku, ja seitsemäntenä aamuna polulla nähtiin kolon miehen hahmon saanut ihminen, jonka käsivarsissa sykki valtava voima ja jonka

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huuto täytti taivaanrannan järvestä järveen. Kreisland oli syntynyt mahtavan äärettömyyden keskelle. (7) (In the beginning, there was a lake with clear water and dark night moving on it. On the first morning, a starry sky rose from the water with unending bogs around the hills. On the second morning, a bright light surged up from the water, painting the clouds of the frosty day green, the pine forest red, and the snow blue. On the third morning, a starving reindeer was hurled out of the lake; on the fourth a swarm of mosquitoes that covered the sun like a thundercloud. On the fifth morning, the water gave birth to snowdrifts, thick ice, and the nightless night, and the night melted the ice on the lake. On the sixth morning, there appeared on the lakeside where the earth was without form and void, a cottage with no windows and a footpath, and on the seventh morning, a human being in the shape of a gloomy man was seen on the path with immense power pulsating in his arms and whose yelling filled the horizon from lake to lake. Kreisland was born in the middle of a vast infinity.)

This array of clichés, puns, and intertextual allusions still contains a vivid description of scenery that clearly characterizes a location in northern Finland, a region not so often present in Finnish depictions of lakes. In a more realistic vein, lake settings serve to describe Finland’s contemporary summer cottage culture (for the Norwegian equivalent, see Ellen Rees’s essay in this volume). This culture produces occasions for describing the strange undertakings of urban summer visitors often estranged from life in nature as well as their encounters with neo-primitive locals on or beside lakes. In these descriptions, the urban population, who take their way of life with them, disturb the remnants of the lake idylls. The lakes are still there, but their role in the literature has changed. Thus lake descriptions in the Finnish classics remain a part of the national cultural memory, but it seems that today lakes themselves are not the waterscapes that best reflect contemporary fears or hopes and consequently no longer have a clear symbolic function in contemporary literature. The new versions of the deluge, on the other hand, seem to be forming a productive image even in Finnish literature, but most often this image involves oceans, not peaceful lakes.

The island in Nordic literature Lisbeth P. Wærp

What one sees on a map of the Nordic region is mostly ocean. Thereafter are islands – islands and peninsulas. The world’s largest island, Greenland, dominates the Nordic seas, while the Faroes and Iceland, though much smaller, have played a notable role in the cultural development of the area. Denmark consists of the peninsula Jutland and several smaller and larger islands. Scandinavia proper, Norway and Sweden, is a peninsula and is itself part of the larger Fenno-Scandinavian peninsula, which also includes the Kola Peninsula as well as Karelia and Finland. In addition thousands of small islands and groups of islands dot the region, forming the Scandinavian archipelagos – local coastal areas with groups of small islets and skerries. Norway and Greece are the two European nations with the greatest number of islands: in Norway alone there are 239,057 islands. The many islands have historically influenced the infrastructure of the Nordic region, and still do, especially in the smaller island societies, even though more and more the larger islands have in due course been connected to the mainland, first by ferries and later, where physically and economically possible, by bridges. The islands, the ocean, the isolation, the exposure to the elements, the boat traffic, and the bridges – all have naturally made their mark on art and culture. Islands also appear to have a particular fascination for the human imagination: Western culture is full of mythological references to notions of “the good life” set on distant, usually nonexistent islands: the ancient conception of the Isles of the Blessed, for example, or the myth of the sunken island paradise of Atlantis, etc. Islands also have a latent symbolic meaning, perhaps because the island surrounded by ocean on all sides is such a specifically defined location and constitutes a place so clearly separated and isolated from the outside world, a world of its own that can be deployed as a reflexive image of this world or some particular part of it. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) is, of course, the prime example of such a symbolic function and the work from which the conception of utopia derives. Although pure utopias are exceptional in island literature, even the unmarked or “ordinary” literary islands often display utopian or dystopian characteristics to varying degrees, along with heterotopic features as well. As both Ringgaard and Briens have emphasized previously in this volume, the heterotopia is a place that represents the other, the deviant, but unlike the utopia, the heterotopia actually exists and by virtue of its being deviant and set apart, it reflects the places from which it differentiates itself. In L’île déserte et autres Textes: Textes et entretiens, 1953–1974 (Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974), Gilles Deleuze focuses his attention on what he calls the desertedness of all islands. He refers to the geological fact that there are two major types of islands: continental islands (islands that are located on a continental plate) and oceanic islands (islands that are located on oceanic plates but are often formed by volcanic activity). He categorizes continental islands as “accidentelles, des îles dérivées” (11) [“accidental, derived islands” (9)] since they are separated from a continent, and oceanic islands as originary, essential islands, since they have grown out of the bottom of the sea. He then compares our conceptions of islands with the two geological processes that produce islands: doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.12war © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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L’élan de l’homme qui l’entraîne vers les îles reprend le double mouvement qui produit les îles en elles-mêmes. Rêver des îles, avec angoisse ou joie peu importe, c’est rêver qu’on se sépare, qu’on est déjà séparé, loin des continents, qu’on est seul et perdu – ou bien c’est rêver qu’on repart à zéro, qu’on recrée, qu’on recommence. Il y avait des îles dérivées, mais l’île, c’est aussi ce vers quoi l’on dérive, et il y avait des îles originaires, mais l’île, c’est aussi l’origine, l’origine radicale et absolue. (12) (The élan that draws humans toward islands extends the double movement that produces islands in themselves. Dreaming of islands – whether with joy or in fear, it doesn’t matter – is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone – or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew. Some islands drifted away from the continent, but the island is also that toward which one drifts; other islands originated in the ocean, but the island is also the origin, radical and absolute.) [10]

With a small adjustment to Deleuze’s point, the history of the island as a discursive construction in Nordic literature can be told as a story not only about dreams, but actions connected to rupture, separation, and the desire for a new beginning. It is a case of actions that are inextricably bound up with identity and rootedness, or the opposite, with a failing or lack of identity and rootlessness, and ultimately, with conceptions of the good life and the fear of the opposite: unhappiness, catastrophe, and defeat. At any rate, that is how the history of the island as a discursive concept in Nordic literature will be told here. The island as a construction enters literature in highly divergent literary discourses, genres, and contexts: nation-building, cultural criticism, poetics, robinsonades, exile, war, love, jealousy, betrayal, freedom and captivity, center and periphery, industrialization, the destruction of the environment, and ecocriticism – to mention some that will be closely examined. Across such dissimilarities, the islands group themselves according to whether utopian, dystopian, or heterotopic characteristics are ascribed to them. This essay first examines the development from the nineteenth century, when the island was an element in more or less edifying discourses, to the twentieth century, when it is used in more critical, pessimistic discourses. The turning point is the two great world wars. In Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger’s summer poetry cycle Langelandsreise i sommeren 1804 (1805; Journey to Langeland in the Summer of 1804), the protagonist is a young poet who sets off on his first long journey from Copenhagen to the little Danish island called Langeland. Langelandsreise i sommeren 1804 is an homage to that which is distinctive: Danish nature and Danish history. The island Langeland is described not only as beautiful, but as a place where beauty can spread and find expression in a special way. Langeland’s qualities proceed precisely from its status as an island – that is to say, broken off, separated from the rest of the land, and completely surrounded by water: Den skiønne Øe! der som en smekker Green, Brudt af den store, danske Rosenhække, I Vandet ligger fastnet ved en Steen, Mens idel Knopper Løvet rundt bedække. I friske Bølge, altid klar og reen, Kan Intet Blomsterkraftens Yttring svække, Og tusind Vinger did sig froe bevæge, For sig i søden Duft at vederqvæge. (134–35)

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148 (The beautiful island! Which like a slender branch, Broken off from the great Danish rose hedge, In the water it is anchored by a stone, While sheer buds wrap the foliage In refreshing waves, forever clear and clean, Nothing can weaken the expression of floral might, And a thousand wings happily flutter, to be refreshed in sweet aromas.)

This island construction is characterized by the nineteenth century’s nation-building discourse. Langeland’s symbolic function is connected to the island as a part of the nation of Denmark, yet separated from Denmark – beautiful, exotic, but simultaneously still a part of it and representative of it. Today Langeland is connected to the island Fyn by a bridge from Rudkøbing to Siø, a dam from Siø to the island Tåsinge, and a bridge between Tåsinge and Fyn. On the other hand, Hans Christian Andersen’s “Amager,” in the lively and parodic travel novel Fodreise fra Holmens Canal til Østpynten af Amager i Aarene 1828 og 1829 (1829; Journey on Foot from Holmens Canal to the Eastern Point of Amager in the Years 1828 and 1829), was connected to the mainland by bridges to Zealand and Copenhagen as early as the seventeenth century. Since then more bridges have been built between Amager and Zealand, and today the Øresund Bridge connects Amager and Sweden. There is, however, nothing in Andersen’s novel that indicates that Amager was no longer experienced as an island. In Fodreise, the protagonist, a young aspiring author, has two different bridges to choose between when going over to Amager – Knippelsbro and Langebro – and in the novel, which is about a young man who wants to go out into the world in order to become an author, this choice is important because it is simultaneously presented as an allegorical choice between two different artistic paths – fantasy and reason, or romanticism and classicism. Thus the island also gains an allegorical function in the novel since it – like the way place functions in the medieval psychomachia – becomes both the protagonist’s destination and his interior struggle, in which fantasy fights against reason and the poetics of romanticism against that of classicism (the conflict between the two muses for power over the aspiring poet does not cease: even though the protagonist chooses to follow the pale muse of fantasy over Langebro, the buxom Amager woman of reason continues to chase after him). This island has also had a special historical status for Danes: during the sixteenth century, it was used as an agricultural tract when King Christian II, in order to obtain enough vegetables for the inhabitants of Copenhagen, persuaded the Dutch to grow vegetables and fruit on Amager. The Amager woman with the basket of fruit in Andersen’s novel reflects this historical situation. When the protagonist of Andersen’s novel wants to go to Amager, it is, however, not because of the vegetables, but rather because there is nothing in particular of interest there; it is the flat and insignificant Amager he seeks. There is, in other words, little written about the island; Amager is “endnu ikke … befaret af nogen poetisk Rytter” (167) [not yet … traversed by any knight of poetry]. At the same time, the undescribed island’s flatness gives fantasy room to develop: “Phantasiens store, herlige Tumleplads, det flade Amager” (209) [Fantasy’s great and glorious arena, the flat Amager]. Here there is “Plads for Tanken til ret at sværme om” (209) [space for thought to fully flutter about]. Instead of a topographic description, which

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the protagonist parodies when he walks onto the island, one is given the following description of Amager: Snart forekom det mig, at jeg promenerede paa den finske Bugt eller var paa det arcadiske Novaia Sembla; snart, at jeg vandrede gjennem Ørknen Kobi, for at aflægge Dalai Lama en Theevisit, eller gjennem Sahara, for at finde Nigerflodens Kilder. – Nu fulgte jeg den hellige Caravane til Mekka, og nu stod jeg imellem Eskimoerne ved Hudsons Bugten. (209) (Suddenly it seemed to me that I was walking on the Gulf of Finland or was on the Arcadian Novaia Sembla: as suddenly again, that I was wandering through the Gobi Desert in order to have tea with the Dalai Lama, or through the Sahara in order to find the source of the Niger River.  – Now I was following the holy pilgrimage to Mecca, and now I stood among the Eskimos on the Hudson Bay).

This parody of the exploring and describing topography illustrates its weakened status in romanticism; from then on, place becomes the object of the poets’ interpreting and estranging gaze. Fodreise also parodies travel literature as a genre: the wandering to which the title refers seemingly lasts for two years, but lasts in reality (which is to say in the universe of the novel) for only a few hours, more precisely from 10:00 pm on New Year’s Eve 1828 to the break of dawn on New Year’s Day in 1829. There is not just one island in Fodreise, but four in all. The novel describes a journey away from an island – the urban and densely populated island of Zealand – over a bridge to the much smaller, less populated, and agrarian island of Amager, and across this island to the wilderness of the eastern point of Amager. There the protagonist suddenly determines he will depart by boat for the even smaller and almost uninhabited island of Saltholm even further east, but he is stopped by Rosmer Havmand, who is also a critic and a reviewer of the book Fodreise, because the protagonist would then end up ruining his own project (which, according to the title, is only supposed to go “from Holmens Canal to the eastern point of Amager”). This movement from the urban cityscape and through the country toward progressively wilder nature is typical of the romantic nature poets. But there is also the limit that is set for this movement. In the island novel Fodreise, this boundary naturally coincides with the edge of the beach on the east coast of Amager. The fourth island is not only fictitious, but part of an allegory that has early modern characteristics: through St. Peter’s magic glasses, the protagonist sees hell as an island in the center of the earth, where the devil is a schoolmaster with tousled hair, the ridiculous but dangerous representative of reason. This dystopian island figuration is not only important for the novel’s characteristic romantic poetics, but it also gives it a hint of cultural criticism. Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) was in its time – when Europeans seriously traveled out into the world to explore and colonize it – a great success. It resulted in the robinsonade, a new genre within the already established desert-island literature. According to the robinsonade theorist Artur Blaim, the robinsonade as a genre involves a desert island motif that is structurally important and a stay on a desert island that is characterized by certain phases and conditions: “enforced isolation, initial despair, survival arrangements, release from isolation or voluntary acceptance of solitary life” (6). A more recent study of the robinsonade (Rønning) makes the point that survival in this broad conception of the robinsonade is more accentuated than experiences in and of themselves. In this more recent study, the emphasis is on the tension

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between experiences and survival in the robinsonade along with the role and status of love (Rønning). A conspicuous characteristic of the genre is its didacticism. It has been described as a kind of picaresque adventure novel with a “moralsk-puritansk Opbyggelsesprogram” (Stangerup 126) [moralistic-puritanical edifying agenda] and a form that anticipates the realistic Bildungsroman. The robinsonade flourished throughout the rest of the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth century, it also (and perhaps first and foremost) became a literary genre for children. A contributing factor appears to have been that in his ground-breaking pedagogical novel Émile ou De l’éducation (1762; Emile, or On Education), Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed that the only book necessary for raising a child was Robinson Crusoe. A Nordic example of a robinsonade is the now little-known juvenile novel Öjungfrun (1832; The Island Maiden) by the Swedish priest, author, and folk Enlightenment figure Gustaf Henrik Mellin. This is a feminine robinsonade with a female protagonist: the fourteen-year-old Helena Säfvenblom, whose father has gone blind. Partly because he needs to get to a famous eye doctor in Italy, partly in order to experience the world, they set out on a lengthy sea journey from Gothenburg. The itinerary changes, however, and leads via the Madeira Islands to the Cape of Good Hope. Immediately after rounding the Cape, the ship founders, and the two survive in dramatic fashion as the only humans on a desert island in the Indian ocean, where the father eventually dies leaving Helena alone for four years before she is found and taken home again. The island, which remains unnamed in the novel, turns out to have a volcanic origin, is fertile and beautiful, and is also compared with paradise on numerous occasions. Helena becomes acclimated to her new surroundings in a remarkably quick and easy fashion. She is often homesick but also gradually begins to feel at home on the island and that she is its owner and conqueror. This sentiment results in a strong ambivalence: she is homesick but does not want to go home. Afterwards she is miraculously found by her brother, who coincidentally falls ill and is taken to the island to be quarantined. Whereas she feels as if she has been saved from life in the wilderness, at the same time she loves it and suggests that they stay and live on the island. Even so, the novel naturally concludes with her return home to Gothenburg with her brother. There she is isolated, recivilized, and resocialized into Swedish society with a ball, an engagement, and a marriage. The novel may thus be seen as a didactic story about female identity and the order of society, which in addition to constantly emphasizing Helena’s remarkable independence, cleverness, and ingenuity also describes her similarly remarkable subservience and faith in authority. The text insists on the necessity of a woman’s dependence and submissiveness to a man, but in addition to the necessary endurance of patriarchal social structure the novel promotes the realization that paradise and the good life are in a place completely different from the beautiful, deserted island in the Indian Ocean. The robinsonade may be characterized as a hybrid of several genres – the desert island genre, the travel narrative, the adventure novel, the Bildungsroman, the (auto)biography, and last but not least, the utopia. Henrik Wergeland’s island farce De sidste Kloge (1835; The Last of the Clever Ones) was published in the same decade as Mellin’s popular robinsonade. Both Wergeland and Mellin may be characterized as folk Enlightenment figures, and both were important at their time in this capacity. Today Wergeland is a canonical author, but Mellin is a name scarcely known. Whereas Mellin’s work is extremely conservative (while inadvertently pointing out alternative possibilities, other homes, and other identities than those typically

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foregrounded), Wergeland’s dystopian drama is highly critical of society. It is a scathing criticism of the capitalistic culture of greed, monopolies, and the raw exploitation of the poor in which the island is a metaphor for the world governed by capitalism. The plot of the drama is set in a futuristic society on the island Terranova where famine reigns and the greedy Kornpugeren [Grain Hoarder] has a monopoly on the sale of grain. He drives the prices up so high that nobody can afford to buy grain, and everybody either dies of starvation or escapes from the island. In the final scene, he drowns as the last living person on the island, not in the sea but in his own grain. The name of the island is, ironically enough, Terranova: the new earth. Nevertheless, all of the positive connotations of the name, which point towards a beneficent location and represent an image thereof, are subordinated by what this island in fact turns out to be. One of Norway’s most well-known and beloved poems is Henrik Ibsen’s “Terje Vigen” (1862). The opening of the forty-three-stanza epic poem is a passage that many have memorized: Der bode en underlig gråsprængt en på den yderste, nøgne ø; – han gjorde visst intet menneske mén hverken på land eller sjø; dog stundom gnistred hans øjne stygt, – helst mod uroligt vejr, – og da mente folk, at han var forrykt, og da var der få, som uden frygt kom Terje Vigen nær. (520) (There lived a remarkably grizzled man on the uttermost, barren isle; – He never harmed, in the world’s wide span, a soul by deceit or by guile; his eyes, though, sometimes would blaze and fret most when a storm was nigh, – and then people sensed he was troubled yet and then there were few that felt no threat with Terje Vigen by.) [Ibsen’s Poems 63]

Here a mysterious person is described as living in exile on “den, yderste nøgne ø” [lit.: the outermost naked island] – not simply on an island but a barren island, and also the one furthest away – a person whose story is recounted in the rest of the poem. The plot is set in southern Norway, and the places named in the poem have geographical names that are identical to the names of factual southern Norwegian places – islands, islets, and skerries in the vicinity of the little Norwegian town of Grimstad, which is situated at some distance south of Oslo. In 1916, the poem was adapted for film. The highly regarded Swedish artist Victor Sjöström directed it and played the leading role. In the film, the Norwegian coastal landscape is portrayed in great and powerful nature imagery (Sjöström was one of the pioneers developing the use of landscape imagery in fiction filmmaking), and the viewer clearly sees the meaning of the sea, the coastal landscape, and the archipelago for the narrative situation, action, and plot. Not only is “the uttermost barren island” important, but so is the coastal landscape and the archipelago itself with

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its deceptive but also protective skerries. Moreover, the great open water between the southern coast of Norway and Skagen in Denmark is not only presented as dangerous but also as a representation of dreams, desires, and possibilities. England is also present in the poem through the mention of the English coastal war fleet and an English yacht in distress. Just as important as all the islands and the skerries – some of which rise above the waterline while others (the blind skerries) are submerged – is the boat, not only as a means of transportation but as a place without a place, i.e. as a heterotopia. Ibsen’s poem is about the seaman and pilot Terje Vigen. Because of the Napoleonic Wars and the English grain blockade, there is a famine in Norway, and Terje Vigen sees that the only possible way to save himself and his little family is to make his way to Denmark and retrieve some grain. In a small, open rowboat without a sail (which would reveal his location), he makes his way – at the risk of his life – to Skagerak and to Fladstrand (Fredrikshavn). However, when he has nearly reached home again, he is caught by an English ship, arrested, and sent to prison for five years until the war is over. By the time he is released, his wife and little daughter have died of hunger. He then withdraws from human society and lives in exile on “the outermost naked island,” until an English yacht is about to sink in the open sea where he lives. He goes out to save the people onboard the ship but is overcome by vengefulness when he recognizes the captain as the one who had arrested him years earlier and put him in “The Prison.” The outermost skerry, where Terje Vigen and the lord’s family find themselves, is a vulnerable place, uninhabitable for humans, constantly in danger of being washed away and devoured by the sea. (The picture on the 2006 DVD cover of Sjöström’s cinematic adaptation shows the small figures on this skerry surrounded by high waves and a white, foaming sea.) The poem thus portrays a symbolically laden movement from the safe coastal area via “the uttermost barren island,” where Terje Vigen withdraws from humanity, to the exposed and vulnerable position on the skerry surrounded by the open sea and the threat of destruction, and back again. Terje Vigen’s heroic journey to Skagen and his work as a pilot and sailor portray the sea – and his boat – as the realm of possibility. The sea too is represented as a home for the seaman Terje Vigen before he settles on land: “[Terje Vigen] fandt ej, med landjorden under sig, ro; / nej, da var det bedre at bygge og bo / på det store bølgende hav!” (11:522) [“With land underfoot he was never at ease; / no, better by far then to dwell on the seas, / on the mighty end and the flow” (Ibsen’s Poems 64)]. It is probably this kind of inner conflict, inextricably linked with dreams and longings for something better, which prompts Foucault to characterize the boat as “la plus grande réserve d’imagination” (49) [“the greatest reserve of imagination” (27)] and as the heterotopia “par excellence.” Both the setting and the thematic treatment of a Norwegian’s fate during the Napoleonic war, as well as the fact that Sjöström’s adaptation of Ibsen’s poem is tightly tied to the original text (the poem is reproduced in Norwegian in the film’s intertitles) would seem to require that the film depict a Norwegian coastline. That is, however, not the case: the film’s location is Swedish and the seascape is from Öja (also called Landsort), an island in Stockholm’s southern archipelago. The irony is thus that the seascape one in fact sees photographed in the film as Norwegian is not only not Norwegian, but belongs to a nation that would have been regarded as hostile within the fictional universe of the film (whereas Denmark-Norway supported France in the Napoleonic wars, Sweden was on the side of Great Britain). Sjöström had used

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the same seascape in the film Havsgamar (1915; Sea Vultures), and according to his biographer Bengt Forslund became renowned for the way the seascape was used (77). Forslund notes that Sjöström undertook thorough explorations of both the Grimstad and Landsort locations prior to the filming of Terje Vigen. The choice of location thus seems to indicate that he concluded that the Norwegian seascape was visually interchangeable with the Swedish. The similarity between the two seascapes is naturally related to the fact that the Swedish and Norwegian island seascapes are parts of the same whole: both are outer groupings of islands in the Scandinavian Peninsula’s southern archipelago. This is a clear indication of the fact that geographical borders do not always coincide with the national, as the Scandinavian Peninsula is divided lengthwise by two nations, Norway and Sweden. After the Treaty of Kiel in 1814, which is referenced in both the poem and the film, Norway entered into a union with Sweden that for a time (until its dissolution in 1905) allowed the geographic and political borders to coincide.

Figure 18.  View from Landsort in the southern Stockholm archipelago, a Swedish “uttermost, barren isle” that substituted for the coastline near Grimstad, Norway. Photo: Arild Vågen (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The time of the film’s production (1916) also bursts the poem’s temporal frame of the early 1800s: politically the film can be seen as providing indirect commentary on its own contemporary events of WWI and England’s (new) blockade and starvation strategies. The director might also have had a personal interest in filming in Sweden, where Sjöström had experienced that his father abandoned both him and his mother, just as Terje Vigen does with such catastrophic consequences, although Sjöström’s father left by boat to a land much more distant than Denmark, namely America (Forslund 84). In this way it might not have been a shortcoming that the film was set on a barren island furthest out in the Swedish archipelago – perhaps for Sjöström just the opposite was the case.

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The dream of a better life is the obvious motivation for the plot of August Strindberg’s archipelago novel Hemsöborna: Skärgårdsberettelse (1887; The Inhabitants of Hemsö: The Tale of an Archipelago). The protagonist of the novel, an enterprising man from Värmland named Carlsson, comes to the island Hemsö to work as a farmhand. The motif of separation and the desire to begin again from scratch is clear from the beginning. The problem is Carlsson’s lack of a sense of belonging to the place and its island identity, its genius loci, and Carlsson’s identity as a landlubber becomes his curse. Hemsö is described as the type of place that Heidegger identifies as a good place in “Bauen Wohnen Denken” (“Building Dwelling Thinking”), at least for those who call it home (the name of the island is composed of the Swedish words hem [home] and ö [island]). The island is also a good place for those who vacation there, but in order to dwell there in the sense of making a home, not to mention to survive there, one must have the necessary island-dweller mentality and have a command of both land and water. While Ibsen’s poem contains a myriad of names of actual southern Norwegian places, islands, and types of skerries, as well as boats and ships that were suited to this coastal landscape, Strindberg’s novel contains a mixture of actual and fictional geographic place and names, and the boats, ships, and objects associated with maritime life are often described through the completely ignorant outsider view of the protagonist and landlubber Carlsson. Throughout the novel the narrator portrays him as incompetent with regard to anything that has to do with the sea. Hemsö is not an actual Swedish island, but the fictitious name of the island Kymmendö in the Stockholm archipelago, which is Sweden’s largest group of islands (35,000 islands in all). Today most of the inhabited islands in the Stockholm archipelago are either connected to the mainland by bridge or ferry or have some form of regular transit boat. They were not so connected to the mainland in Strindberg’s time, but from then on this development accelerated, something reflected in the novel as Hemsö gradually sees the regular arrival of a steam ship. The isolation is revealed in various ways and is intensified in the winter when the sea surrounding the island freezes and becomes impassable. It is quite concretely Carlsson’s lack of familiarity with the dangerous sea ice that occasions his downfall. Strindberg spent several summers on the privately owned island of Kymmendö, but the novel’s realistic description of farm life was in its time regarded as too explicit and raw, and the inhabitants of Kymmendö must have felt that the island had been terribly exploited because after the publication of Hemsöborna, Strindberg was no longer welcome as a summer guest on the island. Carlsson’s dream of a personal independence is not realized on Hemsö; social mobility, escape, and beginning anew are not enough in themselves. The dream of a national independence is another aspect of the dream of the good life. This dream is strong on the Faroe Islands, a group of eighteen islands of volcanic origin. Seventeen of the islands are inhabited, only Litla Dimun  – smaller than one square kilometer  – is uninhabited, but several have very few inhabitants (seven have fewer than fifty). Celtic monks have long been considered the first residents of the Faroe Islands but were supposed to have been driven away when the islands were colonized by Norwegians – pagan Vikings – in the ninth century. Since 1814 the Faroe Islands have been a part of Denmark, but the degree of self-rule has increased to the point that they are in most regards independent (with the exception of defense and foreign policy issues). The dream of national independence is thus a particular characteristic of Faroese art and culture,

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and the most well-known and highly regarded artistic expression of that impulse may, perhaps, be in the Faroese poet Janus Djurhuus’s poem “Atlantis” (1914). There the Faroe Islands are compared with the legendary sunken island Atlantis. Efforts have been made since antiquity to put Atlantis on the map, and thus Djurhuus’s suggestion belongs to a long tradition. When Djurhuus locates the island in the Atlantic Ocean the dream of free and independent Faroe Islands is linked with the dream of Atlantis. The ancient, unattainable kingdom is turned into the longed-for and ultimately attainable goal while the idea of the sunken or the lost location lingers in the background. The fear that an island will be devoured by the sea is found in several Nordic literary works. It is central in the highly regarded Norwegian novelist Olav Duun’s final novel Menneske og maktene (1938; Floodtide of Fate). This novel is widely understood as allegorically thematizing the tense state of Europe between the World Wars. Identity and belonging or the sense of being at home are also of great importance, though it is, however, a vulnerable and threatened home that is depicted. The plot plays out on a group of islands called Øyværet, a name composed of the Norwegian words øy [island] and vær, the name for a spot near the sea where people fish or gather eggs and down (in short, a fishing spot or village). Exactly which island group is the model for Øyværet has been the subject of speculation; one of the most convincing cases can be made for Sør-Gjæslingan, the last fishing village to be depopulated on the Namdal coast of central Norway. This fishing village, which in its time was one of the largest south of Lofoten, was not only located in an area exposed to bad weather and consequently struck many times by storms and floods like Øyværet, but also has several rock formations that share names with formations in Duun’s novel. Øyværet is both a weather-worn place and an unsafe harbor with a series of semi-exposed skerries that are difficult to detect when the sea is breaking over them.

Figure 19.  The fishing village of Sør-Gjæslingan on the Norwegian coast. Photo: Kenneaal (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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The danger of the navigation in such waters, especially in bad weather, is indicative of the vulnerability of the coast and its inhabitants. Equally relevant is the fact that the highest point of the island is nonetheless extremely low and the developed areas are down close to the ocean. The novel begins with a prophecy: “Det var spådd frå gammal tid at Øyvære skulle gå under. Uti have låg det, og have skulde ta det. Det hadde ikkje hendt hit-til. Det kom ikkje til å hende heller. Visst det da ikkje hendte i år. Det var spådd det òg, av einkvan ulykkesvarslaren” (3) [“It had been prophesied from earliest times that Øyvære would go under. There it lay, out in the sea; and the sea would take it. But it hadn’t happened yet; wouldn’t happen either, if it didn’t happen this year. That had been prophesied too, by some prophet of misfortune.” (7)]. In the novel, the sea in fact takes the group of islands: storm and floods gradually make the sea level rise and the islands are submerged. The rising water changes the island landscape in a slow and uncanny way: there is less and less island and more and more water. In the end, the single island Heimværet (made up of the Norwegian words heim [home] and vær [fishing spot or village]) is split into several smaller islands. The situation is dramatic: the sea rips houses and buildings apart and takes them with it. When the water is at its highest, some of the novel’s characters barely manage to save themselves by climbing up onto a rock formation, but even there they sit in water when the waves come. “Dei sat i vatn og skum til oppunder armane første og andre gongen, tredje gongen visste dei ikkje for vel korles det var” (185) [“They sat there in the water and foam up to their arms, both once and twice; and the third time they didn’t know what was happening” (237)]. It is not possible to get any higher. This novel is about a home constantly under threat. The survivors in Duun’s novel have second thoughts, but they end up choosing to remain on the island – it is here they belong. Duun was one of many authors in the 1930s who was fearful of a new world war, and the novel’s fear that the prophecy about the island’s disappearance would be fulfilled may be read as an allegorical expression of this fear. The storm and floods that overtake the island and threaten to kill everyone may be interpreted as catastrophe itself, even if one does not go so far as to allegorically equate the islands with Europe between the wars and the storm and flood with fascism as has been done in the secondary literature about the novel. Other Nordic authors have also used the island as a discursive construction that indirectly touches upon the Second World War. Prominent Nordic examples are Tarjei Vesaas’s Kimen (1940; The Seed) and Stig Dagerman’s De dömdas ö (1946; The Island of the Doomed). While Duun’s novel was written just before the war broke out, Vesaas’s was written in connection with its outbreak in Norway, and Dagerman’s the year after it ended. Whereas Duun’s novel may be read as an allegorical representation of the tense state during the period between the wars, Dagerman’s may be viewed as an extreme undermining of the conditions for survival after the war. In contrast, Vesaas’s novel can be interpreted as thematizing the outbreak and the mechanisms of war – the aggression, propaganda, possession, and violence. The noteworthy fact is that the island has such a central status and important function in three Nordic novels from the 1940s that all allegorically thematize the war. It confirms the thesis that the island as a discursive construction is connected to the dream of the good life and the fear of the opposite – catastrophe, disappearance – as well as to identity, the sense of belonging, and the fear of losing the place where one belongs and with which one identifies oneself. It is most likely not only the war that motivates the depiction of islands in these works but also the geographic perception

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of Scandinavia as a periphery within Europe. The island’s clear boundaries – its separation and isolation – makes it an appropriate way to express the idea of periphery. While Duun’s island is exposed, naked, meager, and vulnerable to the dangerous power of the sea, the island in Vesaas’s Kimen is described as: “ei lita, grøn og rik øy, inne i ei havbukt som livde av for hardveret dei hadde lenger ute. Det var mange gardar på øya. Mellom lauvlundar og småberg. Jorda var oppdriven til å bera mange foll her” (11) [“a small green and fertile island that lay in the middle of a bay that sheltered it from the storms farther out. There were many farms on the island. Between leafy groves and small cliffs. The earth was well cultivated and bore richly” (5–6)]. Like Strindberg’s Hemsö, this island is also the kind of place that in the language of Heidegger’s essay can be called a good place, comparable to his description of the farm in the Schwarzwald, where inhabitants think, build, and live in harmony with nature and the climate (157–59). But it is still more fruitful to understand place in Vesaas’s novel in light of Edward Casey’s definition of place as a relationship between the body, landscape, and culture. This insight is validated in that this particular place – the island in the novel – turns out differently for each different character: for a foreigner who arrives on the island in search of inner peace, it never becomes what he sought, the good place he imagined. He sees, however, that it is in fact a good place for those who live there. The island changes character as its inhabitants change. Vesaas’s island is anonymous, but it has a realistic and mimetic connection to recognizable Norwegian island villages of the 1930s: the inhabitants cultivate farms and orchards, and some also fish to supplement their income. There is no city or densely populated area on the island; there are no shops, no cars, no electricity, and the nearest church is located on a neighboring island, while the nearest population center is further out in the fjord. The island dwellers thus must use a boat to run the smallest errands. From the beginning, the island is also given symbolic characteristics: it is anonymous but is described throughout as “the green island.” The constant emphasis on that which is green, on the fertile orchards, and on the island as a paradise contributes to the island’s symbolic function. But what does it symbolize? For the traumatized Andreas Vest, the foreigner who arrives on the island in search of inner peace, the island appears to be a paradise due to its fertility and peacefulness. Vest has survived a major explosion at a factory and constantly travels around on the lookout for a place where he can rid himself of the destructive memories of the accident: “Kva søkte han etter? Etter stille. Fred. Og etter grønt. Det var komi på han ein ustyrleg trong til å sjå ting vekse og falde seg ut etter planen sin, få fullende seg” (Vesaas 14) [“What was he seeking? Quiet. And peace. And all that was green. He had an uncontrollable desire to see things grow and unfold themselves according to their plans, to perfect themselves” (8)]. He is completely aware, however, that the project might again be unsuccessful, but he insists: “Vi trur at Paradis må finnast” (15) [“Now we believe we can find a paradise” (9)]. Vest does not succeed, quite the contrary: he completely loses his mind when he witnesses a sow that, scared by a fight between two other sows, eats her newborn piglets alive. Thereafter he takes the life of a young girl on the island and is pursued by the angry island dwellers until they apprehend and lynch him. For the island dwellers, the island represents a good place, but it changes character after they realize what they have done. Blinded by aggression and vengeance, they killed a mentally ill man, and the island becomes – as it had been for Andreas Vest – a lost idyll and a place for

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longing and dreaming: now it is no longer called “the green island,” but instead they say, “Øya vår er då like grøn!” (149) [our island is surely still as green! (my translation)]. The hesitation suggested by the use of då [surely] when combined with the contention implied by the use of the exclamation mark reflects the island dwellers’ longing for the good life or at least for the kind of existence they had had on the island prior to the catastrophic events. It also reflects their doubt as to whether it is even possible to enter into that same kind of life again. Kimen is part of the utopian tradition in the sense that the island reflects the image of an earthly paradise even though the paradisiacal aspects of the island are undermined from the beginning by the suspicious or mistrusting gaze the narrator represents from the very first page on. The novel also participates in the dystopian tradition: the view that the novel expresses in its representation of the island dwellers makes it difficult to imagine the island (or the world) naively as a good place. The reader is instead invited to view the island (and the world) as extremely dangerous, a place where catastrophic outbursts such as the type here described always can and will take place: man is revealed as having undomesticated tendencies to exhibit blind aggression, pure murderous intent, blood thirst, and raw violence. Not even the insistence in the novel on humanity and human worth is any defense against the uncontrollable outbursts of wildness and madness. Much indicates that Vesaas’s model for the island in Kimen was Sjernarøy, a group of seven islands in the Bokna Fjord in western Norway. Significant parts of the landmass in the Bokna Fjord consist of ground that was anciently the bottom of the sea and thus rich with mineral deposits. The soil on those islands is thus extremely fertile making them lush and verdant. In the letter “Gjest ved Boknfjorden,” written in the context of the tense atmosphere between the wars in Europe and the food shortages of the time, Vesaas describes this green and idyllic island on the West Coast of Norway: “Her er frukt og brød og fred” [Here is fruit and bread and peace]. While on a scholarship on Sjernarøy in 1935, he finished the novel Kvinnor ropar heim (Women Call Home), which is known by many for its idealization of the farm life and praised by some as “bondelivets bibel” (Ring) [the Bible of farm life] but criticized by others for its reactionary ideology comparable to the German fascist Blut- und-Boden literature of the 1930s and ’40s. In his biography, Olav Vesaas mentions his father’s ambivalent impressions of the journey (200) that he later appropriated literarily in Kimen – the one good (the lush, fertile, green island) and the other unpleasant (two huge sows with hog teeth). Given that Vesaas wrote this novel and re-examined that green island five years after writing Kvinnor ropar heim, it is clearly the result of something more than a literary-historical confrontation with vitalism and Blut-und-Boden literature. It is a temporal engagement with his own time that not only involves the repudiation of the idealization of farm life, but also the debunking of conceptions about Europe and the Western world as safe and peaceful; it is a rejection that, in a broader perspective, is representative of the crisis or dissolution of modernity. Stig Dagerman’s De dömdas ö is an allegorical examination of post-catastrophic conditions: a ship sinks in a furious storm far out at sea, and a group of physically and psychologically damaged people, seven all told – two women and five men – wake up on a desert island. It could appear to be a robinsonade, and the novel can perhaps be read as a subversion of the robinsonade in the sense that none of the characters ever gets used to or masters anything in the new surroundings. They are just ruined under extreme physical and psychological suffering.

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They suffer physical injuries sustained as a result of a shipwreck as well as from the lack of food and fresh water. The psychological suffering is also linked to the catastrophe and the extremity of their present condition, but the characters also experience suffering and psychic trauma with deeper roots in the past. The novel presents a series of hallucinatory scenes of horror woven together with interludes of character portrayal. The focus is on their precarious physical existence in the world (on the desert island). The scenes of horror have surrealistic characteristics: eyes that come sailing in from the sea blown up like balloons; a hand that crawls like a bleeding animal over the sand; thousands of staring lizards; and large, living wounds that devour the surroundings. The island they are on is thus also compared to a man-eating plant: “denna grymma ö som likt blommanmänskoätaren omärkligt slöt sin lena käft kring allas nackar” (34) [“this cruel island that had clamped its gentle jaws round all their necks like the strands of a man-eating plant” (36)]. This is a totally dystopian world of pain, decomposition, and death. Dagerman’s novel can be read as a commentary on the state of the world in 1946, the year of the novel’s publication and the year after the end of the Second World War. It was written on the island that up until the publication of Hemsöborna had been Strindberg’s vacation paradise – Kymmendö – and served as the model for the island in Hemsöborna. But the island in Dagerman’s novel is unnamed, and with its extremely high daytime temperatures, its junglelike nature, and its exotic fish and animal life (swordfish, lizards, sharks, lions), it also resembles an African island as much as one in the Stockholm archipelago. Dagerman himself describes the island as “en av de obebodda öar som höjer seg nånstans ur vilket världshav som helst” (294) [one of the many uninhabited islands that rises out the oceans of the world]. In the same place, he emphasizes this kind of generalized desert island as completely necessary for the purpose of the novel. He describes this island as en opartisk scen, en fritt påhittad verklighet … [var] funderingarna om skuld och makt och vanmakt skulle framstå mycket naknare och häftigare … en symbolisk ö … resultatet av den nödvändiga förminskning, som världens lidanden måste undergå för att det överhuvud taget skall vara möjligt att iakttaga dem. (294) (an impartial scene, a freely fabricated reality … [where] the reflections on guilt and power and powerlessness could stand out more nakedly and impetuously … a symbolic island … the result of that necessary simplification that those suffering in the world must endure so that it is at all possible to observe them.)

The islands in these three novels from the 1940s are allegorical compositions that thematize the war and its consequences. The three novels are representative of the intellectual-historical change that took place as a consequence of the two world wars: a gaze that is suspicious of most everything, a wave of pessimism, and a loss of confidence in humanity, development, and progress. In comparing the island as a discursive construction in the works written before the two world wars with those written during or thereafter, a developmental process becomes apparent: while the island in the works prior to the wars sustains a kind of uplifting discourse, those in works following the war participate in one that is distinctly more critical and pessimistic. While the islands in the works related to the two world wars are evoked in allegorical compositions that thematize existentially liminal situations, the literature of the 1950s and ’60s

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consists of well-known works in which the island as a demarcated and isolated (not to mention claustrophobic) place is used to thematize fundamental existential states and examine intimate interpersonal relations: love, jealousy, and betrayal. One of these is among Denmark’s most well-known island novels from the postwar period, Martin A. Hansen’s Løgneren (1950; The Liar), which is about the teacher Johannes Vig, who moves to the island Sandø. This is a story about unhappy love, jealousy, and betrayal that is inextricably bound with a story about identity, loneliness, and isolation. Sandø is a small, isolated island that becomes doubly detached when the ice freezes and it becomes impossible to get to and from the island by boat. Everyone waits for spring, the boat, and the fiancé of the woman with whom several of the male characters have fallen in love. In this double isolation, the plot plays itself out with intense claustrophobic effect, and the lovers never do come together. The protagonist, the first-person narrator, is not even able to tell her that he loves her. In another novel, Kjell Askildsen’s nouveau roman – like Omgivelser (1969; Surroundings), four people – the lighthouse keeper Mardon, his wife Maria, his daughter Marion, and a guest, the author Albert Krafft – live isolated on an island in the sea and become embroiled in a drama of destructive jealousy. Here the meaning of the surroundings is focused on the (im)possibility of freedom – of free choice. In this sense the place itself – the island – emerges as a decisive literary strategy. The first description of the island is strictly observant in a way that is reminiscent of the classical topographic style: Øya er to kvadratkilometer stor og ligger ytterst mot havet, to sjømil fra fastlandet. Det vokser noen forkrøplete furutrær på øyas vestside, ellers bare lyng og einer. To hus: fyrvokterboligen og en ett-roms hytte; begge ligger ca. hundre meter fra båthavnen og er synlig fra fyret. (8) (The island is two square kilometers big and lies at the edge of the open sea, two nautical miles from the mainland. Some stunted pine trees grow on the West Coast of the island, besides that just heath and juniper. Two houses: the lighthouse keeper’s dwelling and a one-room hut; both are located about a hundred meters from the boat harbor and are visible from the lighthouse.)

In comparison, the final description of the island in the novel – “herregud, dette er da ingen fangeøy” (Askildsen 91) [my God, this isn’t a prison island, after all] – is figurative since the prison island in this case becomes a metaphor for a basic existential condition of captivity, but also ironic since the island gradually reveals itself, as the plot progresses, precisely as if it were a prison island. The novel can be compared to Jean-Paul Sartre’s drama Huis Clos (1944; No Exit), but seems from this perspective to be a literary critique of Sartre’s existential understanding of freedom. Characters in Askildsen’s novel are placed on a meager, tiny little island so small and so flat that everybody and everything can be seen by the others with or without binoculars and with or without the lighthouse as a vantage point. The motifs of voyeurism and surveillance are woven together with the role-playing motif of the 1960s into a whole that undermines Sartre’s conception of free will. One of the characters – the author who has rented a place from the lighthouse keeper’s family in order to write – claims as well that the conception of free will is an illusion because man is controlled by roles and the expectations associated with those roles, thus making life by definition inauthentic: “Og han tenker uklart at et brev som er underveis viser hvordan fortiden dirigerer oss og at det frie valg er en total illusjon” (Askilden 26) [And he has a vague thought that a letter on its way shows how the past controls us and that free choice

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is a total illusion]. This is not a heterotopia, it is not a limited deviant group, but instead is a dystopian interpretation of mankind’s existential situation. While the characters in Hansen’s novel Løgneren and in Askildsen’s novel Omgivelser are confined to their islands, the characters in Edvard Hoem’s Kjærleikens ferjereiser (1974; The Ferry Crossing) are on the move throughout the whole novel on a ferry between the Eikøy Island and the mainland. Eikøy is a fictitious island, and the fictionalization is made explicit as the novelist is described making the island up and putting it on the map along the West Coast of Norway. Kjærleikens ferjereiser is a social, realistic, regional novel, a novel about the status of the remote areas and is clearly critical of the regional politics that dominated the fictional country, a country that is, however, a representation (in part) of Norway in the 1970s. The island is a small place; it is difficult to get a job there, especially for women, and most of the inhabitants have to commute to the mainland by ferry. In Kjærleikens ferjereiser, the island as a construction focuses not only on identity, rootedness, and togetherness, but also on communication or the lack thereof: the ferry traffic between the island and the mainland, the rush to catch the ferry, all of the delays, the desperate waiting, the attempts of the public and private sectors to trick them out of the right to live on the island, and last but not least, as in the metaphor implicit in the title, the problematic communication of love. In an award-winning novel from the 1980s, Hanne Marie Svendsen’s Guldkuglen: Fortælling om en ø (1985; The Gold Ball), the perspective is broadened again, from close interpersonal relationships to the larger context. Here again the mythological conception of the island as a new beginning is encountered but now in terms of a modern settlement that nevertheless has an almost mythical form: “Niels Gløe roede over fra fastlandet for at bese den ø, han betragtede som en arv fra sine fædre” (13) [“Niels Gløe rowed across from the mainland to look over the island

Figure 20.  The island of Hasslö in southern Sweden’s Blekinge archipelago (altered to b/w). Photo: Andreas Faessler. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

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that he considered an inheritance from his fathers” (9)]. He decides to settle on the island and takes some tools and a woman with him. Thus begins the novel, which ends with the necessity of leaving the island with a precarious need to begin anew, because in this novel the island is a link in a timeless but also culturally critical and ecocritical plot: the island becomes urbanized and overpopulated, industrialized and polluted, and needs to be left behind. The protagonist Maja Stina then climbs up into an oak tree along with some of the survivors and escapes, not just from the island, but from the planet earth into a floating forest, an island in space. On her floating escape, she meets the other escapees, not exactly a comforting final image, but yet another example of the island as part of a literary construction that expresses the critical and pessimistic tone of the postwar era. A short reflection will be helpful before concluding: what happens to the sense of the island when an island establishes a connection to the mainland? Does it cease to be – or to be experienced as – an island? In light of the definition of an island as a piece of land surrounded by water, can it still be considered an island? In Brit Bildøen’s novel Landfastlykke (2001; Anchored Joy), the answer is that an island connected to the mainland is neither an island nor mainland. It can become an island again if the bridge connection for one reason or other is destroyed, but at this point it is no longer an island. In the previously discussed essay “Bauen Wohnen Denken,” Heidegger emphasizes the gathering effect that the bridge has on the landscape, that it changes the landscape, gathers it, and thus opens it up to new places. For Heidegger this is a link in the longer argument that place comes before space, that it is place that creates space, and not, conversely, that space opens up for places. In the present context, Heidegger’s point can be used as an argument that the island that is connected to the mainland is no longer an island and is not experienced as such. It is a completely new place composed of the landmass surrounded by water (the original island) augmented by land. The answer to the question of what happens to an island that becomes connected to the mainland by a bridge probably also depends on the eye of the beholder or the body of the experiencer. For a Dane it seems as if Amager – despite all of its bridges – is perceived as an island, as seen in Andersen’s Fodreise, perhaps as a result of its history as an island and because of how it appears on a map, but for an outsider, a foreigner unfamiliar with the map and history of Denmark, it may come as a great surprise that Amager is anything other than a neighborhood in Copenhagen. And is it not equally difficult to get a real sense of what is mainland and what is island when one drives hypermodern highway stretches in, for example, the United States or China? What has been seen in this presentation is a development from periods when the literary island participates in more or less uplifting discourses, to a point in time after the decisive turning point of the two great world wars when it becomes a part of more critical and pessimistic discourses in which the outlook for the good life, whether it involves close interpersonal relationships or broader contexts, seems to be worse. Deleuze is thus perhaps correct when he, in his desert island essay, insists that the lost mythological life of the desert island must be regained. According to this reading of Deleuze, the problem is our crippled ability to imagine a new and better world, an improvement of the state of things, and the solution – expressed metaphorically – is to regain the mythological life of the desert island.

Archipelago Henrik Johnsson

The most famous Swedish novel set in the archipelago is without doubt August Strindberg’s Hemsöborna (1887; The People of Hemsö), and the archipelago as a setting in Swedish fiction is not much older than Strindberg’s novel (see also Lisbeth P. Wærp’s essay in this volume). The archipelago was first popularized, however, by Emilie Flygare-Carlén in Rosen på Tistelön (1842; The Rose of Tistelön) and is also featured in modern texts such as John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Människohamn (2008; Harbor). In these novels, the archipelago is a place where existential dramas dealing with crime and punishment, guilt and redemption are played out, often with religious subtexts. The use of the archipelago as a motif is in this regard related to the liminality of the place itself: the archipelago is a safe and well-known place associated with vacation and rest, but it is also a place where man meets the chaotic and the supernatural. The archipelago occupies a position between civilization (the city, law, order) and nature (the sea, violence, disorder) and is eminently suited to narratives dealing with the conflict between nature and culture. By analyzing three novels from different eras the function of the archipelago in literary texts and the historical continuity of the motif can be highlighted. Emilie Flygare-Carlén’s Rosen på Tistelön: Crime and punishment in the archipelago Emilie Flygare-Carlén’s Rosen på Tistelön is set on the fictional island of Tistelön in the Bohuslän archipelago. The island is inhabited by the Haraldson family: Håkan, his sons Anton and Birger, his daughter Gabriella, and her governess Erika. Håkan and Birger are smugglers, and during one of their ventures, they murder the customs official Arnman and his subordinates. Anton witnesses the killings and is driven mad with guilt. When Erika realizes what has happened, Birger blackmails her into marrying him. Gabriella eventually falls in love with Arnman’s son, Arve. Anton, desperate to prevent a marriage between Gabriella and Arve, reveals what happened. Erika is burned to death when the family tries to flee; Håkan and Birger are finally executed, and Anton commits suicide by drowning. An aged and insane Gabriella, who never married, is seen in the final scene. The novel has a prominent political (liberal) theme that deals with poverty, the death penalty, and social reform as well as a religious theme that examines guilt and repentance, individual responsibility, and retribution. These themes are interrelated and deal with different conceptions of the role of women in society (amorous interests, wives, mothers).1 The novel’s themes are presented through opposing pairs such as land/sea, female/male, culture/nature. 1.

See also Lönnroth and Leffler. Lönnroth’s analysis is the most intellectually coherent of these. Leffler’s article along with her discussion of the novel in her Ph.D. dissertation I skräckens lustgård deal primarily with the question of genre. As Maria Löfgren points out, Leffler thus risks overlooking the moral and philosophical conflicts undertaken by Flygare-Carlén (95). doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.13joh © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Tistelön is the province of the female, whereas the sea belongs to the men. The male characters are linked to nature whereas the women are associated with a desire to cultivate one’s surroundings. The dramatic conflict arises from the tension within each of the juxtaposed pairs and the interaction of opposing spheres of life and activity. Tistelön is a place defined by its liminality where opposing forces collide. The novel depicts a struggle to define the nature of the island. Erika’s desire to reshape the island is linked to a theme of guilt and redemption: she attempts both to cultivate the island and to make Birger repent. Birger does express regret at an early stage: “Ånger är ett förfärligt ord; det är ännu värre att känna den så, som jag gjort och gör det” (Rosen 1:92) [“Ah! Remorse has a dreadful sound – terrible to hear, and far worse to feel it as I have done, and do still!” (The Rose 1:98)]. He asks Erika if the Bible states that “ingen synd är så svår, ingen skuld så stor, att icke ett förbättrat liv kan utplåna den?” (1:93) [“no sin is so great – no blame so heavy, that it may not be forgiven on repentance and amendment?” (1:99)] It is only logical that he should say, after having saved the captain from a certain death: “Allt hopp är icke ute om ett litet avdrag på min stora skuld” (1:176) [“All hope is not extinguished of a small subtraction from my heavy debt” (1:228)]. In spite of Birger’s gestures towards repentance, Erika nevertheless ultimately fails on both counts and takes Birger’s guilt upon herself. Her conception of justice is different from that of Anton, the younger son. He is unsure whether he belongs to the realm of men or women and believes that a blood debt can only be repaid in kind.2 These different views of the meaning of justice are mirrored by the island’s counterpart – the fishing village. The village “kan tyckas perifert men platsen talar civilisationens tydliga språk” (Löfgren 97) [may seem peripheral but the place speaks the clear language of civilization]. Tistelön, which is marked by an absence of law, is transformed by Erika, who introduces a new morality inspired by the New Testament. This religious theme – a struggle between two Christianities – is expressed in the actions of the inhabitants of Tistelön. Birger seeks a scapegoat; Erika sacrifices herself; and Anton pays with his own blood. This is clear in the final scene depicting Anton’s suicide: “Ännu trodde sig ej den arme Anton hava gjort nog att förvärva sin förlossning – nej, icke förrän blodet var försonat, kunde han vinna frid” (2:253) [“Poor Anton did not yet think he had done enough to secure his own salvation, No! not till blood had been atoned for, could he attain to peace” (2:356)]. Their counterparts in the fishing village – Arnman and his mother – are likewise caught between opposing moralities: the mother desires revenge, whereas Arnman seeks to forgive the murderers. In this respect, the morality of Arnman’s mother is less compromising than her son’s: “Om jorden är brännande, så får en ändå gå på henne” (2:97) [“If the earth were burning, still one must tread upon it” (2:124)]. Arnman later turns against his mother’s thirst for vengeance: “Vår Frälsare förlät  – kunna vi känna någon lisa i vår smärta med att förbanna? Jag åtminstone gör det aldrig” (2:230) [“Our Redeemer forgave. Would it be any relief to our sorrow to curse them? I, at least, never will do so” (2:325)]. The religious theme is intertwined with the political in that the death penalty is depicted as a moral defeat. The execution of the 2.

As Lönnroth points out, Anton occupies a position between Tistelön’s male and female spheres (33), between the men’s and women’s parts of the house. He is an androgynous figure, a romantic dreamer, and a deranged, honest character.

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murderers deprives them of the possibility of performing good deeds in the future.3 The death penalty is carried out in Marstrand, which constitutes a disconcerting third position in an ethical-geographic triangle. The justice meted out in Marstrand does not take into account the possibility of the repentance of the criminal. In both the fishing village and on Tistelön, there is a possibility of forgiveness. The city Marstrand, by contrast, represents the state, which dispatches its agents to administer an impersonal brand of justice. As such, the state is opposed to the lawlessness of the archipelago. Erika’s cultivation of Tistelön is her attempt to transform nature (chaos and crime) into culture (order and law). The island is an unwritten page that is filled with meaning as new roads are blasted into the landscape. The island reflects both “invånarnas moraliska karaktär men också centrala konflikter i romanen” (Löfgren 106) [the moral characteristics of the inhabitants but also central conflicts in the novel]. The older part of the house in which the men live is filled with sealskins and plundered goods whereas the addition to the house represents a higher state of moral development. The process of cultivation also entails a shift in power. By laying the foundation of a garden and building a square wall, Erika is keeping out the disorder of nature and setting clear boundaries between exterior and interior. This process is, however, precarious since civilization turns out to be founded on unsteady ground. The renovated house still contains the room where Haraldson keeps his belongings, and here evidence is uncovered proving his and Birger’s guilt. Erika stands no chance against the chaos of nature – when the crime is discovered and the house burns down, the island reverts to its natural state. Erika’s failure to cultivate Tistelön is linked to her attempt to cultivate Birger, which ultimately fails because she allows him to avoid taking responsibility for his crime.4 Cultivation is only possible when the individual assumes responsibility for his actions and acts according to personal conviction. Birger realizes that he committed a serious crime by murdering Arman’s father but does not realize that he also errs by having his wife suffer in his stead. His belated insight should be compared to Haraldson’s, who realizes the error of his ways although his repentance is less obvious than Birger’s.5 Haraldson accepts his fate and confronts it not as a “fullkomligt ångerfull syndare” (2:254) [“thoroughly repentant sinner” (2:358)], but “likväl ödmjukt, utan trotsigt hån och utan nesligt vankelmod” (2:254) [“in a humbled state of mind, without either daring defiance or weak pusillanimity” (2:358)]. He also seems to accept that there is “en Gud och en vedergällning” (2:208) [“a God, and retribution” (2:295)]. Rather than save Birger, Erika becomes complicit in his crime. Her attempt to redeem him has the appearance of selflessness, but entails “ett fullkomligt uppgivande av sig själv” (Löfgren 121) [a complete abandonment of herself]. She assumes the mantle of someone who dies for 3.

Birger tries to assuage his guilt by doing good deeds but is motivated by self-interest. He can be compared to Arve, who likewise does good deeds by helping the poor, but he does so out of the kindness of his heart. Holmgren’s “solution” to the poverty of the fishermen – that the poor should have fewer children – is a grotesque contrast to Arve’s compassionate nature.

4.

Erika’s behavior is reminiscent of Anton’s attempts to bargain away guilt just as in the subsequent dialogue with Gabriella in which he tries to persuade her not to marry Arve: “Och om du lyder mig – du kan tro, att det är för ditt eget bästa – så skall jag för dig uppoffra min egen förlossning” (2:199) [“And if you obey me, you may believe it is for your greatest good since I sacrifice for you my own salvation!” (2:279)].

5.

In her reading of the novel, Leffler fails to notice that Haraldson also repents (156).

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another’s sins, but since her martyrdom makes it impossible for Birger to seek forgiveness, her sacrifice turns out to be a mistake. In the end the roles are reversed – Birger offers to sacrifice himself for Erika’s sake: “Nu kan du tro mig, att jag ville ge mitt hjärteblod, om jag med det förmådde fria dig från skammen att vara min hustru!” (2:228) [“now, you may believe me, I would give my heart’s blood, if I could thereby free you from the shame of being my wife!” (2:322)]. By now he has taken responsibility for his actions: “Vad jag själv får lida, ifall de ertappa oss, det kan jag bära: jag lider det mina gärningar förtjänt” (2:228) [“What I myself may suffer, in case they apprehend us, I can bear; I shall undergo what my crimes have deserved” (2:322)]. Erika meets a violent end, in contrast to Arnman, whose actions are, unlike hers, characterized by his selflessness. August Strindberg’s I havsbandet: The creative intellect and its defeat August Strindberg’s I havsbandet (1890; By the Open Sea) displays a remarkable thematic similarity to Rosen på Tistelön. The protagonist, the fishery inspector Borg, travels to Österskären in Stockholm’s outer archipelago to teach the populace new methods of fishing. He is cast in the mold of a colonialist sent out by civilization to cultivate an area, which occupies a place in between civilization and barbarism. The liminality of the fishing village is accentuated by its geographical position; it is neither part of the sea nor the archipelago proper. Ulf Olsson notes that the title of the novel indicates that the island is part of a “gränsens rum” (244) [border space], but the border can also said to be “mellan natur och kultur, och mellan över- och undermänniska” (244) [between nature and culture, and between Über- and Untermensch]. Borg and Maria, with whom Borg becomes romantically attached, are opposites. Borg is identified with culture and Maria with nature. Their relationship turns into a struggle in which Borg tries to reshape Maria and make her more like him. He sees her as an empty space waiting to be colonized, but she resists and instead transforms the colonizer. Borg’s efforts at civilizing are linked to one of the themes of the novel, i.e. creation consisting of the reshaping of both places and people as expressed in the motif of the homunculus.6 By reshaping Maria and experimenting with creating life, Borg seeks to replace God as creator. Man is thus placed in an antagonistic relationship to God. Borg sees nature as a void waiting for him to fill it with meaning. By cultivating the world, Borg turns into a character in the mold of Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, who like Borg is transformed by the borderland he is sent to explore: the “främmande låter sig inte restlöst koloniseras, utan slår tillbaka, i verkligheten som i fantasin” (Olsson 264) [the foreign does not allow itself to be colonized completely, but fights back, in reality as well as in the imagination]. As with Rosen på Tistelön, Borg’s mission can be seen as the state’s attempt to incorporate its borderlands, in this case the archipelago, into itself. Borg’s failure represents the failure of the state to subdue the wilderness within its borders. As with Tistelön, cultivation fails and the archipelago reverts to its natural form.

6.

For an analysis of this motif, see my doctoral dissertation, (Johnsson 2009).

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Borg’s impulse to create is an expression of a need to master himself and the surrounding environment. He views the world as an aesthetic phenomenon and cultivation as an aesthetic act. The religious subtext of this theme is seen in the use of phrases that echo the Bible, for instance when Borg decorates his room: “Nu gällde det att fylla hålen i bokhyllorna och blåsa en levande anda i tomrummen mellan de mörka brädena” (27) [“It was now a matter of filling the bookcases and blowing a living spirit into the vacuum between the dark boards” (22)]. Borg as creator is also a scientist and sees his tools as outgrowths of his mind. He sees nature as empty, inferior, and incomplete. This is an indirect criticism of God who is portrayed as an incompetent creator. Borg strives to do better than God by mastering nature. It is as a scientist that Borg finds the order underlying nature’s apparent chaos. When Borg tries to reshape the world, he does so while convinced that he does not need anyone else, but his isolation eventually leads to insanity. He fails to replace God and is unable to remake himself into whom he wants to be. He needs the company of other people despite considering them his inferiors. When he meets Maria, he forces himself to ignore what he sees as her animal traits, “denna påminnelse om rovdjur” (69) [“this reminder of the beast of prey” (67)]. To reshape the ugly and insufficient is to master it – in this case the female/animal/nature that is to be dominated. This process is described using religious metaphors: “Här återstod endast att plocka ut ur benhögen det som passade till att sätta ihop ett skelett, vilket han sedan skulle fylla på med levande kött och inblåsa sin anda i” (Strindberg 87) [”All that remained was to select from the heap of bones those which could be made into a skeleton. He would then supply it with living flesh and breathe his spirit into it” (85)]. When he fails to remake Maria he tries to create life on his own and bypass woman entirely. If he were to succeed, it would be the ultimate triumph of culture over nature. His attempt at creating a mirage to impress Maria can be compared to Erika’s attempts at cultivating Tistelön. Instead of a southern landscape, the mirage seems to show a cemetery. Man as creator is unable to transform nature. Borg’s creative urge is sexually charged. This homunculus is a substitute child, but man as creator is impotent. His challenging God results in failure: he fails to cultivate the island, Maria, and the populace. Borg challenges God up to the very end. In a conversation with a priest, Borg states: “Men domen, ser du, den fruktar jag inte, ty verket dömer mästaren, och jag har icke skapat mig själv!” (179) [“But judgment I do not fear, for the master is judged by his work, and I did not create myself ” (181)]. Borg sees his own inadequacy as proof that God is an incompetent creator, which to him explains his own failed attempts at creation. Only nature is capable of creating life. Borg sails out to sea presumably in order to die. This act can be compared to Anton’s suicide by drowning. The sea itself is described as “allmodren, ur vars sköte livets första gnista tändes, fruktsamhetens, kärlekens outtömliga brunn, livets ursprung och livets fiende” (183) [“the mother of all, in whose womb the first spark of life was lit, the inexhaustible well of fertility and love, life’s source, and life’s enemy” (185)]. The sea – the unwritten page, empty nature – is the true creator. Borg’s certainty that the scientist can create life drives him to seek to replace the God he believes has never existed. In this borderland between culture and nature, between civilization and non-civilization, Borg finally admits defeat at the hands of that which was supposed to be mastered and cultivated.

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168 John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Människohamn: Loss, love, and faith

The conflict between nature and culture is not seen in the archipelago of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Människohamn (2008; Harbor), which is rather a place where the supernatural enters into an otherwise realistic world. During a picnic in the Roslagen archipelago, Maja, the daughter of the novel’s protagonist Anders, disappears. His wife later leaves him, and he turns to alcoholism. The novel is set on the fictional island of Domarö [Judge Island]. The picnic takes place on a second small island, Gåvasten [Gift Rock], where human sacrifices were once offered to the sea in order to increase the catch of fish. The sea is a monster that demands tribute and punishes the inhabitants of Domarö when they fail to appease it. The most prominent themes of the novel are parental love and a religious motif dealing with guilt and redemption that is directly related to the Christian faith. The structure of the novel revolves around two sets of mysteries. The first mystery concerns what happened to Maja. That inquiry raises the question concerning exactly what the monster is. Anders is seemingly subject to supernatural experiences and tries to make sense of what is happening. This process of interpretation, which features Anders interpreting different signs that help him solve both mysteries, is similar to the structure of the detective novel. The inexplicable is tied to the places Anders visits. Maja should not have been able to disappear since there is nowhere for her to go. Her disappearance is characterized by an absence of place: “Hur bra man än är på att gömma sig måste man ändå ha en plats att gömma sig på” (30) [“However good you are at hiding you still have to have a place to hide” (26)]. She has been abducted by the monster that is bound to the sea and the wells on the island. When Anders drinks this water, Maja returns therein and takes possession of him. The monster has both a supernatural and a religious (or demonic) aspect. When Anders realizes that his daughter possesses him, he at first refuses to believe it: “Det fanns ju ett ord för det som hände med honom…. ‘Jag är besatt. Jag håller på att bli en annan. Jag håller på att bli Maja’” (281) [“There was in fact a word for what was happening to him…. ‘I’m possessed. I’m becoming someone else. I’m turning into Maja’” (309)]. This possession is linked to a theme of identity, i.e. those who are possessed become someone else. This theme explains the title of the novel: Människohamn signifies that something non-human has taken on the appearance of a human. The two revenants Henrik and Björn, who have devoted themselves to the monster following a violent and humiliating episode in their teenage years, plot this development. They are revenants from Anders’s past who remind him that he did nothing to stop what happened. Also present during the episode was Elin, who later is murdered by the revenants. Elin has subjected herself to plastic surgery in order to become ugly. She wants literally to become someone else: “Hon hade inte bara förfallit, hon hade gjort om sig till något värre än vad tiden kan ställa till med” (133) [“She hadn’t just aged, she had remodelled herself into something far worse than anything time could create” (141)]. Henrik and Björn, on the other hand, have not aged since the episode since their personalities are frozen in time.7 7.

In a manner, Anders does seek their forgiveness: “Och ni visste aldrig hur mycket jag tyckte om er, egentligen. För jag sa det aldrig. Men jag tänkte göra det” (404) [And you never knew how much I liked you,

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The theme of identity is joined with the novel’s detective structure. Only after Anders realizes that he is possessed can he understand how to find Maja. Only wicked people return after having been abducted, and he is forced to revise the image he has constructed of his daughter. He blames himself for her disappearance. Finding Maja becomes a way for Anders to alleviate his guilt. His interpretative struggle features his trying to understand the message behind a pearl embroidery that Anders/Maja has made. When he understands that the embroidery is actually a nautical chart, he succeeds in deciphering it and realizes that Maja is being held by the monster at Gåvasten. He notices a “smal korridor där inga pärlor var nedtryckta, en sträng av tomhet” (314) [“narrow corridor where no beads had been fixed, a band of emptiness” (346)]. Just as when Maja disappeared, the lack of place is significant. Anders travels to Gåvasten and finds that the veins of pink and white color running through the stone form a pattern: “Ett språk. Linjerna som löpte kors och tvärs … var alla tecken, delar i ett skriftsystem så komplicerat att hans tanke inte kunde omfatta det” (323) [“A language. The lines running vertically and horizontally … were characters, parts of a system of writing that was so complex his brain was unable to encompass it” (356)]. The interpretative process in which he has engaged proves to be ineffectual: the fact that he cannot understand these signs shows that he is approaching the realm of the supernatural. When he finds a staircase descending into the sea, the religious subtext of the novel becomes apparent – in order to descend he first must part the waters by supernatural means thus alluding to Moses parting the Red Sea. When Anders goes down into the sea, he finds another world that has been constructed by the monster. The world is a copy of Domarö – a mirage much like Borg’s southern landscape – where he meets people who have been abducted. But this world has the appearance of a theatrical backdrop: the buildings and people are described as “modeller i naturlig storlek” (433) [“life-sized models” (482)]. The monster is a false creator who like Borg can only create an image – in this case, an image of life that, because of its unnatural qualities, becomes instead an image of death. The world created by the monster is a false reality in which those who disappeared live on without realizing where they are. This world can be seen as an inverted version of the Christian conception of resurrection: the dead have been granted eternal life but only because of the workings of a monster. When Anders saves Maja, the monster causes a flood that destroys Domarö, a deluge reminiscent of that in Genesis. These religious allusions cast the monster in the mold of an enemy of God. It performs the same miracles that are ascribed to God in the Christian tradition and is thus an anti-God.8 Anders has done his best to atone for his sins, has seen past his false perception of his daughter, has correctly interpreted the signs that lead to her, and has been able to defeat the monster. Good triumphs over evil because of Anders’s willingness to beg forgiveness and suffer for his mistakes. really. Because I never said. But I meant to]. While confronted with the ghosts of his past he gains the opportunity to ask for forgiveness. 8.

The monster is described in a manner which is similar to the indescribable monsters in H.P. Lovecraft’s (1890–1937) stories: “Det tjänade ingenting till att försöka beskriva det. Det var stor kraft och månghövdad syn, en svart muskel med miljoner ögon som saknade kropp och var blind. Det fanns inte. Det var allt som fanns” (442) [It was no use describing it. It was great power and many-headed vision, a black muscle with millions of eyes which lacked body and was blind. It was not. It was everything that was].

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Figure 21.  Cottages in the Stockholm archipelago. Photo: anse/Shutterstock

Distance and threat: The city and the archipelago A common thread in these novels is the role of the city, which, as the seat of justice and trade, represents the state. As such, the city sends out emissaries of the state who enter the archipelago and disrupt the natural order of things. In Rosen på Tistelön, Marstrand is the seat of an impersonal justice that seeks to find and execute the guilty. Marstrand is the archipelago’s civilized but unforgiving opposite, an opposite, which in the end, destroys Tistelön entirely. In I havsbandet, Borg is sent out by the state to bring order to the archipelago. He conceives of the archipelago as an empty space filled with empty people. He must fill the place and its inhabitants with meaning. In this case, however, the archipelago triumphs and nothing is changed – nature retains its primacy. In Människohamn, the inhabitants of Domarö voice their opposition to the cultivation of the archipelago, a process initiated by city-dwellers who buy up properties and transform fishing villages into copies of the city replete with summer cottages fit for middleclass enjoyment. One such episode tells of a man who is cheated by a realtor who buys the man’s property for far less than it is worth. When he realizes his loss, he commits suicide. This act is another dark side of cultivation: the city uses money to destroy the traditional life of the archipelago and cheat its inhabitants of their wealth. On a lighter note, another island dweller blames the exploitation of the archipelago on the impact of the singer Evert Taube (1890–1976) and the television series Vi på Saltkråkan (Seacrow Island), which according to him created a romanticized image of the archipelago inviting tourists and investors to flock to the islands. The inhabitants of the city are considered unwelcome intruders who turn the archipelago into something worse: they

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cultivate the islands by building houses and modernizing communities, but their efforts have had an inverse effect on the traditional way of life of the island dwellers. In these novels the city is depicted as both distant and threatening, but it should be noted that the cities are all in relatively close proximity to the archipelago. The cities are the only part of the outside world that figures into the stories and are easily accessible by boat. The city seeks to transform the archipelago by imposing justice, teaching the populace new ways of fishing, or simply buying up land for summerhouses for the middle class. The reaction of the characters inhabiting the archipelago is generally negative, albeit to varying degrees. This conflict between city and archipelago is not limited to the novels studied above. It is also a central theme in Skärgårdsdoktorn (The Archipelago’s Doctor), a very successful Swedish television series. The archipelago as liminal space In all three novels discussed above the archipelago is conceptualized as a place of liminality, a concept defined by Bjørn Thomassen as “any ‘betwixt and between’ situation or object, any in-between place or moment, a state of suspense, a moment of freedom between two structured world-views or institutional arrangements” (7). This concept can help explain why the authors choose to make use of the archipelago as a backdrop to themes of conflict between opposing forces, ideas, and values. As a boundary zone the archipelago is especially suited to narratives centered on dichotomies such as that between good and evil, nature and culture, and male and female. In Rosen på Tistelön the central theme can be understood in terms of law and morality confronting lawlessness and a lack of morality, with the murders acting as catalyst for the conflict between these concepts. Jurisprudence, being associated with the city, is tied to a Christian morality associated with the female character, Erika, who also represents the drive toward cultivating the borderland and its inhabitants. The novel can thus be read as a narrative of colonization, with the center attempting to include the periphery within its boundaries by the imposition of law and moral order. Such a reading would account for the novel’s emphasis on the values of political liberalism. Rosen på Tistelön is thus a narrative detailing the expansion of a liberal political order to the furthest confines of the state. A similar reading can be made of I havsbandet, in which the colonizing agent sees himself as representing a new morality based on science instead of faith. The archipelago is characterized by a lack of both ethical and scientific awareness, with Borg detecting hints of criminality and incestuous relationships among the populace. In both novels, an outside influence strives to reform a wilderness with uneven results. An important difference, however, is that FlygareCarlén links the act of cultivation to the feminine and nature itself to the masculine, whereas the roles are reversed in Strindberg’s novel. Of the three authors, only Strindberg incorporates modernity as a theme in his novel with Borg being depicted as a proponent of secularization and rationalization, or even as an enemy of God. The theme of religious conflict is more prominent in Människohamn, in which a natural world becomes infused with a demonic evil existing on the outskirts of civilization and reason that threatens to overwhelm what man has built. The thematic preoccupation in the

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novels with the dangers associated with the sea emphasizes the fragility of men’s lives and of society in general. The archipelago as a liminal space defined by mystery and disorder seems to compel the characters inhabiting it to engage in lengthy and hazardous attempts to subject their chaotic surroundings to various systems of law, morality, and science. As a figurative and literal borderland the archipelago becomes a non-place where men risk their sanity, identities, and lives. The use made of the archipelago by three authors from different historical eras to tell stories dealing with the boundaries between male and female, natural and supernatural, and reason and the unknown, demonstrates the importance of regarding liminality as an aesthetic mode rather than merely a geographical concept.

There must be a periphery Bergur Rønne Moberg

Faroese literature is scarcely over a hundred years old, but it carries with it a past in which the authors continually write about place, nation, people, and history, thus making Faroese literature an important part of the process of cultural mapping and memory in the Faroe Islands. Together with painting and popular historiography, in which nearly every village has obtained its own local history, Faroese literature comprises a coherent ideational complex, the objective of which is to construct a modern Faroese identity. The strong local color of Faroese poetry has made its mark on the Faroese literary mentality all the way up to the advent of the new millennium. The multiple references to Faroese culture in Faroese literature can be viewed as a total literary topography and as a raison d’être for Faroese culture. In other words, the literature is an attempt to construct a common historical consciousness following the dissolution of the original Faroese oral memory-community in the nineteenth century.1 The geography lesson has continued in Faroese literature, which can be seen as a constant attempt to localize the Faroe Islands in the new world of modernity.2 The real geographical points in the Faroese geo-space reach from a rock-solid ensemble of people, animals, sea, and cliffs in the traditional national poetry to the breakthrough of the modern lyric at the beginning of the twentieth century and further on to the modern nature poetry and contemporary prose in the second half of the twentieth century. A sense of place is, thus, an accurate marker for the path of modernity and modernism into the Faroese geo-space in general and for the autonomy of Faroese literature in particular. The Faroe Islands comprise a territory that has been charted in different ways during different periods of Faroese literary history, but it can generally be said that spatial imagination and the spatial perceptions are expanded, differentiated, and deepened. Because of the Faroe Islands’ position in the Atlantic halfway between Scotland and Iceland, nature is a significant background surface in Faroese literature. Waterscapes acquire still greater significance, and in modern Faroese literary geography, the ocean appears as the fundamental element. This essay looks at four writers: the founder of modern Faroese poetry J. H. O. Djurhuus; the Danish-writing twin-pillars in Faroese literature William Heinesen and Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen; and finally the cosmopolitan Gunnar Hoydal. Heinesen and Jacobsen are considered the main authors.

1.

In his book In Place: Spatial and Social Order in a Faeroe Islands Community, Dennis Gaffin makes the following observation concerning place-making in Faroese culture and literature: “Some say that the abundance of literary talent on the islands derives from the strong sense of belonging felt by members of a small nation and from the associated feeling of responsibility of those capable of such writing. Over and above the long-standing importance of oral traditions, the Faeroese sense of place and belonging function to promote written artistry” (204).

2.

Place has been described as a constituent feature of Faroese literature (Moberg 2008). doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.14mob © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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174 Far away in the north: J. H. O. Djurhuus

With J. H. O. Djurhuus, Faroese literature moved away from the earlier agenda of nation building. His modern breakthrough took place when he published his first collection of poems Yrkingar (1914; Poems). Djurhuus’s poetry was a dawning of dissonances and existential themes in Faroese poetry. The pathetic clichés about Faroese greatness that had spread in the national lyric poetry were abruptly replaced.3 by a conception of the Faroe Islands as a harsh place far to the north that resembles an Ultima Thule, i.e. “The North” as the end of the world. The view from within was woven into the view from outside, thus incorporating modern perspectives into Djurhuus’s poems. A new literary geography came into view poetically portraying the waterscape that primarily defines the Faroe Islands as a northern region away from the rest of the world and especially the great European civilizations of the past in Italy and Greece. The Faroes as Atlantic space became existentially significant and linguistically present. The islands were portrayed as an exiled condition of longing for more – (southern) European – light, warmth, and classical culture of the past. The country was represented as the epitome of a widespread imagination of northerliness. To Peter Davidson in The Idea of North, northern regions represent the loneliness of exile: “The early fading of the light is a part of … [a] powerful idea of north, of rain, twilight and loneliness…. A good part of the understanding of north, throughout the world, is bound up with melancholy and remoteness” (17). Generally the imagination of the North gradually moves further north and finally opens onto a “writing back” as the Northern writers themselves acquire this self-image. The North receives a Faroese voice in Djurhuus’s poetry primarily in the shape of accurate descriptions of a world without God or homeland. The Faroes are portrayed as a place where hope freezes to ice and joy drowns in the rains and storm. Djurhuus’s poetry makes clear that Faroese literature not only has assumed an individualistic aesthetic, but also a more gloomy descriptive power. The Faroe Islands materialize the poet’s melancholia and loneliness and appear primarily as an abandoned place of terror. It is a classic conception of the North that is a meditation “on isolation, on absence, stillness, remoteness and the absence of alternatives” (Davidson 18). This northerliness is only accentuated by Djurhuus’s having half of himself anchored in the south. He knew Greek, and besides translating Homer’s Iliad to Faroese, he was well versed in Greek and Roman mythology. Many of his poems create an analogy between conceptions of a bygone Faroese golden age and an antique Roman past. In the sea-swept poem “Atlantis” (1923) the Faroe Islands appear as an image of the legendary realm of Atlantis, which sank into the sea. There are legends, the poem tells, that the Faroes lie “hvar í fyrndini lógu hini skaldadroymdu lond” (Djurhuus 101) [where these ancient and poem-dreamt lands once lay]. Besides the geographical location itself, Djurhuus uses the sea as an image of sailing through the dangerous water that is life. In the poem “Songur um lívið. Yrking vígd JørgenFrantz Jacobsen” (213) (1941; Song about Life: Poem Dedicated to Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen), the water is full of violent forces, reefs, and dangerous currents that represent a treacherous voyage through life and finally a shipwreck. The images of dangerous coasts and reefs are representative of many literary and geographical descriptions in Faroese literature. The jagged, rocky Faroese 3.

Faroese national lyric poetry is long lived, however, and continues far up into the twentieth century.

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coast forms part of the Faroese geo-space that is as if it were made for supplying tales of wreck and sudden death. The geography of the Faroes – the sea and the coast – is an appropriate representation of a place of extremes like the one in Djurhuus’s poetry.

Figure 22.  Faroese waterscape. Photo: Anette Andersen/Shutterstock

It is not surprising that certain landscapes stimulate a certain kind of imagination. In the book Die Geographie der Literatur: Schauplätze, Handlungsräume, Raumphantasien (The Geography of Literature: Scenes, Realms of Action, Fantasies of Space), Barbara Piatti has developed a method for the new interdisciplinary field of literary geography that provides a systematic view of the relationship between literature and geography. A significant insight is that certain landscapes almost speak as symbols themselves. Piatti quotes Robert Louis Stevenson: “Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck” (358). The existential exposure that runs through Djurhuus’s poetry is in a way the exposure of an entire culture. In 1924, the Danish newspaper Social-Demokraten published a conversation with the Faroese poet. Here he related the Faroese native literature to the linguistic isolation. With a vocabulary that draws on the same melancholy conceptions of northerliness and exile as in his poetry, Djurhuus described the Faroese culture as tragically isolated from the outside world (Andreassen 33). The Faroese written language was still very young when its more sensitive users began to feel the isolation attached to the sixth and smallest language in the North. The way out of isolation would also prove to be a way out of the Faroese language. The writers – William Heinesen and Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen – who broke the isolation of the literature

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by writing in Danish, a more widely spoken language than Faroese4 – were about to assume a position of literary prominence with an attitude that held both a new fidelity to reality and a new optimism. Faroese literature thus came to embody two languages – Faroese and Danish – and, thus, mirrors the double heritage of Faroese history with a Danish official bureaucratic language in Tórshavn for several hundred years and with a strong influence of Danish on writing psalms and folk songs. Dano-Faroese literature The realistic, modern turn in Faroese literature reflects a more-or-less explicit mapping process. The cartographic approach reaches an artistic climax in the two best-known novels in Faroese literature: Barbara (1939; Barbara) by Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen and De fortabte Spillemænd (1950; The Lost Musicians) by William Heinesen. Barbara, Jacobsen’s only work of fiction, was published a year after his untimely death at age thirty-seven and De fortabte Spillemænd is Heinesen’s breakthrough work both artistically and financially. In both novels, the sea plays a crucial role as an expression of an Atlantic “writing back,” as a countermapping perspective with the Faroese waterscape in the middle. Jacobsen and Heinesen are among the most prominent figures in Dano-Faroese literature and their contributions can be viewed as the most extroverted part of Faroese literature. From the very beginning their ambition was to translate European cultural capital into Faroese cultural capital and thus to depict the Faroese road to modernity. In a society without a strong and stable literary high culture, having a hybrid writer like Heinesen who mastered the dialogue of complex and comprehensive translation was decisive. David Damrosch underlines that “an excellent translation can be seen as an expansive transformation” (66). Because of their expansive translations, both Heinesen and Jacobsen bridged the gap between Europe and the North Atlantic (West Nordic) periphery. Both have been translated into more than twenty languages, and for the same reason they can be seen today as a link between the Faroese periphery and the global world. They also played an important role in communicating cultural Faroese matters to a Danish public. Heinesen and Jacobsen realized Djurhuus’s dream of being embraced by publishers in the old imperial metropole of 4.

Danish as artistic language is breaking the isolation of the Faroese literature. Those writing in Faroese have confirmed place and nation internally, while at the same time Heinesen and Jacobsen have confirmed the cultural Faroese connections to the outside world. In all their writings, they were connectors and mediators between Faroe Islands and Denmark. Further more they consider themselves as a link between Faroese culture and the Nordic countries in general as they both declared that they wrote for a Nordic public. Jacobsen lived most of his life in Copenhagen – which still has great importance for Faroese students and intellectuals as Paris and London for the African and Asian intelligentsia. “Paris, London, and New York remain key centers of publication, and … writers from peripheral regions typically need to be embraced by publishers and opinion makers in such centers if they are to reach an international audience” (Damrosch 106). The written language of the Faroes was codified by V.U. Hammershaimb in 1846 but did not become a living literary language until around 1900.

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Copenhagen. They also became part of the artistic environment in Copenhagen at the beginning of the twentieth century. The core of their writing is a heterogeneous strand of experiences. The mixture of a Faroese voice and the Danish language makes their works a comprehensive contact zone. Both novels move in a zone where place and world as well as modernity and the old world encounter and confront each other. To be more precise, the contact zones in Barbara and De fortabte Spillemænd will be investigated as examples of an open or network-based mapping with special focus on their representational energy as litmaps and as a convergence between meaning and contingency. Using Foucault and other place- and space-theorists, the focus here will be on these two novels as sea-narratives managed by sea-metaphors of mapping. Paper boat in rough waters Barbara is one of the very few literary bestsellers in Faroese literature reaching as far as Australia, where more than 250,000 copies have been sold. Taking place around the year 1760, the story itself is a rather ordinary tale placed in a historical-cultural framework, which is primarily an acute analysis of the differences between the old and the new society. But these features are only the epic starting point for the encounter and clash between a pre-modern peasant culture and the onset of modernity. The focal point of the novel is a Faroese woman, Barbara, and her relationship with a Danish priest, Pastor Paul. The novel is a drama of destiny, and the plot points inevitably toward instability. Pastor Paul is depicted as a young, promising theologian, who is regarded as being well suited to “genoprejse Ro og Orden og gode Sæder” (37) [“restore peace and order and decency” (41)] to the Faroe Islands. However, the promising theologian becomes a victim of the anxiety generated by his relationship to Barbara. The beginning of the novel is a description of a place wrapped in surf, rain, and darkness. It is a world out in the ocean, whose most important connection to the outside world is the ship Fortuna. The ship and the sea are depicted as dynamic entities, which open up the world. Pastor Paul and the student Andreas Heyde both arrive to the Faroe Islands on the Fortuna. They are both emissaries from the center of the empire – Copenhagen. They both come on the same general errand, as reformers, and as such they represent at the same time enlightenment and colonialism. Their mission is a way of controlling Faroese reality by imposing new structures on it and thus in that sense they are mapmakers. Pastor Paul is on a religious mission and Andreas on an obvious mission on behalf of the Enlightenment. In both cases, the periphery is brought onto the sphere of influence of the enlightened center (Ashcroft Key Concepts 37). Whereas Pastor Paul is sent by the bishop of Copenhagen, Andreas Heyde is sent by the Rentekammeret, then with the Danish Ministry of Finance, to write a topography of the Faroe Islands. They arrive at a periphery that is described as “en Stad i Underverdenen” (24) [“somewhere in the underworld” (27)], and they are both described at first as full of self-confidence and faith in their missions. Their arrival represents a yet unchallenged centrality as they arrive well padded with a protective aura of the Danish-European culture. But it turns out to be a false confidence. The missions of both are, however, interrupted by Barbara’s intercession. The control that their worldview represents proves to be insufficient when it comes to gaining control of the Faroese underworld.

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The superior culture from which they come fails them in this Atlantic heart of darkness.5 In the first sentences of the novel, the small town’s only light in the Royal Trade Buildings is nearly blown out by the wind (9). It is thus a world that on the one hand needs more light, and on the other is difficult to enlighten. As they carry out their mission, Barbara is described as the periphery of a party at which Andreas Heyde enthusiastically tells about progress. Andreas is in the center while a shadow seems to have fallen on the room just where she has been sitting: “Kun Barbara interesserede denne Tale ikke” (158) [“Only Barbara had no taste for such talk” (175)]. Pastor Paul and Andreas Heyde are inferior when they enter Barbara’s world, which, expressed in magnifying maritime metaphors, undermines their scholarship. Barbara is depicted as a symbol of life that can only be mapped poetically. All attempts to gain a hold on Barbara are in the end in vain. When the distressed Pastor Paul asks the judge for advice, he can therefore only answer with a (maritime) metaphor: Og det var altsaa dette, jeg vilde sige til Dem: siden De nu er kommet paa denne Galej, saa rejs som Filosof. Gør Deres filosofiske og moralske Observationer af alt, hvad De ser og hører, og maal hver Dag Daarskabens Vindstyrke. Saa vil De en Dag træde i Land, berøvet Deres Skude maaske, men til Gengæld vil De med et alvidende Smil kunne ryste paa Hovedet og sige “Verden, Verden!” ligesom min Moster Ellen Katrine. (145) (And here is something more I want to tell you: since you are aboard this vessel you must sail as a philosopher. Make philosophical and moral notes of everything you see and hear and, every day, measure the force of folly’s wind. Then you will one day return to shore, having lost your vessel perhaps, but in exchange you will smile an omniscient smile and shake your head and say ‘world, world!’ like my aunt, Ellen Katrina.) [187–88]

Experience of life is a necessary supplement and greater than both theology and science, which are both described as self-confirming enterprises. It is enlightening to take a closer look at the description of the conflicting realities of the Faroes as an oceanic place in terms of Foucault’s conception of the heterotopia. As has been discussed throughout this volume, a heterotopia is a kind of counter-site in which the real sites – those that can be found in the culture – are “à la fois représentés, contestés et inversés des sortes de lieux qui sont hors de tous le lieux, bien que pourtant ils soient effectivement localisables. Ces lieux, parce qu’ils sont absolument autres que tous emplacements qu’ils reflétent” (Foucault 47) [“simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect”] (24)]. Heterotopia is not only a spatial concept, but a linguistic one as well. It comes into being as the interference between representational and non-representational practices. This immanent interference occurs when a practice falls back upon itself and questions both itself as well as all

5.

The one-sidedness of Pastor Paul’s and Andreas’s mapping is countered by situations in which both are put in their places: Pastor Paul carries the crate containing the peat used for warming up the houses and proves to be bad at it, and Andreas Heyde feels alienated when reading Brochmand, a book of sermons by the Danish bishop Jesper Rasmussen Brochmand.

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other practices. It is precisely this movement inward that enables heterotopias to question and contest all other spaces.6 As other contributors have also emphasized, Foucault finds the ship to be the heterotopia par excellence (Foucault 49). In Barbara as well, the most crucial heterotopia is the ship named Fortuna. The Fortuna sails between the Faroes and Denmark, and when it arrives in the Faroese capital of Tórshavn, it sets the entire town in motion.7 The otherwise slow rhythm of daily life in Tórshavn is abruptly interrupted by a more rapid rhythm and a festive mood. Consistent with Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, the Fortuna represents a counter-site that challenges the place and interrupts everyday life. The ship arrives from another, larger world, and it generates both concern and excitement. The Fortuna presupposes the encounter between the two main characters, Pastor Paul and Barbara. Both are powerfully challenged by the mobility afforded by the Fortuna, and both fail in their attempts to satisfy the demands for change imposed on them by modernity. Just like Pastor Paul, Barbara is a victim of the Fortuna as encroaching modernity, an anonymous power that moves things and people around. At the same time, they are both symbols of different kinds of inexpressible experience that cannot be mapped. Barbara represents nature, which can be fooled but not disciplined and can be told but not really mapped. In order to characterize her, the narrator uses metaphors drawn from nature, especially from the maritime realm. Similarly Pastor Paul is compared to a paper boat in rough waters (143), to an easily movable boat in Barbara’s element. Barbara’s essence gives birth to a cascade of questions about the insecure foundation of identity, which is connected to the sea as a movable element. For example, it is asked “Hvem var Barbara?” (140) [“Who was Barbara?” (181)]. The novel answers all the questions but not openly. Barbara can only be explained as the force of life and a grand illusion in a world of salt and darkness. Throughout the novel, the returning Fortuna presents an image of an ambiguous modernity. The entry of the outside world into the small community creates a contact zone between two very different worlds: the local peasant and the modern European culture. In this way, the isolated world in the middle of the ocean is controlled by an unknown power, the modern Fortuna, i.e. the goddess of happiness and fate in the guise of modernity. The Fortuna shows the path forward toward a more easily moving, fluid world. Barbara thus represents the “barbaric” unpredictable element, which at the same time points into an Atlantic waterscape and into a still more movable and accelerating modern world. Barbara becomes a symbol of the Atlantic periphery by representing that which evades the project of modernity. The novel thus makes clear that there on the one hand are phenomena and processes represented by the Fortuna that can be explained as modern, and on the other 6.

Foucault also mentions other heterotopic sites as cemeteries, mirrors, libraries, museums, and places of contemporary relaxation as cafes, cinemas, and beaches. The actual background for reflecting on heterotopia is the experience of a world becoming still more simultaneous. We are in the epoch of simultaneity, Foucault says, and thus he underlines heterotopia as a product of the increasing networking and intersections of all kind.

7.

This questioning points to a complex representation in modern literature. In Modernity at Sea, Cesare Casarino states that “heterotopias as forms of spatial representation comprise a discursive and a nondiscursive aspect, a mimetic and a non-mimetic aspect” (11).

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hand phenomena and processes that reach beyond modernity. The representational energy of the novel emerges from the narrator’s powerful reflection on the gap between modernity and Barbara’s transcendental universe: “The heterotopia of the ship produces a language that gravitates toward the nether world of the nonrepresentational and that operates at the edge of its own dissolution” (Casarino 15–16). Barbara’s world allows itself to be challenged, but as a symbol of inexpressible experience, it cannot be thoroughly modernized. It is the periphery that writes back to the European metropolises in order to give an account of the encounter with a different world that transcends words. Yet before the novel thus challenges the center, it is itself challenged as representative of the periphery by a modern European consciousness. The novel’s self-consciousness accords with Foucault’s view of the ship in European literature. Foucault presents the ship as a heterotopia in which all of Western civilization is seen from outside. The “sea narrative questions not only its own foundation but also reaches beyond itself to question the foundation of a world that for several centuries had been run in all sorts of ways by ships” (Casarino 13). From the sixteenth century until the present, Foucault says the ship has not only been the great instrument of economic development, but also the greatest preserve of imagination. This conception explains why Foucault characterizes the ship as the heterotopia par excellence, and this fact is why Jacobsen makes the Fortuna the narrative motor in the novel. “Far out in an ocean” Heinesen’s De fortabte Spillemænd depicts four musicians: the three brothers Little Kornelius, Sirius, and Moritz Isaksen, and the educated Mortensen. The four play together in a string quartet and are happy amateurs playing music and living a spontaneous lifestyle. The three musical brothers have inherited their talent from their father, whose “urolige aand levede videre i deres sjæle” (12) [“restless spirit lived on in [them]” (16)]. They all get lost primarily because they lose themselves in the music and thus more or less lose contact with “reality.” But the unique musician’s spirit in the Isaksen family lives on when Orfeus, son of Moritz, sails to Copenhagen to pursue his career as violinist. The novel melodramatically portrays the musicians as incarnations of the surplus of meaning. The novel was written during and after the Second World War and for Heinesen the writing process was an act of escapism from the atrocities of the war. In general, it can be read as an attempt by Heinesen to escape this trough of history, imagining a new beginning for European culture by assigning the course of action to the innocent period of his childhood immediately after 1900 and just before the First World War. The novel is an attempt to restart the founding project of modernity by describing its “late” arrival in the Faroes. In literary historical terms, the novel is part of the great reconstruction project that had been on the agenda at the end of the Second World War and was influenced by mythology. Heinesen, though, wrote this novel before the prominent breakthrough of Mayan mythology in contemporary Latin-American literature. The opening of De fortabte Spillemænd is a network-based mapping of the Faroes, insofar as the country is situated in relation to the environment and the environment in relation to the Faroes. The introduction is an unmistakable example of literary mapping with the ocean as the central motif:

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Langt ude i det kviksølvlysende verdenshav ligger et ensomt lille blyfarvet land. Det lillebitte klippeland forholder sig til det store hav omtrent som et sandskorn til gulvet i en balsal. Men set under forstørrelsesglas er dette sandskorn alligevel en hel verden med bjerge og dale, sunde og fjorde og huse med små mennesker. Ja, et sted ligger der endda en hel lille gammel by med brygger og pakhuse, gader og stræder og stejle gyder, haver og torve og kirkegaarde. Der er ogsaa en gammel højtliggende kirke, fra hvis taarn der er udsigt over byens tage og videre ud over det almægtige hav. (9) (Far out in an ocean that gleams and glitters like quicksilver may be found a small leadencolored land. In proportion to the immense ocean the size of the tiny mountainous land is like a grain of sand to a ballroom floor. But viewed through a magnifying glass this grain of sand is an entire world, with mountains and valleys, inlets and fjords, and houses with tiny human beings. At one place there is even a complete little old town, with jetties and piers, warehouses, streets, crooked lanes and steep alleyways, gardens and marketplaces and cemeteries. There is also an old church, situated high above the town; from its steeple there is a view out over the roofs of the houses and beyond – far out over the almighty ocean.) [13]

Many noteworthy features can be observed in this quotation. It is a geographic localization of a country surrounded by an almighty sea on all sides. The space from which the narrator comes is an abstract bodiless dimension, an opening for sight and as such an agent. Due to the distance, the land in the ocean looks like an abstract grain of sand. The ocular gaze directed down on the land into the sea creates a distant proximity. The telescope is an ancient symbol of knowledge and operates as a research metaphor, as a mapping metaphor. The sheer vastness of the ocean, its physical size indicates the absence of control over reality. However the telescope provides a good means for mapping the little land in the ocean. The narrator points out what he has found by using the deictic locative adverb “far out.” The boundary between the land and the world outside is not only a boundary of separation or confrontation, but is more of a continuum, an attempt to capture the world as an answer to modernity. The important point is not the demarcation but the threshold where the land meets the world and vice versa, with the ocean as an in-between. The novel is a depiction of a society in a state of transition. This is highlighted by spatial and temporal markers that do not seem especially remarkable or noteworthy. The reading offered here thus sheds light on details often dismissed as trivial – spatial and temporal markers in the text such as “before” and “after,” “here” and “there” (Holquist 121). The land and the world outside meet as a “here” and a “there,” but it is not entirely clear what is “here” and “there.” First there is the land that through the referential expression “far out” has a distinctly “there”-status. But the land is henceforth experienced from within and becomes an experience of a “here.” That which was out there (the land) now reveals itself as “en hel lille gammel by” (9) [“a complete little old town” (13)] from where the narrator now sees the world. From the vantage point of the steeple, the first thing he notices is the view out over the sea and of the town. The world from which the narrator has come now has the status of a “far out.” Thus an inversion of the perspective occurs. The land, which in the first line of the novel was “Langt ude i det kviksølvlysende verdenshav” (9) [“Far out in an ocean that gleams and glitters” (15)], has become a town with its very own view of the world. Thus the land and the surrounding world both have a double status – both constitute a “here” and a “there.”

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The movement of the sea is highlighted in its description as glittering like quicksilver (liquid mercury). Quicksilver is an element that never stands still, and here it symbolizes change and dynamic movement as a basic condition of modernity. The description of the land as leaden colored is opposed to its contrasting inherent movement. An old, heavy, and sluggish world is here set into motion by a new time. The narrator anchors the space and afterwards opens the place. By doing so, he indicates that even if a place can be localized, it is not about boundaries. By virtue of the gaze from the outside, the narrator approaches the land from the sea in an effortless and sovereign manner. During the introduction, this gaze becomes a part of the place firstly as an unavoidable and definitively forced entry into an isolated world and secondly as a new beginning of place. The place responds with its own view of the world. Two equal realities interact with each other in a process of integration. The approach and landing constitute a transformation in which the small land emerges through the immense space. The great space feeds the small place, and the latter responds to a re-thinking of modern space as place (see Casey 309). After the space has rethought the place, the place looks back at space from a specific setting. The challenged place is capable of responding, thus indicating autonomy and equality. Equality and exchange occur when the space is reborn from the view out over the sea and is furthermore personified immediately afterwards in Kornelius Isaksen and his sons, who sit up in the steeple enjoying the view as they were “lyttede til de lunefuldt skiftende toner fra en vindharpe” (9) [“listening to the capriciously varying sounds of an Aeolian harp” (15)]. The original abstract gaze is anchored in human presence. The scene with the father and his sons in the steeple takes place at a time that is called “den forunderlige eftermiddag” (10) [“this wonderful afternoon” (14)]. In other words, the scene is not only a situation in a particular place, but also is at a particular time during a memorable afternoon, as becomes clear later in the novel. The world is a localized memory. The view from outside in toward the land represents both a subversion of the idea of a self-sufficient locality and an attempt to create meaning in a world without any guarantee of meaning (in contrast to national poetry) or a way of managing the modern image of the world. The main thought behind the movements is that it is legitimate to seek identity in place because identity is never fixed and bound. If one sees the tensions between two worlds in terms of center and periphery, the beginning of the novel can be read as an example of a counter-mapping, as an existential response or a writing back from the periphery. Correspondingly De fortabte Spillemænd depicts the Faroes as a human response to space and thus more than just a locality pointed out in the geography. In this connection, it is important that the Aeolian harp is crafted right on location by the musical artisan Kornelius. A negotiation merging localism and world-scale transformations can be observed. Through the dynamic imagination of the sea, they cross each other and create a culturally specific globalism. Gunnar Hoydal: A rooted cosmopolitan As a child of modern mobility, Gunnar Hoydal (b. 1941) continues the mimetic mapping process. He has grown up both in the Faroe Islands and in South America and draws his inspiration

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from his childhood in two parts of the world. Sea and home are significant aspects of his writing. Sea not only means distance, but also the intimacy of home and connection to other cultures in particular. With his cosmopolitan experiences, Hoydal further expands the boundaries of what modern Faroese native literature is. Hoydal’s major work is the novel Undir Suðurstjørnum (1991; Under Southern Stars). In the novel’s middle chapter, “Undir suðurkrossi” (“Under the Southern Cross”), the narrator’s experiences from two continents appear particularly strongly. Here the Portuguese sailor Ferdinand Magellan is mentioned noting that he was the first European to sail south of South America and thus the first European to reach the Pacific from the East. In the context of the novel, Magellan represents the link between the continents and between the oceans, thereby creating a link between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Faroe Islands, or as they are called, the islands in the great sea (257). The novel’s first chapter accentuates the intercontinental connection through coastal images. During the departure from the Faroe Islands on his way to South America, Hoydal sees the Faroese coasts in the light of imagination through the airplane’s window “sum lógu tær fram við heilt øðrum heimspørtum” (16) [“that seems to belong to another part of the world” (10)]. Experiences drawn from two continents appear as an experience of the same place: the earth. The transatlantic journey is made by plane, but the traditional route – the sea – is a part of the journey as a historical reminder of the significance of the sea. During the flight, the narrator is listening to his sister, who revives the memories of their childhood in South America and who creates a sense of presence: “tey hoyra aftur Kyrrahavið leggja sínar aldur inn á tann breiða sandin” (17) [“evoking the soft lapping of the Pacific Ocean on sandy beaches for them” (10)]. The movement from the coast of one continent to the coast of the other creates a background for the novel’s constant, cinematic crosscutting back and forth between the continents. The narrator processes his fractured biography by means of these constant crosscuttings between parallels extending across the Atlantic and his two worlds. The distance and its traversal are linked to sea and sky. An all-encompassing connection between living among the fishermen on the Faroe Islands and in the city Manta in Ecuador is established. The complex crosscutting between the two worlds functions as a global connection. These worlds are not only between different places, but also between different historical epochs as well as dream and reality. The mobility is so rapid that time and space appear to be one. This total topography of the world encompasses everything from cells to galaxies, and multiple forms of travel and motion result in the conception of life as a journey and a struggle for creating proximity through the alienation from the modern world. The crosscutting renders the narrator place-polygamous (Beck Was ist Globalisierung? 130), since he belongs in two places. The mobility is furthermore portrayed in sharp contrast to a thin globality.8 Neither place nor motion is undermined: place first becomes a place in its union with the mobile world outside, and mobility, for its part, is most meaningful when between discreet points. The novel’s critical aspects depict globalization as an empty transit in the world traffic without sense of culture or geography. But with its rapid crosscuts across the Atlantic, the narrator himself appears as a child of a globalized world. Oscillation and transformation cause the 8.

In the chapter “Verden,” [“World”], the arrival of three French warships in Tórshavn gives rise to similar reactions.

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points of reference on both sides of the Atlantic to gain a translocal, transnational, and transatlantic character, i.e. a cosmopolitanism that is a fertile span between the narrator’s rooted and cosmopolitan experiences. The novel is structured by the narrator’s ability to maneuver in border zones between different worlds. The narrator has his own approach to the motions as he pinpoints the coordinates of intense mobility. He hereby accentuates, that he himself not only crosses borders, but that the borders also cross through him: “People are passing borders, but borders are also passing people” (Frank 2). The narrator thus does not take a passive position with regard to the fragmenting mobility, but maps his migration by crosscutting. Migration is an ongoing condition of transit, where homecoming and completion of the story has been made impossible (Chambers 5). But the geographical anchoring nevertheless reflects a psychological need to belong to somewhere, which is neither an antidote to a prevailing alienation nor to an expulsion of an imaginative sense of the meaning of life. Hoydal takes not only the place, but the whole question of meaning seriously. The narrator’s biography remains fractured but not without attempts at attributing meaning. The feeling of home on both sides of the Atlantic gives him a global sense of place that is a break with the traditional place-monogamous writing replacing it with a place-polygamous writing (Beck Globalisierung 130) and an expression of the narrator’s attempt to extrapolate a modern panorama of homeliness. The narrator uses his globalized experiences and his privileged access to two places on the earth to conjure a world-sensation. Opposed to the world-sensation stands a shallow sensation of outer globalization that produces non-places. A round and deep world is revealed under the hyper-mobile smooth surface of globalization: the sea and the starry sky that embraces the world. The sensation of nature is tied to Hoydal’s description of the periphery as “rundum rørslum” (Hoydal Land í sjónum 66) [round movements]. The break with the outer globalism is a break with the market that has no cultural or geographical center of gravity and is ethically blind. Hoydal breaks with the market as homogenizing and anonymizing mover of knowledge, goods, and values in favor of a mobility with the entire ballast of politics, history, geography, and poetry aboard. This novel’s center of gravity develops by way of global intersections in which the global penetrates the local without dissolving it and the unmistakably local embeds global perspectives. Conclusion The strong consciousness of place in Faroese literature develops into a situated response to globality. Writers from deprived literary spaces like those of the Faroese have been struggling to achieve two forms of independence simultaneously: political and literary independence (Casanova 193). The dependence on history and geography however remains. With Heinesen, Jacobsen, and Hoydal, the literary geography is changed from a gloomy neo-romantic geography to a more-or-less optimistic conception of reality that integrates the Faroe Islands into a joint European process of development. Another Europe and other Faroe Islands now establish the agenda for Faroese literature and culture. Coasts and ocean no longer represent the Faroe Islands as a beautiful place solidifying the national consciousness or as a lonely place seen

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as a testing of the viability of existential dissonances that challenge national self-satisfaction. Faroese literature becomes a network between home and abroad, the local and the global. The focus on the encounter between the Faroe Islands and the world outside is an intentional attempt to place the country and its culture in the modern world. The sea plays a key role in the expansion of Faroese literature as a symbol of an unending fluid process of creolization, singularity, and commonality. Rather than being a discrete entity, the oceanic Faroes become a “crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of ” its own culture and geography. The ocean is an “input channel”, and its waterways “routes of transit, and a form of attachment” unifying all the “connecting tissues binding” the Faroes “to the rest of the world” (Dimock 3). The dominant role of waterscape creates a gateway connection expressing the importance of culture not as a fact of having a border, but as a fact of being a border filled with overlapping zones.

The seven seas Maritime modernity in Nordic literature Søren Frank

Sea histories Humans are irresistibly drawn towards the sea. It is as if they intuit  – through a genetically informed trans-individual memory – that they initially emerged from the sea. Throughout history the sea has served as an imaginative horizontal screen upon which mankind’s cultural imagination has projected its phantasms. In the Christian and Stoic traditions, with their theocentric worldview, the sea was regarded as dangerous, demonic, and chaotic, and man was advised to keep within the limits of the well-known – which among other things meant avoiding the risk-laden and contingent venture of water travel. Homer’s Odysseus may have been the first sea adventurer in the Western literary tradition, but he ended up preferring a domestic life on the soil of Ithaca to roaming the Mediterranean; in the Bible, the Garden of Eden tellingly comprised no ocean; and in his Odes (23 B.C.E.) Horace lamented that mankind defied the laws of heaven by embarking on reckless and sinful sea journeys and explicitly urged ships to return to port (Horace I.3; I.14). The beginning of the change in the view of oceanic travel around 1500 – what Carl Schmitt has referred to as the first spatial revolution on a genuine planetary scale (54) and sometimes referred to as the oceanic turn – inaugurated a period dominated by anthropocentrism during which the surface of the sea glittered enchantingly and lured mankind to it with promising adventures. Formerly regarded as menacing, the winds then began to be hailed as encouraging, and the concept of contingency underwent a gradual change from being associated merely with risk and danger to being linked also with chance and possibilities – possibilities of territorial, mental, scientific, religious, and economic expansion. This was the time of Magellan’s expedition to circumnavigate the Earth (1519–22), Jens Munk’s expedition to find the Northwest Passage (1619–20), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Vitus Bering’s two Kamchatka expeditions (1725–43). However, this rising global importance of the oceanic waterways, which generally marked “a shift from the Mediterranean culture of self-restraint to the Atlantic civilization of transgressive individualism” (Kinzel 44), had already been anticipated in a more regional manner in the Nordic countries during the Viking Age (800–1100). Here, the Odinist Vikings – impeded by neither the Christian idea of sin-related deluge nor the Stoic philosophy of temperance – sought outbound adventure by plundering, colonizing, and trading with the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, the British Isles, France, Russia, and Vinland. Stories about these transgressive voyages can be found in the Icelandic sagas from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and their disposition for mobility and worldly openness has subsequently influenced the Nordic peoples and their maritime literature. During the nineteenth century, however, the surface of the ocean was slowly but steadily transformed from glitter to grid as a result of modernity’s disenchanting inclination to expand, doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.15fra © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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monopolize, and systematize. What had been a comparatively unsystematic enterprise during the age of discovery became a conscious and deliberate program of maritime exploration for its own sake and discovery became an end in itself (Parry viii). In the literary world, one writer in particular absorbed the whole spectrum of the century’s maritime tensions: Once the author of the exotic and enchanting travelogue Typee (1846), Herman Melville four years later meticulously described a thoroughly disenchanted view of naval life in White-Jacket (1850). However, with the first five words of the posthumously published Billy Budd (1924; written 1888–91), “In the time before steamships” (43), Melville also complemented the enchanting and disenchanting visions of the two former novels with a nostalgic craving for re-enchantment – and ever since Melville, nostalgia has played an important role in the works of maritime authors from Joseph Conrad to Amitav Ghosh and Carsten Jensen. According to Schmitt, the sea changed dramatically from a fish to a machine during Melville’s century (98). This diagnosis indicates a shift from anthropocentrism to technocentrism, which still remains dominant today when ocean travel is associated with either the transportation of cargo (the most significant yet partly invisible life-sustaining vein in the globalized world’s circulation of goods) or with leisure (yachting and sea cruises, which offer a sort of rationalized attempt to re-enchant an otherwise disenchanted sea and world). The sea and maritime life give the Nordic countries one of their most distinctive characteristics. They all have the sea as a border zone, most notably Norway, which has the longest coastline in Europe. For the Nordic countries, the sea has always functioned as a connection rather than a barrier between them as well as between the Nordic countries and the rest of the world. Instead of being defined solely by terrestrial border zones – between, for example, Norway, Sweden, and Finland – the Nordic countries are also and primarily defined by aquatic border zones: the Atlantic in the case of Denmark, Norway, the British Isles, and North America and in the case of Sweden, Finland, the Baltic States and Poland by the Baltic. As for Iceland and the Faroe Islands, they each constitute one big border zone that potentially connects them to the entire world. By shifting the vantage point from the land to the sea and bearing in mind the globeencompassing winds and the planetary currents of the oceans, one can see a whole new series of rhizomatic and intercultural constellations between nations and peoples. From distant worlds, cultural impulses and material objects have traveled across the sea into the Nordic households. We come upon one example of this in Jonas Lie’s Tremasteren “Fremtiden” eller Liv nordpaa (1872; The Three-Master “The Future” or Life in the North): Havet tilfører Norge ved dets Tusinder Skibe en Rækved af Tidens Ideer fra alle Lande … Ligesom den varme Golfstrøm fører Vrag og Rækved nordover, saaledes har Strømningerne i de menneskelige Forhold i de sidste Aarhundreder ogsaa sat indunder Nordlands og Finnmarkens Kyster de forskjelligste Slags Vragtilværelser fra Livet Sydpaa. (Lie Tremasteren 1–2) (With its thousands of ships, the sea supplies Norway with a jetsam of ideas of our time from all countries …. Just as the warm gulfstream carries wreckage and jetsam north, the currents in human affairs in the past centuries have also deposited the most varied sorts of wrecked lives from life in the south on the coasts of Nordland and Finnmark.)

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By enabling people to see, but also to smell, taste, touch, contemplate, and listen to another world, the borders of local and regional knowledge and experience were materially challenged and a special blend of skepticism and trust towards the foreign developed.

Figure 23.  Map showing the Norwegian coastline’s interface with the sea. Photo: Peter Hermes Furian/Shutterstock

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Erasure and artistic archaeology Supplementing the horizontal screen of this topography is a vertical dimension beneath the visible surface where depths that are seemingly invisible exist. As Robert Pogue Harrison has pointed out, “the sea, whose brilliant surface veils an underworld of extinction in which no spirits carry on an afterlife … often figures as the imaginary agent of ultimate obliteration” (7, 4). However, Nordic writers such as Jonas Lie, Aksel Sandemose, and Jens Bjørneboe have performed deep dives into the big blue and come back with “les yeux rouges, les tympans percés” (Deleuze Critique 14) [“bloodshot eyes and pierced eardrums” (Deleuze Essays 3)]. Their archaeological endeavors prove that the vertical reservoir may preserve the ghosts and the wreckage that modernity has otherwise attempted to repress ranging from superstition and dehumanization to the slave trade and piracy. From the sea’s conserving depths – and due to writers, painters, and historians – these ghosts and this wreckage have long haunted modernity on the one hand by dimming the glitter of the surface with its dark shadows and on the other by breaching those grids with which modernity had organized the world. In that sense and in contrast to what Roland Barthes believed, the sea carries a message (197) – in fact, it carries many messages, and many of those messages stand in direct opposition to each other. Through a closer examination of the conflicting and age-old songs of the ocean, this essay will attempt to nuance the traditional understanding of modernity on the one hand as being characterized by progress, rationality, secularism, and the freedom and autonomy of the individual and on the other as being spatially defined (by cultural theorists such as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault) primarily through “territorialized spaces like the nation state, the city, the colony, the home, and the factory” (Cohen “Fluid” 75). In their introduction to The Re-Enchantment of the World (2009), Joshua Landy and Michael Saler express similar ambitions when they claim that “modernity is characterized by fruitful tensions between seeming irreconcilable forces and ideas … by contradictions, oppositions, and antimonies: modernity is messy” (6–7). If modernity is messy, one may well argue that maritime modernity may be even messier because of the ship’s attempt to hold together in a compact space increasingly irreconcilable histories. This essay is structured around a series of contrasts and paradoxes – distilled in the opposing forces of rationalism and marvel, of disenchantment and re-enchantment  – that are characteristic of maritime life and literature. Undoubtedly these contrasts represent a transhistorical component of maritime life. But as the brief historical survey above suggests, the images, meanings, and functions of the sea have also undergone general transformations leading to an intensification of tensions during the nineteenth century deriving among other things from the gradual replacement of the sailing ship by the steam ship. This material event had enormous implications for the psychological landscape of the epoch as it became almost synonymous with the change from an enchanted world characterized by heroism, adventure, and authenticity to a disenchanted world dominated by industrial man, mathematical thinking, and wide-spread alienation. Besides the writers already mentioned  – Lie, Sandemose, and Bjørneboe  – other nineteenth- and twentieth-century Nordic authors have also  – from the decks of military and

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mercantile ships, emigrant ships and ocean liners – written extensively and even prominently about the sea, for example Amalie Skram, Holger Drachmann, Alexander Kielland, Johannes V. Jensen, Volter Kilpi, Ole Rølvaag, Karen Blixen, Pär Lagerkvist, Hans Kirk, Vilhelm Moberg, William Heinesen, Nordahl Grieg, Thor Heyerdahl, Göran Schildt, Troels Kløvedal, Bjarne Reuter, Carsten Jensen, and Erik Fosnes Hansen. Some of these writers will be discussed later in this essay, whose remaining part will consist of an examination of the roles and images of the sea, the ship, and the sailor; an analysis of the antagonism and possible compromise between domestic and maritime life; and, finally, a discussion of maritime fiction and re-enchantment. Sea, ship, sailor Humans are irresistibly drawn towards the sea because the sea is a dream factory, and the dreams are often images of both extremity and contrast. The sea is both furious storm and suffocating stillness, maximum chaos and soothing rhythm, sublimely beautiful and deadly disquieting, as well as commercial highway and chilling churchyard. The surface of the sea leaves no traces yet its depths preserve gruesome stories slumbering in layers of time and virtuality only waiting for some author to bring them back to life again. The sea’s semantic complexity, spatial immensity, and mysterious memory are brilliantly captured by Kielland in the famous opening lines of Garman & Worse (1880): Intet er saa rummeligt som Havet, intet saa taalmodigt. Paa sin brede Ryg bærer det lig en godslig Elefant de smaa Puslinger, der bebo Jorden; og i sit store kjølige Dyb eier det Plads for al Verdens Jammer. Det er ikke sandt, at Havet er troløst; thi det har aldrig lovet noget: uden Krav, uden Forpligtelse, frit, rent og uforfalsket banker det store Hjerte – det sidste sunde i den syge Verden. Og mens Puslingerne stirre udover, synger Havet sine gamle Sange. Mange forstaar det slet ikke; men aldrig forstaar to det paa samme Maade. Thi Havet har et særskilt Ord til hver især, som stiller sig Ansigt til Ansigt med det. (5) (Nothing is so boundless as the sea, nothing so patient. On its broad back, it bears, like a good-natured elephant, the tiny manikins which tread the earth; and in its vast cool depths, it has place for all mortal woes. It is not true that the sea is faithless, for it has never promised anything; without claim, without obligation, free, pure, and genuine beats the mighty heart, the last sound one in an ailing world. And while the manikins strain their eyes over it, the sea sings its old song. Many understand it scarce at all, but never two understand it in the same manner, for the sea has a distinct word for each one that sets himself face to face with it.) [3]

Kielland’s picture of the sea is essentially positive. The sea is a place of hospitality as it willingly carries humans on its back; it is a boundless archive capable of not only absorbing the sufferings and misdeeds, but also of communicating them back into the world of human experience; it is a place of purity, which cannot be blamed for its cruelty; it simply is. In Lagerkvist’s Pilgrim på havet (1962; Pilgrim at Sea), the sea is elevated to a sort of secular sacrality because of its beauty, inhumanity, and purposelessness:

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Havet som hade blivit nästan stilla låg och skimrade i alla färger, obestämda och flyktiga färger men obeskrivligt sköna och ljuvliga. Det var som om alla slags blommor hade spritts ut över dess oändliga yta och låg och vaggade på den, för att sedan långsamt vissna, blekna bort i en död full av outsäglig lycka, svårmod och skönhet…. Det stora, oändliga havet. Som är likgiltigt för allt och utplånar allt. Som i sin likgiltighet förlåtar allt. Uråldrigt, ansvarslöst, omänskligt. Som gör människan fri genom omänsklighet…. Utan något bestämt mål, utan något mål alls. (61, 71, 43) (The sea, which was almost calm, shimmered in many colors: hazy, fleeting colors of indescribable beauty as if flowers of every kind had been scattered over its boundless surface, to rock upon it until they slowly faded, paling away in a death of ineffable bliss, melancholy and loveliness…. The great and endless sea which is indifferent to all things, which erases all things; which in its indifference forgives all things. Primeval, irresponsible, inhuman. Freeing man through its inhumanity…. No fixed goal, no goal at all.) [47, 55, 33]

In Lagerkvist’s vision, the sea becomes an epochal and existential metaphor, a guiding principle for humanity in the godless age of fluid modernity in which Christian and scientific certainty, doctrinism, and teleology are replaced by uncertainty, a lack of concern, and freedom. The sea makes us aware of our non-human potentiality, i.e. the interrelatedness of freedom and acquiescence as well as of intensity and composure. The ship for its part is “a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” (Gilroy 4). It moves between polar ice and tropical heat; between national agendas and transnational realities. It navigates between the sun, the stars, and the winds above and the currents, the sharks, and the waves below. The ship is a microcosmos in which freedom and tyranny, community and sectarianism, justice and malice, superstition and rationality coexist, and these attributes are felt with an extreme intensity because of the ship’s potentially claustrophobic atmosphere. In Skibet gaar videre (1924; The Ship Sails On), Grieg poignantly describes his protagonist, a steamship, in terms associated both with industrial society and exotic places, darkness and light, brutality as well as beauty: Det er et pakhus som flytter sig fra havn til havn og stundom mot skjønne kyster. Et samfund av liv, som har svartnende kløfter og juv, men ogsaa bjerge i morgenrøden. En molok, som knaser skjæbner mellem sine jernkjæver, og derpaa vender ansigtet rolig mot ensomheten, som intet var hændt. Alt dette er skibet, og tusen gange anderledes og mer. Og han længter mot det og frygter det. (6) (She is a warehouse that moves about from port to port and sometimes visits lands of beauty. A community of human lives, with darksome clefts and ravines, but also with mountains rosy in the dawn. A Moloch that crushes the lives of men between its iron jaws, and then calmly turns its face to the solitudes as though nothing had happened. All this the ship is, and a thousand things besides. And he feels drawn to her and afraid of her.) [2]

Addicted-to-yet-terrified-by is a combination that is typical of the sailor’s relationship to the sea and the ship. As for the sailor, finally, he is both an admirable hero and a laughable drunkard; a homeless rover, yet at home on the waves; a noble craftsman and violent scum. In Sandemose’s Fortællinger fra Labrador (1923; Tales from Labrador), the author casts a national-regional gaze on the sailor and makes both appreciative and deprecating observations:

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Den skandinaviske Havets Vagabond er Klodens dygtigste Sømand – paa Søen. Der sætter han uden at skænke det en Tanke Livet i Pant for at bjerge den sidste Las af et flænget Raasejl. Men i Havn sætter han baade Liv og Helbred i Pant hos Kong Alkohol med hans hele Skøgefølge og bliver Klodens daarligste Matros. (56) (The Scandinavian vagabond of the sea is the best seaman on earth – on the sea. There, without giving it a thought, he pawns his life in order to salvage the last tatter of a torn sail. But in harbor, he pawns his life and health to King Alcohol with his entourage of harlots and becomes the worst sailor on earth.)

In Kirk’s Slaven (1948; The Slave), criminal pasts and present fights coexist with the feelings of community and solidarity that transcend nationality, ethnicity, and religion: De fleste af dem var mænd uden familie eller blivende sted. Den onde skæbne havde drevet dem tilsøs, de var flygtet fra et drab i et værtshus eller fra et fængsel, eller de var simpelthen drevet af en længsel efter et nyt og frit liv, som de aldrig havde fundet og nu havde glemt…. Men her var fællesskabet, deres egentlige hjem. De var ikke mere andalusiere eller kataloniere, portugisere eller negre, men matroser. De kunne snærre ad hinanden og slås, så blodet flød, men de vidste, at de hørte sammen…. Kun en eneste ting ejede disse grove og afstumpede mænd, disse vagabonder og slagsbrødre: solidariteten. Det var deres eneste gods på rejsen gennem livet, følelsen af samhørighed, den lov, at de stod en for alle og alle for en. (58–59) (Most of them were men without family or permanent abode. Evil fate had driven them to sea: they had fled from a murder in an inn or from a jail, or were simply driven by a yearning for a new and free life, which they had never found and now had forgotten…. But here was fellowship, their real home. They were no longer Andalusians or Catalonians, Portuguese or Negroes, but sailors. They could sneer at one another or fight till blood flowed, but they knew they belonged together…. These coarse and apathetic men, these vagabonds and brawlers owned only one thing: solidarity. That was their only good on the voyage through life, the feeling of belonging together, the law that they stood one for all and all for one.) [52–53]

Kirk here describes what is probably the most significant paradox of ship life: the ship’s sealedoff space triggers an amplification of tensions and conflicts among the crew, yet they are quite literally all in the same boat and thus forced into solidarity. Domestic life and maritime life Literary historians agree that The Pilot, published in 1824 by James Fenimore Cooper, is the first maritime novel in literary history, that is, a novel with the ocean as its principal scene of action, sailors as its protagonists, and a style capable of satisfying the professional seaman with its technical precision without scaring the average reader (Clavel 428). In 1874, fifty years after the publication of Cooper’s novel, Jonas Lie published what is considered to be the first maritime novel in the history of Nordic literatures. Interestingly, the title of Lie’s novel repeats that of Cooper’s novel, yet it also contains an important, perhaps even revealing, addition: Lodsen og hans Hustru (The Pilot and His Wife). One of the basic characteristics of maritime literature is its almost one-dimensional manly universe. In Melville and Conrad, women are absent from the maritime sphere – if they are

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mentioned at all it is usually in connection with a life totally separate from a life on the oceans. Melville’s and Conrad’s novels are thus fundamentally anti-domestic and as such challenge G. W. F. Hegel’s generic assumption that the novel is “der modernen bürgerlichen Epopöe” (Hegel Ästhetik 392) [“the modern bourgeois epic” (Hegel Aesthetics 1092; translation modified)]. In his tale “Ørnen” (1874; The Eagle), Drachmann reflects on this antagonistic image of the traditional family story as theorized by Hegel on the one hand and the exciting and rich travel narrative as practiced by Melville and later Conrad on the other and explicitly calls for more of the latter: I Stedet for vedholdende at spinde en Fortællings Traade i et Væv omkring “Familjens” Middags- eller Aftensbord, skulde man en Gang forsøge at henlægge sin Vævervirksomhed til den frie Luft, hvor Vinden puster, og hvor Spindet gynger sig op og ned i elastiske, lette Traade, som kan udvides i det uendelige, og modtage den omgivende frie Naturs Paavirkning i Skikkelse af friske og fyldige Farver. (28–29) (Instead of continually spinning the threads of a story into a web around the “the family’s” dinner table, one should at least once try to relocate one’s weaving project out into the open air where the wind blows and where the web is swung up and down by light, elastic threads that are infinitely extendable and receptive to the enveloping influence of free nature in the guise of fresh and full colors.)

Whereas Hegel’s theory of the novel in Vorlesungen über Ästhetik (1835–38; Lectures on Aesthetics) comprised houses, family life, and the earth, but excluded ships, itinerant sailors, and the sea, the same Hegel did in fact show an acute sense of the significance of maritime life and the ocean in his Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821; Elements of the Philosophy of Right): Wie für das Prinzip des Familienlebens die Erde, fester Grund und Boden, Bedingung ist, so ist für die Industrie das nach außen das belebende natürliche Element das Meer. In der Sucht des Erwerbs, dadurch, daß sie ihn der Gefahr aussetzt, erhebt sie sich zugleich über ihn und versetzt das Festwerden an der Erdscholle und den begrenzten Kreisen des bürgerlichen Lebens, seine Genüsse und Begierden, mit dem Elemente der Flüssigkeit, der Gefahr und des Unterganges. So bringt sie ferner durch dies größte Medium der Verbindung entfernte Länder in die Beziehung des Verkehrs, eines den Vertrag einführenden rechtlichen Verhältnisses, in welchem Verkehr sich zugleich das größte Bildungsmittel und der Handel seine welthistorische Bedeutung findet. (391) (Just as the earth, the firm and solid ground, is a precondition of the principle of family life, so is the sea the natural element for industry, whose relations with the external world it enlivens. By exposing the pursuit of gain to danger, industry simultaneously rises above it; and for the ties of the soil and the limited circles of civil life with its pleasures and desires, it substitutes the element of fluidity, danger, and destruction. Through this supreme medium of communication, it also creates trading links between distant countries, a legal [rechtlichen] relationship which gives rise to contracts; and at the same time, such trade [Verkehr] is the greatest educational asset [Bildungsmittel] and the source from which commerce derives its world-historical significance.) [Elements 268]

Although Melville and Conrad together with Drachmann agree with Hegel in his assessment of the increased significance of maritime life, they disagree with him in his characterization of the novel’s potential. Lie on the other hand managed to create an aesthetic (and axiological)

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compromise between the ocean and the earth: in Lodsen og hans Hustru industry and domesticity, fluidity and solidity, danger and bourgeois life go hand in hand although not without frictions and contrasts. Tellingly, Lie’s novel is considered not only the first maritime novel in Nordic literature, but also the first novel about marriage in Norwegian literature. Antagonism Lie’s novel tells the story of Salve Kristiansen, a pilot, and Elisabeth, his wife, who live on the small island of Merdø outside Arendal on the south coast of Norway. It narrates two different relationships between the maritime and the domestic, but common to both is that the domestic atmosphere determines the maritime behavioral modality. The first relationship dominates the story quantitatively and is characterized by marital unhappiness on the one hand and maritime recklessness and depravity (but also heroism) on the other. The domestic tensions continually risk provoking Salve to a misguided life away from home that means either Mor Andersens Stue (a pub) or a roaming life on the sea. An example of this inclination occurs before their marriage, when Salve – disheartened by the news of Elisabeth’s engagement to Carl Beck – decides to desert the Norwegian Juno, cut himself loose from Norway, and pursue a life of daring on the seven seas. However, signed on to the American Stars and Stripes in Rio de Janeiro, he soon discovers the general dystopian atmosphere onboard: Mandskabet bestod af Bærmen af New-Orleans og Charlestons Dokker, Folk med Laster og Følgerne af et nedværdigende Liv skrevet i deres Ansigter, og mellem dem lød i et Væk de ryggesløseste Eder og Gudsbespottelser. Slag af Haandspager og oprørende Behandling hørte til Dagens Orden, og den, hvem det gik ud over, kunde blot gjøre Regning paa Skadefryd af sine Kammerater. Nogen Ret var her ikke at faa.… Amerikanere og Irlændere holdt, som den talrigere Nationalitet, sammen og udøvede daglig det skamløseste Tyranni mod enhver Svagere. (145) (The crew was composed of the dregs of the New Orleans and Charleston docks – men with every species of vice and degradation stamped on their countenances and among whom every second word was some infamous oath or blasphemy. Blows with handspikes were a common occurrence, and brutality and violence generally were the order of the day. There was no court of appeal…. The Americans and the Irish banded together, and being the most numerous, practiced a shameless system of tyranny against any who could not defend themselves.) [155–56]

To survive this sectarian hell with his dignity intact, Salve adapts to the rules of the game and transforms himself into a stubborn, violent, and unruly rebel, one of those seamen who often ends his life at the yardarm or with a bullet from the captain’s revolver. However, it is also in connection with excessive maritime behavior that true heroism unfolds. The following passage not only testifies to the duality of honorability and carelessness associated with the maritime life, but also to the disparity between home and ocean. En drivvaad Lods staar pludselig paa Dækket … han har ikke betænkt sig paa at jumpe ud i Sjøen med Linen om Livet; thi paa anden Vis kunde Fartøiet ikke bordes. Naar det gjælder deres Ære, at bjerge Skib, veier Baad og Hjem og Liv kun lidt hos disse Mænd, der ellers til hverdags kunne være nøie nok om Skillingen. (8)

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(A dripping pilot stands upon the deck … they do not think twice about taking a line round their waist and jumping overboard; and when it is a point of honour with them to bring in a ship, boat and home and life weigh but very little on the opposite scale.) [269]

As it appears in this passage, the sailor is an action-driven character and sea fiction is adventure fiction. In that sense, the genre belongs to a narrative tradition predating the modern novel that includes Homer’s Odyssey, the Greek idealistic novels, and the medieval chivalric romances. It is a tradition that valorizes audacity, composure, unpredictability, risk, and adventure, and in the maritime novel, this is conveyed in depictions of the life and death struggles of sailors as they – assisted by ship and technology – tackle enemy armies, brutal pirates, foreign people, and not least the hostile forces of nature, more specifically weather and terrain, flora and fauna (Cohen “Travelling” 485). Compromise The second relationship between the domestic and the sea in Lodsen og hans Hustru is characterized by nuptial happiness, which then results in a more rational and moderate behavior on the sea. Here, the mood is harmony in contrast to the more conflicted attitude of the first relationship. As Franco Moretti has shown in The Way of the World (1987), the ultimate objective in the European Bildungsroman is happiness, a condition that was achieved through compromise. Although the traditional Bildungsroman unfolds with a compromise between aristocracy and middle class, between social demands and personal freedom, this typical pattern is only partially true of Lodsen og hans Hustru. Here, the main compromise is between civil life and maritime life, between the security of home and the metamorphic forces of nautical adventure. The compromised modality of maritime life is perfectly articulated in Salve’s exclamation on the last page of the novel: “Det kan være noksaa godt, at jeg faar Noget paa mig, som driver mig ud af Stuen, ellers blir jeg for kjær i baade den og Dig Elisabeth! … Jeg maa have lidt Rusk og Uveir engang iblandt; det er nu saa min Natur, véd Du” (297) [“It will be just as well that I should have something to drive me out of the house occasionally, for otherwise I should get too fond both of it and of you, Elizabeth … I must have a little rain and storm now and again – it’s my nature, you know” (354–55)]. The living room and a wife are not alone sufficient; sea breezes and a little storm are necessary to balance the equation. The maritime lifestyle now suggested by Salve is far from the reckless and adventurous one he had previously lived. Consequently, Lie’s novel exhibits the simultaneous processes of the domestication of maritime life (“lidt Rusk og Uveir”) and the oceanification of domestic life (Elisabeth’s fascination with and impressive knowledge of ships and sailors). The main reason for the compromise is the role Elisabeth is allowed to play in the novel. Whereas Melville and Conrad broke new ground in the history of the novel with their thoroughly maritime and manly universes, Lie developed a closely related but nevertheless new genre or form in which the maritime and the domestic not only coexisted, but also inter-penetrated one another. This innovation is why the small addition to the title of Lie’s novel (og hans Hustru / and his Wife) is not only important, but also revealing. It points to an emerging and important general tendency in Lie and in many of his fellow Nordic maritime writers in whose

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works women are portrayed as strong, independent, and willful characters who transgress the borders of the purely domestic: Jomfru Een/Madam Kristensen in Rutland (1880) and Sara in Gaa Paa! (1882; Go Ahead!), both by Lie; Nanna in “Poul og Virginie” (1878; Paul and Virginie) as well as Martha and Else in “Kongen” (1881; The King), both by Drachmann; Ory in Skram’s Forraadt (1892; Betrayed); Anna in Klabavtermanden (1927; The Klabavterman) and Elna in Mytteriet på barken Zuidersee (1963; Mutiny on the Ship Zuidersee), both by Sandemose; Fru Anderson in Bjørneboe’s Haiene (1974; The Sharks); and Klara Friis in Jensen’s Vi, de druknede (2006; We the Drowned). A typical form that the new role of women in Nordic maritime fiction took was their physical presence and occasional heroic active contributions onboard the ship. In Lie’s Rutland, Jomfru Een is, for example, onboard a ship during a furious storm, but instead of retreating to her cabin she stays on deck and rescues the ship’s boy when he is about to fall overboard. After her heroic deed, Jomfru Een is not only taken with Kaptajn Kristensen, but also with Rutland whose cabin she likens to her mother’s living room. Although Jomfru Een contributes to the compromise by domesticating the ship, Kristensen also transfers maritime qualities into the domestic sphere when he exclaims: “Fruentimmer og Ferskmad har jeg altid syntes, var lidt søtflaut … men De er et saltet Fruentimmer, Jomfru Een!” (46) [Women and freshwater food I have always found a little too sweet … but you are a salty woman, Jomfru Een!] However, her salty character at times frustrates Kristensen, and he later attempts to restore the traditional division of labor between the ship and the house, between man and woman: “Dette Kvindfolkearbejde med Pakgods op imellem Bryggerne bryr jeg mig ikke mere om. Vi gaar i de gamle lange Fragter igjen, hvor Mand blir Mand! … og … vil Du ikke være med, har Du Lov til at sidde hjemme!” (236) [Women working with cargo among the wharfs I don’t like it anymore. We’ll go back to the long freights again, where a man becomes a man! … and … if you don’t wish to be part of it you are allowed to stay back home!] Amalie Skram was not only a writer who wrote sea fiction with female protagonists, but perhaps more importantly a female writer who wrote sea fiction with female protagonists. Skram married a sea captain early in her life and during their thirteen years of an unhappy marriage she traveled around the world with him onboard his ship. The novel Forraadt is based on the experiences she absorbed during these voyages. If Lie’s Elisabeth and Madam Kristensen are two female sea dogs who relish shipboard life, Skram’s Ory, on the other hand, finds it insufferable. What she had hoped would be a chance to see the big and beautiful world ends up in bewilderment and solitude: “Men at være her som en Fange paa Skibet, med bare Havet omkring sig. Ingen Mulighed for at undslippe, med mindre hun vilde springe paa Sjøen. Og det havde hun tænkt paa mere end én Gang. Hun syntes tit, det var den eneste Udvej” (301) [“But to be here as a prisoner on this ship with only the ocean all around…. With no possible escape unless she jumped into the water. She had thought of that more than once. It often seemed like the only solution” (119–20)]. Skram uses the claustrophobia of ship life to accentuate Ory’s feeling of marriage as a prison from which escape is impossible. Riber’s nickname among the crew, “Eneherskeren” (the Dictator), signals his marital role as an oppressive, tyrannical, and brutal husband. Ironically, it is Riber who ultimately chooses suicide as he gives way to his mental lethargy.

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Anna in Sandemose’s Klabavtermanden is a close relative of Ory. By keeping Anna prisoner on the Ariel, Adam Klinte violates a sacred law of the sea and indirectly dooms his ship to annihilation. However, the final destruction only occurs after Gösta’s murder of Klinte and his subsequent (carnal) union with Anna. The crew cannot tolerate this development and collectively decide to steer the ship into the rocks, thereby causing its destruction: “Mildere Dom kan ikke afsiges af Søens ensomme Mænd over den, der forbryder sig mod deres Drøm, mod Kvinden, mod Hellige Guds Moder” (148) [A more lenient verdict cannot be pronounced by the sea’s lonesome men against the one who offends their dream, against Woman, against the Holy Mother of God]. Anna thus serves as an example of ill-fated female intervention into the maritime manly world, although Klinte is the one to blame. In fact, Anna contributes to softening Klinte’s brutal despotism onboard the Ariel and becomes the schooner’s true commander. The impression remains, though, that her mere presence disturbs the order and hierarchy on the Ariel and ultimately results in the crew’s mental mayhem and downfall. Re-enchantment On the seven seas paradoxes rule and contrasts intensify: maritime life is enchantment and disenchantment, sail and steam. But it is also artistic remembering: “‘the act of blackening pages,’ as he called it, was Conrad’s act of piety towards the perishable – his response to the sea’s irresponsibility, its hostility to memory, its impatience with ruins, and its passion for erasure” (Harrison 14). Owing to the maritime writers’ acts of piety – their preservation of the perishable in the depths of the imperishable – nautical life may possess a promise of re-enchantment as the maritime memories can be seen as a transformative force countering the disenchantments of modernity. However, it also becomes apparent when one looks at maritime fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first century  – from Patrick O’Brian and Amitav Ghosh to Jens Bjørneboe and Carsten Jensen – that it is fundamentally retrospective and historically oriented. Somehow the ship of today has lost its magnetic force and is no longer an object of fascination for writers. So why do authors keep coming back to the (sail) ship and the sea? Why did Bjørneboe write Haiene in 1974, a tale of a multinational crew that shipwrecked in January 1900? What made Carsten Jensen undertake the epic endeavor of writing Vi, de druknede in 2006, a novel whose storyline spans from the early 1800s to the mid-1900s? And, not least, why did Jensen’s novel become such a commercial success? A possible answer would be that the novels of Bjørneboe and Jensen can (and should) be read as conscious or unconscious attempts to re-enchant the world, as attempts to compensate for something lost in disenchantment. What has been lost is first and foremost a sense of immediacy, place, and body. According to Max Weber, Entzauberung is the result of an increasingly rational (as opposed to magical) legitimation of human behavior, which consequently becomes purpose-guided and future-oriented. In that sense, rational behavior is always an investment in potential – and sometimes even pre-calculable – future outcomes and thus entails an idea of mankind’s greater control of surroundings and ability to master (or at least productively cope with) contingency (Sprondel 564–65). In the same vein, Oswald Spengler described modernity as a Faustian culture by which

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he meant a tendency to describe, analyze, and deal with space as an abstract, geometrical dimension. More recently, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has characterized the processes of globalization and modernity as an ongoing elimination of the human body and of space as its dimension of articulation. Gumbrecht traces this development back to Descartes’s separation of mind and body in the seventeenth century but sees it intensified with the emergence of the railroad networks in the early 1800s and with the invention of new communication technologies during the twentieth century. At this juncture, John Harrison’s invention and ongoing perfection of the marine chronometer during the eighteenth century marks an equally important development as the capture and regularization of time led to an increased control and domination over space: “The determination of the [former] allowed the specification of the [latter]. The measure of space was taken by time” (Casey 6). In addition, the emergence of the steam ship during the nineteenth century only emphasizes this development as the regular and mechanic rhythm of steam power, and later engine power, transforms the physical and frictional space of the sea into a geometrical and unresisting space. What used to be a life of unpredictability and immediacy becomes a more rational and future-oriented life, not least because of an enhanced ability to predict future scenarios (for example arrival times). Ever since the oceanic turn, the maritime enterprise has thus been an integral part of (maybe even the cause behind) the process of globalization and the transcendence of physical space. If the space of the sea dominated man in antiquity and the Middle Ages, a more equal and symbiotic relationship between oceanic space and man characterized the age of discovery, and with the advent of steam and engine power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries man can now be said to dominate oceanic space – although the sinkings of the Titanic, Hans Hedtoft, and Scandinavian Star remind us of the relative and porous nature of this dominance. Gumbrecht’s analysis does not stop with the ascertainment of loss, though. His basic intuition is that “the process of globalization, by leaving some universal needs and desires of human life unattended, has paradoxically helped to make these very needs and desires more visible – because we notice, in our everyday lives, how they remain unsatisfied” (232). Gumbrecht then identifies a series of compensatory strategies that humans come up with in order to counter the main effects of globalization (the elimination of body and space), because those effects no longer seem to be in synchrony with some of our basic needs and limits. According to Gumbrecht, phenomena such as practicing and watching sports, piercing, self-cutting, and tattooing, regionalization, and ecological awareness are (new) ways to recuperate space and body. Maritime fiction can be added to Gumbrecht’s list of compensatory strategies as it constitutes a reaction of inertia against modernity’s disregard of the human body, its abandonment of the dimension of space in its non-abstract phenomenality, and its repression of a form of behavior in which rationality does not constantly urge us to be ahead of ourselves. If life at sea in the industrial age is dominated by technology and electronics thereby diminishing the sense of being bodily and mentally present in a particular place on the one hand, and increasing our feeling of chronotopic control on the other, life at sea in the pre-industrial age involved weather and wind, magic and omens, dreams and intuitions, sense alertness and muscle activation. In their maritime novels, Bjørneboe and Jensen re-connect with the sailing era phenomena,

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maybe not so much because these phenomena are irretrievably lost to us as because they are being concealed by modernity’s stronger branch – the one comprised of meanings (as opposed to presences), minds (as opposed to bodies), and ideas (as opposed to sensations). In the essay “Ocean Travel” (1923) Conrad lists a series of “elemental” differences between sail and steam and describes life onboard a sailing vessel in the following terms: It had a charm and an intimacy of a settled existence … and almost all, men and women, became reconciled to the vast solitude of the sea untroubled by the sound of the world’s mechanical contrivances and the noise of its endless controversies. The silence of the universe would lie very close to the sailing ship, with her freight of lives from which the daily stresses and anxieties had been removed, as if the circle of the horizon had been a magic ring laid on the sea. No doubt the days thus enchanted were empty, but they were not so tedious as people may imagine. They passed quickly, and, if they brought no profit or excitement, I cannot help thinking that they were not wasted. No! They were not wasted. (37–38)

The exclamation mark and the final repetition emphasize the maritime writer’s determination to salvage and preserve the dimensions and modes of being repressed by modernity: place, charm, acquiescence, silence, slowness, tediousness, variability, intimacy, solitude, magic, and enchantment. There are such moments of enchantment and seductive, spatial embrace in Bjørneboe’s Haiene (1974; The Sharks) when Peder Jensen is at the helm of the Neptun: Det er ingen overdrivelse å si at jeg skalv, da jeg tok det første taket i mahognyratten … Forsiktig la jeg henne en kvartstrek opp til lovart, bare for å føle kontakten, for å kjenne hvordan hun var på roret. Og da merket jeg det; den svake sitringen, – hun skalv også under berøringen! Det gikk en høy flamme av lykke gjennom meg, fra føttene til fingerspissene følte jeg sitringen hennes, av denne enheten av skrog og rigg – av kropp og sjel, av tauverk og vind. Det var en stor, brusende musikk av sjøen, skuten og vinden. (25) (It’s no exaggeration to say that I trembled as I first gripped the mahogany wheel … Carefully I eased her a quarter of a point off to windward, just to feel the contact, to feel how she minded her rudder. And I felt it, the faint quivering – she too trembled at my touch! A tall flame of happiness went through me, from my feet to my fingertips I felt the trembling of her, of this oneness of hull and rigging – of body and soul, of ropes and wind. It was a great, rushing music: the sea, the ship, and the wind.) [26]

Just a few hours before this experience of intense happiness, Jensen witnessed a ferocious fight between two crewmembers. This contrasting background helps to highlight the redemptive quality of the helm scene during which Jensen experiences an everyday miracle  – that is, a secular epiphany that briefly makes a moment of being possible in which there exists a harmonious synchrony between the individual and the universe. The passage underlines the bodily physicality of the experience as well as the interdependence between Jensen, the Neptun, the sea, and the wind. It is a moment in which the Cartesian dualism collapses and the gap is closed, a moment in which our sense of place within the cosmos is restored and our gratitude simply for what is is revitalized. However, it is important to insist that the contrast between the fight scene and the helm scene has more to do with emotional outcome (appall versus bliss) than actual foundation

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because both experiences are grounded in the human body and the non-abstract phenomenality of place: Det så ut som om han kysset ham, og i det samme kom et vilt, skjærende skrik fra peruvianeren. Tømmermannen bet ham i kinnet, og med en voldsom anstrengelse rev han seg løs, mens blodet strømmet fra kinnet og ned over hals og bryst…. Tømmermannen reiste seg langsomt opp og spyttet blod ut over dekket … og sparket ham bagfra i skrittet. Med et brøl veltet peruvianeren om på siden. To ganger til sparket den andre ham, nå i maven…. Ved siden av ham lå en planke, to tommer tykk og omtrent fire fot lang…. Den rammet tømmermannen der hvor issen går over i pannen, og han falt sammen som om han var skutt. (19–20) (It looked as if he were kissing him, and all at once a wild, piercing scream came from the Peruvian. The carpenter was biting his cheek; with a violent effort he tore himself loose, the blood streaming down over his neck and chest…. Slowly the carpenter rose and spat out blood over the deck … then kicked him in the crotch from behind. With a bellow the Peruvian rolled onto his side. Twice more the other kicked him, now in the stomach…. Beside him lay a plank, two inches thick and about four feet long…. It rammed the carpenter there where the temple joins the forehead and he collapsed as if shot.) [20–21]

Such descriptions of extreme violence are typical in maritime fiction. Undoubtedly violence was an integral part of ship life, and undoubtedly it often had devastating and lethal outcomes. However, this physical aspect is yet another part of maritime fiction’s attempt to compensate for something that has been lost – a bodily (as opposed to an intellectual) being in the world. Readers take pleasure in these scenes (or at least some do), not despite of, but because of their brutality. Jensen’s commercial success with Vi, de druknede was also due to the element of violence and brutality that runs through the novel. This is not the whole story, though. Within the context of national self-understanding Jensen’s novel takes issue with what he considers the nationally dominating pedagogical and nativist narrative in which Denmark is portrayed as an idyllic and down-to-earth nation of farmers. Vi, de druknede contests this image with a performative and hybrid narrative in which Jensen evokes Denmark’s long (but forgotten) history as a dynamic and internationally oriented seafaring nation. So, for Jensen the retrospective point of view serves to narrate a story of loss (the loss of the spatial and corporal aspects of existence). But inherent in the very act of retrospection and remembering, Jensen sees a prospective potential with didactic and political ramifications that enables us to tackle the future challenges of globalization and interculturalism in a more qualified way as it evokes phenomena such as Wanderlust, community, migration, and work – phenomena that were highly relevant in a nineteenth-century context, but which still dominate the agenda in today’s globalization studies. Maritime fiction is thus still being written, first because the sea and the ship constitute environments that compensate for our contemporary loss of body and space, second because maritime life in the past contained phenomena which play a key role in defining our contemporaneity, third because the sea continues to interpenetrate with Nordic life, fourth, and finally, because as humans we quite simply are irresistibly drawn towards the sea.

Cityscapes Dan Ringgaard

The term cityscape implies that villages and towns situated in a landscape do not qualify as such. An urban domination of the framed topography is necessary as is a settlement of considerable size. One of the first Nordic writers to turn landscape into cityscape was Swedish poet Carl Michael Bellman. A product of an ancient Christian and classical rhetorical tradition, he undermines the pastoral and through the pastoral the aesthetic landscape by way of travesty, detail, and a change of milieu. In his two collections of songs, Fredmans Epistlar (1790; Fredman’s Epistles) and Fredmans Sånger (1791; Fredman’s Songs), he creates a carnevalesque cast of characters living on the edge of Stockholm bourgeois society drinking, fornicating, and performing music. In Fredmans epistlar number eighty, the prostitute Ulla Winblad travels to an inn on the outskirts of the city. The song describing the outing is written in the style of the pastoral even though it is about matters of the flesh such as eating, drinking, sex, and sleeping. The elegant style is suffused with crude content. This juxtaposition lies well within the boundaries of an ancient carnevalesque tradition but nevertheless has the effect of pointing to a corporeal place, a lived space rather than a conventional or transcendent place. In many of his songs, Bellman takes poetry into the city by bringing the social world and not nature to the fore. Details portraying world of decaying, dying bodies permeate the songs thus descending into a kind of realism that goes beyond travesty. Fredman can be found lying in the gutter in front of an inn in Stockholm’s Old City contemplating his dirty, tattered clothes and his itching body. He looks up at the city and the sky, not down on a slope or the sea. Or he may be standing at the funeral of a friend seeing how the symbolic gold and purple is transformed into actual gravel on the shovel of the gravedigger. In these examples, there is a direct connection between the description of lived space and the exploration of inner life. The miserable existence is presented as matter-of-fact reality seen through an individual temperament. The landscape is marginalized as it becomes involved with a horizontal and social world; it is replaced by a cityscape within which it is reduced to a mock pastoral on the outskirts of the city. Another kind of city life – or rather town life – at the border of landscape and cityscape is the provincial town, a subject of a number of prose narratives written during the first half of the nineteenth century, be they novels, short stories, autobiographies, or travelogues. To the writer or protagonist of the capital, these towns were stopovers in the landscape; to the educated people living there – the priest, the schoolteacher, the doctor – they were often islands, isolated parcels of civilization, in the provinces. Anna Smedborg Bondesson gives a guided tour of some small towns between Stockholm and Göteborg with the help of Carl Jonas Almqvist’s Det går an (1839; Sara Videbeck), Kerstin Ekman’s tetralogy Kvinnorna och Staden (1974–83; The Women and the City), Hjalmar Bergman’s En döds memoarer (1918; Memoirs of a Dead Man) and Birger Sjöberg’s Fridas bok (1922; Frida’s Book). These towns are termed diatopias, meaning in-between places. They are places through which the reader moves but are also places that are lagom, meaning that which is nicely balanced, a reasonable compromise of extremes. These small towns do not look like much; they may only catch the superficial gaze of the passer-by, doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.16rin © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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but – as especially the female protagonists will point out – they have a certain depth of perspective and their own mode of living. Their geographical in-betweeness makes them intermediaries between what is possible and what is not. The urban novel The Nordic region has no metropolis, only major cities that are also centers of state power. Throughout history these have been Stockholm and Copenhagen and later Oslo and Helsinki. From this point of view, it is a provincial region. The geographical orientations of these major cities differ thus opening the region in various directions and making them part of other regions; increasingly these orientations may, as is the case with present-day Reykjavík, have a more global character. The rise of the major cities as well as the demographic shift from the countryside to the urban environment is of central significance. Being a creature of the nineteenth century, the protagonist’s transition from the countryside to the capital is often a constituent part of many of the Nordic novels of this period. The rise of city literature in Norden is exemplified here in Lieven Ameel’s survey of the birth of literary Helsinki. The essay begins with poet V. A. Koskenniemi, who in 1914 lamented the lack of an urban imaginary in Finnish literature. Koskenniemi was in fact writing at the time when this imagination was just emerging and being modelled after cities such as Paris, St. Petersburg, and Stockholm. Ameel covers a number of novels and short stories among which Arvid Järnefelt’s Veneh’ojalaiset (1908; The People of Veneh’oja) is highlighted for its presentation of a number of different attitudes toward the city that are played out later during the twentieth century. The essay tracks the urban imagination from the arrival of the farmer-student to the panoramic gaze of the city dweller and shows how the specific literary imaginary of Helsinki arises in the conjunction of European (and especially Russian) literature and the history of the city. The movement through and  – even more so  – around the city plays an important role in its construction as a lived space. In literature the male flâneur has been an important agent of this particular shaping of place. Tone Selboe challenges the classic double-bind of gender and ambulant leisure by sketching a broad typology of female pedestrians ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s by drawing on the work of, among other authors, the Norwegian writers Camilla Collett and Cora Sandel; the Swedes Elin Wägner, Ulla Bjerne, and Maria Sandel; Finnish-Swedish writers Anna Åkesson and Helena Westermarck; the Dane Agnes Henningsen; and the Icelandic writer Ásta Sigurðardóttir. It is a story of liberation but also of a repression of freedom and sexuality. Together with Ameel’s, Selboe’s essay describes a period from the 1870s to the1930s that must be considered the peak years of the Scandinavian cityscape, which corresponds with the rise and fall of the realist novel.

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Cityscape as lightscape The cityscape has no horizon and is only weakly grounded in the land. This characterization along with the many other aspects of modernity make cityscapes highly susceptible to change. They are places of transformation as is evident in Knut Hamsun’s Sult (1890; Hunger) as well as in the Danish writer Herman Bang’s Copenhagen novel Stuk (1887; Stucco). Stuk is Bang’s most ambitious attempt to develop a spatial novel, one that counters the linear and biographically grounded novel. With its range of characters, this novel shifts from line to canvas, from nacheinander to nebeneinander; it develops a synchronicity of stories and destinies and patterns them in ways closer to the concept of space than to chronology. In this way the novel portrays the boom-and-bust cycle of Copenhagen in the 1880s. One might argue that the spatial structuring of place familiar from the earlier topographies reoccurs in this novel pointing toward a more mimetic relation between lived space and represented space (Tygstrup 174–83) that dominates the modernist literature of the twentieth century. Place in Herman Bang’s fiction is extremely dynamic; movement through the air creates place. It may derive from the circulation of characters’ bodies, the exchange of speech, or glances cast in all directions. Particular places come to life as a result of these movements of character. Quick shifts between characters weave swift and complicated patterns of speech or glances in the air between them. Place results from action. The narrator does not create a place into which he inserts the characters; he does not place the characters in a landscape or a cityscape, at a table or in a house already described and positioned in time and space. It is the other way around. Place is not mapped in Bang, it is acted out. The mapping of place that more traditional nineteenth-century prose creates by means of description is abandoned and the narrator is transported into the background. By making place a product of an action, Bang emphasizes that the creation of lived space has to do with the body, with perception, movement, and action, and less with memory or history. Lived space is open-ended, a place of fluctuations and metamorphoses as opposed to a static and autonomous place. It is very much a place of extension. The air plays a leading role. As in impressionist painting, it is not the bodies but what is in between the bodies that attracts attention. The air is brought to the fore as the medium of movement. As the characters, the dialogue, or the glances move often frenetically through the air, the air becomes patterned and therefore thick; it is given a materiality of its own. As a consequence the world does not appear as meaning but as atmosphere. The Viktoria Theater – the key symbol of the novel – may be dilapidated and the unpolished pine shows underneath the gold embellishments of the table legs. The decline of things, however, is not of consequence, but rather what takes place around the things or between the bodies that really matters in Stuk. The role of the air almost makes the cityscape in Stuk into a lightscape, and the lightscape has the air of modernity. In Stuk all that is solid melts into air. Ambiance is also crucial in Hjalmar Söderberg’s novel of reflection and murder Dr. Glas (1905; Doctor Glas). By moving the flâneur from Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen of seduction to Stockholm’s spleen and chance encounters and by rejecting the naturalism of Strindberg’s urban narrative Röda rummet (1879; The Red Room) with the introspection of the diary novel, Söderberg creates a literary voice that is inseparable from its environment. Dr. Glas, a physician, a virgin, and eventually a murderer, portrays himself on the walks, at the cafés of Stockholm, or

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sitting by his window enduring the hot summer nights writing. If one can understand Bang as all showing, Söderberg would be all telling, but one cannot trust what is being told. The inner life is deceptive. Place does not result from actions nor is the novel particularly descriptive with regard to the outside world. In Dr. Glas, place comes under the guise of ambiance, it presents itself as heat, dusk, streetlights, and shadows; it is perceived in between buildings and singular trees, over sidewalks, and underneath rose-colored clouds; it is an ambiance of yearning and dying bodies. In this theater of shadows the division between self and environment, subjectivity and cityscape is blurred, if not dissolved. In a moment of Nordic intertextuality, the protagonist recalls Hans Christian Andersen’s story “Skyggen” (1847, “The Shadow”): “nu, då ljuslågan flämtar i draget och min skugga på den gröna tapeten fladdrar och skälver liksom lågan och vill få liv – nu tänker jag på Andersen och hans saga om skuggan som ville bli människa” (67) [“now, as the candleflame flutters in the draught and my shadow shivers and flutters like the flame on the wallpaper, as if trying to come to life – now I think of Hans Andersen and his tale of the shadow. And it seems to me I am the shadow who wished to become a man”(50)]. Becoming a shadow by means of an evil deed may, as in Andersen, be a Faustian way of entering life. But there is also an atmospheric point. The body may double itself and as a shadow become part of the ambience, or the ambience may enter the body: “Dagar som dessa tycker jag att det stiger upp gammal liklukt från kyrkogården och tränger in genom väggar och fönster. Regnet droppar på fönsterblecket. Jag känner det som om det droppade på min hjärna för att urholka den. – Det är något fel med min hjärna … Dropp – dropp – dropp” (157) [“On days like these a smell of old corpses seems to me to rise from the churchyard and force its way in through walls and windows. The rain drips on the window-sill. I feel as if it were dripping on my heart, to hollow it out. There’s something wrong with my brain … Drip – drip – drip,” (124)]. This kind of sensitivity to ambience that has parallels in contemporaries of Söderberg like Thomas Mann or Marcel Proust makes environment an extension of subjectivity and subjectivity an extension of the environment – and place the product of this interference. The cityscape does not lend itself to landscape because it has no horizon. The happiest moment in Dr. Glas’s life was a kiss on a hilltop; he sometimes longs to free himself from the grip of the city well aware, as he is, that he is not a man of nature. The cityscape closes in on him and dissolves him in heat, rain, and shadows. Far from promoting a mere pathetic fallacy by portraying the weather a symbol of the mind, the novel displays a decadent hyper-sensibility to the surroundings and insists that place comes under other guises than just action and scenery. The aestheticism in Dr. Glas goes to the etymological roots of the concept and develops a literal sense of place that is not detached but enclosed. Söderberg’s sense of place is primarily synesthetic, as opposed to the primarily kinesthetic sense in Bang. This enclosure, being aesthetic in nature, nevertheless tends to detach itself from the human, and especially the gendered realities of the city. That, at least, is an objection in Kirstin Ekman’s 2009 rewriting of the novel, Mordets praktik (The Practice of Murder). Writing the diaries of an equally murderous doctor who imagines that he is the model for Söderberg’s Dr. Glas, Ekman at one and the same time deconstructs the magic spell of Söderberg’s prose and engages his voice as if it were a literary space with an ambience of its own. Wrapped in the voice of the narrator, the cityscape – that is very much a lightscape – also becomes a wordscape.

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Cityscape as wordscape Perhaps the permutability of the cityscape is at its strongest when the major cities are becoming the new dominant habitats. As people get accustomed to them, normalization plays down the protomodern experiences of shock. Or perhaps it is due to the fact that there are no metropolises in the region. In Anders Olsson’s contribution, an account of Finland-Swedish poet Gunnar Björling, the small capital of Finland fuses with modernist poetry. The result is a cityscape that exists in the mixed realms of phenomenology and a wordscape; it is a perceived space that materializes as space on the page. Gunnar Björling, who hardly ever left Helsinki, is one of the most daring modernist poets in Norden (and in Europe for that matter), and is an outstanding example of how the avant-garde can thrive on the margins. Challenging any literary limit in his early Dadaist period during the 1920s and later in life, writing “the unlimited” in a broken, stammering, and repetitive syntax, he nevertheless wrote from a fixed and local place and within the limits of carefully framed perceptions. It is a view of the city from the interior, from the window frame – not the view one might normally associate with the cityscape and its phenomenology of the street. By focusing on this one outstanding poet, Olsson reproduces the unusual dynamic of the city filtered through a single, brilliant temperament. To Björling any cityscape is also a wordscape and no place is beyond the spatiality of language. Therefore the breaking down and opening up of language is also an expansion of place. The movement toward the unlimited is conditioned and qualified by the perceptual limits set of the cityscape. Likewise regional belonging challenges the universality of writing. Beyond the Nordic cityscape The major cities of Norden are by no means the centers of the world. Therefore the cityscapes of Nordic literature, especially during the advancing twentieth century, tend to be either mixed with smaller towns, landscapes, and later suburbs or to move beyond the regional borders. In the case of the latter, the ephemeral qualities of the cityscape may develop into an actual placelessness and the protagonist may find himself adrift in an empty space between ancient landscape and cosmopolitan restlessness. The city is not just ephemeral; it is gone. The Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness opens his 1927 debut novel Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír (The Great Weaver from Kashmir) with the vast volcanic landscape of Þingvellir, the place where the Icelanders convened their parliament, the Alþingi, between 930 and 1798. In the opening chapter of the novel, this center of the old world and the nation is the setting of turbulent emotions and ideas that are to catapult the young protagonist, Steinn Elliði, out into a post-war Europe. In this modernist novel with its changing narrators who destabilize the representation of truth, the extremely gifted young man is sent into a centrifuge of changing worldviews making clear to the reader what another Atlantic poet wrote in 1919: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (Yeats 184). In Laxness, the feeling is similar in that Elliði feels let down by his religious master: “En allar hugsanir snerust stjórnlust til og frá í höfði Steins, einsog kulnaðar sólir í dauðu sólkerfi. Hann var staddur andspænis eilífðinni sjálfri og eingin veröld framar til og hvorki handfesta né fótfesta (358) [But all Steinn’s thoughts spun chaotically through his head,

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like cold suns in dead solar systems. He was situated opposite eternal life itself and there was no world in existence any longer where he could gain either a handhold or a foothold (412)]. As in Yeats, the catastrophe is accompanied by a metaphysical yearning that resembles an empty transcendence and collapse of worldviews one after the other. As praise of nature is replaced by the superhuman, so is the superhuman by Catholicism, and Catholicism by human love. Elliði seems to be drifting further and further into a labyrinth of self-delusion. Laxness, writing from the margins, exhibits a finely tuned sensibility towards whatever beliefs and madness circulated in Europe at the time. Like the heroes of the sagas, Elliði travels between Europe and Iceland only to become a foreigner in both. His cosmopolitanism is an exile, and unlike his forefathers, he experiences a split between modernity and tradition. He may, in the manner of the times, praise the asphalt and the newspapers and regard himself as “lifandi líkamníng þeirrar mantegundar sem séd hefur daagsins ljós sídustu tíu, tólf árin” (345) [the living incarnation of the type of man who has seen the light of day the last ten, twelve years, (397)] and claim that (“hugsanir mínar leika á sviði milli hins hrylligasta expressjónisma og glórulausta surrealisma” (346) [my thoughts play on the stage of the most gruesome expressionism and most nonsensical surrealism, (398)]. But Elliði also seeks the trans-historic security of the Catholic Church and – as he in the end of the novel returns to Iceland – longs for the historic continuity in the nature and heritage of Þingvellir. In Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír, the collapse of ideology is parallel to deterritorialization. As a man of means and intellect, Elliði has no relationship with nature other than a certain sentimentality or with the locally owned shipping business of his family. The places of Iceland are as forceful as those of his family, memory, and emotion, but they do not have the power to withstand the debate concerning ideas, let alone to settle it. Instead they become part of this debate: forces and counter-forces in an interiorized maelstrom and a craze of subjectivity and perspectivism. In a Nietzschean moment, Elliði himself puts it: “Eingin mannkynssaga er til fyrir sjálfan mig” (346) [“There is no history of mankind except for myself.” (398)]. If Laxness’s novel is one way of going beyond the Nordic city, another and more literal one is to travel to larger cities. Being a region without a metropolis of its own, Norden often turns to those cities outside the region that thus play a vital role in the literary cultures of Norden. Rome and Paris have been the most frequent destinations for Nordic artists and writers and have thus played an important role in their imagination of the city, but Berlin is the closest foreign metropolis and is a reminder that Germany has long been the major gateway between Norden and the rest of the world. Thomas Mohnike’s contribution follows the transformation of Norden’s Berlin from a city with no history in 1800 to a European lieu de mémoire in 2000. The many and various cultural influences at work differ considerably during the two hundred years in which Nordic writers have visited and written about Berlin, and the number of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish writers mentioned in this essay is equally arresting. As a result of its proximity to Norden, Berlin has played a major role in transmitting impulses to the North ranging from German idealism through the experience of urban, industrialized modernity to that of the global world city. On the world stage of the twentieth century, New York holds the claim of being the world capital and it is no less so for Nordic literature, especially that written after World War II. AnneMarie Mai writes here about the influence of New York and of American literature and art on

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Nordic literature. It is a story of ambivalences: first between the new world and the old, between futuristic ecstasy and industrial dehumanization, later between anti-Americanism/anticapitalism and a fascination with American popular culture and modernity as told through a large number of primarily Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish poets. The story of New York in twentieth-century Scandinavian literature shows how places of cultural identity are no longer connected to the national imagination but instead to the global. And it ends by directing its attention elsewhere as New York by the turn of the millennium ceased to be the capital of the world.

Through the land of lagom in literature Passing small towns in middle Sweden Anna Smedberg Bondesson

There is a typically Swedish word, lagom, used both as an adverb and an adjective. It means “just right,” “adequate/adequately,” or “sufficient/sufficiently.” But it also has something to do with spatiality in the sense that it is positioned connotatively in the in-between, in the somewhat indeterminate and intermediate space between two opposites or extremes. Lagom is not too much and not too little, it is not too big and not too small. Representing the average, it forms a border zone of moderation. This essay is an examination of the sense of lagom as it pertains to literary history. The foundational narratives it examines take place in and between a number of small towns along the route from Stockholm to Göteborg, Sweden’s two major cities. Four authors and four works will serve as focal points: Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s Det går an (1839; Sara Videbeck); Kerstin Ekman’s four novels collectively known as Kvinnorna och staden (1974–83; Women and the City); Hjalmar Bergman’s En döds memoarer (1918; Memoirs of a Dead Man), and Birger Sjöberg’s “Lilla Paris” in the songbook Fridas bok (1922; Frida’s Book). In the first section of this analysis, Foucault’s concept of heterotopia will be used, and, in the final part, a complementary notion (borrowed from linguistics) of diatopia  – literally meaning “through space” or “in-between place” and as such a conceptual parallel to the spatial aspects of lagom – will be suggested.1 “A charming and remarkable intermediate!” In a certain sense, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist was the opposite of lagom in that he was an incarnation of both a romantic artist and a politically radical thinker. He is, nonetheless, often consigned in literary history to a position between romanticism and realism or, perhaps more correctly, grasping at both. The publication of Det går an in 1839 not only marked the transition from the one aesthetic expression to the other, but also caused a literary scandal that led to widespread moral panic in Sweden (Romberg 158). The Swedish title, Det går an, is known in English as Sara Videbeck (1919), but the original title means: “It’s OK” or “it will do,” in both senses of the expressions. The novel’s message is that it is not only OK/good enough but also proper and allowed, and even recommends cohabitation of a man and woman without marriage. 1.

In sociolinguistics, diatopia, meaning linguistic (dialectical) variety, which can be mapped topographically, is coined on the model of diacronia. Just as diacronia means “through time,” diatopia means “through space.” According to Foucault, the mirror is “une hétérotopie, dans la mesure où le miroir existe réellement, et où il a, sur la place que j’occupe, une sorte d’effet en retour” (47) [“a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction” (24)]. If the mirror is a heterotopia, the diatopia would be a window. If the train is a heterotopia, the railway is a diatopia. The ship is a heterotopia, while the trip as such forms a diatopia. Diatopia corresponds in some aspects to what Bakhtin calls the chronotope of threshold, but it is a wider concept than Bakhtin’s (389 [248]). doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.17bon © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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The main character of the novel, Sara Videbeck, is traveling alone from Stockholm because her traveling companion – her aunt – missed the departure of the steamboat Yngve Frey from the Mälar dock. She at once attracts Albert’s attention and awakens his curiosity. By examining the captain’s passenger log, Albert finds out that she is a glazier’s daughter from Lidköping. From the beginning it is clear that the narrator will for the most part maintain Albert’s point of view throughout the story thus allowing him to share his thoughts with the reader. Albert has some difficulties categorizing her: Sergeanten tänkte så här. En glasmästardotter ifrån Lidköping – det är en småstad, långt, långt bort ifrån Stockholm. En mamsell? på sätt och vis, ja. En borgardotter, dock af ringaste borgarklass. Ett intagande och märkvärdigt mellanting! Landtflicka icke, bondflicka alls icke – men icke heller riktigt af bättre klass. Hvad skall en sådan egentligen anses för? hvad kallas? Det är någonting outgrundligt i denna mellansort. (140) (The sergeant meditated as follows: “A glazier’s daughter from Lidköping – that’s a small town far, far from Stockholm. Yes, she is what I took her for – a daughter of the middle class, yet not of the lowest grade. A charming and remarkable intermediate! Not a country girl, not at all a peasant girl – nor yet entirely of the better class. What is the real status of such an individual? How shall I address her? There is something puzzling about this intermediate state.”) [8]

Sara Videbeck represents the future: a new class, a new society, a new woman. When her father died, Sara inherited his business that she, as a woman, may keep only as long as she does not marry. She is an “economic woman” and wants to continue being just that. In Sara Videbeck the new growing middle class finds its perfect literary model of entrepreneurship and management (Svedjedal Rosor 345). In contrast to the old-fashioned sailing boat, the steamship, just like Sara Videbeck, represents progress and the future. At the same time, it is a typical Foucauldian heterotopia, a critical mirror of the society, reflecting, contesting, and inverting it. As has been noted in several other essays in this volume, Foucault sees the ship as the intersection of historical economic forces and imaginative qualities; thus, “Le navire, c’est l’hétérotopie par excellence” (49) [“The ship is the heterotopia par excellence” (27)]. In Det går an, the steamship Yngve Frey as such symbolizes the industrial revolution, which is still to begin, while the upper class representing the old world of antiquated privileges is very negatively caricatured, sitting in their “undre verld, salongen” [“lower world, the saloon”], “likt Troglodyter” (163) [“like troglodytes” (47)]. The future is on the foredeck, where one can breathe “friska luften” (165) [“the fresh air” (49)], especially since this is Sara’s position: “Också han [Albert] tycktes ej trifvas i adyterna; han gick så snart han kunde upp ifrån dem, och måste hafva varit en särdeles vän af den luft, som blåste vid förstäfven; ty der höll han sig mest och hade nu ånyo tändt sin cigarr.” (166) [“Then, too, he did not seem to like the cabin caves: as soon as he could he came up and left them. He must have been a particular friend of the air that was blowing on the foredeck, because that is where he stayed most of the time, and where he had lighted his cigar again” (51)].

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Det går an describes a trip from Stockholm to Lidköping and thus “travels” through central Sweden between Stockholm and Göteborg. Since it takes place before the railroad was built, it begins on the steamboat on Lake Mälaren, stopping at Strängnäs in Södermanland, and then continues by carriage, from Arboga to Fellingsbro in Västmanland, Örebro in Närke, and then turns toward the south to and along Lake Vänern, to Mariestad, and, eventually, Lidköping in Västergötland. If Sara and Albert had waited about thirty years to make their trip, they would most likely have taken the train. In Södermanland, they would have passed a small railway station, which was to be the hometown of Kerstin Ekman and the setting of her tetralogy entitled Kvinnorna och staden (Women and the City): Häxringarna (1974; Witches’ Rings), Springkällan (1976; The Spring), Änglahuset (1979; The Angel House), and En stad av ljus 1983; City of Light). Katrineholm was founded as a stop on the railway line and slowly with industrialization grew into a medium-sized city. Ekman’s tetralogy follows and outlines this process from the 1870s to the 1970s. Using a perspective from within rather than from outside, Ekman lets the town germinate and grow like a living organism. The two contrasting perspectives – the internal and external – could easily be coded as female versus male. While history is conventionally written by men, Kerstin Ekman tells another story, the non-spoken-of, that of the poor, that of Women and the City, i.e. a critique of both patriarchy and capitalism (Schottenius 42–44). Arguably, the literary city of Kerstin Ekman is a heterotopia since it could be said to function as a contesting mirror showing another reality beneath and behind the buildings. This inner world’s symbolic and mythological pattern is thoroughly analyzed according to Jungian psychology by Maria Schottenius. “Det finns ett mönster under mönstret,” (Änglahuset 296) [“There’s a pattern under the pattern” (The Angel House 380)] says Konrad Eriksson, the androgynous character who shares the author’s initials. He continues: “En stad under den här stan. Eller innanför den” (Änglahuset 296) [“A town under this town. Or inside it” (The Angel House 380)]. A mirror reflecting a picture is used as a metafictional symbol in contrast to the literary city in which it is inscribed as a kind of negative corrective: På väggen mittemot dem fanns en spegel och i den såg hon tavlan ovanför deras huvuden. Den såg annorlunda ut i spegeln. Det var en grågul tavla i orena färger och den föreställde nog en sydländsk stad på en sluttning. Man såg inte en människa ute på gatorna och hon kom att tänka på vad Konrad hade sagt för en stund sen. Så typiskt för honom att se en stad innanför den riktiga staden och ett mönster under mönstret. Själv såg hon bara tomma gator och öde kvarter. Kanske samhället inte fanns? (298) (A mirror hung on the opposite wall and in it she could see the picture above their heads. It looked different in the mirror. It was done in muddy colors, predominantly dirty yellow, and you could see it was meant to be a town on a slope, somewhere in southern Europe. There wasn’t a soul to be seen on the streets and she started thinking about what Konrad had said earlier. So typical of him to see a town inside the actual town and a pattern under the pattern. She herself could see only empty streets and deserted districts. Perhaps society didn’t exist?). [382]

In the mirror, reality enters the picture through the muddy, dirty yellow colors, and the dream of southern Europe is somehow absorbed by its surroundings, a realistically depicted café in a

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small town of northern Europe. But something important is still missing in the mirrored picture as Ingrid, Konrad’s sister, remarks: the human beings. And without them, society does not exist, either in art or in real life. Kerstin Ekman’s tetralogy answers this emptiness by filling the gaps of history and of the city with living people, preferably the poorest ones. Her work gives the voiceless a voice, the nameless a name, starting with Sara Sabina Lans, who only stands as “hans maka” (Häxringarna 7) [“his wife” (Witches’ Rings 11)] on her husband’s gravestone. “A kick that shattered the glass and broke the frame” Hjalmar Bergman grew up in Örebro in a high-bourgeois family. Together with Västerås, where Bergman graduated from high school, Örebro stood as model for the fictive town of W in the novel En döds memoarer (1918; Memoirs of a Dead Man) (Linder 67). W was later to be spelled Wadköping in Bergman’s literary production from Markurells i Wadköping (Markurells in Wadköping) on. But inspiration also came from renaissance Florence. Some important traits such as the struggle between families remain from the earlier historical novel Savonarola (1909) about the famous monk and penitent preacher at the end of the fifteenth century. The literary city of Hjalmar Bergman is a heterotopia in its mixture of here and there, now and then, realism and symbolism, comedy and tragedy. En döds memoarer begins and ends with a family curse. The story is told by a first-person narrator Jan, who becomes the victim of the inescapable fate. The first part of the novel is a family chronicle, the second part is about a small-town scandal, and the third part culminates in a dreamlike and decadent world, a kind of symbolic kingdom of death, in Hamburg. The novel as a whole is a pessimistic, dystopian, and nightmarish vision acted out as a comic tragedy. As in Kerstin Ekman’s tetralogy, a mirror plays an important symbolic role, and mirroring is a central pattern of the story’s structure. In fact there are two mirrors, one presumably a false copy of the other, each mirroring the other like the two rival families and owners of the mirrors, Arnfelt and Arnberg. The family rivalry began with Count Arnfelt, Jan’s great-greatgrandfather. He shared his fortune with his illegitimate son, the first Arnberg, but only in trust for the younger and legitimate son, a true Arnfelt. The Count was then killed by his valet in front of his mirror, a murder probably arranged by Arnberg: När han nu slagit sig ned framför sin spegel, en dyrbar pjäs av sexkantigt venezianskt glas och i vars silverram de sju kardinaldygderna voro framställda, insomnade han och sov så länge rakningen varade. Just som kammartjänaren torkade av rakkniven och lade den ifrån sig, spratt greven upp ur sin slummer, och hans yrvakna blick mötte i spegeln kammartjänarens…. Greven betraktade honom oavvänt i spegeln. Och åter möttes deras blickar under en tyst sekund. I stället för att lösa knuten, grep kammartjänaren med båda händer i bandet och snörde det allt hårdare kring grevens strupe. Med rakkniven fullbordade han sin gärning. (20) (When he sat down in front of his mirror, a valuable piece made of hexagonal Venetian glass, upon whose silver frame the seven cardinal virtues where represented, he fell asleep and slept for the duration of the shave. Just as the valet was wiping the blade and putting it aside, the Count awoke with a start, and his dazed eyes met the valet’s in the mirror…. The Count watched him intently in the mirror. And once again their eyes met for a silent moment. Instead

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of loosening the knots, the valet put both hands on the strap and tightened it still further around the Count’s throat. He completed the task with the razor-blade). [12]

The legend of the mirror says that “Den som rätt länge betraktar sin bild i glaset, skall få se den utbytas mot en annan. Och denne andre blir förr eller senare åskådarens baneman” (146) [“Any man who spends a long time regarding his image in the glass will see it replaced by someone else’s. And this someone will sooner or later be the cause of the viewer’s death” (129)]. Uncle Otto, an Arnberg who does not want to sell his mirror to an Arnfelt, especially not when it is accused of only being a false copy, looks into his own future fate. The mirror here functions as a figura in Erich Auerbach’s sense, as a prophecy of what is going to be fulfilled later on, when Uncle Otto dies eating and drinking (or does he commit suicide or is he perhaps murdered?) at the tavern “The Ship”: Farbror Otto rusade fram till spegeln, han hukade sig ner och stirrade sig själv in i de uppspärrade blodsprängda ögonen. Så stod han både länge och väl…. Priset? upprepade farbror Otto och såg sig om. Och plötsligt lyfte han sin fot och måttade en spark, som krossade glaset och bräckte ramen. Därpå gick han utan att säga ett ord sin väg. (149) (Uncle Otto rushed up to the mirror, bent down and stared into his own wide, bloodshot eyes. He stood like that for a long time…. “The price?” Uncle Otto repeated, looking round. And all of a sudden he raised his foot and aimed a kick that shattered the glass and broke the frame. Then, without saying another word, he went out). [132]

The shattered glass and the broken frame serve as illustrations of Bergman’s heterotopia, a heterotopia of inclusion, or even encounter, where the clashes between the different worlds are rather violent (Svend Erik Larsen; Melberg Resa och skriva).2 The utopia of the mirror, the picture which in itself does not exist, is destroyed and turned into its opposite: a dystopia. After two years at sea, Jan ends up in Hamburg, “en god plats, språngbräde från världsdel till världsdel” (269) [“a good place, a springboard from one continent to another” (243)]. But it turns out to be the opposite of what Jan expects, a bad place which closes all doors, as in “spegelsalen” [“the mirrored chamber” (341)], which is “till trängsel fylld med brokiga masker” (379) [“packed full of motley masked figures” (341–42)], where Jan finally gets the question from Father Johannes: “Har du ännu icke förstått, att du och jag icke äro av denna världen?” (380) [“Have you not yet understood that you and I are not of this world?” (342)]. “Though so like Paris…” Birger Sjöberg’s small-town idyll in Fridas bok (Frida’s Book) with music and lyrics from 1922 is the ultimate contrast to Bergman’s nightmare vision. Whereas Bergman’s heterotopia of inclusion mirrors a dystopia, Sjöberg’s heterotopia of exclusion mirrors a utopia. In both cases, however, the heterotopia is a kind of parody of a narrow-minded society. Both authors are mocking 2.

Svend Erik Larsen operates with the terms exclusion/integration, while Melberg uses inversion/interaction. Here exclusion versus inclusion is preferred. Bergman’s inclusion is actually more of a violent encounter, a clash.

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the small town, but in opposite ways. Bergman lets the small-town haute bourgeoisie become a prison from which one must escape by breaking both glass and frame only to realize that one never can truly escape anything – an insight that corresponds to the artistic transformation of this closed room into the more open setting of a dialogic novel (Hästbacka 338). Sjöberg shows instead a lower-middle class utopia experienced through the ironically but tenderly depicted naïve eyes of Frida’s friend, a shop assistant. The shop assistant calls his town “Lilla Paris” [Little Paris], as in the poem and song with this title. “Lilla Paris” was a nickname of Vänersborg at the south end of Lake Vänern, the hometown of Birger Sjöberg (Svedjedal Skrivaredans 315). In the poem “Lilla Paris,” Paris is used as the Other, as the opposite, only to highlight the supremacy of the small-town idyll. Frida’s friend imagines himself as a Frenchman in Paris, thinking that perhaps he would have been more attractive and interesting, but that he would certainly have lacked in morale: “där stod jag skön, men ledsamt nog / så slapp uti moral” (29) [“A handsome youth, provokingly / Morale remained at Low” (45)]. The last stanza concludes therefore: Väl som är! Lyckligt som är! Vår stad, till ytan lik Paris, har ej dess karaktär. Skön till form men fjärran all storm, revolution, soldaters tramp och hopars vilda gorm. Där släpas ej vid facklors brand med blåst i yvigt hår vår Rådman ut av bödelns hand en natt när trumman går. Lilla Paris, Lilla Paris, du ligger trygg och tindrande i sommarns friska bris! (29–30) (Better far Stay as we are! Though so like Paris, yet we lack that French je ne sais quoi. Fair to see, And blessedly free From howling mobs and marching troops and horrid anarchy, We do not drag, by torches’ light, With drums played en sourdine, Our Mayor, in sad disheveled plight, To mount the guillotine. Lilla Paris! lilla Paris! How tranquil and how lovely, in the pleasant summer breeze!) [45]

However, this is also a very good example of how the excluded world always sneaks in again through the back door and is therefore included in the picture. In this case, the parody of the naïve point of view of the shop assistant already gives the mirror of utopia a frame of irony and self-reflection (Hættner Olafsson 276–83). And within the utopian picture imagined by Frida’s

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friend, the excluded and inverted world of danger, Paris as a place of revolution and violence, not only enters as a contrast mocking the small-town’s lack of such ingredients, but it actually takes over the scene completely. In the middle of the small-town idyll, there is a vividly imagined revolution going on. The heterotopia is shown as the mirror that unsuccessfully tries to convey both that its picture is only a utopia, and that the mirror itself exists. The heterotopia has a resonance in the very heart of normality (Ringgaard Stedssans 89). “One of the most beautifully located small cities in Sweden” The reader learns from the description of Sara and Albert’s journey that Sara’s hometown is located between Vänersborg and Mariestad along the southeast coast of Lake Vänern. Both Vänersborg and Mariestad are part of Sara’s extended home district where she will expand her business. She knows how to make “en kitt, så stark, att ej det bittraste höstregn kan upplösa honom. Den skall jag tillverka och sälja åt alla embetsmästare; ty de måste köpa deraf både i Lidköping, Venersborg och Mariestad med, bara de få lära känna honom” (Almqvist 159–60) [“a putty so strong that the severest autumn rainstorm cannot dissolve it. I shall prepare that and sell it to all the official masters of the trade; because they will want to buy it both in Lidköping and Vänersborg and Mariestad, too, once they know about it” (40)]. For Sara, a place has to have a personal and practical “depth” to be interesting and beautiful. Albert tries in vain to share with her the aesthetic experience of looking at the beautiful landscape while passing through it, but Sara is not interested. As long as the landscape has no personal history or practical use, or, put somewhat differently, no depth, it has no meaning to her.3 At stake here is the fundamental difference between landscape as something seen from above or aside and place as something experienced from within (Ringgaard “Sted, landskab, rum” 69–73; Cresswell 10). A conversation between Albert and Sara illustrates their different attitudes towards the landscape: – Tycker du icke, att denna nejd är ganska vacker? Kallas det här en nejd? hafva vi långt till Fellingsbro? – Men har du då icke kärlek för vackra landskapsstycken? Landskapsstycken? frågade hon och såg sig liknöjdt omkring. De äro så sällan naturligt målade, Albert. Mamma hade ett par landskapsstycken hängande der hemma, sedan pappas tid, på väggen i verkstaden; men jag har låtit bära dem upp i vinden. (186–87) (“Don’t you think that these environs are very pretty?” “Are these en – en-virons? Is it far to Fellingsbro? “Have you, then, no love for beautiful landscapes?” “Landscapes?” she asked, and looked about carelessly. “They are very seldom painted in a natural manner, Albert. Ever since papa’s time mamma used to have a couple of landscapes hanging in the workshop at home, but I have had them carried up into the garret”). [87]

3.

Using Stephen Greenblatt’s binary concept wonder and resonance, this depth would be called resonance (Ringgaard Stedssans 18–23).

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From Sara’s point of view, there is no difference between a landscape in nature and in art if the same aesthetic distance is used when looking at them. To her, a place that one cannot enter is not natural, it is not a place but only a landscape, and therefore it has no beauty or meaning. But this view is only true as long as the landscapes are anonymous and without personal connections. The closer they come to Lidköping, the more open Sara is to the beauty of the surroundings. This new openness can also be linked to the fact that she is changed after the stay in Bodarne (Ramundeboda, in Närke, just before the border to Västergötland) where she and Albert obviously had sex. The story of Bodarne is told only when they arrive in Mariestad, where the narrator feels obliged to explain why they needed to sleep four nights on the short trip between Arboga and Mariestad, which was in part due to a delay halfway, in “Bodarne.” “Hon hade icke förr varit utsatt för så mycken rörelse, och hennes ögon, ehuru nu nästan klarare än alltid annars, glimmande och fulla af högsta innerlighet då hon såg på Albert, visade likväl spår af att knappt hafva sofvit halfva natten” (197) [“She had never before experienced so much agitation, and her eyes, though they now seemed more brilliant than ever and were sparkling and full of the deepest fervor when she looked at Albert, still gave evidence that she had scarcely slept half the night” (105)]. Once they have arrived in Mariestad, the narrator exclaims, quite unexpectedly, in almost tourist-like praise: Mariestad njuter förtjent det ryktet, att vara en af Sveriges skönast belägna småstäder. Hvem påminner sig icke den öppna, vidsträckta utsigten öfver Venern, tagen i synnerhet ifrån kyrkvallen? den stora, högt liggande kyrkan sjelf, som, redan innan man hunnit in i staden, bemäktigar sig ögats uppmärksamhet och drager den bort åt höger ifrån den lummiga alleen, hvari man (ifrån Stockholmssidan räknadt) åker? slutligen, när man inkommit i staden och hunnit ned på andra sidan om torget, den långa flottbron, idylliskt simmande på Tidaåns breda, klara vatten? och nu på andra sidan om bron det täcka Marieholm, landshöfdingens residens, ej just prunkande med synnerlig höjd, men desto mera intagande genom den omgifvande trädrika vegetationen? Landsfaderliga minnen ifrån förträffliga styresmän öfver länet sitta liksom inflätade emellan de mjuka, för aftonvinden svigtande lönn-, björk- och hassel-grenarne, med deras vajande löf. (197) (Mariestad enjoys the well-deserved reputation of being one of the most beautifully located small cities in Sweden. Who but will remember the open, extensive view over Lake Vänern, especially from the church grounds! There stands the large church itself on an elevation, where it arrests the eye before one reaches the town and diverts it to the right, away from the leafy avenue in which one is driving. Finally, when one has entered the city and proceeded down the other side of the market-place, there lies the long, floating bridge, swimming idyllic on the broad, clear waters of the Lida [sic] River. And across the bridge is the beautiful Marieholm, the residence of the governor, which, though not very tall, is made all the more charming by an abundance of trees in the surrounding landscape. Memories of excellent paternal rulers of the county seem interwoven as it were with the soft branches and fluttering leaves of the maple, birch, and hazel that bend in the evening breeze). [106]

After this colorful panegyric, which makes the image of Mariestad visually very clear to the reader, the narrator, in a contradictory way, tries to destroy the mimetic power of depiction by saying that one has to have seen the city with his or her own eyes and have a memory of that view since the description is otherwise useless. The song of praise above thus concludes with:

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“Hvem minnes icke detta allt? Minnet beror likväl på om man varit i Mariestad; ty att blott höra talas derom, tjenar föga; man måste med egna ögon se Tidans milda, inbjudande utlopp” (197). [“Who but will remember all this? Yet the remembrance depends, after all, upon whether you have been in Mariestad, for it will do little good merely to hear someone talk about it; you must see the mild, inviting outlet of the Lida [sic] with your own eyes” (106)].

Figure 24.  The Marieholm governor’s residence in Mariestad, Sweden. Photo: author’s own

The power of mimesis remains, since the image is still there, already shaped by the words whether one has been in Mariestad or not. But the image is now seen as only a picture, perhaps not even “naturligt målade” (186) [“painted in a natural manner” (87)]. And just like the mirrored picture in Kerstin Ekman’s Änglahuset, it lacks something important: life, human beings, and personal memories, instead of only “Landsfaderliga minnen ifrån förträffliga styresmän” (106) [“Memories of excellent paternal rulers” (106)]. The only sign of life is the human perspective of the narrator, which moves through the three-dimensional town. As a contrast to this extrinsic tourist picture, there is another town to discover beneath and behind the surface, a “town under this town” (Ekman Änglahuset 380). Walking through the town with Albert, Sara observes the powerful panorama of the Tida River, Lake Vänern, and the sky, which makes her remember the sad incident, which she has already related to Albert, when her mother wanted to kill herself in the Lida River. Very soon thereafter, they come to a graveyard, another typical heterotopia according to Foucault. Sara sits on a gravestone, and Albert notices that she is watching two pretty children with an almost dreamy look: “Barnen sågo hvarken fattiga eller rika ut, men ovanligt vackra. Albert vinkade dem till sig för att göra Sara

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ett nöje” (199) [“The children looked neither poor nor rich, but unusually handsome. Albert beckoned them over to please Sara” (109)]. The symbolic combination of death and life represented by the children playing among the graves has a figural (in Erich Auerbach’s sense of the term) relation to the novel’s last chapter, where the reader learns that Sara’s mother died the same night they were in Bodarne. When they arrive in Lidköping, the narrator leaves Albert for a moment. Sara becomes the focalizer, and she alone sees the funeral procession of her own mother and follows it without showing herself: “Sara ville desto mindre nalkas tåget, som fruntimmer aldrig gå med i sådana; och de, som höra till sorgen, visa sig i synnerhet icke ute, och minst på kyrkogården, vid det afgörande tillfället. Men Sara måste till kyrkogården!” (220) [“Sara would not come near the procession, partly because women never participated in funeral processions; the mourners in particular did not appear in public, least of all in the cemetery at the interment. But Sara simply had to go to the graveyard!” (145)]. Sara thus enters the heterotopia without having real access to it according to the norms, and this is actually what the whole novel is about. During the trip, Sara succeeds in slowly changing Albert with emotional love and rational arguments, and the story ends with his finally stepping over the threshold, breaking the unbreakable norms, to the utopia suggested in the two rooms with “rosiga tapeter” (225) [“roses on the wall-paper” (154)] to let in her own home. “What is a pane of glass in this world?” Michail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope is much wider than Foucault’s heterotopia. A heterotopia could be seen as a certain kind of chronotope, though Foucault’s lecture “Of Other Spaces” shows a less idealistic view of the relation between time and space than does Bakhtin’s essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” A heterotopia highlights the very multitude of different and incompatible times and spaces that disturb the harmony of the chronotope. Among the different kinds of chronotopes described by Bakhtin, the one concerning the threshold, however, represents a border zone similar to the heterotopia in deconstructing the uniformity of time and space (Bakhtin 248). For this chronotope and its relatives, a wider concept could be suggested, namely the diatopia meaning “through space” or “in-between place.” According to Bakhtin, the threshold and related chronotopes such as the staircase, the corridor, and the vestibule always represent places of crisis and change in Dostoevsky. Almqvist, unlike Dostoevsky, only shapes the threshold and makes it possible to pass without a catastrophe. Det går an balances between a regressive fantasy of “roses on the wall-paper” and a utopian future of living together in equality and modernity, and its magic consists in its dwelling there, right on the borderline in a border zone of possibilities and intermediateness (Melberg “Almqvist, resenären” 66). If the train is a heterotopia, the railway is a diatopia. If the heterotopia par excellence is a ship, the trip as such would form a diatopia, as movement through space, as traveling through the Land of Lagom. And if the prototype and symbol of heterotopia is a mirror, the diatopia would be represented by a window. Glass, windows, and windowpanes are actually the most central symbolic elements in Det går an. Importantly, both Albert and Sara express thoughts on

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the literal and metaphorical meaning of a windowpane (Svedner 195; Romberg 161–62). Albert has a monologue in which he, paradoxically, emphasizes the insignificance of the windowpane in itself as representing something indeterminate and intermediate: Hvad är sjelfva denna ruta? började han monologisera. Hvad är här i verlden en glasruta? Den är ett mellanting, den också, ett mellanting emellan inne och ute: underbart nog; ty sjelf synes rutan icke, och skiljer likväl så bestämdt emellan den lilla menniskoverlden Inne och det omätliga stora Ute? Jag kan i rutan sjelf se intet, men genom henne ser jag likväl nu himmelens stjernor? Rutan är obetydlig, kanske föraktlig; icke just en låg varelse ändå, tycker jag; men ej heller mycket hög i värde; ja, just som par exemple jag sjelf!. (178–79) (“What is this pane in itself?” he began to meditate. “What is a pane of glass in this world? That is also an intermediate, an intermediate between inside and outside, strangely enough, because the pane itself cannot be seen, and yet it constitutes a definite boundary between the little human world Inside and the infinitely large Outside. In the pane itself I can see nothing, but through it, nevertheless, I can see the stars of heaven. The pane is insignificant, perhaps contemptible, but for all that not exactly an inferior object, it seems to me, nor yet of any great value; in fact, it is, I think, just like myself!”). [73–74]

The pane is in itself “obetydlig, kanske föraktlig; icke just en låg varelse ändå” (178) [“insignificant, perhaps contemptible, but for all that not exactly an inferior object” (74)]. But Albert’s thoughts also predict his future metamorphosis, a process mastered by Sara: “Jag kan i rutan sjelf se intet, men genom henne ser jag likväl nu himmelens stjernor” (178) [“In the pane itself I can see nothing, but through it, nevertheless, I can see the stars of heaven” (74)]. Although the mirror of a heterotopia contests reality with its image that in itself is a utopia (since it does not exist but as an image), the window of diatopia shows a utopia which actually can be real even if one cannot reach it: “himmelens stjernor” (178) [“the stars of heaven” (74)]. Sara later on explains to Albert this rather metaphysical value of the windowpane: – Jaja . . Albert . . ett fönsterglas är icke så föraktligt, som du tror, Albert. Det skyddar dig om vintern emot kölden ute, och gifver dig likväl ljus med detsamma. Det mesta i lifvet är annars så, att om det värmer, sker sådant icke utan med mörker, eller om det lyser, så sker detta sällan utan med köld. Ett fönster allena . . märk väl, min Albert . . ger ljus utan att låta köld inströmma; och det håller värmen inne, med bibehållande likväl af ljus tillika. Så är ett fönster beskaffadt, och det betyder mera, än mången fattar. Derföre skall du icke förakta fönster, och icke förakta Saras yrke, hvarmed hon har födt sig och alla i Lidköping, dem hon kan hafva haft att bistå . . och skall så hädanefter . . och äfven dig, Albert, om du kommer i nöd. (215–16) (Exactly. A window-pane is not so contemptible as you think, Albert. In winter time it protects you from the cold outside and still gives you light. Most things in life that give you heat do so only without light, or if they give you light, it is seldom without cold. Only a window – notice this carefully, my Albert – gives light without allowing the cold to rush in; and it keeps the heat inside with the addition of light. That is the nature of a window, and it means more than many persons understand. For that reason you must not despise windows, nor Sara’s occupation by which she has fed herself and all those in Lidköping whom she may have assisted or will assist hereafter – even you, Albert, if you get into trouble.). [137–38]

The different heterotopias in Det går an all reflect the utopian in-between and lagom solution and message of the novel as a whole. This utopia is finally realized, with Albert entering the

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house and flying up the stairs: “Han flög uppför trappan” (225) [“He flew up the stairs” (154)]. When the utopia becomes real, the mirror of heterotopia turns into a window of diatopia, which lets all the light of reason in without emitting any of the warmth of emotion. The trip with Sara and Albert through central Sweden has come to an end. But it is an end that is only a beginning, and one that will stay that way, on the threshold and in-between, in the diatopia, in and through the Land of Lagom.

A city awakens Literary Helsinki at the turn of the twentieth century Lieven Ameel

In 1914, the Finnish poet V. A. Koskenniemi gave an account of the literary imagination on Finland’s capital in terms that expressed both earnest disappointment and cautious hopes for the future. Koskenniemi’s collection of essays Runon kaupunkeja (1914; Imagined Cities) presented Helsinki juxtaposed to urban centers like Bruges, Weimar, and Verona, and maintained that Helsinki compared unfavorably to these well-established cities of the imagination. Koskenniemi wrote in exasperation: Tukholmalla on Strindberginsä, Pietarilla Dostojevskinsa, Berlinillä Kretzerinsä, Hampurilla Frensseninsä, Oululla Pakkalansa ja Raumalla Nortamonsa  – kuka on Helsingin runoilija? Kuka on Helsingille lunastanut lupakirjan runon kaupunkien yhdyskuntaan? (89) (Stockholm has Strindberg, St. Petersburg has Dostoevsky, Berlin has Kretzer, Hamburg has Frenssen, Oulu has Pakkala, and Rauma has Nortamo – but who is Helsinki’s poet? Who has claimed for Helsinki entrée into the society of imagined cities?)1

The answer, in his opinion, was disheartening: “Meillä ei ole … synteettistä runoelmaa Helsingistä, romaania tai eeposta, jossa tämä pohjoinen pääkaupunki eläisi kokonaisuudessaan kaikkine niine ominaisuuksineen, joita luonto, rotu ja kulttuuri ovat sille määränneet” (89) [We do not have … a synthetic poetic work about Helsinki, a novel or an epic in which this northern capital would live in its totality with all those characteristics that nature, race, and culture have bestowed upon her]. In Koskenniemi’s view, Helsinki as yet lacked a writer who could capture its particular nature and characteristics and a poetic work that could present this vision. The idea that Finnish literature generally lacks a rich imaginative conception of the city has been advanced time and again during the twentieth century, most notably in Kai Laitinen’s essay “Metsästä kaupunkiin” (1973; From the Forest to the City). It reduced the grand tradition of Finnish prose literature to a gradual descent from the forest to the city. This evolution stressed the “unnatural” character of the city in the Finnish cultural context and the late arrival of a complex urban imagination in literary representations. Although articulating a rather different point of view, a similar perception of the city can be observed in Karkama’s study “Kirjallisuus ja nykyaika” (1994; Literature and Modernity), which gives urbanity a historically negligible role within Finnish literary representations of modernity.2 To what extent was Koskenniemi right in his 1914 denial of Helsinki’s entrance into that society of literary cities and thereby painting 1.

All translations from Finnish are the author’s own.

2.

Although Karkama glosses over the importance of the city in his study “Kirjallisuus ja nykyaika” (Literature and Modernity), his later introductory article “Kaupunki kirjallisuudessa” (1998; The City in Literature) is one of the first extensive overviews of the Finnish literary imagination about the city. Karkama’s article breaks away from the traditional, deprecating view on the city in Finnish literature, in particular in the way it gives ample attention to the turn of the twentieth century as a fruitful period for these thematics. doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.18ame © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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an image of Helsinki that is as old as it is persistent: the image of an eternal Cinderella forever under-aged and waiting to be allowed to the ball?3 This essay will analyze the emerging images of the metropolis in Finnish literature at the turn of the twentieth century paying special attention to the relationship of these early images to a larger discursive framework that includes such contemporary urban centers as Paris, St. Petersburg, and Stockholm as well as ancient archetypical metropoles like Babylon or Nineveh. The discussion will also refer to Finland-Swedish literature in order to demonstrate how later Finnish literature adopted elements from its turn-of-the-century discourse about the city. Belying Koskenniemi’s negative assessment, it will be seen that the early twentieth century witnessed Helsinki emerging for the first time as a complex literary image in Finnish literature by combining strong echoes from a wide range of international images of urban life. These early, dense literary portrayals of the city were arguably even richer and more complex than later descriptions in the way that they reflected and commented on the extreme socio-political upheavals of their time. Against that background the focus here will be on the literary texts written during the first decades of the twentieth century. Arvid Järnefelt’s kaleidoscopic novel Veneh’ojalaiset (1909; The Family Veneh’oja), however, will be treated as a special case; it is one of the very few novels in Finnish written at the turn of the century that could claim the status of the grand urban novel. Before discussing the literary images proper, some observations about their historical context are required. Although Helsinki has often been recognized as a young city, it is, strictly speaking, centuries old. Founded by the Swedish King Gustav Vasa in 1550 on a site showing traces of earlier medieval occupation, it had a violent history including forced relocation, ravaging plague, total destruction, and foreign occupation. During the nineteenth century, the transfer of political allegiance brought radical changes: after Finland had become part of the Russian Empire as a semi-autonomous duchy (1809), Helsinki became the capital in 1812, and in 1828, the university was also transferred from the old capital Turku (Åbo) to Helsinki. The city grew explosively making it one of the fastest-growing European capitals at the turn of the twentieth century. The population spiraled from a mere 4,000 souls at the beginning of the nineteenth century to almost 30,000 in 1870, 93,000 in 1905, and more than 150,000 in 1920 (see Palmgren 22, 38). Considering that Finland was still one of the most rural countries in Europe, the accelerating growth of its capital entailed a particularly bewildering experience for the growing numbers of people moving to Helsinki.

3.

Maila Talvio explicitly draws the comparison between Helsinki and Cinderella, in a short essay “Pieni puhe meidän Helsingille” (1936; A Small Talk to Our Helsinki), which is clearly in dialogue with Koskenniemi’s Runon kaupunkeja (Imagined Cities). The text yet again laments Helsinki’s short (cultural) history. At the turn of the twentieth century, in a period when European cities were more and more described in terms of aging, death, and decay, the Finnish capital was conceived by both Finnish and Finland-Swedish authors as young and immature. More generally, it was – and still is – compared to an innocent girl, newly born from the Baltic Sea – a conceptualization that was embodied by the statue of Havis Amanda erected in 1908 near the Helsinki harbor.

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In the first texts about their new capital, Finnish authors looked to the west for models of urban imagination – to Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Paris – but also to the east towards the expanding empire of which they were a part and especially to St. Petersburg, that imposing metropolis so close nearby. Nordic influences on the urban imagination during this period can be most clearly discerned in a literary genre that is particularly relevant for the embryonic literary images of Helsinki, i.e. the student novel. The Finnish student novel was firmly set in a frame defined by northern European examples, most notably by Strindberg’s collection of short stories Från Fjärdingen och Svartbäcken (1877; From Fjärdingen and Svartbäcken) and Arne Garborg’s Bondestudentar (1883; Peasant Students).4 The most remarkable example of the student novel in Finland-Swedish literature was K. A. Tavaststjerna’s novel Barndomsvänner (1886; Childhood Friends), in which young Ben Thomén moves from the countryside to Helsinki, degenerates, and ends up eventually disillusioned in a God-forsaken place far removed from the capital that made and broke him. In literature in Finnish, the topos of the student in the city appears in novels and novellas such as Juhani Aho’s Helsinkiin (1889; Towards Helsinki), Santeri Ivalo’s Hellaassa (1890; In Hellas), Arvid Järnefelt’s Isänmaa (1893; Fatherland), and Maila Talvio’s Kultainen lyyra (1916; The Golden Lyre). These prose texts depict Helsinki primarily as a place of arrival, a city where an outsider is confronted with a disturbing and paralyzing environment. The dysphoric image of the city in this genre can be related to the discourse about the city in late nineteenth-century French and Nordic realism and naturalism, which presents the city as a seedbed of sin and as a degenerative environment. The gloomy images in turn-of-the-century Finnish student novels are, however, much older than the naturalist or realist city; they are rooted in an age-old discourse about the city as a hotbed of vice and sin as exemplified by the biblical cities of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Babylon. The potent imagery of these ancient examples was not lost on Finnish authors at the turn of the century: large and prosperous cities reminded Koskenniemi inevitably of the ruins of Carthage and Nineveh (see Koskenniemi Runon 45–47); and in his letters to L. Onerva, Eino Leino explicitly refers to Helsinki as a Sodom and Gomorrah (Kirjeet 145, 148). Maila Talvio, for her part, identifies Helsinki with Nineveh in her novel Niniven lapset (1915; Children of Nineveh) and with Sodom in her historical novel Linnoituksen iloiset rouvat (1941; The Merry Wives of the Fortress).5 But this dystopian discourse is never wholly without complex countercurrents. The very ambivalence of the city is the “inability of strong negative and positive impulses towards a totemic object to resolve themselves,” which constitutes the essence of the mystery of the city (Pike xii). It is a manifold complexity that at the turn of the twentieth century becomes ever more apparent in the literature set in Helsinki. During this period, Helsinki is presented as a space 4.

For a study on the Nordic student novel, see Ahlund: Den skandinaviska universitetsromanen 1877–1890. For more on the student novel in Finland, see Söderhjelm: Kotimaisia kulttuurikuvia; Molarius: “Nuoren Apollon syöksykierre”; Ameel: “The Road to Helsinki.”

5.

The same title was incidentally also used by Leino as the title for a poem (1917) but without reference to Helsinki.

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in which atavistic urges and instincts awaken, as in Onerva’s Nousukkaita (1911; Parvenus), or in which lower class women are brutally awakened to an urban reality that oppresses and marginalizes them, as in Leino’s Jaana Rönty (1907; Jaana Rönty). It is a space that presents nervewracking experience and causes degeneration, death, madness, or eventual expulsion from the capital among those who move in, as is the case in Ivalo’s Aikansa lapsipuoli (1895; A Stepchild of His Time). But it is also a city of awakening in a positive sense: a space where representatives of the masses awaken as individuals, where beginning students awaken to the possibilities of learning, and where outsiders can dream of social ascendency and a bright future, such as, for example, in Kyösti Wilkuna’s Vaikea tie (1915; The Difficult Road). The city, then, is presented in many turn-of-the-century novels not only as a threat to the moral integrity of the protagonists, to the family, and to bourgeois values, but also as a space for opportunity. The city walker Eclipsing the importance of Stockholm or St. Petersburg, one city served as an enormously important background for literary Helsinki at the turn of the twentieth century, the omnipresent capital of the nineteenth century, Paris.6 Koskenniemi had mentioned German (Kretzer, Frenssen), Russian (Dostoevsky), and Swedish (Strindberg) writers as models for a future poet of Helsinki, but in his own urban travel poem Kevätilta Quartier Latinissä (1912; A Spring Evening in the Latin Quarter), he expressed a preference for Baudelaire as his model and Paris as the setting (see Pääjärvi 2006).7 Koskenniemi’s Kevätilta Quartier Latinissä exemplifies the attitude of Finnish authors towards that most Parisian urban pastime, flânerie. When the flâneur makes his appearance in Finnish texts at the time, the spatial environment is typically Paris rather than Helsinki, which was considered too small and dull to invite flânerie. Instances of flânerie-inspired movements through urban space, however, can be found in Finnish prose in, among others, Juhani Aho’s Yksin (1890; Alone), Maila Talvio’s Tähtien alla (1910; Under the Stars), and Mika Waltari’s Suuri illusioni (1928; The Great Illusion) among others. In all three cases, the Baudelairean surrender to the crowd and to the frenetic pace of urban movement is set in Paris although the setting of these novels is at least partly Helsinki. Influenced by Hjalmar Söderberg and other Swedish authors’ literary imagination, the idle city walker took firmer root in Finland-Swedish literature. The so-called dagdrivare (idler) generation built a

6.

The importance of Paris for literary images of Helsinki spans much of the twentieth century. For late nineteenth-century writers such as Juhani Aho, as well as for Mika Waltari (in the 1920s to 1950s), or for Markus Nummi or Tommi Kontio (in the 1990s), Paris presents irrevocably a city always present within Helsinki but always lost in it. Imagined, remembered, or dreamed, Paris is the place of last rejuvenation in Aho’s Yksin (1890; Alone), of lost youthful possibilities in Waltari’s short story “Pariisilaissolmio” (1953; Parisian Tie), or both a lost utopia and a palimpsestic space through which Helsinki becomes readable anew in Markus Nummi’s Kadonnut Pariisi (1995; Paris Lost).

7.

In his first collections of poems (1906), Koskenniemi had used urban and industrial imagery, but the city in those poems is hardly recognizable as Helsinki – or, conversely, as Oulu, where Koskenniemi was born.

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rich imagery of literary Helsinki in which the lonely flâneur assumes a central place (Ciaravolo; Pedersen).8 The flâneur may have been largely absent from the literary imagination of Helsinki, but walking still played a significant role. It was not, however, the Baudelairean, wandering stroll in search of the faint heartbeat of the city that gained prominence, but rather a highly programmed bourgeois ritual that consisted for the most part of parading up and down Helsinki’s central promenade, the Esplanade, at the appropriate time.9 In most prose works written between the 1880s and the 1920s, the Esplanade is portrayed as a central space in imagined Helsinki, the nexus of the city where all expectations, fears, and possibilities converge. It presented a complex array of fleeting and opaque layers of meaning. This was especially true of gender relations since the Esplanade was both the main promenade for male exhibitionism and the central precinct for prostitution (Häkkinen 1995). This double image of the Esplanade – an area characterized by leisure, but also by gender expectations and the male gaze – synecdochically functions as a portrayal of the whole of the Finnish capital at the turn of the twentieth century. It is a discourse consistent with the literary imagination of other contemporary literary capitals: Zola’s Paris, Söderberg’s Stockholm, or Hamsun’s Kristiania. These cities, apart from all the other varied images with which they were associated, were experienced by male characters who in striving to reap the cultural and erotic fruits the city had to offer, were brought face to face with a power grid of gendered social expectations. The theme of prostitution and the question of gendered public space were also instrumental in creating  – and/or exposing  – an ever more clearly emerging geographical divide between different districts in Helsinki: Punavuori/Rödberg (and later Söörnäinen) were typical examples of base and indecent surroundings; areas such as the Esplanade, Bulevardi, and the Old Church Park were more ambiguous areas potentially as dangerous as they were uplifting. This geographical divide became ever more clearly defined by class differences equally difficult to bridge in both literature and historical reality. In his text on literary Helsinki quoted earlier, Koskenniemi had already noticed that a future poet of Helsinki would have to write about two cities within the city. Envisioning a possible future novel about the class struggle in the Finnish capital, he writes: “Saammeko sosiaalisen romaanin, kuvauksen niistä kahdesta kaupungista, jotka Pitkänsillan välityksellä ovat toistensa yhteydessä, kertomuksen pääoman ja työn taisteluista?” (Runon 94) [Will we get a social novel, a description of those two cities that are connected to each other by way of Pitkäsilta, a story of the battles between capital and labor?] As will be seen, Arvid Järnefelt’s novel Veneh’ojalaiset (1909; The Family Veneh’oja) constitutes exactly such a narrative that moves through all the layers of urban society. But as the social and political turmoil at the turn of the twentieth century erupted, the formulation of an all-encompassing literary view of both socially divided cities within Helsinki became increasingly challenging, 8.

The Finland-Swedish dagdrivare or idler cannot be equated outright with his close relative the Baudelairean flâneur (as happens in Laitinen, Suomen 301–02 or in Molarius, “Suomenruotsalaisen”). The dagdrivare saw the idleness of his life as an unpleasant pastime and acted out as a lack of anything better rather than as an accomplishment worth pursuing (see Pettersen, Ciaravolo 172–73).

9.

For more on the appearance (and absence) of the flâneur in Finnish turn-of-the-century literature, see Ameel: “Walking the Streets of Helsinki.”

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and the tragic events of Finland’s 1918 civil war made such an endeavor virtually impossible for decades to come. Most of the characteristics that constituted the literary image of Helsinki at the turn of the twentieth century remained part of the ongoing discourse about imagined Helsinki throughout the twentieth century and into the present millennium: a city of leisure inviting dreamy wandering; a city divided along the fault lines of gender, class, and language; a city as a disorienting and paralyzing seedbed of vice. Beginning in 1899, however, a number of dramatic events successively shook the foundations of Finnish society, radicalizing the existing images of the imagined city and infusing the discourse about literary Helsinki with a whole new range of symbols and associations. Helsinki in the mist The beginning point of these climactic events was the February Manifesto issued in 1899 by Nikolai II, Czar of the Russian Empire. The aim of the manifesto was to draw Finland more firmly within the administration of the Russian Empire. It marked the beginning of the “Frost Years,” years of harsh oppression coordinated by Finland’s Governor-General Bobrikov. The February Manifesto and the oppression it embodied sent a shock wave throughout Finnish society, which was immediately perceived in the literary imagination of Helsinki. The first, and in many ways programmatic reaction was Eino Leino’s poem “Helsinki sumussa” (Helsinki in the Mist), which was published in the newspaper Päivälehti on February 17, 1899, only two days after the February Manifesto had been issued. It was the first time Leino chose Helsinki as a literary setting (Larmola 21). During the following decades, Leino – one of the most prolific and influential Finnish authors of his time – wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and poems set in Helsinki presenting a manifold image of the Finnish capital that are still relevant today for their perspectives on (ideological) history and the embryonic modernism they represent. In Leino’s poem, the monumental heart of Helsinki centered upon the Senate Square is gradually covered by a menacing mist. One after the other, the majestic buildings retreat out of sight until only the University and the Bank of Finland remain standing – and the statue of Alexander II, who was seen as a czar with a particularly benign attitude toward his Finnish subjects. Suddenly sounds are heard in the mist: marching Russian soldiers appear and the last buildings and the revered ruler too are covered by the fog, leaving the citizens without hope of salvation. The literary imagery in the poem functions first of all as a political allegory, and this characteristic was indeed the prime function of the poem. Due to strictly enforced censorship, the media had no other option than to resort to allegorical stories and historical reminiscences if they were to criticize the Russian authorities (see Leino-Kaukiainen 238–39). The buildings (the House of the Estates, the House of Nobility) covered by fog were allegories for the legal and political institutions directly affected by the Manifesto as were the institutions standing firm in the onslaught (the University, the National Bank). The statue of Alexander II (the good Czar) functioned as a double allegory in the poem since it referred to an earlier and more benign rule, but also to the statue itself, which in turn consisted of a number of allegories (the figures of law and peace among others).

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Figure 25.  Panorama of Helsinki, seen from the top of the St. Nicholas’ Church (currently the Helsinki Cathedral). Photographer: Signe Brander, 1909/Helsinki City Museum

The literary city in Leino’s poem is more than the scene of a mere political allegory, however: it also presents a dialogue with a major topos within the international imagination of the city. The image of fog invading a city has been used to manifold effects in urban literature, e.g. the fog shrouding Bruges in George Rodenbach’s Bruges la morte (1892; The Dead [City of] Bruges) symbolized in part the melancholy of the protagonist, while in one of the most famous foggy openings in literature, Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53), the mist perturbing London could be interpreted as obscuring the capital’s legal institutions (Keunen 282). In a context closer to Finland, Leino’s poem features a number of images appearing in Pushkin’s famous “Медный всадник” (1833; “The Bronze Horseman”) in which the equestrian statue of Peter the Great hunts a desperate and disorientated hero through the misty streets of the Russian capital.10 “Helsinki sumussa” presents a number of symbols familiar from Pushkin’s poem (mist covers the city as a symbol of (political) unrest, and the urban population wanders in doubt and fear) and turns its attention to the statue of the Russian czar at the heart of the city in the Senate Square. The meaning of the statue is reversed, however: Alexander II is seen not as a cruel oppressor or a lord of doom, like the czar in Pushkin’s poem, but as a potential savior. The ominous sounds in the mist belong not to a deceased, haunting ruler, but to Russian soldiers marching through the city. 10.

A first Finnish translation of Pushkin’s poem was not published until well after Leino’s death. Leino could, of course, have read the poem translated in another language. Eino Leino’s older brother and literary mentor Kasimir knew and highly appreciated Pushkin’s poetry (see Lönnbohm).

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In “Helsinki sumussa,” a number of potent images represent the capital. As the political center of the country, Helsinki becomes a metaphor for the whole nation, and an affliction at the heart of the city functions as a symbol of the nation’s social and political sickness. The layout and architecture of Helsinki’s center – like that of St. Petersburg or Haussman’s Paris – were an expression of the political powers that reigned and the broad, straight lines of Engel’s neo-classical gridiron – built on the orders of the Russian czar – can be seen as representing the political schemes, ambitions, and power of the empire (Kervanto-Nevanlinna 21–22). But in Leino’s poem, the cityscape is more than just a representation of the powers that brought it into being; it becomes as well the expression of the mood of the city’s inhabitants in presenting a troubled face when they feel perturbed. The Great Strike and the Viapori Rebellion Just as Nikolai II’s February Manifesto was the beginning of a dramatically heightened tension within urban public space and of an infusion of new images of the city in literature, the subsequent pivotal moment in Helsinki’s history was the assassination of Finland’s Russian governor-general. The political murder carried out on the staircase of the Finnish Senate at the site of the symbolically charged setting of Leino’s poem violently hurled Helsinki into the orbit of a grand European tradition of urban prose literature. For by a stroke of strange coincidence, the day on which these shots were fired happened to be the day Joyce chose for the setting of Ulysses: June 16, 1904. The events in Helsinki are actually referred to in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). In Finnish literature, overt references to Bobrikov’s murder were few and far between in the years that followed probably partly due to Russian censorship.11 But the importance of this day as a turning point in Helsinki’s history and for the (literary) discourse about the city may well be illustrated by the fact that Kjell Westö puts the opening scene of his monumental Helsinki novel Där vi en gång gått (2006; Where We Once Walked) on the day of the first anniversary of Bobrikov’s murder. The murder at the Senate was, however shocking and symbolic, nothing more than a beginning. The tension of the Frost Years running up to this murder culminated in events that were to pass during the following years. In 1905, the Russian Empire, Finland included, was struck by a revolution and a general strike. The Great Strike and its effects would change the Finnish and Russian power structures irreversibly (Palmgren; Kujala). In Finnish literature and media, it gave rise to a wave of pamphlets, articles, short stories, poems, and novels (Haapala, et al). In Helsinki, a violent aftershock of this political and social earthquake was felt in 1906, when the Russian garrison at Helsinki’s fortress islands of Viapori (present day Suomenlinna) revolted and tried to force the city to take sides in the rebellion (Jussila 112–47). 11.

The Russian authorities did not encourage celebrations of the murder of their prime representative in Finland; a famous anecdote has Jean Sibelius dragged to the police station for celebrating Bobrikov’s death at Kappeli, the legendary restaurant on the Helsinki Esplanade. A comprehensive study of the history of censorship in Finland is not available; for more on Russian censorship in Finland at the turn of the twentieth century, see Leino-Kaukiainen, Sensuuri ja sanomalehdistö Suomessa vuosina 1891–1905.

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In the descriptions of the city in Finnish literature, these events leave a long-lasting mark and coincide with the emergence of a new discourse about the city. The paradigm shift did not remain unnoticed by contemporaries; it was referred to in a long article signed R.Sdt. that appeared in 1912 in the periodical Dagens Tidning. The article, entitled “Helsingfors i skönlitteraturen” (Helsinki in Literature), is part of a collection of essays commemorating the centenary anniversary of Helsinki as the capital of Finland. Behind the unimposing initials, one of the most influential Finland-Swedish writers-to-be is hiding, Runar Schildt. In a number of ways, Schildt’s overview of the literary discourse about the Finnish capital mirrors the disappointment Koskenniemi displays in his 1914 essay: he sees Helsinki as too small and too young to generate a rich literary imagination and as lacking the complex historical layers of, say, Hjalmar Söderberg’s Stockholm. Although Schildt compares the city to a clumsy teenager and to a parvenu, his contribution is nevertheless very different from Koskenniemi’s. Schildt’s essay betrays the heightened interest in everything urban that would be symptomatic of the new generation of Finland-Swedish authors: the prosaists who made their debut in the beginning of the twentieth century with a series of urban novels and who would be grouped under the name dagdrivare. Although they were later seen as apolitical (Palmgren 38–39), Schildt claims that the first genuine literary images of Helsinki present in the novel that heralded the dagdrivare generation – Gustav Alm’s novel Höstdagar (1907; Autumn Days) – could not have arisen out of circumstances other than those of oppression and the Great Strike. Runar Schildt argues in summary that the Finland-Swedish generation responsible for the breakthrough of urban images is the generation marked first and foremost by the Frost Years and the Great Strike (“Helsingfors”). Although Schildt sees a new Finland-Swedish literature of Helsinki emerging in the shadow of the years of oppression, he also notes that contemporary authors writing in Finnish might actually be better situated to paint the complex social reality of the city and mentions Eino Leino and L. Onerva, in particular, as Finnish authors who have taken steps towards describing the first generations of Finnish-speakers in contemporary Helsinki. While the events of the early twentieth century motivated Finland-Swedish authors to concentrate on resigned, blasé, and decadent urban Einzelgänger, in Finnish a number of highly complex and relatively underrated novels appeared depicting the far-reaching causes and effects of these years of oppression. Notable among these representations are Eino Leino’s so-called Routavuosiromaanit (Frost Year Novels), which present a cross section of Finnish society during these years. Other authors, too, have used these tense years as material for writing Helsinki novels such as Kyösti Wilkuna in Vaikea tie and Mika Waltari in Sielu ja liekki (1934; The Soul and the Flame). The way the city is experienced in these novels depicting the Frost Years is one of dysphoric feelings, rootlessness, and unrest brought about by an atmosphere of political fear, insecurity, and looming paranoia.

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A kaleidoscopic city novel The richest kaleidoscopic literary account of these tumultuous years written by one of the most privileged witnesses is Arvid Järnefelt’s novel Veneh’ojalaiset.12 It deals primarily with the events of 1904–06, the years of the Russian oppression, the murder of Bobrikov, the Great Strike, and the Viapori Rebellion. Described by L. Onerva as “nousukaspolven pimeä eepos” (390) [the dark epic of a parvenu generation], it is a multifarious analysis of the social and historical events at the outset of the twentieth century, but also a kaleidoscopic presentation of an emerging metropolis. As a historical document, the novel is particularly interesting since the main character, Hannes, is closely modeled on a prominent historical figure with whom Järnefelt was well acquainted, Captain Johan Kock.13 What makes this novel most relevant for the literary imagination of the city is the way it combines radically different layers of urban meaning. There are at least four clearly distinctive levels from which the problem of the city is approached: an epic/ mythological level; a realist/naturalist level; a revolutionary/apocalyptic level; and finally a level that may well be called euphoric (as opposed to the other three with dysphoric undertones). The imagined city is not only given a historical depth by situating Helsinki at the summit of a family history spanning numerous generations. It is also presented through different focalizations (male and female, middle class and lower class) and in relation to other imagined cities, St. Petersburg in particular. Veneh’ojalaiset thus presents for the first time in Finnish literature a highly complex construction of the imagined city of Helsinki – a construction, which, moreover, takes into consideration a much broader geographical portion of the city than had earlier been the case by expanding its purview into the suburbs and the islands across the Helsinki harbor. All the different levels of the novel bring their own meaning to bear on the image of the city. The opening scenes set in a mythical past first seem to suggest that the novel will deal with the countryside and with the question of land possession. The family – or rather, the tribe – of the Veneh’oja, that lives in a semi-paradisiacal state in the wilderness of southern Finland, is dispersed by the devil, who poses as, among other figures, a land surveyor. The partitioning of the land – possibly referring to the land enclosure started in 1757 when Finland was still part of the Swedish kingdom – is similar to the Fall of Man and the expulsion from Paradise (see

12.

Arvid Järnefelt was one of the most colorful and most prolific Finnish writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Descending from a family belonging to the nobility, his father was a high-ranking officer in the Czarist army, who became a Finnish senator, while his mother, Elisabeth, kept one of the most influential literary salons of Finland. His brother-in-law was the composer Jean Sibelius, and his brothers Armas and Eero belonged to the artistic elite of his time. The most well-known Tolstoyan in Finland, he at one point renounced his position at the law court to become a farmer.

13.

Captain Kock acted as the leader of the Red Guard during the Great Strike and the Viapori Rebellion. The accuracy with which Järnefelt described the events of 1905–06 can be gleaned from the fact that in a long open letter to Järnefelt posthumously published in 1916, Kock accused the author of publishing confidential information and of presenting events in a way which was so convincing and so recognizable, that it made it nigh to impossible for the general audience to see it as a work of fiction; Kock consequently accused Järnefelt of libel (see Kock).

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Molarius, “Johdanto”).14 After having been driven from their lands and experiencing a series of adventures, a branch of the Veneh’oja slowly descends towards Helsinki. The events of this “absolute past” – the time of “fathers and founders of families” – normally destined for the epic genre (Bakhtin 13–14) are essential for understanding the complex literary image of the city in Järnefelt’s novel. The city is the birthplace of all evil, the seat of government, rationalization, and the money-based economy, which disturbs the idyllic village community of the Veneh’oja. The anger of the Veneh’oja is consequently directed at the idea of the city, and one of them concludes a pact with the devil to set fire to what is described as “kaikista isoin kylä” (23) [the greatest village of all].15 The question of land ownership looms large in the background of Järnefelt’s novel, and it is no mere smoke screen that Järnefelt originally claimed that Veneh’ojalaiset was going to be a book about the land question (Kock).16 In many ways, the question of land reform was actually also an urban concern since the landlessness of the poor created the conditions for the growth of the city and for the social and moral degeneration of its inhabitants. The epic conditions at the beginning of the novel thus serve as a contrast to the later dysphoric images, which gain depth once the story is brought into the contemporary timeframe: the last decades of the nineteenth century when the two protagonists Hannes and Hinkki – both descendants of the Veneh’oja – grow up in Helsinki. It is a context whose depiction draws heavily on images taken from realist and naturalist discourse in which the city is seen as a diseased center alien to nature (Lehan 70). It negatively affects the rural hinterland and is portrayed as both cause and effect of profound social evil. This dysphoric image of the city (and society at large) is instinctively felt by Hannes, the main protagonist. Not until he becomes acquainted with Russian revolutionaries at a later stage in the story are his uneasy feelings about the city’s moral and social problems molded into words. The revolutionary Natalja Federova explains to him how the city is not only the most explicit environment for loose morals, but also their ultimate cause: “Prostitutsioni on kaupungin tuottama tauti” (Järnefelt Veneh’ojalaiset 162–63) [Prostitution is a disease produced by the city]. Shocked by his realization of the vicious nature of the city, Hannes readies himself to devote his life to the politics of radical change. As the momentous upheavals resulting from the Great Strike and the Viapori Rebellion drew nearer, the literary city attained another quality: Helsinki in Veneh’ojalaiset is a city swerving towards revolution and impending apocalypse. This state of affairs changed the nature of the imagined city considerably. In much of the turn-of-the-century discourse about on Helsinki, the city was depicted as a degenerative space that exerted its negative influence on a paralyzed and alienated subject. Within the revolutionary framework of Järnefelt’s novel, however, the 14.

For contrasting comments on the themes of the expulsion from paradise and exodus in Järnefelt’s novel, see Isomaa 313. There remain, nevertheless, a number of possible intertextual references to exodus in the text, although the intertextual relation is ambiguous to say the least.

15.

Note how in these early stages, the Veneh’oja did not even possess a word for “city,” but had to denote it with the term “isoin kylä” (Järnefelt Veneh 23) [biggest village].

16.

Järnefelt was particularly preoccupied with the land reform question, writing on the subject the novel Maaemon lapsia (1905; Children of Mother Earth) and the pamphlet Maa kuuluu kaikille; Matkoiltani Laukon lakkomailla (1907; The Land Belongs to Everyone; From My Journeys to the Strike-Torn Region of Laukko), among others. The unresolved question of land reform would eventually be one of the issues that triggered the Finnish civil war.

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city becomes a space in which an individual can grow to an unparalleled extent and can gain the power to destroy or remodel the cityscape. This revolutionary conceptual framework is closely connected to the construction of the novel as Järnefelt’s “tale of two cities.” Veneh’ojalaiset tells the tale of a socially divided city: it moves through the city of the well-to-do, represented by Hannes’s acquaintances with the nobility, but also descends into the city of poor laborers, socialist agitators, working-class gang members, and underground characters. But Veneh’ojalaiset is a novel of two cities in another way too: it is a text about both St. Petersburg and Helsinki and about the myths pertaining to both of them.17 The link with St. Petersburg infuses the imagination of Helsinki with a modified form of the apocalyptic discourse that was strongly present in literature on the Russian capital (Pesonen Andrei Belyin; “Vajoaako”). When Hannes goes to St. Petersburg to study at the military academy, he gradually becomes acquainted with Russian revolutionaries who plan to flood the city by opening the sluice gates of the Neva, an apocalyptic image from the mythology about St. Petersburg and already strongly present in Pushkin’s poem “Медный всадник” (The Bronze Horseman). Gradually, the revolutionaries conceive of another plan in which Hannes’s knowledge of Helsinki as well as his expertise on fortifications figures prominently. Their plan is to use Helsinki and its island fortress Viapori as the hub on which to turn the fate of the Russian Empire. Under the threat of the fortress’s artillery, the Finnish capital will capitulate, offering the revolutionary government a safe haven in which to await the outcome of events in Russia proper. If the first revolutionary strategy involves the mythical images of the destruction of St. Petersburg by flooding, the second envisions the possible annihilation of Helsinki by fire – a vision that has its roots in the Finnish capital’s violent history: the total destruction by fire in 1713 during the Russo-Swedish war and the threat of foreign fire in 1855 during the Crimean. But if amidst all violence, upheaval, and defeat, total destruction is avoided, it is because Veneh’ojalaiset again introduces a completely new theme into the Finnish-language imagination of Helsinki, i.e. the love for one’s home city. The revolution is crushed and Hannes is forced into exile, but all this occurs because the protagonist lacks the ruthlessness to give the order to shell the city at that crucial moment. Pivotal is the scene in which Hannes looks down on the city and on the fortress lying below him knowing that he has the power, at last, to guide the fate of both. The scene reminds one of the ending of Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1835; Old Goriot), in which Rastignac looks down at Paris from Père Lachaise and issues his challenge to the city. In Järnefelt’s Veneh’ojalaiset, the idea of conquering the city pervades the story from the first effort of the forefather Heikki to set fire to the “biggest village” and culminates in Hannes, who devotes years of his life to studying the art of besieging. When Hannes refrains from giving the fateful order, his decision is rooted in a complex web of thoughts and ideals that can be linked to the debate within the novel between the Nietzschean Übermensch and the humble Tolstoyan ideal human (Isomaa). But one of the most important reasons for Hannes’s decision – or indecisiveness – is his feeling of love for his home city.

17.

Järnefelt was intimately acquainted with St. Petersburg and Russian literature; he was born in St. Petersburg, and his mother belonged to Russian (Baltic German) nobility; moreover, Järnefelt was not only an avid reader of Russian literature, but also a translator into Finnish of Tolstoy.

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Conclusion Most of the first Finnish novels and short stories featuring Helsinki deal with an arrival to the city. One might say that in Veneh’ojalaiset, the protagonist has at last come home to the city. Born in Helsinki, initiated on a number of occasions into the mysteries of the city, and schooled in the art of overcoming city fortresses, Hannes experiences, especially upon his return home from St. Petersburg, the most acute feelings of genuine homecoming and belonging. This new theme, the feeling of euphoric love for and belonging to the city as a force vital in guiding the fates of literary characters, was introduced into Finnish literature in Veneh’ojalaiset for the first time with such broad scope. In Järnefelt’s kaleidoscopic novel, various images and new features of the literary city combined and continued to exert an influence on the discourse about the imagined city in Finnish literature throughout the twentieth century. The dysphoric image of the city and the vision of the urban environment as paralyzing and degenerative that can be found in much of the late nineteenth-century literature about the city continues in many respects to the present day. Helsinki novels that draw on images from this frame of reference are, among many others, Unto Karri’s Sodoma (1929; Sodom), Matti Kurjensaari’s Tie Helsinkiin (1937; The Road to Helsinki), and Helvi Hämäläinen’s Katuojan vettä (1935; Water in the Gutter). In the second half of the twentieth century, this theme persists but within a radically changing setting: the city center is gradually replaced by the concrete jungle of suburbs and housing projects. Rosa Liksom’s collection of short stories Yhden yön pysäkki (1985; One-night Stands) may serve as a compelling example of a gloomy picture of life in a nowhere city that could be Helsinki as well as Moscow. Within this predominantly negative representation of the city, the euphoric sense of belonging to one’s urban surroundings has not been much more than an intermittently appearing undercurrent. Interesting early instances of strong feelings of belonging can be found in Toivo Tarvas’s curious collections of Helsinki short stories Häviävää Helsinkiä (1917; Disappearing Helsinki) and Helsinkiläisiä (1919; People of Helsinki). The most well-known examples, however, are probably Mika Waltari’s Helsinki novels, among others Suuri illusioni (1928; The Great Illusion), Surun ja ilon kaupunki (1936; City of Sorrow and Joy), and the historical, semi-autobiographical trilogy Isästä poikaan (1942; From Father to Son), which have retained a considerable popularity. Some of the most lasting eulogies of the city, however, can be found in poetry rather than in prose: from their very different perspectives, poets such as Pentti Saarikoski, for example in the collection Kuljen missä kuljen (1965; I Walk Where I Walk) or Arvo Turtiainen in Minä paljasjalkainen (1962; Me, Barefoot) have sung the praise of Helsinki. The novel Veneh’ojalaiset not only anticipates the coming diversification of thematic perspectives on Helsinki, but also the arrival of the generic variety that would become apparent in the 1920s and ’30s. Järnefelt’s novel shows characteristics of various genres – the epic and novel, the historical novel, the student novel, the revolutionary novel, and of both the “portrait novel” and the “synoptic urban novel” – in Gelfant’s taxonomy of the urban novel (11). During the decades following Finnish independence in 1917, the city was described from a variety of perspectives that were hitherto unseen in Finnish literature: children’s literature (Kersti Bergroth), detective literature (Villo Hellanen, Mika Waltari), literary sketches (Kersti Bergroth, Yrjö Kivimies), essays (Olavi Paavolainen), and historical novels (both Mika Waltari and Maila

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Talvio wrote Helsinki trilogies during the interwar period) among many others. At the same time, the geographical range taken into account in these literary representations was enlarged from the microcosm of the Esplanade in late nineteenth-century literature to the working-class districts and islands of Helsinki in Järnefelt’s novel to the almost post-apocalyptic suburbs in Joel Lehtonen’s Henkien taistelu (1933; The Battle of the Spirits). As early as the turn of the twentieth century, literary Helsinki had been approached from different generic and thematic perspectives in intimate dialogue with both international contemporary traditions and age-old images of the city as well as in ways that were defined by events specific to Helsinki’s own history. In this way, authors built a rich and varied imagination of the city that is distinctly its own and has set the tone for later literary descriptions.

Walking the city Female pedestrians Tone Selboe

According to the British cultural theorist Raymond Williams, “perception of the new qualities of the modern city had been associated, from the beginning, with a man walking, as if alone, in its streets” (233). Numerous books and articles have confirmed his view by telling the story of the solitary male walker-poet confronted with a foreign city, which he longs to conquer – summed up in statements like the following: “The poet who sought to come to terms with the city was often a young man from the country, or indeed from another country” (Timms and Kelly 3). The dominant view has traditionally been that single female city walkers were absent from the streets of the metropolis in the nineteenth-century except when old, in mourning, or as prostitutes. In more recent years, a discussion of whether there can be such a thing as a female flâneur has arisen: in an influential essay, the cultural theorist Janet Wolff states as a fact that a female flâneur is synonymous with an “invisible flâneuse,” a contradiction in terms. Others have confirmed her view that the female city dweller remains a creature of the imagination. Thus, the art historian Griselda Pollock writes: “Women did not enjoy the freedom of incognito in the crowd. They were never positioned as the normal occupants of the public realm. They did not have the right to look, to stare, scrutinize or watch…. They are positioned as the object of the flâneur’s gaze.” (100) However, Deborah Parsons’s Streetwalking the Metropolis (2000) seeks to undermine the notion of the “invisible flâneuse” by “asserting that female experience concerns the domestic world, critics such as Wolff and Pollock only serve to exclude women from the ‘modern’ altogether and resituate her in the Victorian home” (40). She argues for a shift of emphasis from the “comparative experience of the male and female subject in the city,” to the “formulations of the city” (7). It is hardly controversial to claim that the classical city walker whose principal aim was to stroll and observe city life was a man. But among what Virginia Woolf has called “that vast republican army of anonymous trampers” (“Street Haunting” 481), there are also women, and the male city walker has not been as alone as surveys of literary modernity have made us believe. Female writers, like their male colleagues, have in fact investigated the relation between seeing and seen, looking and having, between city and literary form and have given their view on the modern city. Such is also the case for Nordic writers. As the following will reveal, female authors have been exploring the possibility for women’s work, life, and possible independence in the context of the city since the nineteenth century including the freedom to be pedestrians alongside their male counterparts. However, female pedestrians take on many forms: travelers, factory workers, prostitutes, bohemians, artists, journalists, and revolutionaries – they all put the established figure of the leisurely male flâneur strolling the streets with no other aim than observing city life in perspective. This essay will give an account of these different figurations of the female pedestrian.

doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.19sel © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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The didactic traveler The Norwegian writer Camilla Collett, a famous champion for women’s rights, challenges the ingrained prejudice that the nineteenth-century woman did not walk the metropolis alone. From 1851 when her husband Jonas Collett died until her death in 1895, she spent her life traveling through various European cities, staying in hotels and guest houses, and walking the streets. Her letters and essays are full of witty and bizarre observations about the cities she visited. In a letter from Berlin dated October 30, 1863, Collett praises Berlin’s wide, magnificent streets and observes that “Damer kan gaa alene gjennem Gaderne … uden at udsætte sig for Tiltale eller Paatrængenhed af nogen Art” (69) [ladies can walk alone along the streets … without being addressed or offended in any way]. This fact represents a freedom she admires. The observation leads her to a comparison with how things are in the poor Norwegian capital, Kristiania. There, Collett argues, men amuse themselves by pestering walking women, and she takes it upon herself to defend the necessity of street walking: “Jo, vi vil gaa…. Vi maa gaa. De Kvinder, som altid sidder i sine Kareter, kjeder sig tildøde…. vi maa arbeide, erhverve, stride og tumle os, med ett Ord: vi maa gaa” (70) [Yes, we will walk. We must walk. The women who continually sit in their carriages are bored to death. We must work, achieve, struggle, and topple over with one word: we must walk.]. Walking thus becomes a metaphor for independence, a synonym for taking part in life on an equal footing with men. Later in Paris, Collett develops her views on walking the city. Although she is critical of the changes of Baron Haussmann’s modernization of Paris, she also enjoys the freedom of the crowd, and she celebrates the possibility of flow, movement, and observation: “Og saa kan man lade sig vugge paa Strømmen af de spadserende, hvor langt ved man ikke selv; man spadserer ikke, man tænker ikke paa, at man har Fødder; man er blot Øine” (169) [And thus one can let oneself stroll with the flow of the pedestrians for how long one doesn’t know, one doesn’t walk, one doesn’t recognize that one has feet; one is only eyes]. Collett brings her impressions from abroad back to the Norwegian capital in order to change “vor egen lille Parvenu” (70) [our own little Parvenu]. Her aim is didactic: she seeks to educate the Norwegian people. Collett’s attack on Kristiania connects the right to walk with the right to be and moving in the city with the question of emancipation. If a city earns the right to call itself a city, it must offer its inhabitants – all its citizens – places where they can move freely, and if a nation is regarded as a civilized nation, it must offer its women the right to walk the streets alone. The journalist “In or about December 1910, human character changed,” (70) Virginia Woolf wrote in her seminal essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924). Whereas the statement for Woolf serves first and foremost as a rhetorical device – she is of course well aware of the fact that nothing changes overnight – the words are nevertheless of significance when seen from the perspective of Nordic literature. In the years around 1910, several writers made their debut – female writers who, despite their obvious differences, can be introduced under the label “urban.” Stockholm,

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Copenhagen, and Helsinki as well as Paris, London, St. Petersburg, and Barcelona serve as settings and scenes for the various manifestations of the modern female pedestrian. The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of the so-called new woman. The “new woman” is seen as a social agitator as well as a literary representation. She is often presented as a caricature or an embodiment of modern life. She is for instance a professional journalist or writer with short hair and cigarette in hand. She is normally a woman of the middle or upper classes often seen as an anticipation of the suffragette. She springs to life in the 1890s, but in Scandinavia, it is true that “the new woman” seems to merge with the suffragette; she comes to the forefront in the first decade of the twentieth century, and her métier is above all journalism and writing. Besides, she is more often than not politically active. The Swedish novel Pennskaftet by Elin Wägner (1910; The Penwoman)  – its title being the nickname for the female heroine Barbro Maguns who is a journalist and a suffragist – is Sweden’s first New Woman Novel, as Horace Engdahl formulates it (viii–ix). The author herself saw the struggle for the female vote as “den största rörelse världen har sett” (qtd. in Engdahl viii) [the biggest movement the world has seen], and this is reflected in the novel. The protagonist Pennskaftet is a personification of what is labeled SBK: “Självförsörgande Bildad Kvinna” [self-sufficient, educated woman]. Female journalists increased in number during the years around 1910 – in the novel even a visiting princess dreams about being a reporter! – and the “penwoman” is modeled on real journalists in Stockholm of the time. The action takes place in Stockholm 1908–09, and the novel reflects the partial victory that is won when women are entitled to be elected to positions of trust within local government, but universal suffrage is not achieved until 1922. The novel, however, not only concerns work and political struggle, but is also about the right to be judged according to the same moral standards as men. Wägner gives conventional expressions like “a fallen woman” new meaning through the Penwoman’s reinterpretation: a fallen woman is someone who does not dare to stand up to her feelings and beliefs but turns love into a matter of calculation. According to Engdahl, the journalist may be seen as a female equivalent of the male flâneur – or as he argues throughout the essay – the suffragist as well as the traveler, the factory worker, the vagabond, and the bohemian may also all be viewed as different manifestations of the female pedestrian. These figures’ common denominator is the city: all the female figurations discussed here are inextricably linked to the modern metropolis, even when the “metropolis” is a Nordic capital, which may seem rather small. In Pennskaftet, the public spaces, including the meeting hall and the newspaper office, are at the forefront. New or not, the liberated woman sees no problem, however, with having a private servant when she sets up home, even when living alone and home is turned into a site for radical political discussions. The revolutionary The New Woman is characterized by independence and autonomy. The first two decades of the twentieth century opened new opportunities for women and were in many ways a time of change and political unrest. Norway gained its independence from Sweden in 1905; Finland’s position within the Russian empire gave rise to strong destabilizing tensions and finally civil

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war; and in Sweden, World War I led to protests among radical female writers, Elin Wägner particularly notable among them. In the Finland-Swedish urban novels from around 1910, the Russian connection is obvious. The protagonist Ruth in Karin Smirnoff ’s Under Ansvar (1915; Held Responsible) forms a friendship with a poor Russian revolutionary in the boarding house where she lives. In Anna Åkesson’s Gertrud Wiede (1909), wide-spread political resistance towards the Russian Governor Bobrikov contributes to revolutionary actions as does Gertrude’s meeting with Russian revolutionaries living in exile in Geneva. As in Smirnoff ’s novel, the Russian revolutionaries – rather than the revolution itself – represent compassion and humanity. The part of the novel centering on the Russian revolutionaries portrays a relationship that is civil and humane, whereas the Russian rule during the years preceding the revolution connotes tyranny and misery. One is hard put to find a female revolutionary among the Nordic literary figures, but what one does find are women who flirt with the thought of radical political change and with revolutionaries. In short, the theme of politics is conflated with the theme of love. That dialectic relationship characterizes the young female aristocrat and hard core Polish nationalist who in the end falls in love with a political agitator as portrayed in the Danish writer Agnes Henningsen’s Polens Døtre (1922; The Daughters of Poland), which parallels the course also taken by Gertrud in Gertrud Wiede. Compared to their sisters in Europe and North America as well as in Scandinavia, Finnish women at the turn of the century had a substantial degree of equality with men in terms of marriage, education, and divorce laws, but they lacked political rights (Ryall 279). Gertrud Wiede, therefore, goes abroad when she discovers that her father, who is a judge, has betrayed the Finnish cause by complying with the Russian governor. Gertrud feels shame and, unable to do anything about it, leaves Helsinki. Most of the book concerns her travels: Helsinki – London – Berlin – Geneva – Helsinki. The city she does not visit – Paris – gains its significance as the city, whose widely acclaimed attraction is lost in the course of Gertrud’s development into a socially conscious and politically engaged citizen. From the beginning Paris is the city of her dreams, but in the end she feels no inclination to go there. Her travels are prompted by a wish for change – personal and social – and the meeting with the Russian revolutionaries in Geneva has deep cultural and political ramifications. Gertrud’s Bildung as a representative of a morally superior culture and class is supported first by meetings with working class women in Helsinki and then, more radically, with Russian revolutionaries. The Russians preach revolution, nihilism, and uproar but also advocate an alternative utopian reality, humanity, and future. Not surprisingly, Gertrud falls in love with their charismatic leader, but she never fully accepts the argument for violence inherent in her emigrant friend’s revolutionary politics, and she returns home to work for the welfare of her country. Gertrud’s thoughts and beliefs are inextricably bound to the cities she visits. The impression of London was formed by her reading of Dickens: “London hade för henne blifvit en dickensk roman” (Åkesson 100) [London had for her become a Dickensian novel], and Geneva turns out to offer a far more radical reorientation of her politics and world view. Her change of political views is linked to the way Geneva appears to her and her efforts to get to know it. In Åkesson’s account, the modern city merges with the medieval, and on Gertrud’s way to the cathedral, St. Pierrekyrkan, she gets lost: “ty det var som att irra i en labyrinth – kyrkan fick

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hon ej sikte på, fastän den bort vara alldeles nära” (123) [for it was like roaming around in a labyrinth – she could not see the church clearly, even though it ought to be very close]. After this initial meeting with the city, she never returns to the historical sites but moves towards the modernity of future. The spiritual wanderer The Finnish resistance towards the Russian rule is also a theme at the end of Helena Westermarck’s Vandrare (1911; Wanderers), but the novel is not first and foremost striking in its embodiment of political struggles, but rather as a spiritual journey towards a home. The notion of home is connected to the religious, the national, and the individual; the wandering implied in the novel’s title is directed towards finding a home rather than traveling or walking the city. Finding a home is equivalent to finding peace, and the relation between the two sisters Maria and Rosa is laden with biblical allusions. Maria is a kind of Moses leading her little sister through the desert towards the promised land, and when she fails, Rosa, a good Samaritan in the guise of a prostitute, saves her. The novel begins with the two sisters on a boat. In the opening scene they arrive in Helsinki from the countryside on an autumn day in the 1880s in the classical manner of the Bildungsroman. From the very beginning, however, the two sisters demonstrate completely different attitudes towards the city: Maria embracing it, Rosa rejecting it. The novel has an abundance of vivid views of the city. Like the Norwegian writer Cora Sandel, Westermarck began as a painter, and like her, city scenes are informed by someone who “paints” the city as a landscape. The cityscape is seen as a configuration of houses, roofs, pipes, and as a home for people located between the sea and the sky. The Swedish writer Anna Branting’s Staden (1901; The City), which will subsequently be discussed, also merges its social perspective with the metaphysical. At the end of the novel, walking has turned into a spiritual activity symbolizing life’s own journey towards death: “Och när man så gått den långa smala gatan i ände kom man til porten, den sista Fasans port, där tåget rasslar öfver…. Och man glömmer att den porten, då man intet vet, öppnar sig som ett bredt, svart gap, i hvilket man plötsligt sväljes ner till dödsriket” (337) [And when one walks to the end of the long narrow street, one comes to the gate, the last gate of Fear, where the train rustles by…. And one forgets that that gate, when one does not know anything, opens itself like a broad, black mouth, in which one suddenly is swallowed down to the land of the dead]. The vagabond An entire group of writers in Helsinki is defined by the label dagdrivarliteratur. Around 1910 dagdrivaren (the idler, loafer, urban vagabond) invades Finland-Swedish literature. The main boulevard, the Esplanad, with its abundance of open spaces offered ideal conditions for strolling through the city. According to Torsten Petterson, the protagonist is normally between twenty and thirty years old, a student with a bourgeois background who leads a secularized

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life and moves among educated people. Needless to say, the idler is male, and lives in the city. Traditionally he has been described as having an attitude of superiority, irony, and skepticism, in short, many of the characteristics of the French flâneur although with a far stronger emphasis on passivity, sensuality, and decadence. In Petterson’s view, however, the decadent life is something the idler tries to escape from, not something he cherishes. Among the ten writers Petterson lists under the label dagdrivarförfattare [idle authors], only one is a woman, Kersti Bergroth. Arne Toftegaard Pedersen, in his study of urban FinlandSwedish literature, argues that while dagdrivarförfattarna saw the national and social situation in Finland in a pessimistic light, the female prose writers had a more positive view based on their struggle for equality. Bergroth is an exception to both her fellow male and female writers. Her novel Augusti (1911; August) presents a protagonist similar to the idler as well as the European dandy, but it is hardly a typical dagdrivarroman, as Toftegaard Pedersen rightly emphasizes. The reader follows a group of people on vacation far from Helsinki in southern Karelia. The urban settings at the end of the novel are in the small town of Viborg although they involve the emblematic urban evening scenes ranging from cafes, streets, and parks. There are, however, examples of female loafers or vagabonds in Nordic literature, Nora in the Swedish writer Ulla Bjerne’s Mitt andra jag (1916; My Second Self) being one of them. The novel is written in the form of a diary, and the tone is confessional: “Som dagdrivare klarar jag mig utmärkt själv. Men det är inte det, jag vill” (259) [As an idler I am fine on my own. But that is not what I want]. It is thus a reluctant dagdrivare one meets in Nora. From the point of view of established society as represented by her uncle, however, she is seen as a lazy lady of leisure with no clear purpose in life. The fact that she is a sculptor by training is not taken seriously by her compatriots, nor by her artist lover or her bourgeois uncle and subsequently not even by herself. She is, nevertheless, a quintessential vagabond, a label she repeatedly applies to herself. The novel follows her travels across Europe at the beginning of World War I before she finally returns to Scandinavia and takes up sculpting again. The novel ends thus: “Vandra! Att ständigt se vägen försvinna bakom sig. Att träffa en människa och öppna sitt hjärta – och åter gå bort – Det är det enda möjliga” (264) [Wandering! Always seeing the road disappear behind oneself. To meet a person and open one’s heart – and then leave again  – that is the only possibility]. Before getting to this point in the novel, Bjerne has explored her heroine’s vandrareblod. This wanderer’s blood is a leitmotif throughout and connotes freedom, art, and independence but also anxiety, poverty, and loneliness. It is the “new woman” speaking: beautiful and with short hair, this heir of Ibsen – hardly a coincidence that she is named Nora – is drinking, traveling, and visiting cafes on her own but has no social or political purpose in spite of the dramatic times in which she is living. The war remains a background to the heroine’s stage rather than a reality, and the danger consists of needing to return home, not in being killed. Her youth and beauty are also her assets, and the fear of becoming old and forgotten, une femme passée, is an underlying threat. While visiting Copenhagen, Paris, Nice, and Barcelona, she is alone, and when going out to cafes in Spain, she is more often than not the only woman among men. The difficulty of being a lonely woman walking the streets and traveling on her own is highlighted, and when she refuses an insistent admirer, she is taken for a lesbian: the single, young, and attractive woman who refuses men comes across as a contradiction of terms. It is a novel heavy with pathos.

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Its interest lies mainly in the way Bjerne via Nora insists on her protagonist’s rights as a single female wanderer and finally as an independent artist. The bohemian Bjerne’s cosmopolitan young women mingle with other people such as pimps and gigolos, they live on the edge of respectability, and their discourse demonstrates a conflation of motifs from fin-de-siècle literature. One of them undoubtedly is the figure of the Bohemian. In Nordic literature, the term first and foremost connotes artists and authors of the 1880s living an unconventional life in terms of the work ethic and family values. However, the literary figure of the female bohemian portrayed by women themselves comes to the forefront in the literature of the early twentieth century. Nora has many traits of a bohemian, but she finally breaks out of her idleness by starting to work again. Ulla Bjerne’s Nora may be seen as one example, Agnes Henningsen’s protagonist another. Henningsen’s novels were perceived as indecent by her contemporaries. Their portrayal of free love and of women having affairs with more than one lover may indeed seem to be far ahead of its time. Henningsen is a provocative champion of what may be called the sensual or erotic woman, i.e. the woman who refuses to suppress her own feelings. Nevertheless the insincerity in human relations and the conventional verbal play between the sexes are at the core of her novels. Love is a play Henningsen sets out to unmask whether it is in Copenhagen, Paris, or Warsaw. Or rather, love is seen as an illness that causes lovelessness and betrayal, what she once called moral insanity. There are pains, drink, drugs, violence, and hetero- and homosexual relations in her literary universe – all presented in the manner of light comedy, albeit with tragic undertones. At the time, it had an almost explosive effect on the public. In the perspective discussed in this chapter, Henningsen is of interest in the way she weaves the urban and the sexual together. Her women are on the move between places: they walk or drive the streets, go to theaters and operas, or even act themselves, but their main engagement is in life’s play of love. They may well be seen as bohemians, and in Polens Døtre the main character, the beautiful writer Marja Mankowska, even launches the term herself: “Jeg er Bohême…. Bohêmen er et stærkt Folk, ens i alle Lande … Men det gælder om at være det, uden at nogen ved det” (35) [I am a Bohemian. The Bohemians are a strong people, the same in all countries. But it is important to be one, without anybody knowing it]. To be a bohemian is the same as being a cosmopolitan, coming from nowhere and everywhere, as the Danish writer and political agitator Percy Branner formulates it in the novel: “De er ingen Steder fra, og De er alle Steder fra! Kosmopolit” (italics original; Polens Døtre 132) [You are from nowhere, and you are from everywhere! A Cosmopolitan]. Lediggang – Müssiggang, leisure – characterizes several of the characters, and influences even those who want to engage in serious activities to the extent that political activism seems to be subsumed under a sort of unattached drifting. “Der er politiske Lediggængere nok,” (Polens Døtre 45) [There are enough of political idlers] as the weak and aimless Jan formulates it. The cosmopolitan bohemian is in Henningsen’s oeuvre related to the artist on the one hand and the coquette or demimonde on the other. Walking the streets at night may be a pleasure,

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but it is mainly reserved for the erotically available woman. Den elskede Eva (1911; The Beloved Eva) offers an even more explicit description of the female artist-bohemian who drifts between lovers without ever being really loved herself  – despite the title – and who finally ends up killing herself. She names herself “en degenereret Pige” (192) [a degenerated girl]. Another character is called a “demimonde,” and the main function of all the novel’s women is to be a mistress – “fuldendt Elskerinde” [perfect mistress] seems to be something close to a profession. The main characters are actors in every sense of the word, and by moving between cities like Copenhagen and Paris, they are not only cosmopolitan, but are also emotionally homeless – “hvileløs[e] paa Jorden” (244) [restless on earth]. Again the metropolis, its cafes, hotels, and boulevards are the home of homelessness, so to speak. The Icelandic author Ásta Sigurdardottir, even though based in Iceland’s small capital of Reykjavík, is a modern, postwar incarnation of the female bohemian famous in her home country for her provocative lifestyle, her way of staging herself as a daring cosmopolitan, and her tragic life – she died at the age of forty-one after having drunk antifreeze. Her collection of short stories, Sunnudagskvöld til mánudagsmorguns (1961; Sunday Night to Monday Morning), depicts outsiders and travelers – women who cannot find their place in organized society. The stories set in Reykjavík portray people drifting in the streets with no set purpose, and the division between the walking woman’s point of view and that of respectable society is reflected in the narrative technique. In “Gata í rigningu” (The Street in Rain) for instance, the city springs to mind as sensual impressions; sounds, emotions, smells are projected by the subjective consciousness of the female narrator. The sexual woman Bohemian city life is bound up with sexuality. One of Henningsen’s Danish contemporaries, Thit Jensen, promotes a far harsher view on promiscuity. Den erotiske Hamster (1919; The Erotic Hamster) caused a sensation when it was published. It centers on the modern, decadent woman as a notorious mistress who collects lovers and destroys marriages while at the same time being a rather sad creature dependent on her mother as well as on men – despite her self-sufficient attitude. For Jensen, the rejection of promiscuity and free love is at the same time a rejection of the modernity of the city. After Den erotiske Hamster, Jensen increasingly rejects the decadent Copenhagen – even the weather connotes the city’s filth – and in her writing turns towards history and the Danish countryside. Anna Branting’s Staden (1901; The City), which also highlights infidelity in marriage, is an explicitly urban novel. The plot is closely linked to the city where it is set: Stockholm’s cafes, theaters, streets, and houses. The novel may be seen as a female Bildungsroman, viewed from the perspective of the heroine Eva, who is happily married to a journalist, Karl Herzen, whom she one day discovers with another woman. This scene is the crux of the novel engendering both Eva’s own (non-sexual) love affair and her awakening as an independent moral woman who becomes a spokeswoman for realism in art as well as in life. The novel ends with her attending a worker’s meeting.

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The street gains a privileged significance as a site for thoughts and changes. At the very end of the novel, she is walking a street different from the ones she normally inhabits, which leads to a social awakening. The social awakening is at the same time bound to the spiritual. The street and walking the street become a symbol of life and death and of the struggle and relation between the sexes. The right to walk the street is in Staden, as in Camilla Collett’s essays, a synonym for the right to interaction and independence: “Gatan,” tänkte hon, “gatan tar allt vårt, våra män, våra söner, vår lycka, och ändå ha vi ej rätt at gå på den” (Branting 210) [The street, she thought, the street takes everything that is ours, our men, our sons, our happiness, and even then we do not have the right to walk it]. It may be argued that in the literary urban depictions from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the city itself contains an erotic dimension, especially if one turns to the way the street is represented at night with the emergence of demimondes and prostitutes. There exists one city in the day, another in the evening. Furthermore, there is one for the working class and another for the bourgeoisie, and if the two meet, it is primarily in the form of sexual encounters. The class divisions are strict, and women taking the step from one class to another are few, even in the twentieth century. With reference to the urban descriptions of the nineteenth century at a time when walking the street acquired a social importance it had never had before, the gender and class divisions are even more obvious. A dramatic example is given in the Norwegian writer Amalie Skram’s Lucie (1888). In Lucie, the dangerous sexuality has moved into the bourgeois drawing room and thus disturbed not only the gender distinctions, but also the class distinctions. The beautiful Lucie, who is a sort of lower class actress, marries her lawyer lover and moves from the filthy downtown neighborhood to a well off area of central Kristiania. However, Lucie’s sexual past ruins the balance in the marriage and in her new environment; she is met by contempt from women and indecent offers from men. When Lucie, after a fight with her husband, leaves him on the way home from a party and starts walking the streets in the middle of the night, she at the same time walks right into her own destruction at the hand of a rapist. Lucie is not a prostitute; she marries her lover to get a new and better life but finds herself unhappy and emotionally homeless as a married woman. The prostitute is nevertheless a sort of shade figure in Lucie as in many of the texts examined so far; she is the other side of the bourgeois coin so to speak. The prostitute is the woman of the street par excellence. Sometimes she is represented indirectly in the form of men approaching “respectable” women thinking they are prostitutes when walking at night, as when Alberte in Cora Sandel’s Alberte og friheten (1931; Alberta and Freedom) is the object of men’s low whisperings: “tu viens?”(will you come?) on the Paris street. Women’s texts testify to the fact that the urban space is gendered; it qualifies to a certain extent as a no-woman’s-land, in the sense that the woman, more than her male counterpart, is forced to avert her eyes in order not to be hindered in her movement or be taken for a prostitute. The prostitute is seldom if ever given a voice herself. She is primarily represented via others, as is the case in Pennskaftet when she is the protagonist’s childhood friend, or in the form of a passing red dress, as in Staden. A rare example of a protagonist driven to prostitution (in Kristiania) was written by a man: Christian Krohg’s Albertine (1886). Among the Swedish writer Maria Sandel’s working-class women in Stockholm, there is, however, also a woman who, after having left badly paid factory work for prostitution in order to provide for her child, sums up

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her profession in the following words: “Man får både tillräckligt med mat och god mat i den avdelning i helvetet, där jag nu har mitt jobb. I den förra fick jag nöja mig med oset” (Virveln 79) [One gets both enough food and good food in the division of hell where I now work. In the previous one I had to be content with the smell]. The worker The street par excellence for Maria Sandel is the one which epitomizes working class life. In “Min gata” (My street) from Maria Sandel’s first book, Vid svältgränsen och andra berättelser: Skildringar ur Stockholmslifvet (1908; At the Edge of Starvation and Other Stories: Pictures of Life in Stockholm), the street itself plays the role of protagonist. The little text opens thus: “Ur fabriksgatan, som, fyrkantig och kolsvart, gapar mot den solstekta gårdens ödslighet, kommer en ung kvinna gående” (89) [From the factory street that square and pitch black gapes towards the misery of the sunburnt yard, a young woman comes walking]. The street is not the boulevard or the broad avenue but the factory street, and the woman is not out to have fun but is a tired, working woman on the way home to nurse her sick brother. Walking the street acquires a narrative structure, and the text reads like an urban montage, as Alexandra Borg has argued in her seminal study En vildmark av sten (2011; A Wildness of Stone). The young woman, Alma Ström, can be followed as she walks down the almost empty street on a Friday afternoon and is left when she – “vår vandrerska” (our wanderer) – enters her gray, proletarian home. Then the narrator turns her eye like a camera towards the workingclass wives making their four o’clock coffee and the children in the street with their noise and laughter; it is time for the men working in the factory to make their way homewards before going out again to various meetings. At the end of the day, the street “liknar en väldig fattiggraf ” (Sandel 94) [resembles a vast pauper grave]. The image of the street-as-a-grave stands in exact opposition to the second half of the story, which portrays the same street on a Saturday afternoon when workers have got their salary, have finished their work week, and the street is “lik en dragspelslåt” (95) [like a song from an accordion]. The street functions as a mise en abîme for the urban working class, where different lives meet and intersect. The rhythm of the narration, especially in the first part, follows that of walking, of moving from place to place along the street. It is hardly a coincidence that the walking woman forms the opening image of the story since she, even more than her male counterpart, embodies a life with no or few rooms for rest. She is not pictured as a leisurely flâneuse, but on the contrary, in constant movement between the factory and the home. In fact, the women we meet in the text are all workers, and their movements all have a definitive goal. With Maria Sandel, working-class life seen from the perspective of the working woman enters Scandinavian literature for the first time. Her novels and short stories are full of women who walk, run, and hurry along the streets worrying about food, housing, and work. Sandel’s women are always on the move, and they move out of sheer necessity. Her novel Virveln (1913; The Vortex) for instance, portrays different women around 1909, the year of the great strike in Sweden. The men are there, certainly, but they are seen more as hindrances than helpers. In her oeuvre as a whole, it is unmarried mothers in particular who benefit from the author’s

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sympathy. Class and gender form a liaison in Maria Sandel’s portrayal of life in Stockholm’s working-class districts. Sandel’s heroines are born into the working class and thus into a life of struggle and poverty whether married or single. This status is not the case for most of the protagonists discussed in this essay. Class nevertheless plays a part in other texts too. In Karin Smirnoff ’s novel Under Ansvar, one sees that it is set in Helsinki, and the protagonist – Ruth – comes from a solid bourgeois background. Initially she works in an office with other young women her age, but things change when she finds herself pregnant by her late fiancé. In both writers’ work, however, the setting signifies how different topographies connote different social groups. En höstklar septembermorgon gick Ruth genom Runebergsesplanaden, där de första gula löfven börjat falla. När hon kom ut på torget kastade hon en blick på klockan i Edlundska hörnet, men så stannade hon, tveksam om hon skulle ta spårvagnen eller gå. (Smirnoff 76) (A bright September morning Ruth walked through the Runebergsesplanade, where the first yellow leaves had started to fall. When she entered the square, she cast a glance at the clock at the corner of Edlund, but then she stopped while doubting whether she should take the tram or walk.)

This seemingly light and happy description covers a darker reality, i.e. the protagonist’s struggle to find work as a single mother. She had quickly fallen from grace and finds herself poor and frozen out of her social circle save for some good women friends. This sunny morning Ruth makes a final attempt to get a job and walks to her old bank where she is deeply humiliated when she has to beg her former boss to help her find a job – as it turns out, with no result. Thus her walking has to be read in an ironic, even tragic way: from being an independent and confident woman, she is now lapsing into deep depression. The fact that she still chooses to walk in broad daylight is nevertheless significant because it highlights two fundamental aspects of her existence: her refusal to hide herself and her increasing poverty. Consequently the most provoking thing she does in the eyes of the class from which she comes is to walk with her daughter in broad daylight. Karin Smirnoff – August Strindberg’s daughter by Siri von Essen – thus challenged not only established class conventions, but also the misogynic views held by her famous father. The story of female city walkers is as much a story about the lack of freedom as anything else. In this context, Sandel’s young workers are interesting: they are poor, certainly, and they may be taken for prostitutes if they walk the streets at night, but they are not, like Smirnoff ’s heroine, yelled at for walking the streets with their children during the day. Whereas street walking may be seen as a form of class betrayal for someone of Ruth’s background, it is integral to the life of the working class woman. However, for none of them is walking the city synonymous with idleness, Müssiggang, or flânerie. The flâneur revisited The view of the modern city found in the works of women writers is far from unanimous, and their differences in style, background, and experience are just as striking as their similarities.

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A common denominator of the urban texts is, however, that they engage in topics and problems that communicate across national borders and thus may be seen as international, regardless of their setting. The struggle for the vote is one such topic, but organized society’s view of women walking the streets on her own is another. For those writers who go abroad, the urban landscape is more likely to be depicted from an outsider’s perspective of homeless internationalism. Freedom and alienation go hand in hand. In Cora Sandel’s books set in Paris, the last two volumes of the trilogy on Alberte – Alberte og friheten (1931; Alberta and Freedom) and Bare Alberte (1939; Alberta Alone) – the style and rhythm of the text are inextricably interwoven with the city in which it takes place (Selboe). The movement of the city is syntactically and stylistically internalized in the text, which creates for the reader a correspondence between character and environment – the heartbeat, the pulse, and the walking situate the protagonist in the city. On the whole, the portrayal of Alberte is characterized by subtle parallelisms between bodily sensation and environment. The trilogy may be seen as a portrait of the artist as a young woman. The setting of the first volume is in the north of Norway, whereas the second and most of the third take place in France – mostly Paris – before the return to Norway at the end of the third. The trilogy has a third-person narrator, but the text is mainly focalized on Alberte, and Paris is conceptualized via her consciousness. Nearly all her experiences and reflections are based in a certain physical rhythm, where memories are allowed to intervene. Regardless of where she is, Alberte is a true pedestrian; the art of walking is her sine qua non. Throughout the trilogy, walking is a way of thinking, and when walking the streets of Paris, the flexible, heterogeneous impressions of modern city life resonate with her past and present life. While Alberte is wandering, images arise in her that subsequently will be poetically transformed through writing. Thoughts, memories, and experiences have a topographical basis, but the division between the geographical landscape and the inner landscape is frequently blurred. Alberte og friheten consists of several paragraphs which focus on what is called Alberte’s drivertilbøielighet [inclination to drift]. Her movement is syntactically internalized in the utterance: the persona is, so to speak, absorbed in her own walking. Movement is foregrounded and emphasized by the way in which Sandel frequently skips the subject of the sentence in order to make the movement itself the protagonist: Forbi St. Germain-des-Prés, over Place St. Michel, Seinen. La Cité, forbi Porte St. Martin, Garde-de-L’Est. Gjennom brede og rette, smale og krokete gater. Gater som lukter bensin, parfyme, pudder, og gater som lukter olje, pommes frites, pannekake…. Begi seg ut i det. Drive, streife omkring, se på, suge i seg, uten annet mål enn å gjøre det. (46–47) (Past St. Germain-des-Prés, across the Place St. Michel, over the Seine; La Cité, past Porte St. Martin, Gare-de-l’Est; through broad and straight, narrow and crooked streets. Streets smelling of petrol, perfume, powder, and streets smelling of oil, chipped potatoes…. To drift, wander about, absorb it all, with no other purpose.) [42]

Alberte internalizes many of the features of the nineteenth-century flâneur: she observes, she picks up impressions that she later turns into writing, she “botanizes on the asphalt,” and she enjoys the stony landscape of the metropolis. But she is no slow city dweller who walks for the sake of what she sees. The physical movement and the images it engenders inspire her, rather than

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the conscious observation: she walks fast, she runs, she gets warm, and she crosses boundaries between different areas; her aimless and expansive wandering in the city have striking similarities to her childhood walking – either on foot or on skis. Alberte, as well as the other female pedestrians encountered here, are wanderers on the margins of the cosmopolitan literary map. Although they represent different ways of relating to the city, the texts make it clear that female pedestrians belong to city literature alongside their male counterparts. By providing the perspective of the woman in the crowd, whether she is a poor worker, a bohemian, or simply a wanderer out seeking impressions, the writers discussed in this chapter contribute to the story of the city and to the city’s story about itself.

The limits of the unlimited Gunnar Björling’s wordscape Anders Olsson

One of the most spectacular modernist writers in Nordic literature, the Finland-Swedish poet Gunnar Björling, called by his friend and colleague Elmer Diktonius “Skandinaviens enda dadaist” (237) [the only Dadaist of the North],1 is known for his philosophy of life in the sign of “the unlimited.”2 Less frequently considered is that his own poetry is marked by the limiting conditions of perception, of the scene of writing, and of the words themselves that give a stunning material presence on the page. This essay will show how Björling’s poetry, as one of the most radical experiments in the modernist tradition as such, can be interpreted as a neverending struggle between the unlimited and the conditions of limitation as well as between the idea of universality and regional belonging. This structured pattern will be presented in a series of readings that deal with the perceptual framing of the poems with the scene of writing and not least with the peculiar techniques of discontinuity that transform poetic space and that are characteristic of Björling’s wordscape in his late poetry.3 During his lifetime, Björling only left his beloved Helsinki reluctantly. In his youth, he departed twice; he visited Estonia for a month in 1904 and in 1906 embarked on a cargo ship toward the Mediterranean that was under the charge of his uncle, the sea captain Hugo Björling. These trips were, however, undertaken long before Björling’s literary debut in 1922 and just before the first minor traces of his own writing. In material terms, he led a miserable life and never had means to make any longer trips (Olsson Att skriva dagen 239). One can safely conclude that Björling’s trips did not affect his writing in any decisive way. For almost his entire life he lived in a house in Brunnsparken, an idyllic park in central Helsinki with a view over the waters. In an age of intense mobility across national borders, the fact that Björling’s stationary life was translated into poetry is noticeable. In a late letter from 1958 he affirms: “Jag dröjer i mitt rum, här är min plats” (letter to Fritz Mayer, 31 August 1958) [I stay in my room, here is my place].4 In another letter from the same year, he gives his local attachment a more universal accent: “jag förblir här vid mitt joniskhav, mitt – fönsterhav” (letter to Fritz Mayer, 2 August 1958) [I stay here at my Ionian sea, my – window-sea]. When looking at his poetry from the vantage point of regional place, one can, however, observe how Björling’s attachment to the pastoral within the city has a striking exception in a formative period in the late 1920s and ’30s. At that time, he displays a provocative, performative writing in the vein of modernism against the backdrop of the roaring cityscape of Helsinki. 1.

In a letter to Gunnar Ekelöf, April 18, 1933.

2.

About the concept of the unlimited, see Anders Olsson Att skriva dagen 21–27.

3.

For an attempt to describe the thematics of place in Björling’s poetry, see Chapter 10 “En plats invid solen” in Olsson Att skriva dagen 238–59.

4.

It is telling that in another letter to Mayer on July 12, 1956, Björling can compare his attachment to Helsinki with Immanuel Kant’s bond to Königsberg. doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.20ols © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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This mode is visible in the expressionist, carnevalesque images in Korset och löftet (1925; The Cross and the Vow), the Dadaist fragments in the avant-garde journal Quosego (1928–29), or the ecstatic “Lautgedichte” in Kiri-ra! (1930). The hectic period of an intense, collectively shared modernist experimentation is however followed by his late poetry’s solitary writing, which is characterized by a still more radical and never-ending linguistic experiment in the peaceful Brunnsparken. The common view that the origin of modernism in the West is linked to the intensified interaction and experimentation in cities like Paris, London, and Berlin is thus both confirmed and revised in Björling’s case. He makes the modernist revolution permanent and puts it in real action only after he has left the group affiliations, the labels, and the jazz cafés.5 The collection Där jag vet att du (1938; Where I Know That You) marks the turning point in this development.6 What followed was both in value and scope the major part of his work – thirteen of a total of twenty collections of poetry. Diktonius, aesthetically a modernist like Björling but politically a revolutionary unlike the latter, is rather bewildered when he, in the middle of the 1930s, finds that his friend in Brunnsparken stubbornly continues his linguistic revolution after the modernist heyday by confining himself to “möblera … med orden” (262) [furnishing … with words].7 In a sense Björling returns to his debut Vilande dag (1922; Resting Day), a meditative kind of prose poetry with an aphoristic touch, but now has become a poet of place in a more decisive way by actively relating to the scene of writing and to the words themselves. Modernism has in this process had its effect. Step by step through the exuberant period of the urban experiments, he turns the cityscape into a wordscape in which he unconsciously becomes a wild disciple of the late Mallarmé.8 The typography and spacing of words and silences do not merely represent the shifting landscape but make it a reality of language. Typical of all of Björling’s poetry is the immediacy of experience. Sometimes this takes the character of urgency and brutal directness, sometimes of elegiac impression or hesitant gesture. He primarily writes the present, what is seen and experienced, which makes the problem of representation acute. This challenge is visible in several texts that are closely linked to his little apartment in Brunnsparken, where the writing subject coincides with the perceptual I that follows the changing seasons through the window with the sun and the ships coming and 5.

Leif Friberg has, however, another view of Björling’s modernism, claiming in his dissertation that the true modernist Björling is the young writer of the 1920s and ’30s, experimenting with discursive plurality and mixing poetry and prose. See Från sonett till drömtext: Gunnar Björlings väg mot modernismen. It seems, though, that here is no sense in restricting modernism to discursive blending. After all, Mallarmé or Rilke were modernists. On the other hand, Björling never leaves prose, he mixes lyrical poetry with aphoristic writing making lyrical poetry aphoristic and aphorism lyrical. But he does this – in my view – in a far more radical and interesting way, linguistically, in the late poetry. See Olsson “Det gestiska fragmented (Gunnar Björling)” in Skillnadens konst, 220–69.

6.

See Att skriva dagen, 169 f. The great critic Bengt Holmqvist was the first to see the development clearly in Modern finlandssvensk litteratur, 118.

7.

Björling “nöjer sig med att möblera blott med orden” (262) [amuses himself by furnishing with words alone]. Dated April 28, 1936 to Josef Kellgren.

8.

Sixten Ringbom has stressed this sculptural, thing-like quality of Björling’s language in “Bildstruktur hos Björling.”

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going on the waters. This poetics of immediacy wants the poems to contain as little imagination as possible and to be as “literary” as possible. It can be seen as early as this passage from his late correspondence: “Här sitter jag och ser ut over lätt snötäckt Långörn och gråljust hav och himmel. Klockan tickar och jag odlar nån gång orden…. Ack, om en satt här efter tre tusen år, eller bara – liksom de unga – efter femtio år. Men i stort sett är det ändå detsamma. Kanske att med ännu färre-ord (letter to Jaakko Päivärinta, 21 May 1957) [Here I sit watching lightly snowcovered Långörn and luminously gray sea and sky. The clock is ticking and I cultivate now and then the words…. Oh, if one sat here after three thousand years, or only – like the youngsters – after fifty years. But on the whole it is the same. Perhaps that with still fewer words]. The poet watches the winter scenery and at the same time writes down words about what he sees. But he also reflects on this primal scene of writing projecting it onto the future on a sublime scale. Three thousand years later and still the same constancy of space and continual writing remains “basically the same,” as it were. What kind of place is Brunnsparken for Björling? As a park it can be described in Foucauldian terms as a heterotopia, a real place that can contest and reverse sites within a given society.9 More precisely, it is a place on the fringes of the city that reverses the hectic life of Helsinki in favor of solitary meditation in the haven of idyllic nature. In Björling’s case, this reversal can be described in terms of a chiasmus: the more still and stationary his scene of writing, the more revolutionary and intense his work of language. As a poet, Björling was a graphomaniac; he produced a wealth of manuscripts. In the Åbo Academy manuscript archive, one can find about thirty thousand sheets of poetry written after February 1944, when a Russian bomb destroyed his apartment in Brunnsparken turning most of what he had previously written into ashes (Björling Skrifter 87). The remaining manuscripts are thus all written during the last sixteen years of his life. Gunnar Björling died in 1960. One can assume that his writing obsession was even stronger during the three decades preceding the catastrophic event. He has confessed that, for long periods, he did nothing but write: “Ack det där att alltid skriva. Det fanns långa tider när jag skrev alltid, och det var många tiotal kilo jag aldrig hunnit se igenom, förrän de brann upp. Men numera är det inte så, och jag går och tycker jag är omöjlig och vet inte varför, men det är för att jag inte varit koncentrerad eller inte fått ett uttryck” (Skrifter 87) [Oh that constant writing! There were long periods when I wrote constantly, and there were several tens of kilos that I never had the time to go through, before they were burned up. But nowadays it is not that way, and I go around feeling impossible and don’t know why, but it is because I was not concentrating or did not find an expression.] Diktonius mentions in a letter that after the bomb twelve full baskets of manuscripts were burned.10 But when Björling envisions a future with fewer words, he also recognizes the clear tendency of his writing towards reduction and radical revision. If the frame of writing is constant, 9.

See Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History 299–301. Michel Foucault has more than perhaps any other major thinker stressed that the current age is an epoch of space, and therefore of simultaneity and juxtaposition. If this view is adopted, Björling is an acutely contemporary writer. See Foucault “Des Espaces Autres” (“Of Other Spaces).”

10.

Elmer Diktonius brev 389. Dated March 11, 1944 to Sven Grönvall.

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the picture itself, just as writing, is changing. Writing changes while both referring to exterior space as it is perceived and, self-reflectively, to the scene of writing with the hand, the pen, and the corporeal position. Björling was never recognized as a major poet during his lifetime.11 In that sense, he belonged to the future, but it is evident that it is not the dream of a coming recognition that is at stake in the following touching prophecy of blessed constancy in writing and life: “Fanden att en inte upplever 2008. Av rena nyfikenheten. S.k. värs skreve en väl då också. Och sutte i sitt rum – i Brunnsparken! – såsom nu och för femtio år sedan. Och någons barnbarn kommer in eller går. Får en marmelad eller så” (letter to Mr. and Mrs. Roos, 21 December 1954) [Damned that one does not experience 2008. Out of pure curiosity. Would probably write so-called verse even then. And sit in one’s room – in Brunnsparken! – just like now and fifty years ago. And someone’s grandchild comes in or goes. Gets a marmalade or something]. Already in these utterances about Björling’s scene of writing, one can draw conclusions as to his poetic technique. When he says that he stays at “mitt joniskhav – mitt fönsterhav” [my Ionian sea – my window-sea], he not only transports his local position in space and time, making it archaically Greek, but also, contracting window and sea, puts together the frame of vision with the object thereof. Thereby, he says that vision is given in a particular place for a specific subject, as “my” window’s sea. A first determination of how place is represented in Björling’s poetry could be what he himself calls fönstertavlan, the window’s picture. Already in early collections from the 1920s, he indicates the spatial framing of his writing by a self-referential, deictic gesture that gives the poem a visual, generic title: “Denna tavla” (This picture), or else by simply calling the poem “ett litet fönsterstycke” (Korset 26) [a small window piece]. This aesthetic framing of the poem stands in marked contrast to the expressivist diction of other poems in his second collection Korset och löftet (1925; The Cross and the Vow). To call a poem a picture is a double framing, a paratextual indication that metaphorically makes the poem the medium of visual perception. This framing not only implies that the poem presents a visually organized view from a window, but that the poem itself is composed like a picture. In Björling’s development as a poet one can observe how his poetry in the 1930s successively becomes more conscious of itself as an artifact, and it is first in the collection Där jag vet att du (1938; Where I know that You), that he is in full command of his typographic means. This development can be tentatively described as a gradual transition from the poem as expressive representation to a spectacular wordscape. This does not mean, however, that the late Björling’s poetry lacks reference to the exterior world. A transitional poem from 1936 published in Från fönstret and still full of the early expressionist rhetoric begins: 11.

The scandalous reception of Björling is discussed in Olsson Chapter  4 “Den obegriplige diktaren” in Björling Skrifter 61–72. The poet was considered impossible to understand, with the exception of a little circle of devoted friends and colleagues. Björling seems, however, to have met this fierce resistance with a surprising ease. As he puts it in the following two, connected prose fragments: “Att är misskänd och isolerad, det kan ha sin fördel. Och att så lever sitt liv och strävan. Ingen väntar något av mig, det är kanske en nyckel: jag får göra det och jag kan.” (O finns en dag 53) [To be despised and isolated, it can be an advantage. And that thus lives one’s life and striving. Nobody expects anything of me, it is perhaps a key: I am allowed to do it and I can.]

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Med små idyller och solglänstklipporna i havets rymd Jag böjer mig lätt ut  – min egen lilla fästning, sol och sommardag och granna båtar och saltvattensfriskt kring solbränts gamla vallar och sollysttärningarnas vita hus på Sveaborg. (“Men blåser” 8) (With small idylls and sunshinedcliffs in sea’s space I lean out a little – my own little fortress, sun and summer day and dazzling boats and saltwaterfresh around sunburnt’s old walls and sunlitdices’ white houses on Sveaborg.)

Although this poem hardly gives us an idea of the syntactical revolution that will disrupt Björling’s poetry a few years later, he uses peculiar compounds that by a nominalization of the verb retard the dynamic movement in the poem and make the reader attentive to words as such: “solglänstklipporna” [sunshined cliffs]. He has already developed the paratactical syntax, so typical of Björling’s late poetry, where he will use the conjunction “och” [and] in a more original way.12 The poem invokes in the end “man everywhere” and shows how Björling’s ethical universalism, Kantian in spirit, and early transmitted through the German philosopher Heinrich Gomperz, does not contradict his local orientation.13 Place is itself universalized with the limited and framed vision opening up towards the unlimited – Gunnar Björling’s key philosophical concept. A word that appears in the second line of the poem is “idylls,” a generic term here designating a plurality of perceptions. One can legitimately ask if Björling’s place-oriented poems are modern instances of the idyll as a lyrical genre. Just as this genre or mode of writing classically is characterized by “the actual presence” of a moment of bliss, Björling’s poetry constantly evokes the acute experience of everyday life. And if the idyll traditionally represents rural scenery, marked by peacefulness and utopian euphoria, Björling seems at moments to transform the urban landscape of Helsinki into a pastoral setting of Arcadia.14 This is, however, not quite the case. To give a more nuanced picture, one must first go one step further in describing his development. In the collection Ord och att ej annat (1945; Words and That Not Other), written after the war and the bomb catastrophe, the following poem is found. 12.

Björling’s original use of small words and particles, particularly of the conjunction “and” is discussed in Olsson, Att skriva dagen 188–90.

13.

On Björling’s concept of the unlimited and his reading of Gomperz, see Att skriva dagen 21–24.

14.

For a thorough discussion of idyllic representation in Western literary tradition, especially in a Swedish literary context up to Strindberg, see Tore Wretö’s Det förklarade ögonblicket. It is of significance that the archaic εἰδύλλιον (eidyllion) in the modern history of this genre has come to mean “a little image” although this meaning was not present in the original context of Theocritus. There are, however, great difficulties in applying the concept of classical genres to modern literature due to the general dissolution in modernity of homogenic classes or kinds of literature. Wretö interestingly stresses, though, the strong idyllic component in older Finnland-Swedish poetry, from Jacob Frese to Johan Ludvig Runeberg, a tradition to which Björling was very close. See my article “Gunnar Björlings sprängda idyll” (Gunnar Björling’s exploded idyll).

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252 Fabrikers stad med skorstenar i solnedgången den kubiska aspekt från förorts holmar med grönt och vatten en barrgirland som ram kring fönstersynen ett underting av sommarland och drömmens stad en aftonstund i sista solnedgången lugnt vilande. (Ord 85) (Factories’ city with chimneys at sunset the cubic aspect from suburb’s islets with green and water a pineneedlefestoon as frame to window’s sight a wonderthing of summer land and dream’s city an evening’s hour at the last sunset peacefully at rest.)

In this poem Björling explicitly speaks about “the cubic aspect” that gives vision its characteristic as an artistically, well-formed image. He also notes how the “window’s sight” is framed by “a pineneedlefestoon,” “a wonderthing” connecting the landscape of summer with the city of dreams. Also in this poem, there is a shifting of focus from foreground to background, from the object to the material conditions of perception. Remarkable is Björling’s ability to inscribe an intensely present subjectivity without even mentioning an “I.” The formula “the cubic aspect” seems to hint at the dissolution of the central perspective that is at work in the late Björling’s poetry. Two of his radical devices to represent experience in a more many-sided and material way are massive parataxis – where a conjunction like “and” is used as a disjunction – and the elimination of predicates. In this poem, complex experience is represented in very few words. What the poem speaks about is a series of perceived or imagined elements: factories, chimneys, islets, and waters. Furthermore, this picture is given at one particular moment of time, at sunset, which does more than end the day. The only verb in the poem is the last word, which not only marks the closure of the text, but everything that has been perceived and previously mentioned in the poem is “peacefully at rest.” This can be viewed as an instance of the idyllic moment: limited, harmonious, and undisturbed. At the same time, experience is materialized and given back its concrete, epistemological conditions prior to all mythological projections of space. There is no possibility here to separate space and time. Vision is tied to a situated, physical body and a contingent moment that at any time can turn into something else. We can observe how the present can be represented without static closure in another poem from the same collection:

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Vem talar här? och ljud bärs skilda, i färgklart jords lätta akvarell de himmelsljusa blåa vatten vattenljus är himlarna det strålandes ljus är vitare hus och brokigskimmerstenarna nu nu och talar världs timme och lever svart och skuggorna av blad och gräsen och på lyftad vinge. (Ord 87) (Who is speaking here? and sounds are born separate, in colorclear earth’s light water color the heavenlight blue waters waterlight are the heavens the shining’s light is whiter house and motleyshimmeringstones now now and speaks the world’s hour and lives black and the shadows from leaves and grass and lifted wing.)

Even in this poem, concrete experience is not only presented in its extraordinary abundance, but it is also made the object of reflection. The very beginning of poetic speech makes the subject of enunciation problematic: “Who is speaking here?” The whole poem can be viewed as an answer to this question. But this does not occur in the form of a dialectically determined response, rather as a continuation of the question by way of the copulative “and.” It is a peculiar question. Why ask it in a poem? Is the writer uncertain of the status of the subject of lyrical speech? Nothing points in that direction. The poem, as a hymn evoking the world’s presence in one saturated moment, seems rather to demand another subject function. Just as in the previous poem, where “the cubic aspect” necessitated a repression of the speaking I, the world’s presence here seems to demand a displacement of poetic speech itself. In fact, there are other parallels between the poems that suggest this is the case. Even here, the world of perception is turned into an aesthetic category, “earth’s light water color.” What is perceived is framed and structured like a watercolor painting. But if this is the case, it is a picture without central perspective, but rather one disseminated as it were in a multitude of different and only discontinuously connected aspects. Björling’s invention in his late poetry is to create a language for the abundance of being. Being is prior to the isolated ego, and a reversal of agency must be made. One may look at the peculiar nominal compound “brokigskimmerstenarna” [motleyshimmeringstones], that stresses – in its very

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size and awkwardness as a verbal construct  – how materiality and light are connected. The multitude of stones with their shifting shades of light is evoked in one stroke as in a still life by Cézanne. Even if one should be careful to make too swift a comparison between the arts, one can note an interesting parallel between a certain painterly cubism and Björling’s technique of isolating the different elements in his poetical “picture” in order to subvert a unifying, central perspective. And this observation can be made not only in this particular verbal compound, but also in the whole poem. The words and the lines of the poem appear as a variety of distinct elements that are presented side by side in a luminous field. But the question asked in the poem does not primarily concern the nature of perception, but the identity of the speaking subject. What connects the heard with the seen? One answer is given in the second line: “och ljud bärs skilda” [and sounds are born separate], continued by “i färgklart / jords lätta akvarell” [in color clear / earth’s light watercolor]. Elocution is spread out as impersonal “sounds” bound to the earth by an agency that remains unknown. The origin of voice is in the next moment transferred to the world regarded as a variegated picture. The poem gives a surprisingly straightforward answer to the question asked in the beginning of the poem. Björling is no friend of anthropomorphic figures of speech. Things are there and strictly speaking have no voice. Still, the poem’s voice is here brought forward by the perceived objects themselves. And if the world of sight has primacy over the seeing subject, the world of sound simlarly has primacy over the uttering I. Speech is in fact infinitely reinforced when originating in the world itself and becomes an instance of the sublime moment: “nu nu / och talar världs timme” [now now / and speaks the world’s hour]. The iterative series of “ands” that commence five of the thirteen lines of the poem has an invocative, almost insisting tone, which summons the voice to come forth, as it were, from another place. But it does not only come forth from one particular place, but from one place to another, each segment a bit different from the other: “och brokigskimerstenarna,” “och skuggorna,” “och gräsen,” “och lyftad vinge” (my emphasis). The connective “and” is also disconnecting the elements, making them stand apart. And it is precisely this and other techniques of discontinuity that give Björling’s poems their thing-like quality, disrupting or halting the coherent voice of the speaking subject in the tradition of lyrical poetry. But it also makes the poem itself a strikingly material artifact on the white page. There are many comparable figures of displacement of the voice in the late poetry. As Björling writes: “här talar, strömmar på mig / ljusa färgers bild / och ord förutan ord” (Ord 98) [here speaks, streams upon me / light colors image / and words without words]. Sometimes this displacement is part of the ongoing search for a language: Över vidderna är grönt och grått och ljusmattan, vita hav och glans och skyarna jag vill markens röst och jord och ljumt och stjärnors nätter. (Där 89) (Above the spaces wide is green and gray and the light carpet, white sea and luster and the skies

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I will the voice of the ground and earth and warm and nights of stars.)

Here the displacement is both enacted through the prolific use of the disconnecting connective “and” – seven times in this short poem! – and explicitly demanded or willed by the subject: “Jag vill markens röst” [I will the voice of the ground]. And this will is preceded and immediately followed by impersonal, elemental speech: “och jord / och ljumt och stjärnors nätter” [and earth / and warm and nights of stars]. In this sense the subject is present in the poems as an agency of framing and spreading out, making itself visible in acts of an affirmative absence. Everything is there and voiced, day and night, the colors, the sea, the earth, and the stars. What makes it a strong poem is that there is an interaction between the subjective elocution and the objective dissemination of the voice. The declaration, “I will the voice of the ground” is a rare, full statement in Björling, moreover the volitional center of the poem, balanced on both sides by the spots of the world. The same movement towards the voice is present in the following lines: Kommer jag fram till den gård till en trädröst jag känner till tallen min egen och till rötter och piskar ut över sandgropens sluttning. (Do I reach the farmhouse to a treevoice I know to the pine my own and to roots and whips out over the sandpit’s slope.)

The difference is that the search for the voice here seems to evoke a past experience, as if the voice also represents the memory of a primary expression of nature rooted in a very specific childhood experience. “Trädrösten” [the treevoice] appears in the poem as familiar, tied to a pine tree that is called “mine,” to roots and the peculiar memory of a landscape in stark motion. Even here one can observe the use of the copula “and” and the strong subjectivity behind the willingness to let the place take over the elocutionary function. Another remarkable poem, evoking the voice of childhood, was written the winter before the end of the war in December 1944: Skall jag höra den barndoms röst en kattfot kisstass – mitt språk – o våren ett fång, och sommaren marken afton är kylig och fot tar en kyla och mulls doft för ögat bär handen skall jag höra den kisstass en kattfot och vit är, och röd

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256 se, en röd! o våren ett fång, och sommaren marken afton är kylig och mulls doft för ögat bär handen. (Ord 40) (Shall I hear it childhood voice a cat’s foot pussypaw – my language – o spring an armful, and summer the ground evening is chilly and foot takes a chill and earth’s scent for eye is brought by the hand shall I hear it pussypaw a cat’s foot and white is, and red look, a red! o spring an armful, and summer the ground evening is chilly and earth’s scent for eye is brought by the hand.)

This winter poem, hard to translate, is an invocation of poetic language, but also of a coming season with a warmer climate. The peculiar thing is how the summoned language, emphatically called “my language,” is not only associated with the voice of childhood but with a closely connected series of images: a little plant, a paw of a cat, and the coming of spring. The scene of writing, temporally set on a chilly winter evening, is never abandoned. Even in this poem with a split temporality, Björling is an eminent poet of place. The invocation rather makes the seasons shift: from the yearning question, “Shall I hear it,” to the apostrophe of spring, back to winter, to a renewed apostrophe of spring, to be finally rounded off with a repetition of the longest line of the poem, complex and synaesthetic – including scent, sight, and touch – where the last word is like the poet’s signature: the giving and writing organ “the hand.” Björling is in the poem punning on the double connotations of the word “cat’s foot,” also in Swedish not only referring to a cat’s paw but to a small white- or red-flowered creeping plant of the daisy family, with soft white hairs on the stems and leaves. Its scientific name is Antennaria dioica, a well-known and common flower in the Nordic countries in May through July, particularly prevalent in dry and arid areas, on hills, cliffs, and moors. It is more than likely, that Björling could have seen the plant in his immediate neighborhood around the cliffs of Brunnsparken. In fact, it looks exactly like the paw of a cat in the particular colors that the poem so passionately evokes: “and white is, and red / look, a red!” Evidently Björling lets the voice be impersonated by this modest herb. That the cat’s paw is present, we gather from the alliterative word kisstass, here translated “pussypaw,” and from the line “and foot takes a chill,” making the tension between the seasons not only seen, but heard (the whispering kisstass) and physically

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felt (the touch of the chilly ground). Björling does not in this process, characteristically, use metaphor, but lets the associations be transported from word to word without syntactic mediation. The voice, the plant, the cat’s paw: they are all both present and not present, brought forward by the writing hand. In this way the poem is a response to the question that it repeatedly asks. The subject speaking shall itself by the act of writing produce the yearned-for voice in the peculiarly mixed mode of the poem: being both hymnic and elegiac makes it so touching. Perhaps the voice would not have been there without the distance calling. There are other such moments of emotional recollection in a proleptic mode that give us an idea of what is at stake in Björling’s poetry. When looking forward for a possible language, he turns backwards. There is no easy way for a poet who can give an essay the hesitant title “Min skrift – lyrik?” [My writing – lyric poetry?] (Björling Poeter om poesi). The coming of voice is an intensely desired coming back, the only thing that counts: Men jag hör dock en röst alltid barns röst en innerlig röst utan avsikt, det enda : kom, och kom snart kom tillbaka! (Luft 91) (But I hear though a voice always a child’s voice an intimate voice without intention, the only thing : come, and come soon come back!)

This language that the poet can claim to be truly his own, is called “ett hemmaspråk” (Ord 65) [a home language], in a poem written after the bomb catastrophe and in the overwhelming joy over the peace of 1945. Here the totality of being can be invoked again as a song of hope, where the sound is an echo tuned by a world restored. And the ending line comes with a disrupting force – “att händerna är hemma!” (Ord 65) [that the hands are at home!]. It is a strange phenomenon to watch. When almost everything has been destroyed and reduced to ashes, the hands have found their place, as if they represented the true identity of the poet in a metonymically strengthened sense. And if they are at home, they are also at home everywhere the poem construes its picture: in the concrete world out there, approaching the voice among leaves and shadows and waterlights: “och var ort, var mark och fläck är sånger sånger vittnen och att är.” (O 110) [and every place, every ground and spot are songs songs witnesses and that are]. Wordscape is here explicitly pronounced and affirmed as a plurality of songs that are bound to their specific locations in space: every place and every ground has its own voicing. And not only that: the songs are not only poems in a fictive or imaginary sense, they have a truth function since they are witnesses. But the line does not say anything about the content of the testimony. Björling refuses generally to use predicates, as if that which evokes being is

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enough. He simply cuts off and and drops every qualifying adverb or adjective. Being, which always is in space, is enough, adding: let it speak out, sing and testify to that which is! Even if there is a displacement of the speaking voice in many of Björling’s poems, one can argue that there is a strong subjectivity in his writing that is present in gestures and frames of vision. It is marked by the capacity not only to take in the world in its multifarious, concrete abundance, but also to accept being as impossible to close off. If the poem as a picture is described as “open,” it means that the subject is the one who keeps it unlocked. One of his key statements runs: “Jag blir ej färdig / tavlan öppen är” (O 106) [I don’t get finished / the picture is open]. The lines imply that the subject still has work to do; it is not merely a perceiving organ, sheer passivity. Work must be done to keep perception open. It seems that there is a paradoxical reminiscence of Whitman, whom Björling read in the 1930s, in this openness to the multiplicity of the world. The difference is that Björling remains regionally bound, an idyllic revolutionary as it were. As if the evacuated subject at any moment could be turned inside out and encompass the totality of being. Whitman appears to be sifted through Tagore and the Chinese masters of universal touch that nourish much of Björling’s landscape poetry.15 Jag har ej ett landskap jag har ej en stad jag är hela världen och där och var jag och himmels dag över vatten och grönt löv grönast som gräs och vit båt därinunder. Och människa skall  – och jag har ej ett landskap jag har ej en stad jag är hela världen och grav väntar oss alla. (Vårt 71) (I have not a landscape I have not a city I am the whole world and there and was I and heaven’s day over waters and green leaf greenest as grass and white boat there under And man shall – and I have not a landscape I have not a city I am the whole world and grave awaits us all.)

15.

On Björling’s vivid interest in Tagore in the 1920s, see Att skriva dagen 30–31. Björling’s relation to Whitman is indicated on pages 83 and 362. He read the latter, it seems, in a German translation by Johannes Schlaf.

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The poem is an emotionally charged declaration that achieves its sublimely grand affirmation by a frank negation in turning “having” into “being.” What does it mean not to “have” a landscape or a city? The formula is repeated and the poem is built on the antithetic relation between two modes of existence. Here, it has been suggested, Björling attempts a summary of his own stance towards the world, both philosophically and existentially. He himself surely did not possess much, and he entertained a warm sympathy for Max Stirner’s life maxim adopted from Goethe, “auf Nichts gestellt” (qtd. in Olsson Att Skriva Dagen 19) [grounded on nothing]. The series of ands that follow the evacuation of the possessive subject can readily be recognized. Then comes the obligation, the ethical imperative, for Björling so important: “And man shall – .” Also cut in half, refraining from the defining and therefore limiting predicate. The end, with its memento of death, is like a variation on the end line in one of Björling’s favorite poems, Goethe’s “Wandrers Nachtlied” (1780; “Wanderer’s Night Song”): “Warte nur, balde / Ruhest du auch” (2.1:53) [Just wait, soon / You too will be at rest]. Perhaps there is a deep affinity with Goethe and particularly with this poem, just because – as Theodor Adorno has suggested – “es durch seine Sprache das Unsagbare der Sprache von Natur imitiert” (114) [“through its language the poem imitates what is unutterable in the language of nature” (73)].16 The unsaying of language could then be a means to achieve a mimesis of nature beyond the conventional grid of representation. Of course, this is a late poem, written in a period when possessive figures of speech more than ever had lost their appeal to the poet. The late poetry of Björling is not only a voicing of every particular place and spot, but an invocation of silence: Det är så långt långt det och att en strand och frid är ett tyst är det är tyst och frid är och att i en stillhet, och luft och ljus, och fågel genom rymden. (O 12) (It is so far far it and that a shore and peace is a quiet is it is quiet and peace is and that in a stillness and air and light, and bird through space.)

The remarkable aspect in this wordscape is the ability to free language from all pretensions to say something. It unsays – deconstructs poetic utterance – cutting the first line and leaving the 16.

Fredrik Hertzberg has made me aware of Adorno’s commentary on Goethe’s poem and its possible bearing on Björling. See his dissertation Moving Materialities. On Poetic Materiality and Translation, with Special Reference to Gunnar Björling’s Poetry.

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reader with unending but still composed stuttering. Disrupting the second line after the first word leaves nothing that could specify or serve as an antecedent to “it.” The poem says that something is, nothing more, repeats it and varies it with the characteristic razor “and.” In this way the poem creates the silence that it wants to evoke. To paraphrase Samuel Beckett: a poem is not about something – it is this something. But the poem, also, certainly evokes space, lightly sketched in a picture of distances, light, air, and a flying bird. Some critics have in instances like this spoken of the impressionist character of Björling’s poems. This characterization may not be a meaningful analogy. Björling’s poetry is demonstrably construed by the hand and makes that construction felt throughout. Therefore it should not be interpreted in purely phenomenological terms, as a practice of mimetic depiction. The important function of the hand in many of his writings has undoubtedly erotic and ethical meanings, as the organ of touch and solidarity. But it also stands for the work to be done, the act of writing and the act of keeping the passage free. It is precisely this pointing at the material conditions of writing that makes Björling’s poems seem simultaneously self-reflective and spontaneous. The reader feels close to the scene of writing, and life and poetry are thus brought together in the contradictory figure of the open picture. They are temporal phenomena through and through, both being unfinished business. There is a very short, late poem from the collection Att i ens öga [1954; That in One’s Eye] that in an awkward but still marvelously concise way sums up the specular intertwining of subject and object in the construction of poetic space: I den värld värld och i dig i ditt rums värld. (Björling, Att 9) (In that world world and in you in your room’s world.) [You go 76]

Striking is the absence of both verbs and adverbs that could have completed the started-butnever-finished sentence. Nothing is stated, since there is no predicate, nor is there a grammatical subject. What is then said, or rather unsaid, in the poem? The brief answer is place: place in place. Everything turns around the spatial preposition “in,” repeated three times in a chiastic structure of relations. There is, as always in Björling, a problem of reading involved. Here Fredrik Hertzberg’s translation is being used, in which he for good reasons has chosen “that world” instead of “the world,” avoiding the in the perfectly coherent English, “In the world.” In Björling’s poem, diction is markedly not grammatically coherent. But the problem is that “that world” suggests the opposite of “this world,” surely far from Björling’s intention. His wording “den värld” uses the indefinite form of the noun, but the article stresses that we are dealing with the one and only world there is. One could thus be tempted to use italics and translate the first line “in the world,” marking the definite article to disrupt the expression, thus pointing at the primacy of terrestrial space as it is given. Almost as in children’s ways of signing their address by a hierarchy of place names

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that finally includes the universe, a logic of containment working like a box within boxes seems to prevail. But here this logic is also reversed. The poem both indicates the position of the subject in the world, and the position of the world in the subject – “in you” – complementing a determination of Dasein as “being in the world” (as in Heidegger’s In-der-Welt-Sein) with that of the world as “being in the subject.” It is evident that the minimal word “in,” the Greek ἰώτα, has the main role, being the hinge on which everything turns. This strategy is typical of Björling. His vocabulary is not only simple and limited, it demonstratively makes use of otherwise marginalized words and particles. Isolation and repetition of these simple words make them into quasi-objects with a place of their own. The indicator of place is a place in its own right. One may readily be inclined to agree with Hertzberg, who in his reading of the poem states that the Swedish preposition “i” here is a word “which has reclaimed some of the materiality that has been denied it” (79) in everyday uses of language. To conclude, Björling’s continuous struggle with language deeply affects the category of place in his works. He never feels that he knows how to write, or what kind of writing he practices, nor even if he is a “poet.” Characteristic of his poetry is an overwhelming need of expression and a corresponding inability to express what he wants to express. This makes him experiment with language, breaking up regular syntax and diction, making the verse discontinuous and stuttering. This practice is readable only against the backdrop of the schemes of everyday language and the conventions of poetry. The contrast is often violent, but the intention seems in fact to be to overcome violence: more precisely, the violence of regular grammar to limit the field of experience in time and space to one particular possessive mind. Björling’s poetry does not simply get rid of perceptual limitations. On the contrary, these limitations are, as has been observed, pointed out as the framing of his poems and seem to be irreducible. Still, there are many successful attempts in his poetry to overcome the voice of egocentricity. In this endeavor, language itself has to be exploded to break up the limitations of vision, taking away or omitting predicates and qualifying words, exposing the “picture” to being and that which cannot be possessed. Thus, the “windowpicture” turns into something other than a frozen, visual image. It is in motion, in time, written typically as a fragment in a suite of other equally untitled fragments. But it is important to know that the concept of the unlimited is a regulative ideal that can never be fully realized. That is why the “picture” in Björling’s poems must remain endlessly open.

The history-accumulator Berlin as a foreign metropolis Thomas Mohnike

In a newspaper article, the writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri engaged in a fictional interview with the city of Berlin. He describes Berlin as the most accessible of all the metropolises: if one wants to interview New York, one has to pass by dozens of bodyguards and personal assistants; Paris has a secret address; and London works twenty-four hours a day. Berlin has no assistants and is unemployed but is the most relaxed and subversive of the four cities (Khemiri “Staden”). Khemiri was not the first in Nordic literature to meet Berlin and other foreign metropolises. The encounter with a foreign metropolis in general and with Berlin in particular has been a literary theme of considerable importance since the middle of the nineteenth century. In these big, mostly European cities, Nordic writers and artists wanted to meet contemporary culture. Among them, Berlin was certainly not the most important. Cities like Rome in the first half of the nineteenth century, Paris in the second half, London, New York, and Paris again in the twentieth century have usually exercised a more fascinating spell on Nordic writers. Berlin, however, was often, as Khemiri noted, the most accessible and the nearest metropolis for Nordic travelers, the “första verkliga stad” (Knorring 35) [first real city] on the way out to Europe and to other cities, as Sophie von Knorring put it as early as 1847 in her Bref till hemmet (Letters Home). The story of Berlin seen from the Nordic point of view is the history of a transformation from a city without history in the course of the nineteenth century to a city of multi-layered memories, a European lieu de mémoire. The making of Berlin (1800–70) One starting point for the emergence of Berlin in Nordic consciousness is probably the work of the natural philosopher Henrik Steffens, when he  – after having studied in the romantic circles of Jena/Weimar and the Freiberg Institute of Mining  – returned to Denmark to deliver his renowned Indledning til philosophiske Forelæsninger (Introductory Lectures on Natural Philosophy). One of the places he visited and certainly told about on this tour was Berlin. In his 1841–43 autobiography Was ich erlebte (What I Experienced), he remembered his first stay in the city as rather ambiguous: he was surprised by the splendor of the city when entering through the Potsdamer Tor and could not but feel a great aesthetic pleasure when he looked at the well-trained bodies of the parading Prussian army and the imposing buildings of Unter den Linden. At the same time, though, he felt a sublime horror at discovering for the first time the newly rising power of Prussia as part of the “großen Formen der europäischen Geschichte” (Steffens 2:187) [the major structures of European history], historical forces that would only tolerate his individual intellectual freedom if he accepted its military law. Berlin was thus for him an important place to experience the forceful restructuring of the European political stage in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Around 1800, he remembers, the intellectual circles doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.21moh © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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of Berlin were not yet especially attractive to him; but that would change with the Napoleonic wars and the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810, which he admired as an act of inner resistance and intellectual innovativeness at a time when the state of Prussia seemed to be in ruins (Steffens 3:275–76). Steffens would himself become a professor at the University and therefore probably an important mediator of a certain image of Berlin. In his footsteps followed many Nordic intellectuals, Adam Oehlenschläger, H. C. Ørsted, and F. C. Sibbern (Dreyer) being just some Danish examples, even though Berlin as a city did not leave many written traces in their works in these early days. This situation slowly changed with authors such as P. D. A. Atterbom, Erik Gustaf Geijer, as well as Hans Christian Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard, Johan Vilhelm Snellman, and Sophie von Knorring later on. Making contact with the ever-more renowned intellectual German circles of, among others, Hegel, Schelling, Humboldt, and Schleiermacher was the major reason for Nordic authors to pass some time in Berlin – though they were often on their way to Rome, the European cultural capital of the time. The beauty and richness of intellectual Berlin, however, was not the first impression that the travelers had, but rather that of the parading military. Geijer, for instance, describes Berlin in his 1834 travelogue as a “kasern, där civilisationen står på dagorderna” (461) [barracks where civilization is on the agenda], and Atterbom adds, that this “intryck bör ock så mycket mindre kallas illusion, som det är nästan omöjligt att åt något håll rikta fötter eller ögon, utan att träffa på soldater, parader, marscher och manövrer” (Atterbom 54) [impression may not be described as an illusion, as it is almost impossible to go or look somewhere without meeting soldiers, parades, marches, and maneuvers]. Hans Christian Andersen used the same mixture of images in 1831 when he wrote what is probably the first Nordic poem about Berlin. Here he describes the geometric order of the streets being mirrored by the pretty soldiers (pæne Soldater) who tremendously fascinated the poetic ego (“hvilken Krop, hvilke Been!” [what a body, what legs!]). Even more fascinating, however, was the sheer size: Berlin was “for stor til at sætte i Vers” (Andersen 297) [too huge to be put into verse]. Besides military aspects and the intellectual life, the rich theatrical tradition was one of the characteristics treated by all our authors at great length: the plays that were performed, the actors on the stage, and especially the great number of simultaneous attractions that made choices necessary – apparently an embarrassment of riches unimaginable in the Nordic capitals. All of these offerings reminded the Scandinavians of Paris, in their view the capital of contemporary (boulevard) theater and the symbol of modernization since the theater was often seen as a mediator of egalitarian tendencies. In this context, Berlin started to shed its status as an average city, becoming instead a modern metropolis, a place that is different from traditional life, a place that one cannot understand in the usual terms. This transformation is visible in Johan Vilhelm Snellman’s travelogue Tyskland: Skildringar och omdömen från en resa 1840–1841 (Germany: Descriptions and Opinions from a Trip in 1840–1841); and perhaps even more in Sophie von Knorring’s Bref till hemmet. Von Knorring describes the city as “det stora, folkrika, grandiosa Berlin, den första verkliga stad jag sett, som högt talar om nutid och ett oupphörligt rastlöst framskridande” (35) [the enormous, populous, grandiose Berlin, the first real city that I have seen, that speaks aloud about the present times and an unceasing, restless progress]. She saw it as a city that is splendid and modern, but without memory, without history, and all too

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big and too anonymous: “för mycket, för stort, för omätligt, och icke ett enda vänligt anlete” (35) [too much, too big, too vast, and no single friendly face]. After 1870, this motif of the urban experience, i.e. the metropolis as a place of alienated modernity that transgresses the capacities of the individual, became predominant. It is, therefore, no coincidence that about this time the first Nordic novel dealing with Berlin was written, an honor that is to be given to Søren Kierkegaard’s small book Gjentagelsen (1843; Repetition). The novel is a mixture of philosophical treatise, a love story, and a Berlin travelogue. As Bernhard Glienke remarks, Berlin is here an important ingredient in a highly experimental text that used both Berlin’s image as the capital of Hegelian dialectic philosophy and as an already modern metropolis with fascinating inventions as gas lighting and an almost Parisian theatrical diversity (Glienke 74). Similar themes, even if treated in a different way, were important for the two first Nordic novels that used Paris as a literary setting: H. C. Andersen’s Kun en Spillemand (1837; Only a Fiddler!) and C. J. L. Almqvist’s Gabriele Mimanso (1842) (Briens 65). The modern metropolis: Berlin as a parvenu (1870/71–1914/18) The time between 1870 and 1871 was perhaps a period of greater rupture than its contemporaries realized. With the belated establishment of the two nation states of Italy and Germany, European political geography changed profoundly. In the case of Scandinavia, the loss of Schleswig-Holstein meant not only the loss of one third of the former Danish population to Prussia and subsequently to the newly founded Germany with Berlin as its capital, but also the end of the dream of a Pan-Scandinavianism. The violent events of the Paris Commune marked the advent of strong proletarian movements. The renowned lectures of Georg Brandes in 1871 were thus merely a symbol for a modern breakthrough that was to transform not only literature and arts, but also societies in general. The importance of Rome as the center of European culture was rapidly declining. Henrik Ibsen remained for a long time the last of his Nordic contemporaries to choose Rome as the seat of his intellectual exile. Paris became the capital of nineteenth-century modernity (and not only in Nordic eyes), while Berlin was experienced as the parvenu among the European metropolises as a result of its rapid growth, technical innovativeness, and youthful but frightening physical and intellectual power. Basically all Nordic authors and artists who left Scandinavia after 1871 in quest of modernity spent some time in Paris as well as in Berlin; both cities had their specific functions for gaining symbolic (Paris) and pecuniary (Berlin) capital. When Brandes in his 1885 book Berlin som tysk Rigshovedstad (Berlin as the Capital of the German Empire) explained why he had spent several years in Berlin, he declared that he had chosen Berlin because one should study the enemy and the reasons for his success. He is thus related directly to the image of Berlin established during the previous period and adds thereby another historical layer to the young metropolis. He reminded the reader that Heiberg had listened to Hegel and Kierkegaard to Schelling in Berlin. At their time, Berlin was the capital of intellectual revolutions. The Berlin of his days, however, was the Berlin of Bismarck, “Politikens og Militærdespotiets Hovedstad” (Brandes 4:4) [the capital of politics and military despotism].

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The former inner power of intellectual beauty had by then provided the foundation for a more sinister, armed power (Brandes 4:4). Like his predecessors, Brandes thus uses a mixture of outer military appearance and inner intellectual power to characterize Berlin; intellectual beauty, however, is attributed solely to the Berlin of the past. This distinction between the golden days of intellectual cultivation and a present that cannot live up to that ideal remained a typical means of representing Berlin until the end of World War II (see Bourguignon “Culture allemande”). Although military topics are a recurrent theme of the book, the experience of modernity interests Brandes considerably more. This fact is obvious even in the literary form: the book is composed of sixty-six chapters that do not follow a specific order, but offer instead a kaleidoscopic vision: Bismarck, music, the ever-present sand, flower shops, art exhibits, the metropolitan railway, theaters, festivities, social democrats, bars, prostitution, and the newest trends in literature are treated in the same manner (Bourguignon Reportage 82). There is no logical order in the urban experience; Berlin is an all-too-big, all-surpassing universe that can only be understood in a personal, subjective, and necessarily fragmentary manner. Even if Brandes was not yet a flâneur in a proper sense, his way of studying Berlin foreshadows that figure in many ways: the short texts in his book are staged as the result of his wandering and deciphering of Berlin as a text. But Berlin is much more to Brandes: it is a fast growing, internationally attractive, cosmopolitan metropolis. New ideas are developed in an intercultural, global dialogue between visitors from all over the world, as the chapter “Berlin som verdensstad” (Berlin as a World City) shows. The comparison with Paris is a leitmotiv: when it comes to technological developments and open-mindedness, Berlin is more progressive than Paris, Brandes states. Only when it comes to literature and culture in general is Paris still at the forefront. Berlin is young and natural, Paris old and traditional, an often all-too-mannered cultural capital. As Elisabeth Herrmann remarked, Brandes’s implicit point of reference, though, is Copenhagen and Scandinavia in general understood as backward and undeveloped (Herrmann 20–26). By the end of the 1880s Berlin had become an obligatory place to visit for young Scandinavians with literary and artistic ambitions. Herman Bang, August Strindberg, Edvard Munch, Ola Hansson and Laura Marholm, Gustav Vigeland, Dagny Juel, Bjørnsterne Bjørnson, Karl August Tavaststjerna, Gustaf Uddgren, Sophus Claussen, Sigbjørn Obstfelder, Amalie Skram, Viktoria Benedictsson, Arne Garborg, Holger Drachmann, Gunnar Heiberg – to name just the most famous – all spent time in Berlin and often had their international breakthrough there. But whereas the similarly important sojourn in Paris found its echoes in literary texts (see Briens), there are only a few literary works that use Berlin as their setting or theme. Even perhaps the most interesting of them, August Strindberg’s Klostret (The Cloister), was published only posthumously. Apparently, the image of Berlin in Scandinavia was at the time not always congruent with the will to write modernist urban literature. Strindberg’s Klostret was inspired by his Berlin experiences and may be read as a roman à cléf, the cloister being, for example, the literary version of the bar Zum Schwarzen Ferkel (Black Piglet), one of the meeting places of the Nordic modernists depicted most famously in the Strindberg-inspired book by the Finnish-Swedish-German author Adolf Paul. But such a reading tends to overlook the aesthetic qualities of the novel. In the novel, Strindberg explores new forms of literature and more specifically the urban novel by leaving the naturalist frame

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set out by Brandes. As Anna W. Stenport notes, a significant detail in the novel is the lack of almost any description of the outer world proper, especially of the city of Berlin. Berlin becomes a relational and dynamic context: “The protagonist’s experience of time and place as out of sync in Berlin creates a dynamic context. He is dislodged from conventional social frames of reference, and also displaced from calendar and clock time and recognizable physical locations” (Stenport 128–29). In a time of growing nationalism, the protagonists of the novel circulate freely in Europe and challenge thereby the “European nation-state” (146). As in Brandes’s book, Paris is the implicit point of reference in the novel – the ultimate goal – but by the end, the protagonist has not yet reached that destination. Another important theme is the question of gender, which is primarily present in the relationship between the “new woman,” the independent Maria, and her husband, the protagonist. More important in the present context, however, is the description of an event he calls a “Wiener Ball,” a police-controlled ball for homosexuals. The protagonist is, not surprisingly, shocked by the event, but at the same time fascinated by the complexity of human life in a metropolis such as Berlin. This encounter with homosexuality is not by chance. Since the end of the 1880s, Berlin was regarded as the European city where one could most openly live out homoerotic desires – even though it was illegal. Berlin as a gay tourist destination was a recurring, although rarely openly expressed, theme up until the end of the 1920s. The presence of Nordic authors and artists at this time is not only due to the fact that Berlin is the nearest foreign metropolis, but also to the strong interest in Nordic culture in Berlin and Germany generally. Not just modernist art, however, was highly appreciated. Conservative circles were looking north in the hope of building a Pan-Germanic brotherhood with a group of people related by a common origin – as opposed to the Gaulish and Slavic neighbors in the west and east. Nordic authors were not always immune to these ideas: both Holger Drachmann and Ola Hansson, for example, developed Pan-Germanic ideas (Fuchs Ola Hansson). In his “Berliner Breve” (Berlin Letters) for the Danish newspaper Politiken, Drachmann described, for instance, Danes and Germans as heirs of the related Cimbrian and Teutonic tribes. Even if the Danes were at the moment rightly distrustful because of the Dano-Prussian war, it was not by chance that the Germans especially appreciated Nordic literature. There was a “Gemytsfrændskab” (Cimbrer 91) [kinship of minds] between Danes and Germans that never would be possible with the French: while the Nordic people feel easily at home while drinking beer with their German relatives, in France they would always remain “for dem som Dyrene i Jardin d’acclimatisation [sic]” (92) [to them as the animals in the Jardin d’acclimatation].1 Berlin is, even for Drachmann, a military city. He, however, stresses that the experience of Berlin can turn a Scandinavian into a real man – a real Germanic man one may suppose. In Ola Hansson’s work, the same elements are used, although in another mixture. There are a 1.

Drachmann refers here to the specific combination of zoological and botanical garden exemplified most prominently by the Parisian institution of the same name, which was built around the idea that plants and animals placed in such gardens for a certain period would “acclimatize” to the new conditions. The nineteenth-century Jardin d’acclimatation was also the site of organized native-people displays in recreated “natural” environments.

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handful of his poems that refer directly to Berlin, certainly not the most convincing in his literary production. A suite of poems, “I pickelhuvans land” [In the Land of the Spiked Helmet], evokes Berlin as dominated by a seemingly fascinating well-trained army modeled on the image of its surrounding natural setting of tall pine forests (43–70). But Berlin according to him is not always under control: he observes revolutionary tensions, social discrepancies, extreme poverty and wealth, and the continuous confrontations between military and proletarian movements. Both Drachmann and Hansson search for literary forms to evoke the urban experience. Hansson, for example, describes the city in a modernist fashion in several poems inspired by Baudelaire. In “En passant,” the lyrical persona observes a young woman passing by in the waving sea that is the anonymous metropolis crowd (113–14). In poem 9 from “I pickelhufvans land,” he describes the crowds on Friedrichstrasse in electrical illumination (58–59). In turn Drachmann evokes the urban experience in an impressionistic manner: “Elektrisk Lys, Kaféer, Øl-Paladser, ridende Politi, Vogne, Fodgængere, altsammen ordnet som af en usynlig Haand” (Cimbrer 109) [electrical light, coffee shops, beer-palaces, riding police, cars, pedestrians, all controlled by an invisible hand]. This description continues in a similar manner, but slowly he evokes the revolutionary energies that lie behind all that urban modernity: the revolution is already present, “fremadskridende, uafviselig” [progressing, inevitable]. Statesmen die, but “Folket er uopslideligt” (109) [the people are enduring]. The threatening revolution in the background of the only seemingly well-controlled city became an ever more important theme in Nordic-Berlin literature. Authors such as Jens Birkholm studied the proletarian condition in Berlin (Gunnarsson). The protagonist in Henrik Pontoppidan’s Lykke-Per studies technical innovations that he considers to have social revolutionary potential. Berlin is to him one of the most progressive centers of technology. But even in decadent literature – as for example in Sigfrid Siwertz’s Det mörka segermonumentet (1907; The Dark Victory Monument) or the works inspired by Nietzsche of the cultural critic and poet Vilhelm Ekelund, who published in Swedish social-democratic newspapers – Berlin continues to be one of the important references when it comes to the experience of social alienation in the modern metropolis (Bourguignon; Lagrup). Fascinating excesses, enchanting order (1914/18–1944) The metropolis as the generator of revolutionary energy – Paris and Berlin being the two most important examples – remained an important theme for the years to come. It just accelerated and became more radicalized. The social and political tensions that authors like Ekelund and Drachmann felt or sought finally led to a world war and to revolutions in Germany and Russia. The old Europe disappeared in an excess of violence, and art movements such as expressionism, futurism, and Dada reflected this profound transformation. The German expressionism’s enthusiasm for action, force, exalted self-expression, war, and revolution fascinated several Nordic poets, with the Copenhagen expressionist-journal Klingen being an important intermediary. One of the authors behind Klingen was Emil Bønnelycke. Since Scandinavia was rather untouched by war, destruction, and revolution, Bønnelycke worked on the transformation of revolutionary energies into art in order to shock society. The poet became famous because of

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a poetry reading on February 4, 1919. As a special effect, he fired a revolver, caused panic, and became the talk of the city. The theme of his prose poem Rosa Luxemburg is post-war revolutionary Berlin and the killing of the Spartakusbund leader Rosa Luxemburg. In six distinct parts, each of which bears a title drawn from musicological terminology – grave, andante grazioso, allegro, agitatio, largo, presto  – Bønnelycke portrays several parts of Berlin in highly subjective streams of impressions in which the protagonist gets lost in the crowd that through its interaction creates uncontrollable activity and social realities. That highly political and – for the traditional European societies – threatening possibility of a socialist or even communist revolution is transformed by Bønnelycke into art by calling it explicitly music. The gunshot is to bridge – in a controlled manner – the gap between the experience of art and urban Copenhagen life. Berlin, thereby, becomes a symbol of a potentially all-European reality. Berlin is also the subject of another of Bønnelycke’s avant-garde experiments. In 1918 in the journal Klingen, he published a figural, abstract poem reduced to parallel and crossing lines but for the two words “Berlin” and Bønnelycke’s name. Berlin thus dwindles down to a network of communicative intersecting lines that may be interpreted as streets, telephone cables, or metro lines (183). The urban space is, thereby, represented chiefly as a place of interaction – just as in Strindberg’s Klostret – but is here transformed into a new, even more radical aesthetic form. Not as radical, but nonetheless also oriented towards Berlin is Bønnelycke’s comrade Tom Kristensen. In his great Copenhagen novel Hærværk (1930; Havoc), for example, the protagonist envisages the possibility of escaping his miserable alcoholic life in Copenhagen by going to Berlin. But if one takes into consideration the picture of Berlin portrayed in Kristensen’s Verdslige Sange (1927; Worldly Songs), one may wonder if this decision would change the life of the protagonist. Would Berlin not be just another, bigger Copenhagen, another variant of the modern urban experience? Verdslige Sange (Wordly Songs) is a collection of poems that focus, as the title suggests, on the here and now of human life and not on its metaphysical or symbolic aspects, as the poem “Nat i Berlin” (Night in Berlin) powerfully exemplifies. As in a stream of consciousness or in the opening chapter of Strindberg’s Klostret, Berlin enters through the closed windows of a hotel room with the noise of the perpetual traffic, which at this time was still mainly horse drawn. The sound of the horseshoes hinders the poetic ego from sleeping; its rhythm enters his head – invades it – as the city structures the flow of his thoughts. The horsedrawn traffic then mingles with the laughter of women; their bodies seize his imagination by means of that laughter and their sighs. Horses and women are transformed into centaurs that dissolve the subject’s capacity to think and force him into the rhythm of city life. The city becomes a space in its own right; a realm of sensations that is unique to life in the city. Eyvind Johnson had quite another revolutionary perspective when he went to Berlin in 1921 and stayed there for two years before eventually moving to Paris. As Thure Stenström suggests, Johnson had chosen Berlin because of his anarcho-syndicalist interests, and he wanted to get to know the city of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. His time in Berlin was spent mainly as a poorly paid journalist writing for a series of Swedish newspapers about the general strikes and revolutionary tendencies in 1922, Christmas concerts, the armaments industry, hunger, but also painting, literature, and theater. Here he learned the modern literary techniques of describing the here and now of the multifaceted urban experience (Stenström 9–12). Nonetheless, in

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his later work, Paris became a more important theme offering itself, for example, as the location of Stad i ljus (City in Light). On the margins, however, Berlin finds its way into literature, sometimes transformed, sometimes quite openly as in his short story “Det förlorade Europa” (1931; The Lost Europe), which tells of the complex consequences in everyday life for a group of Berlin’s inhabitants in 1923.

Figure 26.  Emil Bønnelycke’s “Berlin” poem, as published in the journal Klingen 1.9–10 (June – July 1918): [183].

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When the Nazis gained power in 1933, the image of Berlin began to change. It was still an unstable world, as at the beginning of the period, but became the symbol of a dubious restructuring of European societies. Authors like Knut Hamsun, Bertil Malmberg, and Sven Hedin showed rather positive reactions. The latter, for instance, portrayed a fairly egocentric picture of his German experience in Femtio år i Tyskland (1939; Fifty Years in Germany). Berlin was at the same time seen as an intellectual and scientific center and the fascinating, ever-growing capital of a rapidly developing world power under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. The new Germany was the guarantor of enduring world peace once the new order was established. He tried to moderate this perception as well as other ideas in his post-war book Utan uppdrag i Berlin (1949; Without Mandate in Berlin). As early as 1934, however, Arvid Brenner wrote a Berlin novel, Kompromiss (The Compromise), which describes the dangers of Nazism. In the novel, the protagonist Peter Werner does not take the rise of the new ideology seriously until it is too late. Similarly most of the other canonized poets and writers showed a very critical attitude in spite of the PanGermanic dreams of the Nazi officials. Another early example is Tom Kristensen’s poem “Dobbelt,” which was published in his collection of poems Mod den yderste rand (1936; Towards the Outmost Limit). In the poem, he describes the simultaneous secret meeting with a woman he loved in Copenhagen and the torture and death of a friend by the Nazis in Berlin as mediated by a report in a newspaper. Significantly, no national borders are evoked: the crime and the rendezvous take place in the same world. This world is characterized by the conventionalized urban requisites such as bars, public parks, workers, and modern media such as newspapers. The realities of Berlin and those of Copenhagen are synchronized and leave the reader alone with the question of how to react. For Nordahl Grieg the question may have an answer: in his 1937 poem “En tysk arbeider” (1937; A German Worker), he evokes Berlin as a conventional metropolis where the windows vibrate with the noise of the city. In the center of the poem is a frightened worker who witnesses the new regime’s brutality toward its enemies, but who by means of an illegal radio station realizes that the fight of the workers is not yet lost, that he is not alone. Even in this poem, the national borders are only evoked to be dismissed: the enemies of the German warplanes in Spain – the Spanish workmen – are to him the real compatriots of the German workers. The best-known description of Berlin during this period is probably Karen Blixen’s Breve fra et land i krig (1948; Letters From a Land at War), even though the texts were not published until after the end of the war. The letters were intended to give a nuanced, subjectively balanced picture of the Third Reich with Berlin as its main example. The charm of Berlin, she regrets, was lost when the army departed in order to fight at the front. Berlin is as a result just boring and dirty. But at the same time, however, she expresses her admiration for the perfect organization and “denne Nationens Viljekraft och umaadelige Arbeijdsevne” (“Breve” 135) [this nation’s will-power and industriousness], the gigantic efforts to rebuild Berlin, even if this admiration is often ironic. Blixen’s criticism is often directed at the leveling of the individual differences by the Nazis. Just as the travelers of the romantic period, she tries to avoid politics and instead reflects on the transformations in art and theater. But looking for innovations attributable to the Third Reich, she finds only the magnification of classical forms.

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Cold wars (1945–89) The catastrophe of World War II and the crimes committed by the Nazis fundamentally transformed the image of Berlin. Admiration for military force and revolutionary energies were no longer possible in the previously established ways, and the project of modernity was supplied with quotation marks. Instead, several Nordic texts then evoked the ruins of Berlin and at the same time stressed the question of culpability often understood as an individual and not a collective guilt. This tendency is true for a long series of texts by different authors like Johannes Edfelt, Peter Weiss, Ole Sarvig, Peter Seeberg, and most famously Stig Dagerman. Dagerman’s Tysk höst (1947; German Autumn) is perhaps the best-known example. Even while posing the question of how to judge the Nazi crimes of the recent past, the main focus of the book lies on the total destruction of the German cities and the suffering of their inhabitants. The cities – and Berlin is here just one example – are described as ruinous deserts and bombed cemeteries with the people surviving thanks to prostitution, black marketeering, theft, and improvisation. The former splendor of the metropolis is not mentioned but remains a subtext that is no longer legible in the city to the traveling reporter. Johannes Edfelt’s poem “Ruinstad” (City in Ruins) from his poetry collection Bråddjupt eko (1947; Precipitous Echo) is very similar. It evokes Berlin as a desert of destruction, disease, and hopelessness but the historical reasons for the destruction are conspicuously absent. Peter Weiss’s collection of prose poems De besegrade (1948; The Defeated) with its addendum of newspaper reportage from Stockholms Tidning follows the same pattern in paying most attention to the destruction and suffering of the people. Here the past is more present than in the two preceding texts as the motto about destiny being the past makes explicit. In the prose poem itself, the city is neither named nor identifiable; the metropolis in ruins becomes a symbol of destruction and suffering without any national logic. It is the symbol of a post-war condition that concerns all of mankind. The link to Berlin becomes visible through the juxtaposition of newspaper articles that are supposed to supply the often quite enigmatic poem with background information. The narrator goes to Berlin as an angel with a parachute and tries to get into contact with the city; Berlin, though, resembles a dead city in a state of urban decay, a suffering body simulating urban life. Ole Sarvig’s novel Stenrosen (1955; Mound of Stones) continues to understand the city in a strongly individualized manner. The reader follows the lives of several people living in Berlin on one day in 1953 mainly through their thoughts and memories. Berlin as a space is created through the interaction of its inhabitants. The introspection makes the destinies and choices of the protagonists during the Hitler years and afterwards understandable. Their destiny transgresses even the national boundaries in becoming a symbol for the post-war condition in general. The tensions between East and West – the communist and capitalist countries – turn the inhabitants of Berlin into obedient, inactive people. An even more radical version is Peter Seeberg’s novel Bipersonerne (1956; Secondary Characters), which in a very schematized manner depicts the everyday life of some forced laborers from various countries in Nazi Berlin. The destruction of Berlin becomes a metaphor of the meaningless emptiness of human existence, adding yet another enduring historical layer to the Nordic depiction of the city.

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During the Cold War period, the former representation of Berlin as the city of Prussian, German, or Nazi-militarism faded since the lost role as a capital is rarely mentioned in the texts. Berlin became instead a symbol for the Cold War, a divided city with an almost unknown eastern part and an intellectual, pacifist western island. Writers like Lars Gustafsson describe their protagonist’s sojourns in Berlin as a self-imposed exile, where one would meet other (especially East-European) intellectuals in exile. Gustafsson’s novel Herr Gustafsson själv (1973; Mister Gustafsson in Person) and the Berlin chapter in his travelogue Världsdelar (1975; Parts of the World) may serve as examples. The division of the city is taken for granted, as a reality not to be changed, even if hoped for, by the protagonists. The travelogue Rapport från Berlin (Berlin Report) by the Finland-Swedish author Jörn Donner, written in 1958 before the Berlin wall was erected, is an interesting exception. He depicts the inhabitants of Berlin in their efforts to resist the propaganda of separation in everyday life. In the 1980s, West Berlin became an island of subversiveness in the Nordic imagination. Its alternative culture and art, especially in the squatter milieu, were understood as laboratories for new, post-capitalistic utopias. The Berlin Wall even became a symbol of the transgressive potential of art as is visible in the work of the Danish poet Michael Strunge (Schramm 70). Berlin is to Strunge a place of lively diversity in contrast to London, which is characterized by politics, and to Paris, the metropolis of fancy superficiality (Schramm 66). Berlin as a lieu de mémoire (1989/90–2010) The end of the Cold War and its most enduring symbol in the fall of the Berlin Wall would shatter Nordic identities that had long been constructed as the ideal third way between socialism and capitalism (see Mohnike). Berlin became a symbol and focal point of that new world that followed, a world in constant reconstruction. The Finnish theater director Peter Lüttge’s words in a special issue on Berlin of the journal Horizont are but one example for that euphoria: “En vecka i Berlin och jag är up to date – med Tyskland, med Europa, ja, till och med världen” (Lüttge 76) [One week in Berlin, and I am up to date – with Germany, with Europe, yes, even with the world]. Lüttge is not the only Scandinavian to think so. Since the 1990s, Berlin has become once again an important place for the production of art and literature. To illustrate, one can recall a Nordic art exhibit in 2004 at the Berlin Museum of Contemporary Art (located in the former Hamburger Bahnhof building) that presented only works of art created in Berlin after 1990 (Knapstein, et al.). Consequently, the number of texts that treat Berlin or use Berlin as their principal setting has become legion. Most of them understand Berlin as the center or focal point for European history in its insolvable complexity. The city becomes a lieu de mémoire for the European history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while being the laboratory for the newest arts. The historical periods often treated are the Prussia of Frederick the Great, the time and figure of Hegel, Strindberg and the Ferkel circle, the Berlin of the twenties as symbolized by Walter Benjamin, and of course and especially the Nazi-period. Most texts use the modern figure of the flâneur or a similar character type to focus literary attention on a city that not only – as the myth of the metropolis puts it – breaches the individual’s perception by its sheer

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size, but does so even with its fragmented and shattered history still legible in its cityscape. Berlin has lost forever its nineteenth-century image as a parvenu without history. Some examples are Ulf-Peter Hallberg’s Flanörens blick (1993; The Glance of the Flâneur), Klaus Rifbjerg’s Berlinerdage (1995; Berlin Days), Carl-Johan Vallgren’s Berlin på 8 kapitel (1999; Berlin in 8 Chapters), and Dag Solstad’s 16.07.41 (2002). These texts evoke Berlin by means of their often fragmented manner of perception; all of them use a walking-tour lecture by a (post) modernized figure of the flâneur to approach the city. In Hallberg’s text, this figure has entered the title. Berlin is the pivotal point of the text as the tourist capital of the new Europe (Hallberg 175), even if it is just one of the great metropolises of the new and old Europe that he visits. The flâneur meets and interviews intellectuals from all over Europe and tries to recover a supposed intellectual European heritage through travel (Mohnike 219–30). Perhaps the best-known contemporary novel about Berlin is Dag Solstad’s 16.07.41, published in 2002. The novel is staged as a fictional autobiography in which the fictional Dag Solstad is hunted by an angel-like father when he takes a plane to Berlin, thereby alluding to the Berlin of Peter Weiss and Wim Wenders’s movie Engel über Berlin (1987; Wings of Desire). The protagonist tries to understand the city by walking or taking the public transportation. The city appears in his text as a network of places and “linguistic data” (Krouk 174) that are temporarily put into order by the walking subject and may be deciphered through the knowledge of history: 1800  – tallsbyen, som dannet Berlin som begrep. Museene. Berliner Dom. Synagogen. Teatrene. Operaene. Kneipene. De flotte restaurantene. Avisene. Kulturen. Riksdagsbygningen. Berlinerne. Parkene. Unter den Linden. Den smale Friedrichstrasse. Tiergarten. Bahnhof Zoologische Garten. Friedrichstrasse S-banestasjon. Fire riker har gått under på 80 år, alle med Berlin som hovedstad. Keiserriket. Weimar-republikken. Nazi-Tyskland. DDR. (Solstad 47) (The nineteenth-century city that established Berlin as a concept. The museums. The Berlin Cathedral. The synagogue. The theaters. The operas. The pretty restaurants. The newspapers. The culture. The Reichstag building. The people of Berlin. The parks. Unter den Linden. The narrow Friedrichstraße. Tiergarten. Zoologischer Garten Bahnhof. Friedrichstraße station. Four empires disappeared in eighty years. All with Berlin as their capital. The German Empire. The Weimar Republic. Nazi-Germany. GDR.)

Words, impressions, and ideas are juxtaposed making sense only by way of a subjective interpretation, a technique that recalls modernist writings of the city such as that of Drachmann cited above. At the same time, one may read that quotation as the summary of the history of Berlin as a subject of Nordic literature: the nineteenth-century establishment of Berlin in the Nordic imaginative geography by writers such as Steffens, Andersen, and Kierkegaard; then, the creation of the urban metropolis with theaters, newspapers, restaurants, and public transportation around the time of Strindberg and his contemporaries; and finally the accumulation of history through wars and revolutions. By now, Berlin has become an important center of European intellectual life for Nordic authors, provoking a rewriting of local Nordic histories in a European context. In different books such as Klaus Rifbjerg’s Skiftespor (2010; Changing Tracks), Bodil Steensen-Leth’s Fem år i Berlin (2008; Five Years in Berlin), Julia Butschkow’s Apropos Opa (2009; Speaking of Opa), Lars Saaby Christensen’s Halvbroderen (2002; The Half-Brother), and Per Olov Enquist’s

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autobiographical Ett annat liv (2008; Another Life), Berlin is an important point of reference and often a place that makes the protagonists reconsider the personal and/or collective history. Berlin continues to inspire Nordic art and literature, perhaps, today more than ever before. In its approximately two hundred years in Nordic imagination, it has transformed itself from a big, young city without a past to a multilayered historical accumulator, a lieu de mémoire, fully charged with European historical memory.

Poets in New York Anne-Marie Mai

The emergence of modern literature and art is linked in Europe and Scandinavia to the world of the big city. The metropolis is a topos in both Charles Baudelaire’s poetry and Charles Dickens’s novels, in Hans Christian Andersen’s tales and in Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy. The metropolis becomes the literary horizon of the modern – also in the many Scandinavian novels which, from the Danish writer Henrik Pontoppidan right up until the Swedish writer Kerstin Ekman, deal with changes to an agrarian universe. The metropolis is the stage for the development of modern literary themes about loss of tradition, secularization, a new inconstancy, temporality, transience, and randomness that both liberate and split the individual. It is primarily in nineteenth-century literature that the big cities of Paris, Berlin, and Vienna acquire a special meaning as seedbeds for discussions of modern literary poetics and the development of new international tendencies in literature and art. Big cities also become the domiciles of artists and writers who have broken out of – or been directly exiled from – a national literary and artistic environment, such as the Dane Herman Bang, who as a homosexual was under the close scrutiny of the authorities; the Swede August Strindberg, who fled from the press; or the Norwegian-Polish writer Dagny Juel-Przybyszewska, whose erotically complex bohemian life sent her on a journey through a whole series of cities in Europe and the Caucasus. Modern literature has differing capitals from the end of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Baudelaire wrote in 1861 of a Paris that was changing and filling up with new buildings, frightened animals, and homeless and defeated individuals from all corners of the globe. To Baudelaire the world of modernity is an allegory that does not refer to a higher meaning, and it turns memory into a poetic method. Paris is the first capital of modern poetry, while Berlin and Vienna in the period leading up to the First World War become centers of experimental and iconoclastic art and literature that deal with the relation between culture, gender, class, and subconscious. At regular intervals, modern art and literature seem to move their big-city stage and environment – and wars and conflicts certainly play a part therein. During the two world wars, New York became the domicile of exiled European artists and writers, and after the Second World War, it was the metropolis of the American victors; in the age of postmodernism, it became the world capital of literature and art. Poems and texts about New York appear in many Scandinavian writers’ works, almost forming a genre, with the writers exploring the conditions for modern and postmodern writing by working on sketches of city locations and forms of experiencing. Such verses can be found in Når engle bøvser jazz (1998; Burping Angels Sing Jazz), a collection of poems by the Danish writer Peter Laugesen, the title of which is a reference to the American writer Jack Kerouac. Here Peter Laugesen writes a long poetic sequence about his American sources of inspiration and about New York as a poetic state: “New York er ikke min hovedstad, jeg har den på halsen og i reolen. Den er hvad jeg læser og skriver” (Laugesen 235) [New York is not my capital. I have it round my neck and on my shelf. It is what I read and write]. It looks as if neither poet doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.22mai © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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nor reader can avoid New York; it has come into being as books, voice, and poetic cadences in the writings of Scandinavian poets, even if it is a very long way, as Laugesen writes, from his Braband, a suburb of the city Århus in Jutland, to New York. It should be noted that it is precisely the city seen through its writers, the artistic environment thereby created  – also in films and new media  – that figures prominently in the Scandinavian writing. It is the poetic, fictional New York of Walt Whitman, García Lorca, William Carlos Williams, Dos Passos, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, and Paul Auster, which is the topos and theme of Scandinavian literature. In terms of New York literature, Scandinavian writers are particularly interested in the artistic and poetic scene of the American beat generation of the 1950s and ’60s. New York is, however, present in earlier Scandinavian writing as a city of both dreams and nightmares. The first New York writers in a Scandinavian context include the Danes Johannes V. Jensen, Emil Bønnelycke, Storm Petersen, and Otto Rung, as well as the Norwegian Knut Hamsun, who visited the metropolis around the turn of the century. City of sun and dreams What is noticeable about the early New York writing is how the metropolis challenges theme, angle, and graphic form. The Danish futurist Emil Bønnelycke, for example, wrote an ekphrastic, Apollinaire-inspired New York poem in which names appeared of everything from commodities to such artists as Chaplin, Upton Sinclair, Walt Whitman, from such emigrants as Jakob A. Riis to the city’s skyscraper profile with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background. The poem was published in the expressionist periodical Klingen and parallels his Berlin poem from 1918 (also discussed in Thomas Mohnike’s essay in this volume; see Figure 26). The poem about Berlin is completely without words and is made up instead of horizontal lines. The reader here has to decide whether the many lines refer to the train tracks, cables, pipes, or streets found in modern cityscapes. Berlin is, then, seen from above or below as a structure of tracks and roads, while New York is viewed frontally as a series of architectural images. The New York poem was published in green lettering on the back cover of the periodical, and the urban image resembles a modern cathedral world. Language, humanity, and architecture are inscribed in each other in this dream of a beautifully written city. Several years before Bønnelycke, Johannes V. Jensen praises modernity’s liberated forms of experience in his long text “New York,” which introduces his volume of prose Den Ny verden (1907; The New World). Johannes V. Jensen visited New York for the first time during his world tour of 1902–03 and remained fascinated with the city as the new life’s laboratory and birthplace of the modern, vitalistic individual whose gaze is fixed on the future. In “New York,” Jensen listens to the city’s voices of street vendors and guides while retaining in his text the city’s movement in the form of the many pedestrians who saunter down the streets chewing gum. The image of New York is finally gathered in the text into a vision of a big city with dwellings pushed up into the sky by the clear air and full of tall, slim New Yorkers. The city, the people, and nature are intertwined as in a modern gothic structure where daytime is always “aaben, drømmeløs, med den fyrige Sol paa Himlen” (9) [open, dreamless with the fiery sun in the sky].

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Johannes V. Jensen returned on several occasions to develop his poetic images, as in the poem “Flyveren” (1938; The Aircraft), where Manhattan is seen from a cockpit and experienced as a modern Babel and a soap bubble. The city is both fragile and fabulous since it reminds humanity of its own powers and position in a greater cosmos. There is the mighty sun that shines over all sorts of bridges and cities thereby demonstrating the existence of cosmic forces greater than humanity and its marvels. Just like Johannes V. Jensen, the young Norwegian Knut Hamsun is vociferous in his praise of the modern metropolis in connection with his visit to New York in 1882. Writing home to a friend, he enthusiastically notes: “De, Torger, burde været med i New York og seet al Herligheden der. Jernbanen gaar op i Luften over Folks Hustage, og Telegraf- og Telefontraadene er spændt i Tusinder fra Hus til andet” (Knut Hamsuns Brev 27) [You, Torger, ought to have been with me here in New York and seen all the marvelous things here. The railway runs high up above people’s rooftops, and the telegraph and telephone wires are stretched by the thousands from one house to another]. A few years later, Hamsun had completely changed his view of New York. The city is now seen as symbolizing a modern industrial advertising hell from which Hamsun distances himself. In his collection of lectures Fra det moderne Amerikas aandsliv (1889; The Cultural Life of Modern America) given in Copenhagen, Hamsun presents Ellis Island, where the many emigrants from all over the world are received, as a frightful industrial conveyor belt. Ellis Island is simply an inhuman bureaucratic machine that admits those capable of working their way to the promised land, the racket, smoke, and noise of which takes the breath away from every European. “Der er overalt det samme travle Hurra i Tingene, samme Damphammerstøj, samme larmende Bevægelse i alt, hvad der foregaar” (2) [“Everywhere there is the same bustling hurrah in things, the same steam-hammer din, the same clamorous activity in everything that goes on” (5)]. The American dream of freedom is as noisy and restless as the city of New York itself. The reader experiences a world of clamor, steam, and groaning piston engines that Hamsun detests. And American writing, at best, leaves the archconservative Hamsun completely cold. Hamsun distances himself from the technology and industrialization of New York on the basis of a declared culturally conservative political attitude that praises the traditional life of the common people and its ideals. The Spanish writer Frederico García Lorca, like Hamsun, has close ties to old, European rural life but does not draw the same political conclusions as Hamsun. The anxiety he feels about the industrialized, mechanical world of New York is mainly expressed in modern, experimental writing. Lorca’s poetic work Poeta en Nueva York (1940; Poet in New York) depicts in surrealist imagery the horror of capitalism that fills the poet when in 1929 he is a student at Columbia University. Lorca’s critique of the big-city poetry is echoed by both American and European poets even when New York is seen in a more positive light later in the century. Scandinavian literature includes a number of depictions of the northern Europeans who emigrated to America and came to Ellis Island and New York. The Norwegian writer Toril Brekke describes in the first volume of a series of historical novels Drømmen om Amerika (2006; The Dream of America) the early emigration of the 1820s, when a group of destitute and religiously persecuted Norwegian men and women arrived in New York. They were on the very first ship carrying Nordic emigrants to arrive in America, and Ellis Island was not yet the point of disembarkation for the more than twenty million travelers who arrived before 1890.

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In Brekke’s book, the Norwegians cautiously make their way into a city that is still very much on the drawing board. They particularly notice the fine clothes of the inhabitants and their eyes “slukte … New Yorks brede gater” (Brekke 101) [swallowed up New York’s wide streets]. The immigrants quickly remove their shoes – in country fashion – when invited inside one of the houses. “Please, no!” the guests are told. Brekke’s account attempts to make the new world come to life via tiny details that catch the eye of the confused and shocked country people. The closer the new arrivals get to their goal, the more uncertain their dream becomes. Between anachronism and synchronism The temporary disparity between humans and life forms linked to New York in the immigrant literature is also seen in later modernist poetry. The Dane Klaus Rifbjerg, in his pivotal collection of poems, Konfrontation (1960; Confrontation), calls New York a “ny metropolis af anakronisme” (Rifbjerg 57) [new metropolis of anachronism]. Rifbjerg includes three poems  – “Madison Avenue Salme,” “Ave. Bayway,” and “Monterey”  – with an American motif in Konfrontation that add perspective to the confrontational themes of the collection and its attempts to pass beyond the traditional poetry of nature and mood. They portray modern-life forms of experience in which gender, the body, and the subconscious are realities. Rifbjerg’s American poems are echoes of Johannes V. Jensen and his translations of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. In Rifbjerg’s poems, one notices – as in Jensen and Whitman – the deep breaths of the new world. The temporal disparity of Rifbjerg’s New York derives first and foremost from the relation between nature, technology, and gender. Bayway, with its enormous, polluting refinery, is a nauseating example of the exploitation of an entire continent. Bayway looks like a cathedral but is a place of modern crime and punishment. Madison Avenue promises a golden “honey future” but ends up in boredom and provincial insanity. One cannot grow up either on Madison Avenue or in Monterey, where sex is completely off-limits in advance. Rifbjerg confronts his reader with the Whitmanesque freedom and even the joyous feeling of walking up and down Manhattan, but at the same time, he retains the provincial aspect, the exploitation, the suppression, and the madness of the American conventions. For the young Rifbjerg, New York is the metropolis of anachronism, where conventions and opportunities belong to completely different ages. An entirely different picture emerges for a slightly younger Scandinavian generation of poets writing in the mid-1960s, for whom New York is a melting pot of cultures and ages. Even though there are enormous differences between ages and cultures in the various districts of the city and among the many immigrants and even though the power of capitalism is massive, these ages – almost as in a utopia – are present at one and the same time in influencing each other in the city’s constant cultural exchanges and clashes. The city is the metropolis of a new synchronism. The novel Drömfakulteten (2005; The Dream Faculty) by the Swedish writer Sara Stridsberg describes New York precisely as the dream city for the young rebel of the 1960s; Valerie Solanas tries to escape from the past world of the Second World War and from the terrible ballast of her childhood: social and psychological misery, repressions, and abuse. New York, tragically

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enough, proves to offer no refuge for the wild, freedom-seeking feminist in the silver cloak. On the contrary, her dreams founder in the avant-garde environment, and she attempts to murder Andy Warhol, with whom she has come in contact, but who has carelessly mislaid her manuscript for a play. Sara Stridsberg makes liberal use of biographical material about the historical person, Valerie Solanas, while also occasionally making things up and jumping between the various times and places in Valerie’s life. Stridsberg’s tale becomes a mental geography, where various experiences, voices, and localities are juxtaposed. Critical dialogues between the narrator and the main character also take place, and the narrative continues the avant-gardist experiments with life and art that occurred in the New York environment. For Valerie, the time around November 1967 is the happiest. She is then living at Chelsea Hotel and writing away at her texts. But the dreams burst. The avant-garde environment is destructive – as is Valerie herself. Sara Stridsberg’s novel is part of the interpretation of the 1960s avant-garde, beat-poetry, and New York scenes with which literature of the period from the 1960s to the present day has dealt with quite intensely. The Danes Jørgen Leth, Hans-Jørgen Nielsen, Peter Laugesen, Klaus Høeck, Suzanne Brøgger, and Dan Turèll have all often recalled their American roots and the New York universe in poems and essays. A number of recent academic studies have dealt with the beat generation and its importance in a Scandinavian and particularly Danish context. The writer and film director Jørgen Leth managed to get Andy Warhol to be part of his first version of the film 66 Scener fra Amerika (1982; 66 Scenes from America). Leth talks about his work on the film, his meeting with Warhol, and the American thematics in his memoirs Guldet på havets bund: Det uperfekte menneske 2 (2007; Gold at the Bottom of the Sea: The Imperfect Man 2). Leth’s interest in the United States of America begins as enthusiasm for jazz, drama, and films during the 1950s and is later also motivated by the wish to present a view of the United States different from the demonized one of the 1970s in connection with the worldwide revulsion at the Vietnam War. In his films, as in his poetry and prose, Leth works with simple scenes, clichés, advertisements, brand names, postcards, small narratives, and nature mortes. Leth describes New York and America as a pure love story in telling about his fascination with such places as Sardi’s bar near Times Square. The howl from America The American architect Lewis Mumford emphasizes that the ideal aim of the big city is to create meetings between people, classes, and groups. The city is to function as a stage where the drama of social life can be enacted and where the roles of actors and audience can take turns. During the 1950s and ’60s, New York resembled that kind of artistic big-city stage upon which musicians, poets, cinema enthusiasts, and visual artists met, inspired each other, and entered into ever-new constellations. With Allen Ginsberg’s pivotal poem “Howl: For Carl Solomon” (1956), which he read aloud for the first time in San Francisco in 1955, literary culture gained a new, highly poetic field that was present in a number of American and European big cities. In “Howl,” Ginsberg, making use of the bebop style of jazz, sings critically and with many

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complaints about American life and his own generation of poets and artists who live, go mad, and die in the shadow of the cruel Moloch of capitalism and industrialism. Beat poetry, with leading figures like Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, who had met at Columbia University in the 1940s, became very important in Scandinavian literature. “Vi hørte hylet fra Amerika / og fes forvirret rundt på vejene” (Laugesen 13–9) [We heard the howl from America / and dashed around the streets in confusion] as the Dane Peter Laugesen later writes in “Poetik,” Vindens tunge (1986; The Wind’s Tongue). “Howl” was published as early as 1956 in a Norwegian translation by Olav Angell. In Denmark, the beat poets were introduced in the periodical Vindrosen in 1959, where Poul Sørensen’s Danish translation of “Howl” was published. In Sweden 4 Poeter appeared, with selected poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Anselm Hollo, and Lionel Kearns in Gunnar Harding’s 1966 translation. Another extremely strong impulse came from the blues/folk and later the rock scene in New York, which Bob Dylan came to in 1960 as a poor young folk musician. For his debut album, Bob Dylan (1962), he wrote the song “Talkin’ New York,” in which he made liberal use of the repertoire of folk music about the traveler who arrives in the big city, gets a job, and sings his lungs out for a dollar a day. Winter in New York is ice-cold, Dylan writes, but even though the young man, like everyone else, is dying from the cold, he does not freeze in this city where he is allowed to be a musician and artist. A Danish view of New York scenes is found at various places in Elsa Gress’s essays. In “Gensyn med New York” (1967; New York Revisited), she wrote about her experiences at the club The Village Gate, in whose basement Dylan had written “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” in 1962. Gress did not, however, like either the noisy music or the young people at the club. She was and remained unsympathetic towards the mixing of high-brow and low-brow culture as found in the New York artistic environment of the 1960s. Nor did Anders Bodelsen feel any urge to get to know the experimental artistic environment. In his essay “Skudvinkler i New York” (1972; Angles of Elevation in New York), he wrote about how he left his hotel room as soon as possible when he realized that during his visit to New York he had been staying at the Chelsea Hotel in which Warhol shot his famous film Chelsea Girls (1966) and which the man-hater Valerie Solanas used to frequent! While Bodelsen maintained a suitable distance, such poets as Klaus Høeck, Peter Laugesen, Dan Turèll, Kate Næs, Jan Erik Vold, Paal Helge Haugen, Tor Åge Bringsværd, Göran Tunström, Suzanne Brøgger, and Hans-Jørgen Nielsen inhaled the experimental American sources. The anti-Americanism that became prevalent in the left-wing environments of the 1970s and in the protest movements connected to the Vietnam War did not prevent Scandinavian poets from feeling a deep affiliation with American poetry and music. As Peter Laugesen explained with regard to his generation: “Alt det gjorde, at der for os kun var et nu, som vi samlede op i halvtredserne, hovedsagelig i den amerikanske jazz-musik hos Charlie Parker og fremad. Now is the time” (Mai and Borup 251) [All this meant that for us there was just a now, which we picked up in the 1950s, mainly in American jazz and onwards. Now is the time]. Dan Turèll went so far as to declare himself not a Danish-American but an American Dane: “Og en meget stor del af min generation og de fleste af mine venner er amerikaner-danskere.” (Turèll 8) [And a great number of my generation and most of my friends are American Danes].

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Turèll saw himself as a “fatherland-free Frankenstein,” much more at home in American pop culture and avant-garde art than among Danish national treasures and entertainment icons. Dan Turèll brought together his articles about American sources of inspiration in the collection Amerikanske ansigter (1979; American Faces) where he wrote about scenes in his native Copenhagen surroundings in such a way that they became hardly distinguishable from the New York metropolis. Several of his poems transplant a downright jazzy New York aesthetic to the Vesterbro district of Copenhagen. The Americanization is also a globalization, and New York becomes a symbol of this new cultural situation: “jeg så verden på amerikansk/gennem solbriller / a la general mac arthur // hele den amerikanske nat / gennem sodsværtet glas så jeg / endnu før john f kennedy var død” (Høeck 17) [I saw the world in American / through sun glasses / à la General MacArthur // the entire American night / through sooty glass I saw / even before John F. Kennedy was dead]. Klaus Høeck’s Honeymoon (1997) takes place in New York and tells of the poet’s meeting with his American artistic sources on his and his wife’s honeymoon trip that had been delayed for ten years. Perhaps the poet should have taken his honeymoon earlier just as he should have experienced the city years earlier, precisely because his own poetry has so many American prerequisites. But the timing is unimportant since the poetic I is always mentally present in the city and in contact with its art and life in the same way as he is always in contact with his beloved. For that reason, the I-figure does not set out on any voyage of discovery, but moves around New York like a tourist writing instant poems, gospel songs, haikus, and boulevard sonnets about the works, the clichés, the brands, and all the unknown things that are part of the poet himself. New York is a landscape of stories, poems, images, sports, and advertising that is and has been present in the poetic “I” throughout his life. That is also why the skyscrapers can be seen as joyful childhood toys: High sonnet chopper up helikopter hummingbird    guldsmed som hjemme over langesø    ingen højdeskræk tingene pludse lig små som før var så store poet    in the sky skyskraberne domino    brikker zippolightere på højkant meccanbroerne technobiler    træerne reduceret til bonsai    dernede i central park søernes hjulkapsler af nikkel alle mine barn    doms drømme og legetøjsfæstninger    pludselig realiserede i sytten minutter over manhattan    selvom det er alt for sent til den slags. (Høeck 35) (chopper up helicopter hummingbird    dragonflies like home over langesø    no fear of heights things suddenly small that formerly seemed to be so large poet    in the sky the skyscrapers just like dom-

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282    inoes zippo lighters stood up on end the meccano bridges dinky cars the    trees all reduced to the size of bonsai    down there in central park the nickel hubcaps of the lakes all the dreams and the toy    fortifications of my childhood sud   denly realized in the short space of seventeen minutes over manhattan    even though it’s far too late for such stuff.)

City of the body It would seem from the texts as if one either has to experience New York from above or as a pedestrian. Many literary depictions of New York are descriptions of experiencing the city on foot. The dimensions of the big city, despite its relatively manageable area, seem so immense that actual footsteps are utterly necessary for activating consciousness and getting geographical and cultural experiences to imprint themselves on the mind. The area covered by New York is 786 sq. km (303 sq. miles), of which Manhattan covers 59 sq. km (22 sq. miles) – by way of comparison, the area of Copenhagen is 90 sq. km (35 sq. miles). Walking maintains one’s awareness by creating a rhythm and a body-time that enables the changing world of the city to be grasped. As the French historian and philosopher Michel de Certeau emphasizes in his essay “Marche dans la ville” (“Walking in the City”), pedestrians create the city as they move through it. In Da jeg opdagede Amerika (1986; When I Discovered America,), the Danish writer and visual artist Dea Trier Mørch walks the length and breadth of Manhattan. It takes her an hour to cross it via Forty-Second Street, while the walk along Broadway takes eight hours. She walks through widely differing districts and meets people of all ages. Walking makes Mørch’s presentation engaging and cinematic. Sensory impressions are processed and, even though the narrative is listing and lapidary, it forms a sequence. The walking writer discovers the city and herself as a citizen in a multi-cultural world, letting small drawings and sketches underpin the impression of a presentation where all the senses are open to an acquisition of the city. The drawings help form an interpretation of the text of the big city that de Certeau claims the pedestrian produces but is not personally able to decode. As an openly leftwing artist and activist, Dea Trier Mørch has a host of Marxist concepts and political analyses as part of her luggage, but she fortunately lets go of all this by discovering that here she must rely on her body and her intuition. For many Scandinavian writers, the meeting with New York is an experience of being uprooted from a familiar national mono-culture and being placed in a new, paradoxical one where preconceived ideas fall short and where the artist is constantly challenged by sights, sounds, contacts, and the tingling of one’s feet and heartbeat. Hans-Jørgen Nielsen, a year earlier than Dea Trier Mørch, described the architecture of New York in the title of one of his essays as “billeder på intetheden: stort, storslået, forbløffende, mirakuløst” (“Billeder” 201) [images of nothingness: big, great, astounding, miraculous] and finally even found himself stating that the Grand Canyon is almost as beautiful as Manhattan.

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The romantic mode of experience that places nature above culture is shaken by the postmodern beauty of the metropolis. In Hans-Jørgen Nielsen’s optic, the city shows the stylistic history of all of modern art. But more than that, it is an artistically enchanting syntax of adjectives, adverbs, and exclamations: “Byen er den gyldne by. Både kosmos og intethed. Det tyvende århundrede bragt til ende i uendelige gentagelser af sig selv og tidligere århundreder længe før det énogtyvende århundredes begyndelse” (223) [The city is a golden city. Both cosmos and nothingness. The twentieth century concluded in endless repetitions of itself and former centuries long before the beginning of the twenty-first century].

Figure 27.  New York City’s Madison Avenue, pedestrian view. Photo: author’s own.

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Figure 28.  Manhattan high-rise buildings. Photo: author’s own.

Camilla Christensen’s poem “I New York” (In New York) from her collection Fugl eller fisk (2009; Fowl or Fish) also takes the relation between body and city as its point of departure and the experience of being shaken out of habitual spatial dimensions and ways of experiencing. The whole collection deals with places and sensory experiences and of being present in the world as a human body. I New York løftes man gang på gang, bæres frem, sættes ned og snurrer om sig selv, vi oplever steder med kroppen, ikke kun med øjet; mursejlere spiser og sover mens de flyver og folk fra de varme lande forstår sig

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på baldakiner; parken er en stue og fluerne kredser midt under loftets roset, hjemme er et særligt sted, her er det nemt at finde rundt, det bratte udsyn mellem bygninger får muskler til at smerte, pupiller til at krympe: derude strømmer floden, havet og måneseglet ligger pludselig vandret som en vugge, Venus er forsvundet som havde halvkuglerne skiftet plads og det har de måske, eller også er det mig. (Christensen 55) (In New York one is lifted time after time, carried forward, put down and spins round oneself, we experience places with the body, not only with the eye; swifts eat and sleep while they fly and people from hot countries know all about canopies; the park is a living room and the flies circle round the rosette in the ceiling, home is a special place, it’s easy to find your way around here, the sudden view between buildings hurts your muscles, makes your pupils contract: out there flows the river, the sea and suddenly the moon’s crescent lies horizontal like a cradle, Venus has vanished as if the hemispheres had changed places as they possibly have, or maybe it is me.)

Precisely one’s presence in New York evokes the phenomenology of the body that is the condition of the ego and a new poetry, and the New York poem, thus, becomes a key for interpreting the entire collection of poems. For many Scandinavian authors, New York is a city of the body, gender, and art. These characteristics particularly apply to Suzanne Brøgger’s confessional book Creme Fraiche (1978). Here she experiences herself using the city to expand the mental and physical capacity of her writing while at the same time, it should be noted, keeping the city at a distance. In the narrative, the author moves freely between localities in the East, Denmark, and United States, and is only driven by an inextinguishable artistic desire for freedom. In her optic, New York offers the artist opportunities to be reflected in unknown appearances, to express sexuality, and to break taboos without being overwhelmed and devoured. She has a cast made of her vagina in tropical green plastic (slightly magnified!) and witnesses urine sex and fistfucking, but she herself is only superficially affected. As a writer, Suzanne Brøgger is transformed into a narcissistic voyeur, who has to see and be seen in her ambition to represent liberation. New York is not a location in Creme Fraiche but an allegory of the artistic practice for which Brøgger is striving. Jeg kunne se hele New York, så klart var det. Glasklubben svævede på en sky, det samme gjorde jeg, let euforisk af sult som jeg var, og luften var varm på huden. Skyskraberne lignede kæmpe diamanter der reflekterede hinanden hvidt og gyldent, og jeg kunne se ind i de lyserøde oplyste kontorer. Det kildede i mig ved tanken om, at der sad nogle ‘executives,’ som kunne se mig uden at nå mig. Det var mig der så ned på dem oppe fra luften – min yndlingsposition! (47) (I could see all New York – it was that clear. The glass club floated on a cloud, and so did I, slightly euphoric from hunger as I was, and the air was warm on my skin. The skyscrapers looked like huge diamonds reflecting each other in white and gold, and I could see into the pink, lit-up offices. The thought tickled me that there were executives sitting there who could see me without being able to reach me. I was the one looking down at them from the sky – my favorite position.)

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While Michel de Certeau recommends looking down at New York from above in order to observe how the city invents itself from one hour to the next, in Brøgger’s thinking it is the performative self-invention of the New York artist that ought to be the goal of one’s gaze. Suzanne Brøgger’s poetics were further developed and renewed in Niels Frank’s reflections on the New York of the body, art, and gender. The cover of his Spørgespil (2010; Question Game) is adorned with a series of Warhol-inspired portraits of the poet himself. New York is the incarnation of playing with identities and gender and the possibility of doing away with the traditional European thinking in terms of identities, in which inheritance, environment, and personal Bildung continue to obsess people. In Spørgespil Frank tells stories of New York’s artist and gay bars and uses the American world as a powerful quasi optical zoom-in of the relation between poetry, desire, power, and sexuality. As a writer, Frank is more preoccupied with the New York school of the 1950s than with the beat poets. He has shown a particular interest in the poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashberry and on several occasions has presented the poetics of the New York school in a Danish context and demonstrated its importance for a new kind of poetry that seeks phenomenological “genesis” rather than European being and insight. Prose writers in New York Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy (1985–87) has been particularly well received in Scandinavia by both readers and reviewers. The novel series has been seen as a deconstruction of the traditional detective genre. In Auster’s writing, the stories intertwine and get lost in language that appears to be some sort of game in which the architecture and geography of the city form frameworks and mirrors. Paul Auster has become a model for many writers because of both his deconstructive aesthetics and his ability to create an almost old-fashioned atmosphere and tension. One can see, for example, the influence of Auster aesthetics on the writing of the Swede Håkan Nesser in his best seller, the New York crime novel Maskarna på Carmine Street (2009; The Worms of Carmine Street). The novel deals with a European couple – both artists – who have settled in New York after the mysterious disappearance of their daughter and, like Auster, Nesser thematizes the connection between language, consciousness, and the outside world. While the European world represents a repression of the past and the subconscious in the novel, the streets of New York, which should otherwise have helped them forget, become constitutive of the characters’ hidden past. The new world helps solve European mysteries. “Vi kom til New York med fire fyldte kufferter og to tomme hjerter.” (7) [We came to New York with four fully packed suitcases and two empty brains] is how the story begins, but it is the metropolis that helps the characters rid themselves of their emotional baggage and gives their hearts feeling once again. The novel concludes with a happy gaze that takes in their retrieved daughter and the Empire State Building. Auster’s New York series has a Scandinavian counterpart in Syvsoverskens dystre frokost (1976; The Sleepyhead’s Gloomy Breakfast) by the Norwegian writer Tor Åge Bringsværd. The novel, which has the subtitle “en underholdningsroman paa liv og død” [A Light Novel about Life and Death] takes place in New York among office girls, writers, detectives, and insane people. Auster possibly dipped deeply into Bringsværd’s book although Syvsoverskens dystre

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frokost is not one of Auster’s directly avowed intertextual references. Bringsværd’s crime novel is also, unlike Auster’s, humorous. It is clear, however, that the two writers share ideas about the doubling of characters and the inclusion of a writer who is visited by his characters and vice versa. They both include number and letter riddles, as well as a more or less insane character’s struggle to maintain control of the world. Bringsværd’s novel is a form of systematic prose that allows him to mix both highbrow and lowbrow genres, make fun of artistic environments, sexual emancipation, and all conventions as to what the author can and cannot allow himself in a novel. The author admits that he is dreaming of writing a very large, European, gothic tale but says that he is always being interrupted by highly unsuitable characters and scenes. Humor is also important in Göran Tunström’s En prosaist i New York (1996; A Prose Writer in New York), but unlike Bringsværd’s portrayal of an author, Tunström has long since proven himself by means of major Scandinavian and European novels and his ultra-short New York tale. En prosaist i New York deals with a writer who arrives in New York just after completing a long European opus dealing with humanity’s modern formation of identity on the basis of Rembrandt’s self-portraits. After this major feat, the writer feels relieved that his most important observation is a single sentence: “En lätt bris fick trädets lövverk att skälva i eftermiddagshettan” (Tunström 5) [A light breeze causes the trees’ foliage to quiver in the afternoon heat]. The author hopes that the sentence can put him on the track of new narratives and characters. He rents an apartment in the Tribeca district from an eccentric painter who lives out the old, European artistic dream of being a totally misunderstood genius. The author begins, by chance, to pretend to be the painter and soon finds himself in the midst of a series of entanglements with a beautiful photo model and the painter’s wife. He is successful in New York’s snobbish, avant-garde gallery environment and manages to sell one of the painter’s trashy paintings at a sky-high price. On paper, then, it is not the writer’s sentence but the lousy work of the artist that occasions love stories and the possibility of exchanging roles and masks. The novel ends with the writer’s sentence, which is now part of a story of how he and the painter’s wife both leave for the locale where she and the painter once stayed when newly married – on paper, at least! For, as the writer thinks with F. Scott Fitzgerald (citing him directly in English in the Swedish text), “Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person” (Tunström 53). In New York’s Tribeca, this modern artist’s conflict becomes a postmodern diversion. Everything glitters The terror attack of September 11, 2001 had a considerable impact on New York’s international literature and has changed the importance of the city as a global focal point. One of the most significant novels about September 11 is Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), which tells of the actual attack and the effects of it on a group of New Yorkers. While DeLillo finds striking ways of telling about 9/11, the Danish writer Stig Dalager chooses to develop a more traditional novel. In his series of novels about the lawyer Jon Bæksgaard, an account of the events of September 11 is inserted. In volume three of the series, Skyggeland (2007; Shadowland), Bæksgaard finds himself close to the attack and has to save his

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girlfriend Eve from one of the burning buildings at the very last moment. The series of novels about Jon Bæksgaard is constructed as a classical Bildungsroman that takes the main character from Denmark out into the wide world – including New York. But the city becomes neither a domicile nor a terminus for the restless Jon. To Stig Dalager’s character, New York is just one of several focal points in a world of constant wars and conflicts. It is no longer the capital of the world. New York, a city where many Scandinavian writers have taken up residence, is also the site of many types of poems, novels, and prose exposés from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Scandinavian literature has depicted New York as the capital of modernity, as a capitalistic hell, and as a wonder of postmodernism. To new generations of writers, New York is less astonishing and more familiar than it was in the twentieth century. New York resembles a classical hometown of art and culture. The Danish poet, Naja Marie Aidt, is one of the temporary emigrants of the new millennium. Her poems in Alting blinker (2009; Everything Glitters) have as their point of departure life in New York after September 11. In the introductory poem “Fjerde april” (7) [Fourth of April] the personal life histories of the poetic I and her family and that of the city merge. New York has become part of the personal history: Engang var der borgerkrig engang blev en sort mand præsident dengang sang man i gaderne engang var byen farlig engang var den bange dengang tårnene faldt var den bange engang satte man alle sindssyge i fængsel engang mødte min mor min far engang landede jeg i Newark med et ordentligt bump. (7) (Once there was civil war once a black man became president then people sang in the streets once the city was dangerous once it was afraid when the towers fell it was afraid once they put all the mentally ill in prison once my mother met my father once I landed in Newark with a big bump).

The world of the city is represented in her poetry by human figures, lights, shadows, street names, objects, and voices. Everything glitters in the outside world, but the city of New York is far less exotic than it once was. It has become one of the global hometowns on the mental and literary map of the twenty-first century.

Lightscapes Dan Ringgaard

Again it is tempting to open the discussion of a node with an almost archetypical passage from the fairy tales and stories of Hans Christian Andersen. Here, “Sneedronningen” (1845; “The Snow Queen”): Slottets Vægge vare af den fygende Snee og Vinduer og Døre af de skjærende Vinde; der vare over hundrede Sale, alt ligesom Sneen fygede, den største strakte sig mange Mile, alle belyste af de stærke Nordlys, og de vare saa store, saa tomme, saa isnende kolde og saa skinnende…. Nordlysene blussede saa nøiagtigt, at man kunde tælle sig til, naar de vare paa det Høieste, og naar de vare paa det Laveste. Midt derinde i den tomme uendelige Sneesal var der en frossen Sø; den var revnet i tusinde Stykker, men hvert Stykke var saa akkurat ligt det andet, at det var et heelt Kunststykke; og midt paa den sad Sneedronningen … (326–27) (The walls of the palace were made of snow, and the windows and doors of the sharp winds; it contained more than a hundred halls, the largest several miles long. All were lighted by the sharp glare of the northern lights; they were huge, empty, and terrifyingly cold… . The northern lights burned so precisely that you could tell to the very second when they would be at their highest and their lowest points. In the middle of that enormous snow hall was a frozen lake. It had cracked into thousands of pieces and every one of them was shaped exactly like all the others. In the middle of the lake was the throne of the Snow Queen.) [Hauggard 258–59]

A completely white majestic world on the northern edge of the world made of snow, wind, ice, light, and, above all, empty space is frozen fast as if life itself had turned to ice. It is still completely ephemeral with walls, windows, and doors of wind and drifting snow and shaped by the continual changing hues of the northern lights reminding the reader that all this whiteness appears as a feeble, dreamlike apparition against the backdrop of an all-encompassing darkness. In Andersen’s romantic and southern-Scandinavian vision of the North, it is a fascinating place and at the same time a place of evil. As is often the case with the Nordic lightscapes, it is a transcendent and a transformative scape. The idea of the North often comes in the guise of a lightscape (Davidson 21–50, 67–83, 159–72); it may appear as life frozen in time and space, but on closer inspection it is a place where the solidity of the ground has vanished and changing lights, winds, and waters reside on the edge of the unknown. Geographically or meteorologically speaking, Nordic light includes many changing lights: the long transformations of dusk and dawn, the huge differences between summer and winter, the mythic celebration of Midsummer, the northern phenomenon of the midnight sun and the aurora borealis, or the multiple gray shades of the South and the West. But lightscapes are more than that. They are inextricably connected to climate: the differences in temperature, the rain and the snow, and the mild and the rough winds. It has to do with atmosphere, changing moods; it evokes memories and reveries; and we attach symbolic meanings to whatever form it may take; it is the conditions of life that we try to master and change and the ecological consequences of that. A lightscape might be whatever is in the air.

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In two comprehensive essays Svend Erik Larsen maps the “Myth and Meaning of Foreign Lightscapes.” The essays begin with the cosmologies that have influenced Nordic ideas of light – among others Genesis and the Old Norse poem about creation, Vǫluspá (Prophecy of the Völva). Larsen points to the transformative and transcendent qualities of lightscapes in the Nordic tradition, lightscapes that interestingly enough tend to be located elsewhere, be it an imaginary elsewhere or a geographical elsewhere usually located in the South. Covering an admirable number of texts from the breadth of the region’s literary history and accounting ambitiously for the specifics of Nordic literature within the major epistemic shifts he proposes, Larsen’s essay frames the Lightscapes node and offers a series of literary constellations across Nordic time and space. With the exception of the myths, lightscapes first appear in Nordic literature during the first half of the sixteenth century. From here on Larsen works with four types of lightscapes: (1) metaphysical and religious lightscapes shaped by God (c. 1500 to c. 1870), (2) poetic lightscapes shaped by the force of the word (c. 1600 to the present), (3) cognitive lightscapes (c. 1750–1925) linked to the idea of Enlightenment, and (4) geographical lightscapes (c. 1800 to the present). The first three are imagined lightscapes not bound to place, whereas the fourth is a material lightscape closely related to the emergence of aesthetic landscapes and later on transformed by the artificial night light of the cityscape. The two subsequent contributions to the topic fall within the paradigms presented in Larsen’s essays. Pia Ahlbäck reads Eino Leino, Hella Wuolijoki, and Arvid Mörne in order to explore the qualities and interaction of light and darkness by moving from the dark Finnish forest to the sunlit fields seen in the darkness of the cinema and then to the lighthouses of the Baltic archipelago with their beams of light focused by lenses and sweeping through the darkness of night. In Leino the strong light casts dark mental shadows in a fundamentally Nordic staging of nature and psyche. In her films, Wuollijoki deterritorializes Leino’s lightscapes only to reterritorialize them in the space of the cinema and the minds of the viewer as a light that has traveled through time. Finally Mörne’s watery lightscape is a disseminated light torn between the nature of the inner heartland of Finland, the Finland-Swedish inclination westward toward Sweden, and the light of the actual island. The sweeping beam of light projected by the lighthouse is the symbol of a life in between. In Stavanger on the West Coast of Norway  – one of the most rain-drenched spots in Norden – Per Thomas Andersen traces the development of inner light into the light of labor as a Nordic and Protestant story of secularization and glocalization. The essay begins with his portrayal of the intimate connection between inner light and melancholia in a reading of Jon Fosse’s novels Melancholia I-II (1995–96) and Arne Garborg’s poem Haugtussa (1895; Hulder); he then turns to the industrial light of modernity in the novels of Kjartan Fløgstad and of globalization in Øivind Rimbereid’s collection of poetry Solaris korrigert (2004; Solaris Adjusted). The Protestant inner light serves as a bridge between the visible and the invisible in justifying worldly concerns and creating a moral foundation for the light of Enlightenment and industrialization. In Rimbereid’s science-fiction poem, this light becomes glocal as the artificial light of the drilling rigs off the Norwegian West Coast assume the same shape as those just off the coast of China but are described in the strangest local dialect: global light draped in local lingo.

Myth and meaning of foreign lightscapes in Nordic literatures 1 The imaginary elsewhere Svend Erik Larsen “Sun came from the South” In 1711 the Norwegian priest and poet Petter Dass published his Bibelsk Viisebog (Psalm Book) in which he recast biblical accounts as narrative folksongs. Concerning the creation he wrote: Først kom Liuset for en Dag Saa blev Himmelen til Tag … Saa kom Jordens heele Tragt Saa kom Soelen i sin Pragt (2:15) (First light appeared in the day, then the sky became a roof … then came the entire Earth, then came the Sun in all its glory)

These lines are but one among many echoes in Nordic literatures of the words of Genesis “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” (1:3–4) They resound with a shared meaning: creation as a lightscape is the world of human life, which in this case is given and controlled by a divine power. When light is called into existence also the quotidian world embracing both humans and their surroundings comes into being: water, animal, plants, the air, the stars, and the moon. The lightscape is constitutive of everything that exists. In particular, the intimate connection between the creative word and the lightscape became a lasting inspiration in literature down to the present day even as its religious foundation has gradually disappeared. With the expansion of Christianity, the version of the creation from Genesis met and at times blended with other and – in most cases – different narratives. There are two pre-Christian Nordic myths of creation, the Finnish Kalevala and the Old Norse Vǫluspá. In Kalevala, the account of the creation of the world is brief: it was created from the egg of a mythical duck with the yoke being the sun shining in the world (1:235–37). Most important for the story is the life of the hero, Väinö, born in a starry darkness. Lightscapes and creative words play no role. Although hailed as the Finnish national epic, Elias Lönnrot’s compilation of stories and songs from various regions of Finland during the mid-nineteenth century never has exercised any influence on the imagination of Nordic literature as a whole. But in the broader European cultural realm, the Old Norse cosmology did. In the poem of creation, Vǫluspá (tenth century), light and creation arose together. Vǫluspá is the prophecy of the Nordic sibyl, the Vǫlva, who remembers everything even from before the beginning of time. Before creation, there was emptiness rather than darkness, of which plenty still abounds in the North long after the creation. Then the gods filled the void and built first the home of humans (Midgaarð) before they began discussing the organization of the world, which they, like God in Genesis, shaped by naming day and night and all things that were and by placing the sun, the moon, and the stars, which did not on their own know where to take their place in their orbit. doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.24lar © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Although the role of light and sun in Vǫluspá is generally consistent with Genesis, it does not have the same significance. Most important is its origin: it comes from elsewhere. In the moment of creation, one learns about the sun: “Sól varp sunnan” (Str. 5:1) [Sun came from the South]. The same is true of sun above the world of human existence, Midgaarð: “sól scein sunnan” (Str. 4:3) [Sun shone from the South]. In contrast to Genesis, this lightscape does not rest on an abstract or metaphysical power with a non-directional reference to a divinity. The source of the lightscape is concrete, although not to the extent of the egg yoke in Kalevala, and there is, moreover, a spatial direction to its place of origin. Two other cosmologies also played a role in the Nordic conception of the lightscape from elsewhere: Greek mythology and Islam. These two worldviews were unknown to the peoples of the North in the eleventh century though Islam was recognized by a few as a pagan belief that was encountered during the expeditions of the Vikings or during the crusades. But neither ever entered Nordic culture as a metaphysical worldview until much later and then as a secular dream world, a lost or foreign realm of light and humanity located around the Mediterranean. This vision was evoked by the adoration of European antiquity pervaded by light, whiteness, and humanity as nurtured by the cultural elite of the eighteenth century. In Homer they read about Olympus where “ἀλλὰ μάλ᾽ αἴθρη πέπταται ἀνέφελος, λευκὴ δ᾽ ἐπιδέδρομεν αἴγλη” (Odyssey 6:44; 208) [“the air is outspread clear and cloudless, and over it hovers a radiant whiteness” (6:44; 209)] and translated it into a utopian human lightscape. A concomitant but more vague Orientalism also emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it depended more on travel accounts and the French translation of Arabian Nights by Antoine Galland (1704–17) than on a serious understanding of the Qur’an and Islam. This European reception took only the aesthetic aspects of Arabic and Asian cultures into account and turned them into a chiaroscuro image of alluring sensuality and depravity. The importance of lightscapes originating in the South and East has been persistent in Nordic thought to the present day. They are an amalgamation of pre-Christian mythology with Christian beliefs as well as an expression of Enlightenment and romantic thought with their fascination with light and humanistic Greek mythology as well as – but less prominently – with Orientalism. This development of lightscapes throughout the cultural history of the Nordic countries has bestowed upon the South an accumulated imaginary and geographical attraction of a mythical and at times metaphysical nature in the Nordic imagination as the location of the enlivening forces of life that could also be directed to the dark Nordic regions as an invigorating lightscape or as a utopian destination. In Skibet (1912; The Ship), one of six volumes in Den lange Rejse (1908–22; The Long Journey), the Danish writer Johannes V. Jensen, presents a condensed version of this vision: Vore Forfædres ældste Historie, Folkevandringen, Vikingetiden, er dunkelt sammenblandet med … det første blændende Udbrud af Foraarssolen, hvormed Verden begynder…. Haabet der er knyttet til Solens Genkomst gør sig fri og bliver til en Naturkraft selv. Hvad der først kun er Sollængsel bliver hos Nordboen til Udve, Vandrelyst, og omsider ved indre Vækst til en Længsel, der er hinsides Tid og Rum og alle kendte Ting, en Idé. Den nordiske Sjæl er en mægtig Higen ud over sig selv. (8–9) (The earliest history of our ancestors  – the period of the great migrations, the age of the Vikings – is mysteriously blended with … the first dazzling outburst of the spring-time sun

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that marks the beginning of the world…. The hope awakened by the return of the sun liberates itself and becomes a force of nature. What begins as a desire for the sun is by the Nordic peoples transformed into an urge to leave, a Wanderlust and is finally turned by an inward growth into a longing beyond time and space and all things known, an idea. The Nordic mind craves to transcend itself.)

By pointing toward the South, the Nordic lightscape transcends time and place, mentality and reality, vision and action, belief and knowledge, as well as the present and the past creation of the world. It transforms the Nordic people as well. The creative power of Jensen’s suggestive poetic language makes it clear that a lightscape is more than an enlightened place. It is a transformative and transcending dynamic located elsewhere which turns Nordic cold and darkness into a site of an abundant and intensified life fueled by a longing for the South. Contrasting domestic lightscapes Lightscapes in the Nordic countries are consistently seen as temporary phenomena and not really locally anchored; for a period of time, they both open the outdoor space closed by darkness and unlock the indoor shelter behind closed doors while nurturing dreams of more sustainable lightscapes elsewhere. The transitory nature of the sunny season and the glimpses of stars or the northern lights are messengers from real and permanent zones of light elsewhere. For many writers the contrast between the lightscape at home and lightscapes elsewhere becomes more important than either of the two distinct lightscapes individually. On a trip to Algeria in 1888, the Swedish playwright Anne Charlotte Leffler, who settled in Naples in 1890 after an Italian marriage, was overwhelmed while at sea just outside Algeria by a transformative lightscape created by the extraordinary moonlight. She could not help but notice its contrast to that at home. In “Från hinsidan Medelhavet” (1888; From Beyond the Mediterranean) she writes: Men det var icke den vanliga månen som vi känna till derhemma, denne bleke, försigtige gubbe, som så sakta klifver ett lite stycke på himlahvalfvet för att ängstligt kryssa ned igen strax och gå til köjs – nej, detta var en öfverdådig ungdomlig sälle, som käckt begaf sig i väg så högt, att vi snart hade den midt öfver våra hufvuden. Och så lysta den sedan – det var ju nästen som solen – denna måne kan man icke så der lugnt och förtroendefullt stirra in i ansigtet, som vår gamla vän derhemma. (April 15) (But it was not the usual moon we knew back home, the pale, cautious old man, who so slowly climbs a little way into the sky in order to anxiously slide down immediately thereafter and go to bed – no, this was a buoyant young chap who courageously rose so high that before long it stood right above our heads. And then it continued to shine – it was almost like the sun – this moon, you cannot look calmly and confidently at its face as at that of our old friend at home.)

In this part of the world, the exuberant moonscape is a real and permanent feature of the surroundings, but at the same time it also transforms the space into a dazzling sunscape. Sweden, in contrast, only shows a pale moon, short-lived and wan.

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Similarly, the lightscape at home is often compared to the lightscape elsewhere. Most notably the closer one gets to the Arctic region during the winter, the more deeply it is shrouded in darkness around the clock. In his long topographical poem Nordlands Trompet (c.1670; published 1739; Nordland’s Trumpet), the Norwegian poet Petter Dass describes the utter darkness in Arctic Norway almost as the limit of human life: Thi Vinteren fører stedsvarende Mørk, … I medens har Bonden ey synderlig Kaar, I Mørk han sig legger, i Mørk han opstaaer, En Nat til den anden monn’ raabe. (1:27) (For winter carries perennial darkness with it, … Meanwhile the peasant has a hard time, In darkness he goes to bed, in darkness he gets up, One night calls forth the other.)

Although belonging to the Nordic region, until the twentieth century places like Nordland and Greenland were for most of the Nordic population (Dass included) as foreign as Siberia or Antarctica. They are, therefore, also places for a more intensified sense of the arrival and disappearance of the vital lightscape of summer arriving from the southern elsewhere. The Nordic lightscape may be a transitory event, but it never disappears forever, not even in the Arctic zones. The Inuit poet Frederik Nielsen expresses this vision in “Aprîle 1926” (1943): pavfa sekinek kíssangâlekaok, silame kiagtikatarêrpok …. tauva inuit takordlôrarait aussalerpat nagdliúkumârtut. (11–12) (Now the sun is high above, it has power again, the air is again mild to breath …. And in the sleep there is a dream of summer that will come shortly.)

In Nielsen’s poem, dream and reality fuse into one magic state in which the dream becomes real and reality becomes a dream just at the point when the light is about to return and transform the real into a subconscious, dreamlike state. The Nordic lightscape only acquired a similar status as a magic lightscape in its own right toward the end of the nineteenth century when impressionism set the agenda for literature and painting alike with a predilection for the transitional phases of the shimmering light in dusk and dawn, mist, and rain. In the novel Forskrevet (1890; Signed Away), Holger Drachmann describes the Nordic midsummer twilight of Copenhagen at dusk when the lightscape oscillates between

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the world of the senses and a dreamlike magic world. But he still enhances the particularity of the lightscape by relating it to foreign places: Jeg holder saa meget af Skumringen. Folk har et udseende, som om de kom fra en fremmed Verden og gik til en anden…. Og enhver Gade ender i en blaa Taage, med enkelte lyse Gavle…. Og den [Bredgade] endte i en blaa Dis, en violet Taage; og ud fra denne løftede sig det kongelige Teaters hvælvede Tag som et fjernt Fjæld svømmende i den røgmættede Luft. (9:32–33, emphasis added) (I love the twilight so much. People have a look as if they had arrived from a foreign world and went on to another…. And every street ends in a blue mist, with a few light gables…. And it [Bredgade] ended in a blue haze, a purple mist; out of it the domed roof of the Royal Theater ascended like a remote mountain swimming in the smoky air.)

By its very beauty, even a local lightscape of a very particular nature – the one just discussed – directs one’s attention elsewhere. Lightscapes in literature are known outside the Nordic literatures, but they always reflect experiences, values, and imaginary patterns in a local, historical context. In Nordic literature, they forcefully transform the given local space into a real or imagined space located elsewhere on a threshold between imagination and reality. Being both real and imagined, lightscapes connect the local space of sensual experience with the larger universe of human imagination. In a similar way, light is also known as a component in the semantic and ideological structures in most cultures across the globe. Through forceful, imaginary languages their literatures reveal the contrast between light and darkness as a symbol of basic ontological and cosmological dimensions of human life. Light and darkness are often symmetrically opposed as a positive versus a negative ideological position, different in meaning but of equal importance. However, the differentiated repository of this intercultural figurative language is not the topic of this essay and the next one on lightscapes. They explore how light creates spaces in literature, and references to the more general imaginary semantics will only be one component of this investigation. In the spatial perspective, the elementary contrast between light and darkness is not positioned in terms of opposites on the same level. Darkness is secondary and appears as a spatial dynamic only when light plays the leading role and attributes a particular spatial position to darkness through punctual light effects: moon, stars, lightning, the Aurora borealis, city lights etc. The topic of this essay and the next is foreign lightscapes in Nordic literatures in their various historical manifestations, and the aim is to enlarge the perspective on Nordic literary cultures. What is the status of such lightscapes? How are they shaped in and by the texts? How do they situate Nordic literary cultures in a larger cultural context? And how do they change in Nordic literary history since its beginning around the year 1000? Four types of lightscapes Apart from the myths of creation ignited by light, the literary complexity of lightscapes at home as well as elsewhere is absent in early Nordic literatures. Lightscapes first emerge around the

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advent of the Lutheran Reformation during the first half of the sixteenth century when the national languages slowly began to gain ground as both literary and ecclesiastical means of expression. The earlier Latin literature mostly refers to light by imitating the classical rhetorical tradition, the Bible, and the standard symbolic repertoire of the Catholic Church. Old Norse literature rarely contains literary landscapes, let alone lightscapes domestic or foreign. The same holds true for the other major Nordic epic Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum (c. 1200), for the popular ballads first written down beginning in the sixteenth century, and for Kalevala. But after the sixteenth century, four enduring types of foreign lightscapes began to take shape, each following its own historical trajectory, sometimes overlapping, sometimes running parallel to, and sometimes leading to the others in the course of literary and cultural history. They fall into two groups, the dualistic lightscapes and the monistic lightscapes. The earliest occurrences of foreign lightscapes are dualistic. The ontologically foreign lightscapes in opposition to the mundane life-world appear, on the one hand, in (1) metaphysical and religious lightscapes shaped by God and interpreted by the poets (from c. 1500 to c. 1870). On the other hand, literature offers (2) poetic lightscapes shaped by the force of the words (c. 1600 to the present). The latter is a conception of the power of poetry that can be found in the earliest Nordic literature down to the present day, but has been only related to fictional and imaginary lightscapes since the seventeenth century. These two lightscapes are not uniquely Nordic but are in Nordic literatures fused with local features. Concomitant with such dualistic lightscapes, two monistic foreign lightscapes are located exclusively within the world of human experience. In a dualistic perspective, light is in itself a non-spatial, creative force that nevertheless has spatial effects in the human life-world. In contrast, light in a monistic perspective is in itself a material phenomenon and therefore has spatial dimensions that may unfold as lightscapes. These lightscapes are late occurrences in Nordic literatures as well as in European literatures in general. They were first made possible by a new conception of light: it was no longer a metaphysical force, but a material reality as demonstrated, for example, by the new studies of optics during the latter part of the seventeenth century. Light is not as in Genesis, but takes place as was the case in the pre-Christian Vǫluspá. Within the mundane view of lightscapes, we meet (3) cognitive lightscapes (c. 1750 to c. 1925), particularly in the Enlightenment and in scientific paradigms that influenced literatures all over Europe. These mental lightscapes are not widespread in literature, and only few possess a remarkable poetic power. Their importance, however, is related to the massive influence of the Enlightenment extending from central Europe to the Nordic cultures, where it remained a permanent inspiration well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The positive cognitive lightscapes acquire a more specific regional touch from their relation to the broader educational project in the Nordic countries that went hand in hand with the democratization of the emerging nation states. From the first quarter of the twentieth century, fear of the consequences of the progress of science is now and then presented through negative lightscapes, whereas the inspiration emanating from Enlightenment ideas determined how Nordic architecture as well as urban planning and design still continue to form positive lightscapes. However, most important in Nordic literatures, we also find an abundance of (4) foreign geographical lightscapes (c. 1800 to the present). These place-bound lightscapes emerged around the beginning of the 1800s together with the scenic landscapes characterized by modern travel,

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in the beginning almost exclusively oriented toward southern Europe but during the twentieth century with an increasingly global outreach. The first three of these four lightscapes can all be characterized as imaginary lightscapes not bound to a specific place. They are presented in this essay, while the following will analyze the geographical lightscape. Religion and metaphysics (1500–1870) In the Lutheran hymns and other religious texts produced after the Reformation, the lightscape of creation is interpreted as a sign to the believers that opens the door to an elevating experience of eternity in their everyday life, often building on the opposition between day and night, between God’s light and the Devil’s darkness as in the Danish Reformation poet Hans Christensen Sthen’s two contrasting hymns “Den mørcke Nat forgangen er” (1588; The Dark Night Is Passed) and “Den liuse Dag forgangen er” (1589; The Bright Day Has Passed). The so-called “Christelige Dagevise” (1569; Christian Daily Hymn) from Hans Thomissen’s Danish hymnal is one of several translations of a Catholic text during the early days of the Reformation employing the lightscape as a religious allegory. The light of the sun in the first stanza, quoted below, merges with the eternity of Christ in the second and is then turned into a lightscape transcending the distinction between day and night of the ordinary human existence but nevertheless still accessible for humans. Den signede Dag, den signede Tid, Vor HErre hans Fødsels time, Da kom der Liuß aff Himmelen ned saa vijt offuer Verden at skinne, det liuser for oss Euindelig, Nu oc foruden al Ende. (Sthen 48) (At the blessed day, the blessed time, the moment of birth of our Lord, light descended from heaven to shine widely over the world; it will light for us eternally, now and without end.)

N. F. S. Grundtvig rewrote several pre-Reformation or early Reformation hymns and revised this one in particular twice. In the second version, “Den signede Dag med Fryd vi seer” (1826; The Blessed Day we See with Joy), his rendering of the second stanza emphasizes the sensual quality of the eternal lightscape in its turning night into day and creating a passageway to Heaven through our daily encounter with the sunrise. It is like the birth of Jesus, who then is complete and a real part of the human world as a lightscape. This lesson is repeated in all the thirteen stanzas of the hymn. Here is the revision of the stanza quoted above but with an enhanced light effect:

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298 Den signede Stund, den Midnats-Tid, Vor Herre han lod sig føde, Da klared det op i Øster-Lid, Til deiligste Morgen-Røde: Da Lyset oprandt, som Jordens Bold Skal lysne udi og gløde! (Sang-Værk 161) (The blessed moment, at midnight, our Lord let himself be born; Then it brightened in the East to the loveliest rosy break of day: The light arose where the ball of the Earth shall light up and glow.)

Instead of the sharp dichotomy between day and night as a spatial representation of the difference between Heaven and Hell, Grundtvig stresses the role of the lightscape we perceive and live in as a proto-Platonic reminiscence of a transcendental lightscape. The almost Manichaean contrast between light and darkness, life and death, as well as salvation and perdition is prominent in standard religious discourse, particularly in orthodox Lutheranism. But with Grundtvig’s approach to the opposition between night and day, the strictly dichotomous lightscape is turned into a lightscape of human action and hopes and opens up for an unmediated interaction with God. Light is seen as fighting a winning battle against darkness while supported by the believers at the risk of their life and afterlife but guaranteed by a transcendental eternal lightscape made visible and tangible for the believers. In romantic thought, this idea of a seamless continuity between Heaven and Earth becomes the general understanding of the metaphysical and religious lightscape. As seen in Grundtvig’s lines quoted above, light itself is a dynamic generator of human space: it transforms the everyday world for the sake of humans, but it is also itself mobile, although in the Christian tradition no longer coming from the south, as in Vǫluspá, but from the east. Hence, the sunrise is referred to over and over again as both a material fact and a transcendental sign of the origin of light and life. The arrival of the sun has always captivated the Nordic imagination, foregrounding the sensual quality of lightscapes before its metaphysical properties. Thus, in 1689 the prolific Danish poet Thomas Kingo powerfully opens a poem with baroque pomp and circumstance: Som dend Gyldne Sool frembryder Giennem dend kulsorte Sky, Og sin straale-Glands udskyder, Saa at Mørk og Molm maa fly, Saa min JEsus aff sin Grav, Og det dybe Dødsens Hav Opstood ærefuld aff Døde, Imod Paaske Morgen-Røde. (4:513) (Like the golden sun breaks through the coal-dark cloud, and spreads its radiant beams,

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forcing dark and dusk to fly, so my Jesus from his tomb and the deepest sea of death, resurrected gloriously with the dawn of Easter.)

The analogy between the natural lightscape and the life of Christ is as clear as the daylight it celebrates. The analogy also serves Kingo as a poetic device to render the royal power of the newly established absolute monarchy after 1660. In his “Hosianna” to the salvation of King Christian V in 1671, it is hard to decide whether the responsibility for the earthly lightscape belongs to God or to the King who transforms his human status through the ritual of anointing: I hver en Straale glands er Krafftig virkning lagt. Hand øser Lius og Lyst paa alle Stierne-flokke, Hand bukker offte sig til Jordens vaade Sokke, Og stikker Qvegnings Krafft i hendes kolde Bryst. (Kingo 2:4) (In every radiant beam, a powerful effect is placed. He dispenses light and happiness on all the groups of stars, He often bends over the cold swamps of the Earth, And induces life-giving power in her cold breast.)

The light-carrying male subject of those actions is actually the King, not God. The celestial lightscape reaches the Earth Kingo’s heavily staged appearance of the sun and the fusion of God and the King are dated to the time of orthodox Protestantism lasting until c. 1750. But the attempt to mellow the sharp edges of the Christian dualism continues, particularly in romantic thought, for example in the Danish romantic B. S. Ingemann’s simple but powerful Morgensange for Børn (1837; Morning Songs for Children) and Syv Aftensange (1838; Seven Evening Songs). In one of the best-known songs, “Lysets Engel gaar med Glands,” (The Angel of Light Walks in Glory) light is impersonated by an angel who spreads the divine lightscape as an everyday reality to all humankind: Lysets Engel gaaer med Glands Gjennem Himmelporte. For Guds Engels Straalekrands Flygter alle Nattens Skygger sorte. Sol seer ind i Slot og Vraa, Seer paa Drot og Tigger, Seer til Store, seer til Smaa, Kysser Barnet, som i Vuggen ligger. (Ingemann 14–15) (The angel of light walks with glory Through the heavenly gates. Met with the radiant power of God’s angel All the black shadows of night flee.

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300 The sun looks into castle and cabin, Looks at prince and beggar, Looks for grownups, looks for little ones, Kisses the child in his cradle.)

Consistent with the general tendency of romanticism, the lightscape of Ingemann’s songs, like Grundtvig’s poems, reduces the sharp dualism between Earth and Heaven. The light bridges the world of experience and the metaphysical elsewhere, and the lightscape becomes a didactic device rather than a vision: sunrise and sunset open an inhabited human world which, often with a local touch, is included in the book of nature from which we can learn about the true life by seeing it as a divine lightscape. The divine lightscape loses its metaphysical rigor and ontological specificity and for some poets becomes a vague metaphysical vision of culture nurtured by an unspecified religious sensibility. In the Norwegian poet Henrik Wergeland’s huge romantic epic poem Skabelsen, Mennesket og Messias (1830; The Creation, the Human, and the Messiah), the world is created as a spiritual entity in a conflict between four spirits surrounding the Messiah, two of heavenly descent carrying the creative light from above (Phun-Abriel and Ohebiel) and two bound to the earthly death and darkness (Cajahel and Obaddon). The Messiah is introduced as nothing but light. When he arrives, the process of creation can begin with his long prophetic speech envisioning the creation of mankind in the dusky world of Cajahel and Obaddon: Læberne aabnes, Evigheds morgenrøde Port, og ud hvirvles Tanken som lysfuldt Ord … Jorden vil lysne, som hellige Fakkel i Solaltret tændt, og Skyen vil vorde den Røg, som lysblaa fra Off ’ret af dens Velsignelser stiger. (26, 30) (The lips are opened, the rosy gate of the morning of eternity, and out swirls the thought as a word charged with light …. The Earth will become light, as A holy torch lit at the altar of the sun, and The cloud will be a light-blue smoke, mounting from the blessings of the sacrifice.)

Here, the dominating ingredients of the lightscape consist of a mixture of biblical allusions, references to heathen sacrifices, and apocryphal spirits with a focus on the moral, rational, and creative capacities of the human being, but not on the divine creative power. Later in the century, the Swedish classicist Viktor Rydberg also includes various religious references in his imagination of creation. In his lyrical dialogue Prometheus och Ahasverus (1877; Prometheus and Ahasverus), the introductory prose section relates how the sun recreates the world as a lightscape when Noah had left his ship after the deluge: Solen sken på den mörkrandade skyväggen i öster, och den Eviges båge visade sig i skyn, och då Noa skådade upp och såg bågen, sade han: se förbundets tecken mellan den Evige och oss!

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Solen sken äfven ned i fjällsvalget, och hennes strålar skimrade, som vore de vilsekomne och förfärade, på det som fans där i djupet. De lyste på en jättegam med brungul rygg och gulstrimmiga vingar. (116) (The sun shone on the dark-rimmed wall of clouds in the east, and the Eternal’s bow appeared through the cloud, and when Noah looked up and saw the bow, he said: see, the sign of the covenant between the Eternal and us! – The sun also shone down in the mountain abyss and twinkled as if they had gone astray and lost their way while the beams reached what was deep down. They shone on a dragon-troll with yellow-brown back and yellow-striped wings.)

In this recreation of the world by the sun, the rainbow represents eternity, visible but unattainable from the earth, that is placed above a dark underworld inhabited by an evil creature of unspecified mythological descent. The following lyrical part consists of a dialogue between the repenting Ahasverus looking for the Messiah to forgive him for his betrayal of Jesus on his way to crucifixion and the rebellious Prometheus who stole fire from the Greek gods and was severely punished for giving the humans the power of fire and light. He, though, continues to be imbued with subversive desires. The dialogue is, however, predominantly a series of self-reflexive ethical and existential statements characterizing each of the two opponents before they eventually meet the Messiah. The religious lightscape elsewhere, evoked by the Messiah, has lost its foundational ideological, religious, and poetic power. Such recycling of received religious poetry has an obviously pathetic character easily subject to satire, as in Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1869). The opportunistic Peer reaches the north African desert where the seductive Anitra greets him as the prophetic light-bringer in the manner of Wergeland’s Messiah: Hans Øjne er Stjerner, blinkende, blide. Intet Jordbarn dog taaler Glansens Glans af de Stjerners Straaler! … Hvor han red blev det lyst. Bag ham blev Mørke; (628) (His eyes are dancing stars. No human can endure The glowing of that fire … And drought lay all behind him; Light was where he rode.) [92]

The fact is, however, that Peer is an imposter taking advantage of his new fame. However, it must be noted that the most powerful visionary lightscape of an ontological foreign nature and in sharp contrast to the material world was shaped by the eighteenthcentury Swedish scientist and metaphysical thinker Emanuel Swedenborg. He traveled widely and worked in the emerging Swedish mineral industry where he was responsible for various construction projects. Between 1710 and 1739 he traveled Europe and made terse, brief, matterof-fact notes in his diaries until he had a divine vision sometime around April 1745 that placed him in a lightscape emanating from God. From then on, his elaborate mystical visions led to his inclusion in the long Platonic and Neo-Platonic tradition of European mysticism extending

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from Antiquity via the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to romanticism and inspired followers during the following centuries. Swedenborg began his diary in 1743, Drömboken (1743–44; published 1859; The Dream Book). It opens with an account of his travel to Holland in 1743 to finish a scientific project. Suddenly it is interrupted, and he instead presents his dreams and his reflections on their broader meaning and origin as well as his own physical and psychological condition. This narrative is a clear demarcation of his movement from one ontological level – the material – to a metaphysical sphere surrounded by light. The spiritual and spatial otherworldliness of his vision is repeatedly seen as a lightscape: everything “blev allt rödljusare, vilken ljushet betyder att däruti är Guds nåd.” (38) [became more and more red imbued, and this brilliance means that in it is the mercy of God]. In this visionary lightscape, the spatial, the verbal, and the spiritual sense of light are fused. From this outset he expands the transcendental lightscape, particularly in De Caelo et ejus Mirabilibus et de Inferno ex auditis et visis (1785; Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell from Things Heard and Seen). In Nordic literature or in other literary traditions for that matter, we do not find anything even close to the incomparable lightscapes in the “Paradiso” of Dante’s Commedia. But Swedenborg draws on the same inspiration: a divine lightscape extending beyond the reach of the senses. We are nevertheless, as in Dante’s account from the transhuman world, made to believe that this lightscape is seen and heard by Swedenborg himself: Sed tametsi in caelo non apparet sol mundi, nec quicquam quod ex illo sole, usque ibi est Sol, est lux et est calor, ac sunt omnia quae in mundo, ac innumerabilia plura, verum non ex simili origine, nam quae in caelo sunt, spiritualia sunt, et quae in mundo naturalia…. In principio miratus sum … sed cum visa est, id testari possum. (§§ 117, 126) (Although the sun of the world is not seen in heaven, nor anything from that sun, yet there is Sun there, and light, and heat, and all things that are in the world, with innumerable others, but from the same origin, for the things in heaven are spiritual and those in the world natural…. At first, I marveled … but, having seen it, I can testify that it is so.)

Swedenborg regards his words as particular instantiations of God’s light-generating Word in Genesis, but they work by correspondences (“correspondentias”) (§§ 1,116). Such correspondences, later made famous in Charles Baudelaire’s poetics, are aesthetic constructs made by the initiated happy few who translate the spiritual lightscapes into imaginary forms that eventually make them accessible for the human mind through open-ended suggestive similarities, images, and allusions. By Swedenborg, we are not only brought back to a vision of a radical lightscape elsewhere, but also back to the power of the poetic word to shape it and make it visible. Rhetoric and poetic creativity (1600 to the present) The creative power of the word or, in modern terms, its locutionary and performative force as a speech act is revered in poetry and poetics across cultures and epochs. However, in Nordic literatures the indissoluble connection between word and light is first and foremost established when the creation of the world as a primordial lightscape in Genesis merges with the word

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that creates it. The word appears as action and vice-versa. The poetic vision of lightscapes sees this reciprocity itself as light and turns it into poetic lightscapes transcending any particular mundane locality. In a religious context and through the late eighteenth century, the creative word gradually separates itself as a purely poetic act giving a new meaning to both poetry and the poet. In Anders Arrebo’s exuberant poem about creation Hexaëmeron (1661; Hexameron) word and action are still united in God. The poem is the longest of its kind in Nordic literatures following the grand European tradition with Guillaume du Bartas’s La Sepmaine; ou, Creation du monde (1578; La Sepmaine; or the Creation of the World). In the long series of introductory texts – one to the King from the author and others to Arrebo from various literati who in Danish and Latin praise his opus – the general tenor is Arrebo’s successful attempt to turn Danish vernacular into a poetic language. He appears as a man who finally bestows Danish vernacular words with a transcendent poetic force that for Arrebo is imagined as light. In the opening of the introduction to God, “Fortale til Skaberen,” Arrebo evokes the creator as light. The divine carrier of light is now asked to ignite Arrebo’s words with poetic power. Then his poetic universe, by the very power of his word, becomes part of the divine lightscape: “HErre Gud, hiælp oc varm gif Lius vort syndige Hierte, / HErre Gud dig forbarm stik op din Fackel og Kierte. / Flydende giør min Pen den drif med Fingrene dine.” (52) [Oh, my God, help and warm and lighten our sinful heart, / Oh, my God, show mercy and raise your torch and candle. / Smoothen the work of my pen to make it move by your fingers.] At this point Arrebo is ready both to represent and reiterate the constitutive lightscape of the creator of the first day of creation. If the divine and the poetic creation is one in Arrebo, in later periods, poetic creativity distances itself from its foundation in a religious metaphysics and concentrates on its own power to open a vista to an imaginary universe, a fictional elsewhere of another ontological order, but rooted in human language and experience. From Arrebo to modern poetry, this poetic universe often unfolds as a lightscape with a persistent reference to the creation of a world by light. Notably, three hundred years later it can be seen in Inger Christensen’s powerful suite of poems det (1969; it), a twentieth century response to Arrebo and to the genre exemplified by his poem, but without any touch of religion. The fictional world of poetry testifies to the power of human imagination to create an alternative vision of the human life-world. This world evolves gradually from the semantically empty and therefore original word maintained in the title, det: Det brænder. Det er solen der brænder. Så længe det varer at brænde en sol. Så længe før og så længe efter de tider der måles i liv eller død…. Når solen slukkes, er liv eller død for længst det samme som det altid har været. Det. Når solen slukkes er solen befriet for alt. Og det. Det var det. Imens, indimellem mens solen endnu har overskud nok til at uddele døden så langsomt, at den ligner liv, imens holder livet fiktionen i gang. (10) (It’s burning. It’s the sun burning. For as long as it takes to burn a sun. As long before and as long after the times measurable in terms of life and death…. When the sun goes out, life or death will long have been the same as it ever was. It. When the sun goes out, the sun will be free of it all. It. That’s it. Meanwhile, in the interim while the sun still has excess enough to dole out death so slowly that it looks like life, life keeps up the fiction.) [4–5]

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In Christensen’s poem as a whole, the metaphysical lightscape of the religious tradition is replaced by a utopian vision of a communal human life-world bound to nature and a shared social life. It is, though, outside the actual world of experience but inside the world of human imagination. Along with the light-inspired verbal autonomy of poetic creativity as triumphantly confirmed by Arrebo’s poem, which anticipates the poetics of romantic, symbolist, and modernist poets like Christensen, another feature stands out in Arrebo. Like his contemporaries, he makes numerous references to classical figures and deities like Phoebus and Aurora. Writing in Danish or Latin, Arrebo embodies the tradition of classical rhetoric beyond the Christian doctrine. Hence, this practice also offers ways of rendering a vision of a secular lightscape elsewhere and of another ontological order. In his use of the classical tradition Petter Dass joins Arrebo with his Nordlands Trompet (1739; Nordland’s Trumpet) in which Nordland appears as a foreign lightscape within the Nordic region: for example “Du tilmed og aldrig saa tiilig staaer op, / At dig jo før høyt over Biergenes Top / Er runden Aurora den røde.” (1:29) [In fact, you never rise so early / that even earlier over the top of the mountains / the red Aurora has already risen]. Through the invocation of Aurora and similar references to other classical deities like Neptune, Apollo, or Jupiter, the particular locality and the midnight sun transcend their spatial specificity so as to be included in a rhetorical realm of a universally shared meaning that renders it a recognizable lightscape beyond just Nordland. Thus, the classical rhetorical devices of representing light construct the foreign elsewhere as a universe belonging to a known cultural tradition as well as turning it into a rhetorical everywhere. Nordland is a real landscape. But the rhetorically charged performativity works with purely fictional references as well. The far-from-historical epic poem “Wladimir den Store” (1817; Wladimir the Great) by the Swedish romantic Erik Stagnelius is a Homeric pastiche in hexameters glorifying the first Christian Russian emperor Wladimir I during his conquest of Novgorod. The meter and other classical traits add a Homeric dimension to the story in which the moon and the sun in the rhetoric of the classical epic tradition provide the narrative trajectory with a quasi-natural quality (Stagnelius 63–104). The classical rhetoric of lightscapes also allows for terrifying lightscapes from the limits of the human world. The Dane Jens Baggesen uses this device in the early nineteenth century in evoking the tradition of the sublime, first in Athenaïs oder die Alpenreise (1804; Athenais or the Alpine Journey) to depict the Alps that he knew from experience, and the unfinished Oceania (1808) to imaginatively portray the Pacific. In both cases, the same rhetorical devices transform the landscape into an awe-inspiring sublime lightscape of a mainly poetic nature in which the foreignness of its location amplifies the effect. Replete with classical references, Baggesen celebrates James Cook’s Pacific expeditions with sublime and stormy light effects to underpin a landscape beyond human comprehension, here after a heavy rain fall at sea: Es theilte sich jetzt das       drückende Luftmeer, Zwei Dampfwolken, entsetzlichen Grauns auf:       thürmend; gen Süden Ein’, und gen Norden die andr’, in die Mitt’

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      enlaßend den Lichtstrom. Weiter und weiter gefernt, dann sanken sie,       schwarz wie der Abgrund, Dicht in sich selber zusammengerollt, daß dem       Auge nun sichtbar Wurden zugleich zwei Nächt’ an den don:       nernden Polen des Himmels, Und der sich neigende Tag; denn am West:       rand strahlte die Sonne. (Oceania 298) (Now the heavy sea in the air       was divided, two towering steamy clouds,       one toward the South, the other toward the North,       opened in the middle a stream of light. Farther and farther away they went down,       black as the abyss, Tightly coiled into themselves, so that       the eye at the same time just Saw two nights at       the thundering poles of the heaven And the vanishing day,       for the sun was shining in the west.)

This lightscape is first of all a sublime poetic creation of a threshold experience between storm and light, clouds and sun, stars and sun, night and day, life and death, and ultimately between the human and the non-human, where reality as a lightscape is transformed into an imaginary vision of an almost surreal wonder. Later writers render a similar lightscape without any classical references, as in DanishNorwegian Aksel Sandemose’s maritime novel Klabavtermanden (1927). The “klabavtermand” is a supernatural demon who reminds us of his haunting presence when we, like Cook in Baggesen’s poem, are transposed into a situation of an almost transhuman nature. This experience is expressed in an imaginary language with organic metaphors ascribing to the lightscape a vitalistic power of its own as here in the North Atlantic. The uneasy smile of the crew of the ship Ariel shows that they know that they were witnessing the workings of the “klabavtermand”: Ved Solnedgang en Aften noget senere gik der fem Sole ned i tyk, hed Dis. Tre laa paa Række som mat lysende kobberplader, ovenover dem laa to og ulmede i Randene. De beholdt den indbyrdes Stilling, mens de sank i smaa Stød. Engang imellem hævede de sig med et Ryk, men naaede tilsidst Havfladen, hvor de laa og gloede hen over Søen gennem Disen. Der var over denne abnorme Solnedgang en skrækindjagende Komik, som fik flere af de stirrende Folk til at fortrække Munden til et tavst, ubevidst Grin. (56) (One evening a little later, at sunset, five suns went down in a burning thick, hot mist. Three lay one after the other like dimly shining copper plates, and on top of them two lay with glowing rims. They kept their relative position as they went down in small jerky movements. Now and then they rose abruptly, but at last they reached the surface of the sea where they remained,

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gazing through the mist. There came from this bizarre sunset an awe-inspiring comic effect, which forced several of the onlookers to twist their mouth into a silent, unconscious smirk.)

Sandemose is just one example of how the entire system of rhetorical devices used to paint or to allude to a lightscape of mythological proportions either disappears or is reduced to isolated elements like the name Ariel of the vessel in Sandemose’s highly individualized poetic language. In one of Knut Hamsun’s autobiographical sketches about his rambling American travels in the late 1890s, “Vagabonds Dage,” (The Vagabond’s Days), he uses the sunrise and sunset simply to subdivide the narrative: “Det lysner, Solen staar op og begynder at gløde”(116) [Dawn came, the sun rose and began to glow], “Solen stod op” (122) [When the sun came up], “Da det lysned” (127) [When it got light], etc. Such phrases, repeated every morning of the travel account, no longer work as rhetorical references adding a wider meaning to the events through names of classical gods or standard images. They only act as a material reference spelling out the only stable order during Hamsun’s erratic tour. At this stage, the otherwise recognized and cohesive implementation of the performative rhetorical power of the creative word can be turned against itself with subtle irony as in Karen Blixen’s “Sorg-Agre” (1942; “Sorrow Acre”). The old lord acts like God himself on his own property while pretending to utter the word of creation that brings the world into existence as a lightscape: Han [den gamle Herre] stod et Øjeblik ubevægelig, og sagde saa langsomt, som Ceremonimesteren, der melder selve Fyrstens Ankomst: “Nu stod Solen op.” Solen kom virkelig i dette Øjeblik til Syne over Horisonten. Det store stille Landskab fik i dens Straalepragt et uventet mangfoldigt Liv og en ny Farverigdom, og det dugvaade Græs glimtede med utallige Diamanter. (226) (He [the aged lord] stood immovable for a moment and then with deep gravity proclaimed: “The sun is up.” The sun did indeed rise above the horizon. The wide landscape was suddenly animated by its splendor, and the dewy grass shone in a thousand gleams.) [39]

However, the performative power of his word, which pretends to call the world into being as a lightscape, is ironically undermined by the story: during this very day the lord actually loses the sovereign power over his land, his people, and his wife. Self-promoting lightscapes The last examples portray poets who have liberated themselves both from shared metaphysical beliefs, a rhetorical universe, as well as shared historical meaning. Instead they have become individual creators in their own right. In the same movement, their texts have been separated from the literary tradition of imitation and are now enclosed in a romantic and modernist tradition of innovative, individual creativity. The lightscapes are introduced to express the precarious and isolated situation of the poets by alluding to a poetic and fictional elsewhere beyond common human experience but within individual human imagination. This assertive, and at times also desperate, self-image emerges in pre-romantic and romantic poetry. The poets refer to a divine lightscape, but only to emphasize their own role as

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quasi-divine creators, thus evoking a lightscape through the autonomous power of their poetic performativity. It is not without reason that the contemporary Danish poet Søren Ulrik Thomsen chose the title Mit lys brænder (1985; My Candle Burns) for his book describing his theory and poetic practice. He is in the company of one of the most ecstatic of the early Nordic poets drawing on similar theories and techniques, Jens Baggesen. In “Den Eeneste Gud” (1791; The Only God), Baggesen portrays a sublime vision of himself surrounded by God’s sunny lightscape in which his poetic enthusiasm makes him more important than its divine origin. Having seen the sun radiating through the entire universe and also feeling that it penetrates his own life, he declares that he can do without it, even if he fell down into absolute darkness. It has given him an everlasting inspiration so that he, as a poet, has achieved an autonomous power: “Jeg har nok! jeg har mig selv!” (159) [I am satisfied! I have myself!]. The Swedish poet Erik Stagnelius is more humble when he evokes the solitude of the romantic poet removed from the true light and left only to his own powers. In his “Kärleken: Metafysisk lärodikt” (Love: A Metaphysical Didactic Poem) from Liljor i Saron (1821; Lilies in Sharon), he first describes the invigorating lightscape that embraces an entire life-world: Ljuset vitt kring alltets kretsar råder…. Dalens rosor det ur knoppen tvingar, Ger åt örnen och åt fjäriln vingar. Skiftande i tusen former, livet Blomstrar för dess vink ur natten opp. (2:213) (Light rules throughout the circles of the Universe…. It forces the roses of the valley out of their buds, Gives the eagle and the butterfly their wings. In thousand shifting forms, life Blossoms out of the night on its orders.)

When the poet realizes that this light disappears around him, it becomes his task, exclusively through his own song, to remind mankind of the lost transcendental lightscape: “Och, vid lyrans skära himlatoner/ Gudalif befolkar verldens zoner” (2:257) [And, at the pure celestial tones of the lyre, / Divine life populates the zones of the world]. Each of the poets tends to develop his own aesthetic strategies for the production of lightscapes but also simultaneously emphasizes the dreamlike position of the isolated poet on the margins of ordinary experience. In Stagnelius’s position, only individual visions and creations are possible. Poets like Inger Christensen in det transport the classical poem about creation into a modern world but without the classical ornamentation. The Faroese poet Christian Matras can be seen in the same optic. Just as Arrebo was praised for his contribution to the transformation of Danish into a major poetic language, Matras was instrumental in a parallel process with regard to Faroese. During the early twentieth century, he outlined the grammar of the language and illustrated its creative potential with his own poetry. From his first collection in 1926 to his last in 1978, the real and metaphorical light as a poetic and a spatial force transcends place and fills a poetic realm of light in its moment of creation. In the short poem “Morgen” (1932; Morning), he expands the local encounter with the sun to a universal human lightscape:

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308 Renn, sól, upp úr havi so glæmu-ung, rís hátt á himinsins boga, nú brotnar og brestur náttin tung, og tindarnir taka at loga. Nú eru vit aftur Alheims børn og vakna í ríkum roða. (68) (Rise, sun, of the sea so dawn-young, rise high on dome of heaven, now the heavy night breaks and bursts and the summits begin to glow. Now we are again the universe’s children and awaken in the red light of sunrise.)

His twentieth-century Norwegian colleagues, Gunnar Reiss-Andersen and the younger Stein Mehren, follow suit, each in his own poetic style. Reiss-Andersen’s suite “Vår plass i solen” (1956; Our Place in the Sun) from Usynlige seil (Invisible Sail) also celebrates the sun by pointing out the sensual intensity of the sunny impressions in and of themselves, which with a word play on place [plass / sted] create an individual existential space, a sense of being: Vår plass i solen – , det å finne sted, hva er vel det? – … Et under finner plass, om ikke sted (105) (Our position in the sun – to take place, what does that mean? – … A miracle finds its position, if not its place.)

Stein Mehren’s collection Mot en verden av lys (1963; Toward a World of Light) consists of poems that from multiple perspectives center on how light through artistic means alludes to colors and sounds and brings a world into being as a lightscape that is closer to both an individual and a universal vision than to Norwegian space as, for example, in the “Dagen og trærne” (The Day and the Trees): Tidlige lys-streif; alle ting skjelver når daggryets strenger blir stemt Hør – det første lys-dirr i træerne Og se når de toner – som stemmegafler berørt av demringens gylne vind … Og brått veller solen ned i hver dal som var de graver brutt åpne av himmel … Å all-dag! I spinn av lys står trærne og ligner drømmer…. (10–11) (Early glimpse of light; everything trembles when the strings of day-break are tuned Listen – the first light-shiver in the trees And look when they sound – like tuning forks

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touched by the golden wind of dawn … And suddenly the sun gushes down in every valley as if they were tombs broken up by heaven … Oh, all-day! In a web of light the trees stand and look like dreams….)

Such lightscapes are not anchored in a collective poetic or religious universe as was the case with texts completely embedded in Christian faith and classical rhetoric, nor are they linked to a particular place. They bring into being an individual world of the text and the poet, a sensory experience of light that transcends the concrete and local experience, often – as in Mehren – rendered as a synesthetic experience beyond the reality of the senses and in a metaphorical language in which one sense impression becomes a metaphor for another. Tom Kristensen is also synaesthetic in a scene from En Kavaler i Spanien (1926; A Gentleman in Spain). A choir concert is transformed poetically into a surreal and fragile lightscape in contrast to the actual darkness he experiences inside and outside of himself: I spinkle, klare Toner steg Hymnen op gennem Mørket; den havde en Straaleglans i sig…. Mørket samlede sig og strømmede op for at støtte denne gennemsigtige Kegle, der borede sig ind i Uendeligheden, og øverst som et Glimt af sylspidst Lys, intenst, som hvis Solen var en Streg i stedet for en Kugle, dirrede en spinkel Drengetenor. Hvert Øjeblik kunde den knække over, saa spændt var den, og i klingrende, lynende Stykker styrte ned gennem det ufattelige Mørke…. inden i mig var et vældigt Mørke, et Misforhold, som truede med at sprænge mig, og et krystalklart Lys som et Taarn, der jager mod himlen. (66) (In fragile, clear tones the hymn ascended through the darkness; it possessed a radiant light…. The darkness collected itself and mounted upwards to support the translucent cone that penetrated into infinity, and above it all as a glimpse of a sharply pointed light, intensely as if the sun were a line instead of a ball, trembled a boy’s fragile tenor. Every moment it might break, it was that tense, and in tinkling, flashing pieces tumble down through the incomprehensible darkness…. Inside me was a vast darkness, a disproportion that threatened to blow me up, and crystal-clear light as a tower that thrusts itself toward the sky.)

Kristensen is one of the many Nordic poets to whom the Swedish poet and critic Artur Lundkvist could have referred in his groundbreaking study of the international modernism, Ikarus’ flykt (1939; The Flight of Icarus). Being destroyed by the sun as a consequence of his subversive project of flying, Icarus epitomizes the non-human nature of a lightscape that belongs to another ontological realm than human life: Lundkvist sees him as an iconic image of the modern poet. In his image, Lundkvist introduced Nordic readers to modern poets like Rimbaud, Lorca, Neruda, and Joyce as individuals trying to express a vision beyond the fragmented world of modernity. But they burn in their solitary poetic experiments, and the light from this creative self-destruction is made visible in and by their poetry. No Nordic poet exemplifies this poetic paradigm more powerfully than the Finno-Swedish expressionist Edith Södergran. Now and then, the vision opens a lightscape as in “Solen” (The Sun) from Framtidans skugga (1920; The Future’s Shade): Jag står som på moln i en sällhet utan like. Molnens rändar brinna röda. Det är solen.

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310 Solen har kysst mig. Så kysser ingenting på jorden…. En gång skall jeg spinna mig in i solen som en fluga i bärnsten, för eftervärlden blir det ingen klenod, men jag har varit i sällhetens glödande ugn. (143) (I am standing as if on a cloud in an unequaled happiness. The rim of the cloud burns in red. It is the sun. The sun has kissed me. Nothing kisses like that in the world…. Sometime I shall spin myself into the sun like a fly in amber, for posterity it will be no treasure, but I have been in the glowing furnace of happiness….)

Here, the poet is turned into the powerful instrument of her vision rendered in her unique ecstatic language as a lightscape – foreign, boundless, awe-inspiring, and dangerous. Lightscapes of cognition (1750–1925) In the first decades of the nineteenth century, a group of Swedish romantics in Uppsala gathered in the Aurora-Förbundet (1807–10) but later rebaptized themselves Phosphoristerna after their journal Phosphoros (1810–14). The group first took its name from the classical goddess of morning and sunrise, then from phosphorus, the fluorescent element first isolated during the seventeenth century by alchemists in search of the stone of wisdom and never occurring in its pure form without chemical refinement. In this image, the romantics saw themselves as bringers of light from within and beyond the material surface of the world, which is accessible only by imaginative and poetical experiments. In spite of its metaphysical inclination toward mysticism, this cultivation of light as an inborn human capacity was a re-interpreted inheritance from the Enlightenment, which again drew on a long European tradition of using light as an image of the human capacity for reason incorporated in Aurora’s divine relative Phoebus Apollo, the god of the sun and of wisdom. Since Plato’s cave, light has been part of a spatial configuration of the conditions and particularity of human cognition and at the same time of its divine origin, which later in European cultural history also competed with the role of light in other religions. But for rational philosophers, particularly René Descartes, natural light was identified exclusively with the universal human cognitive capacity, a gift from nature to all humans that one is obliged to develop further through research, study, and public education in order to promote civilization and humanity. Thus, light also became synonymous with human progress, the utopian deliberation of human reasoning transformed into cultural practice. In short: Enlightenment. But with a few exceptions Plato’s parable of the cave or other cognitive lightscapes did not proliferate in Enlightenment literature; light was primarily seen as a cognitive non-spatial human capacity translated into metaphors of light rather than into complex lightscapes. The Swedish poet Johan Henrik Kellgren was co-founder of a society for advancement of public education Pro Sensus Communis (1787; For Common Sense) and an ardent rationalist.

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His satire “Ljusets fiender” (1792; Enemies of Light) describes a local inn as a lightscape staging a battle between a friend of light, Lucidor, and its enemies. It is dark winter and Phoebus goes to bed by 3:00. All the combatants are sitting in the dark debating and, blind as moles, ruminating on irrelevant issues. Now Lucidor enters the inn and listens to the stupid conjectures about what the dark room really may look like. But when finally somebody calls for the light to be brought in and the room is lit up for everybody to see the interior and each other, they start to shun the light again. What they see does not correspond to the illusions they believed in, Swedenborg’s mysticism included. One of them bursts out that: Mig Skymningen behagar mest. O sälla Skymning, Nöjets dagar! O Dunkelhet, så ljuf och mild! När du förskönar hvarje bild, Hvad gör det mig at du bedrager? (2:152) (I prefer the twilight above all. Oh, happy twilight, the dawn of pleasure! Oh, obscurity, so sweet and gentle! When you embellish every picture, what do I care if you cheat?)

The innkeeper wants to keep everything in the dark to save his business. Others, though, are less critical as long as the light does not illuminate so much that the public can see things for itself. But finally, the visitor, Lucidor, explains that light creates a space for humans when it is apportioned with care and reason – not too much, not too little. A balanced lightscape is the true place for mankind. This conception and its combination with the national awakening in the Nordic countries in the nineteenth century inspired the prolific Danish poet and cultural reformer N. F. S. Grundtvig to establish Danish Folk High Schools as a means for general public education. In the poem “Oplysning” (1839; Enlightenment) he wrote: Er Lyset i Planeter kun, Som ei kan see og mæle? Er ikke Ordet i vor Mund Et Lys for alle Sjæle! (101–02) (Is light in the planets all that can neither see nor speak? Is not the word in our mouth a light for all minds!)

In “Livs-Oplysning” (1856; Life’s Enlightenment), written for the inauguration of the Folk High School in Marielyst, he goes one step further from word to world: Som Urter blomstre og Kornet groer I varme Dage og lyse Nætter, Saa Livs-Oplysning i høie Nord Vor Ungdom Blomster og Frugt forjætter. (152)

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The link between cognitive light, the educative word, and the surrounding world portrays the cognitive lightscape as part of the everyday human world. Later in the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century the blending of natural light, knowledge, and everyday life spilled over into vitalistic movements across Europe, as for example in Norwegian Herman Wildenwey’s elegant and sensual poetry. Here, the cognitive lightscape is replaced by a cultivation of the intuitive perception of the universe beyond the limits of human reason. The Danish poet Thøger Larsen was a skilled amateur scientist and astronomer who is a distant poetic relative of the Danish Renaissance astronomer and poet Tycho Brahe. Brahe had praised Urania, the Muse of astronomical knowledge, in his poem “In Uraniam elegia autoris” (1573; Elegy of the Author Concerning Urania) by reference to the starry lights of the infinite cosmos. Larsen also focuses his attention on the lightscape as a demarcation of the limits of human reason but also as a challenge to reason. He does so without an appeal to Brahe’s metaphysics, to the immediate corporeal experience of vitalist movement, or to the romantic visions of the infinite universe, as was the case the Danish-Norwegian science poet Carsten Hauch’s poem “Pleiaderne ved Midnat” (1869; The Pleiades at Midnight). In “Stjernenatten” (1912; Starry Night) Larsen ruminates on the lightscape of the universe bordering on infinite darkness and unrecognizability. What he observes is “vildsomt at vide” (121) [wild to know]: Aldrig ved Randen evigt jeg møder kun Mørket og Branden. Virkeligheden blotter sin Ild, at jeg bedre kan se den, nærmer sig vildt fra en Himmel som Graven. (120) (Never reaching the edge eternally I encounter only darkness and fire. Reality exposes its fire so that I better can see it, approaches wild from a sky like the grave.)

In the twentieth century, the insight into the limitations of a cognitive lightscape based only on the advancements of scientific knowledge and its consequences also fostered a skeptical attitude toward the enlightening capacity of science, not least triggered by the cataclysm of World War I. In his cosmological poem “Atomernes Oprør” (1925; The Atomic Revolt), the Danish poet Sophus Claussen opposes the rigor and constraints of science to the liberating force of poetry, the first producing a non-human space without life or light, the latter a lightscape of uncontrollable freedom in the image of the atoms swarming like mosquitos in sunlight. In the manner of classical natural cosmologies, particularly Lucretius’s De rerum natura (Concerning the Nature of Things), he uses hexameters to place sun and light at the center of his vision:

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Jeg et Atom under Solen, for alt skal jeg kræves til Regnskab, Videnskabsmænd dog forkynder den Lov, at slet ingen er fri…. Jeg et Atom, som har danset om Solen, faar Sol til at danse, … Jeg, et Atom under Solen, jeg anraaber Lande og Bølger. Træer og Sten og Metaller, Dyr og Fugle som aander, Strømmen i Havenes Dyb og Ilden i Bjergenes Indre: dersom vor Stjerne kan frelses, da lad os ej volde den Skade. (“Atomernes Oprør” 140, 143) (I, an atom under the sun, am accountable for everything, but scientists promulgate the law that nobody at all is free…. I an atom who has danced around the sun, makes the sun dance, … I, an atom under the sun, I call upon lands and waves. Trees and stones and metals, animals, and birds that breathe, the stream in the depth of the oceans and the fire in the heart of the mountains: if our star can be saved, let us not harm it.)

From Kellgren’s programmatic satire and Grundtvig’s optimistic offering of education to all human beings, the irreducible murky corners of the cognitive lightscape and its scientific flipside came to dominate twentieth century Nordic literatures just as they did in literature and arts throughout the rest of the world. But at the same time, the light of the Enlightenment remained a leading idea for the lightscapes shaped by Nordic modernism in architecture, design, and urban planning.

Myth and meaning of foreign lightscapes in Nordic literatures 2 The geographic elsewhere Svend Erik Larsen

“I am longing for Italy” “Jag längtar til Italien” (Sjöberg 156) (I am longing for Italy), Birger Sjöberg declares in one of his popular songs to Frida from Fridas andra Bok (1929; Frida’s Second Book). And he was neither the first nor the only one to share this longing. Between 1000 and 1100 Inga erected a rune stone south of Stockholm with an inscription in the form of a short poem commemorating her son Oleif who turned his stern to the east and met his end in Italy, the land of the Lombards (Sö 65). Oleif had first traveled east on the Russian rivers and ended up in the south as a mercenary soldier in the Byzantine Empire. Another group of about thirty stones with similar inscriptions devoted to Vikings who died in Greece have been found in the same part of Sweden. The sun came from the South, the sibyl chants in Vǫluspá, and this is where Oleif and the others went as the forerunners of their Nordic countrymen who from the beginning of the nineteenth century in ever-growing numbers went in the same direction, in particular to Italy and Greece. They no longer fought, but learned about the environment of classical cultures and enjoyed the climate, the casual and sensual life style, and the particular light of the Mediterranean. Many were painters, sculptors, or writers with a state grant to study for a few years abroad. Most of them returned to the North with a new perspective on both the motifs and the aesthetic strategies of their art and then returned regularly to the South for longer periods of time. How the Vikings experienced the southern lightscape, we do not know. What later southbound Nordic travelers thought of the Mediterranean light up to around 1800 is easier to assess. Judging from their travel accounts, they simply thought nothing. The young Emanuel Swedenborg’s Resebeskrifningar (1710–39; publ. 1870; Descriptions of Travel), Ludvig Holberg’s Ad virum perillustrem (1728–43; To the Distinguished Gentleman), or Carl August Ehrensvärd’s Resa til Italien 1780, 1781, 1782 (1786; Journey to Italy) – all of them travel accounts from Italy and other European countries – do not devote a single word to the effects of light. The FinnoSwedish Frans Michael Franzén traveled south in the mid-1790s and visited his idol, the Danish Jens Baggesen. But neither Franzén’s Resedagbok 1795–1796 (1977; Travel Diary) nor Baggesen’s sentimental and restless travel account in the manner of Laurence Sterne, Labyrinten (1792–93; The Labyrinth), focus on lightscapes. The same goes for the most famous Nordic traveler to the desert region on the Arab Peninsula during the eighteenth century, notably the GermanDanish Carsten Niebuhr, whose Beschreibung von Arabien (1772; A Description of Arabia) and Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien (1774–78; A Description of Travel to Arabia) are devoid of any mention of lightscapes. Neither did travelers to exotic Nordic regions with distinctive lightscapes of ice and snow, northern light, and midnight sun find it worthwhile to take note of lightscapes: neither Hans Egede in Det gamle Grønlands ny Perlustration eller Naturel-historie (1729; Ancient Greenland’s New Exploration or Natural History) nor Carl Linnæus in his private notes mostly in Swedish or Iter Lapponicum dei gratia institutum 1732 (The Journey to Lapland). doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.25lar © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Geographical lightscapes in literature and painting only occurred when landscape as an aesthetic subject and as a symbol of national character and mentality emerged in literature and painting during the eighteenth century. They then made their imprint on Nordic literatures lasting from around 1800 to the present. Together with this development, the sense of light also emerged as a spatial characteristic and at the same time took part in or even dominated the landscape both as a whole and in terms of its symbolic qualities. To represent this new sense of the environment, painters had to reconceive their technique and did so with both Dutch landscape painting as the model and a new sense of analytical clarity inspired by Mediterranean light. There, objects and figures began to stand out in their individuality in the more brilliant light, and day and night were clearly identifiable now being devoid of hour-long murky twilight periods around dusk and dawn. In contrast to the painters, the writers had no models on which to base their lightscapes. The rhetorical devices of the classical tradition had lost their value, embedded as they were in the classical conception of poetry as imitation, which was in turn replaced by the romantic ideal of poetry as a creative practice. In other words, the writers had to invent a new language based on a new way of perceiving the landscape through the qualities of its light. As for the painters, this ideal landscape was located in the Mediterranean region, particularly in Italy and Greece. This fact at once opened a cultural dimension with a long historical perspective associated with light, reason, and pure humanity as first rediscovered during the Renaissance and then further developed by various strands of European classicism up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. For the Nordic artist-travelers of the early nineteenth century – and in a marked contrast to their experience of the Nordic region – the cultural and the natural light of the South fused into one visionary lightscape as an aesthetic synthesis of perception, knowledge, and emotion. This synthesis remained a strong source of inspiration until the second half of the twentieth century as seen, for example, in the Danish poet Paul La Cour’s diary notes from a trip to Greece in 1953, which were published posthumously in De knuste sten (1957; The Broken Stones). I Dagevis har Athen været slukket, skiddengraa, uudholdelig. Nu straaler Solen igen. Alt er Liv og Skønhed. Jeg staar foran Propylæerne med Byen liggende i sin Glans foran mig. En rosagul By foran rosagraa Bjerge af en mærkelig ulegemlig og sublim Stoflighed, næsten løst ud af Stoffet og dog Stof, paa Grænsen til befriet Lys og Luft…. Set her inde fra Propylæernes Skygge er Klippen, den endelige, sidste Jordbund før Himlen, af en umaadelig Stoflighed og Realitet, skønt paa Trinnet til kun at være Lys og Farve. (13–15) (For days Athens has been shut down, dirty-gray, unbearable. Now the sun is shining again. Everything is life and beauty. I am standing in front of the Propylaea with the city in all of its splendor spread out in front of me. A rosy-yellow city in front of rosy-gray mountains of a strange incorporeal and sublime materiality, almost loosened from any matter and still matter, on the border to liberated light and air…. Observed from the shade of the Propylaea, the rock as the very last earthly platform before the sky possesses a vast materiality and reality although on the point of being nothing but light and color.)

Here light is the organizing focal point of a harmonious space charged with history and beauty as well as with a sense of both individual presence and universal humanism that transcend the materiality and the particular locality. This experience was for many late eighteenth-century as

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well as contemporary travelers – La Cour notably included – linked to Italy, Greece, and the Acropolis in particular. The new literary lightscape The attraction of the all-pervasive southern light developed into a rich source of poetic inspiration during the first half of the nineteenth century before reaching La Cour. One writer in particular both traveled widely and used his experiences to create a new type of southern lightscape: Hans Christian Andersen. His novel Improvisatoren (1835; The Improvisatore) is set in Italy and was written in Rome during his stay between 1833 and 1834. It is the first major depiction in Nordic literature of Italy as a complex aesthetic, cultural, emotional, and ethical space – not only dangerous and seductive, but also carrying perceptive human subjects beyond the social and mental constraints of their Nordic homelands. Lightscapes are essential to this space and are thus charged with a power to transcend everyday experience, transform characters, and bring them closer to a more comprehensive sense of the full complexity of life. Early in the novel the protagonist, the orphaned Antonio, goes to the Forum Romanum and the Colosseum in the moonlit twilight: Maanen skinnede, jeg kjendte Stedet, det var forum romanum, Kotorvet, som vi kalde det…. Aldrig havde jeg været her efter Solens Nedgang; det Hele havde noget spøgelsesagtigt for mig, og som jeg gik, faldt jeg over de marmorne Capiteler, der laae i det høie Græs…. Endnu seer jeg tydeligt dette sælsomme Malerie, hvor de [the visitors] kom til Syne, forsvandt og atter viste sig mellem Colonnerne, belyste af Maaneskinnet og den røde Fakkel. Luften var saa uendelig mørkeblaa og Krat og Buske saae ud som det sorteste Fløiel, hvert Blad aandede Nat…. alt rundtom var dødstille. (90–91) (The moon shone brightly; I knew this place; it was the Forum Romanum, the cow market, as we called it…. I had never been here after sunset; there was something spectral for me in the whole, and as I went along I stumbled over the marble capitals which lay in the tall grass…. Now I see this singular picture distinctly as they [the visitors] came into view, vanished, and again showed itself between the pillars, lighted by the moonlight and the red torch. The air was an infinitely dark blue, and the tree and bush seemed as if made of the blackest velvet; every leaf breathed night … all around me was as deadly still.)

Here both an outer and an inner transformation take place. After the first clear sight of the wellknown place, the borders of the lightscape dissolve and open toward infinity, and Antonio’s perception loses its concrete focus and becomes metaphorical and blended with fantasies of death. Finally he falls feverishly asleep, only to awaken in the sunshine next to a wooden cross. The Gothic moonshine is now replaced by the clear sun. Jeg laae virkeligt paa Trappen op til det store Trækors; jeg betragtede nu den hele Omgivning, den havde slet intet skrækkende…. Den [the sleep] maa have varet i flere Timer; jeg vaagnede ved Psalmesang; Solen skinnede paa den øverste Deel af Muren, Capucinerne vandrede med brændende Kjærter fra Altar til Altar og sang deres “Kyrie eleison,” i den smukke Morgen. (92)

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(I lay actually upon the steps of the great wooden cross. I contemplated now all the surroundings; there was nothing frightening…. This [the sleep] must have lasted several hours. I was awakend by the singing of a psalm. The sun shone upon the highest part of the wall; the Capuchins went with burning tapers from altar to altar, and they sang their “Kyrie eleison” in the beautiful morning.)

Now, the monks take the deserted child into the monastery where he stays until his adolescence. Sunny lightscapes, however, can also be extreme, even when Antonio is in the care of the monks: Dag fra Dag brændte Solen varmere, dens Straaler var et Ildhav, der strømmede over Campagnen; de stinkende Vande forpestede Luften…. Lodret brændte Solen, min Skygge syntes jeg vilde skjule sig for den under mine Fødder. Bøflerne laae som døde Masser paa det afsviede Græs eller, grebne af Raseri, fløi med Pilens Fart omkring i store Kredse. (98) (The sun burnt hotter day by day; its beams were like a sea of fire which streamed over the Campagna. The stagnant water infected the air…. The sun burned vertically; my shadow seemed as if it would vanish under my feet. The buffaloes lay like dead masses upon the burntup grass, or excited to madness, flew, with the speed of arrows, around in great circles.)

For Andersen, the Italian lightscape encapsulates all dimensions of human life: the frightening experience in the moonlight and the exposure to the scorching sun where humans are close to extinction. Under the moon, they are close to losing their senses and in the burning sun their physical life. However, between these extremes, there are hours of harmonious daylight with the monks who embrace clarity, humanity, and faith while accompanied by the soft morning or evening sun. A similar complexity is rare in nineteenth-century Nordic literature and only emerges later in twentieth-century modernism. It is a lightscape that represents a challenge to the formation of an identity in a communal but temporary lightscape inspired by universal humanity. It is, though, always at risk of coming too close to its borders as defined by non-human natural forces in the limitless moonlight and under the blazing sun. Later in the novel, this complexity reoccurs when Antonio visits the legendary Blue Grotto, la Grotta Azurra, in Capri with his friend Gennaro (see Figure 15 in Arne Melberg’s essay in this volume). He is no longer a child and is ambiguously attracted to both the sensual Annunziata and the gentle but blind Lara though hardly aware of the physical, social, and mental change he is undergoing. His absorption by the seductive and sensual beauty of the lightscape of the grotto and its surrounding is Andersen’s representation of this challenging, promising, and also terrifying personal transformation. Antonio experiences a rite de passage that begins his development toward responsible adulthood in the manner of the Bildungsroman. The decisive phase is an awe-inspiring lightscape: Den blaa Æther var dybt under mig, over mig og rundt om. Jeg rørte Armen, og som electriske Ildfunker glimrede Millioner Stjerneskud om mig. Af Luftens Strømme blev jeg baaret; jeg var vistnok død, svævede nu gjennem Ætheren til Guds Himmel; … Hvor var jeg  – En skinnende Sø var det, jeg havde antaget for Luft under mig, den brændte svovlblaa, men uden Hede. Var det den, der oplyste Alt rundt om, eller lyste Klippevæggene og Buen høit over mig. Var det Dødens Bolig, Grav-Cellen for min udødelige Aand! et jordisk Opholdsted var det ikke. I alle

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Overgange af Blaat lyste Enhver Gjenstand, jeg selv stod i en Glands, som strømmede Lyset ud inden fra. (276–78) (Far below me, above me, and around me, was blue ether. I moved my arm, and, like electric sparks of fire, millions of falling stars glittered around me. I was carried along by the current of air; I was certainly dead, I thought, and now had floated through ethereal space up to the heaven of God…. Where was I? Was that below me, what I had taken for air, a shining sea, which burned of a sulphurous blue, but without heat; was the illuminated space around me this, or was it light-diffusing walls of rock, and arches high above me? Was it the abode of death, the cell of the grave for my immortal spirit? An earthly inhabitation it certainly was not. Every object was illuminated in every shade of blue; I myself stood in a glory that gave out light.)

The development of Andersen’s prose is a continuing experiment extending most intensively during the 1830s: the first fairy tales were published, his travel narratives were taking shape as seen in Skyggebilleder til en Reise i Harzen (1831; Shadow Pictures: From a Journey to the Harz Mountains, Saxon Switzerland, etc.) as their first major result, and his diaries form a kind of ongoing exploratory project. After his return from Italy until the end of his life, Andersen incessantly traveled across Europe as well as to the Middle East and rendered his impressions in a series of travelogues, most importantly in En Digters Bazar (1842; A Poet’s Bazaar). But there are no lightscapes of the same intensity and complexity as in Improvisatoren. Only later in a modernistic mode is a similar complex of southern lightscapes presented, on the one hand by the intellectual clarity in La Cour’s notes from the Acropolis and on the other by the overwhelming and almost destructive sensual presence in Jørgen Sonne’s “Cikadepinjen” (1960; Cicada Pines): Cikader synger, synger i sort pinje. Sort mod den sol, som driver dem til sang, står kronen om en explosion af liv, tortérende den syreklare luft: Hvidglødte fugle i et helvedtræ … solklump der sitrer, strinter sine gnister, splintrer sin sorte kærne ud i lyd. (92) (Cicadas are singing, singing in black stone-pine. Black against the sun that moves them to sing stands the crown around an explosion of life, torturing the acid-clear air: White-hot birds in an infernal tree … shivering sun-nugget, spraying its sparks, splintering its black core into sound.)

Here the black stone-pine and the destructive light of the scorching sun that drives the cicadas to a relentless singing almost to the point of exhaustion echo Antonio’s encounter with the burning sun in the Campagna outside the monastery.

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From the touristic gaze to the escapist illusion Between Andersen and modernists like La Cour and Sonne the southern lightscape underwent significant changes in the Nordic literatures. For some writers, the lightscape acquired a spiritual value with an ethical or religious content – which had also left its clear marks in Andersen’s text – while for others, the purely aesthetic and sensual quality became its most preeminent feature. Both writers and painters tried to bring their vision from elsewhere back to the Nordic countries until about 1870 by importing impressions from the South and later in an attempt to express the particular Nordic lightscapes in impressionistic paintings and prose. Most of the Nordic authors preferred the harmonious but transitory sunny lightscape spectacularly amplified at sunset and sunrise and marking an escape route from the somber Nordic region. Eventually, this lightscape was turned into a cliché of the standard southern lightscape easy to copy in order to give the fictional space both a foreign and an elevated touch. The development of the foreign literary lightscape from around 1850 to the end of the twentieth century can be seen as an attempt to rediscover both its sensual beauty and its ambiguous complexity as a space between life and death, between humanity and the destruction of life. It was principally configured, however, as the space of intensified life in search of its limits that it at times transcended. One of the interesting early figures in this development is Andersen’s contemporary, the seasoned Swedish traveler Fredrika Bremer. The six volumes of Hemmen i den Nya Världen (1853–54; Homes of the New World) depict her tour to the United States and Cuba. A subsequent set of six volumes, Lifvet i Gamla Verlden (1860–62; Life in the Old World), describes her tour around the easternmost part of the Mediterranean basin and contain edited notes, letters, and diary fragments. Here, the moonlit lightscape is never demonic as in Andersen, and the merciless sunscape never marks its vicinity to death and destruction. Rather, she concentrates first and foremost on the spiritually elevating effects of the picturesque beauty of the lightscape and is often guided by a religious interpretation while also emphasizing the transformative personal influence of the lightscape. She introduces this view in the first volume from Switzerland: Haf förtroende till solen! Låt dig ej modfällas. Har icke öfver ditt eget lif nyss en nattlig storm gått fram, och syntes ej himlen mörk, all utsigt på jorden stängd? Och blef ej på en gång, såsom med trollslag, ovädret skingradt och allt klart? … så sjunka de [the sufferings] i djupet, så smälta de bort för Guds godhets sol. (4:1) (Believe in the sun! Do not lose your courage. Did not a nightly storm recently pass over your own life, and did the sky not look dark, every vision of the earth blocked? And did not the blast, all of a sudden like magic, vanish and everything become clear? … so they [the sufferings] will sink deep down, melt under the sun of God’s mercy.)

In contrast to Andersen’s Antonio, she is never overwhelmed by the lightscape beyond her senses but always observes it fully conscious and at a distance. The most disturbing lightscape she encounters traveling in Europe or on the earlier journey through North America is an eruption of Vesuvius, an event as awe inspiring as Antonio’s entry into the grotto. But the scene is safely observed from her room in Pension Schiazzi on the harbor. Here she watches

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den stora eldbrasan, som brinner, icke ur bergets topp, utan brutit ut i fördjupningen emellan den stora käglan och berget Somma…. Man tycker sig se en dalsträckning full af glödande strömmar. Högsta toppen af Vesuvius är höljd i mörka rökmoln. Vägen dit säges vara afskuren af lava-strömmen, men från trakten kring Eremitaget lärer man förträffligt kunna se den brinnande dalen. Mig höll synen deraf på afstånd vaken denna natt. Skådespelet var så egendomligt, i synnerhet när fullmånen uppsteg deröfver, höljd i molnslöja … Åter och åter måste jag lemna min säng under natten för att från min balkong betrakta de kämpande ljusen … som färgade himmelen röd. (1.2: 297) (the big fire which burns not from the summit, but erupts from a vent between the big cone and Mount Somma…. It looks like a long valley full of glowing streams. The very peak of Vesuvius is shrouded in dark clouds of smoke. The road is said to be cut off by the streams of lava, but from the vicinity of the Eremitage the view of the burning valley should be magnificent. The view kept me awake the whole night. The scenery was quite unique, in particular when the moon rose above it veiled behind the clouds…. Over and over again during the night, I had to leave my bed to observe from my balcony the fighting lights … that colored the sky in red.)

Alternative realities or the limits of existence are not evoked in her imagination but a more favorable vantage point with a better view of the spectacle. She adopts the tourist’s gaze. After 1850 most of the Nordic writers followed the aesthetic and at times moralizing trend of Fredrika Bremer and reduced the southern lightscape to a proto-touristic banality teaching the observer and the reader a vaguely edifying lesson. Two notable exceptions are the Danish symbolist poet Johannes Jørgensen, who converted to Catholicism and lived as a monk in Italy for the better part of his life, and the contemporary Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf, whose travels to Italy and Palestine deeply influenced her work. Although their texts are not rich in foreign lightscapes, they are nonetheless charged with a genuine religious sensitivity, Jørgensen in his memoires Mit Livs Legende 1–7 (1916–28; My Life’s Legends) and Lagerlöf in Antikrists Mirakler (1897; The Miracles of the Antichrist, 1899) and Jerusalem (1902; Jerusalem, 1915). But the predominantly aesthetic approach with more than a touch of hedonism is clear in the Swedish poet Carl Snoilsky, who in Italienska Bilder (1865; Italian Pictures) includes a poem about Nero’s Domus Aurea, “Neros gyllene hus” (Nero’s Golden House), the extravagant country house built in central Rome after the fire in 64 CE and surrounded by enormous gardens. Here sunset, history, and beauty unite in a pleasurable lightscape tinted with nostalgia: Se! Solens kula sig sänker bak pinjer och blåa berg; på Coliseum hon blänker i brunröd, glödande färg…. En gang, da solen går neder i purpur och guld, som nu, och nickar farväll till eder, I eviga kullar sju, då skall hon Roma betrakta och småle odödligt gladt, som ville hon saga sakta: I gamla tider, godnatt! (32–33)

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(Look! The orb of the sun sinks behind stone pines and blue mountains; on the Coliseum she twinkles in a brownish red, glowing color…. Sometime when the sun goes down in purple and gold, as now, and nods farewell to you, you eternal seven hills, then she will look at Rome, and smile immortally glad as if she wanted to say silently: Bygone times goodnight!)

Snoilsky’s approach is also found in his older Danish colleague Ludvig Bødtcher, whose poetry, inspired by his stay in Italy 1824–35, indulges in the pleasures of an easy going and idyllic life under the sun surrounded by good natured people, a fertile landscape, and smiling peasants, as in, for example, a series of poems from Nemi, here from “Morgen i Nemi” (1836; Morning in Nemi): Solen straaler stedse mere mægtig, Hvilket Syn at skue fra vor Klint! Hvor sig Dalen breder riig og prægtig Som en tavlet, frugtbar Labyrinth! Paradisiske Natur! Sø og Dal og runde Klippemuur, Alt sig bølger her som Poesi! (107–08) (The sun shines stronger and stronger still, What a vista from our cliff! See, how the valley extends rich and splendid As a plotted, prosperous labyrinth! Edenic nature! Lake and valley and round stone wall, Every thing undulates like poetry!)

However, the most widely read Nordic writer with a touristic gaze is the Dane Vilhelm Bergsøe, whose bestseller Fra Piazza del Popolo (1866; From the Piazza del Popolo) saw numerous reprints well into the twentieth century. It is mainly set in Italy as well as in Denmark and is centered around a group of embedded stories, told by a group of Nordic exilés gathering regularly on Piazza del Popolo. The interconnected chain of events is amplified by the exotic Italian surroundings and enveloped in lightscapes of sunrise, sunset, stars, and moonlight. These lightscapes are rendered without great variation and only serve as a theatrical backdrop to the various actions. Bergsøe exemplifies the conception of Italy as a sensual and liberating but also seductive and slightly demonic place wrapped in standardized lightscapes. Already toward the end of the nineteenth century, this conception was so widely known that it could be parodied as for example in Herman Bang’s short novel Ved Vejen (1886; Katinka). During an outing to a provincial marketplace, the boorish and vulgar Bai, his subdued and unfulfilled wife Katinka, and the young Huus – the latter two hardly aware of their

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mutual feelings – enter a tent to see the traveling panorama of Neapolitan scenery. Huus has been there, Katinka dreams about it, Bai could not care less. Since the visual associations had become a cultural commonplace, a few trivial one-liners suffice to show the repressed sensuality and emotions of the three characters  – Katinka’s diffident and vague dream of another life only revealed by the soft tone of her voice, Huus’s brief matter-of-factness masking his feelings, and Bai’s indifference: Det er Landskaber, sagde Bai, som var begyndt at kigge i Gluggerne. – Det blaa Vand, sagde han og gik videre…. – Det er Golfen – sagde Huus – ved Neapel. Billedet var ikke slet. Blinkende Sol laa over Golf og Strand og Stad. Baade fløj hen over Vandets Blaa. – Neapel, sagde Katinka sagte. (208–09) (It’s different parts of the country,” said Bai, who had started to peer into the peepholes. “The blue water,” he said, moving on…. “It’s so beautiful.” “That’s the gulf,” said Huus, “near Naples.” The picture wasn’t bad. Glittering sunshine lay over the gulf and the beach and the city. Boats flew across the blue of the water. “Naples,” Katinka said softly.) [Katinka 87]

A painted show of a trivial lightscape of blinking sunshine is all that remains of Andersen’s visionary lightscape of the Bay of Naples charged with the power to transform and emancipate human lives. Here the reader is left with a parody of the escapist illusion of a life in perennial sunshine. Individualized lightscapes However, a smaller group of writers continues to explore the sensual complexities of the southern lightscape. Their aim is both to maintain the aesthetic fascination of the lightscapes located elsewhere and to oppose the trivializing trend of the emergent modern mass culture of which the touristic gaze is but one element. But together with the reduction of the trivializing complacency, their lightscapes also tend to lose the collective cultural and ideological meaning of earlier literature in order to appear instead as individualized spaces for intensive transformations of identity often hard to situate in particular place. A master in such lightscapes – poignant and paradoxical – is the Danish poet Henrik Nordbrandt. His favorite points of reference are the Mediterranean, Turkey, and Greece in particular. The concrete spatial reference, however, is no longer pertinent, but rather an image beyond the ordinary logic of sense perception – the blind eye can see, the shadows can be heard: Når solen endelig skinner i november skinner den så stærkt at selv blinde farer sammen når de hører deres skyggers drøn. (75)

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(When the sun finally shines in November it shines so forcefully that even the blind start when they hear the boom of their shadows.)

In spite of the recognizable location of such lightscapes, these writers more closely parallel the Nordic writers focusing on foreign lightscapes outside the European South, which had never been imbued with a shared cultural meaning and had never established a literary tradition. There are Italian lightscapes in the visual arts and literature, perhaps also Greek as well, but never Latin American, African, or Siberian. They are individual occurrences both in the sense of their relative scarcity in Nordic literatures and in the sense that they are more closely related to the individual writers than to a specific locality in their aesthetic particularity. From the end of the nineteenth century on, these individual variations have become the hallmark of most depictions of foreign lightscapes in Nordic literatures wherever they are located. What they share with the earlier lightscapes, however, is the transformative power ranging from daydreaming to a passionate longing for a new life. In his collection of small travelogues Med Kul og Kridt (1872; With Coal and Chalk), the Danish writer and painter Holger Drachmann reports from Sicily. In “Messina og Østkysten,” (Messina and the East Coast), he is watching the moonlit Mediterranean coastline outside Palermo as a spectacular scenery, “som man kun kan oplever i Syden…. Sceneriet kunde ikke være smukkere eller effektfuldere. Maanen skinnede fra den dybe Azur ned paa Middelhavets lange, taktfaste Dønninger” (1:72) [that one could only experience in the South…. The panorama could not be more beautiful or more appealing. The moon was shining from the deep Azure down on the long, stable waves of the Mediterranean]. The next morning the surroundings, although recognizable, appear as being brought into existence for the first time by the morning light with more and more details united in one long phrase as one light-born landscape, stronger and stronger in its effect as if created here and now by the observations of the poet: Tidligt den næste Morgen var jeg igen paa Dækket…. Til venstre traadte Kalabriens Kyst frem af Morgentaagen med sine vilde Klipper, der paa denne Side af Skylla falde stejlt af imod Havet. Til højre begyndte Husene i Messinas langstrakte Forstad at vise sig, tittende frem af de tætbevoksede Dale og adspredte rundt omkring paa de nøgne Høje, der efterhaanden løftede sig i dristigere Linjer og længere inde i Landet antog den fuldstændige Form af blaatakkede Bjerge, saa at man ligesom kunde forstaa, at denne opadstigende Skala til sidste maatte ende i Ætnas kæmpemæssige, snedækte Tinde…. denne Række … af … Bjerge … vidnede om voldsomme Udbrud, Naturens store Lidenskaber. (1:73) (Early next morning, I returned to the deck…. To the left, the coast of Calabria pierced through the morning fog with its wild cliffs, which on this side of Scylla, slid abruptly down toward the sea. To the right, the houses of the drawn-out suburb of Messina began to appear, peeping through the richly planted valleys and scattered on the naked hills, which gradually mounted in more and more boldly drawn lines and in the distance completely assumed the form of bluepeaked mountains making it understandable that this ascending scale eventually would end in the enormous, snow-covered peak of Etna…. This series … of … mountains testified to violent eruptions, the great passions of nature.)

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These great passions are what younger writers were looking for rather than pleasurable indolence and a lightscape related to a particular locale. This tendency also holds true for the most important Danish poet in the first quarter of the twentieth century, Sophus Claussen. In Djævlerier (1904; Devils), his poem about Naples, “Længsel efter Neapel,” (Longing for Naples), is far from the superficial and commonplace daydreaming of Herman Bang’s Katinka. The light, the place, and the poet’s own burning urge are wild and transgressive and highly individualized with a clear erotic emphasis: I dag brænder jeg efter Neapel, det brede, paa Vulkaner fra umindelige Tider myldrende og altid splinternye! Dronninge-Søstaden i Pjalter, hvor det hellige vilde Sollys er hverdags som Skidenheden og Støvet, den alle Rammer brydende Hverdag i det uoverkommelige Neapel … Og Damen fra Salerno – en eneste Solbølge i en sort Særk af Silke! (115–16) (Today I am burning for Naples, the broad, on volcanoes from time immemorial swarming and always brand new! The queen marine city in rags, where the holy wild sunshine is trivial as is the dirt and the dust, the total norm breaking triviality in the overwhelming Naples … And the lady from Salerno – one single wave of sun in a black skirt of silk!)

Apart from Italy and Greece, some Nordic poets – the Danish flatland poets, more frequently than those from more mountainous parts of the North – also admired the Alps and similar regions. In a sketch dating from 1886, “Nat mellem Bjerge” (Night Among the Mountains), Herman Bang juxtaposes mountainous lightscapes of day and night but evaluates them exclusively in terms to their meaning for his personal preferences: Under os laa Højene, blaaomhyllede, og det saa’ ud  – et Nu,  – som om Solens store Kugle svømmede paa mørkeblaa Bølger, før den sank … i rødt og Guld og Purpur, som blegnede og sluktes bag “Kejserens” [Wilder Kaiser] store Kegle…. Aldrig skal jeg glemme denne Nat. I en Luft saa blød, som jeg aldrig saa’, laa Bjergene i en Dæmring, der mildnede hver Linie; og over alle Tinder sejlede Maanen frem, tyst…. Jeg giver den hele Solopgang – med Gletscheres Pragt mod Himlens Rosenhav og alle Tinder som gyldne Øer i Havet – jeg giver alt for en Time her i denne Nat: paa det stille Bjerg, under Maanens Skær. (341–42) (Under us were the hills, blue-shrouded, and it looked – for a split second – as if the big globe of the sun was swimming on dark blue waves before it sank … in red and gold and purple, which faded and died out behind the big cone of Wilder Kaiser…. Never shall I forget that

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night. In an air softer than I had ever seen, the mountains lay in a twilight that softened every line; and above all, the peaks the moon came sailing, silent…. I’d gladly sacrifice the entire sunrise – with the glory of the glacier against the rosy sea of the sky and all the crests as golden islands in the sea – I’d sacrifice it all for just one hour in this night: on the quite mountain in the moon’s light.)

Bang’s impressionism concentrates on immediate sensory impressions. This style is transformed into lyric poetry, also portraying the Alps, by the Swedish impressionist poet Ola Hansson in his Dikter (1901; Poems). In the poem “Andermatt,” he pinpoints isolated impressions of light and in particular their effect on him: Jag kom i juni en tidig morgon, då solen ännu bak bergen stod…. Jag satt och väntade mig få höra i solskensdagern en lärkas drill (24–25) (I came in June Early one morning when the sun still lay behind the mountain…. I sat and waited to hear in the sunny day the twitter of a lark)

The role of the mountains and their lightscapes for profound existential changes is central to Henrik Pontoppidan’s novel Lykke-Per (1898–1904; Lucky Per), a complex portrait of Denmark on its way from a national isolation to a modern, global world. As an engineering student, the protagonist Per Sidenius is sent to Switzerland and is overwhelmed by the Alps: Det var, som om noget derude i den store Sten- og Sneørken havde kaldt paa ham…. I virkeligheden var det saaledes mindre Landskabet selv, der optog ham, end Maaden, hvorpaa det indvirkede paa ham i hans fuldkomne Ensomhed. (2:62–63, emphasis added) (It was as if something out there in the huge desert of snow and stone had called upon him…. Actually it was less the landscape itself that captured him, than the way in which it influenced him in his absolute solitude.)

The last phrase can be seen as a common denominator for the literary lightscapes after 1870: individual effect is more important than local specification. In this case, the irresistible individual attraction of the mountains culminates when it becomes a lightscape. Lightscapes do not abound, but they mark the crucial turning points in Per’s life while in the Alps. The small village in which he is living, Dresack, is a narrow and somber place darkened by the shadows of the high surrounding mountains. But when he walks up into the heights, he sees “en uhyre Snemark, der øverst oppe gennembrødes af en nøgen, rødgraa, solbeskinnet Klippekam” (2:63)

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[a huge snow field that was only interrupted high up by a naked, red-gray sunny crest]. The higher sunny region releases a profound self-reflection. Here he is overwhelmed by the invincible power of nature that he, as an engineer, is educated to control. Even Per, the intransigent atheist, cannot avoid associations with the religious cosmology of light and sun: “En glødende Urtaage! Et opløst Solsystem!” (2:64) [A glowing primal fog! A dissolved solar system!]. When the mountains are seen from the town, moreover, it is always the small glimpses of a lightscape – night and day, morning and evening – that remind him of a world beyond his duties, his angst, and his doubts. The Italian lightscape nonetheless remains for Per the central cliché for Nordic daydreaming as indicated at the end of the following quotation: Mangen Gang i de forløbne Maaneder havde han staaet der om Natten, udmattet og nedtrykt af sin frugtesløse Læsning, og stirret op paa den lysende Klodevrimmel…. Allerede den næste Dag vilde han kunne rulle hen gennem Norditaliens aabne og lyse Natur i Sommersol og Blomsterduft. (2:77–78) (Often during the previous months, he stood here at night, exhausted and depressed by his futile reading and looking up at the glittering swarms of planets…. Already the next day, he would drive through the open and radient realms of nature of northern Italy under the summer sun and accompanied by the fragrance of flowers.)

The role of lightscapes is played out when the life of a character takes a new turn. They loosen their intimate relation to a particular location and strengthen instead their connection with the characters and the individual poets. This development calls for a differentiation of lightscapes according to their individualizing function and less to their geographical reference. No matter where they are situated around the globe or how elaborate they are, they serve three functions as exemplified by Lykke-Per: (1) existential changes toward a more intensified life, (2) escapist dreams of a fuller or a more pleasant life elsewhere, and (3) evocations of comprehensive cosmologies. The first two of these are the most prominent. Existential changes The restless Norwegian traveler Axel Jensen’s tour to the Sahara is told in his fictional travelogue Ikaros (1957; Icarus). Like Icarus, the traveling I is disturbingly close to the sun. He desires the ultimate experience of presence but is burned in his quest, not by the sun, but rather because of his highly personal passion for hazardous experiences. Icarus and the sun are, thus, used as more or less schematic devices, the former to mythologize the protagonist, the latter to subdivide the narrative trajectory. Sunrise and sunset, rendered in a quasi-expressionistic language, provide the scenery with a touch of exoticism and a promise of extreme adventure: Luften var blitt kjølig. Over sandhavet mot Colom Bechar fløt en tynn kobbergrønn oppløsning av dis og lys. Fløt sammen med messingdisen og kobberdisen over Chaamba el Mohabi…. Teppet gikk ned for siste akt og solen forsvant bak sandhavet som et ildrødt utropstegn. Akkurat som bomben over Hiroshima som avslutning på generasjoners vitenskapelige svette. (51)

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(The air has cooled down. Toward Colom Bechar above the ocean of sand, there floated a thin copper-green dissolution of mist and light. It floated together with the brazen and cupreous mist above Chaamba el Mohabi…. The curtain fell for the last act and the sun disappeared behind the desert ocean as a flaming red exclamation point. Just like the bomb over Hiroshima as the conclusion of generations’ scientific efforts.)

Such lightscapes give the nomadic protagonist an existential hangover, and the main part of the story present his second thoughts expressed in lightscapes. The book opens with a brief lightscape that frames a dynamic in-between space as a space for individual sensual freedom that the protagonist exploits to a fault. But later he feels the emptiness after a long period of a casual life, “oppjaget, planløst og fullt af bisarre påfund. Et sigøynerliv” (138) [pursued, erratic, and filled with bizarre impulses. The life of a gypsy]. This difficult awakening is also represented by a lightscape although very different from the ambiguous one at the beginning and the explosive one referring to the Hiroshima bomb: a narrow indoor lightscape of physical pain that forces him to reflect on his life: Jeg våkner. En lysstråle finner veien gjennom et hull i muren. En synåltynn lysstråle. Den vandrer sakte, famlende oppover ullteppet. Den fanger støvpartikler i luften og får dem til å glitre som fint glasstøv. Synålen treffer pupillen. Det er som hos øyenlegen der man får en lyspil skutt inn i øyets dunkle regioner. Hver morgen er jeg hos øyenlegen. Hver morgen kommer lysstrålen og jeg glipper med øynene og myser opp mot taket. (139) (I wake up. A beam of light finds its way through a hole in the wall. A beam thin as a needle. It moves quietly, gropingly across the woolen blanket. It captures dust particles in the air and makes them twinkle like fine dust of glass. The needle hits the pupil. It is as if at the ophthalmologists where an arrow of light is shot into the dark regions of the eye. I am at the ophthalmologist every morning. Every morning the beam enters, and I squint my eyes blinking against the roof.)

Karen Blixen’s Den afrikanske Farm (1937; Out of Africa) also opens with a lightscape, but as part of a broader representation of the African landscape. Its dynamic power is the product of its liminal status between air and water, up and down, object and mirror, dream and reality. The lightscape opens a floating space that gradually enhances her feeling of individual identity: Himlen var aldrig stærkt blaa, men oftest ganske bleg, og saa lys, at det var svært at faa Øjnene op imod den, med en Rigdom af vældige, vægtløse, omskiftende Skyer, som taarnede sig op i Horisonten og sejlede hen over den. Men den havde en skjult blaa Kraftkilde i sig, paa ganske kort Afstand farvede den Højdedraget dybt, friskt himmelblaat. I Middagsheden blev Luften over Sletten levende som en Flamme der brændte, den blinkede, bølgede og randt som Vand, genspejlede og fordoblede alle Genstande og skabte store Luftsyn. Her i denne høje Luft trak man Vejret let og indaandede et vildt Haab, som Vinger. I Højlandet vaagnede man om Morgenen og tænkte: Nu er jeg der, hvor jeg skal være. (10) (The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet with a profusion of mighty, weightless, everchanging clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has a blue vigour in it, and at a short distance, it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue. In the middle of the day the air was alive over the land, like a flame burning; it scintillated, waved, and shone like running water, mirrored and doubled all objects, and created a great Fata Morgana. Up in this high air

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Svend Erik Larsen you breathed easily drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of the heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.) [4]

One of the most ambitious travelogues in recent Danish literature is Thomas Boberg’s trilogy Sølvtråden: Rejseminder (1996; The Silver Thread), Americas: Rejseminder (1999; Travel Memories of the Americas), and Invitation til at rejse (2003; Invitation to Travel), which combines travel memoirs mostly from Latin America and childhood memoirs from Denmark. Like the older globetrotting Johannes V. Jensen from the turn of 19th century, Boberg is an easily distracted traveler with no clear sense of direction, but also without Jensen’s desperate search for extremes and inability to dwell in the present. Like Blixen he cherishes the sense of presence in spite of its being unexpected and its passing brevity. Large parts of the books are small poignant experiences drawn from constant travel in all directions but at the same time also focus on a brief and absorbing sense of presence, as for example when the sun with a sudden intensity shows a deserted mine near a river while also underscoring its appeal to travel on: Når uvejret stilner af og solen i et nu splintrer eftermiddagens glasregn og ryster den i de sidste dråber ud over urskovens løvtag, ser jeg igen bredderne helt klart. Guldfeberen efterlader sine spor. Bunker af grus og sten. Man må videre. Gabende grave hvor intet mere kan gro. Man tager videre. (Sølvtråden 134) (When the storm subsides and the sun suddenly shatters the afternoon’s glassy rain and shakes its last drops over the canopy of the jungle, I can again clearly see the riverbanks. The gold rush has left its traces. Tons of gravel and stones. One has to continue on. Pits wide open where nothing can grow anymore. One continues on.)

The delicate balance between traveling and presence is of a highly individual nature, often ambiguously enigmatic. Here, the lightscape both reveals legs too thin for walking and a net that may catch him: Det var tidlig morgen, og solen var på vej op i en tåge. Dens stråler lignede tynde ben og tågen et skide net. Jeg stod og betragtede sceneriet fra stranden. Mens jeg klatrede rundt i mit eget tankenet og et øjeblik så solen som universets edderkop, kom en lille mand hen til mig. Han kiggede på mig med den dybeste undren, så rakte han armen ud og berørte min hofte med en finger. – Hvilken planet er De fra? spurgte han pludselig. Jeg stod et øjeblik stum og forbløffet, så pegede jeg ud i ørkenen ørkenen. (Invitation 523) (It was early morning, and the sun was rising in a fog. The beam looked like skinny legs and the fog a damn web. I was watching the scenery from the beach. While I was crawling around in the web of my own mind and for a moment saw the sun as the spider of the universe, a tiny man came up to me. He looked at me in deep amazement, then he stretched out his arm and touched my hip with a finger. “Which planet are you from?” he asked suddenly. For a moment I was standing dumb-founded, then I pointed to the desert.)

In such moments the lightscapes both transcend the place and the human subject in undecidable directions of movement, location, and identity. This position may turn into pure escapism, but not in Boberg.

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Escapist dreams The rich orientalism in French and English literature does not find a clear parallel in Nordic literatures, and even less in the case of lightscapes. Of course, the exoticizing attitude toward the Orient and Africa as mythological continents – the “heart of darkness” – is known and so is the fantasy about those regions as a site of a lascivious lifestyle. But this stereotypical voluptuous and atavistic “darkness” is not generally translated into lightscapes. Instead there are a few examples of an exoticism in closed spaces with melodramatic light effects as in this stanza from “De tre frågorna” (The Three Questions) in the Swedish poet Verner von Heidenstam’s Vallfart och Vandringsår (1888; Pilgrimage and Years of Wandering): Och natt är nu. En storväxt neger böjer åt sidan tamariskerna och dröjer. I blåvitt lyser hans turbans muslin. Och i hans svarta huvud kan jeg spåra hans röda läppar som en blodröd skåra i sidan på en lädersäck med vin. Så klar är örkenmånen och så stor, att allt har dagens färg. Är dagen vaken? Det gula berget sitter som en naken ghavaziflicka i ett blåvitt flor. (30–31) (And night now. A big African separates the tamarisks and waits. His turban’s muslin shines in blue and white. And in his black face I can see his red lips as a blood-red slit in the side of a leather bag with wine. The desert moon is so clear and so huge that everything takes on the color of the day. Is the day awake? The yellow mountain sits as if a naked ghawazi girl in a blue-white veil.)

Another fin-de-siècle poet, the Danish J. P. Jacobsen, contributes to the exoticizing orientalism in his early poem “I Seraillets Have” (1870; In the Garden of the Seraglio) set in a sensual chiaroscuro lightscape: Rosen sænker sit Hoved, tungt Af Dug og Duft, Og Pinjerne svaje saa tyst og mat I lumre Luft. Kilderne vælte det tunge Sølv I døsig Ro, Minareterne pege mod Himlen op I Tyrketro, Og Halvmaanen driver saa jævnt afsted Over det jævne Blaa, Og den kysser Rosers og Liljers Flok,

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330 Alle de Blomster smaa I Seraillets Have, I Seraillets Have. (335) (The rose is lowering its head, heavy With dew and fragrance, And the stone-pines are swaying silently and faintly In the sultry air. The springs are pouring their silver In sleepy quietness, The minarets are pointing to the heaven In blind faith, And the half moon is sailing steadily Across the steady blue, Kissing the group of roses and lilies, All the small flowers In the garden of the seraglio, In the garden of the seraglio).

Here Jacobsen contributes with a more sophisticated oriental pastiche of indolent sensuality than most of his contemporaries with light effects of the shimmering silver of water and a sailing moon toward the blue sky, just making the minarets visible. Cosmologies The fascination of African mythology may also express itself through lightscapes. In “Ekvatorial Soloppgang” (1973; Equatorial Sunrise), Kolbein Falkeid rewrites an African foundational myth of the union of sun and moon in a steamy cosmic lightscape of early morning: Enda før natten har sopt stjernene sammen og ryddet himmelen etter seg står Lisa, solen, opp fra sengen av åser i øst. Rødøyet av søvn og hete kysser han Mawu, månen, sin elskede og legger et laken av lys over henne. Så damper skogene. Så ryker mangrovene. Hele morgenen rødmer ved dette stevnemøtet. (18) (Even before the night has swept the stars together and cleared the sky before leaving, Lisa, the sun, rises from his bed of slopes in the east. Red-eyed from sleep and heat he kisses Mawu, the moon, his beloved and covers her with a blanket of light. Then the steam rises from the forests. Then the smoke rises from the mangroves. And the whole morning blushes at this rendezvous.)

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The novel Nattens Rygrad (1999; The Spine of Night) by the Danish Arthur Krasilnikoff on the creation myth and the life of the Kalahari people opens with a misty lightscape that frames the murder of an entire village carried out by early morning intruders. This event also marks the initiation of the boy Kanta to a life as a shaman in a world that from now on will remain out of joint: Han undrede sig over det slørede lys og disen, som syntes at hænge sammen med lyset. Kun buskene og træerne stak mørke ud af den hvide tåge. Alt var omgivet af en rygende gus, der kun langsomt lod ham se, hvad den skjulte…. Først var der den hvide damp som om verden var spundet ind i et spindelvæv af tåge. Og enkelte fuglefløjt. Men stilheden begyndte at brumme og hvine som om verden var ved at kæntre…. Morgenen lå med sin sjældne hvide dis og bævrede af lys. Tøvende vendte verden tilbage. (13) (He was stunned by the veiled light and the mist that seemed one with the light. Only the shrubs and the trees darkly pierced out through the white fog. Everything was wrapped in a smoking fog that only slowly revealed to him what it contained…. First there was a white steam as if the world were spun into the foggy cobweb. And a few bird songs. But the silence started to growl and screech as if the world were about to capsize…. The morning was drawn out with its rare white mist and shimmered with light. Hesitantly the world returned.)

This initial lightscape returns later in Kanta’s memory as a complex reminiscence of a violent creational process that makes him return to the world and the world to him. The sea and the city The individualized lightscapes not only unfold in a particular elsewhere outside the Nordic region, they also tend to loosen their place-specific spatial anchoring only to occur wherever the experiencing subject happens to be. But, on the other hand, some places support this spatial dissolution more effectively than others. First, there is the boundless sea where lightscapes become part of the more general seascape, for example in Harry Martinson’s Resor utan mål (1932; Aimless Travel). The feeling of being adrift is represented as a lightscape with no welldefined place that produces a bewildering contradiction in time, location, temperature, and weather conditions: Efter dimmorna bli rymderna höga. När eftertruppsmolnen fått ge sig av kommer solen. Vi befinna oss på en latitud, gud vet var, där ingen årstid tycks finnas och där själva tiden – ja, var är den? Den har ingen köld och ingen värme, inga skrattgropar och ingen gråt. Den är inte ens suddig av mist och dis och på så sätt obestämd i sin bild. Nej, den är klar, himlen har korkskruvstottar vita som bomull sparsamt grupperade i anryckande flottor. Solen är som ett hisnande eldhål i rymden och ren som radium. (43–44) (After the mist, the spaces rise. When the trailing clouds have departed, comes the sun. We find ourselves at a latitude, God knows where, apparently without particular seasons and where time itself – yes, where is it? it has neither cold nor heat, no dimples, no tears. It is not even blurred by mist and fog and thus with an undefined appearance. No, it is clear, the sky has cork-screw shaped wads like cotton sparsely grouped in approaching fleets. The sun is like an awesome hole of fire in the space and clean as radium.)

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The second important site for lightscapes with no clear specific spatial location is the metropolis. Since romanticism, the big city developed from occupying a central but most often a negative role in the cultural semantics. It has acquired the position of the irresistible and seductive prototypical locale of modernism but with an ambiguous double edge, a place of both human freedom and destruction. In the nineteenth century, Nordic writers most often connected the urban experience with international nodal sites like Paris and London, later also with New York and Berlin, and more recently with any metropolis around the globe, as has been discussed in this volume’s Cityscape node. But beginning in the twentieth century, the expanding Nordic capitals – Copenhagen in particular – were also perceived through lightscapes of precisely the same nature as elsewhere. The urban lightscape became a general urban feature not related to a particular place or city. In the early phases, the city did not have a lightscape of its own. The big city was seen as an artificial space in contrast to nature at large or to the open panoramic landscape. It was, therefore, often viewed as a more-or-less disturbing part of a natural lightscape. When in her essay “Monte Pincio og nede i Byen” (1881; Monte Pincio and Down in the City) the Norwegian Camilla Collett describes Rome flooded by sunlight, its urban nature is transcended, and the city is transformed into a natural land thus repeating the stereotypical Italian lightscape observed by the touristic gaze. She is viewing the city from Monte Pincio as a panorama: Man ved ikke ret, i hvilken Belysning dette Syn virker mest betagende, maaske netop i skyet Veir eller i disig Luft, der lader dette uhyre Stenhav fremtræde fuldkommen skyggeløst, efter Omstændighederne mat bly- eller bronzefarvet, undertiden næsten marmorlig lysende. Herligst er det dog vel, naar Solnedgangen ligeoverfor strør Farver og sit Guld ud over det. En Spadsertur paa Monte Pincio giver en Følelse, som om man allerede var løftet høit over Jorden og dens Jammerligheder, og at man nu var befriet fra at betræde den mer. (96) (One never knows in which light this sight has its most impressive effect, perhaps best in cloudy weather or in the misty air that makes this enormous sea of stone appear without any shadows, under certain circumstances in dim colors of lead and bronze, now and then shining as marble. It is most spectacular, though, when the sunset in front of me spreads its colors and gold over it. A walk on Monte Pincio creates a feeling as if one were elevated high above the earth and its miseries, liberated from any obligation to get in touch with it.)

Collett implicitly ends by conflating the city with the human miseries it often exemplifies but from which the observer is now for a moment relieved by the effects of the lightscape. The city remains a negative space in need of such an imaginary operation to disguise its miseries precisely when a particular lightscape softens its outline. But the city itself is not a lightscape. Both of the novels by the Swedish writer Eyvind Johnson, Stad i mörker (1927; City in Darkness) and Stad i ljus (1928; City in Light), could have carried the title of the first, alluding to the urban darkness. The first is set in Paris and the second in Sweden, and both tell stories of frustrated desire and ambition with love as a frail repose. They are, though, more preoccupied with the bodily sensation of hunger and with acoustic impressions than with light. But in the titles, the two novels are framed by the image of the city as a place without its own, natural light and as the site of real and symbolic darkness. When sunlight is seen, if only in a passing glimpse, it shows the city almost under attack from external light: “Solen hade den side av jorden, som heter Paris, rätt under sig och stekte den sakta, likt en mästerkock, som vet hur

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sakerna bli mörast” (Stad i ljus 59) [Right under it, the sun had that part of the earth called Paris and grilled it steadily like a chef who knows how things became most tender]. Natural lightscapes do not belong to the city. The city only began to appear as a lightscape in its own right when streetlights produced artificial lightscape that seemed to play with night and day and other natural categories. This impression began to make itself felt in the early nineteenth century when gaslights first appeared but gained prominence when electric street lights were widely used. At this point, the luminous artificiality turned the city into a new type of lightscape as expressed in Tom Kristensen’s poem about Barcelona, “Forvandling” (1926; Transformation). The city is seen here as a self-mirroring affect that turns the lightscape upon itself and makes the city a vibrant microcosm: Og Lygternes Blus i den regnvaade By gav Gyderne Similiglans, og sort og erotisk i natlige Blikke laa Skæret af billige, lysende Drikke og spejled en Similisans. (59) (And the light from the street lamps in the rainy city gave the alleys a glare of make believe, and black and erotic in nightly gazes was the light of cheap, luminous drinks and mirrored a sense of make believe.)

In a more complex manner, August Strindberg describes the same autonomizing effect of an ambiguous Parisian lightscape in the first part, “Land och stad,” (Country and City) of his Bland franska bönder: Subjektiva reseskildringar (1889; Among French Farmers: Subjective Travel Portrayals): Där låg kulturens underverk, det moderna Babylon, alltid lika skön, like lockande, lika frånstötande. Morgonsolens strålknippor bröto igenom rökarne från sjuttiotvåtusen byggningar och lyste upp dessas fyra millioner fönster…. Brännförgyllningen på Invalidernas Dom sattes i brand av den glödande solen, Ryktet och Odödligheten på Operahuset flammade genom rökarne, Arc de Triomphe öppnade sin port till en byggnad som icke finns ännu, men över densamma svävar för vinden ett lätt svart moln som när myggen dansar i sommarkvällan över trädtopparna…. Glastaket på Industripalatset ligger i blått, ljusblått som en klar sjö i vilken himlen speglar sig, och genom dess fönster bryter vårsol och vårluft in över tusende konstverk, över tiotusen vallfärdande främlingar, över lidelser och lidanden, över jublande segrar och gråtande nederlag. (11–12) (Here was the miracle of culture, the modern Babylon, as beautiful, as luring, as repulsive as ever. The bundles of light from the morning sun pierced through the clouds of smoke from seventy two thousand houses and lit up there four million windows…. The gilded roof of the Dôme des Invalides was set afire by the glowing sun, Fame and Immortality on the Opera House flamed through the smoke, the Arc de Triomphe opened its gate to a house which does not yet exist, but over it a light, black cloud sails along as a mosquito over the tree tops in the summer evening…. The glass roof on the Palace of Industry stands in blue, pale blue as a clear lake reflecting the sky, and through its windows spring sun and spring air spread over a thousand art works, over ten thousand foreign pilgrims, over miseries, over jubilant victories, and crying defeats.)

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As in Kristensen, the urban lightscape is characterized by a mirror effect, here of the blue sky in the glass roof of the Grand Palais, whereas in Kristensen the city is mirroring itself in the wet alleys. But Strindberg’s lightscape changes its meaning during the quoted text. First, it appears as a purely quantitative monumentality with its monotonous array of identical buildings. It opens then an endless imaginary space through the Arc de Triomphe and ultimately reflects and thus integrates nature in the glass roof by finally establishing itself as a complete human microcosm. Another Parisian mirror effect is rendered by Sophus Claussen in his Antonius i Paris (1896; Antonius in Paris). While Kristensen points through the lightscape to the material city itself and Strindberg opens a view of a larger imaginary and natural space, Claussen’s urban mirror enhances the magic world of fantasy that in Strindberg is concentrated in a bare glimpse through Arc de Triomphe. For Claussen the city as such is the place of limitless fantasy created by its own light effects transcending its darker sides as portrayed in a description of an evening with Paul Verlaines: Det var en mild, fugtig Januar-Aften. Vi saa  – da vi havde passeret den skumle Seine  – tilbage over Broen, og i lange, tætte Straalerækker tindrede Lysene paa højre Bred frem gennem Tøvejrsdunsten som Gasflammer i et Spejl. En blid Spejl-Verden – kun at der var Luft nok, øm, fyldig Luft, til at aande, og at man kunde gaa, hvorhen man vilde, og spejle sig i det Ubekendte, uden at Virkeligheden havde Spejlglas eller Grænse. (77) (It was a mild, humid evening in January. We looked back – after having passed the gloomy Seine – at the bridge, and in long dense gleaming rows, the lights on the right bank were twinkling through the scent of the thaw like gas flames in a mirror. A gentle mirror-world – but with enough air, tender, abundant air to breath and to allow one to walk wherever one wanted and see one’s reflection in the unknown without reality showed any mirror or limit.)

In Claussen’s text, the magic is generated by the streetlight that, as in Kristensen’s poem, creates a universe of sensual attraction but also expands far beyond the attraction itself to a general vision of an urbanized freedom of movement and imagination. Claussen gives form to an experience of urban lightscapes that persist from the early experience of gaslights to the modern electrified city intimately linked to the fascinating emancipation and fatality of such artificial lightscapes. The gaslight version of this sense of magic and freedom can be found in H. C. Andersen’s fairy tale “Dryaden: Et Eventyr fra Udstillingstiden i Paris 1867” (1868; “The Wood Nymph”), which takes place in Paris during the world’s fair in 1867. The Wood Nymph, a tiny female tree spirit living in a chestnut tree, is brought to Paris during the big exhibition. Here Andersen offers a view of the vast city when the seductive gaslights are being lit. Paris is called “Fortryllelsens Stad” (202) [the city of enchantment], not least because the gaslight erases the difference between night and day, city and nature. Like humans, the Wood Nymph wants to throw herself into the pleasures of the magic urban world, but the price to be paid is that her life will last only one festive night. As with all magic, her spellbound life rests on a seduction that extends to a new level but at the same time confuses reality with the artificial lightscape that eventually destroys its admirers, seen here in a sequence of passages:

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Det var dag endnu da Lygterne tændtes, Gasstraalerne lyste ud fra Boutikerne, lyste op imellem Træets Grene; det var som et Sommersolskin…. Hun følte sig i den levende Menneske-Verden. (205) Hun naaede Boulevarden; her strømmede et Lyshav fra Gasflammer i Lanterner, Boutiker og Cafeer. Her stode i Række Træer, unge og slanke, hver gjemte sin Dryade for Straalerne af det konstige Sollys. (207) Dryaden forsvandt, løftet op i Gasflammernes Lysning i det friske Frie; der … kunde Underet findes, Verdens-Underet, det, hun søgte i sin korte Levenat; det maatte straale stærkere end alle Gasflammerne heroppe, stærkere end Maanen, som nu gled frem. Ja, tilvisse! og hun saae det hist henne, det straalede foran hende, det blinkede, vinkede, som Venusstjernen paa Himlen. (210) (It was still daylight when the lamps were lit and the gaslight streamed from the shops, shining through the branches of the tree. It was like summer sunshine…. She found herself in the midst of the living world of humans … [“The Wood Nymph” 389] She reached the boulevard. There a sea of light streamed from the gas flames in the streetlamps, shops, and cafés. There the trees stood in rows, young and slender, each hiding its wood nymph from the rays of the artificial sunlight. [391] … the wood nymph vanished, rising up in the glimmer of gas flames into the fresh air. Up there … would the Wonder be found, the Wonder of the World, the one she was seeking in her brief lifetime. Surely it would shine brighter than all of the gas flames below, brighter than the moon that was now gliding into view. Yes, of course! She saw it in the distance. It was shining before her, glinting, winking, like Venus in the sky.) [395]

The image of the ambiguous and luring power of the city that transcends the order of nature continues to be expressed through its electric lightscape. One hundred years after Andersen, the Danish Hans-Jørgen Nielsen describes in his essay “City by Night: City by Light” (1968) what he calls the phenomenology of the modern city. His point of departure is that the city as a human construct constitutes a second nature, more accessible to humans than the first consisting of natural processes: Opfindelsen af det elektriske lys har gjort vores byer yderligere syntetiske, når mørket falder på. Om dagen er der dog det ‘naturlige’ rum, det ‘naturlige’ lys…. Men om natten forvandles dette århundreds storbyer til en totalt artificiel, unaturlig formverden. Et strålende og eventyrligt rum af svævende, stedløse, immaterielle lyspunkter og ellers mørke, som man umuligt kan applicere på almindelige naturoplevelser. Naturens stjernehimmel er noget fjernt. I byerne bevæger vi os rundt midt i én, vi selv har skabt…. En uendelig spejlverden af hvirvlende reflekser og lyskilder … (108–09) (The invention of electric light has made our cities even more artificial when it gets dark. During the day, we have at least the “natural” space, the “natural” light…. But at night, the metropolises of this century [the twentieth] transform themselves into an entirely artificial, unnatural world made up of forms: a shining magic space of gliding, spaceless, immaterial points of light surrounded by darkness which cannot be applied to ordinary experiences of nature. The starry natural sky is something distant. In the cities we are moving about in one such sky that we have created ourselves…. an infinite world of mirrors with whirling reflections and sources of light …)

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Like Andersen and other predecessors, Nielsen is overwhelmed by the transforming power of the urban lightscape and its infinite mirroring and magic effects that dissolve the sense of time and space. But here, too, second thoughts arise when the urban dweller is confronted with the flipside of the enticing life-world of purely human creation: “En endeløs monotoni af øjeblikke råder både i astronauternes og natbyernes univers…. Letter man fra det faktiske miljø og prøver at forlænge det utopisk ud i fremtiden, melder der sig efterhånden en vis distance og træthed i én …” (110) [An endless monotony of detached moments governs both the universe of astronauts and of the city of night…. If one leaves the environment as it actually is and projects it utopically onto the future, one cannot help feeling a certain distance and fatigue …]. But there are still Nordic writers who integrate the full sense of the foreign lightscape in their work – nature, culture, reality and imagination. This is the case with the contemporary Icelandic writer Sjón. His works have already been translated into about twenty-five languages. His novel Rökkurbýsnir (2008; From the Mouth of the Whale) deals with the transition from the imaginary twilight zone between the magic medieval and the modern anthropocentric worlds embodied in the autodidactic thinker Jonas. His visions are expressed in a powerful lightscape: Ægirbirta; þegar dagurinn er svo bláhvítur að hvelfingin er ekki lengur umgjörð um brennandi sólina heldur er sólin eldiviður þess funandi silfurtjalds sem rís úti við sjónarrönd og er dregið um alla hina sýnilegu veröld, en fjallahringurinn í norðri, vestri og suðri tifar eins og tíbrá, er stundum skuggi og stundum ljós, en aldrei fastur fyrir auga, og hafíð er dúandi flauelsdúkur sem liggur þaninn frá ströndum eyjarinnar að faldbrún himinsins, en eyjan sem glampar í efninu miðju er gullgulur hnappur á fiðurríkum kodda sem bíður þess að verða bældur af barnshöfði himnesku; og svo er sýnin öll stungin klingjandi björtum silkiþræði sem lipurlega er þræddur milli jarðar og hafs og himins og sólarbáls með þeirri miklu saumnál sem klýfur höfuðskepnurnar allar. En teikning logandi saumsins segir mennsku auga fátt því þótt ein lína spretti af annarri, eins og æð sem vex af æð í bjarkarlaufi, í handarbaki, í góðgrýti, þá er þessi stórfenglegi ljósaleikur svo smár í óendanleikanum að til þess að greina myndina alla þyrfti áhorfandinn að stíga svo langt aftur að hann væri kominn upp að hásætinu handan veraldar, þar sem sá situr sem í upphafi lauk upp munni sínum og mælti fram orðið: Ljós. Og það varð ægibjart. (101–02) (Dazzling light: when the day is such a brilliant blue-white that the firmament is no longer a frame for the burning sun, rather the sun has become the kindling for a brilliant silver curtain that rises at the horizon and is drawn across the entire visible world, while the mountain ranges to the north, west and south shimmer as if in a mirage, sometimes in shadow, sometimes in sunlight, but never still; and the sea is a sheet of billowing velvet, stretching from the shores of the island to the hem of the sky, while the island itself, glittering in its midst, is a yellow-gold button on a downy cushion, waiting to be dented by the head of the heavenly child; and the whole vision is run through with tinkling bright silk thread, nimbly tacked between earth and sea and sky and fiery sun with the great needle that can pierce every element. But tracing the blazing needlework means little to the human eye, for although one line springs from another, like vein branching from vein on a birch leaf or the back of one’s hand or a precious stone, this magnificent play of light is so small when set against eternity that to perceive the whole picture the spectator would have to step back into the next world, to stand beside the throne of the One who in the beginning opened His mouth and uttered the words: ‘Let there be light!’ And there was dazzling light.) [115–16]

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In this in-between space of culture, cognition, and imagination, a lightscape transcends any particular place and becomes itself both Nordic and elsewhere at the same time, embracing both the magic and the scientific, the natural and the artificial, the topological and the poetic dimensions of human life. That is what foreign lightscapes have been about since the earliest examples in Nordic literary history. With Sjón the two essays on foreign lightscapes have come full circle. He underlines that lightscapes are more than traditional imaginary language using light in metaphors and other tropes to convey complex meanings. Lightscapes shape the human world by means of light. If metaphors of light to a large extent carry important cultural clusters of meaning across national cultures, lightscapes anchor those meanings in a specific cultural space – in this case, the Nordic. Foreign lightscapes in particular open those spaces to the world and make the regional culture accessible to the world at large. The lightscape’s combination of groundedness and openness is recapitulated by Sjón. He reworks and combines the various types of lightscapes from Nordic literatures: from the divine creation by word and light to the human production of lightscapes, from the visionary poetical creations to the placebound geographical light formations outside the Nordic region, transformative and transcendent power is the quintessence of lightscapes across their historical and material differences, thus making representations of lightscapes an active and integral part of shifting cultural identity formations.

Qualities of light Interfacing lightscapes in Eino Leino, Hella Wuolijoki, and Arvid Mörne Pia Maria Ahlbäck

The “Day of Summer and Poetry” is the lyrical name of one of the flag days on the Finnish calendar (July 6th). The name is an obvious link between the season and its genre: poetry. In the Finnish cultural imagination, summer above all implies light, warmth, relaxation, and – hopefully – peace of mind. The reason for the day’s name, however, is the commemoration of the birth of the poet Eino Leino, a prominent icon in Finnish literary history. Despite the sweet and often sun-drenched name of the day, neither Leino’s life nor his literary oeuvre were very sunny. Although much of his poetry is profoundly painful and bears witness of his poetic loneliness and isolation, his poems are nonetheless also extremely beautiful. Leino was also a formidable intellectual and a man of great learning despite the fact that he did not have a university education. He was extremely well read in the classics and translated the Divina Commedia into Finnish. His poetry, though, has always been very popular among the people. Today Leino’s poems are often sung, and many have been recorded with melodies that underscore their arresting lyric quality. In many respects, Leino can be considered the Finnish writer par excellence since one of the stereotypes of the Finnish character is loneliness and silence of which there is much in Leino’s poetry. In the poem “Yksin hiihtäjä” (The Lone Skier) from one of Leino’s earliest collections of poetry Hiihtäjän virsiä (1900; Hymns of the Skier), such an intense feeling of loneliness is pictured as part of an increasingly dark forest landscape, perceived from the inside. Minä hiihtelen hankia hiljakseen, jo aurinko maillehen vaipuu, minun mieleni käy niin murheisaks, minun rintani täyttää kaipuu. Latu vitkaan vie. Vai vääräkö lie? Niin pitkä on yksin hiihtäjän tie. (1) (I ski through the drifts in silence, Already the sun sinks toward the earth My spirits turn so sorrowful, My bosom is filled with longing. The trail is slow. Or is it the wrong one? So long is the lone skier’s path.)1

1.

As I have not been able to find any published translations of Leino’s poems, I have translated the extracts thereof myself. The translations have been made on a word for word basis. I translated the first two Mörne’s poems previous to their inclusion in this essay, and they have been published elsewhere. doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.26ahl © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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In the first of the poem’s ten stanzas, only the odd beam of light penetrates the depth of the forest occasionally reaching the lonely poetic skier. Finally the light disappears altogether. In the last stanza, the lyric voice relates how the shadows of the spruces grow longer and longer and gusts of wind blow the snow. It wonders whether the skier on the bogs really got back home or the previous stanza’s vision of home and family had just been a dream. Whichever the case may be, sleep relieves the pain. Just as the day has come to an end, so has the lonely road of the equally lonely skier. Nevertheless, the stereotype of Leino as an unhappy introvert is false in many respects. Leino was an extremely sociable man, and when all of the different genres of his literary corpus are taken into account – criticism, columns, and essays – he appears to be as much an outgoing, often socially engaged writer as he is an introverted poet. Marja-Liisa Nevala aptly describes the problem of Leino in the following words: Leinon kirjailijanlaadulle on ominaista voimakas polaarisuus. Yhtäältä hän on ulospäin suuntautuva, ajoittain poleeminenkin kirjoittaja, ja toisaalta hänessä on sisäänpäinkääntynyt, yhä syvemmälle yksityiseen minään porautuva lyyrikko. Nämä kaksi eri suuntiin vetävää virettä näyttävät kulkevan päällekkäin ja limittäin, ei vuorotellen. (1:20) (Leino’s writing style is characterized by a strong polarity. On the one hand, he is outgoing, at times even a polemic writer, but on the other hand there resides in him an introverted lyricist who probes ever deeper into his private self. These two contending currents seem to take place at one and the same time or to overlap rather than occurring in turns.)

Leino, in other words, burned too strongly, and the heat of the fire was all consuming. Out of the perception of intense light that the combination of the two words – summer and poetry – produce in connection with July sixth and the sunniest season of Finland, “her heart of summer” [Finnish: Sydänkesä], the appearance of the name of Eino Leino both contributes to and decreases its luminosity. Lux: Leino carries a pained mental landscape expressed in exquisite poetry, yet casts a shadow of sadness in the sunlight. This particular light of Leino also shines through in the following poem, “Se Herra, jota ma palvelen … ” (The Lord whom I serve), also from the Hiihtäjän virsiä collection: Se Herra, jota ma palvelen, se ei ole Herra teidän, ei tunne se kirkkoja, munkkeja, ei kuule se messuja heidän. Se Herra se asuvi korvessa ja hän on korven Herra! Hänet kasvoista kasvoihin siellä ma näin, kun metsiä hiihdin kerran. (55) (The Lord whom I serve is not your Lord he does not know churches, monks he does not listen to their masses. This Lord lives in the wilderness and he is the Lord of the wilderness!

Pia Maria Ahlbäck

340 There I saw him face to face, when once I skied through the forests.)

In this poem, the importance of the forests to Leino’s imagination is made particularly clear. In Leino, divine light coincides with the darkest shades of green and brown. The light of God, ultimate light as it were, resides in the harshest parts of nature. Forest-light to field-light Leino’s deep and frosty, poetic forests and divine wilderness merging with the mental landscapes of his poetic subjects could, perhaps, be characterized as darkscapes, as a kind of converse of the lightscape. These landscapes of light and darkness are never stable, particularly in Leino. Even his literary god of the wilderness later asks his subject, the forest man, to rise towards the sky and cultivate the land (57–58). Within a cultural imagery referring particularly to Finland where lightscapes of varying luminosity are closely related and readily interchangeable, the wintry forests in Leino can be read as “deterritorialised” (in Deleuze and Guattari’s famous words, 508) by the sun-drenched open fields of Hella Wuolijoki’s literary world only to be “re-territorialised” (508–10). Both of these lightscapes are firmly established and have their cross-cultural connections as part of both a Finnish and a Finland-Swedish imagination. The step from Eino Leino to Hella Wuolijoki is not big, either in terms of location  – Tavastlandia  – or rapport. They were friends, and Wuolijoki gave a vivid portrayal of their friendship in her book Kummituksia ja kajavia (1947). In terms of their literary imagination, however, there is a world of difference. Leino was born in Karelia and first attended school in the towns of Kajaani [Swedish: Kajana] and Oulu [Swedish: Uleåborg]. Thereafter he completed his education in Hämeenlinna [Swedish: Tavastehus], the largest town of the province of Häme [Swedish: Tavastland; English: Tavastlandia]. Häme was a very different geographical, cultural, and emotional environment when compared to Leino’s birthplace; it was the bountiful landscape of Finnish history and culture, the so-called “Heart of Finland” that has traditionally been represented as the locus of the Finnish cultural essence. Tavastlandia is well known as a sunny and prosperous cultural contrast to the deep and historically impoverished woodland areas of the eastern and northern regions of Finland. Hella Wuolijoki has no doubt been effective in portraying Finnish light. In Wuolijoki’s dramatic Niskavuori series and the subsequent films based on her plays, the medium and infrastructure of film is of central importance. The cinema scholar Anu Koivunen’s study of the Niskavuori films (2003) as well as Michel Foucault’s view of the cinema as a heterotopia will therefore inform the following discussion. Another problem to be acknowledged in connection with the construction of historical light is that of a possible presence of the past. Guided by the philosopher of history Eelco Runia, this discussion will relate that issue to the representation of persistent light that the Niskavuori world has communicated to the Finnish nation for some seventy years.

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Wuolijoki’s five Niskavuori plays have been performed repeatedly right up to the present

day.2 In addition, the plays were adapted as films shortly after their appearance.3 Being extremely

popular, they have also been repeatedly shown on television. In her study of the Niskavuori series and in particular its reception and continuing cultural presence, Anu Koivunen has revealed a cohesion in their sequential stagings, filmings, and television productions that established an overarching lightscape of major chronological importance extending over the relative(ly short) duration of Finnish modernity and most of the period of Finnish independence. The first in this series is Niskavuoren naiset (The Women of Niskavuori), which appeared in 1936. It, like the rest of the series, is set in an environment based on Wuolijoki’s husband’s manor Vuolijoki, which is situated in central Tavastlandia. The lightscape of Niskavuori emerged out of that environment. It was then further deterritorialized and reterritorialized in cinematic and television filmings as well as in the minds of generations of spectators. The lightscape is both long and broad and accordingly became effectively grounded in the consciousness of the nation. Anu Koivunen draws a crucial conclusion when she states that the Niskavuori films produce duplicity by providing distanced spectacle as well as identity (112). When regarded in terms of lightscapes, the out-of-body experiences of the Niskavuori correspond well with what Foucault characterizes as the heterotopian (“Des espaces autres” 47) space of the cinema. Such experiences imply that the succession of de- and reterritorializations of light would reach its fulfillment in the dark space of the cinema. As a heterotopia of illusion (49), the other space of the cinema provides the scene where an overwhelming darkness is sharply cut through by the light of the projector thus annexing the audience and merging it with another time and space. While light is projected onto the screen, the spectator, surrounded by darkness, perceives this light, which is the projected light of the sun-drenched fields of the well-known “Finnish heartland” of Tavastlandia. This lightscape accordingly extends from the physical landscape chosen for its artistic and ideological impact to the camera and from the finished film to the screen via the projector. What is more, the process continues, and the illuminated, projected landscape is reterritorialized at the level of the mind of the spectator. At a later point in time, the temporal distance contributes to the heightened effect of light in the transmissions of a shared past by making it present and thus uniting the two. Both soothing as well as painful identification is thus made possible. The presence of past light What are the particular qualities of the light of Niskavuori? Watching some of the oldest Niskavuori films today – the first film Niskavuoren naiset from 1938 or Loviisa from 1946 – implies

2.

Juhani Tervapää (pseudonym for Hella Wuolijoki), Niskavuoren naiset (1936; The Women of Niskavuori); Juhani Tervapää, Niskavuoren nuori emäntä (1940; The Young Matron of Niskavuori); Hella Wuolijoki, Heta Niskavuori (1950); Juhani Tervapää, Niskavuoren leipä (1938; The Bread of Niskavuori); Hella Wuolijoki, Mitä nyt Niskavuori (1953; Niskavuori Fights).

3.

Niskavuoren naiset (1938; The Women of Niskavuori); Loviisa (1946); Heta Niskavuori (1952); Aarne Niskavuori (1954); Niskavuori taistelee (1957; Niskavuori Fights); The Women of Niskavuori (1958); Niskavuori (1984).

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perceiving light that has traveled temporally. The production of a particular light, that is to say lighting or a cultural use of light, is nevertheless dependent on the interplay of natural light and darkness at the time of the filming. In terms of the historical theories of Eelco Runia, who has concerned himself with the problem of the historiographic presence of the past, the various procedures of lighting would become a metaphor of natural light whereas that natural light of the past, i.e. during filming, would here be understood as historical light, as historical reality in an environmentally historical sense, if the fictions of the Niskavuori films were to be understood as the historical texts that they of course also are. Runia claims: “Historical reality travels with historiography not as a paying passenger but as a stow-away. As a stowaway the past ‘survives’ the text; as a stowaway the past may spring surprises on us.” Historical light, in a way, is a stowaway in film. Run the film, and light “stands out” in the “epiphanic moment” of the cinema (27). Natural light in the film, thus, becomes a historical place producing a “transfer of presence” (14) of the past, in Runia’s words. Enjoying the pleasurable, re-cast light of the past, both the fiction of its actual presence and its veritable presence are achieved because, in a certain sense, the presence of past light is of course actual. Taking part in the past thus becomes only relatively impossible and relatively fictive. Fictive, after all, because in the cinema this kind of interaction happens in the concrete darkness of the tangible present, producing the presence of past light. Koivunen shows that much of the theme of the Niskavuori suite is about the confrontation and negotiation of modernity and tradition. Niskavuori carries several positive markers of modernity at the same time as it offers a sentimental treatment of an agricultural Finnish tradition that at the time of all of the Niskavuori films (1938–84) was initially slowly but eventually evermore rapidly disappearing. By 1984, the year when the final film was made, this effect of parallel contrast and identification should have been stronger than ever, but by then the relationship of modernity and tradition was already to some extent lopsided. To an audience in 1984, the markers of modernity were already dated but still fully recognizable as modern and thus possible to identify with. Again the intriguing fiction of presence, of the presence of the past, must have carried light with it. This is light in a different sense, though, light achieved by means of a modernity set in the past. The markers of modernity are about the vision of renewal and the future. In other words, this particular kind of luminosity was not so much about the neverending, nurturing light of the open fields of Finland as about the technological innovations that could make those fields yield more and better crops, innovations that were also connected with national pride and progress. Aarne Niskavuori, with his university education in agriculture, the new teacher Ilona, with her modern views on love and interpersonal relations, and the advances in agricultural technology being implemented by Aarne at Niskavuori all produce a secure and familiar vision of Finnish modernity from the vantage point of a later Finnish audience. This is a light of modernity that has been turned from a threat to secure potentiality precisely by means of the land. Modernization in the Niskavuori world is safe and therefore subsequently appealing because it is land related and land motivated. In the cinema, the spectator consequently becomes part of the shared pleasures of two intersecting lightscapes. The luminosity of the presence-of-the-past lightscape makes identification possible by means of the opacity of the absence-of-the-present darkscape that produces escape. The presence of the past and the absence of the present converge, and a seemingly

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eternal light that represents the nation’s glory is accordingly produced. What therefore ultimately unites these past topoi and a modern-day audience in the cinema is the culturally and physically material light emanating from the Tavastlandian fields of the historical films. This light dissolves the limits between the fiction and the real by blending them, i.e. having them melt into each other by means of their material luminosity and corresponding lack of it. Light and its interplay with darkness are held captive in the cinema as well as in history and fiction. Shadow lands How captive indeed. The interplay is like the hypnotic intervals of the lighthouses in the literary and geographic world of the Finland-Swedish writer, politician, and academic scholar Arvid Mörne. Although in Mörne’s thinking the open sea – the “field of the fisherman” – might occasionally carry a light that is at least as powerful as that of the sunny fields that first appear in Wuolijoki’s Niskavuori in the 1930s, the contrast between the lightscapes of Wuolijoki’s and Mörne’s imagination is perhaps the most apparent when all three writers – Leino, Wuolijoki, and Mörne – are compared in more than just chronological terms. Mörne’s collection of poetry, Rytm och rim (1899; Rhythm and Rhyme) was the first in a long series of collections of poetry extending up until his death in 1946 and included two poems that are considered characteristic of his literary imagination throughout his career. The first poem of the collection “Två toner” (Two Tones) sets forth an agenda addressing Mörne’s contemporary, Eino Leino, as Mörne’s biographer Hans Ruin has made clear (41).4 Jag äger skären och hafvet kvar. Jag äger vågor, som hvita stänka, jag äger sånger, som djärfva dränka ditt strängaspel i en käck fanfar. Jag äger fyrar, som höga blänka. (3) (I still own the skerries and the sea. I own waves that whitely spray, I own songs that bravely flood your harp in a bold fanfare. I own lighthouses that widely shine.)

Ruin states that in his first collection of poems Mörne “skiftade … åt sig havet och kusten som poetisk ägodel” (41) [made the sea and the coast his poetic possession]. Mörne never abandoned that possession, but the luminosity carried by the marine topography decreased. Ruin claims, moreover, that the shadows were there from the beginning. “För ensamhetskänslan ges det tidiga uttryck i Mörnes poesi. Redan i ‘Rytm och rim’, eljest så rik på hela varma stämningar och djärva, långt i framtiden gripande tankar, bryter ensamhetskänslan fram gång på gang.” (274) [Early expressions are given to the feeling of loneliness in Mörne’s poetry. As early as Rytm och rim, which is otherwise so rich in full, warm emotions and brave thoughts that grasp far 4.

At the time of the publication of Rytm och rim, Arvid Mörne was studying Finnish literature at Helsinki University. He later received a doctorate in that subject and also came to occupy a docentship.

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into the future, the feeling of loneliness breaks through time and time again]. In a discussion of the more general cultural importance and wide spread use of the motif of the dwarfed pine, which is considered Mörne’s individual poetic invention, Clas Zilliacus concludes for his part: “Den tragiska attityden var inte ensamrådande i martallspoesin. Där fanns också både saltstänk och solljus genom grenverket. Men orgelpunkten var det tålmodiga lidandet” (38). [The tragic attitude was not exclusive in the poetry of the dwarfed pine. There were also both salty spray and sunshine between the branches. But the main note was that of patient suffering]. According to Ruin, though, the lyrical song was the genre that made Mörne famous as a national poet of the Swedish-speaking population in Finland by providing a powerful image of a light-drenched archipelago and a glittering sea. One such example is “Sjömansvisa” (“Sailor’s Song”)5 in which the motif of the lighthouse is intimately connected with that of an island girl. Båklandets vackra Maja, är du min hjärtanskär, ser du min vimpel svaja röd vid ditt bruna skär? Duken är röd och namnet ditt sirligt sömmadt i guld och hvitt. Båklandets vackra Maja är du min hjärtanskär? (Mörne 11–12) (Beautiful May of Båkland are you my dearest love, see my colors flying red by your brownish ground? My cloth is purple with your sign tenderly sewn into gold and white. Beautiful May of Båkland are you my dearest love?)

In this poem, three major images are united: the island, the lighthouse, and the girl Maja. Throughout Mörne’s oeuvre, the lighthouse consistently functions as a master metaphor for the Swedish-speaking civilization on guard on Finnish soil. Ruin claims that in Mörne “fyrarna innebär maning och förpliktelse” (45) [the lighthouses imply prompting and duty]. Zilliacus also emphasizes Mörne’s poetic subjects as watchmen of civilization. Mörne’s concurrent Swedish nationalism and Finnish patriotism is evident here: the island is a secluded space in the sea connected to both Sweden and the Finnish mainland by means of a complex series of de- and reterritorializations implying simultaneously the link to the “fatherland”  – Finland  – and to Sweden through a metonymic series of substitutions. By choosing to represent Sweden as a continent beyond the sea, Sweden is deterritorialized only to be re-territorialized by the island that in fact belongs to Finland. There is an intricate union: a simultaneous Finnish-patriotic 5.

This poem was set to music in 1907 by Hanna Hagbom and became an extremely popular song in both the Swedish and Finnish cultural context. Today this poem/song is better known under the titles of “Båklandets vackra Maja” and “Seiskarin kaunis Siiri” (Beautiful May of Båkland). The “Båkland” of the poem is “beacon land” in English. The word cannot be translated into English while preserving the rhythm of the poem. It is therefore treated as a place name and has not been translated.

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and Swedish-language ideology is achieved. The image of an ideal space of organic Swedish culture on Finnish territory thus appears. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, this cultural/ political union is also a rural territory where the Swedish language is at one with its defining geographical limits thus becoming the defining aspect of identity. So far, however, Maja and her cultural importance have not been recognized. What or who is she? The answer is that Mörne portrays Maja as yet another means of disseminating light, a means that is fundamentally corporeal. The innocent island girl that she is – smooth-skinned and barefoot – also makes her congruent with the indigenes. (The image of the noble savage is not very distant.) She moreover embodies further specificities: her space is an island with a lighthouse. By means of these markers, Mörne evokes the ultimate luminosity of civilization that is here imaginatively born out of the luminance of the sea, the sky, and the lighthouse together with presence of the woman. Nevertheless the insecurity of Maja’s affection, the repeated quest for the poetic subject, and Maja’s final abandonment cast a shadow even in this otherwise brilliant light. It is important to acknowledge the possibility that in many respects landscape in Mörne’s poetry of the archipelago ultimately points back to his own birthplace and his early environment. From the little Finnish inland town of Kuopio, the Mörne family moved to the small coastal town of Nystad [Finnish: Uusikaupunki] in southwestern Finland when Arvid Mörne was six years old. From the vantage point that Nystad offered, Mörne became well acquainted with the western archipelago of Åboland and the Åland islands. Ruin suggests that the school years in Nystad were important to Mörne, as “han levde där bokstavligen på gränsen mellan svenskt och finskt” (32) [he literally lived there on the border between Swedish and Finnish]. These relatively later circumstances and landscapes must necessarily have affected the young Mörne. A territorial reading of Mörne’s work, however, also requires attention to his earliest experiences in a more homogeneous inland part of Finland for the sake of its role in having shaped his future poetic vision. Thus, in Mörne’s poetry, the so-called lines of escape (understood in Deleuzian terms) can be seen in a process of movement leading away from inner Finland, thus facilitating a deterritorialization of the deep woods of Keski-Suomi and their subsequent reterritorialization in the image of the island with its dwarfed pines. Mörne’s islands thus became an at least three-fold ensemble of Swedish, Finnish, and Fenno-Swedish elements. The dwarfed pine, the lighthouse, and the young woman do not always stand alone as symbols of the western outpost, of the Swedish-speaking “common people,” or – with regard to the woman – of the nurturing soil out of which that common Swedish-speaking people should grow and flourish. They are also symbols of the Finnish patriot that Mörne was, one desiring but lacking a homeland. In that context, the poem “Skäret” (The Skerry), also from Mörne’s first collection, is especially important: Östra branten är mörk och tvär. Skäret är högre än andra skär. Skurarna piska gräsen hvita, i tallen på krönet byarna slita. Det mörknar och kampen går hög i brotten, djupt i klyftorna mullra skotten.

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346 Hafvets djärvaste måsar skria öfver skäret, det vilda, fria. (72) (The eastern precipice is dark and sharp. The skerry is higher than other skerries. The showers are whipping the grasses white, the winds are tearing the pine on the crest. It is getting dark and the battle runs high on the breaks, deep in the rifts the shots are thundering. The boldest gulls of the sea are screaming above the skerry, the wild, the free.)

This poem appeared in the final section of the volume entitled Furan. A fura is the kind of pine that, in contrast to the dwarfed pine, rises high above the ground and grows more frequently in the inner parts of Finland than along the coast. The pine in the poem is not specified; it is called neither martallen nor furan, whereas its space is that of the archipelago and of the imagined land of the Swedish-speaking population in Finland. The poem thus evokes at least a double significance: it can be read both as a bold expression of Finland-Swedish nationalism and as a stand taken in favor of and promoting an autonomous territory of Swedish-speakers in Finland. It is thus reacting negatively to Finnish nationalism, but it can equally well be read as a statement supporting Finnish independence and the struggle against Russification, which set in at the end of the nineteenth century. Whichever way it is read, it is the Finland-Swedish territory of the island in the sea, encircled by seagulls, and carrying the storm-ridden pine-tree: its unstated characteristics underscore what Finnish-speakers and Swedish-speakers in Finland had in common, i.e. the vision of independence. The poem stresses the idea of a particular responsibility that the Swedish-speaking population had in being an outpost. The light that the poem produces culturally is that of the stormy sea. It is dark gray. In Mörne’s works the traditional Runebergian ideals and virtues can consequently be seen as splintered and spread over vast and various territories. The dwarfed pine is a pained tree in Mörne’s poetry, and the lighthouse becomes an ambivalent source of light. The pine is torn in three directions: towards a Finnish inland of forests, westwards over the sea to Sweden and a Scandinavian past, and downwards into the soil lacking essential fertility on the barren island. There it must remain and try to feed a new and complex nationalist ideology, that of FennoSwedish culture. The woman Maja is present to provide nutrition for the nationalist enterprise, but she does not accept the task. The persistent image of the lighthouse and the changing light- and darkscapes that it produces – on-off, coming-going – becomes one of interacting hope and despair in this wider context. This hope is without hope since change is not possible. The poetic subject is bound to these rhythmic intervals; he cannot leave, only stay while waiting and watching for the next beam of light to be seen. Although lighthouses “flare high,” they do not provide any persistent light. If it can be agreed that much of the literary imagination dealing with nationalisms in Finland is arboreal in character (Zilliacus 37–38) – an obvious exception of course being Hella

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Wuolijoki – it is necessary to pose the question as to the qualities of light that have been attached to these culturally privileged trees independent of nationalist codification. The conclusion must be that despite the occasional intense luminosity of heaven and sea melting into one another and blinding anyone watching them, Mörne’s landscape gives birth to a lightscape that is not very much more than a sinister shadowland. The shadow cast by the pine in its open space on the island thus ultimately has a Leinoesque quality. This dwarfed pine in its environment does not produce the same darkscape as Leino’s spruces and bogs, but what it does reflect is the distant lux of sylvan solitude.

Glocalizing the light of Norwg-West From inner light to the light of labor Per Thomas Andersen

Morning light is just about to fall onto the windowpanes. The cobblestones still lie in the dark. Sparrows are chirping; maybe they can hear the sound of clogs clattering down the street. They know who is coming: a tall, big-bearded man walking heavily as if a hostile headwind were attacking him. He talks loudly to himself, always steamed up about something. The same thing every morning. But he never forgets the birds. He always brings them some crumbs. Under his arm he carries a frame saw, the blade wrapped up in old newspapers. He stops and empties his pockets of crumbs. His eyes are small, peering towards the sky, his gaze simultaneously expectant and uneasy because of the sharp morning light. It hurts until the beams heat up. He is early. He tries to avoid confrontation with gangs of kids running after him and shouting Ratman or Lars the Mad-Lad. He heads towards a family living on the west side, where he has been hired to cut firewood. Lars the Mad-Lad is taken care of by the city’s poor relief fund. But he adds a few coins to his pocket money by cutting firewood for well-off families. He harms nobody. He just talks loudly to himself, babbling about things no one else can see. While sawing, he leads long discussions with the logs. He gathers them in two heaps. Logs with a lot of knots he puts by themselves. Straight logs go into another heap. When he splits the wood, he shouts, “you son of a bitch” while fighting with the knotted logs. “You devil,” he moans, “you German!” He seems to be furious with quite a number of people. But in general people think he is harmless. Mostly he takes his rage out on logs, lops, and tops. When he has finished his work, he receives a loaf of bread and a few coins. Then he heads back through town. He stops where the sparrow has its nest. He has saved some crumbs this time too. Inner light Nearly no one knows that Lars the Mad-Lad is the greatest painter in Scandinavia. The painter of light. He was born in 1830 on a little island in Tysvær, Borgøye, one of the many small islands in Ryfylke off the southwestern coast of Norway. But his family moved to Stavanger while he was still a child. He was seven at the time, but already his remarkable talent had been discovered, and wealthy citizens of Stavanger decided to pay for his education. After some years of local training, he was sent to the art academy in Düsseldorf. The famous national romantic landscape painter Hans Gude regarded Lars Hertervig as his most talented student. During the 1850s Hertervig painted a number of landscape paintings in which the romantic influence was explicit. But a strong expressive element was undoubtedly threatening the romantic harmony. Hertervig preferred to depict dramatic weather conditions in his landscapes, often portraying a storm brewing or about to be over. The contrast between light and dark brings about an almost mysterious feeling in his paintings. At the same time, there is no doubt that the scenes depicted are from southwestern Norway. The intensity, the shades of color, and the doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.27and © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Figure 29.  Hans Hertervig, Borgøya (1867), oil on canvas, 61.5cm x 69.5cm. National Gallery (Oslo); photo: Jacques Lathion. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode

reflections of light have distinct local characteristics. His technique, however, was a product of the Düsseldorf school. While he was in Germany, Hertervig experienced the first symptoms of his illness. He returned to Norway in 1854, was hospitalized at the Gaustad Asylum in 1856, and discharged in 1858 without having been cured. He was diagnosed with melancholia that was later diagnosed as dementia. According to the doctors, the disease was caused by an unhappy love affair in Germany and further complicated by masturbation, which at the time was considered harmful. Hertervig himself, however, had a different explanation: Paa Forespørgsel, om han kjender nogen Aarsag til sin Sygdom angiver han at den er bevirket ved stirrende Iagttagelse af Landskaberne i Solskin, hvorunder efter hans Forklaring Solstraalerne have virket saa stærkt paa hans Øine, at han har følt og fremdeles føler en af Fortumling ledsaget spændende Smerte over Panden. (Koefoed 55) (When asked whether he knows of any explanation for his illness, he states that it is caused by staring intensely at landscapes in sunshine, whereby according to his reasoning, the sunbeams have had such a strong impact on his eyes that he has felt and still feels a clenching pain above his forehead, accompanied by a strong sense of bewilderment.)1 1.

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations into English are my own.

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“Eg ser lyset, i alt. Eg kan male” [I can see the light in everything. I can paint]. This is how Lars Hertervig expresses himself in Jon Fosse’s breakthrough novel Melancholia I published in 1995 (232). The novel is a highly original story about Hertervig’s life. The reader first meets him during his time in Düsseldorf and later while he is hospitalized at the Gaustad Asylum. In 1991, in the last part of the novel, the reader meets the author Vidme, the author within the novel, the day he is about to start writing the novel about Hertervig. In his novel, the author relates the story of Hertervig’s unhappy love affair with Helene Winkelmann. His fellow painters taunt him for his defeat. But for Hertervig nearly everything revolves around light, not only the light of the landscapes, but the light in all things. The way Fosse depicts it, the meeting with Helene was a transforming light: Og frå auga hennar kom det sterkaste lys han nokon gong har sett. Lyset frå auga hennar. Aldri hadde han vel sett eit slikt lys…. ja lyset frå auga hennar la seg som eit lys rundt han! og i det lyset blei han ein annan enn han var, han blei ikkje lenger Lars frå Hattarvågen, han blei ein annan, all hans uro, all hans redsle, alt han mangla og som alltid var i han som uro, alt han sakna, blei som fylt av lyset frå Helene Winckelmanns auge og han blei roleg, blei fylt opp. (11–12) (And from her eyes came the strongest light he had ever seen. The light from her eyes. Never had he seen such a light…. Yes, the light from her eyes formed a light around him! And in that light, he was transformed into another person, he was no longer Lars from Hattarvågen, he became another; all his turmoil, all his fear, everything he was missing and which always marked him with unrest, turmoil, everything he was longing for, seemed replete in the light from Helene Winkelmann’s eyes, and he became calm, complete.)

In Melancholia II, Hertervig is seen from the point of view of his sister, Oline, when she was old. Here one hears about the paintings he did late in life. He was desperately poor and lacked paints, brushes, and easels. He painted on wrapping paper and on the back of tobacco boxes. He made his charcoal drawings by burning matches and using them as charcoal pencils. A number of his paintings were imaginary pictures that resembled symbolist visions. Eventually they were to play an important part in Norwegian art history. The great German-Norwegian artist Rolf Nesch regarded Hertervig as the most important Norwegian painter of all time even without having forgotten the great influence Edvard Munch had once had on him. The light of the landscape and the inner light are connected on the West Coast of Norway, as are darkness and melancholy. With the rapidly changing sky, it is impossible to keep these elements apart. Light and darkness seem to be engaged in a permanent and dramatic interchange creating an abundance of intermediate states caused by varying weather conditions and day gradually turning into night. The author who comes closest to Hertervig in depicting the landscape of western Norway as illuminated by magic backlighting is Arne Garborg, whose Haugtussa (1895) is one of the most important poetic works in Norwegian literature. In his famous, “Mot soleglad” (Sunset), the landscape is seen at the moment it catches fire and starts to hover against the horizon just before sunset: Det stig av hav eit alveland    med tind og mo; det kviler klårt mot himilrand    i kveldblå ro.

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Eg såg det tidt som sveipt i eim    bak havdis grå; det er ein huld, ein heilag heim,    me ei kan nå. Ho søv, den fine tinderad    i draume-bann; men so ei stund ved soleglad    ho kjem i brand. Når dagen sig som eld og blod    i blåe-myr, det logar upp med glim og glod    og æventyr. Det brenn i brè og skjelv og skin    med gullan-bragd, og lufti glø’r i glans av vin,    sylv og smaragd. (64–65) (From the sea there rises an elfin land with peaks and moors; it rests so clearly against horizon in the blue calm of evening. I saw it often as if swathed in haze behind the gray sea-mist; it is a lovely, a blessed home we ne’er can reach. Banished to the world of dreams, it sleeps, that magnificent range of peaks, but for a while when the sun sets it catches fire. When the day sinks like fire and blood into the bluish marsh, they flare up and gleam and glitter with the promise of fairytales. The glaciers burn and quake and shine like burnished gold, and the air glows with the radiance of wine, silver and emerald.)2

In the novel with the ironic title Fred (1892; Peace), Garborg depicts the religious glumness that following the advent of pietism led Norway’s southwestern region to be designated the dark mainland. “Det er eit sterkt, tungt folk, som grev seg gjenom livet med gruvling og slit, putlar med jordi og granskar skrifti, piner korn av aur’en og von av sine draumar, trur på skillingen og 2.

Unpublished translation by Marie Wells.

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trøyster seg til Gud” (8) [It is a strong, heavy people who dig their way through life with brooding and hard work, busying themselves with the earth, and studying the scripture, forcing gains from the gritty soil and hoping for their dreams]. The protagonist Enok Haave, who resembles Garborg’s own father, lives in the darkness of sin and religious repression, in the sadness of silent solemnity, and in the fog of falseness and hypocrisy that are so frighteningly depicted in the works of another famous author from the region, the father of the realist novel in Norway, Alexander Kielland. Madame Torvestad in Skipper Worse (1882) is a professional serial killer of sound spirits. She kills in the same way that is depicted in Garborg’s Fred, through religious gloom and fanatic restraint. Lars Hertervig descended from a deeply religious family. But his parents belonged to a less morose movement than the pietists described by Kielland and Garborg. They were Quakers, which means they belonged to the Religious Society of Friends. They believed in the idea of “the inner light.” The British founder of the movement George Fox and his religious concept were clearly influenced by mysticism. In his inner being, man could find the light that was God’s existence in the soul and that could enlighten the spiritual subject directly without any necessary instructions from the scripture. The Quakers congregated for silent devotions and worship of the holy gleam of inner light. There were, however, strict regulations concerning the rights of religious societies outside the official state church. A fellow villager of Lars Hertervig was sent to the United States to study the possibility for the Quakers to immigrate and establish a colony in the new world. The villager’s name was Kleng Pedersson, later known as Cleng Peerson, one of the most famous individuals in Norwegian emigration history. The story of his life has been thoroughly recounted in the novels of Alfred Hauge, yet another eminent author from Rogaland. Peerson was some years older than Hertervig. His journey started in 1821. He travelled together with a friend, Knut Eide, from the small island Fogn in Ryfylke. Peerson reported back in 1824 and in 1825 that the sail sloop Restaurationen was equipped and departed with fifty-two emigrants on board. This was the first organized emigration from Norway to the United States. In the tiny, isolated community of Tysvær, connections with the outside world made during the religious movements in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were contemporaneous with the romantic movement in visual arts in Düsseldorf during the nineteenth century as well as with immigration to the United States, first to New York and then to Fox River, LaSalle County, just west of Chicago. The light of labor Late in the summer of 1909 or 1910 the small steamship Gausta departed from Tinnoset in Telemark heading for Fagerstrand. On board was the young Hertingen. He was not, like Hertervig, born into a Quaker family, but, like Athena from her father’s forehead, he was born out of his mother’s mouth. Or perhaps he is a child of the great ten-volume work by Kristoffer Uppdal, Dansen gjennom skuggeheimen (1919–24; The Dance Through the Land of Shadows). Kjartan Fløgstad’s protagonist was thus born partly as an impoverished, socially realistic boy and partly as a literary magical but also realistic allegory. In Fløgstad’s Fyr og flamme (1980;

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On Fire), Hertingen and his traveling companions are seen boarding Gausta on their way to Rjukan looking for work at the industrial sites there. When they arrive, it is dark, gjennom riftene i skydekket såg Hertingen nå dei første stjernene, som blinka vått og uforanderleg til han, og som verken peika att eller fram, opp eller ned. Nå såg også Hertingen lysa frå dei høge båla framfor seg, såg dei høge eldtungene som slikka mot det høge mørkret og sende ut ein rå ande av røyk og gneistar som kunne tenna både håpet og ein præriebrann. Komne endå nærare høyrde både Hertingen og alle som kom i same følgjet knitringa frå den rå veden og dei grove røystene til folket som ringa seg kring båla. Til slutt såg dei folka ein og ein også, såg raude og lysande andlet som var oppglødde av elden og rusen og samværet. (43) (through the rifts in the cloud cover, Hertingen now saw the first stars, twinkling at him moistly and immutably, not pointing backward or forward, up or down. Hertingen also saw the light from the high bonfires before him, and he saw the enormous tongues of flame lapping up at the towering darkness, emitting a raw billow of smoke and sparks that might ignite both hope and a prairie fire. Moving even closer, Hertingen and those with him heard the crackling of the unseasoned wood and the harsh voices of the people gathered in a ring around the bonfire. Finally, one by one people also saw the red and gleaming face, fervently lit by the flames and the ecstasy and the company.)3

In 1990 Kjartan Fløgstad published Arbeidets lys (The Light of Labor), an industrial history depicting the business of Electric Furnace Products Company located in Sauda at the head of the Boknafjorden not far from Hertervig’s Tysfjord. Sauda is Fløgstad’s homeland, and in the preface he states that he knew the factory very well as a laborer during the years between 1960 and 1971. He added: “I tillegg har Electric Furnace og erfaringane mine derifrå vore hovudkjelde og viktigaste metaforprodusent bak mitt eige skjønnlitterære forfattarskap” (8) [In addition, Electric Furnace and my experiences working there have been the main source of metaphors and inspiration in my own literary authorship]. This fact can be seen not least in the novels Dalen Portland (1977; Dollar Road) for which Fløgstad was awarded the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize and Fyr og flamme, which depicts the industrialization of Sauda over the course of several generations. Electric Furnace in Sauda was established in 1915. It made Sauda a glocal community. From the outset the factory was owned by United Sates capital, camouflaged by a Canadian company. After some years, the raw material had to be brought in from South Africa. For young people growing up in Sauda, the United States and South Africa were the closest “neighboring districts.” One could at any time sign onto a ship heading for South Africa. Oslo, the Norwegian capital on the other side of the mountains, felt much farther away. The national administration was so far away that the taxation authorities were not able to find a way to collect taxes from the international company. In Fløgstad’s œuvre all workers are depicted as proud and strong individuals who gained new freedom as ties to the soil and obligations to a family farm were severed. At the same time, Fløgstad describes class distinction, class struggle, and exploitation. The most authentic values in Fløgstad’s works are comradeship and solidarity. The light and heat from the melting furnaces resemble the metaphorical light represented by labor, by the industrial culture, and by the industrial age in history. Here one finds no pietism, no religious gloom, no inner light; heroes are introduced almost as mythical men personifying the 3.

This and the following two unpublished translations are by Tara F. Chace.

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light of labor. In Dalen Portland Fløgstad frames his story with two quotations from a certain Lars Wivallius, one of them a 1632 petition addressed to Riksrådet (a kind of senate existing from 1200 until 1660). In the novel, the quotation foreshadows the industrialization process as the “Demringa i Norge” [Sunrise in Norway]. Soolen med hela thet sköna himmelens firmament prisar nu sin herre och skapare, att han bortdriffwit hafwer the kalla, swåra, tiocka, mörka, oblida och bedröfveliga wintermoln med theras snöö, kyld, fuchtighet och qualma! Jorden kläder sig aff glädie med een härlig grön klädning och beprydar och vtsmyckar sig med allehanda färgors blomster, gofvandes Herranom en liufflig lucht och röökopffer till tacksäijelse för thet hans guddommelige M:t henne vthus winterens kalla och qwalsamma fängelse hulpit hafwer! (qtd. in Fløgstad, Dalen Portland 211) (Now the sun and all the glorious firmament of the heavens praise their Lord and Creator for having driven off the freezing, relentless, thick, dark, harsh, and wretched clouds of winter with their snow, cold, humidity, and dankness. In elation the Earth dons her delightful green raiment adorning and decorating herself with flowers in a host of colors and giving fresh air and a burnt offering to the Lord in gratitude because His divine might has helped her out of the cold and dank captivity of winter!)4

Regio Norwg-West, picts takat fra ofven One summer morning in 1975, inhabitants on the Ryfylkefjord islands woke up to a sound they had never heard before: a deep, grim growling. They felt their bodies trembling. The earth itself was shaking. No one had heard of earthquakes in this region, yet the people’s thoughts turned to an earthquake. Something was about to happen that had never happened before. Some people feared the outbreak of war. The weather was drizzly with clouds dipping their toes into the sea; the land lay covered in a haze making visibility poor. Suddenly one could catch a glimpse of something never seen before. Far above the highest mountaintops along the fjord and above the clouds, a monster rose up. It was the first Condeep platform5 to be towed from Stavanger out into the North Sea. It was about one thousand feet tall. It seemed almost unreal. Its dimensions distorted the whole landscape. What had seemed large as long as people could remember was suddenly transformed into a tiny miniature. At the front, the platform was towed by an armada of the world’s largest tugboats. At the rear, three boats were tugging in the opposite direction to provide stability. The platform was hardly moving. But the power at work whirled through the fjord, lifting the bottom of the fjord to its surface. Large chunks of seaweed torn up from the bottom of the sea were thrown ashore together with dead fish, crabs, and lobsters. The waves were larger than ever before, even bigger than hurricane waves. It took several years until fish and seagulls returned to the area.

4.

Translated for this occasion by Tara F. Chace and thus not formerly published.

5.

The term “Condeep” refers to the “concrete deep water structure” type of oil platform introduced by engineer Olav Mo in 1973. The Troll A platform put into use in 1995 in the Troll oil field is the largest condeep platform in existence.

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Figure 30.  Condeep oil platform being hauled out to sea in 1974. Photo: Leif Berge/Norsk Oljemuseum.

From that day one thing has been clear: the late-modern prosperous society in Norway is a mining society. What people observed that morning was the largest chisel made in history, the biggest tool ever made for mining, a troll’s pick axe, a monster’s sledgehammer. In Norway one learned in school that traditional Norwegian society was a balanced, agricultural society. The small islands in the Ryfylkefjord exemplified this claim – here old-fashioned farming was the dominant way of living until the age of oil. One also learned that Norway was a nation dominated by shipping and fishing. Mining belonged to the past. But the fact is that the prosperity of modern Norway – the wealth that according to the United Nations has repeatedly made Norway the best country in which to live – is the result of Norway’s being a late-modern mining society. While they are mining out there, while wealth is increasing, social analysts and authors, Kjartan Fløgstad included, inform us that the nation has reached a postindustrial era, and that we are living in an information society. It is, however, the industrial society out there in the North Sea that makes it possible for such analysts and authors to make a living by such assertions. The oil installations drilling endless tunnels into the continental shelf do not excavate silver – like they did in the mines at Kongsberg, nor copper as in Røros – but black gold and natural gas. The technology and the tools are different, but they are still mining in search of increased quantities to add to the nation’s floating wealth. On satellite photos of Europe at night, one can see the light from the big cities while the rest of the landscape is obscured in bluish darkness.

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Figure 31.  European lightscape at night, with small pricks of light showing in the North Sea oil fields as well. Image: stockmdm/Shutterstock

Except for a few spots of light: the red flames out in the North Sea, the gas flames burning from the oil installations. They represent the light of labor in late modern Norway. In Leif Henriksen’s novel Fjorten dager i Nordsjøen (2008; Fourteen Days in the North Sea), the author depicts the climbers who are responsible for the maintenance of the 250-foot-high flame towers at the Statfjord A platform: Det smeller. Et blafrende smell. Jeg ser opp, fakkelen i toppen av flammebommen er tent. Flammetungen bukter, vrir seg, større og mindre, sammenhengende, usammenhengende, aldri den samme. Jeg kjenner varmestrålingen fra flammen, her jeg står åtti meter lenger nede på hoveddekk…. Torleif Hovde har vært der oppe, mange ganger. Åtti meter der oppe har han vært og montert tenningssystemet til fakkelen. Han forklarer det inngående, peker opp. Jeg nikker og følger med. Torleif har vært der oppe. På toppen av flammetårnet. (26–27) (There’s a bang. A flickering bang. I look up. The flame at the top of the flare boom is lit. The tongue of fire twists and writhes, bigger and smaller, unified, disjointed, never the same. I can feel the heat radiating from the flame where I’m standing eighty meters below it on the main deck…. Thorleif Hovde has been up there, many times. He’s been eighty meters up, installing the ignition system for the torch. He points upward and describes it in detail. I nod, following along. Thorleif has been up there, at the top of the flame tower.)6

In 2004 the Norwegian poet Øivind Rimbereid published a cycle of poems called Solaris korrigert (Solaris Adjusted). The setting is a southwestern Norwegian landscape in the year 2480. The narrator of the poems has black oil and yellow grease on his hands, and he is the foreman of 123 robot workers. They operate in gigantic underwater tunnels in the North Sea, among wrecks of drilling platforms and empty oil wells. The “uage” [usage] in the poems is an invented mix of the local dialect from the Stavanger region, English, German, some Danish, and 6.

Translated for this occasion by Tara F. Chace and thus not formerly published.

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some Old Norse. It is characterized by many abbreviations and the omission of vowels. The specific Scandinavian letters æ, ø, and å are omitted. In one of the poems, the narrator views the regional landscape from above, a way quite similar to the nocturnal satellite photos (the translation here will not attempt to reproduce the many linguistic hybridizations in the original, which means that the English text is more legible, normalized, and less hybrid than the originallanguage citation): SOMTIIMS aig find og seer an min screen, Seer an regio Norwg-West,                    picts takat fra ovfen, seer all ljus om natt, spots eftr spots so tait tog komplex, fra Krisand til Bergn. SPOTS af ljus i ein sigd, som om all saman hengr. EIN sigd klar til ou skera gennom all materie                    og all human life. OG sama om aig seer an andr regio, an andr picts takat fra ovfen. I Chin f.ex., der ne siddys kan skillast out, Der infinit mengd af sigd i ljus er. OG liksom uppo kverodder,                    i ein gigant pattern, vanskl ou vita wat all sigdar tilsaman blir …              OR seer out som half moons detta? SOM big mengd half moons up ner, vid jord undr seg, vid oren jord som ein dark, infinit                    univrs undr seg? JA, er det detta wi er? EIN vorld af half moons? MEN wat er da oren sol?       WAT wi da reflecten,            halft or heilt (11–12) (SOMETIMES I find and see on my screen, see the region Norway-West,                    pictures taken from above, see all the lights at night, spots after spots so tight and complex, from Kristiansand to Bergen. SPOTS of light in a sickle, as if everything is connected. ONE sickle ready to cut through all substance                    and all human life. AND same thing if I see another region, and other pictures taken from above. In China for instance, where no cities are discernible, where there is an infinite number of sickles of light. AND kind of on top of each other,

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358                    in a giant pattern, difficult to know what the totality of sickles constitute …              OR look like half moons, this? LIKE a great quantity of half moons upside down, with earth beneath, with another earth like a dark, infinite                    universe beneath? YES, is that what we are? ONE world of half moons? BUT what then is the other sun?       WHAT do we reflect there,            partly or wholly.)

Rimbereid’s sci-fi “uage” [usage] is a clear expression of the hybridization that follows as a result of international contact within the most globalized field of work in Norway, the oil drilling on the continental shelf along the coast. It is worth noting that the point of departure for the invention of a new, hybrid “uage” is not the official Norwegian written “uage,” but the local, spoken dialect. This fact becomes a manifest expression not only of a typical Norwegian regionalism, but also of an important aspect of contemporary cosmopolitan theory: that is, the close connection between the local and the global in new “glocal” communities. Cosmopolitanism and postnationalism have contributed considerably to the development of late-modern or postmodern societies in many parts of the world during the recent decades, and it is no coincidence that this region of southwestern Norway is the geographical landscape where Rimbereid’s cultural cosmopolitanism, his hybrid “uage,” develops. As early as the 1970s, Stavanger became the oil capital of Norway, and the country has since that time developed into a postmodern mining society (i.e. mining below the surface of the sea). The enormous economic growth and wealth of the country are results of oil drilling, and this activity was from the outset an international activity, economically, industrially, and scientifically. The historical dimensions of the oil industry are the point of departure for the author Jan Kjærstad’s substantial trilogy about postmodern Norway written in the 1990s, which includes the novels Forføreren (1993; The Seducer), Erobreren (1996; The Conquerer), and Oppdageren (1999; The Discoverer). Kjærstad’s concept of the country’s situation today is that it is a result of coincidence and pure luck. In the 1970s Norway basically quadrupled its territory. The Norwegian part of the continental shelf makes up one third of the entire European continental shelf. These facts play an important part in Forføreren, the first novel in the trilogy, which concerns a famous media king named Jonas Wergeland. When large amounts of oil were discovered beyond the Norwegian coast, the whole country was economically transformed during a hectic period of growth, and the nation found a new international position thanks to the much-coveted resource. The narrator in Kjærstad’s novel (who turns out to be a woman) writes a short passage about Norway and luck in which she focuses on the early history of Norway as an oil producing country. She states that one has to go back to the history of colonialism to find examples of territorial annexation similar to the expansion of Norwegian territory during the international negotiations concerning the Law of the Sea between 1973 and 1982. The new United Nations convention established every country’s right to a two-hundred-mile economic

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zone and determined the national rights concerning the continental shelf. Every Norwegian home ought to have a bust of Jens Evensen, the periods’ minister of the Law of the Sea at that time, the narrator writes. The so-called “oil adventure” in Norway has everything to do with the nationalization of the continental shelf, but at the same time, it represents an internationalization of political and economic legislation. The industrial as well as the financial aspects of oil drilling are part of the global economy. From the outset there were American interests behind the test drilling in the North Sea, and after production started, a number of international companies participated in the competition for licenses. The beginning of the adventure is legendary and embarrassing: in 1958 the Norwegian Foreign Ministry asked NGU (Norges Geologiske Undersøkelse/ Geological Survey of Norway) to prepare a report about potential industrial and economic interests on the continental shelf. They reported back stating that one can exclude the possibility of finding oil, coal, or sulfur on the continental shelf along the Norwegian coast. A few years later, a group of Americans representing Philips Petroleum Company showed up and applied for a license to do test drilling in the North Sea. And then the “oil adventure” began. The oil industry not only made Norway a part of the global economy, but an important participant in the late modern risk society as well. Even though the full environmental consequences were not known when the adventure began, it was well established that the massive extraction and combustion of oil were potentially harmful to the natural environment. In addition to the economic, social, political, and judicial connections between nation states and transnational environmental risks, the oil industry also represents a characteristic aspect of late modern cosmopolitanism, namely the interconnection between the local and the global, the so-called glocalization. More than anything else, glocalization is on a thematic, linguistic, and stylistic level what Øyvind Rimbereid discusses in Solaris korrigert. When Stavanger is designated the “oil capital” of Norway, a real (more than symbolic) sense is reflected. The cross-border contact between the oil industry and the international community is not always channeled through central national institutions in the capital. From the perspective of the big entrepreneurs in the North Sea, Oslo is a city on the periphery, even though the Norwegian state has been an active participant in the oil adventure from the very beginning and has profited greatly from it thanks to different licenses and tax regulations. Globalization is situational and cannot be described without referring to specific places and locations. The common fate shared by the local and the global is perhaps easiest to recognize when it comes to climate change and environmental risks. For the oil region of Norway, however, one must also recognize the social, demographic, and financial importance of the fact that international contacts between the local community and the oil companies to a large extent have been direct. Light The development from the inner light to the light of labor and the bright production of wealth is a historical development that characterizes not only the southwestern part of Norway, but the whole of Scandinavia as well. An astonishing example of development from local industry

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to global business is the Finnish company Nokia. Its history can be traced back to 1865 when Fredrik Idestam, a mining engineer, established a wood pulp mill in Tampere, followed by a second one three years later near the small town of Nokia. The publicly held company with the brand Nokia was founded in 1871 to manufacture paper. Two additional local companies, Finnish Rubber Works (manufacturing rubber boots) and Finnish Cable Works (manufacturing electrical cables) were owned by the same investors as the paper mills from 1922. In 1967 the three companies were transformed into Nokia Corporation, which manufactures various products, such as paper, boots, televisions, and different consumer electronics. In the 1970s, Nokia established itself as one of the world’s most successful companies producing cell phones. In 2009 Nokia was listed as the fifth most valuable global brand in the Business Week Best Global Brands. In other words, one of the world’s most famous commercial brands is the name of a small local town in Finland. In a way, the same holds true for the Swedish IKEA, the world’s largest furniture retailer. The brand is an acronym constructed from the founder’s initials, Ingvar Kamprad, in addition to the initials of the place where he grew up, the farm Elmtaryd near the small town Agunnaryd with a population of 215. Ingvar Kamprad’s background and image are the incarnation of a northern European protestant work ethic. His frugality is legendary. He drives a fifteen-year-old Volvo, and for dinner he prefers a cheap plate of meatballs at the local IKEA store. Nonetheless, Kamprad tops the lists of the world’s richest people. He started out by selling matches. IKEA was founded in 1943, and the company designed its first furniture in 1955. The IKEA catalog is the most widely disseminated printed book in the world next to the Bible. The development from local to global – here portrayed as the development from the inner light to the light of industrial labor – can be traced from very poor Scandinavian communities significantly defined by the local landscape and the pietistic, almost fundamentalist Christian ways of thinking. It arose in part from the famous Protestant work ethic and led to the late modern welfare states characterized by an extremely high standard of living. Light in the context of religion usually symbolizes an idea of the Invisible, the Other. Pietist Christians in Scandinavia cherished congregational singing of “Eg er ein gjest i verda, min heim i himlen er” (Sangboken. Syng for Herren, no. 857) [I am a guest in the world; my home is in heaven]. However, the lightscape of Scandinavia might indicate that this schism is not the whole truth about the visible and the invisible in the Scandinavian way of thinking. The ability to see the metaphysics of light in the local landscape, in another person’s face or in the inner life of the self, indicates an idea of a light which symbolizes the interconnectedness between the invisible and the visible. Perhaps Protestantism has determined northern European communities in a particular way so that the inhabitants imagine such connections: so that they “trur på skillingen, og trøyster seg til Gud” (Garborg Fred 8) [believe in the shilling and find comfort in God]. Perhaps this well-trained imagination was an important part of what people brought with them on board the sail sloops to the United States? In Scandinavia, unlike in the “New World,” modernization and industrialization gradually extinguished the religious light of the invisible by creating the light of labor instead and advancing the idea of a secularized, egalitarian welfare state.

Millenniumscapes Dan Ringgaard

New Nordic In the summer of 2012 the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art north of Copenhagen held an exhibition entitled New Nordic. The “new” in Nordic referred to whether present-day Norden formed a region with its own identity in a globalized world. A part of the exhibition was called “Nordic Dioramas.” For this exhibit, the museum asked thirty prominent commentators from different cultural spheres in the five Nordic countries to suggest in small-diorama format an answer to the question, “What is Nordic for you?” The respondents reflected on this question of contemporary Nordic identity by using any materials that seemed appropriate to the display (“New Nordic”). In one of the boxes Icelandic author Hallgrimur Helgason presents the Nordic nations as identical transparent modern skyscrapers placed on a line from west to east and differing in height according to population. Sweden is the highest followed by Denmark, Norway, and Finland while leaving Iceland and especially Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Sápmi, and the Åland Islands as diminutive buildings close to the ground. On the descriptive texts accompanying the box he calls it “the true map” because it tells more about the region than an ordinary map: “The past was all about territories. The present is more about people,” he writes, thus emphasizing that populated areas, not national territories, are the concern of globalization. The text by Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk emphasizes the relationship between Nordic identity, nature, and climate. It is in the extreme shifts between summertime exhilaration and wintertime introspection that Tunbjörk finds his key to Nordic identity. Even so, the display by the text ironically shows a dark Swedish street corner minutely composed like Edward Hopper’s iconic painting Nighthawks, so that “Nordic Identity” and “Swedish Winter” are epitomized by American iconography. The dialogue between display and text points to the global images of place in which one’s own identity and the identity of one’s own places is understood. Finnish textile designer Anne Kyyrö Quinn has made an empty organically grooved box out of white wool felt recalling a resolved calm that she associates with the region. Making it in a tactile manner that encourages a phenomenological response, she moves beyond the ideological fixity of language and points to a common corporeal experience. Finally, the Norwegian writer Erland Loe has made a small toy schoolroom with Functionalist furniture that many Nordic citizens who attended school especially during the 1960s and ’70s will recognize as the quintessence of the Nordic welfare state, and, again, recall on the level of bodily experience. Any investigation of place in Nordic literature must take into account the kind of spatiality that is currently shaping the collective point of view, and the exhibition at Louisiana is an attempt to do just that. In the four examples just presented, the new in Nordic identity is never isolated but in various ways put into a global frame of reference. One of the features noticed while looking at the region from the outside, from the perspective of the global is, as Erlend Loe points out in his contribution to the exhibit, the welfare state. The Nordic welfare states doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.28rin © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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that developed between the 1950s and the ’70s overlapped but later gave way to globalization. Especially during the 1960s in these rich, small, and tidy societies, modernism and the avantgarde thrived on the paradox that wealth and political freedom produced its own estrangement and entrapment, and they called for a scrutiny of real-life conditions in the social-democratic idyllic setting. As global conditions made their way into the doll’s house of Nordic society, literature too was facing larger spaces and more mixed and interrelated places. At the margins of the welfare state One recent example of this negotiation between national identity and global involvement is Norwegian writer Dag Solstad’s novel Armand V (2006). In his works from the 1960s up until the present, Solstad has chronicled and mapped the modern Norwegian nation. In Armand V, Solstad moves beyond the nation state and into the globalized world with an ambassador as protagonist and the Norwegian involvement in Afghanistan as a backdrop. In many of Solstad’s novels a seemingly ordinary protagonist is placed in a very specific town or neighborhood, and as the personal story unfolds, so does the history of the place and its mapping. If regarded as a single work, Solstad’s novels form a history of modern Norway constituted by a network of topographies in the sense of Ptolemy: a detailed mapping of a part of the world. In this manner, modern Norway is stitched together by the proximity of a series of local destinies and topographies. It is this national map that Solstad opens toward the global in Armand V. The topographic strategy often shows itself as a detailed mapping of walks or riding in cars or trains across sometimes ridiculously small areas, as is the case in his following novel 17. Roman (2010) in which an afternoon walk around the very small town of Bø is carefully chronicled over several pages. The equality and wealth of the welfare state has created a literary scrutiny of conformity, as seen in Solstad’s often quite ordinary protagonists living in places typical of the suburbanurbanism of modern Norden. One of the major characteristics of this conformity is that its protagonists, as in Solstad, may be found in the middle of the map, but nevertheless on the margins of society. The success of Nordic crime novels may have to do with an interest in the social textures that hold normality together and can be regarded as a way of making the overruling conformity visible by way of its excess. But crime fiction also points to the margins as a place of exceptional literary potential. And to live on the margins is to be somehow out of place but at the same time in places that seem more real than the center. In 1982 Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski published what was to be his last book of prose and his third travelogue, Euroopan reuna (The Edge of Europe). The four parts of the book are named for the marginal places in which Saarikoski took up temporary residence: Stavanger, Norway; Kerlin, Brittany; Valsäng, Koster (islands that are the most western parts of Sweden); and Dublin. In a still more regional Europe, these places are the same to Saarikoski in that they are defined not by a nation but by the marginality that they have in common. In Brittany he passes a local who asks him where he is from since he does not strike him as Breton. When Saarikoski answers that he is from Finland, the Breton gentleman says, “Suomalainen, mutta sehän on melkein sama asia” (131) (Finland, but that’s almost the same thing). To Saarikoski

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“Ei ole mitään Ithakaa” (153) (there is no Ithaca), no home; instead he fantasizes about a house with an entrance in Dublin, a living room in Paris, a sauna in Kerimäki, etc. The marginal is cosmopolitical, and being without a home is not the same as being placeless. Saarikoski’s cosmopolitanism is a cosmopolitanism of the margins, not, as is more common, of the metropolis (despite his imagining his living room in Paris). Saarikoski enters each new place through a series of daily routines and digressions stemming from the two activities that define him: writing and drinking. His text is likewise an allinclusive flow of excursions and returns. Place is embodied by constant walks and excursions to corners of wayward bars and cafés where the poet sits and drinks and writes texts that mimic these activities and subjects. He calls his book “kineettinen kuva” (kinetic picture) and explains it with Heraclitus’s well-known interest in rest under change. Looking out the window of the Hotel Ormond in Dublin at the end of the book, he argues that the continual change and movement that characterize his life and his writing, as well as his location, are themselves a constant state of affairs. Looking out on the Anna Livia monument in a Joycean state of mind, Saarikoski offers this figure of eternal repetition as a version of the way modernist form may mimic its subject matter, and one of presence rather than absence. Saarikoski restlessly sinks into the often-painful presence of the place in being right in the middle of the flow of the marginal place. It may be that the non-places (Augé) have invaded the centers, making the margins the only real places. The marginality of Saarikoski’s alcoholic poète maudit roaming the edges of northern Europe while writing a wild stream of life is one way of opening the small rooms of the Nordic welfare state. Another way to cast a light on the normal places is to look at them from the nearby heterotopias of society. Whereas Solstad has chronicled modern Norway, Einar Már Guðmundsson [English: Gudmundsson] has done the same with modern Iceland. In Englar alheimsins (1993; Angels of the Universe), he continues a rich tradition in Nordic literature of writing from within mental asylums. The asylum in Reykjavík is called Kleppur. The asylum narrator and protagonist, Paul, is not only mad, but is also dead. This should be more than enough to establish a heterotopia, but the style goes even further. It is not only indebted to magical realism but also to the orality, sparseness, and grandeur of the sagas. Drawing on both stylistic approaches and on a content taken from the welfare society of Iceland, one might argue that Guðmundsson not only performs a rare feat of literary glocalization (Robertson), but also connects two ways of writing that go well beyond the boundaries of everyday rationality: the mad and the dead, the magical and the heroic worlds open to a cosmic space of freedom and insight but also of devastating pain. When Paul’s successful friend Rögnvaldur kills himself, the last hope of any normality is taken away from Paul, and he realizes that “Kleppur er viða, ekki aðeins spítali, ekki aðeins höll, heldur mynstur ofið úr þraðum svo fínum að enginn greinir pá, hvorki keisarinn né börnin, hvorki ég né pú” (146) [“The madhouse is in a lot of places, not just a hospital, not just a palace, but also a pattern woven from threads so fine that no one can distinguish them, neither the Emperor nor the children, neither you nor I” (105)]. The heterotopia cannot be marginalized; it is in the very texture of society, perhaps especially in those who apparently have had the most success trying to marginalize it. Einar Már as well as Saarikoski may in one sense write from the margins, but they also write from a cosmic and cosmopolitan center in a continuous effort to do

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away with the narrow spaces of Nordic society and culture. Just as a heterotopia is within society, writing from the margins of Europe is not really marginal but local and very much a place. Beyond literary place In the debates concerning globalization, it has been argued that physical distance and actual place are challenged by time-space compression (Harvey), deterritorialization (Tomlinson), and place-polygamy (Beck). This aspect of globalization is very much a matter of technology. Here at the end of the spatial nodes dealing with various scapes, the meeting places in cyberspace, the branding and distribution of places, and the virtual places that are being developed there should be investigated. Just as the place of literature is no longer easily located in a nation, it is not necessarily limited to the medium of the book or to the technology of printing. As technology develops, place as well as literature are thoroughly meditated and remediated. The contours and stability of both are rapidly changing. The last essay in the node on Lightscapes (by Andersen) opens the discussion of millenniumscapes and globalization, and the three essays in this final node continue that inquiry. The topic of place in globalized world is a central concern in Christopher Oscarson’s essay. He examines the contours of a “toxic discourse” and its influence on the sense of place by focusing on the Chernobyl radioactive meltdown as it is represented by the Norwegian poet Ingrid Storholmen’s Tsjernobylfortellinger (2009; Chernobyl Stories), Swedish novelist Kerstin Ekman’s novel Skraplotter (2003; Lotteray Scratch Cards), and her compatriot Stefan Jarl’s film Hotet/ Uhkkádus (1987; The Threat). The case of Chernobyl calls for a new and global sense of place in which place is not grounded in the sensual world of the local but a product of unperceivable connections across space that, being outside of the realm of the senses, takes mediated forms. C. Claire Thomson and Pei-Sze Chow write about the emerging Øresund region as a postnational or transnational product of remediation between events, literature, film, and television with special focus on four recent films. The region is very much a place under construction. First its identity is created in a variety of media just as national identity during the nineteenth century was created through novels and newspapers. The role of literature in the culture of the new millennium as one among many other media becomes clear. Second the negotiation of place in globalization proves to be a complex, conflicting, and continual process between nation and transnational region as well as between city planning and a variety of individual perspectives and uses. In the new millennium, literature has moved to a new place of excessive medial, aesthetic, and cognitive interchange, and place is moved into a similarly incessant circuit of changing mediations. Bo Kampmann Walther uses the Danish videogame Blackout (1997) to investigate the spatiality of computer games and their use of place and contends that computer games and literature should not be seen as generic dichotomies but rather conceived in terms of the axiomatic attributes of a combination of fiction, media, games, and literature. If fiction, as Walther argues, is an experimental framing, then the temporality of this framing is far stronger in literature, thus making the interactive computer games more spatial. It is, however, very much a matter of space and not of place in that these games are virtual as well as global. If technology

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has made it possible to move some of the qualities of fiction from literature to other media and among them computer games, and if computer games represent a new experience of place as space, then this seems a proper place to end the inquiries into place and literature as scapes.

Toxic places Chernobyl and a sense of place in Nordic literature Christopher Oscarson

In the early morning hours of April 26, 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl power plant near the Belarusian-Ukrainian border in the Soviet Union exploded catastrophically. Soviet officials said nothing about the accident to the outside world and at first did not even evacuate nearby towns. On the morning of April 28, however, workers at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden detected the presence of radioactive particles fourteen times above normal levels. Technicians feared a leak at the site, but inspections soon verified that Forsmark was not the source of the radiation. The ensuing questions led directly to a laconic news release at the end of the regular Soviet television evening news later that day stating that an accident had taken place at the Chernobyl plant and that measures were being taken to “eliminate the consequences of the accident” (USSR Council of Ministers 1). Despite their frantic work, however, the Soviets were woefully unable to deal with the “consequences of the accident” and over thirty years later the world is still coping with the ecological, economic, political, sociological, and cultural aftermath of what happened that spring. It took over two days – from April 26 to April 28 – for the outside world to find out about the disaster at Chernobyl, and by that time radioactive debris had been carried thousands of kilometers by the prevailing winds through Russia and up over parts of Sweden, Finland, and Norway. The spring rain that fell in Scandinavia on April 28 caused this radioactive debris to settle out of the atmosphere at high rates so that the Nordic Region (Finland, Norway, and Sweden in particular) received more fallout than any other place outside the Soviet Union. Over the following weeks, radioactive particles spread not only over the 1,100 kilometers from Chernobyl to Forsmark but also from the Arctic to the Mediterranean and from Asia to Ireland and beyond. The accident highlighted the deep connection between the local and the global. By looking only at the abstract representation of space on a map, Scandinavia would seem to have relatively little to do with the Belarusian-Ukrainian border thousands of kilometers away, but the Chernobyl accident radically altered any such mental geography. The spread of fallout from Chernobyl changed the perceived map of the Nordic region and indeed all of Europe as the wind carried nuclear radiation invisibly through the atmosphere. To paraphrase an article in Svenska Dagbladet, April 28 was the day that Scandinavia became neighbors with Chernobyl (see Lidskog). This event, along with the risk of future unforeseen accidents and incidents from acid rain to volcanic ash, forces a reconsideration of the concept of the local and of definitions of place anchored in notions of geographic proximity. This study considers some of the ways that the presence and threat of manmade pollutants  – and the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster in particular  – have been represented in Nordic culture. The intent is to consider how these representations make up a “toxic discourse” that both reflects and catalyzes an altered sense of place and human relationship to the physical environment. Laurence Buell, who coined the term “toxic discourse,” defined it as “an interlocked set of topoi whose force derives partly from the anxieties of late industrial culture, partly doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.29osc © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Figure 32.  Total Cesium 137 Deposition from both nuclear tests as well as the Chernobyl accident as of 1998. With courtesy of De Cort et al. (1998).

from deeper-rooted habits of thought and expression” (Writing 30). In this spirit, it will prove useful to begin by briefly touching upon some of the important historical precedents configuring Nordic definitions of place in a variety of cultural expressions and then to proceed to how these definitions have interacted with, configured, and been altered by the real and perceived threats of toxicity in the environment. Place and the nation Any attempt at articulating a definitive sense of place and how it has been expressed in Nordic cultures will inevitably fail if it seeks to define place in monolithic terms. As a concept, the definition of place is decidedly dynamic and a highly subjective category. Its scale ranges from the immediate and proximate to the global. Unlike the notion of space, place cannot be measured abstractly or objectively but is grounded in individual and collective experience of some form or another. Place (again to quote Buell) has “both an objective and subjective face, pointing outward toward the tangible world and inward to the perceptions one brings to it” (Writing 59). While geography, climate, and landscape may seem to have a self-evident solidity, the perception and experience of those places is very much variable and mediated by language and culture. Place cannot be considered except as a part of some kind of context or network of relations linking both a subject and an object. Various manifestations of space attachment have been important at various times in the history of Nordic cultures, and many of the earliest instances of preserved writing in the Nordic

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region in the form of runic inscriptions are dedicated precisely to the definition of place in various forms. These terse inscriptions suggest the important relationships individuals and groups had with the experience of the geography of the region. Rune stones were often strategically placed alongside roadways and bridges or at sites for assembly and worship, thus marking significant events. Some even construct a sense of the local by referencing significant oversea voyages that departed from that place to distant lands, as in the case of the Ingvar stones in Sweden’s Mälardalen. The coming of Christianity to the Nordic region generally weakened the attachment to proximate space both with a theocentric privileging of spirituality over physicality and as well with an orientation towards a universalized history that supplanted interest in the here and now. The Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century slowly began to temper these trends especially through the rise of nascent forms of nationalism promoted by new state bureaucratic structures, but it was not until the romantic movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that nationalism became particularly invested in fostering a sense of place grounded in the indigenous and the local. The nationalistic discourse proceeding from these romantic movements was formative and continues even today to inform some of the most powerful forms of space attachment, most especially nationalism. One of the reasons that the sense of place generated by romanticism has had such enduring power is its presentation of nationalism as a “natural” category. Following the lead of Herder, writers such as Adam Oehlenschläger, Erik Gustaf Geijer, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, Henrik Gabriel Porthan, Christian Ganande, Elias Lönnrot, and others in the early nineteenth century argued that the nation was born out of the folk’s intuitive sense of the uniqueness of place. Wrote Almqvist in his well-known essay “Svenska fattigdomens betydelse” (The Meaning of Swedish Poverty): Hvad nationlighet, eller – då det nu är frågan om vårt land – hvad svenskhet är, det kan kännas djupt: det är ett odödligt sinnelag hos den som har det: svensk natur, med folk, sjöar, berg och skogar, står då för ens håg i sin egna och rätta färg. Men den person, som icke har detta sinnelag, kan författaren lemna föga undervisning derom, emedan det nästan intet tillhör det rationella. Det har hufvudsakligen sitt hem i känslan. (288) (What patriotism or – as it is now a question about our country – what Swedishness is can be deeply felt: it is an abiding disposition for those who have it: Swedish nature, with folk, lakes, mountains and forests, represents one’s mind in its own true colors. But this author cannot contribute much instruction to one who does not have this disposition as it is hardly rational. It mainly resides in feelings.)

Familiarity and direct experience with the local and immediate is privileged in Almqvist’s reckoning of nationalism over that which is geographically distant. The abstraction of language insufficiently represents this spontaneous attachment to place that is described here as less rational than instinctive. Almqvist invites nationality to pass as natural and organic by arguing that “Swedishness” is born out of the uniqueness of geography and the indigenous folk culture to which it belongs. By interpreting traits relating to national character and artistic expression as determined by environmental factors, these definitions and categories effectively conceal the abstract and fundamentally constructed circumstances of their origins – an artificiality later exposed by toxic discourse.

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Again in the late nineteenth century when much of Scandinavia was moving in earnest into the industrial age, many authors and artists retreated to representations of decidedly local and regional themes motivated by the fear of losing the uniqueness of the local in the face of increasing global cosmopolitanism. This revival of romantic ideas did much to shape national stereotypes that persist today and left an indelible stamp on Scandinavian aesthetic cultures especially in the way they represented the nature and landscape of the North. By way of example, Verner von Heidenstam famously captures this veneration of a local-based place in his poem “Ensamhetens tankar” (Thoughts of Loneliness) from the collection Vallfart och vandringsår (1888; Pilgrimage and Wandering Years). In Heidenstam’s poem, he proclaims: “Jag längtar hem. Jag längtar var jag går /  – men ej till människor! Jag längtar marken, / jag längtar stenarna där barn jag lekt” (106) (I Long for Home. I long everywhere I go / but not for people! I long for the earth, / I long for the stones where I played as a child.) His longing in the poem stems precisely from his mobility as implied by both the poetic voice’s distance from “home” as well as the idea of pilgrimage and wandering indicated in the title of the collection. Significantly, the poet’s longing, however, is not directed toward other humans or to human culture per se, but to the perceived stony materiality of an environment he experienced as a child. The imagined solidity of the place is contrasted with the ephemerality of human relationships and cosmopolitan culture. Place, in this configuration, is imagined to stand outside of history and human culture. Indeed, Heidenstam seems to overlook entirely how culture contributes at all to the construction of place. Instead, a heightened, almost intuitive sense of place is suggested as an antidote for what is lost by modernity’s mobility and transnational aspirations. Heidenstam’s landscape is an essentialized view of indigenous nature that stands independent of human construction and, ironically, is only apparent because of the mobility facilitated by human technology. Not surprisingly, the nascent environmental protection movement in Scandinavia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was dominated by the idea of naturfredning or naturskydd – the protection of the distinctive attributes of “untouched” nature that seemed to define the uniqueness of place and national identity. The German biologist Hugo Conwentz was particularly influential in promoting this view throughout Scandinavia by arguing that the preservation of Naturdenkmäler [Nature’s Monuments] was vital for nation building because it developed a sense of regional identity or, as Jeffery Wilson calls it, “a Heimat consciousness” (337). Natural monuments could take the form of any plant, tree, or geological formation that had regional, scientific, or aesthetic interest, but it was particularly important to Conwentz that this nature be original and unchanged by human culture. This model of preservation assumes, as in Heidenstam’s poem, that nature exists in individual and discrete units that are separate from each other and from human culture. It is precisely the ability of individuals to separate themselves from nature that created the nostalgia for Scandinavia’s unique landscapes. Conwentz’s focus on untouched nature suggests a separation that is to be maintained and protected from human intrusion as a means of preserving unique identity.

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The atomic age and the vision of the global While nationalist identity grounded in locally defined place certainly has continued into the twenty-first century, the “naturalness” of nationalism and essentialist understandings of geography have long since been questioned. The excesses of National Socialism and the violence associated with Blut und Boden ideologies in particular caused many European cultures to view such place-based national identities with increasing degrees of skepticism. Furthermore, poststructuralist redefinitions of nationality have altered the fundamental conception of the nation with a far greater attention to how this identification emerges from an interaction of discourse, technology, and ideology. More fundamentally, the separation that naturskydd posited between human culture and an unspoiled nature proved increasingly difficult to maintain into the twentieth century in large measure because of the transnational challenges posed by pollution. Water pollution especially was an important issue in the early decades of the 1900s, but the detonation of atomic bombs above Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 ushered in a new era and facilitated a fundamental shift in how cultures imagined their relationships to place and to the physical environment. Atomic arsenals had the potential to wipe out entire nations and the subsequent radiation from such a conflict (and from the testing of these weapons) would not stop at the borders of the belligerents but touch every part of the globe. The hope of naturskydd and naturfredning that an essential nature could exist outside of human culture and history began to fade as the idea of nature gave way to the notion of the environment understood as an integrated system rather than a collection of isolated entities. In the final chapter of his book, Det levande landskapet (1955; The Living Landscape), the poet and botanist Sten Selander criticizes precisely the inadequacies of early twentieth-century notions of naturskydd that overly simplify the complex relationship between the human and the non-human. In order to avoid civilization’s collapse into barbarism, claimed Selander, human culture desperately needs the help of naturalists, biologists, geneticists, ecologists, and soil scientists because they alone can enable mankind to “handla inte mot, utan med naturen” (456) [act not against but with nature]. He calls for the protection of nature as “mänsklighetens väsentligaste angelägenhet” [mankind’s most pressing concern] but qualifies what he means with “protection” saying, “Inte den parodi på naturskydd, som pysslar med att fridlysa flyttblock och ormgranar, utan det verkliga, som vill vårda och bevara våra livsviktigaste tillgångar, de levande organismerna, vattnet och jorden” (456) [not that parody of protecting nature that busies itself with preserving unique boulders and snake spruce trees but the real kind that will take care of and preserve our most vital assets, the living organisms of water and earth]. Specialists, in Selander’s estimation, are uniquely equipped to perceive and communicate the interrelations between human actions and the effects those actions have on the physical environment both seen and unseen. The problem for the inexperienced observer is that these relationships are not always readily obvious and often require a particular sensitivity or even technological mediation to become apparent. While Selander does not advocate this more abstracted conception of the natural world as a substitute for immediate experience, he clearly believes it is an important complement to it. The care for nature (naturvård) takes a more holistic view of the environment than naturskydd by seeing it as an organism or complex system of deeply interdependent parts.

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A change to one part of the system has consequences for the other parts, and in this model, humans cannot stand outside of these entangling relationships to the natural world. Harry Martinson’s epic poem Aniara (1956) is an arresting hybrid text juxtaposing naturskydd and naturvård. Like Selander’s text, it explores the difficulty of separating nature from culture, yet unlike Selander who reaches this conclusion by considering the depletion of resources, Martinson is motivated more directly by emerging discourses about toxicity in Scandinavia during the early and mid-1950s. The threat of atomic warfare (with Sweden situated precisely between the presumptive combatants) and the possibility that the attendant radiation would poison the entire planet forced him to confront man’s power to alter the planet’s ecosystems completely. This poem portrays the plight of the passengers aboard the spaceship Aniara who must flee the Earth after it has been contaminated by the radiation of atomic warfare. When their vessel has to dodge an unmapped asteroid, Hondo (the former name of the island upon which Hiroshima is situated), they are knocked irrevocably off course and hurtle into the depths of space with no hope of return. As they travel farther and farther from their homes through empty space, the passengers on board long for Doris (the Earth), opining: Den varma Doris och den goda Doris, den fjärran Doris nu en ädel stjärna att längta till. Nu är hon stjärnors stjärna. O, kunde jag blott veta var hon glimmar på sjätte året nu så helt förblandad bland rymdens solar att jag aldrig finner den stjärnan mer. Den ädla Dorisstjärnan. (45) (The warming Doris and the kindly Doris, the distant Doris now a noble star to pine for. Now she is the star of stars. O could I but know where she is gleaming in this sixth year, so inconspicuous among the suns of space. It star again. The noble star of Doris.) [55]

The nostalgia in the poem for the Earth fading away in the distance is analogous to the desire in the post-atomic age for a nature still untouched by human technology – a nature that many hoped would relieve the alienation brought on by modern life. Doris, the Earth, destroyed here by mankind’s own foolishness, is configured as a paradise lost. For Martinson, this nature cannot exist in the technological age in which everything man does affects everything else in the system. The irony in the poem is that technology both separates man from nature (a fact Martinson deeply laments) at the same time that it destroys the dichotomy between nature and culture and helps form a more global and holistic view of the environment. Humans must, of course, have an effect on their local ecosystems, but by virtue of their technology their presence is disproportionately magnified. As Martinson writes: Det finnes skydd mot nästan allt som är mot eld och skador genom storm och köld

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372 ja, räkna upp vad slag som tänkas kan. Men det finns inget skydd mot människan. (54) (There is protection from near everything, from fire and damages by storm and frost, oh, add whichever blows may come to mind. But there is no protection from mankind.) [59]

The threat particularly of anthropogenic toxicity at the center of the poem changes the entire conception of nature through its pervasive reach because its radioactive traces can at any time be omnipresent. This technology and the toxicity it produces combine to create a mythology of virgin nature that in many ways recalls the project of the national romantic’s nostalgic longing for a nature that no longer existed – a nature that was just as distant for Martinson as it was for the passengers on the fated Aniara. Martinson’s Aniara was well received, but even more influential in altering the perceived relationship between humans and nature and establishing modern toxic discourse in the Nordic region was Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962) (translated into Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish in 1963 and Icelandic in 1965). Silent Spring elaborates on the dangers of chemical pesticides (DDT in particular) and presents the physical environment as an integrated system in which any action has potentially far-reaching consequences for both humans and the Earth’s ecosystems alike. Carson’s work helped introduce and redefine words like “ecology” and “environment” for a broad audience (see Anderberg 161), and the book became the catalyst for the modern environmental movement both in the Nordic region and around the world (Garrard 1–3; Buell Imagination 44; Whited et al. 195). Chernobyl in the Nordic spatial imagination With this brief history of place attachment and toxic discourse as background, attention can now be turned to the specific example of the reaction to and representation of the Chernobyl nuclear power disaster in several examples from Nordic literary cultures. When the news of Chernobyl’s explosion first came to light on April 28, 1986, it was unexpected, but in another sense it was also anticipated by the discourse about toxicity in the environment established by Martinson, Carson, and others. Particularly in the case of Sweden, the nuclear power debates of the late 1970s and reaction to the Three Mile Island accident in the United States were important precursors for creating channels of reception and discursive practice. In Denmark, it came with the Barsebäck nuclear power plant built in Skåne within view from Copenhagen that began operation in 1975. Thus while the specifics of the Chernobyl accident caught inhabitants of the region off guard (Finnish radiation detection technicians were actually on strike at the time), there was a ready-made means for conceptualizing it and representing it. In the discussion that follows, the important dimensions of this reception from the time of the accident to the present day will be discussed. The focus will be on several texts dealing both directly and indirectly with the accident, subsequent pollution, and the altered sense of place that came with the awareness of the airborne contamination. These texts include Ingrid Storholmen’s Tsjernobylfortellinger

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(2009; Chernobyl Stories), Kerstin Ekman’s Skraplotter (2003; Lottery Scratch Cards), and Stefan Jarl’s Hotet/Uhkkádus (1987; Threat). Toxicity and the lost pastoral In the spring of 1986, filmmaker and author Stefan Jarl  – best known for his documentary films De kallar oss mods (1968; They Call us Mods), Naturens hämnd (1983; Nature’s Revenge), and, more recently, Underkastelsen (2010; Submission)  – was in northern Sweden making a film when the news of Chernobyl broke. Realizing the import of the situation, he immediately stopped filming and began work on Hotet/Uhkkádus (Hellman 105), a film that focuses on the impact of the Chernobyl disaster, particularly on the lives of the indigenous Sámi. Through voice-over narration, interviews, shots of austere landscape, and apocalyptic images of the disposal of contaminated reindeer, Jarl provides a stark illustration of the effects of the disaster on a society directly dependent on a healthy environment and furthermore suggests rather haunting implications for the rest of Western culture as well. The opening images of Jarl’s Hotet document the pristine, wild beauty of northern Sweden – an owl, a fox, rabbit tracks in the snow, a snow-covered landscape, and lakes freezing over with no signs of human presence or habitation. The narrator states that it is early October, the first snows have fallen, and the scene is as far north as one can go in Sweden thus emphasizing its remoteness and seclusion. As the camera rests on a shot of a snow-covered mountain, a train enters suddenly and without warning moving quickly from right to left with whistle blaring. This intrusion of the paradigmatic image of technology is startling and in the context of the

Figure 33.  Still image from the opening sequence of Jarl’s Hotet/Uhkkádus showing the sudden intrusion of a train into the landscape.

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preceding montage, Jarl portrays a violent invasion of the industrial and intrusive mechanical upon the natural and the unconstructed. As with Carson’s pastoral imagery at the beginning of Silent Spring, Jarl draws upon this representation of wilderness (a subset of the pastoral) to set the stage for his depiction of the global risks of nuclear power. Pastoralism operates with the basic assumption that an agrarian or wilderness idyll offers a more healthy and fecund alternative to the hazards and pollutions of urbanity, technology, and culture. Notoriously slippery, though, it has nonetheless been used widely and to many different and divergent ends. As Laurence Buell points out, pastoral representations can “[open] up the possibility of a more densely imaged, environmentally responsive art” yet also “[reduce] the land to a highly selective ideological construct” (Environmental 32). The romantics from both the beginning and end of the nineteenth century were often guilty of the latter as the pastoral was frequently used, as in the case of Heidenstam, to appeal to an essence outside human culture that was fixed and static in order to shore up national identity, but this is not the approach of Jarl, Storholmen, or Ekman. In each case, they use the “traumas of pastoral disruption” (Buell Writing 37) to point out that the exposure to remote sources of toxicity reveals exactly how linked humans are to ecological systems on both local and global scales. Jarl deliberately focuses on the effects of the radioactive fallout on the Sámi’s reindeer herding in the north of Sweden. Their lifestyle is undoubtedly idealized in Jarl’s work, and he freely admits that he believes that “Svenskens förhållande till naturen är primitivt i förhållande till samernas” (Hellman 106) [The Swede’s relationship to nature is primitive compared to that of the Sámi]. But this is also a privileged platform for him to decry the injustice of what has happened. Those believed to have the most balanced relationship to the natural world and the ones who benefit least from the advantages of modern technology are those who are most affected. The rain that fell over Scandinavia in the days after Chernobyl’s meltdown contaminated both groundwater and forage for the reindeer. Once the reindeer ate the polluted moss and lichen, the meat could no longer be sold, and the traditional Sámi way of life was threatened. As the narrator in Hotet states: Samerna klarar sig inte utan renen. Och vi, vi andra, klarar oss inte utan vildmarken. Utan föreställningen om de orörda, om harmonin, om jämvikten som vi förlagt till vildmarken blir inte vårt hem hitom vildmarken beboligt. Ett enda moln från ett av Europas alla kärnkraftverk förändrade allt. Allt är besudlat. Överallt där du sätter din fot, i den minsta vrån, i varje cell finns det radioaktivt spill upplagrat. Det finns inga platser mer som är orörda. Det finns inte längre någon vildmark. (The Sámi can’t live without reindeer. And we – the rest of us – we can’t live without wilderness. Without our vision of untouched land, of harmony, of balance, which we have relegated to the wilderness, our homes beyond the wilderness will not be habitable. A single cloud from one European nuclear power plant changed everything. Everything is defiled. Wherever you go, in the smallest cubby-hole, in every cell, radioactive fallout is stored. There are no untouched places left. There is no longer any wilderness.)

At its heart, Jarl’s film is a call to save the wilderness and Sámi culture in the national romantic spirit of protection, but with an important change to the idea of naturskydd. Because of the pervasiveness of the contamination, contemporary society can no longer conceptualize nature as existing in discrete parts as did the romantics. Provincial or even national boarders cease to

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have meaning, as societies must begin to think in terms of integrated environmental networks in which pollution in one part of the system translates into a contamination of the whole system. Nothing is left untouched. Because of Chernobyl, there is no untouched wilderness any more, and it must be recognized that that human beings do not stand outside of nature; they too are part of this system. Thus toxicity and the spread of unseen contaminants alter the underpinnings of naturskydd, and it gives way to models of naturvård and a focus on the conservation of ecological systems. The romantic idea of nature made up of disconnected parts is replaced by the more integrated concept of the environment.

Figure 34.  Still image from Hotet/Uhkkádus showing the slaughtered corpses of contaminated reindeer being helicoptered away for disposal.

Toxicity and a globalized sense of place The images of a disrupted pastoral in Jarl’s Hotet are preceded by the text: “Lördagen den 26 april 1986 kom våren till Sverige. Samma dag exploderade i Tjernobyl ett av Europas alla kärnkraftverk. Det var därifrån de ljumma vårvindarna blåste mot Skandinavien. Sverige drabbades mer än något annat land av det radioaktiva giftet.” (On Saturday April 26, 1986 spring arrived in Sweden. The same day Chernobyl exploded. It was just one of Europe’s many nuclear power plants. It was from there the warm spring winds blew towards Scandinavia. Sweden received more radioactive poison than any other country.) The date April 26 in this text does not identify, at least in the first instance, the accident at Chernobyl, rather it establishes a pastoral image – the day “spring came to Sweden.” Only then does it mention Chernobyl, and in setting Chernobyl parallel with Sweden, the film inextricably links the two. By virtue of “the

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mild spring winds” what happens in the one place affects the other in a common geographic imaginary that did not exist before. The toxicity facilitates this translocal and transnational awareness. Ingrid Storholmen makes this new sense of place even plainer in Tsjernobylfortellinger in which she collects and recasts the voices and experiences of the victims of the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine and Belarus into Norwegian and then portrays the parallels to her own family’s history in Norway. In the book’s final section she writes: Da jeg var ti år gammel, eksploderte reaktor fire på kjernekraftverket i Tsjernobyl. Det kom store mengder radioaktivt nedfall med vinden fra øst den våren. Jeg vokste opp i et område i Midt-Norge som ble hardt rammet. Vi var tre søsken som var ute og lekte den aprildagen regnet førte med seg Cesium 137. Søstrene mine har måttet fjerne skjoldbruskkjertelen, de har et smykkeformet arr på halsen. Denne boka skrev jeg i 2001 og 2002, før og etter en to måneder lang reise til Ukraina og Hviterussland. Jeg sto tett ved kjernekraftverket og så hvordan sarkofagen over reaktoren holdt på å forvitre. På Skole nr. 6, som jeg besøkte i nærheten av Kiev, hadde svært mange av ungdommene likedanne arr som mine søstre. Skjoldbruskkjertelen tar opp radioaktivitet. (139) (When I was ten years old, reactor four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. A great deal of radioactive fallout came with the wind from the east that spring. I grew up in an area in central Norway that was hard hit. My two siblings and I were out playing on that April day when the rain brought with it cesium 137. My sisters have been forced to have their thyroid glands removed. They have a jewel shaped scar on their necks. I wrote this book in 2001 and 2002 before and after a two-month trip to Ukraine and Belarus. I stood next to the nuclear power plant and saw how the sarcophagus over the reactor was crumbling. At school number 6 that I visited in Kiev, many of the children had scars identical to those of my sisters. The thyroid gland absorbs radioactivity.)

As in Hotet, Storholmen draws attention to the wind that connects east and west in late April of 1986. While wind normally blows from west to east, the fact that it was different that spring was certainly not unprecedented. What was different, though, was that the wind spread cesium 137 thus suddenly making the connection between east and west more prominent and creating a new spatial continuity between Norway and Chernobyl. Place is refashioned by Storholmen not according to national boundaries or through an attentiveness to local geography but is rather based on an awareness of global ecological interconnectedness. The jewel-shaped scars of her sisters and the children in Ukraine mark the membership in a transnational community inhabiting this place that was formed as a result of this new spatial reality and the forces that created it. Interestingly, this community lacks the hierarchical and hegemonic traits associated with the nation; the members its author mentions are all victims, women, and children. The book’s cover illustration is a map that shows the extent of the radiation from the accident and emphasizes how this new spatial consciousness arose from the toxic discourse. The reality of ecological connectedness laid bare by toxic contamination forces a reevaluation of the concept of place that divorces it from the political or cultural boundaries of the nation. Storholmen reminds her readers that she has seen both the crumbling sarcophagus around the still-dangerous exploded reactor and that the dangers to health of the initial contamination still live within many unawares; communities are still at risk and the lesson learned

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Figure 35.  Cover from Ingrid Storholmen’s book Tsjernobylfortellinger, representing the spread of radioactive fallout from Chernobyl up over Scandinavia.

in April 1986 should not be forgotten. “Tsjernobyl pågår fremdeles, folk blir syke i Ukraina og Hviterussland, men også i Norge. . . . Tjernobyl er en katastrofe som bare så vidt har begynt” (Storholmen 139) [Chernobyl continues, people are getting sick not only in Ukraine and Belarus, but also Norway. Chernobyl is a catastrophe that has only just begun]. Toxicity and invisible geographies Jarl and Storholmen both argue, in essence, that contemporary civilization is what Ulrich Beck has called a global risk society in which the threats of events like Chernobyl force the reevaluation of the idea of the local and exchange it for a more global vision with necessary implications for how we then act in our environment. Advantages and disadvantages come with this broadened perspective. The advantages are those promised by a modern, mobile lifestyle that reaches far beyond the local and the immediate. There are even ecological advantages to such a global vision (see for example Heise 17–67). The drawbacks, however, are that individuals become estranged from their own sensuous experience of their immediate surroundings and are forced to rely increasingly on different forms of technological mediation. The radiation from Chernobyl could not be tasted, seen, or smelled but was only detected by experts using sophisticated equipment. Thus the individual subject’s relationship to the environment in contemporary society is necessarily mediated by the technologies that have produced the contaminants and the conditions for pollution in the first place. The alienation of the individual from the sensuous experience of the immediate physical environment is present in all of the texts already discussed but is perhaps best illustrated by Kerstin Ekman’s short reference to Chernobyl in Skraplotter, the third book of her Vargskinnet

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(Wolf Skin) trilogy, which follows several generations of the inhabitants of Svartvatten in Jämtland in northern Sweden. The aged Kristin (Risten) Clementsson narrates long parts of the novel in the first person and recalls April 28, 1986 because of a photograph taken on that day. She says, Sen kom Tjernobyl. Det där regnet. Underligt nog har jag ett fotografi av det. Det var ett vårregn som föll mjukt på våra ansikten. Mats hade tagit en storöring på nät under isen. . . . Han hade öringen hängande på en stång. Det var en ung björk som han inte hade kvistat av ordentligt. På fotografiet ser man regndropparna i kvistverket. Det var det sjuka regnet. Det är det man tittar på nu om man tar fram fotografiet, inte på storöringen. Giftet fanns i vattendropparna som blänker i björkriset. Det kom osynligt ner over oss. Det kom därför att oroliga moln hade rört sig från öster till väster. För det mesta brukar det vara tvärtom hos oss. Lågtrycken vandrar in från Atlanten på en bana som förefaller evig. Rädslan kom också ur det där regnet. Den föll i alla sinnen. Man talade om bäckeräll [sic]. Det var måttet pågiftet och på vår ängslan att inte få nånting sålt av köttet. (Ekman 197) (Then came Chernobyl. That rain. Strangely enough I have a picture of it. It was a spring rain that gently fell on our faces. Mats had caught a big trout in a net under the ice. . . . He had the trout hanging on a pole. It was a young birch that he hadn’t stripped completely. On the picture you can see raindrops in the twigs. That was the sick rain. That is what you look at now when you pull out the photograph, not the big trout. The poison was in the drops of water on the birch twigs. It fell invisibly down over us. It came because anxious clouds had moved from east to west. Usually, it happens the other way around for us. The low pressure wanders in from the Atlantic on a path that seems eternal. Fear also came out of that rain. It fell in all minds. You talked about Becquerel. That was the measurement of the poison and of our anxiety that we wouldn’t be able to sell any meat.)

Like Carson, Jarl, and Storholmen, Ekman makes use of the disrupted pastoral but in a highly self-conscious way. By casting the memory as a photograph, Ekman is able to position the memory at a distance and can deliberately re-interpret it every time the photograph is taken out. What was in the first instance immediate for Kristin becomes increasingly removed with time permitting the focus of her attention to shift from the fish to what was initially only background – the rain. Things do not simply exist, but they exist always in relationship to everything else. The toxic imaginary was not at play when the photograph was taken but came later and forced a subsequent reevaluation of all the component parts of the memory. She can no longer see the trout; she can only see the rain. The same is true for the Sámi couple Lars-Jon and Lillmor interviewed by Jarl in Hotet; the presence of the unseen contagion alienates them from their relationship and livelihood dependent on the natural world. Lars-Jon says, Man ska ta hänsyn till djur i alla sätt, på alla sätt. . . . Om fjällrenen vill upp till fjällen då ska man flytta med den upp till fjällen. Och sen på vintern till skogen. Men nu med den här Tjernobyl olyckan är det helt kört. Nu måste vi ta hänsyn till cesium och det förstår inte renen. Och då måste vi jobba mot renen på det sättet. Renen känner att det skulle vara bra där nere i skogen men de känner inte att det är cesium i renlaven. Och på det sättet så får vi andra värderingar. . . . Vi förändrar våra värderingssätt och vi får andra synvinklar till djuret. Ofta är det till det bästa att man tar hänsyn till djuret som ett djur utan man ta hänsyn kanske till det som om det är en produktiv vara sett ekonomisk . . . då blir det att man jobbar mot naturen i naturen.

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(You have to take care of the animals in every way . . . If the highland reindeer want to go up to the mountains, then you go. And then to the forest in winter. But now after the Chernobyl accident it is all messed up. We have to consider the cesium; and the reindeer don’t understand that. And then we have to work at odds with the reindeer. The reindeer feel it’s time to go down to the forest, but they don’t know about the cesium in the lichen. And that way we acquire different values . . . We shift our values and see the animals from another angle. It’s best to consider the animal as an animal, but now maybe we’ll think about it as productive goods . . . from a financial point of view. But it’s not right, it shouldn’t be that way. For then you’re working at odds with nature, in nature.)

The view of nature as a holistic entity is traded for one of nature as a global economy. This reversal of perceptions is not just about how Lars-Jon and Lillmor will make a living but also about a fundamental orientation and a way of looking at place that has been destroyed by the necessity of viewing nature in terms of resource and product. As if to emphasize this point, there are apocalyptic images throughout the film of a helicopter transporting dead, contaminated reindeer for disposal. Ominous images of how this life is altered (see Figure 34). The consequences of Chernobyl cannot be contained. In each of the representations of the disaster, there is no protection from consequences, and there is no going back. The poison is invisible, and the individual subject must rely on various forms of technological and institutional mediations of the environment that can help foster a better sense of the global but often at the cost of the immediate sensual interaction with the physical world. As Storholmen writes, “Alt er annerledes” (77) [Everything is changed]. Pollution and place This view of toxic imaginary has suggested how pollution and the discourses that surround it have impinged upon and altered both a conception of place as well as the human relationship with the physical world. Scandinavia after April 26, 1986 cannot be conceived as entirely separate from Chernobyl, a location thousands of kilometers away. The contaminant in this case was completely invisible to the human eye, and it was, thus, the discourse around the event that necessarily created the collective imagined proximity of these two places. But by linking the two locations, a new experience of place is suggested in which physical proximity is less important than other types of connections that point to integrated environments and deterritorialization. Similar analyses of other phenomena like acid rain and greenhouse gases would each produce a different map highlighting different elements of the human relationship to the physical world, but all would point away from place defined solely by something immediate and present. For many years, environmental discourses have been grounded in the idea that, as Arne Næss wrote, “the nearer has priority over the more remote – in space, time, culture, species” (266) and that successful environmental stewardship is based upon an attentive relationship to the proximate. While there may continue to be much truth in these views, the idea of toxicity forces cultures also to look to other more highly mediated forms of place awareness that allows disparate geographical locations to be imagined or conceived as part of the same system. Literature, film, and art in all of its various forms play an important role in forming this consciousness.

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This type of global cosmopolitanism necessitates new patterns of thought and new potential for understanding how culture and discursive practices are not separate from nature but fundamentally a part of it.

This site is under construction Mediating the Øresund region around the millennium C. Claire Thomson and Pei-Sze Chow

In 1908, what was to be Copenhagen’s largest public sculpture was erected near the waterfront, at the southern tip of Kastellet and Langelinie Park. The Gefion Fountain, sculpted by Anders Bundgaard, represents the mythical origin of the terrain around the Øresund strait, which separates present-day Denmark and Sweden. The sculpture depicts Gefion, the Norse goddess of fertility, driving her oxen to plow a tract of land to the north of the strait. The land that Gefion plowed would be cast into the waters of the Øresund, forming the Danish island of Sjælland, and leaving behind a flooded hollow in the Swedish landscape that became Lake Mälaren. Per Erik Ljung comments wryly that Gefion’s creation of the Sound separating Swedish Skåne from the Danish island she had won by her plowing must have resonated in the turn-of-the-century national imagination; the sculpture’s construction coincided with Denmark’s support for the dissolution of the Union between Norway and Sweden, making Gefion an apt political symbol of the apparently irrevocable renunciation by Denmark of her friends on the other side of the Øresund (Ljung 71). At the twentieth century’s other extreme, quite a different monument to Dano-Swedish relations would rise above the waters. The Øresund Bridge linking the cities of Malmö and Copenhagen, inaugurated in 2000, was only the most concrete manifestation of the region’s self-conscious metamorphosis into one of Europe’s most populous and dynamic transnational metropolitan areas. If the Gefion Sculpture still symbolizes the intricate mythical, historical, and ecological interconnections between the two coasts, it is the Øresund Bridge and tunnel that constitute the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the transnational conurbation of Copenhagen-Malmö and the concomitant economies of scale (Bucken-Knapp 56). This chapter explores how the Øresund has been imagined in literature, film, television and, briefly, new media since the mid-nineteenth century, but with a focus on film and television since 2000. Specifically, the focus is the Øresund strait itself and the bridge that now spans it. While the Øresund region is geo-politically defined as encompassing the Danish island of Sjælland and the Swedish county of Skåne, this discussion does not cover literary or other media representations of the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö nor the surrounding land. This is not just for reasons of space and focus: by restricting attention to the liminal space or non-place (Augé) of crossing, one can better understand the mediation of the “trans” in this transnational region in the process of emergence. While the chapter is organized more or less chronologically, this is not to posit a comprehensive and teleological grand narrative of ever-closer union between the two nations and cities bordering the Sound. Rather, the intention is to offer a range of examples of the interplay between politics, culture and media in local and international imaginings about the Øresund – a process that, like the architecture of the region, is “under construction” and profoundly contested.

doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.30tho © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Figure 36.  View of the Øresund Bridge seen from the south on the Swedish side. Photo: kimson/Shutterstock

Imagined communities and planned regions Of all the arts, it is the novel that has been credited with the popular dissemination of the concept of the modern nation. In his seminal and seductive work Imagined Communities (1983, revised edition 1991), Benedict Anderson argues that most modern nations read themselves into being in the course of the nineteenth century. He singles out the novel and the newspaper as the kinds of text that employed print culture and a shared vernacular to construct and disseminate the concept of a nation as a community of individuals located in a finite space and moving together through linear, historical time. That most of these individuals would never meet in person meant that the national community was a product of the collective socio-cultural imagination; but Anderson is quick to emphasize that although nations are “imagined,” they are not “imaginary” or entirely “fabricated,” nor are they less “true” than other types of community (6). Pushed to its limits, the notion that places and communities are mediated into existence through literature and other forms of art suggests that a national community only exists in mediated form, for, as Anderson argues, any community larger than “primordial villages of faceto-face contact” (6) is necessarily a work of collective imagination. Anderson puzzles over the question of how an imagined entity inspires such zeal in its members that they would fight and die for their country. He deploys the curious metaphor of “seeping” to describe the mechanism by which the novel educates society to understand itself as such, writing: “fiction seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations” (36, emphasis added). This is a compelling metaphor,

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but one that perhaps too readily separates out the stuff of text from the stuff of life. The practice of reading a novel (or watching a film, or surfing the web, or tweeting) is, surely, just as much a part of the embodied life of the individual participating in a community as is eating local food or celebrating a national festival. The notion of the “imagined community” continues to be widely used across the study of a range of media, not always with the same concentration on medium-specific qualities which Anderson himself accords the novel, newspaper, map, and other artifacts. Cinema, for example, constructs national time and space through editing and camerawork, though the indexical nature of its images entails a contribution to national imagining that is predicated on the concrete rather than the abstract or general (see for example Hjort, “Themes of Nation”). The television series is interesting for its ability to leverage the notion of national “homogeneous, empty time” shared by viewers simultaneously tuning in across a territory, an experience not entirely eradicated in the age of on-demand streaming. Successive media evolutions have furnished a nexus of media in which to imagine and live out communities of belonging. But despite the proliferation of digital technologies over the last twenty-five years, the theory of “new media” tends to insist on the continuities between different media (Bolter and Grusin; Hayles “Print”). The novels, newspapers, censuses, and maps that conjured the modern nation into existence seem, in the light of flickering laptop screens, quaint perhaps and undeniably papery, but they too form a part of the imaginative, dynamic ecology of a community. The term “ecology” is borrowed from N. Katherine Hayles (Writing): she claims that media tend to imitate each other and to draw attention to their own instantiation, sometimes in the very attempt to conceal it. Calling for a turn to medium-specific analysis, Hayles reminds the reader that “all texts are instantiated and the medium in which they are instantiated matters” (Hayles “Print” 67). One can thus observe, for example, that the physical form of the (Western) novel – the pages are normally read line by line, left to right, in turn, front to back, whether in serial or book format – is the sine qua non of its construction of a “sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time” (Anderson 26). Or, one might point to the miniaturization of digital cameras in the late 1990s as the condition of possibility for the perspectives on the region afforded by some of the documentaries discussed later in this chapter. The medium of instantiation also matters if its ephemerality truncates the life of a text: as will later be argued, this is the case with the now-defunct online map mediating the territory of the popular Øresund-based television series Bron/Broen (2011–; The Bridge). The role of the arts in negotiating and disseminating the imagined community was not lost on the architects of the Øresund Region when plans for the transnational link began to gather pace in the early 1990s. The problem of coaxing a region into imaginative existence is partly, as Bucken-Knapp suggests, about tempting ever-greater numbers of ordinary people to use – that is, to live out – the possibilities of professional and leisure-related mobility afforded by the region. Here the problematics of planned versus lived space in play can be seen: regional politicians on both sides of the Øresund face a challenge as they seek greater mass involvement in constructing a cross-border region where inhabitants both know of, and are ready to take advantage of, employment, housing and other opportunities on both sides of the border (Bucken-Knapp 56). Social and political factors also militate against integration progressing

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beyond the economic. Of particular note is the emergence of a range of counter-discourses focusing on the environmental impact of the built link (Linnros and Hallin); and it has been argued (Bucken-Knapp) that the swing to the Center-Right in Danish politics in the early 2000s (and again fifteen years later) hindered regional integration by focusing national discourse on immigration and national identity. For the economic benefits of the new region to bear fruit, the necessity of cultural spillover was recognized: “the history of the dream of the region is dominated by ideas about the region having to be or become popular and anchored in a genuine cultural basis” (Hornskov 86, emphasis in original). An Øresund Committee, established 1993, focused increasingly on branding the region locally and internationally as “Øresund: The Human Capital” (Hospers 1024–26). A range of strategies have been funded over the years to foster grass-roots engagement with the project, for example the “Open Bridge” festival to mark its opening in July 2000 (O’Dell). Hornskov describes how local cultural organizations were ambivalent about financial support from Kulturbro (Culture Bridge), a biennial festival of local culture that ran in 2000 and 2002; the money “came with the obligation to become cogs in the machine of the regional branding strategy” (87). Nonetheless, the very act of resisting and rebelling against the constraints imposed by the Kulturbro branding exercise was itself an act of region-making, he argues. The same could be said of journalism in the region. Falkheimer offers an analysis of the influence of the Øresund Media Platform, a clearinghouse for regional news funded by the European Union program Interreg from 2012–14 that aimed to increase coverage and thus knowledge of regional issues. Falkheimer reports that not only has newspaper coverage of Øresund issues in the region decreased since 2007, it also tends to consist of stereotypes about the other side of the Sound, as well as “simple news about culture, crimes and accidents” (37). For Hospers, this failure of a regional identity to grow from the grassroots makes the Øresund region an “imagined place” (1028), by which he actually means that it is “imaginary” – that is, decidedly not an “imagined community” in Anderson’s sense. As costly and complex enterprises, film and television are particularly prone to being facilitated, financed, and shaped by national cultural policies, insofar as state investment may be predicated on defined “national” themes or styles (Hjort Small Nation, Global Cinema). The Øresund region is no exception. Since 2000, a number of bodies including the Øresund Film Commission have supplemented national and regional film institutions to encourage inward investment in the area and transnational co-productions across the Sound. There is, though, no supranational institution responsible for setting funding criteria or film policy at regional level. Nonetheless, the economic importance of the audiovisual industries in the region, the social and economic instrumentalization of the “creative industries” more generally since the 1990s, the wide and penetrating reach of cinema and television in the region, and the relative ease of subtitling make these media a particularly catalytic and compelling space in which to thrash out notions of national and regional identity (Chow 57–59). The advent of the Øresund link, then, was contingent on, and constitutive of, a culture in which the stories that the “new” region would tell about itself would be narrated in film and television. To date, there has been no “Øresund novel,” and apparently no attempt on the part of the region’s cultural arbiters to foster or fund such a thing, perhaps not solely due to the tantalizing linguistic challenges such a project would pose. On the other hand, if images of the Øresund are sought in the heyday of

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the historical novel, it is apparent that the Sound has played at least a bit part in the imaginative delineation of national boundaries in Danish literature. Negotiating national boundaries in the novel The Øresund presents an oddly liminal space. The coastlines of the Sound bound the two modern nations, but how does one demarcate the border? As Per Erik Ljung (71) points out, popular and scholarly understanding of the “natural” function of the Øresund waters has shifted through time: do the waters separate the two coasts or connect them? Until the Great Powers awarded the provinces of Skåne, Halland, and Blekinge to Sweden in 1658, the Dano-Swedish border lay far within present-day Sweden, and Denmark controlled the Øresund and with it the entrance to the Baltic. But even after the Øresund came to coincide with the boundary of the Danish state, traffic back and forth was frequent – or at least is constructed as such by the various books and websites extolling the long history of exchange between the two nations (see, for example, Holmberg, or www.oresundstid.dk: The History of the Øresund Region). An interesting motif is the fascination in the mid-nineteenth-century novel with traversing ice-bound straits between islands and shores around the Øresund. Intimate knowledge of the behavior of ice on water is the basis of a compelling passage in Hans Christian Andersen’s Kun en Spillemand (1837; Only a Minstrel). Andersen conjures up a magical account of the frozen Øresund as a shifting ice-scape whose mercurial dynamics erode not only geo-political boundaries but also the very distinction between land and sea: Som Sømand var det ham klart, at den stærke Iis, ved Forandring af Strøm og sydøstlig Vind, som det nu var blevet, kunde i meget kort Tid brydes og drive Nord paa. Det er en af de mest imposante Naturscener, vort Land fremviser. Isens Styrke, Strømningens Kraft, især ved Helsingøer, hvor Sundet mellem Landene kun er en halv Miil bredt, er af stor Virkning. Mægtige Iisstykker presse mod hverandre, Strømmen løfter dem høit op, og, som skruede rundt om, reise sig i barokke Former de glasagtige, svømmende Fjelde. En forbiseilende Gletscher synes da Sundet. (Andersen 123) (As a sailor, it was obvious to him that if the current should change and the wind come from the south-east, as it now had begun to do, the strong ice could very quickly break up and move north. This is one of the most imposing scenes of nature the land has to offer. The strength of the ice and the force of the current are very great, especially at Elsinore, where the Sound between the coasts is but a half mile wide. Great blocks of ice press against each other, the current lifts them high, and, as if twisted round, glassy, floating mountains rear up in Baroque formations. The Sound resembles a glacier sailing by.)

With the ice cracking beneath their sled, Andersen’s protagonists miraculously find themselves, with a wise cattle herder, on solid ground: the flat little island of Saltholm, with only some trees and an abandoned house incongruously visible above the ice (125), suspended in a space that is “between” two physical states (freezewater melting) and two nation states. While the Swedish army’s march across the frozen Great and Little Belts in January 1658 was a feat of military logistics facilitated by army engineers, the emphasis in Carit Etlar’s

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well-loved novel Gjøngehøvdingen (1853; The Chieftan) is on the power of intimate knowledge of local topography to enable the heroes’ escape. Knowing the only safe path over the icy Præstø Bay to the island of Maderne, Ib’s band of refugees not only save themselves, but also tempt their Swedish pursuers out onto thin ice (Etlar 86–88). The drowning Swedish troops are observed from a perspective that employs a precise sense of the geography of the bay to stage a historical spectacle with the national boundaries as, quite literally, a backdrop: Han tog en Pistol, spændte Hanen og trykkede af. Skuddet genlod flere Gange ind imellem Bakkerne langs Kysten. Paa samme Tid saa man Svenskernes mørke Klynge udstrække sig i en lang Linie og bevæge sig fremad hen over Isen. . . . Endnu mens Ib talede, lød et hult og pibende Suk hen over Havfladen. Rytterne standsede, de syntes at betænke sig, nogle af dem vendte deres Heste ind mod Land igjen, men det var for silde; man hørte et Skrald i Isen, et gjennemtrængende og gjentaget Skrig. Hestene vrinskede, Isfladen bevæger sig og bøjes sammen, Rytterne raabe om Hjælp, de kæmpe og forsvinde under Isen. Ude paa Holmen vare Ib og Gjøngerne tavse, grebne Vidner til dette Optrin. (Etlar 87) (He took a pistol, pulled the trigger, and fired. The shot echoed several times in between the slopes along the cost. At the same time, one saw the dark knot of the Swedes stretch out in a long line and start to move out onto the ice…. Even as Ib spoke, a hollow, whistling sigh was heard along the surface of the sea. The troops halted, they seemed to reconsider, some of them turned their horses towards land again, but it was too late; a cracking was heard in the ice, a piercing, echoing scream. The horses reared, the surface of the ice moving and warping, the troops shouting for help, struggling, sinking under the ice. Out on the island, Ib and the rebels were silent witnesses gripped by this event.)

The waters and bays of the Øresund thus become the theater for a spectacle that avenges the successful crossing of the frozen Great and Little Belts by the Swedes; when ice-bound, the Øresund is contested national territory, as indeed it was in the period this novel is set. For those of a pan-Scandinavian bent in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Øresund had an ambiguous status. In Herman Bang’s Copenhagen novel Stuk (1887; Stucco), the protagonist, Berg, tries to persuade the authorities of the necessity of a theater where Copenhageners could be exposed to the universal (or at least the Nordic) language of art. The conversation hinges on two incommensurable interpretations of post-1864 national space that meet at the water’s edge. Berg tells the official that without the development of a sense of the unity of Nordic arts and languages, Copenhagen will be a city without a hinterland; that commerce and the law must build on a collective sense of Scandinavian culture. “What is there space for in this country?” he asks, frustrated: Konferentsraaden havde løftet Hovedet, og Berg fulgte instinktmæssig Retningen af hans Blik, der hvilede paa Skandinaviens Kort paa Væggen. Med Øjnene paa Kortet, hvis hundrede Skibsruter bøjede sig ind mod København, sagde Konferentsraaden med sit ejendommelige Smil: – Jeg har fundet Plads til en Havn. Og i en anden Tone, bestandig betragtende Kortet, som hans Geni havde aflæst dets Hemmeligheder, sagde han: – Fire og treds amputerede os for Land ved Hofterne. . . . Nu har vi kun Vandene tilbage, de levende Vande, sagde han. (345–46)

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(The official had lifted his head, and Berg followed instinctively the direction of his glance, which rested on the map of Scandinavia on the wall. With his eyes on the map, whose hundred shipping routes arched in towards Copenhagen, the official smiled: – I found space for a port. And in a different tone, still looking at the map, as if his genius had revealed its secrets, he said: – The peace of ’64 amputated this land at the hips. . . . Now we only have the water left, the living waters, he said.)

The resonance of Bang’s text with present-day struggles over the cultural and economic identity of the Øresund region has also been noted by Hans Holmberg (217–18). This passage from Bang is relevant not just for its articulation of the chicken-egg debate between economic and cultural development, but also for its breathtaking spatial renegotiation of the shape of Denmark. Stuk is renowned as a novel that maps the complexity of the city for a post-1864 Danish audience still smarting from the loss of Slesvig and Holsten. But here, the novel resorts to ekphrasis – describing the routes on the wall map – to establish Copenhagen as a major international shipping node. The city planners have “made space” for a harbor, but in doing so they have expanded the nation’s space into the transnational. A markedly similar tension between the coastline as demarcation and threshold, a kind of essential hinterland for a small nation, is found in a novel by Mogens Klitgaard, Den guddommelige Hverdag (The Blessed Everyday), set and written in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. Formally experimental, juxtaposing first- and second-person narratives from different parts of the country in the year of its publication with authentic contemporary newspaper clippings, the novel owes a debt to the collective novel and the montage of John Dos Passos (Thomson “Material”). In its opening and closing texts, the “camera-eye” of the narrator sweeps across a beach and looks out to sea commenting that once the waters were a way out: now they are a wall. In this text, the nation turns in on itself; its knowledge of the war raging outside is self-consciously mediated through the unreliable press. When Klitgaard’s novel was published, Denmark was under black-out in the evenings, and the public houses of north Sjælland were resonating to the strains of a popular song composed in the late thirties by Henry Carlsen: “Kronborg-Valsen” [The Kronborg Waltz]. The song describes walking on Kronborg beach at sunset with a lover and waiting for the lights to come on in Helsingborg across the water, “som tusinde stjerner” (Carlsen) [like a thousand stars]. Witnessing the lights going on across the Sound is presented here as an integral part of the romance of the local place; to “kende dit land” [know your land], says the same song, is to be acutely aware of the light (both literal and metaphorical) of the free life on the other side of the water. Place here is both bounded by historical circumstance and imbued with the sublime experience of what can be seen beyond. Bridging the binational binary Until the opening of the Øresund Bridge in 2000, crossing the Øresund entailed navigation through a panoply of modes of transport and borders. Orvar Löfgren (2002) has written extensively on the anxieties and irritations of criss-crossing the Øresund via the non-places (Augé)

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of arrival halls, customs searches, ferry-ports, and train carriages. Even after the advent of the bridge, crossing the national border between Denmark and Sweden is much like any other landlocked border: marked by the switch from Danish to Swedish-language loudspeaker announcements in the train carriage and by the temporary break in cellphone network coverage. As Bucken-Knapp (72) points out, this binary Danish-Swedish model of the region persists to the present day. The debates over the construction of the Øresund Bridge and the fostering of mobility in the region tend to be couched in terms of what two monolithic cultures share (or not). The discourse elides almost completely the demographic fact that this is Scandinavia’s most ethnically diverse region (O’Dell 47, n. 13). Even the contrasting national approaches to immigration and assimilation have been a key topic in public discussion about the post-bridge Øresund thus, as Bucken-Knapp (74) argues, further emphasizing the “two peoples, two shores, two cultures” model. This discourse about the nature of the region was, argues O’Dell, only intensified by the functionality of the bridge itself: while any shoreline allows for a variety of crossing points, “the bridge tyrannically and exclusively prioritizes only two points of connection” (O’Dell 38). Bridges are unique structures, he observes, because, “while coaxing us to sing the praises of unification, they also paradoxically reinforce the perception of disjuncture in space, as though the two points we now see as being unified had once been separated – thus thrusting (in the case of Øresund) nautical juncture into the realm of the forgotten” (37–38). As O’Dell argues (41–42), local interest in the construction of the Øresund Bridge in the 1990s was such that the structure – and, by extension, the region it would “unite” – produced an experience that was at once mediated in complex ways through the “visual continuity” provided by local press and television and also profoundly immediate, at least for those who lived or drove along the coastline with views of the bridge as it came into being. The impromptu museum near the ridge-top of Stenberget offered three-dimensional models of the structure that teased with the “anticipated movement” (42) of the first embodied experience of traveling over the bridge. On a very simple level, visual media harness the symbolic power of the bridge to signify a region under construction and then eventually united. But it can be argued that at least some of the film and television productions during and after the bridge’s construction employ the visual potential of television and/or cinema in ways that gesture to a much more complex understanding of space, structure, and community than the panoramic view from Stenberget. Much recent film and television in the region seems to adopt a set of representational strategies that poses questions about planned space versus lived place. That is, it uses the tension between the long shot of an iconic building and the potential to get inside the building or its formwork, often to explore similar sets of ideas about planned versus lived space. To outline the potential of film and television to mediate an emerging community, this essay now turns to consider some recent productions that explicitly engage with the new architecture of the region. The Øresund as global nexus The Danish television channel TV2 and Swedish Television Malmö co-funded a documentary on the building of the bridge, which was released in summer 2000 to coincide with the bridge’s

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opening. Gå på vatten (Walking on Water), directed by Fredrik Gertten and Lars Westman, follows the experience of a number of workers involved in the construction, from the architect, to the crane operator, to the waitress in the on-site snack bar. At one level, the focus on individuals reveals the sheer scale of the operation: panoramic views of the structure tend to imply that it grows in and of itself while concealing the vast numbers of human workers who execute the many small actions involved. But the strategy of privileging the “human interest” also has the effect of opening out the space around the bridge into different dimensions: local, national, transnational, and global. For example, the film follows one constructor back to his home in Jutland, where he is preparing for his wedding; the viewer has previously learned about his sense of homesickness, his fiancée’s desire for him to stop traveling for work, and his nagging back injury. Knowing that the Øresund Bridge will eradicate the distance between Copenhagen and Malmö, the viewer is startled into a sense of the relativity of space by this Danish worker’s conviction that he is very far from home. The café waitress is chosen as a contestant in the Danish version of a Swedish reality television show Expedition Robinson – from which the American and multiple international versions of Survivor were adapted – and departs to compete on a tropical island: a choice example of hyper-mediatization, that is, the documentary documenting its own subject caught up in a game show which beams the exotic exploits of Danes back to their own countrymen. Quite a different sense of space and scale comes from repeated visits to the cab of the crane operator who has traveled the world working on construction projects. The glass walls of the cramped cab, suspended breathtakingly high over the water, provide a perspective that is at once deeply intimate – as the cameraman crouches to interview the operator about his travels and exotic love affairs – and dramatically panoramic, high over a sunny Øresund. But the crane is also the epicenter of a protest action by Swedish activists, who occupy the cabin one night. Their leader, in interview with the film’s director, reveals much about the stubbornly national character of the environmental activist groups on either side of the Øresund: the Swedish group has not coordinated much with its Danish counterparts, she says, because they dress differently and listen to different music. Such sequences at altitude situate the bridge in its own locality surrounded by water and flatlands, buffeted by Baltic winds, and simultaneously within the complex global flows of construction workers, capital, and materials. Gertten employs a similar technique in his subsequent documentary for Malmö City Archive about the dismantling of the Kockums crane. In Bye Bye Malmö! (2002) the camera also ventures into the crane operator’s cabin, but this time to record his last lift before the cabin is cut from the now defunct crane and lowered to the ground. Having been privy to the life story of the crane operator in the cramped confines of the cabin of this, once the world’s tallest crane, the viewer comes to understand the film’s logic of traumatic spatial change. The crane operator came to Sweden from Yugoslavia as a migrant worker in the 1960s and retains an accent; the man in charge of dismantling the crane is also an accented Scottish engineer, whose laptop screensaver is the view from his loch-side holiday home; the crane has been sold to a South Korean company and will be dismantled and shipped off into the Øresund horizon at the end of the film. Again, change and regeneration in Malmö is contextualized as an expression of global flows. But as one climbs into the now-earthbound cab with the distraught operator or watches with him from his kitchen window as the crane disappears from the horizon, the film seems

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to give the lie to Roland Barthes’s insistence that cinema does not share with photography the power to give the sense of “that has been” (Camera Lucida 71), the indexical record of a person or world that will be no more. In both these films, the potential of the moving image to capture the process of change – that is, the ephemeral stages of the construction process – is the most important mechanism by which the transformation of the region as a collective enterprise is communicated. Ordinary workers and managers demonstrate their craft and explain their vision, even passion, for the project. Ordinary viewers, for whom the bridge or the crane is an object on the horizon made to disappear or grow by unknown forces, are invited into the crawl spaces, stairwells, and scaffolding of buildings in the process of emergence or dismantling. The well-worn critical-theoretical terminology of “constructing” an imagined community here means something very concrete. A third documentary directed by Gertten employs many of the same strategies but weaves the construction of a new building in Malmö into the social history of the city. Sossen, arkitekten och det skruvade huset (2006; The Socialist, the Architect, and the Twisted Tower) chronicles the struggle of Johnny Örbäck, the head of the Swedish cooperative housing organization Hyresgästernas sparkasse- och byggnadsförening (HSB), to realize his vision of building Scandinavia’s tallest tower in Malmö. As it grows, the Turning Torso, designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, affords ever-more panoramic views over Malmö and the Øresund (including the now-complete bridge), as well as a blow-by-blow account of the ever-more

Figure 37.  Still image from Sossen, arkitekten och det skruvade huset (2006). Regional memory under contruction in the shape of Calatrava’s Turning Torso building in Malmö.

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complex technical problems of its construction. However, the heavy work of envisioning the community is done by weaving together the planning process with an account of the history of HSB’s pioneering work in social housing. Calatrava works both as a sculptor and as an architect. His buildings are, he suggests, sculptures of monumental scale that do what no sculpture can: they can be penetrated, lived in. In this case, the Turning Torso is conceived as a livable sculpture that is embedded in Malmö’s tradition of social housing, but also functions as a monument to that history, as well as a monolithic symbol of the regeneration of the city and the region. The skyscraper is, as Örbäck puts it in the documentary, “the Formula One of housing.” And its monumental scale, as Calatrava predicts, functions – in the film, and in real life – to facilitate a double vision: an urban and maritime panorama from the higher floors of the building, and dramatic long-shots of the tower emerging from the flat plane of the waterside. Øresund noir: Bron/Broen Also in 2006, screenwriters Hans Rosenfeldt, Nikolaj Scherfig, Måns Marlin, and Björn Stein began work on creating a bilingual crime thriller television series that would place the Øresund and its iconic architectural landmarks, not least the Turning Torso and the bridge, front and center. The first season of Bron/Broen (The Bridge) debuted on Danish and Swedish television simultaneously in 2011, imaginatively suturing the two national groups of viewers by dint of a shared broadcast schedule. Riding on the popularity of ‘Nordic noir’ television series such as Forbrydelsen (2007–12; The Killing) and the various Swedish and British incarnations of Wallander, the binational co-production mediates the spatial and cultural dynamics of the Øresund through the lens of crime, reimagining transnational movement across natural and man-made boundaries. Co-produced by Filmlance (Sweden) and Nimbus Film (Denmark) for the Danish and Swedish national broadcasting corporations, the series features blood spilled from serial killings that taint the bridge and both sides of the Sound and prompt the SwedishDanish detective pair Saga Norén and Martin Rohde to traverse the region in pursuit of crime and justice. The show is predicated on Bucken-Knapp’s “two peoples, two shores, two cultures” model (74), given the interplay between the two characters (arguably both national archetypes) and the emphasis on binational difference in its plotline, narrative structure, and dialogue. Even the spectacularly staged crime in the first episode has an essentially binary logic: two bodies cut in half are reassembled as one, spanning the Dano-Swedish border on the bridge. The opening credits of the show, repeated in every episode to the melancholic strains of Choir of Young Believers’ “Hollow Talk,” is arguably the visual text that has done most to cement an imaginary map of the region for local and international audiences since the inauguration of the Øresund Link. The credits portray the region as a noir-style nocturnal metropolis studded with motorcar headlights and punctuated by super-modern landmarks such as the Øresund Bridge, Malmö’s Turning Torso skyscraper, and Copenhagen’s functionalist monolith of a hospital (Rigshospitalet). Along with the iconic Danish sculpture The Little Mermaid, the depiction of the nineteenth-century Malmöhus Windmill gestures to deeper historical specificities in the respective cities, but the overall effect of Bron/Broen’s opening credits is to construct the region as one conurbation dominated by night sky and water, in which national difference

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is extinguished by darkness, and through which the illuminated ribbon of the bridge snakes panoramically.

Figure 38.  Still image from the opening credit sequence of Bron/Broen (The Bridge), Season Two.

This staging of the bridge in the series is described by Susanne Eichner and Anne Marit Waade (15) as “hyper-mediatization”: the layering of imagined place on real place, producing an icon that can be endlessly remediated. From the repeated, canted opening shot of the cables against a twilight sky, to the concluding face-off between murderer and detectives in Season One under the bridge, to a ship in Season Two veering off course and crashing into it, the bridge serves as a lightning rod for fears and imaginings about not just the region but the effects of globalization. The final show-down in the third season brings the detectives to Saltholm. Instead of being a haven for wildlife, the island is now transformed into an imaginary place of terror in the middle of the Sound. Crime becomes the glue that brings the transnational police team together while at the same time drawing the viewers’ attention to the very heart of the region. Bron/Broen can thus be read as a drama about blurring and transcending geographical and cultural boundaries, albeit through crime. Border crossing forms a central visual and narrative motif rendered literal several times an episode as the detectives criss-cross the bridge by car, but so too does the audiovisual text itself travel across boundaries that are linguistic, geographical, and material, engendering the construction of an imagined community of viewers and fans. It can also be argued that the broadcast of Bron/Broen is as much a transnational television event as it is a cultural event, in some ways similar to the grand opening of the Øresund Bridge since it brings together a transnational group of viewers in the communal act of experiencing and imagining a sense of the region. Communities of international viewers also interact with the fiction and communicate with each other (and the series’ producers) on the official Facebook page and via shared hashtags on Twitter, not least with peaks in activity during broadcasts that become “national” events.

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Notwithstanding its geographical specificity, the bi-national, cross-border premise of Bron/Broen has proven to be so highly marketable to global audiences that it has been sold and broadcast in over 100 countries worldwide and adapted in the UK/French context (The Tunnel, 2013) and for screens in the USA and Mexico (The Bridge, 2013). Eichner and Waade attribute this appeal to the dual function of what they call “local color,” namely details of everyday culture that are at once familiar to domestic audiences and aspirational or exotic to global viewers: Local colour is staged as a brand image, referring to the broader genre of Nordic Noir and the compelling and fascinating human abyss, and simultaneously to an ideal social reality of stability, state welfare and gender equality. The local colour that has been identified in Bron/ Broen could therefore be regarded as creating a sense of proximity and belonging on the one hand, while creating a sense of longing (for an exotic place, for a specific, idealised society, etc.) on the other. (16)

The ephemerality of the region During and for a time after the broadcast of the second season, the Danish broadcaster Danmarks Radio (DR) created an official website for Bron/Broen featuring an interactive Google Maps interface that mapped the positions of all the key locations in the series, a constellation of red pins across different parts of Copenhagen and Malmö. For example, Saga’s flat is found just next to the Turning Torso in Västra Hamnen, and not too far from Copenhagen city center there is the hotel in which Martin stayed after being thrown out of his home by his wife. The “viewer” is invited to point, click, drag, and zoom, to navigate the region as a kind of criminologist, mapping crime across the region on the one hand, and on the other hand becoming more intimate with the contours of the region with the fictional narrative as a frame. The appeal of this map is predicated on its symbiotic relationship with newer forms of media: it employs the standard Google Maps interface to invest its noir fantasy of Copenhagen with a familiar sense of authenticity, employing the collectively understood norms of high-resolution aerial photography (zoomability, mash-ups). It thus poses questions about surveillance and the ease with which digital images of a territory can be manipulated, questions thematically linked to the television series itself. The website and its bite-sized representation of the Øresund has since been taken down, one of many ephemera generated by television marketing and social media campaigns aimed at constructing an imagined social life of the region, but only temporarily. Epilogue At the time of writing, it seems increasingly feasible that the Øresund Region itself may prove to be ephemeral as a political entity. In early 2015, the mayor of Copenhagen announced a shift in local place-branding to emphasize the dominant role of the Danish city: the region would henceforth be known as “Greater Copenhagen” (greatercph.com), thus erasing the Øresund strait itself from the region to which it gave its name (Chow 8–9). Moreover, as of December 2015, Sweden has instituted identity checks at its border, including in mass transportation on

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the Øresund Link, citing a need to control the numbers of refugees entering the country. These measures have been criticized by local politicians not just for their effect on local business but also in more idealistic terms, indicating an enduring political will for regional integration: Det gränslösa Europa får inte vara en dröm reserverad för tider av världsfred. Den europeiska integrationen med transnationella regioner, som vår kring Öresund, är värd att skydda då den skapar förutsättningar för interaktion och innovativt företagande med frihet för mer interagerande människor emellan. (Sonesson) (The borderless Europe should not be a dream reserved for times of global peace. European integration in the form of transnational regions – like ours around the Øresund – are worth protecting, because they create the conditions for contact and innovative forms of employment, with freedom for more interaction between people.)

In such a climate, a final example of film from the Øresund seems prescient in its portrayal of the strait as a locus of transnational anxieties, intercultural encounter, and perhaps expiation. OUT (2006) is a Danish short fiction film, directed by Daniel Dencik, which stages an encounter between an alleged terrorist and a nature warden on Saltholm island, the same island which serves as a haven for Hans Christian Andersen’s itinerants. Saltholm today is a nature reserve to which there is restricted access, and so the sparse landscape, bathed in a very intense, pale light, imbues the film with an otherworldly liminality that befits its setting between two shores, two cultures, linked by a bridge that occasionally swims into view as a ghostly frame within the frame. OUT is self-conscious about its own task of remediating the region: the fleeing woman protagonist watches in disbelief as her escape from custody and deportation at Kastrup airport is reconstructed on television as an attempt to storm the bridge, and perhaps blow it up. As helicopters fly overhead, the nature warden decides to help the woman flee to Sweden and fixes up a small motorboat. The circumstances, and his conversation, link the woman’s present plight explicitly to the evacuation of Denmark’s Jews across the Øresund in October 1943. This operation was feasible only because of the peculiarly narrow strait between Sjælland and Sweden; the refugees escaped on small boats, kayaks, even swimming (Kirchhoff 97). In this film, the audience is situated in the tiny boat with the Chechen woman and her erstwhile rescuer, suspended between two coasts, sailing in the shadow of the bridge that, for her, is an emblem of the infrastructure the authorities believe she threatens. The man reconsiders his decision to help; she leaps into the water; and the last shot is an aerial view of the vast expanse of water she must swim. At last, one sees the Øresund on its own terms, all surface pattern, filling the frame, as close to unmediated as cinema can offer us: simply a space between.

Cathartic moments or spatial liberty Variations of the interplay between fiction, play, and place in computer games Bo Kampmann Walther

The Nordic countries may be small on a global scale, but in terms of creative and commercial work with new media there is actually a significant hub of game-design activity in the North. Computer games developed in the Nordic region would include broadly familiar titles like Angry Birds, Minecraft, Snakeball, Kane & Lynch, Limbo, Need for Speed, and the Hitman series. Looking for trends in Nordic game design, one might say that it shares three general qualities: there is a broad and rich history of integrating play and playfulness into cultural commodities, including the culture’s games; there is a special proficiency in revitalizing “old” games and remixing them into mobile and pervasive games intended for a new generation that is always on the move; and finally and most importantly, there is a complex and quite interesting tradition of investigating the narrative possibilities and challenges of computer games. The Danish game Blackout (1997), which is the central case study of this essay, belongs squarely in this latter group. As a video game, it is already “historical” in the sense that one would now need an emulator to play the game directly on a modern computer – otherwise, it might ruin one’s PC or Mac. The issue of interest here, however, is that the game bursts with complex narrativity while remaining highly playable. One interacts with it through one’s fingers and body, yet the mind starts to wander as if one were dealing with a novel or some other form of traditional literature. Blackout stands out among Nordic games because it implicitly adresses the hard question of how to turn the linear mode of narrativity into the nonlinear materiality of the computer and scrutinizes the effect of toying with a player who is both outside of the game and very much inside the “story.” Despite these compelling reasons for examining Nordic game narratives within the context of a literary history, it is worth highlighting in a history of spatial nodes like the present volume that “place” serves a less generative or causal function in the argument that follows than in the previous essays. The main concerns of this essay, that is, are not to pinpoint a specific region in Denmark or anywhere else in the world for that matter. The argument does not primarily bear the stamp of national or even regional impact. Instead, the object of investigation – the computer game – floats; it is timeless (although the technology that produces it is certainly not), virtual, and immaterial. The focal point will be the digital zeroes and ones that tell stories using ludic scenarios – “story games,” one might say, or, to borrow a seminal phrase from Jay David Bolter, “topographic writing,” which is “not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics” (25, emphasis added). The relevant keywords will be fiction, gameplay, and the topos of a game, i.e. its game world. What are the similarities and differences between fiction and games? An extended examination here of both theory and specific examples will suggest that perhaps one ought to think of “fiction” as a flexible epistemological archetype. Whether one plays or reads, one inevitably seems to return to a striated, grid-like world. In literature, this world is bound to plot, character, and structure; in games, worldliness and narrative investment occur in space. Fiction is textual; doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.31wal © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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computer games are spatial. Therefore, much of this essay will center on the way in which narrativity and spatiality are connected in games and game playing. Such reterritorialization of fantasy does not come unchallenged. The following pages evolve around the tension between control and freedom that is exemplified through literature (codex signs) and computer games, all the time while anchoring this perhaps inherent and unavoidable tension within game topoi. Can the hermeneutic materiality of words be linked to the interactive world-voyaging of games, or are they forever separated? Literature, one could argue, is about constrained strings of words, sequential fixations that despite the historic claim for the supremacy of the reader situate the author as a controlling designer-God. Digital games, on the contrary, exist (mostly) in spatial realms that act as a framework for the player’s choices and actions. Yet, rather than seeing this as a tragic mêlée between fixation and framing – which has also led to the undercurrent of the “ludology-narratology debate” – one might ask whether “fiction,” instead of being mainly attributed to writing, is actually something that resides on an even deeper level than that of computers, books, and films. Of course, this poses a tough philosophical challenge that goes beyond the current topic and can be only touched upon in this essay. In the following, the investigation will center instead on what a “game” is; how one can understand the straightforward yet complex notion of “gameplay”; and whether it is possible to play Hamlet – neither on stage, nor as adapted cinema, but by hammering keyboard commands. Are computer games and romantic heartbreak incompatible? Rather than scrutinizing the tools of literature and games, this essay will consider the axiomatic attributes of fictional media, games, and literature combined. After these theoretical investigations, the essay will provide a reading of the Danish videogame Blackout, paying close attention to the possibility of cathartic moments and/or spatial freedom. In a spatial sense, this game hovers between the fixated norms of progression in literature on the one side and the open boundaries of contemporary games such as Grand Theft Auto and Diablo on the other. Although Deadline Game’s Blackout, with a storyline by Michael Valeur, is by no means a recent game (it came out in 1997), it is indisputably a canonical work of art blending schizophrenia, film-noir, and the interactive capability of the adventure-game genre. Following the Blackout section, the essay will conclude with a brief note about the thirdperson shooter/adventure classic Max Payne (Rockstar Games 2001). Fiction Literary theory, media studies, and, most recently, computer game theory (today known as “ludology”) have long struggled with obnoxious terms such as “fiction” and “fictionality.” In its purest form, one could say that fiction involves an experiential framing. People do it all the time; they make up worlds. In order for a fiction to be trustworthy, one needs to set up boundaries and believe in them. Some have perfected this enterprise of world-making and boundary installment and raised it to a professional level that is unattainable to most. If one has a creative mind and wants to write a novel or direct a movie, the key is to decide what to put inside the edges of the frame and what to leave out. For a long time, at least since Immanuel Kant’s infamous accent on “disinterestedness” in his third critique, scholars of literary theory have highlighted de-personalization (that is, the

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generalization of intimate affairs) as a pivotal factor in the triumphant transformation of the mind, especially those of geniuses. The moral of New Criticism is that readers should enjoy the complexity of T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland without scrutinizing the poet’s literal life and using it as a lens with which to spot the truth of the artwork. The art of making fiction becomes a matter of differentiation – inclusion and exclusion – and subsequently to master the cover-up mechanism so that the whimsicalities of a sole creator can instead be turned into a mirror for the many. Images of fiction arrive in a multiplicity of forms, although they all demand that we venture into alien spaces ranging in modality from crystal-clear realism to atrocity-filled distortion, and from the codes and norms of literature, to the projected worlds of cinema, and on to the interactive motor skills of the computer game. According to the literary scholar Thomas Pavel, the frontiers of fiction separate it on the one side from myths, and on the other from actual history. “Fiction,” he claims, “is surrounded by sacred borders, by actuality and by representational borders” (81, emphasis added). Inside these flexible borders, the structure of fiction is variously organized. For instance, in the ludic experiments of modernist literature, the fictional arrangements are often such that they maximize the distance between the real and the imagined world. Think about Jorge Luis Borges or the openly playful inventions of the seventeenth-century French novel; the purpose of “establishing these fictional spaces is less to increase the trade in conventional wisdom than to expand our perception of fictional possibilities” (Pavel 84). A well-known theorem tells us that readers “read for the plot,” but suffice it to say here that “plot” is a trajectory through projected time and space. Borrowing a visual metaphor from modern physics, one might think of a plot as a journey through valleys and mountain peaks, basins of unsolved business followed by densely knitted regions where it all falls into place. As will be clear in the reading of Blackout that follows here, these regions resemble the contractions of a giant caterpillar, in which context the protagonist tries to unveil the conspiracy, solve the murder case, and redeem a fragile romance. World-making thus consists of differentiation, depersonalization, and trajectory. Something is differentiated from something else; it is encircled; and depersonalized. These three modes count as rules to be obeyed, played with, read, or enacted, whether the world with which one is dealing is or seems made up or not. Fiction and cinema establish and necessitate a contract between the virtual representation and the tangible reality of viewers and readers. Similarly, games require a magic circle; otherwise they would not come into existence. And without the magic circle, no one would play games either. Recently the so-called “narratology-versus-ludology” debate has arrived at the (perhaps more ideologically biased rather than theoretically informed) conclusion that narratives are about world manufacturing and temporality, whereas the ludic realm of computer games is grounded in imperative rules set in complex worlds and secured by discrete mechanics (Frasca “Ludologists Love Stories”). Games take place within a spatial, mostly three-dimensional environment in which interactivity and decision-making are performed on a much more physical, hands-on level than the passive, hermeneutic universe of literature that resides inside the head. I think at least part of this polarization of codex fiction and games is naïve: first, the ludologists adopt an understanding of fictionality mostly reserved for pre-modernist literature that seldom toyed with time, space, and composition or simply did not have the mental or cultural tools to

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“hypertextualise” the literary form. Second, the ludologists’ critique of narratological formalization turns into a peculiar counterargument against their own methods: hardcore ludology typically revels in formalist thinking. Third, embedded within the dichotomy of narration versus gameplay, a transcendental notion of “story,” or some otherwise minimal reminiscence of “configurable space” or “structured chain of events,” must prevail simply in order to ground the dichotomy in the first place. Convinced ludologists know exactly what they are not looking for. In the tradition of sociologists like Gregory Bateson and Niklas Luhmann the central mark of “play” is the participants’ ability to invest in something that is both real and, at the same time, not real. Bateson’s own prime example is monkeys fooling around (Bateson 179–80). They bite, and they do not bite. In fact, monkeys are good at “not-biting,” producing that particular bite which is simultaneously a bite and not a bite. Monkeys take fun very seriously: they bite the not-real bite for real. The distinctive cognition here, pace Bateson, is neither the predicative nor transformative quality of the bite (the bite “is”; the bite “stands for”) but rather the word “not” – as in “this is not a bite” and “this is not a non-bite,” at the same time. Empirically speaking, a monkey’s playful bite should not be hard, but not too soft; not soft, but not too hard. The monkey illustration is analogous to the whereabouts of human players. One really puts an effort into killing foes in Counter-Strike; and yet one is highly aware, since this is part of playing’s tacit knowledge, that in reality those teams are merely pixels and virtual trickery. If players lift the illusion of gameplay out into reality and violently transgress the confines of the magic circle, two things happen: either the game turns into a “serious” game, a meta-game, a game about what it means to play a game, or it vaporizes into no game at all. When contestants fervently argue over a referee’s decision in a game of soccer, their quarrel is definitely part of the game and a way of keeping track of the rule system. But to insist that the absolute goal of soccer is not to win would be a poisonous abortion of the very reality of the magic circle’s ontology. In play, the deep fascination therefore lies in the oscillation between play and nonplay, which is the “other” of play and is usually considered to be “reality.” In the playing of games, we are more fixated on progressing in the prior structure that is the game (Kirkpatrick 74). Gaming presupposes the tension of the initial transgression in which one constantly resists falling out of the fantasy context of play. Furthermore, gaming also presupposes a focus on a second, higher evolutionary platform, a transgression in which success and failure is measured against the achievement of defined objectives. Thus, in playing a computer game, one works within a second simulacrum, an “as if-structure” overlain on top of the initial transgression that makes play possible in the first place. We can paraphrase this from a gamer’s point of view, claiming that as long as any interaction between players about teleological concerns (the purpose, rights and wrongs of this and that) is enacted within the ontology of the game, it is acceptable. If the communication takes place outside of this “sacred” being, it immediately becomes obscure, dangerous and, exactly, beside the point. As one commentator on an Internet war game forum puts it: A game where peace is the ultimate objective would not be fun at all. What would be the thrill of sitting in a room full of the world’s leaders and negotiating a treaty? What would motivate people to bring more peace? People want action and adventure, not to pore over volumes of text and watch people NOT die. (Gabbo)

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Gameplay A game is built from the bottom up. For the moment, set aside actual games such as Monopoly, chess, and checkers, or videogames like Counter-Strike, The Sims, and Grand Theft Auto; it will be helpful instead to dwell more abstractly first on the idea of a game before considering specific instances of games. First, one defines parameters by conferring specific qualities onto the game world being developed, and as a whole, this process is called “parametrization.” One scans one’s surroundings and creates transitions from one place to another. One delineates, sets up frontiers, and builds bridges. The world becomes a board. Only then one can pretend as if the earth beneath one’s feet is poisoned, and the player can start asking if there’s a sniper hiding somewhere. Second, one needs to allocate values to the fields – remember that the gradual move is from a continuous “world” to a discontinuous “board.” The world, once open and insignificant, is now closed and significant and full of meaning. This is called “valorization,” which further constitutes the need for rules signaling what can and cannot be done. For instance, one might only be allowed to touch the ground twice (otherwise it is “game over”), or one may locate an “ammo dump” to recharge weapons and gather strength. Thirdly, goals are defined teleologically; the game is all about winning. How does one win? By acting efficiently within the virtual terrain, knowing the values and meaning of the fields, and mastering the space (“edges”) around them. Congratulations! A game has now been designed in its most abstract form. It could be chess, or it could be Counter-Strike. What is required to play this game? The answer lies in the combination of game and play, i.e. game-play. The word “gameplay” is often deployed as a qualitative measure. Some think the action in Counter-Strike, in which terrorists and anti-terrorists fight each other within a “map,” is an engaging gameplay, while others instead enjoy adventure games where the tempo is reduced and there is ample time to contemplate both narrative and fancy graphics. More elaborate definitions point to gameplay as the player’s complex experience of the systemic, semantic, and structural features of the game, i.e. game rules, game world, and game mechanics. The most important feature of play, which is one half of the term game play, is to be there, that is, to be present. One has to invest in the activity of play. The other players mock those who do not take the immersive stance and the flow of play seriously, and eventually the latter group will be banned from play. The arena that encircles play is widely known as a “magic circle.” By stepping into this circle, one abandons reality or, strictly speaking, non-play. The practices of everyday life, work, leisure, family duties, and so on, threaten to obstruct the existence of the magic circle, but a set of unique rules, even natural laws, exists within the domain of play. The worst aspect of playing is without a doubt interruption because it is a termination of the “sacred” duration of the circle. The best, thus, is when it just goes on and on. Play is presence. A chessboard can serve as our archetypical example of games. The board is divided into sixty-four discrete fields with no continuous transitions between them. One must be either on one field or the other since one cannot be in the middle. This configuration is gaming in a nutshell; the free space of play is transformed into the fixed structure of the game board. Games are progression. One should not ask why one plays but, rather, how to get from A2 to F4.

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Martin Heidegger’s term Dasein can be repurposed here: while play is Da-sein emphasizing the present sense and the phenomenological quality of being, games are Da-sein that highlight the quest for progression as a particular mode of existence – not the “being” of beingpresent, as in play, but the “being-there-ness” of games. Hence, gameplay translates into an equation: Gameplay = Progression + Presence. Hamlet revisited Is it possible to play Hamlet? There is a catch to this question: we are not only asking whether Hamlet: The Game would be a blockbuster, but also whether Hamlet as player-avatar can be recommended. The answer is no. Shakespeare’s initial cliffhanger evaporates if the player is stuck on the wrong game level; that is, if she arrives too soon or too late to face Hamlet’s sudden experience of deceit and domestic intrigue. The literary strength of Hamlet is precisely the plot control, which is to say, the way that the trajectory through events in time and space is vigilantly orchestrated. It is crucial that Hamlet discovers, in a specific moment, what goes on around him and subsequently decides to act insane. This moment and this willful act are the peripeteia of the narrative, the reversal of circumstances and the turning point of the story. In other words, the kind of freedom enjoyed in a computer game in which character and reader-player melt together to create a story of her own is indeed powerless when it comes to the ordered sequentiality of epic fiction. Hamlet’s catharsis counts for nothing if undiscovered. The Norwegian novelist Jan Kjærstad reflects on this in an autobiographical book about the future of writing: For ved at tekstens rækkefølge i så høj grad bliver bestemt af læseren (og af tilfældigheder) og ikke af forfatteren – selvom forfatteren bestemmer hvilke ord og afsnit der skal rumme links – taber vi det, der for mig er et litterært værks mål: at skabe indsigt, erkendelse. . . . man mister muligheden for katarsis-øjeblikket. (Kjærstad 209–10) ([When] the sequential order of the text is highly predetermined by the reader (and by coincidence), and not by the author – even though the author decides which words and paragraphs should contain links – we lose what is essentially the goal of a literary work: to create insight, recognition. . . . we lose the possibility of the moment of catharsis.)

According to game theoretician Gonzalo Frasca, games and fiction – or ludus and narrative – disclose similar structures in the sense of a game “session” being equal to the fixed “sequence” of a narrative. “However,” he goes on, “that does not mean that they are the same thing. For an external observer, an adventure videogame session will look like a group of narrative sequences” (Frasca “Ludology Meets Narratology”). But while observers are passive, the player is active, and if she does not act, there will be no game – at least in the articulated and not purely virtual sense – and therefore no session at all. Moving back to the dilemma of catharsis, one sees that one cannot interact with a cliffhanger that has already taken place, and, likewise, when one is already aware that it will take place. This “taking place” impinges on the temporal and spatial structure of the story, whether based in session or sequence. In a game, either to know all too well in advance or to be ignorant

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of a specific moment after the event challenges the temporal structure of an otherwise organized narrative; and, furthermore, to be present at the location, the place where something is bound to happen according to the internal organization of the story, becomes downright boring if nothing of interest happens. It is therefore important to authorize at least some control of a narrated sequence, as is the case in Blackout, with its balanced collision between narrative and world interaction. Caterpillar and self-reference The composer and keyboard player Brian Eno once said that he enjoyed working with the computer as a tool to produce randomness within artistic order. In typical Eno style, he wanted less “Western world” and more “Africa” in the digital production. But how is that possible? Can interaction and storytelling meet? Mit navn er [Bo], eller det tror jeg i hvert fald, det er. Jeg er ikke sikker på, hvad jeg vågner fra. Det sidste, jeg husker, er at jeg satte mig foran min computer. Jeg føler mig fremmed, samtidig med at rummet forekommer mig bekendt. Jeg mærker tæerne mod gulvet, mærker den velkendte lugt i rummet. Hører lydene udenfor. Hvor er jeg? – Har en underlig smag i munden. Som om jeg ikke har talt længe. Hvem er jeg? (Blackout) (My name is [Bo] or, at least, that’s what I think it is. I’m not so sure of what I wake up from. The last I remember is that I sat down in front of my computer. I feel like a stranger yet in the meantime the space around me feels familiar. I feel my toes against the floor, sense the well known smell in the room. I hear the sounds outside. Where am I? – Have a peculiar taste in my mouth. As if I haven’t talked in a long time. Who am I?)

This is how the Danish adventure game Blackout (1997), produced by Deadline Games and designed by artist and writer Michael Valeur, begins. Following the opening sequence, an endless array of avatars sitting at a computer multiplies across the screen, fades into each other, and vanishes, leaving the digital alter ego to investigate a dark and bloody apartment and find a woman’s body with a severed head. Right after this grotesque discovery, the player avatar suffers a blackout and is thrown out into the streets in the suburban area that is one of four boroughs of the game world. How does this beautiful and very complex game tackle fiction (and gameplay) and place (topos)? “Where” is Blackout, and how can its “what” be trusted? A look at the composition of a computer game reveals a close link between narrative structure and the topo-graphy of the portrayed and, of course, playable world. The way one experiences the world is forcefully guided by the way one travels through the world. In other words, gameplay is not just about the desirable feeling of “being-in-the-game’s-world,” but, also, the result of narrative progression, the balance of control and freedom, and the topos of the game. The action and narrative of Blackout is set in a city. As the creator, Michael Valeur writes, the user is able to move about freely in one or more of the four locations in the city, meet with people, talk to them, get on the subway, and so on (Valeur). Each site as well as each person (so-called non-player characters or NPCs) contains a hint of the player-avatar’s past and the plot mystery. Instead of a traditional linear epic, bits and pieces of the ongoing story (the now-axis)

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Figure 39.  Screen shot of the opening, schizophrenic sequence in Blackout.

and fragments of the underlying backstory (the then-axis) are distributed among the nodal points of the game, i.e. the game world, the game characters, and the unfolding gameplay. The big challenge, then, is to ensure that this does not become a pointless wandering through a colorful theatrical site. In other words, games need, at least on a minimal level, missions (because missions or quests are narrative “determinators”) and places where the player/reader can be transported from one area of the game to another. We neither want to solve the mystery too quickly nor get bogged down in it. The narrative disposition of the world of Blackout is like a giant caterpillar. The bellies of this caterpillar represent the locations of the game: the downtown area, the suburb, the harbor area, etc. Players have a sense of spatial freedom but very soon find that this freedom is highly limited by 1) the computer’s algorithm, and 2) specific choices and actions. One can explore the various sites of the world – roughly corresponding to the boroughs of the Blackout city – and, at the same time, these sites are also transportation devices that teleport the player from one act in the story to the next. As opposed to open and very large computer games like the Grand Theft Auto and Diablo series, Blackout is carefully construed so as to guide the player through portals or branch points within the world/the narrative. These portals ideally serve a double purpose: they are dominant paths that ensure that the user is not thrown off course in the midst of gameplay, and they are spatial exploration zones with a high degree of narrative purpose. The user wants to go there; and the user must go there (since one cannot go elsewhere). A governing principle of Blackout is to allow the user to navigate through the story and enjoy its spatial

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richness but not to create this story. Thereby, it sacrifices some of the hyped features of total interaction in favor of authorial influence and narrative organization. It is something like saying, “Go nuts – but only within these walls!”

Figure 40.  The caterpillar structure of Blackout (© Michael Valeur).

It is obvious that Blackout, in an effort to suck the player into the story, adopts a way of composing stories or a narrative modality anxious to comment upon its own construction that lies behind the told story. However, it also risks tossing the player out of the same story through the self-reflexive consciousness that is then required to be an “avid reader” of the Blackout game. Also, Blackout is meta-textual since the linear succession is constantly suspended. The player is explicitly misguided; and yet she willingly allows the deceit. If a game breaks the illusion – if it fails to indicate its unity through the difference between itself and its other – one is likely to be thrown back into a kind of futile and diffuse play. In Blackout the user takes on the role of Gabriel, who suffers from severe schizophrenia (he has no less than four split personalities) and anamneses. The plot within the game is both traditional, in that it carefully peels off layer after layer of hidden psychologies, and allegorical. The fact that our alter ego (Gabriel) is a schizophrenic can be read as a figural dissemination of what would be the starting point of most computer games: I am and am not the character I am playing. In a similar fashion, Gabriel’s memory loss might be interpreted as a kind of meta-fiction that points towards a common game feeling: one has to complete the game in order to “remember” what happened. One must proceed to the end of the line to fully grasp where the line itself began. This is the detective novel with an interactive catch-22 effect. Blackout evidently wants to meta-communicate what it means to play a game (as such) and communicate the kind of player actions necessary to play this particular game, all in one. Subtleties like these surely put the game on the high side of industrial tricks. But on one occasion Blackout, perhaps inadvertently, cuts short the imperative illusion. In a particular scene the user is asked by an old fortune-teller to “click” on a symbol on the screen. Abruptly, the user is thrown back to square one, unintentionally recollecting the initial hocus-pocus – that one made a contract in order to play, and that one adapted and interacted with the structural complexity in order to game (in the active verbal sense). Therefore, at this point there is a profound focus on playing, i.e. being “present” rather than being “present-there.” The user is forced into making a crossing operation, stepping from the structural progression of the game into the delicate balance between play and non-play.

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However, as it happens, rather than treating the represented game world as a detached object within the play environment (i.e. a screen instead of a game element), one can compete against the game. Blackout is organized as a complex series of interchangeable choices and levels of proactive interactions. While one might think one is “reading” the machine (meaning its scripted actions), the machine is also “reading” the composition of player choices. But once one gets the sense of this (to what extent do one’s interactions influence the path that the machine is directing?), one is able to “foresee” this action pattern and thus play “against” the machine, as if given the chance to re-design the map underneath the very landscape with which one is interacting. This is gaming, then, and actually on a higher level. One is not just completing the game’s mission; one is also challenging the organization that frames this mission. Such desire to read the code that reads and directs the player is a sign of the cynicism of the player engaged in digital epistemology. Ultimately it is a desire to gain freedom in order to regain control. The player that continuously searches for the underlying atlas and machinery of the game is the quintessential hacker, the digital penetrator, as elaborated by tech philosopher Graeme Kirkpatrick: [In essence,] the hacker is someone who is disrespectful of the rules that are codified into the machine interface and which attempt to regulate the course of their interaction with it. The hacker sees through the interface and knows it to be a cynical mask on the underlying machine. (Kirkpatrick 117)

Evidently, Blackout needs some sort of external signifier to protect the boundary between the fictional layer of the game and the immersion of the player within that layer. According to Michel de Certeau, stories perform an important function in everyday life by setting limitations. By describing space they arrange and order cultural domains. As such they do not only set limits but also alter boundaries: “one can see that the primary function is to authorize the establishment, displacement or transcendence of limits” (Certeau Practice 123). To describe this paradoxical quality of boundaries, he distinguishes two narrative figures in every story that respectively have the power to fix boundaries and to revise them, namely the frontier and the bridge (Lammes). Frontiers, Certeau suggests, create spatial forms such as regions and empires. Bridges, on the other hand, point to alien exteriority, the “other” of what has been demarcated by the frontier, such as other nations, unconquered territories or no-man lands. However, the relation between the two is dynamic: the frontier has a “bridging” quality because it is the point of contact between the two entities it separates, and in itself it does not belong to either entity (Certeau 126–28). Frontiers are in that sense twilight zones. A game like Blackout invites a continuous transgression from the space of the player to the space of the game, and vice versa; and at the same time it blocks this contact by a sudden reference to the game being played, and not the game being told. Blackout’s intricate metafictional dimension points to the simultaneous existence of frontier and bridge. This paradoxical simultaneity splits in two directions, as one is both invited to be a part of the game’s fiction and blocked from merging completely into the modus operandi of this fiction. On a deep level, since stories are playgrounds of delineated domains the trick is to jump into and out of the playground while remaining in the playground.

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Many games seem to disrupt the unfolding of narratives within game worlds in order to assist the player in how to control the keyboard, how to set up the buttons on the joystick, etc. One example (Juul 158–59) among many is the GameCube game Pikmin in which the player’s avatar is a scientist stranded on an unknown planet. In the course of gameplay, the scientist takes notes in a diary that is displayed on the screen, including notes about the handling of the controller. According to Juul there is nothing ‘artistic’ about this deliberate mix of fictional representation and game control commands. In fact, this confusion even strengthens the fiction: since the player ‘is’ the avatar, notes about the controller is “exactly the kind of thing we would write down if we were to take notes about our playing of the game” (Juul 159). Another example, however, conveys the idea that the reference system of games is not always that straightforward. In the adventure-based first-person-shooter Max Payne one is, as noted by Søren Pold, caught in a stratified maze controlled by drug lords and corrupt police on the level of the plot and by the cybernetic game engine on the structural level. Instead of providing the in-game story as a motivation for gameplay, which is typical of the genre, Max Payne designates the narrative as a cliché; the Hollywood signs “point toward narrative structure in general rather than support a particular narrative” (Pold). Pold continues: the game could easily be interpreted as a self-conscious intervention in the ongoing debate about the roles of narrative in computer games. Narrative becomes an effect to which the game alludes self-consciously and which it puts on but does not fulfill in the deep Aristotelian way imagined by the proponents of interactive narrative. . . . Instead narrative is only a surface or skin; it does not attempt to become hegemonic or to account for and relate to all aspects of the game, but like postmodern novels and cinema, it alludes to narrative, quotes it, and deconstructs it, without fully enacting it.

In a graphic novel sequence in the drugged opening of the third act, Max Payne finally realizes and reveals to the player that he is nothing but a pixilated avatar in a computer game. Suddenly,

Figure 41.  Screenshot from the game Max Payne.

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Max Payne, as a pre-condition for the game’s plot, questions the initial and vital transgression of play. Consequently, through the meta-fictional confession one is thrown out of game-mode and into play-mode. Why play if the character that is supposed to glue together playful praxis and structured game space is genuinely untrustworthy? Payne’s existence serves only the endless repetition of the game, which is the at-once dull and sophisticated blend of “realism to the max” and “max pain,” advertised through the graphical user interface with its weaponry, red bar, and bullet time on-off button. Pold concludes by categorizing Max Payne as “illusionistic media realism,” a realism that simultaneously engages in illusion and can be viewed as a selfreflexive exploration of its own representational techniques and media. Playability: Closing remarks Even though games and non-interactive media copy from each other’s domains – which nowadays is natural evidence for the much celebrated media convergence (Jenkins) – there are still overarching differences. First, the codex sign in its traditional form, as non-interactive materiality, is a realized action (or string of actions), whereas games frame or scaffold actions. This difference between realization and framing is a simple yet crucial difference. Second, literature may envision or invent stories that play with the potential of interactivity, but it can never materialize this potential. To a certain degree, literature is inspired by space and spatial modalities (ancient literature was oral, and classical rhetoric stressed the physicality of narration), and literature may further borrow elements from the structure and dynamics of games, but it does not for that reason become a game, ontologically speaking. In a similar vein, games may adopt certain hermeneutic expressions and artistic qualities, but it happens in order to support a cultural teleology that chiefly has to do with immersing oneself as an auxiliary alter ego – or a schizophrenic “I” proliferating across the interface, as in Blackout. Ludology is quite right in postulating a genuine and unsurpassable difference between the fixed causalities of books or movies and the interactive user-friendliness of computer games. Codex literature and cinema are for the mind; computer games are for the fingers. This insight should not, however, block investigations into the rich intercrossing of the rules of fiction and the rules of gamespace. How else should one explain the artistic beauty of Memento or The Matrix if not through the style and history of videogames? Rather than continue to polarize methodologies focusing on either “fiction” or “interactivity,” claiming an unbridgeable gap between narratology and ludology, it would be much more rewarding to consider a number of media forms – the ones available now, and the ones that will become available in the future – as more or less reflected derivations of differentiated framings. Between a stiflingly traditionalist and a wildly expansionist approach, “narrative” can be scrutinized as “avatars of story,” i.e. cognitive constructs with an invariant nucleus of meaning that can however be molded into a variety of shapes (Ryan xviii). There are many similarities between undertaking a mission and engaging with a narrative; and there are many ways in which the binding rules of a fiction may be transformed into the exact edges of a discrete game-space. As an ancient mode of culture, “to tell a story” might share distinct features with the invention of the game board as well as with the phantasmagoria of quests and their narrated/playable travels from A to B to C. There

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would be no strategy games without The Holy Grail, and there would be no adventure games without The Odyssey. “Playability,” hence, signifies the ontology of framed experiences at its most basic or indeed naïve level; it merely states that the material at hand (a book, a movie, a game) demands a linear journey along its paths, a confirmation of its binding forces (so that one is not alienated into asking the “why do I play?” question), and a desire to continuously reterritorialize the open “play” into the more rigid and striated “game.” In fact, this is an anti-Deleuzian claim; rather than the call for a “Body without Organs” that thrives like a madman amidst the open-ended autonomy of nomadic anarchy (Deleuze 149), the underlying thesis here is one of an inevitable return to a striated, grid-fixed game universe. Ultimately, “flight lines” becomes telic lines; not necessarily unmovable guidelines, but guidelines nonetheless. There’s nothing wrong with reading a game, and having a fun time doing it. Thus, as we have seen, digital works as well as the digital epistemology that embraces them mark a shifting sense of place in contemporary fiction. Traditional literary histories are still very much tied to the place of composition, depiction, and reception. By placing the study of contemporary video games directly within such a tradition, as shown in this essay, it also becomes clear that the logic of virtual worlding is much less concerned with specific stable referential markers, linguistic or cultural. Rather, this logic questions the notion of fictional borders, the narrative flux of a story, the space within this flux, and, indeed, national authority. This certainly does not imply, however, that video games and other forms of interactive entertainment are barred from engaging with “literary” complexities and in that way demanding avid readers.

Practices

Introduction Practices of place Thomas A. DuBois

As the preceding essays have shown, the textual inscription of place provides an important and interesting means of organizing a study of Nordic literary history. The description or narrative emplotment of settings becomes part of the idiom of Nordic literary culture as writers and readers come to share certain conventional understandings of particular scapes. As the discussions in this volume so far have made clear, none of these textual representations is in any way “natural” – i.e. there is no single way of viewing lightscapes or seascapes or cityscapes that is perfectly expectable or automatic. Rather, human relations with place are governed by cultural patterns or conventions that can be seen to develop and change over time. Thus, a literary history that examines the representation of place provides not only a chronicle of changing literary tastes and perceptions, but also indications of evolving social and cultural attitudes toward the environment, whether natural or shaped by human intervention. The forest of the early medieval period was experienced in a far different manner than it was in the seventeenth or in the early twenty-first, and shifts in this experience can be followed through its representation in literary products. Place, however, can be seen from the point of view of the actions undertaken by humans in relation to it. As William Cronon’s seminal edited volume Uncommon Ground demonstrated already in 1996, humans are never invisible as denizens of the environment: like every other species, human beings affect the world in which they live, and over the course of the centuries, their effects on their surroundings have grown astronomically. The combined effects of such human interventions in recent centuries have become so formidable that scholars have suggested renaming the current geological era, the Holocene, as the “Anthropocene” (Crutzen and Stoermer). Even the seemingly remote “wilderness areas” or national parks that enjoy important symbolic prominence in some Nordic countries – e.g., the rugged interior of Iceland, the remote glacial landscape of northern Greenland, the high mountain pastures of northern Norway or Sweden, the quiet bogs and fens of central Finland, the lapping waves of the Danish Kattegat and Skagerrak – show extensive signs of human management and policy. They are supervised, “imagined” images of what environments free of human influence might look like – carefully crafted representations of what the world may have looked like before human dominance, but reminders by their very existence of the utter dependence of the modern environment on human management strategies and practices. On the level of ecological function, modern “wild” spaces may show greater resemblance to environments completely devoid of human influence than do, for instance, cityscapes or the carefully maintained fields and villages of a rural landscape. But on the level of cultural function, all such spaces – both seemingly wild and seemingly cultivated – play roles as cultural symbols, promoted, extended, or emended through literary products. They are matters about which people write, and concrete or abstract entities that motivate human thought. doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.32dub © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Given this reality of place, it becomes natural to include within a volume such as this a substantive examination of the practices of place – i.e. the actions that are narratively depicted in Nordic literature over time to denote or interpret the interactions of human actors with their surroundings. The following four nodes take stock of these literary inscriptions as organized around four key acts: settling, dwelling, exploring, and sacralizing. Each of these terms subsumes a great variety of actions that have unfolded over the history of Nordic cultures and describes a broad range of activities related to a particular orientation toward place, its experience, and its management or control. Settling refers to acts of claiming lands as property and transforming them into spaces that yield a livelihood, and often an identity, for the people who claim to own them. Dwelling refers to acts of seeming stasis: the perpetual use of particular spaces as one’s home and source of sustenance. Exploring refers to the act of leaving one’s familiar moorings for new adventure, seeking out new opportunities and often new dangers in a distant locale, visited perhaps, for only a short time. Sacralizing, finally, refers to acts that single out space as holy or powerful, identifying singular places or even entire lands as charged with supernatural significance. The following pages examine the literary manifestations of each of these practices as they unfold over the history and space of the Nordic region. Neither the list of place-related practices nor the explorations of the literary realization of each is meant to be exhaustive but should rather be seen as opening a framework for the recounting of Nordic literary production that takes stock of place not simply in terms of “nouns” (places, settings, scapes) but also in terms of “verbs,” acts that constitute and control places as creative products of human culture. As with the discussion of scapes, the following essays seek to highlight shifts in the human experience of place among Nordic peoples as these become evidenced in literary production. The focus is on the literary phenomena that grow up around particular practices and that depend upon them for their logic and agendas. Perhaps even more so than in the case of scapes, these depictions tie to essential ideologies of Nordic societies and their idealized or problematized relations with the lands and waters upon which they depend.

Settling Thomas A. DuBois

In creating a beginning for his book Muitalus sámiid birra (1910) (An Account of the Sámi), the great Sámi writer Johan Turi asserts that his people came from nowhere else, but rather have always simply lived in the lands that we know today as the Nordic region. Writing in 1908 with pencil and paper in a prospector’s cabin alongside the great lake Torneträsk, close to a set of arbitrary demarcations that divide the area into the countries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, Turi states: Sámiid boahtimušas ii leat gullon, ahte livčče boahtán gosge. Sápmelaš lea leamaš dáppe – orru – miehtá Sámi eatnama. Ja go sápmelaš lea leamaš dáppe mearragáttiin orrume, dalle eai leat leamaš orrut – ii oktage – mearragáttiin, ja dalle leai buorre orrut sámiide. Ja sámit leat orron Ruoŧa bealde maiddá juohke báikkis ja eai dalle lean dálolaččat eai gosge. Eai sámit diehtán ahte leat iežá olbmot go sii. (13) (One never hears about the Sámi’s arrival, as if they had come from somewhere else. The Sámi have always lived in these parts, here in the Sámi homeland. And in those days when the Sámi were living up by the coast, there was no one else there, and so the living was good for Sámi. And on the Swedish side of the border, Sámi also lived everywhere. And back then there weren’t any settlers at all; the Sámi didn’t know that there were any other people apart from themselves). [11]

A professional hunter and sometime reindeer herder, Turi had no formal education but instead a strong familiarity with the Bible and an encyclopedic knowledge of his culture’s oral history and literature. He knew of no founding narratives, no stories of arrival that would describe the Sámi as having come to the region from some other place, a fact which distinguished them, in Turi’s eyes, from the various populations of Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns who had migrated to the far north of Scandinavia in more recent centuries and who increasingly threatened to completely displace the Sámi. Turi’s Muitalus is recognized as a milestone in Sámi literary history: the first book written entirely in Sámi by a Sámi writer. That this milestone occurs as recently as 1910 reflects the social and linguistic history of the Nordic region – the fact that some of the languages spoken in the North became established as idioms for official communication and written literature already in the medieval era, while others, such as Turi’s Northern Sámi, remained relegated to largely oral use until the modern era. doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.33dub © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Figure 42.  Manuscript page from the first draft of Johan Turi’s Muitalus sámiid birra, written in Finnish in 1910. This passage describes reindeer roundup techniques. Photo: Author’s own.

The examination of settling begins here with Turi’s fervent denial of the act as part of Sámi history because Turi’s stance underscores the complex and problematic nature of settling as a concept, and the political and social uses made of settling in Nordic texts. To settle is to take control, to establish borders and boundaries, to assert ownership, and ultimately, to thwart rival claims of other would-be settlers, “invaders.” To describe oneself as a “settler” is to accept a status as a sometime outsider who has now come inside a particular landmass or area and become established as its proprietor. It is an essentially political assertion, often encapsulated or memorialized in texts: be they oral recitations of ownership, runestones placed so as to command the attention of passersby, or written documents, conserved or circulated by royal or monastic bodies so as to promote a wider awareness of an act of settling as a fait accompli. For Turi, claiming settlerhood for his people would deny a Sámi reality of continual residence in the region, a continuity that later in the twentieth century would come to be defined in legal and cultural arenas as indigeneity. In contrast to Turi’s Sámi portrayal, Icelandic writers of the eleventh century, carefully inscribing their texts with quill and ink on the treated hides of slaughtered cattle, made no such claims to indigeneity. For them, their homeland, Iceland, was a discovered place, a formerly uninhabited island in the North Atlantic to which settlers had flocked in the late ninth century in a quest for land and freedom. They had come from mainland Scandinavia as well as from Scotland and Ireland, where Scandinavians had migrated some generations before and where the Scandinavian presence was transforming societies and livelihoods. The notion of writing in

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Old Norse/Icelandic rather than Latin (the dominant language for all written communication at this time in mainland Europe) is traditionally credited to Ari Þorgilsson hinn fróði (Ari the Wise; 1067–1148), a well-connected Icelandic chieftain and possibly a Christian priest, whose education seems to have brought him into direct and extensive contact with Latin chronicle literature. Ari is credited with an important work, entitled Libellus Islandorum, or in Icelandic Íslendingabók (The Book of Icelanders), completed sometime between 1122 and 1133. The text provides narratives about the various prominent families that journeyed to Iceland in the late ninth century to settle the newly discovered island of Iceland and establish the society in which Ari now lived and worked. Following Ari, settlement is the overwhelming preoccupation of the early Icelandic sagas, particularly those works designated by the Icelandic term Íslendingasögur, translated into English as the “Sagas of Icelanders” or “Family Sagas.” To be sure, the landnám [land-taking] of Iceland was a remarkable demographic event in medieval Europe: the mass migration of some ten to twenty thousand people to the shores of an apparently previously uninhabited island over the course of some sixty years (Byock 7–11). Although Nordic inhabitants had been migrating for centuries to the British Isles, Normandy, the eastern Baltic, Russia, and other places in the so-called “Viking world,” in Iceland they encountered no preexisting society against which to struggle or into which to acculturate. Instead, they found a landscape, imposing and at times violent: volcanic, windswept, and dangerous, but also fruitful and sustaining. They divided its forests, heaths, meadows and mountains into hereditary holdings, built houses, stables, and outbuildings, established pastures for their livestock, and deforested the landscape through charcoal burning and building activities. Ari chronicled the coming of settlers to this landscape and the genealogies of subsequent intermarriage and alliance building that had shaped emergent Icelandic society. A later work, the Landnámabók (Book of Land-Taking)  – to which Ari may have also contributed  – retells Ari’s history in a somewhat different format and became a key source for later sagas. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Icelandic writers returned over and over again to the Íslendingabók and Landnámabók as sources for their imaginative accounts of the rugged era of the first settlement, a period of supposed independence and resourcefulness, which was regarded as a contrast to the present day of the thirteenth century, in which Iceland had become an integrated part of the Norwegian realm, dominated by aristocratic chieftains and royal prerogatives. The days of settlement of three centuries earlier become in these sagas an idealized and culturally laden setting in which to depict some of the most cherished or disparaged aspects of Iceland’s national character, the narrative grounds upon which to construct an image of the Icelander. The image of settling contained in the sagas is illustrated well by the account of the establishment of the farmstead Borg in Egils saga. Like many of the Íslendingasögur, the narrative of Egils saga begins not in Iceland, but rather in ninth-century Norway, where independent and enterprising Norwegian progenitors chafe against the rapacious and controlling King Haraldr hárfagri (Harald Finehair; c. 850 – c. 933), whose wish to consolidate all of Norway under a single rule threatened the status quo and presaged an era centuries later when Norway would stand as a united kingdom, linked, rather than bordered, by the seas of the North Atlantic. After the death of his more presentable son Þorolfr at the hands of King Haraldr’s men, the semimythical character Kveld-Ulfr pulls up stakes and heads for a new life in Iceland taking with

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him aboard two ships his ungainly and irascible son Skalla-Grímr and various other members of his household. On the way to Iceland, Kveld-Ulfr dies but sagely instructs his crew on how to dispose of his body so that he can help determine the place where his son and crew will eventually settle. The men are to build a coffin, place Kveld-Ulfr’s body in it, and launch it on the waves. They do so, watching as it eventually floats to land. In careful and clearly fond detail, the saga writer relates the landing of the two boats and their finding of Kveld-Ulfr’s coffin. In the place where the coffin has come to shore, they elect to establish their farm. As the saga relates: Skalla-Grímr …flutti um várit eptir skipit suðr til fjarðarins ok inn í vág þann, er næstr var því, er KveldÚlfr hafði til lands komit, ok setti þar bœ ok kallaði at Borg, en fjǫrðinn Borgarfjǫrð, ok svá heraðit upp frá kenndu þeir við fjǫrðinn. (Egils saga 72–73) (Skalla-Grímr… moved his ship south to the fjord in the spring and up a creek near where Kveld-Ulfr had come to shore. And there he built a farm and called it Borg [round hill, or fort] and the fjord Borgarfjǫrðr [fort fjord] and likewise the lands along the fjord.)

Skalla-Grímr’s names for the places he settles are simple and declarative: they designate terrain and often the foodstuffs or wildlife that the settlers can take advantage of there. The newly settled Borg with its prominent round hill becomes a key site for the subsequent narrative as well as a setting of singular significance in Icelandic history. It figures in various saga episodes as a setting, and it serves for a time as the home of the immensely influential thirteenth-century writer and lawman Snorri Sturluson, author of the Prose Edda, Heimskringla, and possibly other works of Icelandic literature. In the terse and understated narrative style of the sagas, settings like Borg become characters in themselves – sites whose former or later historical significance

Figure 43.  View of Borgarfjǫrðr in Iceland. Photo: CoolKengzz/Shutterstock

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is meant to reflect silently on the narrative actions associated with them. By its very existence and the characters who are said to have lived out their days on its lands, Borg becomes a site upon which to contemplate both the uneasy relation between Icelanders and the Norwegian crown and also the role of Christianity in transforming the world of the Icelandic settlers. No wonder that when, in Sturla Þórðarson’s Sturlunga saga compilation, Sturla recounts Snorri’s decision to move from Borg so as to take up residence in Reykjaholt, he furnishes the event with a stirring dream vision. Skalla-Grímr’s famous son Egill returns to a local man in his sleep to ask whether it is true that Snorri is planning to leave the locale and to advocate strongly for his remaining at Borg (131). The passage reminds us of the fact that Egil’s story survives not only because of his memorable and beautiful poems but also because of the status and motivation of his descendants. And this factor must be recognized in virtually all of the Islendigasögur: settlement as a theme reinforced current presence on the land of the families and polities who controlled the Iceland of the thirteenth century, when works like Egils saga were composed. In the manner of a charter myth, settlement confirms the rights and privileges of an ensconced elite made synonymous with the lands they have come to occupy. Similar prestige, both in terms of family connections and other institutions of power, hovers about Helgafell, a featured site of settlement and politics in Eyrbyggja saga and Laxdaela saga, and the eventual location of an important Christian monastery as will be noted in the node on “Sacralizing” below. And of course, one could note a similar function for Þingvellir, the wide plain consciously left unsettled so that it could be used each year as the neutral site of the Alþingi, Iceland’s medieval parliament and a symbol to later Icelanders of the former independence of their island home. Þingvellir was literally the level playing field for Icelandic politics, the place where, ostensibly, every landowning family had equal access to law and

Figure 44.  View of the Þingvellir plain in Iceland. Photo: Oleksandr Lipko/Shutterstock

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justice. In practice, as Orri Vésteinsson has suggested, not all families in Iceland were equal, and Icelandic society seems to have had the marked stratifications and differing standards or privileges that characterized “feudal” societies in mainland. But the textual representation of Iceland’s past presents a different story, one in which the common heritage of settling has created a sense of equality that all Icelanders accept in their sharing of the bounty and challenges of their island home. That this narrative of Icelandic settlement is distinctive is clear when we compare the story of the settlement at Borg with the more mythic accounts of the settling of Norway and Gotland preserved in other medieval Nordic texts. An account of the settling of Norway, appended to Orkneyingasaga by the Icelandic cleric Jón Þorðarson in his creation of the late-fourteenthcentury Flateyjarbók, describes a pair of brothers, Nor and Gor (names clearly derived as back formations from the toponym Noregr [Norway]). The two brothers travel the length of the country in search of their missing sister, finding her at last in the hall of a mountain giant at Dovre. Nor searches the mainland, while Gor searches the coastal islands. The account is filled with supernatural details and accounts of magic struggles with the Sámi, a far cry from the comparatively staid and plausible tale of the settling of Iceland. Even more extreme is the tale of the settling of Gotland as recounted in Gutasaga, a work surviving in Gutnish in a text dated to c. 1350. Here, the island is said to have been uninhabitable because it submerges each morning then rising out of the sea again only at night. The hero-settler Þieluar puts an end to this untenable situation by carrying fire to the island, thereby apparently civilizing it and breaking the spell that had made it impossible for others to settle. Such mythic tales hold much in common with etiological legendry elsewhere in Europe but offer a striking contrast to the very human, strikingly concrete narratives of the land-taking of Iceland. The Bible offered its own account of geography, of course, as well as a key event from which to date all subsequent settlement: the Great Flood. Since, according to Genesis, all mankind was descended from the sons of Noah, eighteenth-century Nordic writers were keen to clarify their own nations’ relation to this seminal event. And, like medieval authors elsewhere in Europe, they needed to integrate this Judeo-Christian account with what they knew from classical literature,

Figure 45.  Detail map showing the island of Gotland off the Swedish coast. Photo: Artalis/Shutterstock

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especially the epics of Homer and Virgil. Olof Rudbeck asserted that Sweden had been settled by the descendants of Japhet and was the Atlantis of the ancients. He presented his theory in five volumes entitled Atland eller Manheim, which appeared in both Latin and Swedish from 1679 up until the great fire of Uppsala in 1702 brought his writing career to an end. Daniel Juslenius made similarly grandiose claims for the eastern side of the Swedish realm, publishing his history of the city of Åbo/Turku Aboa vetus et nova (Åbo Old and New) in 1700. The Norwegian priest Jonas Ramus asserted the historical unity of the Greek hero Odysseus and the Norse god Óðinn in his Ulysses et Otinus unus et idem (Odin and Ulysses One and the Same). The essays following in this node explore Nordic settlement in North America as reflected in works produced on both sides of the Atlantic. The stirring tales of saga heroes described above furnished a natural backdrop against which to depict nineteenth- and twentieth-century characters, particularly in a North America nearly obsessed with its comparatively recent European settlement history and the significance of that history in establishing or maintaining a national identity. In her “‘And the Two Shall Become One Flesh,’” Julie Allen explores the marital imagery by which Scandinavian authors Ole Edvart Rølvaag and Sophus Keith Winther describe the relation of immigrant farm families and their North American homesteads. The land becomes imagined as feminine and alluring, beckoning especially men and standing in competition with the women of the farmstead as the focus of men’s emotional attention. Allen explores the gendered and intergenerational aspects of this marriage metaphor as they play out in two of the most widely read chroniclers of the Scandinavian American experience. In her “Taking Land and Claiming Place in Nordic Migrant Literature,” Ingeborg Kongslien employs the concept of “migrant literature” to compare narratives of the North American settlement experience with more recent Nordic literature written by immigrants, refugees, and exiles living in contemporary Nordic countries. Kongslien adds an examination of Vilhelm Moberg and Halldór Kiljan Laxness to Allen’s discussion of Rølvaag and Winther, and then explores an array of modern Nordic multicultural authors, including Theodor Kallifatides, Fateme Behros, Azar Mahloujian, Michael Konupek, and Rubén Palma. As Kongslien shows, migrants to the urban cityscapes of the modern Nordic region can undergo very different experiences and impressions than those who emigrated from Scandinavia to build new lives on a rural landscape. Yet in other ways, the two experiences share aspects in that Nordic migrant authors often use the literary depiction of the North American settlement as a reference point and metaphor, much as earlier authors writing about North America harkened back to the sagas as a parallel. In my own contribution to this section, “Radical Utopianism,” the notion of creating a better, more just world is explored as it played out in the essays, novels, plays, and songbooks of Scandinavian America’s progressive left. Writers like Marcus Thrane, Louis Pio, Matti Kurikka, Helmi Mattson, Jacob Riis, Thorstein Bunde Veblen, Joe Hill, T-bone Slim, Mikael Rutanen, and Hiski Salomaa created idealistic and often strident works in both Nordic languages and in English, aiming at transforming American society into the place of freedom, justice, and equality that it already claimed to be. Their writings, like those of the agricultural migrants of the same period or of the multicultural writers of modern Scandinavia, have reshaped Nordic societies in profound ways, just as the intrepid Icelandic settlers of the ninth century reshaped their newfound island and its collection of arriving families. Settlement changes people, just as it changes the land.

“And the two shall become one flesh” Forging familial ties to the New Land in Nordic-American immigrant literature Julie K. Allen

Regardless of the analytic lens through which emigration and immigration are viewed, they deal intrinsically and unavoidably with place  – places of origin and departure, places being transited, places of arrival and resettlement  – and the relationship of the migrants to those places. While historical and scholarly accounts generally concentrate on quantifiable, objective data about migration, literary texts are uniquely capable of exploring the subjective dimensions of the migration experience: the hopes, dreams, expectations, joys, and disappointments of the people whose lives are shaped by the places they traverse and inhabit. In conveying this subjective experience, Nordic-American immigrant literature tends to depict the process of immigration in terms of forging familial ties to the new land. Immigration from the Nordic countries to North America is both a historical and an ongoing phenomenon ranging from the early medieval Vinland colony of Greenlandic Vikings in Newfoundland to present-day enclaves of Finns in Manhattan. The most numerically significant waves of Nordic immigration to America peaked in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when between two and three million Scandinavians uprooted themselves and their families in search of a better life in the United States. Beginning with the arrival of a shipload of Norwegian Quakers (known as Sloopers for the type of ship that carried them to New York in 1825) the story of modern-day Nordic-American immigration is a complex and heterogeneous one encompassing religious pioneers and radical politicians, gold-diggers and lumberjacks, domestic servants, and desperate farmers. The concentration of Nordic immigrants in the American Midwest (particularly Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, North and South Dakota) is often attributed to a perceived climatic and topographical similarity to the landscape of the Nordic countries, which, in turn, seems to support the view that Nordic immigrants chose to settle this region in order to recreate the countries and communities they had left behind. In her 1853 book Hemmen i den Nya verlden (The Homes of the New World), the Swedish author Fredrika Bremer exulted: Hvilket herrligt Nytt Skandinavien kunde ej Minnesota bli! Här skulle svenskarne återfinna sina klara, romantiska sjöar, Skånes sädesrika slätter och Norrlands dalar; här norrmännen sina strida elfvar, sina höga berg – ty jag tar Klippbergen och Oregon med i det nya riket; båda folken sina jagtmarker och sitt fiske. Danskarne skulle beta sina hjordar och bygga sina farms på rikare kuster och med mindre töcken än Danmarks. Klippbergen äro nya Seveberg med mythologiska vidunder, jätter och troll nog, att föda sagosinnet och det stridbare lynnet. . . . Klimat, läge, natur här, passa våra folk bättre än i någon af de andra amerikanska staterna, och ingen af dem synes mig kunna ha en störra och skönare framtid än Minnesota. (351–52) (What a glorious new Scandinavia might not Minnesota become! Here would the Swede find again his clear, romantic lakes, the plains of Scania rich in corn, and the valleys of Norrland; here would the Norwegian find his rapid rivers, his lofty mountains, for I include the Rocky doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.34all © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Mountains and Oregon in the new kingdom; and both nations, their hunting-fields and their fisheries. The Danes might here pasture their flocks and herds, and lay out their farms on richer and less misty coasts than those of Denmark. The Rocky Mountains are a new Seveberg with mythological monsters, giants and witches enough to feed the legendary mind and the warlike temperament. . . . The climate, the situation, the character of the scenery agrees with our people better than that of any other of the American States, and none of them appear to me to have a greater or a more beautiful future before them than Minnesota.) [Homes 56–57]

There are significant obstacles to this identification of the Midwest as the locus for a rebirth of the Nordic homeland, however. Characterizing the upper Midwest as a pristine replica of the Nordic region requires prodigious feats of cartographic flexibility, which Bremer attempts by stretching her definition of Minnesota to include the Rocky Mountains and Oregon so as to justify her promises of Norwegian mountains. This sentimentalized approach also ignores the pivotal role of the American government’s policy of encouraging the settlement of precisely this region during the period of the most intensive Nordic immigration. Without the Homestead Act of 1862, which provided the immigrants with free land with relatively few restrictions, the establishment of the Nordic colonies in the Midwest would have been a much less viable prospect. The coincidence of a region bearing some familiar topographical features being opened for settlement during a period of favorable economic conditions drew millions of Nordic immigrants to the Midwest, but Bremer’s vision of a “new Scandinavia” was not the ultimate outcome of this vast resettlement. Instead of replicating their homelands or fossilizing their native cultures, Nordic immigrants created new identities in the new places they settled thus transforming themselves from Copenhageners or Trøndere into Nordic-Americans in all areas of their lives: linguistically, religiously, politically, ethnically, gastronomically, etc. As hyphenated Americans, they continued to cherish many of the traditions of their homelands even as these traditions blended with elements of the culture in which they found themselves immersed. After just a short time in America, most Nordic immigrants began internalizing the social and political mores of American populist democracy by mixing English words into their speech, wearing American clothes, and eating American foods. This new identity, which demonstrated itself most markedly in the first three generations of immigrant families, demanded unique literary narratives of its origins, evolution, and expression. Over the past two centuries, a large body of literature dealing with the experience of Nordic-American immigration has emerged, much of which attempts to come to terms with the myriad ways in which Nordic immigrants have perceived, responded to, and shaped the places they settled and claimed in the new land. As Oscar Handlin argues in his preface to Dorothy Skårdal Burton’s The Divided Heart, a comprehensive overview of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Scandinavian-American literature, such popular literature can be valuable as representative samples of typical Nordic immigrant experiences: “Precisely because its themes must be comprehensible to a wide audience, it seeks out for description situations which are common, depicts emotions shared by many, and finds the heroic in the victories and defeats of everyday life” (7). Two of the best-known and most highly regarded works of Nordic-American immigrant literature are novel trilogies written by the Norwegian-born author Ole Edvart Rølvaag and

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the Danish-born author Sophus Keith Winther, both of whom worked as literature professors at American universities. (Technically, Rølvaag’s novels form a quadrilogy in their original Norwegian form, but they appeared as a trilogy in English). Although the authors were born a generation apart, both trilogies reached the American market within a decade of each other  – Rølvaag’s in 1927–31, Winther’s in 1936–38. They deal with very different periods in the history of Nordic immigration to America, reflecting the authors’ own immigrant experiences. Rølvaag, who arrived in America in 1896 at the age of twenty and began working as a farmhand on an uncle’s farm in South Dakota, narrates the adventures of isolated Norwegian homesteaders who had settled the Dakota frontier in the 1870s and ’80s, while Winther, who came to the United States with his parents in 1895 at the age of two, concerns himself with the challenges facing turn-of-the-century Danish immigrants on the Great Plains trying to carve out a niche for themselves as rent farmers in a more densely settled and economically competitive American landscape in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Figure 46.  View of the South Dakota prairie landscape, whose vast expanses have no close corrolary in the Nordic region. Photo: pzig98/Shutterstock

Each trilogy tells the story of a single Nordic immigrant family over three generations, but in different languages and for different audiences. While Winther wrote in English and published his trilogy in the United States, Rølvaag composed his novels in Norwegian and published them initially in Norway before translating them himself and publishing them in English a few years later. Beginning with I de dage (In those days; 1923) and Riket grundlægges (Founding the Kingdom; 1924) (which were published together in English in one volume titled Giants in the Earth in 1927), Rølvaag follows Per Hansa, his wife Beret, and their children as they cross the plains from Minnesota to the Dakota territory, where they become founding members of the Spring Creek settlement. Although Per Hansa dies at the end of the first (combined) volume, the second and third volumes, Peder Seier (Peder Victorious; 1929) and Den signede dag (Their Fathers’ God; 1931), chronicle the turbulent adolescence and adulthood of his children, particularly his American-born son Peder Victorious, who struggles to come to terms with his Norwegian heritage. Winther’s first volume, Take All to Nebraska (1936), also begins with a journey, from Massachusetts to Nebraska, where Peter Grimsen and his wife Meta, after having experienced three disappointing years in the East hope at last to realize the American dream of independence and prosperity for themselves and their children in Nebraska. The first volume ends with the Grimsens’ eviction from their much-improved rental farm, while Mortgage Your Heart (1937)

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and This Passion Never Dies (1938) depict Peter’s transformation first into a proud landowner and then a forlorn victim of foreclosure with no physical or cultural legacy to bequeath to his Americanized sons. Winther’s novels were translated into Danish by the author Hans Kirk and published in Copenhagen in two volumes under the title Nebraska er mit Hjem in 1940. Although both authors painstakingly describe the physical labor involved in their characters’ attempts to claim the land, they underscore that it is primarily an emotional investment rather than such physical effluvia as blood, sweat, and tears that binds these Nordic immigrants to their new land. In these novels, the immigrants’ odyssey across the ocean and plains is not depicted as a primarily physical one of leaving one place and settling in another, but rather as a psychological-sociological challenge that involves severing emotional ties in and to the old country while gradually developing a network of connections to the new. Both Rølvaag and Winther describe the practices underlying the process of forging new emotional bonds with images and terminology that evoke the establishment of marital and familial relationships. Rather than conquering or taming the land, Per Hansa and Peter Grimsen wed themselves to it, thereby creating legal and biological connections between themselves, their posterity, and America that eventually outweigh the competing claims of their Nordic homelands. The primary rhetorical device underpinning this familial characterization of the Nordic immigrant experience is the metaphor of immigration as a marriage of cultures that reflects the immigrant’s conscious choice of a new homeland and concomitant development of a new identity. In discourses about immigration, the country of emigration is generally described in parental terms as the “mother” or “fatherland,” echoing its status as the land of the immigrant’s birth, a concept preserved in the word “native,” that derives from the Latin words nasci (to be born) and natus (birth). While the country of immigration is frequently referred to as the immigrant’s “adopted” country, thus preserving the relationship of immigrant-as-child to country-as-parent, this term as well – derived from the Latin root optare (to choose, select) – denotes a more deliberate and intentional relationship than the randomness of biology enables. The rhetoric of immigration discourse supports this perception, for example, in regarding dual citizenship as akin to bigamy (Geyer 68). The immigrant, both as an individual and as a representative of a particular native culture, leaves his parental home and weds himself to the new land, its language, customs, and fate in order to create a new, hybrid identity. In keeping with this tendency, both Rølvaag and Winther characterize the relationship of their male protagonists to their new country as a type of marital bond, a process that involves leaving one’s parents and cleaving to a chosen life-partner and becoming in the process part of a new family unit. Rølvaag’s characters Per Hansa and Hans Olsa illustrate this legal point when, in the course of applying for American citizenship, they also undergo an identity shift usually reserved for marriage: they change their surnames, abandoning their Norwegian patronymics and adopting place names from Norway that will anchor their new Norwegian-American identities: Peder Hansen becomes Peder Holm, Hans Olsen becomes Hans Vaag. By contrast, Winther depicts the physicality of the way in which Peter fulfills the biblical injunction of becoming “one flesh” with his farm, as the title of the second volume of his trilogy, Mortgage Your Heart, vividly illustrates. When Peter commits to purchasing his farm, finally realizing the Nordic immigrant’s fondest dream, the narrator describes Peter’s uncharacteristically exuberant physical and emotional reaction: “He wanted to spread out his arms and embrace the hills,

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the pasture, the hay field, the bottomland, every inch of this farm he loved so well” (316). When the post-World War I depression causes him to lose the farm and his son, Hans, urges him to move to Lincoln, Peter replies, “That would be the worst end I could think of. . . . To leave the land, in my old age, and spend my days walking on city sidewalks! No, Hans, I could not do that. I would rather lay my bones down right here, than end my days in a city” (Passion 202). Peter’s identity is so closely bound to the particular rural landscape he has chosen that he, adamantly determined, would rather die than be parted from it. The nature of the characters’ relationship to the land is linked to their enactment of traditional gender roles. The male characters are depicted as bold adventurers who embrace the challenges presented by their new country, breaking new fields and braving the elements while the women are largely confined – either by inclination or necessity – to the family’s primitive dwelling spaces where they prepare food and care for the children until the boys are old enough to join their fathers outdoors. While Beret trembles in fear at the openness of the prairie, Per Hansa takes ever more daring journeys to explore and exploit the riches of the countryside. To cope with her fears, Beret takes to hiding in the large wooden trunk they brought from Norway. It is only after Per Hansa’s untimely death that Beret, thrust into the role of head of the household, begins to involve herself more actively in the life of the farm by caring for the animals and building the barn of which Per Hansa dreamed but never had the chance to erect. Similarly, Meta’s relationship to Peter is always subordinate to his preoccupation with the new land. Though she longs to return to Denmark and to her mother, her only living relative, Peter, will not even consider it for he has made his bed in America, both proverbially and literally. The narrator explains, “Even in his dreams he saw Denmark only at rare intervals; it was always the new land of America with its great difficulties that disturbed his sleep” (Nebraska 23). The first farm they rent in Nebraska has fertile soil that delights Peter, but the farmhouse is a decrepit wreck that looks “more like a chicken house than a human dwelling-place” (18). Peter can always scrape together the money to make improvements to the farm even if it means denying his children shoes, but he begrudges Meta the smallest expenses for the house to which she is confined. She is not wedded to the land – she is excluded from it and from her husband’s intimate relationship to it. This disparate relationship intensifies after Peter purchases his own farm. He is so bound to his land that he cannot imagine leaving it, even after his mortgage is foreclosed. Instead, he dies on the same day that their farm implements are auctioned off thereby freeing Meta to leave the farm and take up residence in the nearby town of Weeping Willow. The female characters are also depicted as the primary guardians and transmitters of Nordic culture. Both Beret and Meta inhabit closely circumscribed communities made up of other immigrants from their home countries who interact very little with their American surroundings. Beret approaches the task of ensuring her children’s cultural identity with the same single-mindedness she applies to religion and cleaning her house. She insists that her sons speak Norwegian and attend Norwegian church services. When Peder’s teacher instructs him to stop speaking Norwegian at home, she transfers him to a different school with a more predominantly Norwegian student body. She subscribes to Norwegian-language newspapers and demands that Peder read aloud to her from them. When he deliberately mispronounces the words, she boxes his ears. Despite living in America for decades, she refuses to become proficient in English even when she is sharing a home with her non-Norwegian speaking

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daughter-in-law. In contrast, Meta’s approach to cultural preservation and transmission is less aggressive and more accommodating than Beret’s; it involves positioning the Danish language and Danish foods as sources of comfort and refuge for her children from the unfriendly foreign world around them. When Hans comes home from his first day of kindergarten in tears for having been mocked for speaking Danish and beaten up, it is “his mother’s voice and the Danish words that meant release from the awful experience of the first day in school” (Nebraska 59). She is always prepared for visitors, a tired husband, or unhappy children with a pot of Danish coffee, open-faced sandwiches, and cake. The metaphor of immigration as marriage is complicated for the female characters by the implicit rivalry between themselves and the respective lands to which their husbands lay claim. The male protagonists’ eagerness to immigrate to North America and to develop profitable farms places tremendous strain upon their marriages as their passion for the land and their devotion to their wives compete for supremacy. This tension between a man’s livelihood and his love life is not exclusive to America, as the original use of the term “husbandry” to refer to a householder or farmer suggests, but the allure of the fertile American soil is compounded by the unprecedented sacrifices it requires of the immigrants. While Per Hansa and Peter Grimsen are eagerly and whole-heartedly committed to embracing the challenges that face them in America, Beret and Meta long for their families back home in Norway and Denmark. They feel threatened by the dangers that surround them in this foreign land and resent the attention their husbands pay to cultivating and improving the land, while their families suffer from emotional alienation and cultural deprivation. From the female perspective, the new land appears as a dangerous seductress by luring men from their stable, settled lives in the old countries and tempting them with promises of greatness and wealth, behind which lurk the specters of adversity and death to which both Per Hansa and Peter prematurely succumb. The feminizing of the American landscape is a long-standing discursive practice in American literature that Rølvaag and Winther seem to adopt implicitly, but not naively or uncritically. As Annette Kolodny explains in her 1975 study The Lay of the Land, many early textual depictions of a feminized American landscape focus on its nurturing, maternal qualities and note that “at the deepest psychological level, the move to America was experienced as the daily reality of what has become its single dominating metaphor: regression from the cares of adult life and a return to the primal warmth of womb or breast in a feminine landscape” (6). In Rølvaag and Winther’s trilogies, however, there is no suggestion of the possibility of a “regression from the cares of adult life” into the embrace of the sheltering feminine landscape. Instead, the unfamiliar American terrain is feminized as a temperamental wife who demands constant attention and countless sacrifices. It is in their capacity as responsible husbands to their farms that Per Hansa and Peter Grimsen, and their sons after them, demonstrate their maturity and masculinity. Rølvaag in particular consistently anthropomorphizes the prairie landscape as a dangerous female figure who feels threatened by the encroachment of the settlers, scheming to defeat their attempts to possess her: “Storvidda laa der, trak pusten den ene uken og slap den den næste. . . . Nei ellers tak, menneskekryp skulde ho ikke ha noe av! – Ho skulde sagtens vite at hytte sig, og beholde sit for sig sjøl” (Riket 3) [“Monsterlike the Plain lay there – sucked in her breath one week, and the next blew it out again. Man she scorned; his works she would not

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brook. . . . She would know, when the time came, how to guard herself and her own against him!” (Giants 283)]. After a plague of locusts destroys the settlers’ crops, the narrator explains, with descriptive, imaginative elaboration in Rølvaag’s English version that is not present in his original Norwegian text, “Storvidda laa der og strakte sig i al sin vælde” (Riket 96) [“That night the Great Prairie stretched herself voluptuously; giantlike and full of cunning, she laughed softly into the reddish moon. ‘Now we will see what human might may avail against us! . . . Now we’ll see!” (Giants 398–99)]. Her dominance is confirmed in the final chapter of Riket Grundlægges, which bears the title, “Storvidda faar Kristenmandsblod og roer sig” (168) [“The Great Plain Drinks the Blood of Christian Men and Is Satisfied” (Giants 484)], when both Hans Olsa and Per Hansa die due to weather-related causes. In one of the most memorable images in the trilogy, the narrator describes how, when some boys find Per Hansa’s frozen body beside a haystack in the spring of 1881, “Han stirret ende foran sig, bent vestover” (Riket 206) [“His face was ashen and drawn. His eyes were set toward the west” (Giants 531)]. Even in death, Per Hansa oriented himself away from the old country and toward the land to which he had wed himself. Underscoring the gender specificity of this relationship, the novels make a direct link between immigration and sexuality. Beret had joyfully followed Per Hansa to America, despite her parents’ tearful objections, because of her emotional and physical love for her husband. In recalling their arrival in America, Beret describes the frenzy of westward migration in animalistic terms: “Menneskene rodde i ørske, som fuglen ute ved havet i parringstiden. Og saa fløj de mot soleglad, i smaa flokker, og store, men altid mot soleglad. . . . Og denne febermatte luft var de kommet opi!” (Dage 219) [“People drifted about in a sort of delirium, like sea birds in mating time; then they flew toward the sunset, in small flocks and large – always toward Sunset Land. . . . Into this feverish atmosphere, they had come” (Giants 260)]. When Per Hansa is infected by westward-fever, he becomes very affectionate toward Beret, and she responds in kind, recalling “Det hadde været lifligere at gi sig hen til ham end i hine første dage da hun fik ham” (Dage 219) [“It had been even more deliciously sweet to give herself to him then, than back in those days when she had first won him” (Giants 260)]. Similarly, when he finds his way home after being lost on the prairie, he comes back to bed and is “god mot konen sin” (Dage 20) [“good to his wife” (Giants 24)]. Yet Beret also uses sex as a weapon to compete against the allure of the land. In their earliest days in the Dakotas, when Per Hansa leaps out of bed to break new fields, she entices him with kisses and caresses to stay in bed. Later, when she is tormented by depression, she retaliates against her husband by refusing his sexual advances thus forcing him to expend his excess energy in plowing and planting. Many years later, their son Peder resorts to similar tactics after arguments with his Irish Catholic wife: while she prefers to resolve arguments through intimacy, he chooses to work himself to exhaustion on the farm, then sleep in the loft rather than share his wife’s bed. In Peter Grimsen’s case, Winther depicts his sense of belonging to America as being closely tied to his infatuation with a German-American widow, Hilda Schneidermann, who symbolizes the seductive power of the new land. Peter first approaches her about renting some of her land, but he is soon entranced by her attractive appearance, domestic and conversational skills, as well as her mastery of the American system. Despite her thick German accent, she is already a landowner and an American citizen. Talking with her causes Peter “for the first time to feel that he was a part of the new country” (Nebraska 286). Walking home one night after spending the

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evening chatting with Hilda, Peter is struck by the beauty of the “round fertile hills of eastern Nebraska,” which “called to something deep in Peter’s heart as if it urged him to love this land, to forget the old country, to become a part of the new world. . . . Nature, the sweet, bespangled prostitute, seducing man to love her at night and in the heat of the day torturing him to the very limits of his endurance” (290). Torn between the seductive eroticism of the new land and his duty to his very pregnant Danish wife, Peter lies to Meta about where he has been, reflecting the guilt he feels about his attraction to both Hilda and America.

Figure 47.  The “round, fertile hills” of the Nebraska farming landscape. Photo: Weldon Schloneger/ Shutterstock

Although Peter had long harbored a secret hope of returning home to Denmark as a prosperous farmer, he now begins to think seriously about becoming an American citizen, about choosing to “renounce all allegiance to Denmark and become a citizen of the United States” (291). However, after missing the birth of his son while visiting Hilda, he hesitates and reminds himself that “his deep sense of duty and his loyalty to Meta and the children must not be sacrificed” (302). It is not until Meta has learned that their oldest son would not accompany them back to Denmark if they sold out that she endorses Peter’s desire to stay in America and he makes the final decision to submit his citizenship papers. The danger of Peter’s infidelity to his wife has been averted, but his and Meta’s inborn loyalty to the land of their birth has been replaced without their realizing it by familial ties to the new land. Their sons, whether born in Denmark or Nebraska, are now firmly rooted in the American soil where their only daughter lies buried: Neither one of them had thought that the children would object to leaving, but now they saw clearly that already this land was their home and that Denmark would be a foreign country to them. A brief ten years had bound them to this land. Silently day by day the road back for Peter and Meta had been torn up, the bridges burned, and the guide signs destroyed. While they had

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Their ties to the family they left behind in Denmark have slowly atrophied, while their children’s ties to America have matured. Envisioning a future alone in their old age in Denmark, Peter and Meta realize that “America is our home now for good or ill” (305). As with Per Hansa, their westward orientation has shaped not only their deeds but also their identities. Although Peter and Meta eventually agree about their commitment to America, willpower alone is not enough to transform them into Americans on every level; their loyalty to America does not preclude the persistence of their affection for Denmark. Ten years after becoming citizens, the narrator notes, “culturally they were still Danish. Their social life, their reading and their thinking were still very much in the terms of the Old Country” (Mortgage 109). Winther makes it clear that their situation is representative of their fellow Danish immigrants as well. Peter and Meta celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary at the end of the second novel surrounded by Danish-American friends, “sons and daughters of Denmark who had wandered far from home to find a shelter in the new land. . . . They were, every man of them, citizens and voters of the republic. They had given their hands and hearts resolutely to America, and particularly to the state of Nebraska” (330–31). All of them have made painful sacrifices of hope and strength along the way, “the sacrifice that all people make everywhere, but that the immigrant assumes as an added burden to long memories of a homeland he will never see again” (331). The anniversary celebration is a quintessentially Danish affair with Danish food and stories of their youth in Denmark, but at the end of the day, Peter and Meta agree, “Nebraska is [our] home. There can never be another on this earth” (333). They have made their choice in favor of the new land, but their certainty does not prevent them from feeling keenly the loss of the old. Yet while the choice of allegiance and attitude toward the new country is starkest and most pressing for the first generation of Nordic-Americans, it is still an emotionally charged issue for the second, the children who have grown up in America but have been shaped by the Nordic culture of their homes. Peter and Meta “left the warm shelter of their simple homes to cross the great Atlantic in search of land, in the hope of gaining independence, in the faith of a greater destiny for themselves and especially for the children” (Nebraska 3). Even after their only daughter, Margaret, dies of whooping-cough and Meta bursts out, “Oh, if we had only stayed in Denmark!” she continues, “But I am glad we are here in America. Our children will not have to be farmers. They can rise to better things in this democratic country” (121). Yet for the Grimsens, as for many Nordic immigrants, this choice to risk everything for a better life for the children leads to the children’s estrangement from their parents and their parents’ culture. Per Hansa and Beret settle in a predominantly Norwegian community so that their children will know and cherish their Norwegian heritage, but their sons prefer to speak English. Despite his mother’s fears, Peder Holm marries an Irish Catholic rather than a Norwegian Lutheran, a marriage that eventually founders on cultural differences. Even as his marriage is falling apart, however, and the attractive Norwegian girl Nikoline invites him to return to Norway with her, he cannot even consider it. Peter Grimsen invests his entire life in his farm to give his sons greater opportunities but is still disappointed when they chafe under his tutelage and seek their success in the city instead. Meta teaches her children Danish songs and prepares Danish foods for them, but they are mocked at school for their Danish ways and grow ashamed of them. Only

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one of their six sons, David, marries a Danish girl, but that marriage is ill fated and short-lived. As Meta learns at the end of Take All to Nebraska when her oldest son refuses to accompany his parents back to Denmark, none of her children regards Denmark as his home. At the same time, however, the children of Nordic immigrants are not completely at home in America either to a large degree because of their Nordic cultural heritage. In Rølvaag’s Peder Seier, the eponymous title character is chastised by his schoolteacher for speaking too much Norwegian at home, which has caused him to speak with a Norwegian accent in English. The central topic of the final novel in Rølvaag’s trilogy, Den signede dag, is the conflict between Peder and his Irish Catholic wife Susie, who considers herself completely American because English is her first language. Whenever they disagree or Peder does something of which she does not approve, she complains of his being too Norwegian. She chafes at living with Beret, whose English skills are minimal (even though her control over her household is absolute), and at participating in gatherings of Norwegians, where she feels excluded by their clannishness, different religious customs, and incomprehensible speech. In the first novel in Winther’s trilogy, Meta Grimsen throws a birthday party for her son Hans and his school friends, but the children argue over whether Meta can speak English. When Hans and David defend their mother, another boy calls their father “a damn foreigner” (270) and the party turns into a fistfight. Meta and Peter are ashamed by the truth of the insults and resolve to improve their English, but their sons are ashamed of their parents’ failure to fit in. As they grow up, they distance themselves more and more from their parents’ culture but are still unable to find full acceptance among Anglo-Americans as Hans learns when he speaks out against America’s involvement in World War I while attending the University of Nebraska and is labeled a coward and a foreigner by his fellow students. Unlike their parents, the second-generation Nordic-Americans depicted in Rølvaag and Winther’s novels are not torn by conflicting loyalties to two actual but geographically and culturally distinct places. Instead, they are caught between multiple imagined places: a vaguely remembered ancestral homeland familiar only from stories, letters, and faded photographs; the perceived but inadequate haven of their homes characterized by a defensively conservative attitude toward Nordic culture; the conformity-demanding America of the public spaces they frequent – schoolrooms, church meetings, dances, workplaces – with their apparent hostility toward the private culture of their families; and an idealized America in which equal opportunity is truly available to all, where religion, language, and money are not the determining factors for success or happiness. It is this latter construct that the second-generation protagonists of Rølvaag and Winther’s trilogies find most compelling and which they strive to realize by combining the most positive aspects of both of their cultural heritages, as full-fledged Americans with a unique and valuable perspective derived from their Nordic roots. For example, even though his disagreements with his wife drive him to associate himself more decisively with his Norwegian identity, Peder Holm does not want to return to Norway with Nikoline; instead he wants to change American society to conform to his own ideals, which prompts him to embark on a political career. Similarly, Hans Grimsen ardently defends his American citizenship even while critiquing the United States’ involvement in World War I and defending an anti-imperialist, neutral stance very similar to the official policy of the Danish government during the same period and at the same time supporting Norwegian-American sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s

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critique of capitalism. He is not tempted to choose Denmark over America, but neither is he content simply to accept America as it is. In the hybridization of their Nordic and American identities in a way their parents could not achieve completely or whole-heartedly, Peder and Hans are best able to contribute to the country they regard as their own. As inspiring as the scenario of different cultures merging both literally and metaphorically into one American flesh might be, however, Rølvaag and Winther make it clear that it is neither easily attainable nor reliably successful. The narrative thread concerning Peder’s own son offers a particularly vivid illustration of the powerful tensions inherent in the attempt to blend inherited cultural traditions and forge new ones. Peder undertakes his marriage to Susie with the best intentions and highest hopes of overcoming the cultural differences between them. Facilitated by the mutual affection and goodwill of both parties, the endeavor succeeds initially, but things begin to break down after the birth of their son, whom they call Petie, when both Peder and Susie begin to insist upon the correctness of their own customs. Disillusioned with religion, Peder neglects to have the baby baptized so his mother and wife both take the task upon themselves. Both women are concerned for the baby’s immortal soul, but too intimidated to ask Peder’s permission, so they proceed, keeping their actions secret from him and from each other. Beret persuades her friend Sörine to baptize the baby with the name Peder Emmanuel, while Susie has her priest perform the ceremony and gives him the name Patrick St. Olaf. On her deathbed, Beret confesses (in English) to Peder and Susie what she has done, driving Susie into such hysterics that she loses the baby she was carrying. A few months later, Peder learns of the Catholic baptism at a political rally held by his opponent and, in retaliation, destroys Susie’s rosary and crucifix. The next morning, she has taken the child and left Peder for good, thus concluding the final novel in the trilogy and apparently dashing any hopes for personal or cross-cultural reconciliation. On one level, then, the stories that Rølvaag and Winther tell are tragic ones of Nordic immigrant families ravaged by physical, social, financial, and emotional hardships, with little to show for their efforts at the end of their lives. However timeless and common a practice it might be, migration can also be a treacherous, heart-wrenching undertaking. The price of severing ties to the familiar land of one’s parentage and birth in order to forge bonds to an unfamiliar new land is extremely high. Disappointment and death are guaranteed, while economic success and happiness are elusive and fleeting. Despite their eagerness and ingenuity, neither Per Hansa nor Peter Grimsen can truly conquer the new land they set out to colonize. Instead, both men are ultimately crushed by the physical and financial burdens they try to shoulder. Their wives try to be supportive of the men they love and trust, but they struggle with their own emotional burdens: loneliness, resentment, alienation, and fear. Their children grow to adulthood with conflicted feelings about their relationship to their parents and their parents’ culture as well as about the American culture of which they are a part. Cultural differences persist into the thirdgeneration and beyond, raising the question of whether Nordic immigrants can ever become integral parts of American society without surrendering all remnants of their ancestral cultures. On the other hand, however, Rølvaag and Winther’s trilogies bear testament to the success of the seemingly hopeless endeavor they describe. Written by first-generation immigrants who became Americans, these enduring Nordic-American literary texts capture not only the hardships and challenges faced by Nordic immigrants to America, but also the immigrants’

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determination to decide their identities for themselves. Rather than passively accepting the place and culture thrust upon them by chance, the characters choose to shape their own destiny by seeking a place to realize their dreams not only for themselves, but also for their children and grandchildren. The imagined, idealized America that lured Nordic immigrants across the sea and plains could not become reality until those immigrants – like the characters depicted in the novels – invested themselves in the creation of it. The metaphor of immigration as a marriage of cultures that underlies both trilogies is particularly apt, for the success of a marriage cannot be measured entirely by the challenges it endures nor the happiness it engenders, but rather by its legacy. By its nature, marriage is a difficult task that requires sacrifices and does not promise success. Unlike a biological relationship, marriage depends on the volition of the parties who enter into it, but out of that exercise of willpower, a new entity is created. The Bible enjoins, “And the two shall become one flesh” (English Standard Version Mark 10:8), but this transformation cannot be completed by the marital partners themselves; it requires future generations to fulfill this commandment. The same holds true of immigration: it requires sacrifices, does not promise success, and depends on the will of the individuals who embark upon it. Even if the price paid by individual immigrant families seems too high to counterbalance the rewards they attained, the collective outcome of this vast group migration is unmistakably positive. Rølvaag and Winther’s trilogies illustrate that Nordic immigrants to America were profoundly shaped by the places they settled, but that they also contributed to shaping the identity of those places. The result of this marriage of cultures was the creation of not only a national community of Nordic-Americans who continue to successfully combine and cherish positive attributes of both Nordic and American culture, but also the creation of modern America itself.

Taking land and claiming place in Nordic migrant literature Ingeborg Kongslien

De gick som deras förfäder en gång för årtusenden sedan hade gått över deras hemlands marker. . . . De svenska bönderna som farit tusen mils väg för att bosätta sig i Chippewas jaktmarker och som nu här uppmätte matjordens djup, visste ingenting om folket, vars land de skulle övertaga. (Moberg Invandrarna 281, 284) (They walked as their forefathers thousand of years ago had walked over the fields of their homelands. . . . The Swedish farmers who had travelled thousand of miles to settle in the hunting grounds of the Chippewas and now here measured the depth of the top soil, knew nothing about the people whose land they were to claim.) Uppsala är min stad, den ska bli min stad. Snälla, snälla fina lilla stad, bli min, ta emot mig! “Uppsala påminner mig om min hemstad,” sa jag. . . . “Tabriz heter min stad.” (Behros Fångarnas kör 231, 242) (Uppsala is my city; it will become my city. Please, please beautiful little city, be mine, take me in! “Uppsala reminds me of my home town,” I said. . . . “Tabriz is my home town.”)

These two passages about the Nordic immigration to America during the nineteenth century and the immigration into the Nordic countries during the last four decades portray a major difference between these migratory movements. The older relates to rural land and includes the epic perspectives of its people’s history as well as that of the indigenous peoples of its adopted land. The more recent concerns urban space and also includes the double perspective of the homeland and the adopted land. Cultural representations of these different migrations and transitions in the form of Nordic literary texts depict such movements. Emigration and immigration narratives The emigration from the Nordic countries to North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is part of the large-scale exodus from Europe to the new world. The hungry and oppressed classes in the old world left to claim land in the new world in order to make possible a new life, in which they could provide for themselves and their loved ones. The forces that drove them out of their homeland were religious and political oppression, material needs, and social hierarchies. A sharp population increase due to peace, potatoes, and the smallpox vaccination, a well-known point attributed to the prominent nineteenth-century Swedish poet and intellectual Esaias Tegnér, accounts for the mass emigration that followed. The vision that attracted them was the possibility of realizing their hopes for a new and better life. This movement has been richly reflected in Scandinavian as well as in Scandinavian-American literature. The Swede Vilhelm Moberg’s tetralogy – Utvandrarna (1949; The Emigrants), Invandrarna (1952; Unto a Good Land), Nybyggarna (1956; The Settlers), and Sista brevet till Sverige (1959; The Last Letter Home) – about Swedes in Minnesota is the high point of this literary tradition doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.35kon © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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in Scandinavia. Among immigrant writers in America writing in their native languages, the Norwegian-American O. E. Rølvaag gained singular prominence there for his entirely credible representation of the settling of the open prairie regardless of the settler’s national background, as Julie Allen also discusses in this volume. The tetralogy (I de dage [1924]; Riket grundlægges [1925]; Peder Seier [1928]; and Den signede dag [1931]) in its original Norwegian version and the trilogy in its better known English translation (Giants in the Earth [1927] – the first two Norwegian volumes – Peder Victorious [1929], and Their Father’s God [1931]) have as their central theme the experiences of Norwegian settlers on the prairie of South Dakota. Giants in the Earth in particular has won many appreciative readers and considerable fame as the quintessential narrative of life on the Midwestern plains. It speaks of taking the land in its use of the Old Norse term landnám as the subtitle for the first part of the book. The introductory quotation from Moberg’s Invandrarna well illustrates the epic scope of his presentation of the migration. In 1850 his Swedish farmers are searching for land in Minnesota since there is none to be had in their native Sweden. They cannot, thus, continue as tillers of the soil at home. They are comparatively juxtaposed to their forefathers who undertook the same enterprise centuries before but also to the ancient Native Americans whose land they now – though unbeknownst to them – occupy. Karl Oskar, the Swede from the small and stony farm in Småland, finds his place and eventually cultivates the wheat field in North America that he had envisioned. His inspiration had been a picture in a Swedish newspaper “en slätt utan gräns,” “inte en enda sten,” “en ofattbar mängd av bröd åt människorna” (Utvandrarna 145) [“an endless field without borders,” “not a single stone,” “an unmeasurable quantity of bread for man” (The Emigrants 93)]. This theme is the guiding perspective in Moberg’s oeuvre: how the poor and hungry people from Europe can reestablish their way of life in a new place: “Nya världen rymde jord av oändliga vidder, men saknade människor. Gamla världen var överfylld av människor, som saknade jord” (Invandrarna 6–7) [The New World had infinite stretches of land; the Old World was filled up with people that lacked land]. The raison d’être of Moberg’s project was to portray how the poor Swedish farmer could live freely and build a meaningful life in the new world where he had access to land: an agenda that embodies an implied criticism of the Swedish class system of the mid-nineteenth century. The two main characters, though, appropriate the new space from different perspectives: – Här ä lättbråten mark, sade Karl Oskar. Likare kan int’ finnas. . . .  – Ett grant ställe har du hittat, Karl Oska. Här ä nästan lika härlitt ve sjön som hemma i Duvemåla. . . . Karl Oskar stack det långa skaftet på oxpiskan ner i jorden och visade henne: Så här djupt gick matjorden ner – överallt var den lika djup.  – Tockna fina blommor dä växer oppe på slätten, sade Kristina. (Invandrarna 307) (“The ground is easy to break,” Karl Oskar said. “There isn’t any finer!” “You’ve found a nice place, Karl Oskar. It looks almost as nice as home in Duvemala.” . . . Karl Oskar . . . said the topsoil was as deep as the whip handle was long. He had measured all over – it was the same everywhere. “Such pretty flowers in the meadow,” she [Kristina] said.) [Unto a Good Land 234]

Karl Oskar’s main concern is to turn the land into fertile grounds for crops; Kristina’s is to establish a new home that can remind her of home in the old country. Together, they make the wilderness their own, although Kristina still longs for Sweden and only resolves her ambivalent

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existence within a spiritual realm. Karl Oskar, though, is content to have reclaimed his space and have made it useful: “Den säden skulle inte ha växt där, om han inte hade varit” (Sista brevet 347) [“Those crops would not have grown there if he hadn’t lived” (Last Letter 224)]. In this epic narrative, the process of how the immigrants settled into a new space and made use of it is summed up in the titles of the short introductions to each of the three volumes about their life in America: “Landet som tog emot dem” (Invandrarna 5) [The Land That Received Them], “Landet som de förvandlade” (Nybyggarna 7) [“The Land They Changed” (Settlers 7)], “Landet som förvandlade dem” (Sista brevet 5) [“The Land That Changed Them” (Last Letter xxxi)]. In the process of settling on and controlling the land, they themselves were changed and entered into a new relationship with it. But there is a problem: the tiller of the soil from the old world has not come to an empty space, although he thinks he has and the authorities tell him it is so. The emigrants from Europe have come to the land of the Native Americans: “Odlaren var kommen til nomadens land” (Nybyggarna 8) [“The tiller had come to the land of the nomad” (Settlers 7)], and thus there is an encounter between “två skilda sätt att leva” (Nybyggarna 8) [“two different ways of life” (Settlers 7)]. The immigrant turned American farmer, Karl Oskar, justifies his land-taking: “Här växte bara villgräs när jag kom hit! Va växer här nu? Grödor som livnär både oss själva å annra människor!” (Sista brevet 85) [“Only weeds grew here when I came! What grows here now? Crops to nourish us as well as others” (Last Letter 53–54)]. But the hunter Nöjd, a man situated between farmer and nomad, reminds him that all the land is stolen from the Native Americans. The two opposite views of land come into focus: indigenous people believe that man cannot own the land, and the farmer believes that using land to feed others entitles him to it. The greatness of Moberg’s representation is that it demonstrates the irresolvable opposition between the tiller of the soil who gets a second chance in the New World and the native nomad, whose space is invaded and exploited, without blaming either side. The author shows how the forces of history work. The characters in Rølvaag’s immigrant epic are pictured as they cross the plains of the Midwest and settle on the South Dakota prairie in the early 1870s. It is a story of taking land, and the Old Norse term landnám evokes the Norwegian settlement of Iceland in 874. Rølvaag’s novel is a story about people who start from scratch and turn the wild prairie into farms and livelihood for men. The presentation is broadly realistic but occasionally manifests some romantic streaks in that the prairie is both challenging and frightening, both inspiring and destructive. The project of the taking of land is, again, to turn the wilderness – i.e. the prairie – into a dwelling place for human beings while establishing social order. The two main characters of the epic represent two very different conceptions of life on the prairie. The woman, Beret, finds it frightening, “her er ikke noget at skjule sig bak!” (I de dage 34) [“here there was nothing even to hide behind” (Giants in the Earth 37)] and feels it is impossible to give birth to her child here. Per, her husband, finds it challenging and inspiring: “Inde i han Per Hansa sit væsen sprang der op sluser han ikke hadde visst av før; kraften i ham var utømmelig” (I de dage 41) [“As Per Hansa lay there dreaming of the future it seemed to him that hidden springs of energy, hitherto unsuspected even by himself, were welling up in his heart. He felt as if his strength were inexhaustible” (Giants 46)] and “Her var han bare saavidt kommet fram, og hadde allikevel faat mer sæd i jorda end noget andet aar” (46) [“Here he had barely

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arrived in a new country; yet already he had got more seed into the ground than in any previous year” (50)]. He engages the prairie from the very beginning and sets out to claim his place as a farmer and provider in the new land. Snowstorms on the prairie can be overcome like an ocean storm back home, and they are just one of many challenges to be conquered. Per Hansa domesticates the prairie by changing it from wilderness into home. But the one thing he cannot achieve is to have Beret share his vision. While Per changes the prairie, the prairie changes Beret by breaking down her sanity and emerges as a threat. Ironically, the result is that Per has to give up his life within this space while Beret has to continue her life there.

Figure 48.  One form of “settling” – taking land – in the cultivation of the South Dakota prairie. Photo: pzig98/Shutterstock

Nevertheless, when Per dies on the prairie, his female counterpart is able to assume the challenge of continuing to build the society in the place they had chosen. This process includes the second generation, her son Peder, and shows the isolated Norwegian-American rural community gradually becoming a part of the larger American society. Time and space thus emerge as decisive aspects. Their specific place with fields and farms widens to incorporate cultural space where language, culture, and religion, as they pertain to assimilation, are hotly debated in the immigrant community, and in its attention to this emerging ethnic pluralism the present essay differs in emphasis from Allen’s preceding essay with its emphasis on gendered metaphors of settling. The view that “du e norsk aa de e eiris” (Peder Seier 123) [“you are Norwegian and they are Irish” (Peder Victorious 113)] and “da gaar kje an aa ha kveita aa potates i samme bengen” (123) [“you can’t mix wheat and potatoes in the same bin” (114)] contrasts with “vi e no i Amerika, sir du!” (152) [“but we are living in America” (128)] and “Du og jeg er amerikanere. Hverken med paver eller andre potentater har vi noe at gjøre” (Rølvaag, Den signede dag 10) [“You and I are Americans, Charley. Popes and kings don’t mean a darn to us” (Their Fathers’ God 11)]. The landscape’s high sky and wide prairie as well as the larger society with varied ethnic groups and a strong emerging American identity set the stage. Scholars seem to agree that the opposition between the two prairie experiences in the first part of Rølvaag’s epic is a key to the interpretation, but they differ in terms of where to put the main emphasis when analyzing the work. In Prairies Within, Harold P. Simonson portrays it

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mainly as tragedy as evidenced in the book’s subtitle, The Tragic Trilogy of Ole Rölvaag, and states that “tragedy,” which is inherent in all existence, is “given special meaning in immigration and its consequences” (23), i.e. in dislocation and relocation. Paul Reigstad’s study Rölvaag: His Life and Art emphasizes the epic as a powerful tale of land taking and thus a promise of a new life. He points out that Beret eventually becomes “a daughter of the prairie” and that nothing “obliterates the import of the final symbol: Per Hansa’s body leaning against a haystack facing west” (124–25). In the second part when the expansive space has been conquered, the challenge is a larger social and cultural realm that is distinctly American and includes many other ethnic groups. Rølvaag’s position as a strong proponent of preserving the Norwegian heritage in America is reflected in his use of the immigrant language and in his concern about Norwegian-Americans within the larger American context. The characters differ in how they approach this space. Beret rejects it and therefore struggles constantly and not too successfully to include her Norwegian heritage in their prairie life. Her son Peder embraces it and feels strongly that the Midwest is his place, yet he still harbors a double perspective. While Moberg’s and Rølvaag’s epics fall within the genre of realistic novels, the Icelander Halldór Kiljan Laxness’s Paradísarheimt(1960; Paradise Reclaimed) is a naturalistic novel with utopian dimensions as well. Here, the actual landnám in 874 is directly referenced in that the story begins at the millennial anniversary celebration of the event at Þingvellir, the place of the ancient Icelandic parliament. The second historical strand is more personal: it recounts the experience of the Icelandic farmer, Eiríkur á Brúnum, who converted to Mormonism, traveled to Utah, and wrote briefly and disparagingly about his experiences in a text that Laxness read as a young man. The novel’s central figure is the farmer Steinar Steinsson who lives on a small homestead with an especially well-tended stone wall behind his house. When his children are about to have outgrown their childhood, Steinar meets a Mormon missionary during a visit to Copenhagen and subsequently becomes positively disposed to Mormonism. His conversion motivates his belief that he can find a new paradise in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. There he becomes very successful at making and laying the best bricks in town and makes enough money to pay the fare for his family to join him. They have, however, endured privation and the sexual abuse of the local sheriff. Their journey, moreover, is not without great disappointment: his wife dies at sea and his daughter is raped. After his daughter achieves a degree of social acceptance in Utah, however, Steinar, for various reasons, returns to Iceland by himself and once again settles in his old farmstead and begins rebuilding his once famous and beautiful, but now badly damaged, stone wall. The ending echoes Voltaire’s expression from Candide, “mais il faut cultiver notre jardin” (260) [but now we must cultivate our garden]. Here in a rugged Icelandic landscape Steinar is back exactly where he began. In between, he has reclaimed paradise, he is the man “sem heimti aftur Paradís og gaf hana börnum sínum” (Paradísarheimt 301) [“who reclaimed Paradise and gave it to his children” (254)]. Interpreting the end of the narrative, some readings might see his final position as a defeat of the immigrant’s search, with his eventual solitude back in Iceland undercutting the space achieved for his children in the New Land. This reading of the novel as a realistic story offers powerful images of poverty and class differences in Iceland at that time and a social critique that some believe coincides with much of his earlier writing with regard to place and time.

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Considering the utopian aspects of the narrative and the idea of the Promised Land, however, Laxness has pointed out that such a land “is not primarily of a geographical nature, although it might coincide with a geographical location” (Origins 3–4). By questioning the traditional and sometimes negative interpretations of the parallel conclusion of Candide as utter disillusionment and by pointing out the references to the concept of home in the title of the book, Steven P. Sondrup has argued that the “reclaimed paradise must be understood as a paradise that is brought home [heimta]” and is “an ideal but not an ideal place” (“Politics of Paradise” 79). Furthermore, at the conclusion of the book and with regard to Steinar’s enigmatic answer to the passer-by, Sondrup notes that “Steinar corrects himself insisting that he is a man who found a Paradise in finding the truth that is independent of facts and in finding the land where it lives that is independent of geography, typology, or location” (“Paradísarheimt” 3–5). The utopian aspect of the narrative implies that such a place cannot be limited to or defined as an actual location in space and time but also implies that it is not necessarily separated from facts, places, and reality. Throughout the book, the historical recollection of landnám through literary signposts like Landnámabók and Íslendingabók lends a scope of time as well as space to his endeavor. The works presented here offer three different narratives regarding the Nordic version of the great exodus from the Old World to the New during the nineteenth century. They are quite different from one another, but all tell stories of dislocation, of relocation, and of reclaiming space. Two of them – Moberg’s and Rølvaag’s epics – are realistic novels depicting historical, sociological, and psychological aspects of the emigration movement and establishment of a new life. Laxness’s work combines a documentary basis with an existential theme where migrating and reclaiming constitutes a circular movement. Contemporary migrant literature In contemporary Nordic migrant literature, a major difference in the representation of place is striking. Migrant literature is a complicated and contested term in the contemporary context but is here used simply to designate a new literary tradition emerging in the Nordic countries. It began in Sweden around 1970, in Norway in the mid-1980s, and in Denmark in the later 1980s and in all cases concurrent with the immigration into the respective countries. Migrant indicates that the writers are themselves immigrants, and they are mostly also “translingual,” i.e. they write in the language of their new homeland, a language other than their mother tongue or first language. Thus, they differ from the immigrant Rølvaag and his peers who mostly wrote in their native immigrant languages. The oeuvres of these contemporary writers are in a position to challenge the national canon as well as the traditional conceptions of place. My selection of texts here is limited to works by migrant writers in the Nordic countries since their oeuvres are most comparable to the Scandinavian-American works. The new multicultural writers – especially prominent in Sweden and represented by the highly successful Jonas Hassen Khemiri – who are actually first-generation authors born in Sweden but are often nonetheless incorrectly referred to as migrant writers are thus not included here. Homi Bhabha writes that “the Western metropole must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migrants and refugees” (9) because their narratives are now

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becoming part of the national identity. Although there are only minor elements of colonialism in Nordic history, immigrants have arrived, and their presence is mainly confined to urban centers as in the rest of Europe. Immigrants-turned-writers are translingual literary artists with a double perspective regarding culture and language as well as space; their narratives are about diversity and dislocation rather than of homogeneity and home. Edward Said writes of exiles – and many of these writers are exiles – that they, contrary to widely disseminated opinions, have a “plurality of vision” that “gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions” that he calls contrapuntal (186). In texts by Nordic migrant writers, this “contrapuntal” characteristic is expressed with the double perspective of space and location. The grand old man of Swedish belles lettres best known for depicting contemporary migrant experiences as well as transcultural and translingual movements is undoubtedly Theodor Kallifatides. Since his debut in 1969, just five years after he had immigrated to Sweden from Greece, his literary career has spanned more than forty years and forty books. A majority of his books are situated in the urban space of Stockholm, where streets, buildings, and locations are important points of orientation for his characters who are often, but not always, immigrants trying to find their place in the new homeland. In Kallifatides’s first novel, Utlänningar (1970; Foreigners), the young protagonist makes his way into the Swedish society by entering Centralen – the central railway station in the nation’s capital – by walking the streets, entering cafes, workplaces, restaurants, squares, etc. Finding one’s place in the new environment is described with details from the urban space within which this integration takes place, with frequent references back to the home city in Greece. Twenty-five years later, his novel Det sista ljuset (1995; The Last Light) deals with the generational motif frequent in transcultural fiction: the intrigues are played out in Rinkeby, the Stockholm suburb with the highest percentage of immigrants. The protagonist Odysseus reflects on his almost twenty-five years in Sweden and now tries to come to terms with his young son’s death, a destiny crushed between tradition and modernity. In his search for a foothold, Odysseus is claiming a space within this urban center while also constantly referring back to his home country in his attempt to hold onto his place and to control his own situation. In a book of essays and memoirs, Ett nytt land utanför mitt fönster (2001; A New Land Outside My Window), Kallifatides sums up his life and writing career; he begins by walking the streets of Stockholm and ends up situating himself between his two countries or spaces: Jag har inte blivit svensk, även om jag inte längre är den grek jag trodde att jag var. Jag är inte ens en främling till hundra procent. . . . Det finns stunder då jag känner mig naknare än när jag föddes. . . . Men det finns också stunder då jag känner en djup frid över att jag lärde mig älska något annat än det som var mig givet. (154–55) (I have not become Swedish even though I am no longer the Greek I thought I was. I am not even a total stranger. . . . There are times when I feel more naked than when I was born. . . . But there are times when I feel a profound peace for having learned to love something other than what was given me.)

Kallifatides and many of his protagonists have claimed their space within the urban environment in their new homeland while simultaneously harboring a double perspective, most often spanning Stockholm and Athens. There are also numerous references to Greek history and

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mythology that create extra spatial and temporal realms in Kallifatides’s works. The bottom line seen in the end of his essay is that a new life and new space have been conquered. Other important migrant writers in Sweden are two women who have gained significant prominence in contemporary Swedish literature. Fateme Behros, quoted at the beginning of this essay, reveals the same double perspective in her texts that position her characters and protagonists between the cities of homeland and new country as does Kallifatides. Here, however, the reference is to Tabriz (in northern Iran) and Uppsala. In her debut novel, Som ödet vill (1997; As Fate Demands), a political appropriation weaves the protagonist into the fabric of Swedish society: “Någon hade skjutit Olof Palme. . . . Jag hade förlorat min beskyddare och var nu både faderlös och hjälplös. . . . Han hade lämnat mig, oss och Sverige, vi bar på samma sorg” (338) [Someone had shot Olof Palme. . . . I had lost my protector and was now both fatherless and helpless. . . . He had left me, us and Sweden; we were burdened with the same grief]. The reference is to the 1986 assassination of the Prime Minister Olof Palme whose Social Democratic politics helped define the Swedish welfare state. He opposed dictators of many sorts and supported oppressed peoples, so immigrants to Sweden looked up to him as a protector and guarantor that there was a place for them as well. The protagonist attaches herself to Palme as a symbol of a society where she can find her place. In Fångarnas kör (2001; The Prisoners’ Choir), Behros presents a story of female emancipation. The narrative concerns a young Iranian immigrant woman’s development as she endeavors to honor the customary values of her own cultural background. Through experiences both tragic and happy in her new liberal homeland, she proceeds toward a new self-reliance. The protagonist Shabtab moves within the urban space of the rather small city of Uppsala with its pleasant city square, shops, cafes, and institutions like schools and libraries on her journey towards her newfound independence. Throughout, she refers back to her hometown and family, thus representing the double perspective that is the basic structural element of the narrative. Said’s concept of the contrapuntal is valid here as well; the Iranian voice in the form of references to concepts, beliefs, places, and history in the protagonist’s homeland is present in the Swedish language. And Shabtab’s effort to find her place in her new homeland involves situating herself within the confines of the city. A cultural appropriation of Moberg and his narrative about Swedes in America also attaches her to the new country and culture. She compares herself to its heroine, Kristina: “Jag var djupt tagen av denna kvinnans upplevelser i främmande land. Vi delade saknad och längtan” (Fångarnas 341) [I was deeply moved by this woman’s experiences in a foreign country. We shared loss and longing]. This view juxtaposes the historic emigration from Sweden to North America with the contemporary immigration to Sweden. The book closes with the protagonist, or modern heroine, reconnecting with her mother in Iran by telephone and getting her tea ready in her small apartment in Uppsala: “Jag lade på luren och satte på nytt tevatten. Te och te och te. Iranier och te, det hör ihop” (351) [I hung up and put the kettle on. Tea and tea and tea. Iranians and tea belong together]. She has now established a firm relationship with her new place, and from that position she can safely reconnect with her Iranian family and her background. In Älskar du någon annan? (2002; Do You Love Somebody Else?), novelist and essayist Azar Mahloujian tells a bitter-sweet love story in which chapters set in Teheran and Stockholm alternate and thus contrast the two urban centers that shape the development of the relationship.

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The sinister Iranian capital with its suppression, secret police, and prisons has led to the couple’s breakup and exile. When the man and the woman meet again after several years in the peaceful capital of Sweden, the past cannot be restored. But the female protagonist has established a new life within the multicultural urban center of Stockholm, where she has been able to turn her own background as an exile into a job as an interpreter for asylum seekers, and she also lectures about ethics in translation for future interpreters. She thus contributes necessary knowledge about her homeland to contemporary Swedish society. With exile as a major theme in Mahloujian’s writings, she adds a new dimension to place and space described in Nordic literature in her reportage Vi lyser som guld (2006; We Shine Like Gold), which deals with the Parsees, i.e. Zoroastrians who fled from Persia to India twelve hundred years ago. They are still very much of a diaspora keeping their history and memories alive and adhering to their religion and identity. In this case, the writer studies the concept of exile, here in India with ancient Persia as background. Having fled from modern Iran, she is well prepared to compare it to her own present-day experience of exile in Sweden. In Norwegian literature, the Czech Michael Konupek migrated to Norway in 1977 and debuted as a Norwegian writer in 1986. In his second novel I sin tid (1993; In Its Own Time), he tells the story of a young Czech and his new life as an immigrant or exile in Oslo in the late 1970s and 1980s while reflecting on his life in Prague as backdrop. With its broken chronology and double perspective, it is thematically as well as structurally reminiscent of Kallifatides’s early novel Utlänningar. The text consists of many interconnected narratives from the narrator’s childhood in the early 1950s to the watershed year of 1989. These narratives develop around probing considerations of place and time. Location and dislocation are politically and psychologically basic elements of the protagonist’s development and quest for identity as well as of his understanding of love, exile, and existence. They all converge in the end: “Alt opplevd, forlanger plutselig å få tildelt sine ord. Særlig alle de crazy bastards fra den tiden da han gikk omkring og kjærlighetssultet i Kristiania” (231) [Everything that had been experienced suddenly demands to be put into words. Especially all the crazy bastards from the time he walked around and starved for love in Kristiania]. The narrator and protagonist anchor their narrative in his new home in Oslo and in its social, literary, and cultural history with the intertextual reference to the opening paragraph of Knut Hamsun’s Sult (1890; Hunger). The novel also hints at a global framework of multilingualism. The story is deeply rooted in both past and present urban space. Actual places in his home city of Prague (in the novel called “the city in the heart of Europe”) as well as political turning points ground the story. These include the café Nihilisten (the actual meeting place of the political dissidents), the place where the young student immolated himself as a political protest in early 1969 (outside the National Museum), the Old Town square with the monument to Jan Hus (who was burned at the stake as a heretic), and the Karls-Brücke (Charles Bridge). The year of the invasion in 1968 is also referenced. It is worth noting the convergence of political and historical aspects with concrete elements like houses and squares. The novel’s setting in Oslo is framed on one end by the 1977 arrival of the protagonist and on the other by the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. Throughout, the narrator and protagonist Thomas Klapste’s project is to reestablish himself in the new homeland. An important part of that effort involves conquering the new urban space that is now his habitat in Oslo. Streets and crossroads, park and forest, the

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Old Town – they are all important points of attachment. In fact, it is in the main street of Oslo that he finally realizes that his life is actually in Norway. The many narratives of locations and dislocations in time and place as defining structural elements make up this tale of exile and of gradual integration into Norwegian society. The ending of the book takes place right after the watershed year of 1989 when the narrator walks down the main street in Oslo looking for a friend to talk to: Men istedenfor en interessert samtalepartner har han fått en surrende flue i neven. . . . Det er solskinn og fullt kaos på Karl Johan. Han åpner neven, og i samme øyeblikk misunner han fluen at den har noen få høstlige dager igjen å leve i Oslo. Tenk å leve i Norge! Og så blir han plutselig klar over at også han lever i Norge. Hver gang han klarer å rive seg løs fra fortiden og drømmene, noe som ikke skjer særlig ofte, lever han i Norge. Han blir glad ved tanken. (Konupek 238) (But instead of an interesting conversation partner, he has caught a buzzing fly in his hand. . . . It is a sunny day, and there is complete chaos on Karl Johan [Boulevard]. He opens his closed fist, and in that very moment, he envies the fly for having a few fall days left to live in Oslo. Imagine living in Norway! And then he suddenly realizes that he too lives in Norway. Whenever he manages to tear himself away from the past and his dreams, something that does not happen very often, he lives in Norway. The very thought of it makes him happy.)

Thus, the story ends right in the midst of the urban space of the nation’s capital. Having lived out his twelve-odd years in Oslo continuously negotiating between past and present – between the two urban spaces – the protagonist seems to have finally relocated and reclaimed a space, and that is in his new homeland of Norway. The sight of his sleeping children also strongly helps to anchor him. A Danish example of literature reflecting a movement across borders is the writings of Rubén Palma. Having left Chile in the tumultuous year of 1973, he arrived in Denmark in 1974 and debuted as a Danish writer in the mid-1980s. He is one of very few migrant writers in Denmark to have achieved any kind of recognition. He writes in many genres – short stories, novels, poetry, plays – and his collection of short stories, Fra lufthavn til lufthavn – og andre indvandrerfortællinger (2001; From Airport to Airport – and Other Immigrant Stories) has been translated and published in the United States as The Trail We Leave (2004). These stories reflect the exile existence in bridging Santiago and Copenhagen. They are highly contrapuntal texts as Said defines the concept and deal with finding space in the new country of exile, which one eventually realizes will be a permanent place of residence. In the long title story of the collection, the airport metaphor is used to designate the transitional or in-between space. Palma is at the Santiago airport after a visit to his native country, on his way back to Denmark where he lives. He reflects on the past and present while trying to recapture and understand his Chilean past as well as attempting to make sense of his present life in Denmark. The story ends as he descends into the Copenhagen airport, characterized as “Smukt syn” (176) [“Beautiful sight” (152)], thus indicating his attachment to his new home. Chile and Denmark – Santiago and Copenhagen – are the two anchors of his dislocation and relocation with the new country now seemingly claimed as his home. The initial story in the collection, “Santiago, sommervarmen og det hinsides” [“Santiago, the Summer Heat and the Hereafter”] is framed by introductory and concluding sentences that

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emphasize the twofold view of the migrant: “Santiagos grusomme sommersol fulgte mig hele vejen til min barndoms mest fortryllende sted” (7) [“Santiago’s terrible summer sun followed me all the way to my childhood’s most secret place of enchantment” (3)] and “Havde det altid været så varmt i Santiago?” (15) [“Had it always been so warm in Santiago?” (10)]. In his childhood park, the protagonist notices a tiny memorial commemorating a tragic and sudden death; such memorials were customarily believed to perform miracles. The narrator visiting his homeland after many years in Denmark is surprised that he had never noticed it before. This experience leads to reflections on the differences between the rational and secular Denmark and the spiritual and Catholic Chile, as well as on his changing perspective. The beginning and end of the story stress his current Danish reaction to the heat while the rest of the text moves in the space between the different cultural discourses and expresses the complexity in this identity formation, although Danish is now his perspective and Denmark is his space. The two narratives demonstrate how time and space are constituent aspects in the migrant’s transnational movement. In the final story of the collection, “En engels kys” (“An Angel’s Kiss”), his reclaiming of space in his new home city of Copenhagen is measured out in different time sequences but is attached to the same location: Hun var en engel, da hun pludselig stod foran mig den nat i slutningen af august 1974. . . . Jeg tror, at der gik hele tre år, før jeg atter så hende. På Nørreport station. . . . Den tredje gang jeg så hende, atter på Nørrebro, havde jeg boet næsten fem år i Danmark. . . . Og derfor, når jeg kommer hjem, vil jeg se ud af mit vindue, mod Nørrebrogade. . . . for mere end tyve år siden. . . . (178–90) (She was an angel when, suddenly, she stood before me that night at the end of August in 1974. . . . I think it was at least a full three years before I saw her again. At Nørreport Station. . . .

Figure 49.  Another form of “settling” – claiming place – in the Nørrebro neighborhood of Copenhagen.

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The third time I saw her, again in Nørrebro, I had lived nearly five years in Denmark. . . . And so, when I get home, and I’ll look out of my window toward Nørrebro Street. . . . more than twenty years ago.) [156–66]

The metaphor of the airport in Palma’s stories designates the transitional space, but in these scenes in the concluding story of the collection, the narrator measures out his twenty some years in Denmark from the perspective of his reclaimed place at Nørrebro, the densely immigrant-populated part of Copenhagen. Conclusion The contemporary texts discussed here add a cosmopolitical perspective to recent Scandinavian literature. Several of these writers have backgrounds in countries where political conflicts brought them to Nordic shores in the first place, conflicts that received international news attention at the time, i.e. the overthrow of Allende in Chile in 1973 as background for Palma’s exile, the turbulent years in then-Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and ’70s as Konupek’s past, and the political upheavals in Iran as a backdrop for the accounts of Behros and Mahloujian. These places enter the Scandinavian realm with authors bringing their double perspectives and contrapuntal discourses into Nordic literature and thus the Nordic societies. In their cultural and political appropriations, these writers demonstrate how they try to reclaim a sense of place for themselves in their new societies. A political appropriation with parallels in many novels by immigrant writers in Sweden is found in Behros’s reference to Olof Palme, a symbol of the generous Swedish society and a hero for immigrants and exiles. The first striking difference between the emigrant epics of the Scandinavian-American emigration to North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the works by and about immigrants to the Nordic countries in the last four decades is the choice of language. Norwegian-American writers like their counterparts in other European immigrant groups chose mainly their mother tongues when writing about a new existence in America and thus addressed their fellow immigrants and readers in their countries of origin. They had a reading public in the concentrated settlements in the Midwest where churches, schools, and newspapers were also important elements in the ethnic communities. The literature written depicted their struggles to establish their lives in new places and contexts; outcomes were both happy and tragic and mostly somewhere in between. The contemporary novels are instead written mainly in the languages of the new homelands, i.e. Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, so the new translingual, transnational writers and their texts are part of the general literary public sphere in those countries. These books most often deal with topics of identity negotiations, double perspectives, and integration. The second striking difference has to do with time and context, the rural “land taking” in older times versus the urban “place claiming” in contemporary texts. The immigrants to America most often came to open space, and they needed to work hard on the land to make a place for themselves. They changed it in order to make it their own, to take control of it, and make a living off it. The contemporary migrant writers in the Nordic countries come to an

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urban space where they have to try to fit in and anchor their translingual and transcultural personae by communicating with the new place and appropriating it for themselves. The similarities are the basic human experiences of dislocation and relocation depicted in the narratives discussed. In all of them, there are underlying concepts of both “freedom from” and “freedom to” in their search for a space that can be a place of realization.

Radical utopianism among Nordic immigrant authors Thomas A. DuBois

For a nineteenth-century Nordic populace, still overwhelmingly agrarian in culture as well as economy, the prospect of plentiful available farmland on the American frontier proved a powerful, nearly irresistible, attraction. In terms of the percentage of the source population, the Nordic countries – particularly Norway – became among the most prominent contributors to the mass migration that settled and populated the lands of the United States. Just as enticing, however – in the eyes of a populace long accustomed to rigid class boundaries, limited freedom of movement, and entrenched resistance to social change – were the ideological claims of the New World: the much touted liberty, equality, and justice for all that American statecraft proclaimed as its singular innovation in human society. Inspired Scandinavians rushed to become a part of this new social experiment. When they found it lacking or embattled in their adopted country, they rolled up their sleeves to set things right. Perhaps more than any other population of immigrants to North America, Scandinavians became part of the liberal, even radical, project of making America’s finest dreams a reality. The following describes a handful of the many literary figures who arose from among the mass of Nordic immigrants to work towards a utopian vision of the United States as a place of fairness, equal opportunity, and human compassion. Whether they wrote in English and aimed their arguments at a broad cross-section of American society, or continued to use their Nordic native languages to address a smaller but potentially more cohesive polity of fellow immigrants, these intellectuals reshaped forever American political and social history creating blueprints for a social welfare state that would eventually find realization in the countries they had left behind, among a populace that read their works as a voice calling in the wilderness, a cry for reform emanating from the distant shores of America. As scholars of Nordic emigration have widely shown, the Great Migration as it unfolded in Scandinavia was a phenomenon facilitated and often driven by popular literacy. Lutheran Scandinavians – possessed of reading and writing skills far surpassing those of other peasant populations elsewhere in Europe – read about America through pamphlets and traveler memoirs and determined to join the emigrants’ ranks. Once abroad, they sent home letters detailing the practical and cultural experiences they had undergone. They wrote and performed songs that chronicled their experience and shared these through broadsides, songbooks, and community performances. They created newspapers that reported the news of America and of the homeland and gave space to serialized novels, polemical essays, and reviews of local performances or performers. In many ways, the immigrant literary scene reflected a broader range of class and political identities than that produced within the Nordic countries themselves, where access to print was more stringently controlled by formal and informal mechanisms of privileging, censorship, and exclusion. As Dag Blanck points out in a survey of titles available through Swedish-American bookstores and presses, the vast majority of literary works available to Swedish Americans during the latter decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth were works written and originally published in Sweden (134–39). Such is not surprising, given the vast difference doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.36dub © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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in magnitude between populations of readers within the Nordic region and their satellite communities in the New World. This natural tendency toward imported literature, along with the dominance of conservative Lutheran cultural institutions in Scandinavian-American education

Figure 50.  Title page of Aakkosia Sosialistien Lapsille (Socialist Alphabet for Children), published by Finnish-Americans in Massachusetts.

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and intellectual life would suggest that left-oriented literary works would find relatively little distribution or readership in the United States. Several factors challenge this assumption, however. First, as David Kirby points out, the labor movement in Scandinavia – particularly that of Norway and Finland – was strikingly rural in both membership and outlook. Where socialist ideas in more industrialized parts of Europe took hold on factory floors and in urban communities, Nordic socialism often focused on rural issues like landlessness and rural poverty. It translated these into a potent political movement that advocated for voter suffrage, land reform, and social welfare. Many Scandinavian emigrants came from areas that were most economically challenged and, thus, most given to socialist leanings. Second, as the biographies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Nordic radicals like the Norwegian Marcus Thrane, Danish Louis Pio, and Finnish Matti Kurikka illustrate, the United States became a haven for idealists whose radical ideas proved untenable in their homelands (Leiren Marcus Thrane; Wild 27–34; Øverland 89–91; Lovoll 83–89). Coming to the United States as political refugees, these writers used their adopted country’s freedom of the press as a new opportunity for literary production, creating a radical and often stridently anticlerical voice in opposition to the conservative line put forward by Scandinavian-American church officials and educators. Finnish-American historian Art Jura sums up the effects of these factors, writing: “[R]eference to socialistic movements may seem disturbing to some of Finnish descent, after a hundred years of acculturation, but it is none the less true. All of my own grandparents were socialists, and nearly all of the Finns that I recall from my childhood [in Maine] came from socialistic roots” (108). Perhaps no immigrant intellectual in the history of Norwegian America so epitomized the radical potential of an American life as Marcus Thrane (Bjørklund, Leiren). In an immigrant world shaped by agrarian ideals, Lutheran piety, and earnest hard work, Thrane became a strident voice for “free thinking” (i.e. agnosticism), social reform, flippant humor, and urban life. Born in Christiania in 1817, Thrane witnessed in his childhood the economic fragility of nineteenth-century Norwegian city life. In 1848, at the age of thirty-one, he founded Norway’s first union, eventually becoming the editor of the organization’s first newspaper, Arbeiderforeningernes Blad (The Paper of the Workers’ Union). Together with hundreds and soon thousands of his fellow countrymen, he worked to present a petition to the Swedish King Oscar II addressing the various social ills of the day and calling for universal male suffrage, reform of conscription laws, improved schools, and land redistribution, all of which eventually resulted in abortive plans for a coup (Bjørklund 58–61). In 1851, he was arrested and spent seven years in prison for his radical activities, during which time the movement that had become synonymous with his name subsided. In 1864, he immigrated to the United States, coming eventually to settle in Chicago, a “center of immigrant radicalism” of his day (Lovoll 83) and a hotbed of Scandinavian resistance to the conservative pietism that held sway in many rural Scandinavian-American communities. His initial act in his new home was to found a newspaper – Marcus Thrane’s Norske Amerikanerne (Marcus Thrane’s Norwegian Americans), which was intended to provide a further, more progressive voice in the mix of newly-established Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish papers that had sprung up in the 1850s and ’60s in imitation of the German-American press, including Hemlandet (The Homeland), Svenska Amerikanaren (The Swedish American), Fremad (Forward), Nordisk Folkeblad (Nordic People’s Paper), Skandinaven (The Scandinavian), Fœdrelandet (The Fatherland), and Emigranten (The

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Emigrant) (Lovoll 72–84). Thrane also founded a theatrical company under the ambitious title of the Norwegian National Theater (Øverland 89), a first Norwegian foray into a genre that was unfamiliar to many Scandinavian immigrants of rural background but which would eventually become crucially important to the cultural life of Scandinavian-American communities throughout the United States. Thrane’s various plays, ably recovered for an American scholarly readership through Leiren’s 2007 translations, staged for their audiences a lively mix of satire, social critique, and humor. Chicago dramatic companies would eventually take on tremendously ambitious undertakings, including the world premier of Ibsen’s Gengangere (Ghosts) in 1882 (Øverland 93) and worked to keep immigrant theatergoers up to date regarding the dramatic activities of the Old Countries, while also serving up memorable portrayals of the New. Thrane, for his part, went on to start a new paper in 1869: Dagslyset (The Light of Day), a vehicle for Chicago’s Skandinaviske Fritænkerforening (Scandinavian Free Thinkers’ Society) and eventually a catalyst in the 1871 founding of the Scandinavian Section  4, a Norwegian branch of the International Workingmen’s Association (Lovoll 87). Dagslyset would in time become folded into the Danish socialist paper, Den Nye Tid (The New Time), edited by Thrane’s friend and associate the Danish socialist Louis Pio (88). Subscribers to the paper were offered as a premium a copy of Thrane’s merciless send-up of Norwegian Lutheran ministers, Wisconsinbiblen (1881; The Wisconsin Bible) (88). In deft and comical handling of biblical diction and phrasing, Thrane lays bare the smugness, hypocrisy, and arrogance of various ministers and bishops in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, identifying each by name. Chapter 8 of the work presents the preaching of the Westerheim prophet Tubalcain, parodying Christian teaching as well as Old Testament wisdom literature. Illustrating the moral failings of the ministers of the upper Midwest, whose practice of Christianity falls far short of the ideal, Tubalcain declares: Store Indkomster med Retfærdighed er bedre end smaa Indkomster med Uretfærdighed. Bedre et Hus fuldt af slagtet (Kvæg), naar Rolighed er derhos, end en tør Mundbid med Trætte. Hvo som gjengiver Ondt med Ondt, han skal blive frygtet, og alle skulle lade ham være i Fred; men, hvo som gjengiver Ondt med Godt, han vil holdes for en Daare, og alle Naboer ville benytte sig af ham. (Thrane 21) (Large incomes with righteousness are better than small incomes with unrighteousness. Better a house full of slaughtered beasts (cattle), in which serenity reigns, than a dry mouthful with quarreling. He who returns evil with evil will be feared, and everyone will leave him in peace; but he who returns evil with good will be considered a fool and all his neighbors will take advantage of him.)

The book ends in a grand and gloating feast shared by the corrupt ministers, described in humorous detail and including, of course, plentiful coffee. Thrane notes: “Men Herren saa i Naade til Kaffe-Drikningen” (64) [But the Lord looked with mercy upon their coffee drinking]. Thrane’s wry parody enjoyed many reprintings but almost always ended up the victim of minister-led book burnings. Matti Kurikka’s career followed a comparable trajectory in the Finnish-American context some thirty years later (Wild 27–45). Born in 1863, and raised and educated in Finland, Kurikka began to develop his unique combination of socialism, radical Christianity, theosophism, and Tolstoyan ideas when he took over the editorship of the Finnish socialist newspaper Työmies

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(Working Man) in 1897. This was the era of Russification in czarist Finland, in which a combination of social progressivism and Finnish cultural nationalism became a powerful draw among Finnish intellectuals. Kurikka’s increasingly provocative anticlerical and socialist plays and essays stepped beyond what most Finns were comfortable with at the time and soon led to an end of his marriage and the decision to emigrate in 1899 to Australia, where he journeyed with a band of like-minded colonists to create a commune under the name Kalevan Kansa (People of Kaleva), a reference to Lönnrot’s Kalevala. The Finnish emigrants hoped to create a harmonious Finnish society in the wilds of Queensland free of the corrupting influences of state and religious authorities. Financial difficulties led to the ruin of the colony, however, and Kurikka was soon invited by a group of idealist Finnish immigrants to Canada to found a similar commune in British Columbia. The island community Sointula (Place of Harmony) resulted and gave rise as well to Kurikka’s founding of the first Finnish-language newspaper in Canada, Aika (Time) in 1900. Kurikka would continue to move during his subsequent career, supporting himself through newspaper editorships, essays, and utopian visions. Kurikka’s utopianism was, like many utopian visions, chiefly an intellectual engagement: invariably, when his plans were put into action they proved a failure doomed by the imperfections of human nature and Kurikka’s own combative manner. Yet such is not to say that they were not inspirational or influential in the Finnish diaspora: Kurikka and his comrades sought earnestly to establish on earth the concrete manifestations of a just society by bringing the principles of socialism contained in essays and tracts into the lived world of the American frontier, just as their Christian counterparts tried to bring forth a new Jerusalem in the new land. That their scripture was modern, scientific, and authored by ordinary men made it that much more exciting to adherents, who looked to relegate to the past the clerical strictures and reactionary political stances of their ethnic group’s often fierce and disapproving religious leaders. For writers like Kurikka, religion was part of the Old World; socialism was part of the New. The newspaper that Kurikka established soon found counterparts throughout North America. The Finnish immigrant and second-generation populace  – still strongly reliant on Finnish as a language of daily communication and intellectual discussion – were thrilled by the prospect of creating a Finnish-language press a half-century after the establishment of similar organs among Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes. Finnish socialist and social democratic newspapers in particular would flourish in North America, including Amerikan Työmies (American Worker) and Eteenpäin (Forward) in New York, Raivaaja (Pioneer) in Fitchburg, MA, Toveri (Comrade) in Astoria, Oregon, Vapaa Sana (Free Word) in Toronto, Ontario, and Työmies (Worker) in Hancock, Michigan (later Superior, Wisconsin). With circulations at their heights in the tens of thousands, these newspapers created a thriving network of socialist information that united Finns in the United States, Canada, Australia, Finland, Sweden, and the Soviet Union. While presenting Finnish and local news from a socialist perspective, they also included reports of concerts, dramatic performances, and lectures, and often carried serialized novels or stories by favorite leftist authors. They sought to convey the culture of the working class in an affordable and popular medium that could reach every household with an interest in socialist ideals and a command of the Finnish language. Helmi Mattson rode to fame on the back of this new, transnational medium. Born Helmi Dagmar Lampila, she immigrated to Canada in 1911, eventually moving to Astoria, Oregon,

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where she came to edit the women’s complement to Toveri, aptly entitled Toveritar (Female Comrade) (Vähämäki 40). As editor, she filled her pages with essays, news stories, and occasional creative works of her own, including poetry, numerous plays, and a dozen serialized novels. Written in short vignettes – a literary technique made popular by Juhani Aho and called ever after lastuja [shavings] – Mattson’s novels, like her plays, poke fun at the rich and mighty of her new country as well as the foibles of her transplanted countrymen. Contemporary politics comes in for round and merciless critique, as do religious leaders of virtually every ilk. Writing for an audience mostly of women, Mattson creates strong female characters who learn to take charge of their lives through education and class consciousness. Pauloihin kierretty (1949; Caught in a Trap) depicts Finnish immigrant women in a wide array of typical, low-paying jobs, including textile factory work, domestic service, and waitressing. The novel’s male characters, similarly, are engaged in the typical duties of Finnish men of the Pacific Northwest: fishing, logging, and tradeswork. Mattson describes romance between these polities sympathetically with an eye toward everyday details. Of the women she writes: Raumalan talon suuressa istumahuoneessa iltasin seurustelivat kutomotehtaassa työssä käyvät naiset, jotka olivat nuoria, terveitä ja punaposkisia, äskettäin maahan saapuneita siirtolaisia. Kahvipannu porisi myötäänsä keittiössä, jossa tytöt vuorottaisin emännöivät, laitellen ruokaa illaksi itselleen. Raumalan misis piti tyttöjä talossaan asumassa sopimuksella, että jokainen saa keittää omat ateriansa, siivota ruoka-astiansa, suorittaa kaiken ruokahommansa ja myöskin makuuhuoneensa puhdistuksen. Emäntä katsoi kaiken perään, että asiat talossa kulkivat hyvässä järjestyksessä ja siisteys ja kuri pysyi moitteettomana. (34) (In the big living room of the Raumala boarding house, women who worked in the textile factory, young, healthy, and red-cheeked, newly arrived immigrants, kept company with each other. A coffee pot brewed in the kitchen, where the girls took charge by turns, fixing food for themselves for the evening. Mrs. Raumala allowed girls to stay at her house on the condition that each cooked her own meals, did her dishes, cleaned up after herself, and kept her bedroom picked up as well. The lady of the house made certain that everything in the household went according to order and that cleanliness and discipline were maintained irreproachably.)

And of the men: Metsämiehet, lokarit, nuo tunnetut metsien pojat, palasivat kaupunkiin Washingtonin metsistä. Suurin osa painoi suoraan tuttuun Luhti-Marjattan kapakkaan, jonka metsän työmuurahaiset tiesivät reiluksi paikaksi tarjoilun puolesta. Mutta siellä kerrottiin olevan myös vaarana, että kaikkein nopeammin pääsi lähtemään takaisin metsiin, kun pussi dollareista tyhjentyi huimaavalla vauhdilla. (68) (The woodsmen, the loggers, those familiar forest men returned to the city from the forests of Washington. The bulk of them headed straight for Luhti-Marjatta’s bar, that the worker ants of the forest knew as a reliable place to get served. But they also spoke of the danger of having to return to the forest that much quicker, once one’s bag of dollars had been emptied with dizzying speed.)

Writers like Mattson could rely on a burgeoning network of amateur dramatic societies and “Finn halls” for reception and performance of their dramatic works. Finnish American theater has been well studied as a social phenomenon (Mattila, Sundstén, Riippa, Roe). On the

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other hand, its original plays – added to a standard repertoire imported from Finland, such as Minna Canth’s social realist works (Wargelin-Brown) – have received relatively little scholarly attention. While Nordic-language publications enjoyed notable success in radical households and settlements, some of the most significant products of Scandinavian-American radicalism were written in English. These texts were often works of nonfiction but characteristically display an artistry of persuasive argument, irony, and polemic that stood in stark contrast to the more staid writings of the Yankee press. Scandinavian-American intellectuals used their status as outsider observers to call attention to the abuses and hypocrisy of the Anglo-American social establishment and the injustices it countenanced. Perhaps the most significant work written by any Scandinavian in the history of the United States is How the Other Half Lives, a scathing photojournalistic exposé of the injustices of the tenement system in New York’s Lower Manhattan, published by the Danish immigrant Jacob Riis in 1890. Riis’s work helped create a taste and market for a brand of investigative reporting that later disgruntled critics would label “muck-raking,” helping establish newspaper journalism as an important catalyst for concrete social reform. Riis also saw the power of photography as a tool for journalistic writing by drawing on the penchant for photographic documentation of current events that had developed during the Civil War and especially in connection with the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. For Riis, place is a material reality, an environment whose wholesomeness or corruption uplifts or degrades its denizens. In his text, Riis attributes the woes of New York’s Lower East Side to two main factors: on the one hand, the rapidity and unprecedented magnitude of nineteenth-century migration – a process which had engulfed and ultimately overwhelmed the once-orderly streets and houses of eighteenth-century New York – and on the other hand, the callous greed of unbridled capitalism. In delineating the effects of these processes with a clinical eye, Riis seeks to disabuse his audience of a favorite exculpatory option: the assertion that such developments have occurred without their being noticed by the city’s leaders or citizens of standing. In fact, Riis argues, the realities of the squalor and injustice of the tenement system have been abundantly clear to New Yorkers for decades as documented in official reports, court transcripts, and the exhortations of charitable institutions. In this light, How the Other Half Lives does not portray itself as educating a heretofore-ignorant public, but rather as indicting the knowing reader for past complicity in a manifest and now undeniable injustice. The facts and figures that Riis marshals to his argument, along with his unvarnished descriptions of deplorable conditions, close off plausible deniability as a mitigating response. In this sense, How the Other Half Lives differs little from the work of avowedly fictive Modern Breakthrough authors like Ibsen and Canth. Whereas Riis illustrates the significance that an eloquent immigrant writer could have in the volatile political environment of the late nineteenth century, Thorstein Bunde Veblen represents a prime example of the participation of American-born Scandinavian Americans in their new nation’s halls of learning (Griffin). Born in Cato, Wisconsin in 1857, Veblen soon moved with his family to Nerstrand, Minnesota, a farming community made up primarily of Norwegian immigrants. Fired by a profound dislike of conservative religiosity, Veblen marked his intention to move beyond the Norwegian community by attending the anglophone Carlton

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College for his undergraduate studies, rather than enrolling in any of the Scandinavian sectarian colleges that had emerged in the upper Midwest by his day. He continued his studies at Johns Hopkins University, Yale, and Cornell, studying with some of the most influential economists and philosophers of his day. In 1891 he took up a post at the University of Chicago, where he produced his most influential work, Theory of the Leisure Class. Coining the term “conspicuous consumption,” Veblen argued that business owners constituted a wasteful and parasitic class benefitting unfairly from the labor and ingenuity of subordinated workers and engineers. The profits of others’ hard work were frittered away in acts of luxurious self-indulgence that could not be tolerated by any just society. Veblen would develop his ideas further in numerous later works, offering a distinctive theory of evolutionary economics that would stand as a counterpart and partial challenge to Marxist theory. Veblen’s professional career reflects the challenges that radical intellectuals could face in American higher education: overt or covert disapproval of his ethnic roots, agnostic religious outlook, and/or marital indiscretions led to difficulties retaining academic posts. During his career, Veblen moved between appointments at the University of Chicago, Stanford, the University of Missouri, and the New School for Social Research, an institution that he helped found. Where Riis and Veblen contributed to progressive action among the American social elite, numerous other first- and second-generation Scandinavian-Americans aimed at transforming the consciousness of the working class. As Archie Green and colleagues have shown, the American Labor movement – and particularly the work of the union called the International Workers of the World, (founded in Chicago in 1905) – made abundant and ample use of popular song. IWW members composed hymns in praise of the ideals of worker solidarity and enfranchisement and jaunty ditties that exposed the abuses and injustices of corporate America to all who would listen. Some of the best-known Scandinavians in the ranks of the IWW – e.g., Joe Hill, a.k.a. Joel Emmanuel Hägglund (Gibbs M. Smith; Söderström) and T-bone Slim, a.k.a. Matt Valentine Huhta (Leary 6) – composed and performed their works entirely in English. As Smith notes in his biography of Hill, in fact, the great labor singer had little interest in celebrating or even acknowledging his Swedish roots. Writing in response to a request for autobiographical details in 1915, the imprisoned Hill declared: Biography you say? No. Let’s not spoil good writing paper with such nonsense – Only the here and now is of concern to me. I am “a citizen of the world” and I was born on a planet called the earth. The exact spot where first I saw the light of day is of such slight importance that it deserves no comment. (153)

Others, however, wrote and performed for the great masses of their fellow Scandinavian Americans for whom Nordic languages were still primary and beloved vehicles of communication. As James P. Leary shows, the Nordic-language component of this literature is still surprisingly overlooked both in American scholarship and in Nordic.1 IWW songbooks emerged in various Nordic languages, sometimes containing translations of English-language songs but sometimes also including works composed originally in Nordic languages. Leary 1.

I am grateful to James P. Leary for his guidance and input in this article, particularly in connection with his research specialization, Scandinavian-American workers’ songs.

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has documented an IWW Skandinavisk Sång Bok (IWW Scandinavian Song Book) published by the Skandinaviska Propaganda Gruppen (Scandinavian Propaganda Group) of Seattle, Washington, a 1915 Työväen laulukirja (Working Class Songbook) produced in Astoria, Oregon by Lännen Työväen kustannusyhtiö, as well as a follow-up Uusi Työväen laulukirja (New Working Class Songbook) produced by Työmies Kustannusyhtiö in Superior, Wisconsin, at the home of the now-relocated newspaper Työmies. The 1915 edition of the new songbook describes itself as “7:mas uusittu ja laajennettu painos” [the seventh revised and expanded edition]; Pekka Gronow has estimated that it sold more than 200,000 copies in the United States and in Finland between the years 1900 and 1920 (Gronow 55). A. William Hoglund makes the important point that poetic recitations among all immigrant Finnish groups tended to be set to music, often with the accompaniment of the kantele, so that the line between Finnish poetic and musical performance was far less distinct than it would become in later times (32). Finnish voices of labor solidarity, working especially within the lumber and mining industries of the upper Midwest and beyond, chronicled the fortunes of the disenfranchised worker through both novels and song. Mikael Rutanen’s 1929 novel Unohdettujen maailmasta (Of the World of the Forgotten) describes the life and hardships of lumber workers. IWW member and noted singer-songwriter-entertainer Hiski Salomaa plays with the language of Finnish immigrants while depicting the swaggering claims of a footloose logger: Täss on lokari ny lännen risukosta olen kulkenu vaikka missä. olen käynynnä Piuttissa, Lousissa, Retulaatsissa, Miamissa. Olen kulkenu merta ja mantereita ja Alaskan tuntureita ja kaikkialla hulivilityttäret muistaa lännen lokkareita. (Westerholm 70) (Here’s a logger from the timber camps of the West And I’ve rambled nigh all over! I have been out to Butte and L.A. to boot, Red Lodge and Miami, sir. I have been on the sea and the continents, And the peaks up in Alaska! And at every place I go the wild girls all know The loggers of the West.)

Tellingly, Salomaa’s jaunty logger ends his song with the dream of a secure, landed existence: Mutta punapuun kantoon kun torppansa laittaa, niin sinne se ilon päivä koittaa. Vaikka maailman myrskyt meitä tuudittaa niin vapaus se varmasti voittaa. (Westerholm 70) (But when one builds one’s home beneath the red tree Then breaks the day of joy. Though the storms of life they can cause us strife It is freedom that will win the day.)

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It is noteworthy, and characteristic, of Scandinavian radicals in North America that in the end they asked for very little: a secure life, a working wage, guarantees of fairness, and liberty. They spoke boisterously against the forces that aimed at disenfranchising or misleading them and they created a substantive challenge to the hegemonic control of the immigrant communities’ Lutheran clergy. Their cherished goals  – universal suffrage, equal opportunity, gender equality, the right to collective bargaining, the eight-hour workday  – now seem so familiar that they scarcely attract attention unless targeted for attack. Later generations of Scandinavian Americans, having achieved the security that their ancestors so hungered for, may sometimes forget their forbears’ progressive views, but the literary record speaks for itself. And the effects of this activist writing – both in the New World, and perhaps even more importantly, in the emerging social-welfare systems of the post-World-War-II Nordic countries – changed forever the political and social realities of later generations. America, Canada, and Australia became places of personal and social realization for Scandinavian writers, new lands upon which to build a more just society.

Dwelling Thomas A. DuBois

At the opening of the twentieth century, in the aftermath of an era of emigration that drew roughly a quarter of the Norwegian populace away from their native shores, novelist, poet, and playwright Hans Aanrud set out to create a text that would celebrate the peasants who chose to stay put. The title character of his novella Sidsel Sidserk (1903; Girl of Norway) is a shy but industrious orphan girl, who works as a goatherd for a prosperous farm in a valley much like Aanrud’s native Gausdal. She spends her summers high in the mountains at the farm’s shieling where she is befriended by John and Peter, fellow goatherds who eventually become her suitors. Their long days of unmonitored friendship are spent in wholesome camaraderie with no threat of sexual transgression of any sort. As the three chaste friends grow to adulthood, John emigrates to America but Peter and Sidsel remain behind. One day Peter comes to visit Sidsel while she is passing through the mountain pastures on an errand. Aanrud depicts their shy conversation: “Jeg har en hilsen til dig.  – Fra Jon. Jeg fik Amerikabrev fra ham for fjorten dage siden. Han ber mig uttrykkelig om at hilse dig.” “Tak. Staar det godt til med ham?” “Ja, han laater vel; han har faat god plads og tjener godt.” “Ja, Jon fortjener det; det blev en flink kar av ham.” “Ja, det blev det.  – Han spør om jeg – vil komme efter til vaaren. Han vil skikke mig billet.” Da saa Sidsel Sidserk op paa ham et øieblik, men saa bøiet hun hodet igjen og sa ingenting. Peter forsatte: “Nu var det det jeg vilde spørre dig, om du – vil at jeg skal gjøre det?” Det blev ganske stille, og han sat og saa spørgende paa hende. Hun sat længe med hodet bøiet; saa saa hun pludselig op, satte sine blaa øine paa ham og sa raskt og bestemt: “Nei, det vil jeg ikke.” (102) (“I have a message for you from John. I had a letter from America two weeks ago. He asked specially about you.” “Thank you. How is he getting on?” “He seems very contented. He has a good position and earns good wages.” “He deserves it. I’m glad. He was a fine fellow.” “Yes, he is. He wants to know if I will join him in the spring. He offered to send me my ticket.” Now Sidsel looked quickly at him for a moment, then bent her head again, and said nothing. Peter continued: “This is what I wanted to ask you, if you – if you would like me to go?” They were both silent, and he was looking hard at her. Sidsel sat for a long time looking down, and then she lifted her blue eyes to his face as she said very firmly: “No, I would not.”) [114]

Assured in this way that he has won her heart, Peter rejoices and the two revisit the sites of their youth with nostalgia and affection:

doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.37dub © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Thomas A. DuBois Alle steder hadde de saa meget at mindes fra den tid de gjætet sammen her, og mer end én gang sa de at de syntes synd paa John, som kanske aldrig fik komme her mer. Himmelen hvælvet sig høi og klar over dem, og fjeldet laa bortover med sine uendelige, stille vidder, og de var saa vidunderlig lette og glade. (103) (Everywhere they found something to remember from the times when they had played here together, and time and again they said how sorry they were for John, who perhaps would never come back again. The sky was so high and clear over their heads, the vast stretches of the mountain so quiet, that they both felt strangely light-hearted and content.) [114]

Narratives of dwelling, of the decision not to set forth but rather to stay in one’s native valley or home tract, can easily seem overshadowed by the stirring tales of settling and exploring discussed elsewhere in the “Practices” section of this volume. In a region that experienced some of Europe’s highest rates of emigration during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, remaining behind could seem anachronistic, even foolish. From the point of view of narrative construction, too, settling and exploring offer ready and adaptable frameworks for building a story: a beginning, middle, and potentially also an end are constituted by the event itself and suggest the scaffolding for the writer’s tale. Dwelling – living and working in a single place from year to year, generation to generation, century to century – seems to offer few hard temporal markers that could set a narrative off and few stirring conflicts upon which to center a tale. Or perhaps it is simply the undervalued norm against which the irregular, the exceptional, the narratable becomes framed? Perhaps it is not surprising in light of these considerations that Icelandic saga writers preferred to relate the stories of the settlement period rather than the doings of their own day, when Iceland had become clearly parceled into discrete farmsteads, each with their own properties, heirs, and tax rates. With all lands settled, everything narrative was settled as well, and little would seem to happen from one year to the next, apart from the eventual death of residents and transferal of property to the past owner’s legitimate heirs. Yet to assume that dwelling plays no part in Nordic literary practices of place is to miss the impassioned tone of Hans Aanrud’s Sidsel Sidserk, its plea for a poetics of remaining and the role which Aanrud believed literature could play in reversing a demographic trend that seemed destined to utterly depopulate his native land. It is also to miss the wealth of other Nordic works that, with greater or lesser amounts of fanfare, have taken up and depicted the notion of dwelling as a narrative or poetic topic, either as an idealized activity – as in Aanrud’s narrative – or as a symbol of stagnation, debasement, and imprisonment. In this node, then, the practice of dwelling as a narrative trope within the literary production of Nordic writers is examined. One of the key elements of any literary representation is the way in which it accepts, circumvents, or challenges past representations. Aanrud’s narrative of shieling life was not the first that had been produced in Norwegian literature, nor in Nordic literature more broadly. In Ellen Rees’s article below, we sense the ways in which the shieling was typically portrayed in previous and contemporary Nordic literature and the ways in which Aanrud’s text aimed at ameliorating or reinscribing the setting. The shieling cabin, the seter, becomes a site of sexual license and transgression, a place away from the mainstream in which to experience a time out of time. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, on the other hand, the seter becomes an increasingly less familiar and therefore more exoticized locale, the site of touristic forays no longer directly tied to the economy of the lowlands, except through acts of leisure consumption.

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As Rees’s essay makes clear, it is hard to pinpoint when exactly the notion of dwelling becomes a marked presence in Nordic literature. In a sense, it has always been part of the writings of Nordic authors. The Eddic poem Hávamál – often interpreted as the words of the god Óðinn, a deity with a penchant for wandering and adventures – nonetheless offers strong words in praise of home and the act of staying there. The poem opens with advice on how to be a good host when guests arrive (str. 1–4) – the importance of providing food and drink and a place by the fire – and observes that home is a better place to stay if one is not sharp of wits (str. 5). After similar admonishments regarding proper guest behavior (particularly with regard to drinking and talking), the poem eventually declares the value of owning one’s own property, however humble: Bú er betra, þótt lítit sé, halr er heima hverr; þótt tvær geitr eigi oc taugreptan sal, þat er þó betra en bœnn. Bú er betra, þótt lítit sé, halr er heima hverr; blóðuct er hiarta, þeim er biðia scal sér í mál hvert matar. (Str. 36–37: 22) (A dwelling is better, though it be little – There a man is at home; Though one has but two goats, and thatch over the hall, It is better than begging. A dwelling is better, though it be little – There is a man at home; The heart bleeds in one who must beg For his every meal.)

The term bú here refers to a household, one capable of producing its own food through milking. Owning one’s own home is portrayed as an inherent good, the foundation for a credible and effective life. Here one can entertain and repay allies with feasting and gifts, ensuring similar hospitality on those occasions when one is compelled to travel. The assumed audience of the poem is male and landed, and from the poem’s perspective, such men are the very building blocks of society. To be without a household is a source of shame, a situation that makes one’s heart bleed. As noted in the previous node, the Icelandic sagas devote particular narrative attention to the act of settling lands and establishing households while leaving the intergenerational maintenance of these holdings – i.e. the act of dwelling – largely as an unquestioned given of the narrative. Scholars of the sagas point to a stirring moment in the thirteenth-century Njáls saga, however, as a key enunciation of an Icelandic love of home place, even amid a genre so taken up with images of settling and travel. In the saga, the hero Gunnar Hámundarson has been sentenced to three years banishment for his part in killing an antagonist. Although he agrees to the settlement, Gunnar subsequently announces that he will leave Iceland forever, perhaps due to the embarrassment and shame that his banishment brings. As he prepares to make his final departure, however, his horse stumbles:

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Thomas A. DuBois Þá drap hestr Gunnars fœti, ok stǫkk hann ór sǫðlinum. Honum varð litit upp til hlíðarinnar ok bœjarins at Hlíðarenda ok mælti: “Fǫgr er hlíðin, svá at mér hefir hon aldri jafnfǫgr sýnsk, bleikir akrar ok slegin tún, ok mun ek ríða heim aptr ok fara hvergi.” (182) (Then Gunnar’s horse stumbled, and he fell out of his saddle. He glanced up toward the hillside and the farmhouse at Hlíðarendi and said: “Fair is the hillside, such that it seems to me that I have never seen it so fair: white grain fields and a home field of mown hay, and I intend to ride home and leave no more.”)

Gunnar’s decision invalidates the settlement that had spared him from the legal repercussions of his acts and opens the way to his being slain in retribution. For a time, he simply ignores such a possibility while continuing to visit and host guests on his farm as if nothing had happened. Eventually, however, his enemies surround his house and kill him. Gunnar’s state of mind is left ambiguous: no more is said of his love for his farm, nor does the saga writer comment any further on his hero’s decision to dwell rather than depart. After his death, however, Gunnar is depicted content in the burial mound erected for him near his farmhouse as witnessed by his reciting verses that are overheard by surviving friends and family (192–94). The notion of contentment at home runs through the traditional narrative of the entire Nordic region. Although Nordic wonder tales – like their counterparts in the rest of Europe – tend to focus on a young hero leaving home to have an adventure, they nearly always end with a wedding and the establishment of a workable household, often one of royal dimensions. A young lad – often the youngest in a household, and therefore not in line for any substantial inheritance – travels out to seek his fortune and ends up rescuing an imprisoned princess whom he subsequently marries. A young girl, mistreated by her wicked step mother, is befriended by a flock of geese – actually her own brothers in transformed shape – and must labor to disenchant them while not running athwart of the prince who intends to marry her. Drawing on a corpus of literally thousands of such tales collected in the nineteenth century by the Danish Evald Tang Kristensen, Bengt Holbek suggested that such narratives constituted a kind of collective wish-fulfillment fantasy for the largely disempowered rural poor who were Tang Kristensen’s primary informants (32). Through stories of poor boys or girls who wound up living happily ever after in a kingdom far away, Danish narrators imagined a world of social mobility for themselves and the youth of their communities, one in which the goal of a stable married life with a workable economic basis was achieved. For them, stasis was a dreamed-of goal: poor laborers could be certain of no such stability in their lives but were obliged to move whenever and wherever opportunities for employment arose. Such applied to children as well as adults in an agrarian environment that was one of the poorest in Europe. This same idealization of home and stasis characterizes Elias Lönnrot’s epic Kalevala (original 1835; revised 1849), a work he created on the basis of traditional Finnish and Karelian folk songs that he collected in the early 1830s. The main narrative of Lönnrot’s text is a story of courtship, the creation of a magic mill (the Sampo) and the resulting internecine strife, but it is framed in a cultural setting that consistently values the home place and its ways over distant strands and adventures. Heroes journey forth to accomplish particular ends, but they are always relieved and renewed by their return to their homes. Even the reckless Lemminkäinen shows a readiness to return to his home to be met and comforted by his mother. When the hero

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Väinämöinen finds himself washed ashore in the distant land of Pohjola, he laments his predicament with lines that have become some of the most beloved in the entire epic: Mies on maallansa parempi, Kotonansa korkeampi; Soisipa sula Jumala, Antaisipa armoluoja, Pääsisin omille maille, Elomaillen entisille! Parempi omalla maalla Vetonenki virsun alta, Kuin on maalla vierahalla Kultamaljasta metonen. (Poem 41, ll. 279–88) (A man is better off on his own land, higher at his own home. Grant, dear God, Permit, oh Lord, That I may reach my lands My former lands of residence! Better on one’s own land Is a slurp from a birch-bark shoe Than on a stranger’s land Mead drunk from a golden cup.)

Generations of Finns since Lönnrot have quoted Väinämöinen’s words when considering or experiencing foreign sojourns, which can also be summarized by the familiar Finnish proverb, Oma maa mansikka, muu maa mustikka [one’s own land is a strawberry, another land is (merely) a blueberry]. The symbolic power of this literary attention toward dwelling in Finnish literature in particular is discussed by Leena Kaunonen in her essay “Worker Ants on the Lush Bosom of the Earth.” Kaunonen explores the ideology of rural dwelling depicted in twentieth-century Finnish literature and its relation to class, migration, and modernization. As Kaunonen shows, the cyclic, bucolic world of the agrarian countryside  – particularly as imagined in nostalgic views of a time gone by – stands as a timeless counter to the ticking chronology of the modern world, its frenetic pace and often dehumanizing relations. As the last of the Nordic countries to undergo massive urbanization, largely in the 1970s, Finland possessed a population that until recently had firsthand memory of rural life. Kaunonen examines the literary representations of rural existence, and its relation to class, gender, and identity. In their collection of North Sámi proverbs, Harald Gaski and Aage Solbakk point to the distinctive Sámi proverb Jođi lea buoret go oru, “migrating is better than staying put,” as reflecting a Sámi love of movement over stasis (9). Yet such does not imply a dislike of dwelling. Instead, Sámi dwelling took other forms than that characteristic of their neighbors. Whereas Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns sought to demarcate land through boundary markers, fences, and permanent housing, Sámi sought to minimize their human footprint on the land so as to ensure the continued abundance of wildlife and flora. They moved within a broad area in

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response to seasonal shifts in food availability, and they made use of small huts or portable tents instead of permanent houses as their residences. Yet their relations with particular lands and waters spanned generations and held the solidity of tradition. This quintessentially Sámi notion is symbolized powerfully in the North Sámi word ruoktu, meaning home. In Scandinavian languages, the word hem (Swedish), hjem (Danish and Norwegian) and heim (Icelandic) is used to mean one’s permanent domicile, an emotionally charged and significant place. The same associations adhere to the Finnish term koti. A more neutral term (Danish tilbage, Icelandic til baka, Norwegian tilbake, Swedish tillbaka, Finnish takaisin) means “back,” denoting a place that one has been before, but that is not necessarily one’s home. “Going home,” in other words, is distinct from “going back.” In North Sámi, by contrast, the adverbial form ruoktot combines both these meanings: i.e. it means not only to go toward one’s home but also to go back, to return to some other place. “Home,” North Sámi grammar seems to say, is constituted not so much by the place itself but by the act of returning to it. Or perhaps more pointedly, no one would return to a place that is devoid of the positive qualities associated with home – thus, “home” and “back” become one and the same. The integrally positive associations of this act of returning to a place are evident in Johan Turi’s 1910 account of Sámi reindeer herders’ return to the coast of Norway after a fall and winter spent in the mountains and inland forests to the east, included in his Muitalus sámiid birra [An Account of the Sámi] the first Sámi-language book ever published. There, Turi describes both the act of returning to the coast in the spring and the expressive response that that return evokes for Sámi herders, encapsulated in a joik (a verbal performance) that, in Turi’s writing includes both words and vocables that he abbreviates since he assumes anyone will know them: Go sámit giđđat bohtet badjel duoddariid, gos lea leamaš čoaskkis ja olu muohta, nu ahte ii báljo leat bievlaráigi, muhto lea goit dan meare ahte jur eallá boazu. Ja go sii bohtet Norgii nu ahte álget mearravuovddit oidnot, ja dain lea rássi ja lasta, ja dat leat nu čáppat ja hávski sámi mielas. Ja go bohtet lagabui, de álgá gullot giehka ja visot lottit mat leat sámi mielas hávskkit, ja de sii juoiggadišgohtet:

eatnihiid ja čáppa rássevákkážiid miesi eatni, v[oja] v[oja] n[ana] n[ana] bures, bures, dál eatnihat n[ana] n[ana] n[ana] n[ana] n[ana] n[ana] n[ana] v[oja] n[ana] váldet dal vuostá mu eloža ja dikšot nu go ovdal nai lávebet v[oja] v[oja] … n[ana] n[ana] n[ana] … n[ana] n[ana] n[ana] … v[oja] n[ana] … (Turi 90)

(When the Sámi come over the mountains in the spring, and when there has been cold weather and much snow, there is little open ground for grazing, but enough so that the herd can manage. And when they come to Norway so that they start to see the coastal forests, where there is grass and leaves, it is so beautiful and pleasant to the Sámi’s eyes. And when they draw near so that one starts to hear the cuckoo and all the other birds singing, that is pleasant to the Sámi’s, and they begin to joik:

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461 Oh Mother Earth and beautiful grassland, oh mother of calves, voya voya nana nana hello, hello, oh mother ground, nana nana voya voya nana nana nana voya nana receive now my livelihood and care for them as in the past you have done voya voya nana nana nana voya nana) [Turi An Account 85]

The twentieth-century Sámi poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapää plays on Sámi notions of home and return succinctly and suggestively in a poem from one of his final collections, Eanni, eannážán (2001; Earth, my little mother). He writes: Ruoktu mii orrut ruovttus ruovttu dát lea mu ruoktu gáisi duottar várri vuopmi arvevuovdi jietnja jitnjon ábit dát lea min ruoktu (119) (Home we live at home home this here is our home snow-capped fell, mountain, meadow rainforest voice voiced in flowing this here is our home.)

Speaking for the world’s indigenous peoples, and accompanying his poems with photographs and drawings from other continents and cultures, Valkeapää nonetheless presents a singularly Sámi understanding of home in Eanni, eannážán, one incorporated into the very landscape. Employing ample open space and a jagged line in the manner of modern poetry, Valkeapää also visually portrays in his poem the idea of home as a tiny entity dotting the wider expanse of nature. Valkeapää’s poetry speaks eloquently to the notion of a Sámi presence upon the land, albeit one that refrains from marring and subduing the landscape in the manner employed by other cultures. Such is the core concept behind the proverb “migrating is better than staying

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put” and a rallying cry for many Sámi activists and artists like Valkeapää in the final decades of the twentieth century. Long-term residence brings with it the development of local cultures: norms for accomplishing the basic tasks of life and preferences regarding food, behaviors, and dress. Medieval saga writers point out such variations as interesting curiosities in their texts but focus more attention on the notion of an overarching standard culture based on a common language, prevailing customs, and a set of expectations regarding honorable and dishonorable conduct. In Saxo Grammaticus’s thirteenth-century Gesta Danorum (Deeds of the Danes) and particularly its sixteenth-century reworking in Olaus Magnus’s Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555; A Description of the Northern Peoples), however, these cultural specificities truly come to the fore. For Olaus in particular, writing for a Latinate audience in Italy at the outset of the Reformation, the immense cultural and economic treasures of his homeland are crucial to convey if he is to gain support for any attempt to pull the realm of Sweden back in line with Rome. His work includes detailed discussions of local culture and livelihoods throughout the realm of Sweden and its environs providing details, for instance, about the ways fishermen mark fissures in ice over which they must travel (1:49), about a rock off the southern coast of the Faroes shaped like a monk (1:98), about the dangers of crossing the mountains from Sweden into Norway (1:10), about the magical practices of Sámi and Finns (1:172–74), about the election of the Swedish king at the Mora stone (2:350), about various methods of making of mead and beer (2:637–47), about Swedish wedding customs (2:693–94), about ceremonies for driving away winter and welcoming summer (2:733), about the uses of reindeer among Sámi (3:868–72), and about methods of seal hunting (3:1034–36). Olaus mixes his local knowledge with extensive discussions of animals and minerals of the region and plentiful references to classical literature, the writings of ancient Greek and Roman authorities, and the teachings of ecclesiastical authors. Despite the work’s gestures toward Latin learning, however, it is evident from his work that Olaus was an acute observer of folk custom and diligent in his recording of its details. Occasionally he emerges as a character in his work, describing his adventures during various visitations in his far-flung see that came under his purview as the Bishop of Uppsala. For instance, after careful description of the various kinds of boats made by local craftsmen, Olaus describes his own experience of travel in one such boat, probably in the region north of Tornio: Quo genere nauigi periculosissime inter montana flumina M.D.XVIII. descendendo cuectus fui: adeo fragili lingo coactus sum, ob publica negotia peragenda, credere animam & salutem meam: eoque formidabilior erat transitus, quo magis in littore signa apparuere, magni nominis personas ibidem vi fluminum suisse suffocatas. (Book 4, Chapter 10) (It was in this kind of boat that I was carried down the network of mountain rivers in the year 1518 to my very great danger; because of public business that had to be done I was compelled to entrust my soul and safety to this frail piece of wood, and the passage was all the more terrifying when further marks became visible on the bank to indicate that persons of great importance had been drowned there by the violence of those waterways.) [1:209]

On the surface, Olaus’s Historia can be imagined as a tale of exploration, much like the travel accounts of Linné, Kalm, Andersen, or Bremer described in the node on Exploration. Yet crucially, Olaus aims at describing cultures and places as static: his work can be aptly described

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as an encyclopedic encomium to methods of dwelling in the Nordic region. As such, it stands as a valuable source regarding economy, customs, and narrative expectations as they existed in the sixteenth century. In the present context it is perhaps most importantly also a poignant testimony to one man’s feelings of homesickness while writing in exile in a foreign land (the experience of exile will be examined more thoroughly in volume 2 of this literary history). The cultural diversity observed by Olaus in the Nordic region and paralleled in the myriad languages and cultures of the greater world presented European writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with a formidable intellectual challenge. The biblical narrative of the Tower of Babel and the post-Deluge wanderings of the descendants of Noah hardly seemed to account for the extreme variation observable in the world’s peoples. The notion that human culture was influenced by climate and terrain – an idea advanced by John Arbuthnot in An Essay Concerning the Effects of the Air on Human Bodies (1733) and further developed by the Baron de Montesquieu in De l’Esprit des Lois (1748) – became influential among Nordic intellectuals, shaping their understandings of culture and leading to the idea of a crystallization of cultural traits that came to be known as “national types” (Harris 42–43). Even writers that resisted Montesquieu, such as Ludvig Holberg (Remarques), did so with a cognizance that Montesquieu’s ideas had shifted the ways in which European intellectuals in general approached culture. In Scandinavia, as elsewhere in Europe, it became the task of Enlightenment scholars to seek out, describe, and classify the local cultures of their homelands, just as Carl von Linné had proposed for the animal and plant kingdoms (see the node on “Exploring”). Viewed as unchanging and unique, these distinct local cultures became evidence of a mystic interaction between land and people conceptualized eventually through Johan Gottfried Herder’s concept of the Volksgeist [national spirit]. Herder’s ideas of national character played a formative role in Nordic conceptualizations of their nations’ history upon the land. Herder himself became fascinated with peasant Volkspoesie through his reading of Shakespeare and James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760). The latter work in particular suggested that the illiterate folk of the countryside could possess in their oral traditions the relics of great epics heretofore never recorded in writing. In the aftermath of Macpherson’s tales of the hero Ossian (later hotly and somewhat petulantly disputed by English critics) and Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), Herder produced Stimmen der Völker in ihren Liedern (1773; Voices of Peoples in their Songs), a work that set out to present the diversity of human cultures through a sampling of their songs. The idea of collecting oral lore directly from peasants excited European intellectuals of the day, and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm soon produced their seminal collection of German tales Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812; Children’s and Household Tales). In Scandinavia, the challenge was soon taken up by Finnish collectors of folksong, most notably Elias Lönnrot, whose Kalevala (1835) sought to recover a lost Finnish epic and thereby a previously unknown Finnish history. In Norway, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe followed the example of the Brothers Grimm to produce a collection of folktales, Norske folkeventyr (1841–44). The Asbjørnsen and Moe collection helped inspire a Norwegian intelligentsia that had long contended itself with reading and writing in Danish to take an interest in and develop a written form of Norwegian. In Denmark, the collecting gauntlet was taken up by Evald Tang Kristensen,

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who began collecting songs and tales in rural Jutland in the late 1860s and continued to do so for the rest of his life by interviewing literally thousands of informants and generating more than 24,000 pages of field notes. These collectors eventually created the basis for a distinctively Nordic brand of folklore studies and helped create a system of folklore archives in all of the Nordic countries as well as the similarly affected Baltic countries that today represent some of the world’s largest collections of oral traditions. Whereas later scholars, following the Grimms, would come to recognize the international nature of much folklore – i.e. its easy passage across cultural and linguistic boundaries – as well as its ready and natural borrowing from written texts, the early collectors of the nineteenth century could not imagine such a situation. For them, the folklore of rural peasants was a fixture of the landscape, much like the people – seemingly anchored to a particular locale and lifestyle since time immemorial and devoid of any contact with the outside world. It is striking that the Nordic celebration of peasant oral literature – seemingly so rooted to locale and so imbued with a sense of intergenerational continuity – occurred during the same era that peasants were rapidly abandoning their rural tracts for urban factory positions or the chance to emigrate to the New World. Middle- and upper-class Nordic intellectuals were in a sense attempting in their literary efforts to capture once and for all the rapidly disappearing peasantry of the rural countryside. The collected tales and songs of the Nordic region have also served as the basis of countless later literary adaptations, most notably those of Hans Christian Andersen, whose literary reworkings of Danish oral storytelling created wry and often haunting tales that have captivated audiences throughout the world. In the works of Johan Ludwig Runeberg the poetic celebration of dwelling reaches new patriotic heights. In his 1830 poem “Högt bland Saarijärvis moar” (High Amid the Heaths of Saarijärvi), Runeberg depicts an impoverished farmer, Paavo, and his grumbling wife struggling to eke out a living in an environment plagued by famine and crop failure. When the harvest fails, Paavo’s wife falls repeatedly into despair, but Paavo simply redoubles his work efforts and counsels her simply to knead more bark into the bread dough and trust in God. When at last the couple’s prayers are answered and their fields come successfully to harvest, the wife plans to celebrate by baking rye bread unadulterated with bark admixture. Paavo, however, looks upon his neighbor’s need and counsels her to add the bark after all: “Blanda du till hälften bark i brödet, / ty förfrusen står vår grannes åker!” (79) [Make the bread up half with bark / For frost has hit our neighbor’s field!]. Runeberg encapsulates a nineteenth-century understanding of the hardy peasant of Hávamál or Njáls saga, humbly devoted to his land, household, and locale. Dwelling, struggling, albeit (or perhaps especially) in poverty is a moral good in Runeberg’s poetic world, the appropriate stage for the performance of the quiet heroism of the peasant in his struggle against nature. The religious and patriotic implications of this image are strong in Runeberg’s work, as illustrated in his prayer poem “Fosterlandet.” Here the poem’s speaker and the reader are enjoined to pray to God for the good of the fosterland, the native land. The intergenerational bonds that tie the peasant to the locale are extolled in an earnest, pious manner: Här hafva våra fäder bott, Arbetat, kämpat, hoppats, trott; Här äfven vi vår boning fått, Med samma lif och samma lott. Här skola våra barn också

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Endgång på våra stigar gå, Ha det vi haft, se det vi sett, Och be till Herren, som vi bedt. (118) (Here our fathers have dwelled, Worked, fought, hoped, believed; Here, too, we have made our homes With the same life and same lot. Here shall our children also One day tread our paths, Have what we have had, see what we have seen, And pray to the Lord as we have prayed.)

The world of Runeberg’s faithful peasant admits no migration in or out: it is an idyll to the stasis of dwelling, and the heroic struggle to make ends meet. In his tremendously influential literary reworking of an Icelandic saga, Esaias Tegnér reenvisioned the Viking past with nineteenth-century romantic eyes. His Frithiofs saga (1825; The Saga of Frithiof) became a sensation among European intellectuals and was soon translated into multiple languages. It became the basis of numerous operatic and symphonic adaptations in both Sweden and Germany. The narrative focuses primarily on the love between a doughty Norwegian Viking (Frithiof) and the high-born princess (Ingeborg) he has known since childhood through the custom of fosterage. For much of the epic, Frithiof is depicted living away from home or on military expeditions, yet Tegnér also builds into the narrative his hero’s touching love of his father’s estate, Framnäs. During one of his expeditions, Ingeborg’s disapproving brother arranges for Frithiof’s farm to be burned, so that the hero returns not to glory and contentment but to the ruins of his beloved home. With high dramatic sense Tegnér depicts Frithiof’s homecoming: Han gnuggar ögat, han lägger handen utöfver pannan och ser åt stranden, Men hur han gnuggar och hur han ser, han finner icke sitt Framnäs mer. Den nakna eldstad står upp ur mullen, lik kämpens benrad i ättekullen; der gården var, är ett svedjeland, och asken hvirflar kring härjad strand. Förbittrad Frithiof från skeppet hastar, kring brända tomter han ögat kastar, sin faders tomter, sin barndomsban. (110) (He rubs his eyes and lays his hand Upon his brow to view the land, Yet how he’d rub and how he’d stare, He cannot see his Framnas there, For naked hearth sticks from a mound Like skeleton on burial ground. From trees the fire had cleared the land, And ashes whirl on ravaged strand.

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466 Stunned Frithiof from the ship now hastes, Casts bitter eyes on empty wastes For naught was left of father’s place.) [88]

As a literary echo of Gunnar’s love of Hlíðarendi, Frithiof’s love of Framnäs stands as a pivotal moment in the epic, one that Tegnér uses to convey the notion of a heroic love of homeland. August Strindberg, too, went in for the patriotic. His Svenska folket I and II (1881–82; The Swedish People) provided an encyclopedic documentation of the Swedish presence from heden tiden [heathen times] to the author’s present stressing the continuity and distinctiveness of the Swedish people. Illustrated by Carl Larsson and written in close contact with the cultural preservationist Artur Hazelius (founder of Skansen, as noted above, the world’s first open air museum and a key element in the academic documentation of rural peasant life), the work aimed at presenting the history of the Swedish nation in all its glories and variation. Numbering some one thousand pages arranged in two volumes, the study includes discussions of Swedish folk dress, dancing, farming, and housing and includes discussions of Swedish emigration to the wider world (10:52–70) as well as migration into Sweden, described  – in a mark of the time – as rasblandning [racial mixing] (10:71–76). Strindberg praises groups that have assimilated well into the broader Swedish populace, such as Walloons and Swedish-speaking Finns, but shows little sympathy for those like Finns or Jews who fail to acculturate effectively. Although Strindberg continued to show a fondness for describing rural settings in his later works (see Berendsohn) – most notably the peaceful islands of the Stockholm archipelago – setting and character are seldom treated as one in his works. If anything, the quiet waters and shady glades of works like Hemsöborna (1887; The People of Hemsö) act as an ironic contrast to the conniving and self-serving behaviors of his characters. Strindberg’s invocation of race was typical of his time: the cultural specificities long observed as national types or characters became somaticized in late-nineteenth century European thought into the notion of genetic determination. Cultural traditions and even elements of moral character became conceptualized as phenotypic expressions akin to height, skin, and eye color. So thoroughly had European intellectuals embraced the notion of the long-term influence of place on person, that they were unable to differentiate between cultural norms and genetic heritage. In a scientific climate shaped by the ideas of Darwin and natural selection, national character took on new significance. The stasis and contentment imagined by Nordic authors from Olaus Magnus down to Strindberg projected movement  – migration  – as an aberrant, literally unsettling, event. Populations were not meant to move, and species like migratory birds furnished object lessons in the allure or abhorrence of transplantation. In her essay “By Land, by Sea, by Air, by Mind,” Kjerstin Moody explores the intertwined representations of traversing and dwelling in Swedish and Finnish poetic works from the nineteenth century to today. Humans and birds, secure residence and restless flight, imprisonment and freedom, winter and spring – Moody explores persistent metaphors and juxtapositions that characterize Nordic poetry from the peasant songs of agrarian oral tradition to the globalized experiences of twentieth-century refugees.

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Dwelling as captivity The uneasy tension between imagining dwelling as a state of security and yearning for the revelatory and emancipating promises of travel, explored through poetry in Moody’s essay, finds ample expression in Scandinavian prose fiction as well, but for many authors of the nineteenth century, the farmstead or small town developed into an image of entrapment, a system of social expectation and control that the artist must endeavor to escape. Henrik Ibsen created some of world literature’s most memorable images of home as a place of domestic entrapment, confinement, and hypocrisy. Born to a respected merchant-class family, the young Ibsen witnessed the destruction of his childhood security as well as the ruin of his father’s health and sobriety in the aftermath of sudden and crippling bankruptcy. His own departure from Norway and residence abroad in Germany and Italy for the twenty-seven years between 1864 and 1891 further gave him new, more distant perspectives that could leverage his insider views of Norwegian culture, a double voicing that marks much of his poetic and dramatic production from that point forward. In his play Peer Gynt (1867), an impetuous and self-deluding Peer roves the world over in search of success and happiness, only to realize at the end of life that his greatest happiness – irredeemably squandered – lay waiting for him in his faithful bride Solveig and the couple’s humble mountain cabin, though this more grounded view of dwelling is likely far less memorable for readers than Peer’s colorful adventures on the run. When Ibsen began his final cycle of twelve prose plays with Samfundets støtter (1877; Pillars of Society), he commenced an ongoing project designed to unsettle and defamiliarize domestic space and its attendant ideologies. This deconstructive impulse finds its most lasting expression in the estranging miniaturization of the home and its ideology in Et dukkehjem (1879; A Doll House) and the burning of the orphanage in Gengangere (1881; Ghosts), but one can find a similar critique of dwelling in most of the contemporary prose plays. Since they all follow the investigative logic of the analytic drama, initial facades and the past secrets they conceal typically give way under pressure and his characters look for escape, most often in vain. Only his later play Fruen fra havet (1888; The Lady from the Sea) provides a tentative rapprochement with the idea of dwelling. Despite the caustic depiction throughout the play of domesticity as a carp pond or inner fjord with brackish waters far from the open sea, the main character Ellida reconciles herself to her husband and her place in the familial order through a delicate dialectical balance between freedom and responsibility, an attempt to redefine security as a free choice and give it something more than a regressive valence. This positive ending was Ibsen’s last, however, and the five following plays return to a notion of freedom that can only be found on the margins, experienced by outsiders and traveling characters who have given up the attractions and delusions of home. Ibsen’s plays and their enunciations of the conflicts of the home vs. the individual, which were quite challenging for viewers of his day, have continued down to the current day to serve in international contexts as potent emblems of modernity’s key issues of personal realization, liberation, and the problematic nature of the traditional, the domestic, and the familiar. Aksel Sandemose continued Ibsen’s problematization of home and its attendant ideological structures in his novel En flyktning krysser sitt spor (1933; A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks). This protomodernist novel echoed Ibsen’s analytic method of excavating the past for clues to

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understanding the present, playing with narrative temporality and memory to describe the psychological process of repression and the genesis of a criminal personality. Using thinly veiled autobiographical material, Sandemose described in pieces and fragments the confining life of a fictionalized Danish village named Jante, an utterly unremarkable place that is nevertheless home to crushing forces of moral surveillance and cruelty. This small-town milieu is said to be possessed of unwritten but inviolable laws of conduct that stand as a modern Scandinavian answer to the biblical Ten Commandments: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Du skal ikke tro at du er noe. Du skal ikke tro at du er like så meget som oss. Du skal ikke tro at du er klokere enn oss. Du skal ikke innbille deg at du er bedre enn oss. Du skal ikke tro at du vet mere enn oss. Du skal ikke tro at du er mere enn oss. Du skal ikke tro at du duger til noe. Du skal ikke le av oss. Du skal ikke tro at noen bryr seg om deg. Du skal ikke tro at du kan lære oss noe. (80)

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

(You’re not to think you are anything special. You’re not to think you are as good as we are. You’re not to think you are smarter than we are. You’re not to convince yourself that you are better than we are. You’re not to think you know more than we do. You’re not to think you are more important than we are. You’re not to think you are good at anything. You’re not to laugh at us. You’re not to think anyone cares about you. You’re not to think you can teach us anything.)

The character and narrator Espen Arnakke describes a childhood of brutal insistence on conformity, one that conditions him to eventually turn into a murderer in his adult life. Throughout the rest of the twentieth century to the present day, Sandemose’s Janteloven [Law of Jante] has been frequently invoked as an emblematic aspect of Nordic societies signaling both a key weakness and (to some) a particular strength of the cultures. Like Ibsen’s dollhouse metaphor, Janteloven has taken on a life of its own, despite its origins as a concentrated expression of the dark side of dwelling and the constrictive aspects of the provincial worldview. The concept has grown more complex as it has accrued new layers of meaning through the special mix of welfare-state politics, the cultural enshrinement of native rural values, and a general self-satisfaction with late twentieth-century Nordic prosperity. All of these additions have now turned the idea of Janteloven into a common cultural reference to a consensus value of “moderation” in the Nordic region, a shift in meaning that obscures the originally bitter critique and satire in the context of Sandemose’s original novel. There, a positive notion of dwelling was an impossibility given the small town’s relentless cultural repression of individual difference, which for

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Sandemose made liberation an act of desperation. Together, Ibsen and Sandemose gave the idea of dwelling its most negative literary depictions by seeing it as a nearly ceaseless social process of subordination, discipline, and suppression in which the individual faces stifling challenges to autonomy, happiness, and feelings of self-worth. Powerful supplements to the writings of Ibsen and Sandemose and their explorations of the individual’s role in a community can be found among authors with closer ties to the rural populace or the peasant class of the Nordic countries. In the 1906–10 semi-autobiographical novel series Pelle Erobreren (Pelle the Conqueror), Danish writer Martin Andersen Nexø depicts the blatant injustice and harsh realities of the life of migrant farm workers on the Danish island of Bornholm.

Figure 51.  Detail map showing Bornholm’s location relative to Copenhagen and the southern Swedish coastline. Photo: Serban Bogdan/Shutterstock

Far from describing the rural estate at which his characters come to labor as idyllic or peaceful, Andersen Nexø describes a world of brutality, rigid class divisions, and brooding secrets. Stengården, or “Stone Farm,” is described in the novel’s opening pages as the product of earlier generations’ rapaciousness and perseverance. It had begun as a simple crofter’s farm, but under the relentless labor of a prominent figure of the past, Vevest Koller, it had grown into a nexus of power and control. “Under ham blev huset til gård – han sled sig ihjæl på det, undte nok hverken sig selv eller de andre maden” [During his time, the cottage became a farm. He worked himself to death on it, and grudged food both for himself and the others]. Koller’s descendants

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build on their predecessor’s achievements through ruthless acquisition and control of their neighbors’ lands, profiting from the misfortune of others in order to extend and consolidate their property and the power it confers: Men Stengårdsslægten ville købe – bestandig købe og udvide sig, og den måtte købe ved ulykke. Overalt hvor misvækst og sygdom og uheld med kreaturer slog til end mand så han ravede, købte Køllerne. Således voksede Stengården, fik mange bygninger og fik tyngde; den blev så tung en nabo som havet er det, hvor det æder af landmandens jord, mark for mark og der intet er at stille op. (1:28) (But the Stone Farm family was always wanting to buy and extend their property, and their chance only came through their neighbors’ misfortunes. Wherever a bad harvest or sickness or ill luck with his beasts hit a man hard enough to make him reel, the Kollers bought. Thus Stone Farm grew, and acquired numerous buildings and much importance; it became as hard a neighbor as the sea is, when it eats up the farmer’s land, field by field, and nothing can be done to check it.)

For proletarian writers like Andersen Nexø, the countryside represented not a locus of loving human interrelations but a place of struggle as ruthless and as heartless as the sea, a site of near feudal slavery and injustice, where inequities of wealth and birth differentiated people for the entirety of their lives and migrant laborers like Lasse and his little son Pelle received the dregs of the largely empty cup of life’s good fortune. Dwelling holds no allure for Pelle, although the human relations formed with salt-of-the-earth fellow workers stay with him throughout his subsequent life. In a similar vein, Ivar Lo-Johansson drew on his childhood experiences to create a parallel story of oppression and eventual escape. His autobiographical Godnatt jord (1933; Breaking Free) offers a poignant depiction of the life of the struggling rural class of statare – impoverished Swedish farm laborers who worked for payment in goods rather than in wages on large farm estates, particularly in the provinces of Uppland, Sörmland, and Skåne. Statar families were housed in long communal barracks with other families, or occasionally – when a worker proved particularly useful at an estate – in a single torp, a croft or sharecropper’s cabin. With strong irony, Lo-Johansson describes the conversations of the laborers Göranson and Bylund, who have spent their lives in toil for wealthy barons: De talade om sin gamla gård. De kände ett slags gemensamhet i detta. De var omåttligt stolta över att ha varit på just Spaxarnas gård, som var känd av alla. De talade om gården nästan som om den varit deras egen. De satt och erinrade sig vägar och särskilda åkrar. De nämde broar som lagts om och täckdiken som öppnats för femtio år tillbaka. De talade om skörden på det fältet eller det – något år för ett mannaminne sedan. De mindes särskilda torrår och regniga år. De talade om ekarna, om husen, om redskapen. Det var nog för dem sakerna fanns. (390) (They talked about their old estate, since this was something they had in common. They were immeasurably proud of having been at the Spax estate, which everyone had heard of, and no other. They talked about the estate as if it had been their own. They sat there remembering particular paths and fields. They mentioned bridges that had been rerouted and drainage ditches that had been dug fifty years ago. They talked about the harvest on this field or that in some year of their youth. They called to mind particularly dry years and wet ones. They talked about the buildings, about the tools. It was enough for them that these things existed.) [420]

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Lo-Johansson depicts the resignation and servility of the rural proletariat and the vast class divide that separated them from baronen, the baron. Against the baron’s subtle threats and the prevailing desire that the statare not rock the boat, the erstwhile efforts of the agitator Brontén to lead his fellow workers to strike in pursuit of more equitable conditions come to nothing as news of a distant war between France and Germany carries with it the threat or promise of change. Based on his own childhood memories in a statare household and his subsequent abandonment of the farm laborer’s life for a career as a writer, it is not surprising that the LoJohansson’s main character Mikael Bister eventually chooses to leave the estate and his family behind at the end of the novel. Surprised by his decision, his father reproaches him, to which Mikael makes a largely silent reply: – Du flyr från oss. Har vi inte gjort för dig vad vi kunnat? Då hade han velat tala om den nöd, som är mätt, som går i varma kläder och som sover i en säng om natten, men som därför kan vara ett skrämmande spöke. Det är dessa ting som hindrar honom. Han blev stående rådvill med oron i sitt hjärta. – Jo . . . stammade han endast. (419) (“You’re leaving us. Haven’t we done what we could for you?” He would have liked to tell them about a kind of deprivation that eats its fill, has warm clothes, and sleeps in a bed at night, but for precisely that reason can haunt you like a ghost. It’s these things that hold him back. He stands there, not knowing what to do, his heart filled with anxiety. “Yes . . .” is all he can stammer out.) [452]

In such narratives, the countryside, and the boundless experience of dwelling, becomes typically viewed as claustrophobic and deleterious: an insidious process that saps human potential and stunts ambitions. The city, in contrast, offers new possibilities for self-realization and progress. Such representations coincide with the rapid urbanization of Nordic societies, a process that was well underway already in nineteenth-century Denmark, but that spread to Sweden somewhat later, and to Norway, Finland, and Iceland only after the Second World War. Eventually, however, narratives of urban dwelling begin to appear, epitomized by the powerful depiction of working class Copenhagen in Barndommens gade (1943; Street of Childhood) by the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen. Ditlevsen’s autobiographical novel can be seen as a kind of answer to the male proletarian Bildungsroman of a generation earlier. With a female protagonist rather than a male and an urban setting rather than a rural one, Ditlevsen revises the dichotomies of earlier works. In her novel, Copenhagen offers all the warmth and all the limitations that Andersen, Nexø and Lo-Johansson associate with the countryside, which suggests that it is perhaps not environment per se that shapes an individual, but one’s attitude and connection with that environment. Dwelling creates inertia, a resistance to change either in one’s greater community or in one’s own personal life. Viewed positively or negatively, the personal response to such inertia forms a key theme and source of conflict in much twentieth-century Nordic literature.

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472 The rise of children’s literature

Nowhere is the struggle between dwelling and self-realization more consciously explored than in Scandinavian children’s literature. By examining the thematic tendencies of Scandinavian children’s authors, often world renowned for their evocative or fanciful portrayals, one can in a sense trace the broader trajectories of literary attitudes toward dwelling described above. Although didactic literature aimed at children began to appear already in the late sixteenth century, the cultural transformations of the nineteenth century and the twin processes of industrialization and urbanization began to segregate children from their adult counterparts. The schoolroom and the nursery arose as ever-greater components of childhood, and eventually a brand of literature specifically created for the instruction and entertainment of children developed. In many ways, the literature produced by this process mirrors thematically the conflicting portrayals of dwelling discussed above. For late nineteenth century Nordic households, the children’s tales by the Swedish-speaking Finn Zacharias Topelius became perennial favorites. Whereas the earlier Hans Christian Andersen  – often viewed outside of Scandinavia as a children’s author  – actually wrote frequently ambiguous and complex tales intended for adults, Topelius set out in his collections of children’s tales to employ simple language and unmistakable plots to entertain and edify children audiences. An accomplished poet and novelist for adults, Topelius nonetheless became most famous for his Läsning for barn (Reading Material for Children), a series of eight volumes of children’s poems and tales that came out between 1865 and 1896. Perhaps best known of his prodigious writings is the simple tale “Björken och stjernan” (The Birch and the Star), which appeared in Topelius’s first volume of Läsning för barn. Setting his tale in the aftermath of an unspecified war two hundred years in the past, Topelius depicts a young boy and girl who have found themselves transported far from their parents and childhood home. Undaunted by this situation, they set off on foot to return to Finland seeking a place they know only through their combined memory of a birch tree and a star shining through its branches. Placing their trust in God, the two children begin their march homeward, guided by angels in the form of birds. After a long trek, they begin to meet people who speak their parents’ language, and then, after yet more determined trudging, they find the locale whose nature and celestial characteristics exactly match those they had remembered. Here they are reunited with their surprised and jubilant parents once again and realize that the angels that had guided them were actually their deceased siblings, whose graves now lie under the selfsame birch. With paternal wisdom their father declares: Ni gingo efter björken; – han betydde edert fädernesland. Välan, må det vara eder kärleks och edert arbetes mål, så länge ni lefva! Ni gingo efter stjärnan; – hon betecknar det eviga lifvet. Välan, må hon lysa eder hela er lefnad igenom! – Amen, ske alltså! – sade barnen och modern med knäppta hander. (240–41) (“You set out after the birch – it signifies the land of your fathers. So may it be the goal of your love and work as long as you live! You set out after the star – it betokens life eternal. So may it shine for you throughout your lives!” “Amen, let it be so!” said the children and the mother with clasped hands.)

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The sometimes cloying sentimentality of Topelius’s works contrasts stridently with the irreverent, comical nature of the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren’s tales of Pippi Långstrump (1945; Pippi Longstocking). Ostensibly an orphan at the outset of Lindgren’s long series of books dedicated to Pippi and her adventures, the young Pippi nonetheless shows no fear, blithely returning to her natal village to take up residence in her family’s long abandoned villa – Villa Villekulla. She has masses of pirate treasure, various pets, superhuman strength, and unparalleled selfconfidence. Pippi makes her own rules, flaunting social convention at every turn and finding little of interest in the provincial town, apart from her newfound friendship with her more conventional neighbors Tommy and Annika. It is in fact through their eyes that the tale unfolds, and with them the reader is able to enjoy the strange feeling of liberation that comes from having a truly original friend, particularly one who does not care for rigid social niceties of polite society or the constricting expectations adults held for their children. Since her work has been translated into more than sixty languages worldwide, Lindgren has transformed children’s literature and remains even today one of the most recognizable Nordic literary figures of all time. In her Pippi books as well as a long string of other titles that marked her prolific career, Lindgren repeatedly portrayed characters that stand outside social norms by creating a wryly subversive role for the genre of children’s literature that coincided with the twentieth century’s greater interest in the autonomy and rights of children. Although many of her characters live in towns or cities, Lindgren also created a memoir of an idyllic childhood in rural Sweden beginning with Alla vi barn i Bullerbyn (1947; All Us Children in Bullerbyn), which was followed by several more volumes in subsequent years. The Bullerbyn books and eventual television series in the 1960s celebrate the simple pranks and pleasures of childhood in a small hamlet of several farms by presenting a warm and nostalgic portrayal of a fast-disappearing rural life increasingly unfamiliar to a postwar Swedish populace. Where Pippi’s village threatens to control and tame, Bullerbyn depicts a relaxed and permissive childhood existence in which children are free to entertain themselves in inventive and mostly wholesome ways. Still another portrayal of home and dwelling emerges from the Swedish-language Finnish series of Mumintroll books, those authored by Tove Jansson. Schooled as a visual artist with a prominent sculptor for a father and a well-known artist as a mother, Jansson was destined to create books in which image and text closely interrelate and in which eccentric family dynamics play a prominent role. Her Trollkarlens hatt (1948; The Wizard’s Hat; published in English as Finn Family Moomintroll) introduces Jansson’s endearing main character Mumintroll, a small hippopotamus-like troll child whose sensitive nature and love of adventure vie with each other in determining his actions. Mumintroll is influenced by the warm domesticity of his mother, Muminmamma, a jovial, nearly unflappable hostess, who enjoys welcoming guests of all sorts and who carries prodigious amounts of essential items in her handbag. Mumintroll’s moodier, more reclusive father Muminpappa provides a stark and often comical contrast to Muminmamma and offers the young Mumintroll a rather ambivalent image of adult masculinity. Dangers of frightening proportions face the Moomin family throughout the six books that Jansson created and in the many comics and television cartoons that followed in their wake: massive comets, floods, relocation to a distant lighthouse on an island, and other events threaten to destroy the peaceful existence they have enjoyed in the valley where they live. So, too, the rugged independence of Mumintroll’s best friend, Snusmumriken (dubbed Snufkin in

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English translations), constantly pulls the young Mumintroll away from the clucking domesticity of his unchanging home. Jansson’s books thematize wryly the dangers and allure of dwelling, providing answers that are elusive and open to the interpretation of the reader, child, or adult. The Norwegian counterpart to Lindgren and Jansson is undoubtedly Thorbjørn Egner, a Norwegian writer and entertainer who became known to Norwegian audiences largely through his afternoon children’s television series and songs. His book Folk og Røvere i Kardemomme By (1955; People and Robbers in Cardamom Town; published in English as When the Robbers Came to Cardamom Town) portrays the cohesive and friendly village of Kardemomme By and its short-lived crime wave. Cardamom – a favorite spice in Nordic Christmas baking – symbolizes well the cheerful and fun-loving nature of Egner’s imagined village, which combines both elements of the exotic – e.g., camels and elephants walking the street – and the familiar with villagers much like ordinary Norwegians in all but name. Townspeople enjoy riding their town’s single trolley (the fare is free) and are daily informed of the coming weather through the pronouncements of Gamle Tobias, or “Old Tobias,” a jolly, white-bearded bachelor who lives in a tall tower in the center of town. When three of the town’s young men decide to become robbers, they are eventually arrested and rehabilitated through the warm policeman Bastian’s kind-hearted wife, fru Bastian (Mrs. Bastian). Under her good influence the men begin to tidy up their prison cell, wash themselves regularly, and get haircuts. At the climax of the story, the former criminals, now turned musicians, rescue the aged Tobias and his parrot and puppy from a burning house thus becoming heroes to all the town. The villagers find useful and enjoyable employment for each of the men as well as their pet lion, and all settle down to a happy life without any need of leaving. Reflective of the social democratic idealism of the postwar Nordic region, the message of Egner’s work is simple: all people are basically good, but they need a community to bring out that goodness. Rural dwelling and the rise of tourism A final topic of importance to a sense of the importance of dwelling in Nordic literature is the development of tourism, a mode of experience described in part in the Exploring node, but also integrally linked to the sort of descriptions of stasis and economy described by writers from Olaus Magnus to Strindberg. As Ellen Rees notes in her contribution to this volume, tourism equipped Nordic intellectuals – as well as people from outside of the region – with a new lens through which to experience the countryside. Bringing to their rural travels perceptions shaped by romantic nationalism, history, and classic literary works, early tourists sought “authentic” experience of a world they increasingly knew only through texts. Through their willingness to pay for such experiences, they gradually created an economic niche for rural providers willing and able to help recreate or even confect such events. From the point of view of writers, such experiences could be seen as acts of exploration. Yet on a fundamental level, they were also a description of – even a celebration of – modes of dwelling as practiced in particular habitats and climes. Part of the essential mechanism of touristic writing is the encapsulation of other people and places into fixed and transportable narratives. It is in a sense at its heart an act of

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displacement, in which the intended reader comes to appreciate the place described (and its associated way of life) as separate from the reader’s own, be it through space, time, social system, spirituality, or access to forms of technology. Especially if the place described seems to describe a world of the past, it can create in the reader a poignant sensation of loss or nostalgia, evocation of a world temporally separated from the “modernity” of the reader’s own present life. That this act of representation is visual as much as it is narrative is evident in the rise of Nordic travel writing, which develops alongside and sometimes in answer to the writings of foreign travelers discussed in the Exploring node. Central to this visual touristic experience were the writings of the Swedish aristocrat Jonas Carl Linnerhjelm. Linnerhjelm published his accounts in three volumes between 1776 and 1816, i.e. at about the same time as Acerbi and Skjöldebrand, as discussed in the chapter on Exploring. What was distinctive about Linnerhjelm’s work was his attitude toward the land and its people. Linnerhjelm occupied himself in developing an elaborate landscape garden on his Småland estate, emulating the activities of leading English aristocrats of his day. He wrote his accounts of places he visited as letters, describing in them both the people he saw and the picturesque or inspiring landscape he viewed. He accompanied his work with watercolor paintings that included sweeping landscape panoramas, wild and natural trees, and billowing clouds and that served as the sources for the engravings that accompanied his published volumes. Linnerhjelm’s writings and images paralleled those of the eighteenth-century English cleric William Gilpin and Swiss painter Salomon Gessner and helped create a taste for touristic description of Sweden, one in which dwelling and stasis played a central role. His essentially aristocratic experiences and writings would be followed a century later by the 1868 founding of the Den Norske Turistforening (The Norwegian Tourist Association) and the 1885 founding of Svenska Turistföreningen (The Swedish Tourist Association). Both organizations aimed at facilitating travel of middle-class Norwegians and Swedes to the rural and wilderness tracts of their country, setting up networks of way-station cabins in remote areas and sharing news of tourist routes and experiences through popular publications like the Svenska Turistföreningens Årsskrift (Yearbook of the Swedish Tourist Association) (DuBois, “Borg Mensch”). In Iceland, W. G. Collingwood and Jón Stefánsson traveled the rugged landscape of Iceland in the late nineteenth century to gain an idea of the topography upon which the sagas are staged. Collingwood in particular, who drew upon romantic ideas built on Montesquieu and the landscape painting movement, could only imagine the striking events of the sagas as having been generated by a landscape of particular power. Along with various other places, the pair visited the sites of Njáls saga including Gunnar’s farm, Hlíðarendi, of which Collingwood writes: In the morning we learnt once more that scenery and romance are inseparable. Gunnar’s home which he so passionately loved was worthy of his affection – even from the sentimental view of the landscapist. He may not have known why he “thought it so fair”: perhaps the blake acres commended themselves to him as much for practical farming as for poetic fancy. But no modern traveler can fail to note that the one place of all the world, where a man, in those distant and rude days, chose deliberately to die, rather than go out into exile from it, was so magnificently situated. (30)

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Collingwood and Stefánsson go on to describe: “Alps and ocean brought together into one unparalleled prospect, and near at hand, all that is most picturesque of nestling pasture and swarded nooks and flowery dells among the rocks, lifted above the vast level of the plain” (30).

Figure 52.  Illustration of Hlíðarendi in Collingwood and Stefansson, p. 30.

A century later, in an era of SUVs and a full-fledged saga tourism industry, Emily Lethbridge followed in the footsteps of Collingwood and Stefánsson to offer her own views of Hlíðarendi today. After a four-day pony expedition to visit sites described in the saga and a visit to The Saga Centre museum in Hvolsvöllur, Lethbridge writes: The manager of the local Njáls saga museum in Hvolsvöllur said that he had met the last farmer of Hlíðarendi in the late 1970s and been shown these spots and others connected with the saga; this farmer is no longer living, and it seems that local knowledge about Hlíðarendi (and other places around the district associated with the saga) has diminished to the point where in many cases, such extra-saga place-names and locations are not much more than shadowy remembrances or the subject of speculation. (Lethbridge)

Implicit in the above discussion of Collingwood and Lethbridge are the massive transformations in understandings of place that have occurred since the medieval era or even since the preindustrial eighteenth century to today. Collingwood and Stefánsson write at the very outset of Icelandic tourism; Lethbridge amid the varied strands and competing tensions of the twentyfirst century’s cultural heritage industry. Collingwood draws attention to the perceived gulf between his past and present in his musing acknowledgement that “perhaps the blake acres commended themselves to [Gunnar] as much for practical farming as for poetic fancy.” For Collingwood and Stefánsson, landscape shapes literature; for Lethbridge, landscape is a repository of narrative kernels that become ordered and rendered sequential in a saga:

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The itinerary took us from one Njáls saga site to another – but not by adhering to the chronological progression of chapters and events in the written saga. In this, I was struck even more by the way that the events that make up any one saga can be “read” very differently through the physical exploration and familiarization of the landscapes in which they are set, as opposed to an armchair or desk-based linear reading of that saga from the first chapter through to the last. Specific places in a local area bear three-dimensional witness to the narrative that has written itself into and around the topographical features of the landscape, become embodied in grassy slopes, rocky screes, open plains, riverbanks. As one moves around a district, this leads one to a sense of any one saga as a much more flexible entity – a narrative whose component parts can be processed mentally in any order, as individual places one encounters present their stories and associations. (Lethbridge)

Lethbridge, like Collingwood and Stefánsson before her, hopes to gain a greater insight into the sagas by visiting the places where they are said to have occurred. Similar pilgrimages occur in urban scapes as Swedish and foreign tourists walk the streets of Stockholm for a sense of the world of Strindberg, or in rural districts wherever a famous author’s childhood home still exists. In a twist of irony characteristic of the postmodern era, many literary tourists in the Nordic region today travel to sites to visit purely imaginary locales, especially ones associated with children’s books. The imaginative world that Tove Jansson created can be experienced at Muminvärlden/Muumimaailma (Moomin World) near Naantali, Finland. Similarly, the happy village of Egner’s Kardemomme By can be experienced today as a theme park in Kristiansand, Norway. And the diverse characters of Astrid Lindgren’s long career can all be met at Astrid Lindgrens Värld (Astrid Lindren’s World) in Vimmerby, Sweden. Ultimately, perhaps, the imaginary countryside of such children’s books or those glimpsed in saga tours or literary walks are not so different after all: in every instance, readers seek contact with a world they have come to know through reading, film, or television, and which they hope may really exist in the concrete world of the everyday. Often such tourism finds motivation in a kind of nostalgia arising perhaps from one’s own memories of reading and admiring a particular book, but also perhaps from a fascination with the notion of dwelling and permanence in an era of unsurpassed mobility and dislocation. Readers-turned-tourists read the physical landscape – real or confected – like a book, lamenting in so doing the seeming loss of a world of contented stasis and continuity, one that Hans Aanrud in his Sidsel Sidserk tried to convince his Norwegian readers never to leave.

Seasonal secondary dwellings Ellen Rees

The Nordic countries today have an unusually high percentage of inhabitants who own or have access to seasonal secondary dwellings. This phenomenon is not only a result of the high standard of living that the countries afford, which puts summerhouses and ski cabins within the reach of most citizens. In Norway and parts of Sweden, the agricultural use of summer dairies as satellites to the main farm dates back to at least the iron age and was in turn exported to Iceland during the time of settlement. A summer dairy, known also in English as “shieling,” was referred to variously as sel (Icelandic and Norwegian), seter (Norwegian), and fäbod (Swedish). These secondary dwellings have had a profound impact on land use and social norms in the areas where they were prevalent. Likewise, timber harvesting required that similar temporary or seasonal dwellings be constructed to house workers at remote wilderness locations within reach of important resources, particularly in Norway, northern Sweden, and Finland. Summer dairies, logging huts, and hunting cabins appear in the folkloric material collected starting in the eighteenth century as liminal places where supernatural, sexual, and other transgressions can take place. Starting in the nineteenth century, these work dwellings were occupied with increasing frequency by urban elites in pursuit of outdoor leisure activities. The rise of social democracy in the twentieth century brought with it an explosion in the construction of privately owned leisure cabins at the same time that shifts in economic forces made many of the traditional temporary work dwellings obsolete. This essay traces the symbolic capital that such temporary dwellings have had in Norwegian literature from the Enlightenment through the early twenty-first century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what references we find to temporary dwellings such as the seter and cabin are typically either part of topographical descriptions of the landscape and agricultural practices of Norway, or part of the moral didactic literature that posited the humble cabin as a trope of moderation. We see an example of the latter in Poul Juel’s 1721 poem, Et Lycksaligt Liv Eftertænckt Da Indbilding og Forfarenhed Derom Disputerede (A Happy Life Reconsidered when Delusion and Experience Debated about It) where personified “Forfarenhed” [experience] praises the simple life of the farmer: “En Bonde-Hyte / som et Konge-Slot skal blive” (59) [A farmer’s cabin / shall be like a king’s castle]. The cabin, along with its occupant the peasant farmer, is held up as an ideal of moderation intended as a model both for the ruling civil-servant class itself, and for the peasants it administered. In the nineteenth century this ideal begins to take on nationalistic significance. Writing soon after the ratification of the Norwegian constitution, Maurits C. Hansen posits a peasant cabin as the explicit symbolic home for a new nation. He attempts to negotiate class hierarchies and create a united national identity that, at the time of writing, was not at all a given. He does this in the short story “Luren” (The Lur) which first appeared in 1819 and was later published along with six other stories in Nationale skizzerede Fortællinger (1825; National Sketched Stories). In “Luren” the cabin in question is built so that Ragnhild and Guttorm, representing different social spheres, can build a new family life together that symbolizes the Norway of the future. Ragnhild, the daughter of a well-to-do farmer represents bondeadelen, the class of doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.38ree © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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powerful land-owning farmers. Guttorm is a man of the landless husmannsstand [tenant farmer class]. In Hansen’s text a third group, the urban embetsstand [civil-servant class], which is here represented by the narrator Carl Møllmann, provides necessary mediation between these two groups. In Hansen’s vision of what he refers to in the text as “det egentlige Norge” (83, Hansen’s italics) [the real Norway], all three groups are – with Møllmann’s intervention – united by the common goal of creating a new, modern society free from the yoke of Danish and Swedish cultural and political domination. In “Luren” the specific space of the cabin itself functions as the meeting place where these social negotiations are worked out conceptually. Note that here the cabin is emphatically a proper family space, rather than an illicit lovers’ hideaway. Guttorm builds it in the wilderness midway between Ragnhild’s family farm and the farm where he works, intending it as a new home for their illegitimate infant daughter. Henrik Ibsen parodies this metaphorical home for the newly united Norwegian family in scene three of the third act of his dramatic poem, Peer Gynt (1867), in which the protagonist builds a settler’s cabin but runs away when confronted with the dual representations of family life embodied in the innocent Solvejg and the monstrous troll-king’s daughter and her (equally monstrous) illegitimate child. Ibsen also parodies what had by the middle of the nineteenth century become a cliché, namely the seter as an erotic space, through the three lusty herd-girls who quite explicitly invite Peer back to their seter for sex in scene two of the second act. The record of the work and social practices carried out in the Norwegian seter in particular is extensive (Solheim and Reinton). The seter is imagined primarily as a feminine space, populated by young women from lower social strata within the farming community, whose job it was to tend and milk cows, sheep, and goats, gather winter fodder, and produce dairy products. Historically, many men of the same social status also used it as a base from which to gather winter fodder, burn charcoal, and hunt, yet the seter has been posited in almost exclusively feminine terms. Indeed it was widely thought to be occupied by female supernatural beings (Huldrer) during the off-season. The location of the seter outside the surveillance of authority figures in the larger rural community created opportunity for both legitimate courting and illicit sexual relations and in turn prompted a rich tradition of folk narratives regarding seduction and sexual encounters with supernatural beings. Yet it is important to note that both lexicographer Christen Jensøn writing in 1646 and topographer Jens Essendrop writing in 1761 describe the inhabitants of the seter as “utro” (respectively 80 and 142) [unfaithful], in the sense of unreliable and likely to cheat the farmer economically rather than as sexually unfaithful, thus suggesting that the notion of the seter as a space of specifically sexual transgression was a relatively late development. Edvard Storm’s Døleviser (Valley Songs) from the 1770s contains one of the earliest literary representations of seter-life. In “Heimreise fraa Sæteren” (Journey Home from the Shieling), Storm situates the seter in terms of the agricultural practices performed, and indeed the return to the main farm is prompted by the completion of the tasks expected of the budeie, or dairy maid, and the exhaustion of seasonal food resources: Os ha gjort qva gjæras skulle, ysta Ost aa kinna Smør, Naa staa at aa kløvja Øikjom, sættja Laas for Sæterdør. Korkje finds dæ meire Føe her for Heie hel’ for Krist, Gla æ os, os slæp aat Bygden, meire gla æ Kue vist. (210)

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480 (We have done what needs to be done, made cheese and churned butter, Now all that remains is saddling the horse, locking the shieling door. There is no more fodder here for heathen or Christian, We are happy, we are going to the village, even happier surely are the cows.)

This opening verse, which was written in Storm’s approximation of the Gudbrandsdal dialect, expresses a sense of relief at the prospect of returning to the village. Often assumed to be an authentic example of oral folk poetry, Storm’s seter poem has lived on, at least peripherally, in the Norwegian cultural imagination up to the present. Storm posits the seter as an explicitly erotic locus. The unidentified, but presumably female I of the poem addresses the seter building with direct references to both work and sexuality: “Farvæl Sæl! mi kjære Stugu, som saa mangt mit Arbei saag! / Montru du aa mærkte naagaa, nær Stakællom sjaa mæg laag?” (210) [Goodbye shieling! my dear cabin, which saw so much work! / Perhaps you also noticed something, when the young men lay with me?]. Taken as a whole the poems represent a merging of the classical pastoral literary tradition with oral folk narratives. The poetic I in the Døleviser poems frequently gives voice to an explicitly female desiring gaze that is directed toward the male body. This voice is sometimes that of a peasant milkmaid (Kari or Mari), sometimes that of a supernatural hulder (wood nymph). The setting, however, is not an idealized Arcadia, but rather a recognizable and functioning workplace.

Figure 53.  Traditional seter milieu in Norway, with a primitive cabin in a high-altitude summer pasture. Photo: Max Smolyar/Shutterstock

Storm’s unusual merging of the work practices with the erotic stands in marked contrast to later national-romantic notions of the particularly Norwegian character of seter life, which posits the high-mountain seter as a specifically national and a highly idealized locus. This later view typically erases the intensely demanding work practices and is perhaps most popularly expressed in

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Henrik Anker Bjerregaard’s drama Fjeldeventyret (1825; Mountain Adventure), Peter Christen Asbjørnsen’s second volume of Norske huldreeventyr og folkesagn (1848; Norwegian Wood Nymph Folktales and Folk Legends), Camilla Collett’s Amtmandens Døttre (1854–1855; The District Governor’s Daughters), and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s Synnøve Solbakken (1857). These writers were pivotal in articulating nostalgia for the mountain dairy among the increasingly urbanized Norwegian civil-servant class, which was essentially the highest social status in a country without a functional aristocracy. As a result of the romantic concepts of the Volk being imported from Germany by the cultural elite in Norway, the landscape became central to emerging constructions of national identity in the aftermath of the 1814 constitution. Often this geography was posited as though it were an unmediated wilderness of untouched mountains and fjords. It is important to note, however, that many of the key national romantic texts used the seter or hunting cabin as a crucial point of access to this wilderness and in fact most of the literary depictions of rural storytelling took place during leisure activities shared by traveling members of the embetsstand and working peasants while resting at a temporary seasonal dwelling. This is most clearly illustrated in Asbjørnsen’s two “Højfjeldsbilleder” (High Mountain Pictures), “En Søndagskveld til Sæters” (1848; A Sunday Evening at the Shieling) and “Reensdyrjagt ved Ronderne” (1848; Reindeer Hunt in Rondane), in which the leisure activity of tale-telling unites the two groups that are otherwise at odds. Both Bjørnson and Collett activated the seter in their explorations of feminine ideals. In Synnøve Solbakken, Bjørnson appears to strip the seter of its erotic connotations. He presents an idealized representation of the seter as an extension of village life, rather than a liminal and transgressive place. In Amtmandens Døttre, Collett uses the seter as a topos of freedom for her bourgeois protagonist, Sofie Ramm. It is while playing peasant at her family’s seter that Sofie discovers her singing voice, and there she becomes an object of desire for Georg Cold. This bourgeois occupation of peasant space is further emphasized in the novel by a memorable scene in which the Ramm family and their guest literally occupy the cabin of fisherman Anders. The family damages Anders’s property thereby leading to a lively debate as to whether their occupation of a peasant home for the purposes of pleasure is morally defensible. With the rise of tourism in Scandinavia starting in the mid-nineteenth century, structures previously exclusively used as dairies or lumberjack housing joined hunting cabins as key points of access to the Nordic wilderness. One of the earliest literary representations of tourism appeared in Bjerregaard’s comedy, Fjeldeventyret, in which a group of three young men traveling across the mountains on foot in the 1820s is taken to be a band of criminals rather than the (at the time) far less common tourists that they actually are. This now almost forgotten work was a central text in nineteenth-century Norway, with no lesser figures than Henrik Wergeland, Ibsen, Ivar Aasen, Bjørnson, and Arne Garborg all involved in various productions and translations of the play. In the mid-nineteenth century, Norway closely followed Switzerland in its transformation into a site for commercial tourism. By the 1860s, the Norwegian civil-servant class had appropriated British tourism practices for itself. As tourism increased, the liminal nature of seasonal dwellings was largely maintained, thus making the cabins and summerhouses of the late nineteenth century as transgressive as those from the early modern era. With the establishment of

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the Norwegian Tourist Association in 1868 came the purchase of large numbers of seter buildings and other outlying cabins in order to establish a network of access points to the wilderness for purely leisurely purposes. By the 1890s this practice had become firmly entrenched, and it was articulated as a set of healthy and health-promoting practices. In the literature of the period, however, one can detect a subversive discourse of abject masculinity in which the goal of the cabin visit was not merely to get in touch with idealized nature, but rather to act out ostensibly primitive impulses. One not only hunted for wild game, but also conceptualized women as prey. We see this abject masculinity reflected in the final act of Ibsen’s Når vi døde vågner (1899; When We Dead Awaken). In the third act, Ulfhejm and the hunter’s cabin where he takes Maja serve as an alluring primal contrast to Rubek and Irene’s lofty idealism. Ibsen locates Ulfhejm’s primal instinct in the run-down cabin, while Rubek’s idealism remains ungrounded in the vertical mountain landscape and is eventually dashed to pieces in the avalanche that ends the play. The cabin as a locus for the abject male is even more fully developed in Knut Hamsun’s Pan: Fra Løjtnant Glahns Papirer (1894; Pan: From the Papers of Lieutenant Thomas Glahn). Hamsun’s well-known nostalgia for an imagined, pre-industrial, feudal society, free from the alienating horrors of modernity is ideologically retrogressive. Yet, ironically, in the example of Pan, it is through the enactment of the quintessentially modern social practice of tourism that Hamsun’s protagonist is able to place himself in the dominant position in his own atavistic fantasy. Hamsun sets the narratives back in time, a move that places the Nordland narrative at the precise historical moment when tourism in Norway began to be commodified rather than sporadic and individual. Glahn’s (and Hamsun’s) nostalgia for an imagined, primitive connection to the wilderness links directly to a much larger, romantic conceptualization of Norwegian national identity that is manifested through Norway’s developing profile as a tourist destination. Tourism fundamentally entails a going-elsewhere. In Pan, the protagonist goes two places for recreation: a rented hunter’s cabin in northern Norway and a cabin or hotel of sorts (Hamsun is not clear on this point) in rural India. Although the province of Nordland lies within the national borders of Norway, Hamsun treats it and its inhabitants as foreign and exotic (and of course the very status of Norway’s borders as “national” throughout the 1800s is problematic), much as he does the inhabitants of the Indian province depicted in the novel’s epilogue. The cabin as conceptualized in the Norwegian cultural imagination is a paradoxical space. It is on the one hand intensely private and personal, yet on the other hand remains outside the realm of everyday life. As is the case in Pan, it is almost, but not quite a part of the wilderness by which it is imagined to be (but in reality is often not) surrounded. This imagined isolation may be why the reader finds it so easy to erase the fact that Glahn’s cabin is in visual range of the settlement at Sirilund. For Glahn the cabin represents his desire for a primitive life in which he can rule the land. His social standing and lieutenant’s salary allow him to act out this fantasy, but only for a limited time. Edvarda consistently resists Glahn’s attempts to objectify her and instead tries to claim his attention and love as his social equal. She devastatingly disrupts Glahn’s fantasy of control over both the cabin and herself when she comments: “Ifjor var det en englænder som hadde Deres hytte, han kom også ofte til os og spiste” (340) [“Last year it was an Englishman who had your hut, and he came and ate with us quite often” (12)] and again, after Mack has burned the cabin “Tænk skal De allerede reise! gjentok hun. Hvem skal nu komme

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til næste år?” (407) [“‘To think that you’re leaving already!’ She said again. ‘Who will be coming next year?’” (104)]. The comments are doubly disturbing to Glahn’s sense of mastery: the Englishman of last year both occupied the cabin that Glahn considers as his own and quite easily may have been the object of Edvarda’s desire for a time, as will (presumably) next year’s occupant of the rebuilt cabin. It appears that the dominant public discourse of health and outdoorsmanship eventually drowned out the more abject and transgressive masculinity represented in Ibsen’s Når vi døde vågner and Hamsun’s Pan. With the rise of social democracy in the early decades of the twentieth century, we also see increasing efforts to democratize places of leisure and normalize the practices that take place within them. We see this both in the spread of urban kolonihager [garden colonies] and in attempts to make more cabins available to a broader spectrum of society. Businesses, for example, invest in “company cabins” for the use of their employees. During the decades after World War II, we see an explosive increase in the number of private cabins built for leisure use. It is thus perhaps not surprising that at the very historical juncture in which leisure cabins came within reach of the non-elite, they also more or less disappeared from literary texts but became one of the key tropes of crime fiction. As this took place, the social practices of idealized cabin life were cemented in popular culture. Notably the activities that were most central to cabin life mimicked the hard work and harsh living conditions of seter life: cabin life typically required a dramatically lower standard of living than urban life, with outdoor toilets and a lack of electricity and running water considered essential to a positive cabin experience. Summer cabin occupants spent a large part of their time either repairing and maintaining the cabin structure itself or hunting, fishing, picking berries, or otherwise engaging in outdoor activities that echo the work practices of the shieling. The interwar writer Gunnar Larsen might be viewed as the literary heir to Hamsun’s abject elitism. All five of his novels explore transgressive aspects of cabin life for well-heeled Oslo-ites, and in each case, the cabins are privately owned and constructed purely for leisure purposes. In Week-end i evigheten (1934; Weekend in Eternity) the unnamed protagonist experiences a traumatic and dreamlike altered state of consciousness that is played out in no fewer than three separate temporary seasonal dwellings. The protagonist appears to take two separate journeys, one “real” and one imagined. On the “real” journey, which is glimpsed only in passing in the text, he joins his wife, children, and guests at a seaside cottage, while in his mind he follows a mysterious stranger to an isolated cabin in the woods. That stranger leads him further in, as it were, to a lakeside summer house where he has a conversation with a woman from his past who, Larsen posits, holds the key to an early traumatic experience that continues to block the protagonist. Vacation cabins are similarly connected to the unconscious mind in André Bjerke’s important crime novel, De dødes tjern (1942; Pond of the Dead), which was published under the pseudonym Bernhard Borge. As with Larsen and other interwar writers such as Sigurd Hoel and Johan Borgen, Bjerke sees temporary seasonal dwellings as a locus where modern, urban professionals can get in touch with their more primitive instincts. But Bjerke focuses on criminal behavior and moreover takes full advantage of the narrative possibilities that the cabin offers as a particularly Norwegian variant of the classic English country-house detective story.

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Cabins disappeared rather mysteriously from Norwegian belles lettres after the Second World War but flourished in the detective fiction of the postwar period. They started to reappear in Norwegian literature just before the millennium. It seems likely that this reappearance of specifically literary seasonal temporary dwellings coincided with substantive shifts in normative leisure practices. Whereas throughout the period of roughly 1930–80, cabin life was idealized as consisting of Spartan and primitive leisure practices that mimicked real work, after the rise of “yuppie” individualism, leisure practices in Norway began to more closely resemble leisure practices in other parts of the world. In other words, it became more socially acceptable to want comfort and convenience. By the early 2000s, cabins had taken on an entirely new role as markers of wealth and social status. New practices began to dominate, particularly in the realm of sports. Whereas previously simple activities such as hiking and cross-country skiing dominated, in recent years higher status and more expensive sports activities, such as snowboarding, Alpine skiing, and snowmobiling have made significant inroads. At the same time, a wider variety of indoor leisure practices have become acceptable, with a much higher standard of interior design and facilities, more and more cabins connected to satellite television and the internet, and increasing emphasis on the serving of luxury food and drink.

Figure 54.  A modern Norwegian cabin in the area north of Oslo shows the evolution of the secondary seasonal dwelling. Photo: Paul D. Smith/Shutterstock

Per Petterson’s critically acclaimed novel Ut og stjæle hester (2003; Out Stealing Horses) intertwines multiple narratives set in different time periods in the first-person narrator’s life. In the narrative present of 1999, the narrator Trond T. Sander has moved to a run-down cabin in a rural community and is in the process of fixing it up. In the primary narrative past of 1948, Trond is staying with his father in a similar cabin in a similarly remote rural environment. The geographic location at the edge of the forest along the Swedish border is revealed in the course

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of the novel to have great significance for yet another narrative past, which is told in the words of a minor character. This embedded narrative relates events from the war years of 1942 and 1944 at the same cabin, which Trond’s father used as a base for trafficking for the resistance movement. This structure makes possible the heroic subversion of Nazi occupiers from a liminal and dangerous place, but also a masculine escape from the family by Trond’s father. In the present narrative, Trond too goes to a cabin to escape the pressures of urban life. Although he occupies the cabin full-time, his activities overwhelmingly correspond to twentieth-century cultural practices carried out at Norwegian vacation cabins  – chopping wood, repairing the cabin, watching the seasons, rejecting modern-day conveniences such as the telephone, television, and central heating. Petterson reactivates the erotic aspect of the seter tradition by inserting an almost otherworldly episode that takes place at a seter on the night during which the fifteen-year-old Trond discovers his father’s extramarital affair. Awaking during the night to find his father gone, Trond starts walking aimlessly until he comes to a nearby seter. He sleeps in the cow shed until the early morning, when he is awakened by the dairymaid, whom he confuses with his own mother. As he watches her milk he becomes sexually aroused. He leaves abruptly and walks toward the river, where he sees his father passionately kissing a local farmer’s wife. Petterson’s novel echoes folkloric narratives of bergtagning (being lured into the mountain by supernatural creatures) in that the father is seduced away by an alluring woman in nature and is never seen again. Petterson’s nostalgic literary representation of normative cabin and seter practices appears at a juncture in history in which this idealized cabin life has been increasingly disappearing, as cabin owners demand greater and greater luxury in their second (and even third) homes. Acknowledgements Material from this essay has appeared previously in Cabins in Modern Norwegian Literature: Negotiating Place and Identity (2014). This slightly altered version is republished here with permission from Farleigh Dickinson University Press.

“Worker ants on the lush bosom of Earth” Cyclic patterns of life in the Finnish countryside Leena Kaunonen

Oli jo väki vähitellen vetäytynyt tuvasta pihamaalle ja miesväki heittäytynyt ruokalevoilleen pihapientareelle. Siinä auringon hellittävässä lämmössä kellottelivat he rentoina, ruumis valtoinaan maata pitkin . . . Kun pappi katseli ympärillään laajenevaa maisemaa, näytti kuin maassa makaavat miehet niinkuin työmuurahaisia tai mitä pieniä kasvannaisia vain olivat siinä maan rehevällä povella. Sepä maanpovi se olikin heille kaikki kaikessa, sitä kyntö, siihen kylvö, siitä kasvu kaikenlainen. Irti siitä sitä ei ihminen ollut. Ryntäitään myöten sitä siinä kiinni oli. Niin olivat olleet heidän isänsä ja isiensä isät, niin olivat he ja heidän jälkeläisensä. Ja missä oli ihminen irti siitä? (Jotuni 76) (The workers had gradually moved from the farmhouse living room to the yard where the men had flung themselves onto the grass to stretch out and enjoy a rest after dinner. There, in the relaxing warmth of the sun, they sprawled with their bodies relaxed and their limbs spread apart . . . As Reverend Nyman viewed the scene which stretched out around him, it seemed to him that these men lying on the grass were reminiscent of worker ants, or simply some small growths, there on the lush bosom of the earth. Indeed, that very bosom of earth was everything to them; it was the soil to be plowed, to be sown, and to yield crops of all kinds. Uprooted from it, a person was not a person. They were deeply rooted in it. That’s the way it had been with their fathers and grandfathers, and, in turn, with them and their offspring. And where would a man find a place of existence uprooted from the earth?)1

Maria Jotuni’s first novel Arkielämää (1909; Everyday Life) gives an account of the events during an ordinary workday at the Koppelmäki farm, in Savonia (Finnish: Savo), a province in the east of Finland. The novel is set sometime between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The storyline recounts the events on the Koppelmäki farm from the dawning of one day until the early hours of the next. The central protagonist of the novel is Reverend Nyman, the name by which he is called by the villagers. In the excerpt from Jotuni’s novel quoted above, the usual bustle has calmed down in the farmyard, and Rev. Nyman, an occasional visitor to the house, has stopped for a moment to watch the men who after having a lunch break have thrown themselves down on the ground in the farmyard to take a nap before getting back to work in the hayfield. In Rev. Nyman’s mind, these exhausted men – these human beings – are comparable to the worker ants or a small outgrowth from “maan rehevällä povella” [the lush bosom of the earth]. This image emphasizes the quintessential relationship between people and the earth (Mother Nature); these men are just one link in a chain of generations all of which are bound to the earth. Here Jotuni’s text will serve as an introduction to the themes of living, dwelling, and working in a pre-modern, agrarian milieu. It is important to note that here the figurative meaning of land and earth as the maternal source of life is located in the soil of an ordinary farmyard. From 1.

All translations of Finnish texts in this essay, unless otherwise credited, are the author’s own and are previously unpublished. doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.39kau © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Figure 55.  Map of the provinces of southern Finland, including the regions of Savonia and Ostrobothnia. Photo: Maria Egupova/Shutterstock

the yard where men are resting, the perspective expands to encompass the whole landscape and the setting in which people are living their lives. Consequently, the humble yard is part of the bigger picture, of the whole system of agrarian life: living and earning one’s daily bread through hard work entirely dependent on nature and its annual rhythms. These rhythms are based on routines that are part of the demands of living and working in a spatially defined milieu of which a farmyard is but one example. Of course, there are other examples of important spaces such as the tupa (or pirtti in the north of Finland), a multipurpose living room in the farmhouse, which along with the yard is centrally located and an important part of the household. The intricacies of the meanings connected to spatial practices first demand attention. They include routines and recurrent tasks that are performed regularly by the inhabitants of the farm and the paid laborers. The farmhouse and the workspaces of the farmyard are here analyzed as a functional unit. These farms are characteristically well managed and orderly, and, significantly, they are owned by the farmer and his family.

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Although Finnish novelists often depict orderly households and the industrious people living and working in them in minute detail, there is an obvious tendency to balance this idealistic picture of the hard-working Finnish peasantry with an equally notable inclination to portray it in a humorous light and often as almost infantile in its ignorance, credulity, and slackness. Early critics interpreted the novels as giving an accurate account of the agrarian way of life, but a radical reassessment of the genre in recent Finnish literary history has emerged. In recent interpretations, humor is seen as a veiled, ironic weapon and an implicit critique of society as well as of the inequality between higher and lower social classes. Moreover, it is stressed that the comic characters are meant to deconstruct national myths and a misguided conception of a Finnish peasantry (Rojola “Veren ääni” 173–77). The intention here is not to undertake extensive analysis of the socio-historical connections between literature and society, but rather to highlight the contextual aspect of several important works, particularly Lehtonen’s classic novel Putkinotko (1919–20). Over the course of a number of years, the protagonist Juutas Käkriäinen’s legendary laziness and slovenly way of running his household has been interpreted in various ways. It is even questionable whether the word “running” in the sense of managing or assuming responsibility is an apt term for describing his role. What is of particular interest is to view Juutas’s household along with those of others located in small cabins. Although the important issues are the recurrent practices and the idea of cyclic time, the primary focus is on what happens to people born and raised in pre-modern, agrarian communities but who move to new, modern milieus. Thematically, the migration from the countryside to the metropolis is not new. What has been characteristic and typical for the development of Finnish society has also been typical for Finnish literature as well, writes Pertti Karkama in his book Kirjallisuus ja nykyaika (1994; Literature and Modern Times). According to him, one can detect a constant tension between rural and urban experience in the literary works from the realism of the late 1800s to the modernism of the 1950s. As the result of the processes of modernization, the characters in the novels have to leave their familiar and safe home district, which is undergoing a gradual change, and move to the town (175). In his study, Karkama charts the history of this development as it is described in Finnish novels beginning with Järnefelt’s Isänmaa (1893; Fatherland) and continuing all the way through to Sillanpää’s Elämä ja aurinko (1916; Life and Sun) and his collection of short stories Ihmislapsia elämän saatossa (1918; The Children of Man Throughout the Course of Life). For Karkama, the motif of the return from the modern back to the pre-modern is of central importance. The protagonists of the novels discussed in Karkama’s study have moved to the city and acquainted themselves with the modern lifestyle and the whole gamut of urban attitudes, philosophies, and opinions. Their experiences in the urban milieu lead them to disillusionment. The protagonists return home to their pre-modern life, which they now completely value anew in the light of their recently acquired experience of life (177, 179). The tension between the rural and the urban – the social and philosophical changes caused by modernization and the movement between the local and the global – bring Hyry’s novels in close proximity to the works of earlier periods. The novels by Jotuni, Lehtonen, and Hyry belong to two contrasting traditions depicting rural life. On the one hand, Jotuni’s and Lehtonen’s novels portray the agrarian world and its way of life as undisturbed and eternal without any visible signs of modernization. Indeed, some

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signs – occasional visitors from the city or passing references to technical innovations (forestry, agricultural machinery, or telephones) – lurk in the background but are generally subdued, and the story focuses on the rustic setting and its inhabitants. These novels do not foreground the tensions between the rural and the urban settings that are thematized in the literary works by Järnefelt and Sillanpää. On the other hand, the conclusions emerging from Antti Hyry’s texts written in different phases of his career portray in an exemplary way both the modernization of Finnish society and the transition from the agrarian way of life to the modern. In his early novels Kevättä ja syksyä (1958; Spring and Autumn), Kotona (1960; At Home), and Alakoulu (1965; Elementary School), he depicts the quotidian life of Ostrobothnian rural communities along the Gulf of Bothnia coast in western Finland during the 1930s and ’40s, the so-called golden years of Finnish agriculture characterized by an almost exclusive use of human labor and horse power in farm work. In his later novels and short stories, the turning points in the history of Finland – the two wars, the post-war reconstruction, the mass-migration to Sweden in the 1970s, the crucial changes in the social structure, along with the increasing urbanization and a decreasing rural population – form an implicit background. The protagonists of Hyry’s novels experience these radical social changes and are forced to move from their own or their parents’ farms to metropolitan areas. The reader could easily imagine that in the past their parents and all the preceding generations had had their roots in “the lush bosom” of their homestead, to cite the words of Rev. Nyman. But Hyry’s protagonists who live in modern times and have established their new residences in urban areas are those with whom the chain of generations has been broken and who are uprooted from the earth. Well-ordered households and daily routines The introduction to this essay mentions the prominence of the rhythm resulting from the practices of working and moving in these spaces. An examination of Koppelmäki’s farm further elucidates the spatiality of a farmhouse and its practices. The buildings and their placement on the farm are of vital importance because they dictate which routes people follow to move among them. Equally important is the frequency with which they choose the same paths. These two elements create the rhythm of the Koppelmäki farm. It is a spatial system divided into different areas according to the needs of the inhabitants of a farm who are living and working in the household. The yard is a square framed by the farmhouse and the barn directly opposite it and two rows of cabins – one for the male farmhands and the other for the female servants – as well as the granary and the storehouse. The most significant of these mentioned in Jotuni’s novel are the farmhouse and the barn, as indicated by their position in the yard. The well-worn path from the veranda of the farmhouse to the barn (the shortest of all routes) indicates the importance of the dairy to the household: Itse Koppelmäen piha oli avara nurmikkoneliö, jossa asuinrakennus ja navettarakennus olivat vastakkaisina sivuina ja naisten ja miesten aittojen rivit toisina vastakkaisina sivuina. Kaidat polut risteilivät vihreällä pihapeitteellä. (Jotuni 10)

490

Leena Kaunonen (The Koppelmäki farm had a wide square-shaped yard, which was covered with grass. The yard was flanked by the farmhouse and barn on opposite sides, and lined by two rows of cabins facing each other on the other two sides of the square. The cabins on the opposite sides of the farmyard were places in which male and female farmhands and servants were housed. Narrow paths crisscrossed on the green ground of the yard.)

Cattle need constant care throughout the day, seven days a week. The tending of cattle is a task that is the essential part of the duties of the farmer’s wife and servants. The farmyard’s closely spaced structures form a compact unit, a working sphere in which people constantly move between various areas during the workday. The Koppelmäki farmyard, where people rest after their meals, is the place where the representatives of two different worlds meet. On the one hand there are those who are living and working at the farm enjoying a well-deserved, but short rest before going back to work. They are tied to the rhythm of a scheduled workday. On the other hand, Rev. Nyman’s rhythm of life is totally different. He is a sympathizing observer and an outsider; and there is a touch of a Hamsunian vagabond about him. He is not tied to land in terms of either land ownership or paid work, and he has never done hard physical farm labor. Despite his name, Rev. Nyman holds no office but moves around the countryside making small repairs and acting as a natural healer to support himself. He has all the time he needs at his disposal, he does not need to hurry up, to rush anything through. For him, time is infinitely long, or at least it used to be, because presently he is in his sixties and feels that his life span is drawing to a close. There is a contrast embedded in this situation: on the one hand a longish, eventful life history of a free individual who comes to realize the finiteness of his life after having met a colorful mixture of people of different ages, sexes, and social status belonging to the same household; on the other, all of them bound together by the necessity of hard work and routines, which they carry out day after day. The arrangement of the Koppelmäki farm structures resembles the typical layout of an Ostrobothnian farm, a characteristic setting in Antti Hyry’s novels. The Ostrobothnian farmyard though, is more tightly enclosed: the structures are placed such that the yard is sheltered from every direction. A narrow drive, wide enough for a horse carriage to pass, leads to the yard. The farmhands – usually the brothers in the same family – dwell around the yard (Kaunonen 48). Each household is independent, but their proximity to each other facilitates comraderie and opportunity for frequent visiting. In many of Hyry’s early novels, the protagonists are children, and their daily activities – play and exploration – are portrayed. Children in particular are free to move around the yard whenever they like. There is a constant coming and going between the households, but adults and children know very well the invisible borders that differentiate the spatial system of the farmyard. They know that this barn belongs to our family, and that granary belongs to the neighbor. In both Jotuni’s Arkielämää and in Hyry’s novel Kotona, the paths are specifically mentioned in order to illustrate the day-to-day routes and routine movements of people. The footpaths are a result of the constant walking through the yard. A closer look at the farmyard in Hyry’s novel as seen through the eyes of the farmer’s son is revealing. Portailta oli polkuja navettaan, saunaan, maantielle, talliin ja aittaan. Polut olivat mullanvärisiä, niillä kasvoi ruohoa siellä täällä. Muualla oli ruohikkoa, jossa oli keltaisia pieniä nuppuja, ja matalia kiviä. Navetta ja navetanporstua olivat suoraan edessä, ja vasemmalla oli navetan

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kanssa vinkkelissä talli ja aitta rinnakkain. Liiteri, jossa oli lattialla puunsilppua, oli kattoluiskan alla aitta- ja tallirakennuksen takana. (9) (At the foot of the steps there were paths that led to the barn, the sauna, the road, the stable, and the granary. The paths were earth-colored, but one could see some tufts of grass here and there. Except for the paths, the farmyard was covered in grass and spotted with small yellow buds and flat stones. The barn and its small porch were located straight across from the steps, and, on the left, the stable and the granary stood side-by-side at right angles to the barn. The woodshed, with its floor covered in chips, stood underneath a slanted roof behind the granary and the stable.)

The ground of the yard is soil covered with grass, some flat stones, and yellow flowers. Several paths lead from the steps of the veranda in various directions to numerous structures located within the yard or in close proximity: the barn, the sauna, the road, the stable, and the granary. Through the eyes of a young boy observing the yard from the veranda, the earthy color of the crisscrossing paths stands out against the grass-covered ground. The exposure of the earth on the paths is the visible sign of the established daily work routines. The paths leading from the doorstep of the veranda in all directions emphasize the central location of the farmhouse in relation to the other buildings and structures in the yard. It must be noted that in comparison to Hyry, who is better acquainted with men’s way of life, Jotuni is drawn to more of the places and activities in agrarian communities that are regarded as feminine, such as working indoors, raising children, caring for the sick and old, as well as preparing food for the household. All these activities take place in the tupa [farmhouse living room], a multipurpose center of the house. Meal times and coffee breaks are important markers that divide the workday into periods with different tasks and duties assigned to each. A succession of tasks is to be carried out at specified times each day and forms a continuum that extends throughout the day from dawn to dusk. A typical workday is organized around breakfast, lunch at noon, and supper along with some short coffee breaks throughout the day. The women and men gather regularly in the tupa where they eat, drink, chat, gossip, and entertain themselves with old stories. Often those who are most keen on chatting and telling stories are too old and weak to take part in the physically taxing work on the farm. It is characteristic of Jotuni’s novels as well as other Finnish novels describing rustic life that this cyclic pattern of daily life is portrayed as if it had always existed and will continue to exist unchanged. The cycles of human life and work are, thus, inextricably connected to eternal, immutable nature: “Ihana oli maailma ja ihanalta tuntui elämä, joka luonnon povesta kohosi, sen ikuisen, muuttumattoman luonnon. Kuin satua sen parmahilla oli ihmisen elämä, kuin satua vuosisatojen ja aikojen leikki” (Jotuni 117) [What a wonderful world this was, and how wonderful life felt that sprang from the bosom of nature, that eternal, immutable nature. In its bosom, human life was like a dream, as was the play of the centuries and epochs.] Not surprisingly, the novels consist of more than just descriptions of the cyclic patterns and routines. Jotuni and Hyry populate the scenes they describe. One finds in these novelists’ texts a figure of a diligent and industrious female. She is always on the move, often carrying something, coming and going, often walking across the yard to the barn or storehouse or just leaving it. In the first two short chapters of Arkielämää, Rev. Nyman is described as he slowly approaches the Koppelmäki farm. Before arriving, he meets two particularly industrious

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women: Annastiina, an energetic young woman employed by the Koppelmäki family as a maid, and later Loviisa, the daughter of Ukko Koppelmäkeläinen, the retired old master of the house. Rev. Nyman and Annastiina chat, after which she hastens away. When Rev. Nyman eventually arrives at the farm, the first person he sees is Loviisa, who is just walking across the yard from the house to the storehouse where dairy products and equipment are kept.2 She has a milk can in her hands because she is preparing lunch for those who have been harvesting hay in the field. Loviisa is taking charge of the daily duties of the emäntä because the wife of the old master of the house has died and the responsibilities of the emäntä have fallen to her. (Emäntä refers to the eldest woman in the household – typically the farmer’s wife – who supervises the work of the servants.) One might think that this part of Jotuni’s novel is just one example of this kind of scene, but it is on the contrary portrayed often. A passage in Hyry’s short story, “Oikeastaan ihminen,” (1962; Actually a Person) reads: “Vastalypsetyn maidon tuoksu, ja maitokeiton tuoksu. Pilvinen, pehmeä pouta, ja emännät tulevat navetasta” (35) [The aroma of fresh milk and the aroma of boiled milk with bread. Cloudy weather with light haze, and the farmers’ wives are coming out of the barn]. Hyry’s image is tinged with nostalgia. The passage evokes a domestic fantasy in the imagination of the protagonist who is living in the modern world. The days of dairy farming, though, are over and consequently, the aroma of fresh milk and the traditional dishes made from it are no longer readily available. The fantasy culminates in the moment the emännät are returning from the barn, perhaps having just milked the cows. The sweet olfactory sensation of fresh milk, the traditional accompanying dishes, and the image of a hazy day are wrapped up in a soft and sentimental atmosphere. In fact, the image of the industrious female, particularly the image of emäntä, can be traced back to Kalevala: Anopp’ aitasta tulevi Jauhovakka kainalossa: Juokse vastahan pihalle, Alaha kumarteleite, Pyyä vakka kainalosta Tuo tupahan vieäksesi. (2005; 141) (Mother-in-law comes in from the shed the grain-box under her arm: run to meet her in the yard bow down low, ask for the box from under her arm that you may take it indoors.) [Kalevala 304–05]

This quotation from Kalevala advises a young bride, the future daughter-in-law, how to please her anoppi (her future mother-in-law), the emäntä of her new home. The image of the anoppi as 2.

The dairy storehouse was a very important place for the household. Various utensils, pots, and jars were kept there along with dairy products. Raw milk was not kept in storage, so the cream was skimmed off the milk, churned into butter, and salted for preservation. Other ways of processing milk to preserve it longer included souring it to produce buttermilk.

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just coming out of the storehouse with a basket under her arm is similar to that of the emäntä carrying out her daily duties in Jotuni’s and Hyry’s texts. The image of the emäntä walking along the path that leads to the storehouse and carrying a basket and a milk can is emotionally charged and full of an atmosphere of domestic happiness. The following famous passage is from Kivi’s Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers): “Talo ilman aitan polulla astelevata emäntää on niinkuin pilvinen päivä, ja sen perheenpöydän päässä asuu ikävyys kuin riutuva syksy-ilta. Mutta hyvä emäntä on talon kirkas aurinko, joka valaisee ja lämmittää” (20–21) [“A farm without a mistress on its storehouse path is like a cloudy day, and gloom sits at the head of the family table like a dying autumn evening. Whereas a good mistress is the bright sun of a house, spreading light and warmth” (25)]. In Seitsemän veljestä, the eldest brother, Juhani, is planning to marry Venla, a girl from a neighboring cottage. His brother Aapo envisions a happy, domestic life. In this fantasy, he sees the emäntä in the farmyard busily walking along the path that leads to the storehouse. Aapo’s fantasy then continues on by further elaborating on the virtues of a good farmer’s wife. However, the reader eventually sees the fantasy thrown into comic relief in the fourteenth chapter’s portrayal of the domestic life of the newlywed couple. Venla is diligent enough but has her own ways of running the household that are not as docile and industrious as Juhani wishes. The narrator comments on their married life: “Oli siis Juhanin perheen-elämä enimmiten lämmintä päiväpaistetta, mutta välillä myös hieman tuulta ja myrskyä” (334) [“Juhani’s family life was thus for the most warm sunshine, with little interludes of wind and storm” (311)]. The contrasting imagery of sunshine and clouds and even the occasional thunder makes clear the difference between reality and Aapo’s vision of a wife who is as warm and bright as the sun in lighting up the household. As a married man, Juhani learns that thunder and clouds are part of this marriage too. The image of the emäntä walking across the yard can also be linked to tragic events as seen in a poem from Eino Leino’s collection of poems, Helkavirsiä (1903; Whitsong), which tells a story of a man named Räikkö Räähkä, who betrays his people and lets the enemy destroy and burn down his village. After his treachery is disclosed, Räikkö goes into the dark woods and commits suicide. The last two stanzas of the poem read: Kääntyi mies rajassa metsän. Näki hän kullaisen kotinsa, kuuli hän kesäiset äänet, savun saunasta sinisen, karjankellojen kilinän, kaivonvintin vingahduksen, tuvan uksen aukeavan, emon aittahan menevän. Sydän kiertyi synkän miehen, elo kaunis kangastihe, askar autuas inehmon maan kovalla kannikalla; seisoi hetken, katsoi kaksi, metsän korpehen katosi. (45)

Leena Kaunonen

494 (The man turned at the wood’s edge. He saw his dear home, he heard the sounds of summer, the blue smoke from the bath-house, the tinkling of the cowbells, the creaking of the well-sweep, the cabin door opening, mother going to the shed. The desolate man’s heart writhed, a fair life shimmered, the blessed duty of man on the earth’s hard crust; he stood a moment, looked two, vanished into the forest.) [50]

The yard of Räikkö’s home is described as he sees it for the last time. The poem reaches a climax with his last glance at his home, which is accompanied by a complex of sensory experiences. The sights and sounds are typical of summer: the bluish smoke coming from the smoke sauna, the tinkle of a cowbell, the squeak of the draw-well, and finally the opening of the door of the house with the last glimpse of his wife (emo) walking across the yard before going inside the storehouse and disappearing from sight.3 The poem dramatically contrasts the warm and intimate atmosphere of the yard surrounding Räikkö’s home with the grim woods, the scene of his imminent death. Hard life and bohemian lifestyle in small cabins The novels to be discussed next give an account of an alternate lifestyle that is a clear contrast to the orderly and carefully organized households of the well-to-do farms. The reader catches a glimpse of the everyday life in the small cottages that are usually owned by a landlord, not by the farmer himself. What is common to the families who live in these houses is the lack of economic independence and the inability to break away from the poor living conditions. This situation is illustrated in the novels’ depiction of material detail by the lack of adequate space to house the many people often living small cabins, which are so ramshackle that they are more like shacks than cabins. Often there is a swarm of adults, children, bugs, and domestic animals – pigs, chickens, cats, and dogs – living in a shared and confined space. The crowded, messy, and even chaotic life of people dwelling in these primitive conditions is made memorable by Joel Lehtonen’s novel Putkinotko. The novel gives an account of the life of the Finnish proletariat family living in Haapavesi in the east of Finland at some time before the Finnish Civil War in 1918. One can detect hints of the impending conflict when Lehtonen plainly describes the bitterness and suffering of Juutas Käkriäinen and his family caused by the near impossibility of making a living. 3.

Emo is an archaic and poetic expression meaning “mother.” It can also be a synonym for emäntä.

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Attention is then turned in greater detail to the yard of the family of Juutas, the father, and Rosina, the mother. Even though they do not own Putkinotko, the property of their landlord, they regard it as their own territory. For the family, their yard is a safe place, a zone they try to control by every means possible. They mostly remain within the boundaries of their own yard because they feel safe and free there. Beyond the yard looms the unfamiliar and occasionally hostile outside world. On rare occasions, they venture across the boundaries, but they prefer not to go very far. They are careful to stay nearby with their home in sight. Of course every now and then members of the family make visits to the town. Juutas himself, moreover, likes to set off around the county to sell his homemade spirits. But in most cases, they like to keep to themselves in their own terrain in a manner reminiscent of animals’ territories around their dens. An analogy between Käkriäinen’s family and animals is apparent in the description of their digging as if they were from a den of badgers: Kaikki Käkriäiset ovat vielä kuopassa. Tutkivat ojansa reunoja. Yhtäkkiä nostavat he sieltä päätänsä . . . Toisetkin kuuntelevat ylentäen päitään kuopasta kuin olisivat itse mitäkin mäyriä. Heillä on hiestä kosteilla naamoilla ja nenän päällä ruohonkorsia, havuneulasia ja pölyä. Juutas Käkriäisellä, joka on työntänyt kiviä niskavoimillaan, on takin hartioissa paljon multaa. (251) (The whole Käkriäinen family is still in the pit. They inspect its edges. There, they suddenly raise their heads . . . The others listen, poking their heads out of the pit like badgers. On their sweaty faces and on their noses, they have blades of grass, conifer needles, and dust; Juutas Käkriäinen’s coat is covered with dirt from pushing stones with the strong muscles of his shoulder and neck.)

The whole family is beginning to resemble vigilant badgers scanning their surroundings, sniffing the air, and listening for every hiss and whisper that might be a warning of danger or emergency. The analogical relationship is not pejorative. The similarity between human beings and animals does not suggest that the human beings are morally corrupted and have sunk to the level of animals because they are uncivilized, illiterate, and disordered. They are no doubt uncivilized, but their situation goes substantially beyond that. They also resemble animals because of their vitality, fertility, and persistence, all necessary qualities of human beings – or beasts – trying to survive harsh living conditions. Their home territory, the yard, is not clearly demarcated. It is not enclosed by fences or symmetrically surrounded by buildings and structures. The permanent disarray of their way of life can be seen in the manner in which their structures randomly dot the riverside cliffs. “Rakennukset ovat rinteellä, hiukan ylempänä rantaäyrästä. Ne on kyhätty epäjärjestykseen, mikä millekin kalliolle” (8) [The structures stand on the slope, somewhat higher up than the bank. They have been built haphazardly and without order onto the rocks]. As a result of this indifferent placement of structures – or rather huts and shacks – the yard is approximately square but is narrower on the side next to the riverbank. Since there are no precise physical boundaries, one may ask how the extent of the yard can be determined. The answer is that there are auditory boundaries that are set by Rosina’s voice. She has a loud voice that can be heard from a considerable distance. Returning home after hearing Rosina’s shrieks from afar, Juutas reflects that she must have a horn-like organ that serves as her throat. Juutas wonders how her voice clatters at such a speed that one cannot distinguish separate words; even the echo cannot keep

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up with Rosina’s cries. Given that the whole family is associated with badgers and occasionally individual members are equated with squirrels and other small wild animals, it is logical to interpret Rosina’s shrieks as connecting the inhabitants of Putkinotko to the animal world. Rosina has a territorial call, so to speak. It is she who makes known when a visitor is venturing into the territory of Putkinotko, i.e., entering within the reach of her powerful voice. The daily life in Putkinotko is quite different from the well-organized households of Koppelmäki and the functional Ostrobothinan farmyards in Hyry’s novels. Juutas and Rosina try their best to maintain a sort of order in the household, but, typically, every initiative is preceded by a violent row and shouting. Usually the high-spirited children start squabbling over some insignificant matter; the situation escalates quickly; the parents join in; and eventually dogs and cats also become excited and start barking and howling. In a few moments, the household is in total chaos. The same disorder prevails in the farmyard where a motley array of domestic animals moves freely within the yard and its vicinity without constraints. Rosina’s voice alone controls them but not always even that. Despite their boisterous and messy lifestyle, the family members always settle their disputes (most often by Rosina forcefully calling her husband and children to order) without lapsing into physical violence. The same carefree attitude towards household management emerges in Jotuni’s Arkielämää as well. While the majority of the novel is dedicated to the account of life at the Koppelmäki farm, one chapter contains an episode in which the protagonist, Rev. Nyman, calls on his old acquaintance Roikka-Pietari. He is living with his wife, children, and grandchildren in the small Ohkola cabin located a few yards from Koppelmäki. The reader is told explicitly that the overall impression of Ohkola’s household and inhabitants is that of abandonment and total indifference to their worldly existence (77). The yard is untidy, and everything in the Ohkola cabin and its surroundings is in a dilapidated state. Curiously enough, the overall impression of Ohkola is not misery and despair, but rather a relaxed and slothful attitude towards life. Though it is a common negative characteristic, Roikka-Pietari raises this trait to an art form by spending the majority of his daily life dozing on the bench. A masculine sensibility dominates the household in that Roikka-Pietari exercises control over the female members of the family, who assume the principal responsibility for the domestic duties even though they are accustomed to doing so in a rather slovenly manner. Comparing the attitudes of Ohkola’s inhabitants with the moral codes and principles held by the neighboring family of Koppelmäki is revealing. In the latter case, the sense of duty, diligence, and decency are held in high esteem, whereas in the Ohkola cabin, the attitudes are more liberal, even to the point of total nonchalance. Roikka-Pietari, for example, has a “second wife” whose existence he emphatically denies. In a sly counterbalance, his wife, Otteljaana, and their daughter have several children, some of whom are the legitimate offspring of Roikka-Pietari, but the rest are by unknown fathers. As some of the early commentators have argued clearly in regard to Arkielämää, Jotuni had a satirical eye and a conscious intention in juxtaposing the somewhat rigid virtues and orderly house management of Koppelmäki with Ohrola’s bohemian atmosphere. Contrary to the reception Rev. Nyman received when approaching the adjacent Koppelmäki farm – Annastiina and Loviisa diligently at work, one breathlessly running an errand and the other preparing a meal – a very different sight welcomes him as he arrives at the Ohkola cabin.

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Instead of women bustling about in the tupa, Roikka-Pietari is lying on the bench so listlessly that it takes a long time for him to sit up slowly up to greet the visitor. This juxtaposition of contrasting encounters is emblematic. While fully recognizing the value of the well-managed and decent farm of Koppelmäki, it is also evident that the lifestyle in Ohrola has its peculiar charm: the members of the household are living in a passive and carefree state in which every initiative and project is postponed almost ad infinitum. Separation from agrarian time-space This essay has up to this point engaged two different ways of approaching the rhythm of space. The first focused on the regular cyclic patterns that are part of working and moving among the spaces of the farmyard; the second treated small cabins without a yard that embody irregular or at times chaotic patterns of living. In fact, there is always more or less open space around small cabins, but it cannot be called a yard in the sense of a functional unit like that of the Koppelmäki and other Ostrobothnian farms. While the inhabitants of the cabins seem to be less dependent on cyclic patterns than the farmers and their households, the general experience of time in all kinds of agrarian communities is still based on temporal coordinates. This fact means that daily life and farm labor are not scheduled according to certain hours of the day and measured by clock. People adjust themselves to diurnal and seasonal cycles and more specifically to changing weather conditions, fluctuating temperatures, and the amount of natural light necessary to work outdoors. The week is divided into seven days: six busy workdays followed by Sunday, the day dedicated to rest. On a larger timescale, the cycle of the changing season dictates the seasonal tasks of plowing and sowing. What do these cyclic patterns mean to people who shift from an agrarian way of life to modern, urban rhythms? After being brought up in a rural milieu, can people adjust to the modern experience of time in towns and cities? According to Anthony Giddens, one of the signs of a society’s modernization process is the shift from the unity of local space and time to national and global time zones. In many of Antti Hyry’s novels and stories, this change of temporal coordinates causes problems for people who, as they move away from their agrarian environment, also leave the agrarian experience of time behind. The temporary transition into institutional spaces and places such as the military service in garrisons, the compulsory schedules in schools, and the regular routine of medical care in hospitals brings people for the first time into contact with the modern experience of time. This dramatic shift happens to Pauli, a thirteen-year-old boy and the protagonist of the novels Isä ja poika (1971; Father and Son) and Silta liikkuu (1975; The Bridge is Moving), who is hospitalized because of his undiagnosed illness. Growing up in a small village in the north of Finland during the early 1940s, Pauli has never before been in a hospital. He finds the new faces and customs, his immobility in his sick bed, and the electric light very strange. Here he has also entered a differently structured time system not based on natural phenomena. He is separated from his familiar rhythm of life: the alternation of sleep and work based on the pattern of day and night. In the absence of these markers of time, the monotony of hospitalization gradually begins to irritate Pauli. In the hospital, he must for the first time in his life invent new

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compensatory ways to experience time that otherwise would appear formless. Pauli’s confusion about living in a global time system fits neatly into Giddens’s analysis. It is very likely that after some time spent in the hospital his confusion would result in the complete loss of the sense of time. He quietly reflects: “Kun täällä ei mitään työtä tehdä, eikä nousta ylös sängystä päivälläkään, ei ole oikeaa yötäkään” (Isä ja poika 132) [Because nobody here does any work, and no one gets out of bed in the daytime, there is no real night either]. A pendant attached to the ceiling of the ward attracts Pauli’s attention because it glows with a dim light at night. Lying awake, he finds the artificial light to be a strange and interesting phenomenon because it dissipates the nocturnal darkness and creates the impression of daytime even though it is quiet and nobody is either moving or working at night. Pauli is intently searching for a basic pattern of time that could help him divide his experienced time into discernible periods. Gradually he learns that by observing the scheduled daily activities – treatments and routines carried out by the nurses – he can establish a “clock” with which he can synchronize his own sometimes-blurred sense of time.4 The weekends and especially Sundays come as a surprise just as he is getting accustomed to the hospital routines. He is expecting the doctor to come to the ward as usual, but because of the weekend, his expectation is not fulfilled. Despite many modern amenities – running water, central heating, and electricity  – the clinical environment disappoints him because Sundays are not spent in the same way as at home. There, as in the other homes in his neighborhood, the alternation of busy weekdays and peaceful Sundays given over to repose is an essential part of the agrarian and Laestadian culture. Everyone living in that culture is expected to keep the Sabbath. Lying in his hospital bed, Pauli comes to the conclusion that here he cannot experience the same feeling for Sunday he did at home. For him, keeping of the Sabbath means not merely the cessation of work and silent surroundings, but also a special atmosphere characterized as serene, calm, and – in an understated way – sublime. Like Pauli, several other characters in Hyry’s novels from the 1970s to the ’90s have been forced to cut their ties to familiar surroundings and move to unfamiliar settings.5 The protagonists of Hyry’s stories have permanently moved away from their home villages. The world, however, has become significantly different from the way it was described in Järnefelt’s and Sillanpää’s novels: the ultimate return to home village is no more considered a realistic possibility. Every visit home in the country is temporary. But these visits tend to form a regular pattern: a recurring motif in Hyry’s works is that the protagonists spend a period from early spring to late fall in their home village and the rest of the time in a metropolitan area. This movement between the country and the city thus follows the cycles of nature as witnessed in the changing of the seasons (Kaunonen 240). 4.

There is a nice detail associated with the nurses. Pauli very much likes the way they bustle around in the hospital ward. The nurses move between patients’ beds, distribute medicines, feed patients, take their temperatures, and make their beds. Pauli sees the nurses in this modern hospital milieu as maternal figures taking care of him even though they are just doing their job. Interestingly enough, there are certain similarities between the descriptions of diligent nurses in Hyry’s novel and the image of the emäntä walking across the farm yard often carrying something – a basket or a milk jar – in her hands.

5.

Relevant here are the characters in “Kaivon teko” (1962; Making of a Well), “Hartaushetki” (1962; Moment of Earnestness), “Leveitä lautoja” (1968; Wide Boards), and Aitta (1999; The Barn), among others.

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People who find themselves in this situation tend to regard themselves as the first and, perhaps, the only ones to experience it. For them pre-modern and pre-industrial communities represent the unity and meaningfulness of life that the experience of modernity has never had. Many have probably experienced modern phenomena as a radical threat to their entire history and all their traditions. Hyry’s novels can be seen as exemplary: the protagonists feel that they are living in an age of rapid change in every dimension of their social life. The development of modern technology has introduced many inventions that are useful to the protagonists, for example, mobile phones, personal computers, faxes, and cars. At the same time, they can remember what it was like to live in an environment – the rural community of their childhood – that is far from modern. The themes of many of Hyry’s novels emerge from this inner dichotomy, this sense of living in two worlds simultaneously. The new way of living in urban areas is also contrasted with religious values. For the protagonists of Hyry’s novels who feel that they are living in two worlds, religion is not just confined to the private spiritual life. It is, rather, manifested in concrete terms; it is an everyday practice. While they are living in modern metropolitan areas, the protagonists feel that the cyclic pattern of life to which they are accustomed in their home villages has disappeared in the midst of the hectic demands on their time. There is no time for a pause, to rest, and to keep the Sabbath, a teaching and a practice that their religion advocates. They feel that the teachings of their religion provide an alternative to the modern rhythm of life to which a satisfying balance between work and rest is not possible. A protagonist in Hyry’s short story “Leveitä lautoja,” (1968; Wide Boards) sums up this attitude: On kummallista, hän mietti, miksi ihmiset eivät enää osaa pysyä asiassa ja ymmärrä pitää sunnuntaita ja pyhiä. Kun ei paljon muuta, niin pitäisi mielessään sen, että kuusi päivää teki työtä ja seitsemäntenä lepäsi. . . . Ennen maailmassa, kun maata viljeltiin, oli se, että nouse ja luo sonta ja ruoki elukat ja lypsä ja vie laitumelle. Kun siitä selvisi, tuntui mukavalta olla pyhäkamppeissa, maata ruohikolla. Ehkä on niin, että nykyään ne pitävät työnä sitä kun istuvat toimistossa tai varastossa ja lihovat, ja lepona sitä kun pyhänä rakentavat jotain hökkeliä tai panevat perunaa maahan ja vetävät itse sahrojakin. Selvähän se on, että tulee maailmanloppu, kun ihmisillä on lihakset, mutta työnteko on istumista ja lihomista. (34–35) (It is strange, he thought, how people can no longer stay focused and see the importance of keeping the Sabbath. If nothing else, they ought to bear in mind that the Lord worked for six days and rested on the seventh. . . . In the old days, when land was cultivated, the first thing one would do is get up, clean up the dung, feed and milk the animals, and put them out to pasture. After getting through with that, it was pleasant to wear your Sunday best and lie on the grass. Maybe people nowadays call it real work when they sit in their office or in the warehouse and get fat, and maybe they call it rest when they spend the Sabbath putting up some kind of a cottage or planting potatoes or even pulling the plow. It is clear that the end of the world is nigh when people have muscles, but what they call work is just sitting in a chair and getting fat.)

The man in Hyry’s narrative openly expresses his contentment with the old way of living: the hard physical labor, the long working days, and the religious belief that God watches over him. The alternation of busy weekdays and peaceful Sundays given over to repose and religious meditation has an ethical and religious undertone in many of Hyry’s narratives. It can be interpreted as a symbol of the good life. The idea of the old-time life based on hard physical work is summed

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up in the exhortation: “Nouse ja luo sonta ja ruoki elukat ja lypsä ja vie laitumelle” (“Leveitä lautoja” 34) [Get up, clean up the dung, feed and milk the animals, and put them out to pasture]. The protagonist presents an idealistic view or rural life by ignoring the fact that it was not the result of a free choice. For those living from agricultural labor in the north of Finland, it was the only means of earning their daily bread. The protagonist, for his part, has moved to the southern metropolitan area. He does not need to engage in physical labor as his parents probably did. That is the reason why the hard facts about farm work have been forgotten. When he starts shoveling the snow, it all comes back to him. He now remembers how hard the physical work was: “Hän loi rupeaman kerrallaan ja lapionpisto lapionpistolta tuli kuumempi ja väsytti, ja hän huomasi taas mitä työnteko oli, rasittavaa, ja vatsassakin rupesi tuntumaan jotain pahoinvoinnin tapaista.” (“Leveitä lautoja” 65) [He shoveled step-by-step, and with every thrust of the shovel, he felt hotter and more tired, and he remembered what work was like, backbreaking, and gradually he began to feel sick]. After a short while, he has to stop his work. He hands the shovel over to another man who takes over briskly and finishes off the job. The reader detects a gentle irony and humor in this passage. A man who is nostalgic about the past and idealizes it cannot live up to his ideals. Even though the uncritical glorification of the past is presented in ironic light in the story, Hyry points out how different the past is from the present. His preferences are made clear throughout the story. The protagonist, a kind of mouthpiece for the author, speaks highly of the old times and its set of values, which he respects. The people living in the modern world, according to him, do not esteem physical labor. And there is more to it: the alternation of work and rest are not considered natural and a matter-of-course. For the protagonist, faith appears as a harmonious and unifying counterforce against the negative aspects of modern life.6 Contemporary nostalgia for the agrarian way of life Antti Hyry’s books have become part of the national canon of Finnish literature, and his works have won a wide readership. Many readers have felt they can easily identify with the characters of his novels and short stories. A whole generation of people who have been born and raised in Finland’s rural areas throughout the country share the same memories of a childhood spent in the country between the mid-1930s and late 1940s. Similarly, Hyry’s stories about people who have migrated from the country to the big cities have been popular among readers owing to the fact that he portrays the thoughts and emotions of those who find themselves living simultaneously in two worlds. They no longer are part of the agrarian world of their childhood, and they know they cannot become a part of the urban world – their new residence – either.

6.

It is interesting to compare the significance of religion in the protagonist’s life with the general trend in the process of modernization in western Europe as seen by Charles Taylor in his well-known book Sources of the Self (1989). According to Taylor, modernization and secularization are simultaneous processes. Religion, which is the counterforce to modernization, is regarded as a recessive ideological force in Western society (313).

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But there is still more worth telling about Hyry: on December 2, 2009 he was awarded the Finlandia prize, the most prestigious annual award in Finland for the best novel. His awardwinning book Uuni (The Oven) tells a story of a man who spends his summer building a traditional stone oven in his summer cottage in the north of Finland. The story line follows the slow process of his work. When the respected art historian and Finnish museum director Tuula Arkio presented the award, she emphasized in Hyry’s writing the significance of nature, the importance of small, daily routines in the lives the protagonist and his wife, and the general atmosphere of tranquility that characterizes the novel: Hyryn kirja on kuvaus ihmisen elämästä maailmankaikkeudessa kaukana pohjoisessa, luonnon keskellä, kuvaus ihmiselämän perusasioista, hyvästä arjesta ja työn tekemisestä käsin. Kohtuullisen ja hyvän elämän rakennuspuista. Ihmisen olemassaolosta ja ajan kulumisesta. Oloni oli tyven ja hyvä luettuani Uunin. Olkoonkin, ettei meillä useimmilla ole halua eikä mahdollisuuksiakaan Hyryn kuvaamaan elämään, eikä kelloa voi eikä ole syytäkään kiertää takaisin päin niin kuitenkin kirja antoi uskoa siihen, että meistä jokainen voi omilla arvovalinnoillaan vaikuttaa omaan elämäänsä. (Arkio) (Hyry’s book portrays a person’s life in the universe, far off in the north, surrounded by nature; it is a description of the fundamentals of life, a good, everyday life, and of work done by hand. It is a book about the building materials of a modest and good life. It is a book about human existence and the passage of time. I felt tranquil and relaxed after reading Hyry’s book. Most of us do not want, nor do we have the opportunity to experience, the life portrayed by Hyry – we cannot turn back the clock, nor is there any reason to. Nevertheless, the book inspires the belief that each of us can shape our own lives through our individual choices.)

This definition of a “modest and good life” could be expressed by any of the characters in Hyry’s works. The enthusiastic response to his books demonstrates a shift between earlier literary modes that document rural life and later ones that function as a wish fulfillment for urban readers. Although unsustainable in reality, the rural idyll remains strongly evocative in contemporary Finland. The literary depiction of rural space as an immutable and peaceful mode of life serves as a relief in fictional form from the busy life of modern people. Even though Hyry’s illustration of the life close to nature is an unattainable ideal for most of the people living in the urban world, it still fascinates readers irrespective of age or profession.

By land, by sea, by air, by mind Traversing externally internally via the trope of the bird in Finnish and Swedish poetry Kjerstin Moody

To traverse is to move. It brings to mind a motion of back and forth, of zigzagging between places. Thinking of the verb “to traverse” calls forth the image of rough terrain – a terra firma that puts up some resistance, seas that are choppy, airstreams fraught with gusts – the movement upon, through, in which is likely not going to be easy, go smoothly, nor be without effort. But traversing can also be a practice that takes place on a variety of levels: in the space of the mind, the imagination, the heart; here, too, it may reveal itself to be movement reflective of resistance and of desire. In his essay “Des espaces autres” (“Of Other Spaces”), Foucault contemplates, with a nod to Bachelard’s seminal work La poétique de l’espace (The Poetics of Space), the ways that humans perceive space both internally and externally. The places, or sites, of these internal and external spaces are sensed and experienced simultaneously.1 Foucault’s main interest in the essay, as has been discussed elsewhere in this volume, lies in the relation between utopias and heterotopias. Whereas sites of utopias have no actual place in the world, sites of heterotopias do. Foucault describes heterotopias as des sortes de contre-emplacements, sortes d’utopies effectivement réalisées dans lesquelles les emplacements réels, tous les autres emplacements réels que l’on peut trouver à l’intérieur de la culture sont à la fois représentés, contestés et inversés, des sortes de lieux qui sont hors de tous les lieux, bien que pourtant ils soient effectivement localisables. (47) (something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.) [24]

Of central interest to the poems discussed in the present essay is Foucault’s brief passage toward the beginning of “Des espaces autres,” about the place where utopia and heterotopia meet. Between these two sites – where the idealized place that does not really exist meets the marginalized place that does or could – exists “une sorte d’expérience mixte, mitoyenne, qui serait le miroir” (47) [“a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror” (24)]. Containing both the place of a utopia and a heterotopia, the mirror might be thought of as a third site – a site at which the unreal place of the utopia and the marginalized but potentially real place of the heterotopia meet. The mirror reflects the place where the “I” is not: “c’est à partir du miroir que je me découvre absent à la place où je suis puisque je me vois là-bas” (47) [“From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there” (24)]. It is at the site of the mirror that “je reviens vers moi et je recommence à 1.

Foucault uses the terms “place” and “site” interchangeably throughout his essay. doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.40moo © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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porter mes yeux vers moi-même et à me reconstituer là où je suis” (47) [“I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am” (24)]. The curious shift to the first-person singular that Foucault employs at (and only at) this point in “Des espaces autres” itself mirrors the way that lyric poetry can serve as a site which similarly contains a place for reflection of potentially real, marginalized, heterotopian worlds, and, simultaneously idealized, utopian, non-existent worlds. While literature in general is a reflective medium that allows its readers to journey along with the narrative perspective, lyric poetry in particular has long been conceived to perpetuate such movement, par excellence, within the literary arts. This essay approaches the concept of traversing at and as the site of Foucault’s mirror, the place at which utopia and heterotopia meet, through the reading of a selection of Finnish and Swedish poetry. In each of the poems discussed in this essay the mirror is represented not only via the poem itself as this site for reflection, but more specifically by investigating the ways in which the trope of the bird has, in differing ways, continued to be put into literary practice as a means to traverse place. By sampling poetry published in Finnish and Swedish over the course of the past two centuries, this essay shows that the bird reflects in each poem the site of (or the site of the possibility of) the human subjects’ ability to traverse external places, sometimes within, sometimes beyond Scandinavia and varyingly between utopian and heterotopian worlds. It is through the trope of the bird traversing internally in the poem that external traversing could (and in some cases does) take place. In each of the poems, it is at the site of the birds that the narrating subjects of the poem go – or perceive the possibility of going – where one actually cannot: to a loved one far away on distant shores, to warmer climes and far-off landscapes and cultures, across stormy skies to heaven’s shores, beyond cyclical earthly seasons into timelessness, to the home before the current home of social and/or political exile. Each poem will be discussed chronologically and range from a maiden’s song published in the lyric Finnish folk narrative Kanteletar (The Kanteletar), to a contrasting triad of poems about migrating birds penned by two Swedish and one Swedish-language Finnish poet during the height of literary romanticism in the nineteenth century, to excerpts from a book-length poem by the twentieth century Finnish-born Sámi poet, artist, and musician Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, and finally to two short sections of a poem from the 2003 debut collection of the contemporary Swedish poet Johannes Anyuru. Whereas the birds can fly through the sky, cut across borders geographical, political, linguistic, socio-economic, float upon the sea, rest along the Nile, follow an internal call of nature, potentially take flight from or within their current place of domicile, the poetic voices physically cannot, and so it is through the poem – specifically through the site of the bird within the poem – that they imagine the possibility of such a journey. The poem, in all cases, is the site at which individual, fixed histories and localities can be transcended, and the place at which the utopian and heterotopian coincide, albeit in disparate ways. “Tehkös liitto, lintuseni” / Let us strike a bargain, little bird Birds are a traditional element of Nordic folk song and as such appear in numerous works collected from the Nordic oral tradition from the nineteenth century on. In the song “Tehkös

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liitto, lintuseni” [Let us strike a bargain, little bird] is a maiden’s song initially put to paper by Elias Lönnrot as he traveled through the Karelian region of Finland and crossed the border into Karelian Russia collecting the epic and the lyric folk songs throughout the 1820s and ’30s. This poem was one of the more than six hundred songs he collected for the three-volume Kanteletar taikka Suomen Kansan Wanhoja Lauluja ja Wirsiä (1840–1841; The Kanteletar: Lyrics and Ballads After Oral Tradition), which he also employed in Kalewala, taikka Wanhoja Karjalan Runoja Suomen Kansan Muinosista Ajoista (Kalevala, or Old Karelian Poems of the Ancient Past of the Finnish People). Lönnrot categorized the song as one of a group he described as “tyttöin lauluja” (Book 2, no. 46) [girls’ songs]. It opens with the female lyric subject asking a question: “Kussa lie mun kultueni, / maalla millä marjueni  – / liekö maalla, vai merellä” (111) [“Where is my treasure / in what land is my berry: / is he on land or at sea” (42)]. From these lines it seems that the lyric subject is inquiring after the whereabouts of a man she loves. She proceeds in the following four lines to name three particular geographical locations where she believes he might be: “meren suurella selällä, / vaiko Ruotsin rantasilla, / Saksan salmilla syvillä, / Juutin julmassa soassa” (112) [“on the mighty main / or on Sweden’s shores / in Germany’s deep bays, / in Jutland’s cruel war” (42)]. From these details it becomes evident that the speaker’s beloved is probably a conscript she imagines in the real, foreign sites: Sweden, Germany, and the Danish peninsula where he may have been sent by the Swedish army. The lyric subject points out that these locations are awash in red with the blood of war. The thought of her beloved being caught in these strange landscapes of death awakens anxiety, which serves as the narrative crux of the poem. At the beginning of the second stanza, she asks who might be able to travel to the place where her beloved is and find out how he is faring: “Voi, ken saattaisi sanoman, / ja kuka kuletteleisi, / ennen kuin muut murehen saapi, / akat huolen arvoavi?  – ” (112) [“O who could bear news / and who could fetch it / before others know my woe / and old women guess my care?” (42)]. In the following lines she addresses a little bird; the maiden will tend to the bird’s nest and children if the bird will carry a message to her beloved: Tehkös liitto, lintuseni, salakauppa kaunoiseni, liitto lyökäme välehen .... mie piän pesästä huolen, laitan ruoan lapsillesi, sie lennä ajalla sillä, saata sana sille maalle, kussa kulta kuuntelevi, kautokenkä katselevi. (112) (Make a pact, my little bird a secret deal, my fair one let us strike a bargain quick .... I will take care of your nest provide food for your children and you fly meanwhile

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bring word to that land where my treasure listens out my leather-shod one looks out.) [42–43]

In this pact, she hopes that the bird might undertake a journey she herself is incapable of making. She asks the bird to fly a great distance over land and sea to catch sight of her beloved, to see that he is safe, while hoping that the bird might find him at peace, rather than amidst the bloody fields of war in which she had earlier pictured him. By the beginning of the final stanza the lyric subject realizes that this journey – though in practice a physical possibility for the little bird – would likely bring the bird to exhaustion, perhaps even to its own death: “Ei se jaksa pieni lintu, / ei mennä meren ylitse, / välehen vähä väsyvi, / pian heikko hengästyvi” (112) [“But a little bird has not / the strength to go over sea: / the small one will quickly tire / the weak one soon be breathless” (43)]. Though the sight of the bird first inspires hope in the young woman, she with empathy retracts her offer to exchange responsibilities with the bird. She and the bird are destined to stay at home, waiting, in hope, for the conscript’s return. This short poem opens wrought with desire and longing, transitions into grief, and finally, ends with empathy. On an individual level, the sight of the bird allows the lyric subject to reflect on her beloved, where he might be, and how she could exchange places with the bird in order to make the difficult journey to him. By means of the lyric she comes to an understanding of the reality of her situation thereby reconstituting herself through the enactment of the poem. She ultimately comes back at greater peace with the place in the world where she physically is. On a more communal level the singing of this poem in its original folk song form also voiced a shared, unmet desire that other women in the lyric subject’s community potentially were themselves experiencing. The song articulates, on one level, the political outcry expressing dissatisfaction with the system of conscription in particular and, on another level, laments the very notion of war and loss of life in general. The majority of the girls’ and women’s songs recorded by Lönnrot and published in Kanteletar are concerned with elements of daily life – love, desire, marriage, daily chores, and aging. Although published as a tide of national romanticism swept over the literary landscape, a strong sense of realism pervades the songs of the boys and men, which also center on the concerns and practices of everyday life in a primarily rural setting: war and the realities of conscription by an unnamed foreign crown – once Swedish, now Russian – are likewise disdained. “Flyttfåglarne” / Birds of passage An interesting intersection can be found in three poems, all entitled “Flyttfåglarne” (“Flyttfåglarna,” in Tegnér’s spelling) [Birds of passage] and published in Swedish over the course of the nineteenth century: the first two by the Swedish poets Esaias Tegnér in 1812 and Erik Johan Stagnelius, and the third by Finland-Swedish poet John Ludvig Runeberg in 1830. In differing ways, each of these poems takes up the image of the migratory bird and exploits it as a device for contemplating the place at which utopia and heterotopia meet. In contrast to the setting of “Tehkös liitto, lintuseni,” in which the lyric subject anxiously considers from Finland’s shores the fate of her beloved conscript off in some strange but real and unknown land, all

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three of “Flyttfåglarne” poems portray the Scandinavian homeland as an idealized, verdant, and peaceful setting. Turning away from the rational, calculated mind of the Enlightenment, the Scandinavian-language romantic poets sought aesthetic and rhetorical inspiration from sources as diverse as Plato, the Icelandic sagas, and the Poetic Edda as well as motifs and creatures from localized folktales and legends, the philosophical writings of Herder, Schiller, the poetry of Goethe, and the English-language romantics. The Swedish-language romantic poets advanced the forms and styles of the poets from Sweden’s recent past whose works they themselves were promoting. Of primary importance to this literary period across western and northern Europe was the fact that the romantic poet had access to and could meditate on the mysteries of the natural world. Nationalist sentiments by way of the idealized northern landscape of the poets’ Swedish and Finnish homes are apparent in all three “Flyttfåglarne” poems. The narrative voice of Tegnér’s version of the poem is the collective view of the birds themselves. The opening stanza of the poem describes the unified thought of the birds that have become too warm during their stay in the southern region of their annual journey. This southern landscape is real but strange, it seems, for the birds, as it is not the home in which they were born. They are constantly longing to return to the north, even soon after their arrival in the southern world to which they had been drawn: Så hett skiner solen på Nilvågen ner, och palmerna ge ingen skugga mer. Då griper oss längtan till fädernejorden, och tåget församlas. Mot Norden! mot Norden! (96) (With such heat the sun burns down upon the Nile, and the palms no longer give shade. It is then that we long for the soil of our forefathers, and the flock gathers together. To the North! to the North!)

A seemingly physical and spiritual longing for “fädernejorden” [the soil of our forefathers] comes over the birds, and they gather in a flock to set off again for their northern home at the beginning of the poem. Though the skies may be stormy as they traverse them, the birds are able to pass through the storms as they head north. The site and description of the birds in Tegnér’s poem reveal a romantic freedom of mind and of imaginations as well as the sentiment of nationalism in the identification of the north as the soil of our forefathers. For the reader of this poem, the flight of the migrating birds allows a mental practice of escape from the cold and harsh Scandinavian winters and likewise serves to remind them to enjoy their northern homeland when conditions are at their most favorable and fair during the summer months, when the birds of passage have returned. Stanzas three, four, and five describe a picturesque, utopian northern landscape, where the migrating birds lay and hatch their eggs beneath the midnight sun, where peaceful valleys abound which no hunter can find, where a green-mantled forest maiden wanders about in the evening, and where elves hammer their gold in the fells. A romantic idyll persists throughout the second to the fourth stanzas of the poem aided by imagery of folkloric creatures. Yet, in the fifth stanza, when the chill of winter sets in, the flock inevitably cries out “Mot Söder! mot

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Söder!” (97) [To the South! to the South!], and they prepare to make their journey south to winter there again. In the final stanza of Tegnér’s poem, they reach their southern home: Till grönskande ängar, till ljummande våg, till skuggande palmer står åter vår håg. Der hvila vi ut från den luftiga färden, der längta vi åter till nordliga verlden. (97) (To the green meadows, to the mild waves, to the shady palm trees which again we desire. There we rest after our perilous aerial journey, there we again long for the northerly world.)

Though they safely reach their shady palm trees along the Nile once more and can rest after their dangerous journey through the sky, their longing for their idealized northern home is already setting in. There is a constant tension besetting the birds: when they arrive to one place, they are already reflecting on the other. It is clear in Tegnér’s poem, however, that the north is the birds’ more-desired home. Tegnér’s poem celebrates the attraction of the north for its denizens, but simultaneously depicts the desire of birds – and by extension an audience – to escape the confines and cold of this homeland and to seek enjoyment elsewhere. It is a poem both utopian and heterotopian at the same time, in which neither north nor south is fully satisfactory for the migratory birds or the human beings who, like Tegnér, choose to identify with them. While a sense of restlessness and an understanding that movement between the world of the north and the world of the south will be constant in Tegnér’s birds of passage, the birds’ journeys back and forth between these two locales is harmonious. This peaceful journey of Tegnér’s birds of passage differs from the journey of the birds of passage found in Stagnelius’s “Flyttfåglarne.” Stagnelius’s poem opens with an omniscient narrator giving instructions to the reader of the poem to take sight of the birds in the sky overhead: Se fåglarnes skara! Till frammande land De suckande fara Från Gauthiods strand. Med vädren de blanda Sitt klagande ljud. “Vart skola vi landa? Vart för oss ditt bud?” Så ropar den fjädrade skaran till Gud. (389) (Look at the flock of birds! To a foreign land they reluctantly depart Gauthiod’s shore. Their sounds of complaint join with the weather. “Where should we land? Where will you tell us to go?” In this manner the feathered flock cries out to God.)

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The admonition to observe the birds causes the reader to imagine from a fixed place on the earth the journey that the birds are undertaking as they cross through the skies. The birds cry out in distress as they fly over the land. The seventh and eighth lines of this first stanza shift from a third-person to a first-person-plural narrative voice to express the feelings of the birds: they confess that they know neither whence they are to travel nor where they should land. They migrate in contrast to Tegnér’s birds, which rather peacefully intuit both to and from where they are continuously destined and bound. The following four stanzas of Stagnelius’s poem continue with this first-person-plural voice of the birds. Stanzas two and three describe, from the collective point of view of the birds, a utopian Scandinavian landscape, complete with flowering trees, balmy breezes, golden midsummer nights (which are personified and described as “hon” [she]), but by stanza four, the birds collectively lament and fear the onset of the colder weather they feel as fall begins; the trees are bare, and the once balmy winds have turned stormy (390). The northern landscape, earlier so fair, has turned on them. With their wings (named, in the poem, as a gift from God), the birds migrate to the south, a place that exists on the margins where they do not seem to feel they belong. Stanza six shifts back to the voice of the omniscient narrator, who describes the birds’ journey south to a world in which beauty also abounds, where “ränkorna skväla” (390) [clinging vines quake] and “bäckarne välva” (390) [brooks stream]. By the seventh and final stanza, the omniscient narrative voice takes an instructive tone similar to that found in the opening stanza of the poem, but, rather than telling the reader to look at the birds, words of comfort are offered about the metaphysical journey that is undergone as one makes the transition from the spring to the autumn of earthly life: Det ler bortom haven Mot fågeln en strand. På hinsidan graven Är även ett land, Förgyllt av den eviga morgonens brand. (391) (Beyond the ocean a beach welcomes the flock. On the other side of the grave there is also a land gilded with the eternal fire of morning.)

The birds’ journey – both physically, in terms of their traveling between north and south, but also metaphorically in terms of their life on earth – seems to end in the south, yet something lies beyond, elsewhere. The migrating birds – who do not comprehend from where they depart nor where they are bound – seem to be caught in a grand design of God. God, with a capital “G,” is named twice in the poem, yet this God’s powers appear to work through an initially uncaring but ultimately benevolent, pantheistic nature: his creatures – represented here by the migrating birds – do not comprehend his efforts, however, and fear them (though apparently they need not be afraid considering the closing lines of the poem). The birds’ cyclical migrations seem woven into a predetermined pattern of life over which they have neither control nor understanding. Their journey, in Stagnelius’s poem, appears to reflect, more generally, the journey

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undertaken by all beings that live on earth – a utopian paradise (Christian Paradise) seems to wait beyond the real, strange, troubled earthly shores in his poem. The Finland-Swedish poet and dramatist Runeberg joins in the poetic musing about birds of passage with his “Flyttfåglarne” in 1830. Whereas we read Tegnér’s birds of passage physically traversing from north to south to north, and Stagnelius’s birds’ journey starting in the north but ending in the south (where an otherworldly paradise lies beyond), Runeberg’s version opens with the birds in the south and ends with their returning safely to their home in the north. The final stanza of Runeberg’s poem reassures the reader by using the pronoun “du” [singular “you”] that she or he will also find her or his way home to the north – an idealized Scandinavian homeland (18). As in the other two “Flyttfåglarne” poems, in Runeberg’s the north is described as an utopian natural world, where everything is verdant and bountiful, and the south is a “främmande” [foreign, strange] world on the margins. Runeberg’s poem opens with and maintains throughout the perspective of an earthbound omniscient narrator who observes the birds from a distance, who at times addresses the reader directly, and at other times addresses the birds. While they are in their place on foreign shores, he describes the sight of a utopian homeland; the actual geographical place is not named but this “fädernesland” (17) [land of the forefathers] in the north that they have missed is a place they are (instinctively rather than through a plan of any sort of god) certain to be able to find again: De finna så säkert den saknade nord, Der våren dem väntar med hydda och bord, Der källornas spenar De trötta förfriska, Och vaggande grenar Om njutningar hviska, Der hjertat får drömma Vid nattsolens gång, Och kärleken glömma, Vid lekar och sång, Att vägen var lång. (17) (They find with certainty the north that they’ve missed, where the spring awaits them with cabins and tables, where at the breast of a spring the weary are revitalized and the cradling branches whisper of pleasure where the heart is able to dream in time with the midnight sun and love forgets with the help of games and songs, that the journey is long.)

The northern landscape to be returned to is presented here as a copious land of plenty where fresh water and comforting spaces await. A northern spring is personified (again as a female) with a revitalizing breast; the branches of the northern trees are cradling branches; in the north the heart can dream in the long light of the Nordic summer. The final line of the stanza tells how

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the journey is arduous and lengthy, but the good things that await the birds’ return from south to north are well worth the effort. With Runeberg’s efforts, this nineteenth-century triad of poems by the same name ends it poetic journey back in their northerly home – in each of the poems a fertile pastoral world that readers of the poems are rhetorically, subliminally encouraged to take in and be a part of the time when the Scandinavian landscape is in its fairest season. The other colder, rainier, grayer times of the year in the poems seem to openly advocate a physical leave-taking. Though written over a century and a half ago and no longer likely to be read and contemplated in-depth, this phenomenon of a seasonal migration out of Sweden or Finland to warmer southern climates finds its parallel in human experience as well. Ruoktu Váimmus / Trekways of the Wind Writers like Tegnér, Stagnelius, and Runeberg inscribe in their poetry an assumed reader with particular geographic and class characteristics. A singular Scandinavian sensibility is proffered, located by authorial fiat even into the tiny brains of migratory birds. Voices and viewpoints excluded from this singularity have arisen since the nineteenth century, often taking on the stock images of past Nordic poetry and exploring these in new ways. When the Finnish-born Sámi poet and artist Nils-Aslak Valkeapää won the Nordic Council’s Prize for Literature in 1991 for his book Beaivi áhcázan (The Sun, My Father), his creative output was not easy to categorize in terms of nation, language, or genre, nor in terms of a conceptualization of linear chronological time. Valkeapää’s earlier formative poetic work, Ruoktu Váimmus ([Home in the Heart] retitled for an English-speaking audience Trekways of the Wind), traverses in content, time, space, and also in terms of genre between poetry, drawing, music, and political manifesto. On the pages of the book, Valkeapää’s hand renders a utopian world of Sápmi,2 devoid of traces of the commercialized material world. Through the words of the poem, the north is evoked at times as a peaceful, serene, uninterrupted, and gracefully contoured place. On other occasions, it is conceived as a real but abnormal and strange place in terms of how Sápmi and the Sámi people have been perceived by distant legal authorities in such a way that the values inherent in the land and its people have been undermined. Valkeapää’s Sápmi homeland is thus a utopia that has been harmed, not by natural cycles of weather or darkness, but by the colonial forces emanating from the capitals of the Nordic countries themselves. The north that Valkeapää depicts in words and images mirrors the expansiveness of Sápmi and the continuous cycle of seasons. In Ruoktu Váimmus, as in the poems previously discussed, birds function as a site of reflection and desire, and throughout Valkeapää’s narrative, the birds change with the seasons. At the opening of the collection the author invites the reader to become like a bird and take flight:

2.

“Sápmi” is the word in the North Sámi language denoting both the Sámi land and people. Sápmi does not have independent political status, but spans the national borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. In current usage, this Sámi term is preferred to the more objectionable outside term “Lapland.”

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Lehkos ráffi duinna Veaháš áigái báhtaran du lusa veaháš áigái váimmu raban suonjan du jurdagiid liegga sallii veaháš áigái atte munnje dorvvu sojiid lebbe (Unnumbered Pages) (Wishing you peace Awhile, I take refuge with you open briefly my heart crawl into your thoughts’ warm embrace for a short while give me security Spread your wings) [Unnumbered Pages]

Figure 56.  Map of the transnational Sámi language areas that constitute Sápmi. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License)

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As the reader looks down over the pages, she reads not only the words on the page but also sees the black and white drawings of Sápmi’s ever-changing topography represented through Valkeapää’s visual artistic renderings. Tundra grows into fell and then into steeper-yet fell, as her eyes look over and turn the pages. In this way the expansiveness of this place in northern Scandinavia is experienced and traversed by way of the images along with the words on the pages of the book. The poem as a mirror extends to the book that contains it and invites the reader/ viewer to experience it as a rendering of the land described and the culture that lives within it. The birds named throughout the unnumbered pages of Ruoktu Váimmus call forth the evershifting cycles of the seasons. At the beginning of the book the plover cries and the bluethroat sings, and these birds’ songs announce the coming of spring. In spring the narrative first-person speaker of the poem anticipates joining his beloved alongside the water in the north as he does each year. The songs of the bluethroat and the plover tell him that it again is time for him to begin his journey to her. The speaker is not stationary, as in the poems of Valkeapää’s nationalist predecessors, but rather migratory and moves along accustomed routes to places where he finds birds that have similarly appeared. When the lyric subject arrives to meet his beloved, seagulls are waiting and springtime pleasurably passes into summer. When the birds’ songs stop, he knows that summer is over. The way in which the sight and sounds of the birds reflect time in turn tell the narrative voice what time of the year it is and where he should be. The cycle of the birds reflects his movement over the course of the year. Each bird, when written of, is referenced by its place in a particular season. The snow buntings and ptarmigans are the birds of the narrator’s winter home. The plovers, bluethroats, swans, and geese mark spring. Summer references the sparrows (whose songs, along with the narrator’s own songs, are enjoyed by his beloved); the buzzards and crows clean up what is in decay in the summer; seagulls, falcons, and cuckoos are noted during the summer, and the loon surfaces at one moment of the couple’s lovemaking while they enjoy summer together. The fall brings the departure of the migrating birds, who, as in the triad of “Flyttfåglarne” poems, are called to leave their summer home for their winter one. In Ruoktu Váimmus the sight of the migratory birds banding together to depart the north means that the time has come for the lyric subject to take leave of the place he shares each summer with his beloved. The site of the birds in Valkeapää’s poem reflects both a particular time and place but also a timelessness that is held to no specific place. Towards the end of the cycle of the poem, the narrative voice implores: “Girdde lottáš / vizar // Girdde jurdagiid / duogábeallai” [“Fly little bird / sing // Fly beyond / thoughts”]. He beckons the bird’s physical body to take flight as well as its song. Towards the middle of the cycle of Ruoktu Váimmus the narrative voice explains: “Hálidivččen jápmit / dego lean eallánge / láhppot duoddara biekkaíe / muhttot lottiid lávlumin.” [“I would like to die / as I have lived / disappear among the tundra winds / be transformed into birdsong”]. To be like the bird not only in body but also in song – to be able to change both physically and audibly into an infinite realm of the spheres where time and place are both boundless – is something the lyric subject desires, and he admires the little bird’s possibilities to do so. But the lyric subject in Ruoktu Váimmus shares the same earth-bound body as the lyric subject in the maiden song “Tehkös liitto, lintuseni.” One can imagine, hope, and admire the birds’ ability to take leave of the earth, but one cannot escape one’s own physical body. In portraying the birds this way, Valkeapää inverts the romantic othering of the trope of the bird employed in all three “Flyttfåglarne” poems and thereby calls into question the particular

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bifurcations such as man and nature, northern and southern, us and them, that are often encapsulated in canonical Nordic literature. “Tid: en sång om Trojas murar” / Time: A song about the walls of Troy The desire to escape, to flee, to move, to transcend, to be elsewhere – someone real or imagined – has been a persistent desire, actualized or not, in each of the poems considered so far. In the poem, “Tid: en sång om Trojas murar” (Time: A Song about the Walls of Troy), from the first collection of poems published by the contemporary Swedish poet Johannes Anyuru in his book Det är bara gudarna som är nya (It’s Only the Gods Who Are New), we find two groups of women – one younger, one older – compared to birds by the third-person narrative eye of the poem. In contrast to the poems discussed earlier, the setting of Anyuru’s poem is urban rather than pastoral. The opening section of the poem depicts a group of young women – young mothers – and paints an image of their lives: Mödrarna med sina oändliga hjärtan av tvätt i famnarna som vita bål i den blå skymningen (mantelrörelse) och deras barn, nyss nedkomna från klätterställningen (moderfågel) som står med slutna ögon och halvt öppna munnar och lyssnar till sina hjärtans vilda blindskrift innan de rusar efter upp i trappuppgångarna, in i mörkret och långsamt uppåt och om något land är deras är det där, precis då, när vingar inte behövs, bara rum, rum och bultande hjärtan som åter fångar in pulsen från de döda stjärnorna som nu framträder i det violetta över höghustaken (och långsamt uppåt). (13) (The mothers with their endless hearts of laundry in their arms like small fires in the blue nightfall (the movement of a cloak) and their children, who’ve just come down from the jungle gym (mother bird) who stand with closed eyes and half-opened mouths and listen to the wild Braille of their hearts

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514 before they rush forward up the stairwell in the dark and slowly upwards and if any country is theirs is it there, just then, that wings aren’t needed, only space, space and bolting hearts which again catch the pulse from the dead stars that are now appearing in the violet above the roofs of the high-rises (and slowly upwards).)

The young mothers described here are set in the domestic space of their homes: their arms are full of laundry, their eyes keep watch over their children as they play; in going about this work, they are described as mother birds. The women seem incapable of speaking, but they listen to the (undomesticated) wild Braille of their hearts before they rush up the stairwells of the highrise buildings in which they live and from which they look out over the country. It is at this moment, in this place – when they have a bird’s-eye view out over the land below – “när vingar inte behövs” (13) [that wings aren’t needed]. At this moment of peace – when the dead stars (perhaps past dreams?) in the violet sky above the high-rise apartment buildings allow their thoughts to be carried away, slowly upwards, into the heavens – they can overcome their daily existence. Busy with their lives in the domestic sphere, seemingly capable of comprehending only the language of their hearts, the top floor, perhaps the roof of their home, seems the highest physical space to which they are capable of ascending. These young mothers are described as birds unable to take flight beyond (or from) their immediate existence. While the earlier poets have reflected on birds in their natural settings and contemplated the meaning of such birds’ movements, Anyuru metaphorically represents human beings as birds engaged not with a beautiful song or arduous flight, but in the daily pecking and scratching, the work of providing emotional and physical sustenance for the young, thus, in some ways echoing the work of the mother bird named in “Tekhös liittu, lintuseni.” The lyric subject of this Finnish folk song also articulates the important work of the mother bird in making and keeping her nest; indeed, her observation of the little bird’s domestic work prompts the lyric subject’s turn towards empathy and ultimately leads her to retract her wish to trade places with the little bird as well as to retract her request that the little bird make the journey to get sight of her beloved. The site of the high-rise apartment buildings in this section of Anyuru’s poem calls to mind the suburban outskirts of some of Sweden’s larger cities, peripheral places where the majority of the country’s recent immigrant and refugee families reside. For these women who are going about their daily lives as young mothers, perhaps the language of their new home is still new to them. They can, though, still comprehend and listen to the wild Braille of their hearts, and from above, they are able to contemplate their current existence in Sweden as well as look beyond the landscape and envision (even if only in their minds) a place (perhaps real, perhaps imagined) beyond their present one. Through the metaphorical representation, the young émigré women become embodiments of the same kinds of yearning as that found in the romantic nationalists’ poems, but these women’s yearnings are for other lands, those from which they

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have been driven, likely against their will, by way of war and/or politics. The north in “Tid: en sång om Trojas murar” becomes a land of refuge, but like the Nile or the southern climes a land lacking the utopian fullness ascribed to the land of one’s forefathers. In another section of Anyuru’s poem, an older group of women are also described as birds, albeit a different sort, in a different way: De muslimska kvinnorna, äldre än husen de ska dö i tittar ut ur sig själva med sina döttrars ögon och gungar fram genom kvarteret som dova fågelflockar (eviga exil bakom svarta segel) och solens färg i en cykelram får plötsligt en av dem att stanna till och stå som en saltstod på skolgården, som om hon just kom på att hon en gång letat efter ett örhänge på en likadan skolgård men i en annan tid, på andra sidan en ocean. Deras namn är moder: Majka! Amma! Som påfåglar av sorg skyndar de vidare genom kvällen (15–16) (The Muslim women, older than the houses they’ll die in look outside of themselves with their own daughters’ eyes swishing through the neighborhood like flocks of deaf birds (eternal exile behind black sails) and the glint of the sun in the rim of a bike suddenly brings one of them to a stop and she stands like a pillar of salt in the schoolyard, as if she’s just realized that once upon a time she had searched for an earring in just such a schoolyard but in a different time, on the other side of an ocean. Their name is mother: Majka! Amma! Like peahens of sorrow they rush forward though the evening)

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We see in this excerpt a group of women moving about their neighborhood compared to “dova fågelflockar” (16) [deaf flocks of birds]. Though these women can likely communicate with each other and with their families, they may not yet speak the language of the country to which they (were) moved and in which they now dwell. We do not know whether they ever knew the wild Braille of the heart in which the younger women seem fluent. These older mothers move about their new home together, but the black sails of their headscarves mark not only their exile from their previous home, but also their exile in their new home where these veils mark them as different. The woman’s sudden paralysis on the playground where she recalls a similar setting of an earlier time but in another country – an actual place to which she likely may never be able return – displays a mental traversing taking place as she thinks across time and space. It also points to the physical traversing that must have taken place as she left her old home, crossed the ocean, and arrived at her new home. The mental, physical, and emotional effects of this journey are not probed in detail in the poem, and they are, of course, unique to her. The general circumstances, obstacles, and efforts in the old home, on the journey, and in the new home can be imagined and are effectively called to mind in reading Anyuru’s poem. Like a communally voiced concern for a group of women who share a similar struggle in “Tehkös liitto, lintuseni,” we find in Anyuru’s poem a third-person narrator expressing an experience of shared hardship. Described at the end of the above section of the poem as peahens (the drably colored female counterpart to the brightly hued male peacock), sorrowful (perhaps dressed in black on account of their mourning the death of a family member, friend, or neighbor) and full of longing, these women rush about their new home. They pass their time there like birds who circle about in city squares where their lives are destined to come to an end in buildings far from the places of their birth, constructed years after they were born. The third-person narrator of “Tid: en sång om Trojas murar” mirrors the ways in which the trope of the bird in both groups of mothers – one younger, the other older – reflects these two groups of women’s daily existence. But the two groups of mothers, both described as birds, are similar in the ways that both groups move in the contemporary, real, urban margins of their societies; the poem also reflects the moments at which these women manage to transcend where they actually are – even if ever so briefly – imagining an unnamed (utopian or heterotopian) place in the world beyond. Conclusion From the site of the bird in these poems, one can work back to the site of the poem as the mirror – the site where the experience of engaging the world (both the heterotopian which really exists or could, and the utopian that does not) is mirrored and takes place. Foucault’s “Des espaces autres” stresses the practice of reflection – of finding a third place where real and not real places can combine and be brought to presence as a means of experiencing what can be found there. In each of the poems discussed we have reflected on poetic voices witnessing, traversing, and contemplating such movement. The recurring use of the trope of the bird in each of the poems works to show ways in which the internalized practice of traversing reflects possibilities for transcending place when an external practice of traversing may not have been or may not currently be possible. These poems can furthermore be read at times as acts of resistance and

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at others (and sometimes simultaneously), as acts of reconstitution for the lyric subject, and, in turn, the reader the poem. In “Tehkös liitto, lintuseni” the maiden singing desires to trade places with the little bird so that she could in some way be in contact with her beloved. But the young woman was physically unable to journey to him likely on account of her gender, and her place in society; the methods of travel necessary for her to make the voyage herself were not available. Her song expresses discontent about the distant powers that have removed her beloved from her. In each of the “Flyttfåglarne” poems, the northern landscape of Scandinavia is romanticized as lush, harmonious, peaceful, and superior to the foreign south. Escaping each winter comfortably in the more temperate south, their northern home, nonetheless, seems to be the one that always holds the greatest attraction; the northern homeland is the place that the birds ultimately long to be and where they feel most secure. The writing and reading of their poems – even as they may be read today – allow for an interiorized practice of leaving the cold north behind for a while. The poets, readers, and listeners alike are reminded to take heart in and make the most of the warmer months spent in the northern home in which they actually dwell. Valkeapää’s cataloging of birds in Ruoktu Váimmus proves to be the site where the poetic voice comes to know the time of the year, and where, in turn, he should be according to the seasonal cycles. The internal traversing of the narrative poetic voice is seen in the awareness of the birds, but an external traversing of the tundra through the seasons also occurs. In Valkeapää’s poem the lyric subject’s self is – like the changing seasons he experiences and the myriad of types of birds with which he identifies – ever reformulating itself and never wholly constant. It rather is always moving, like the birds in the “Flyttfåglarne” poems. Although the way of being in the world described by the lyric subject in Ruoktu Váimmus might be romanticized because of (mis)conceptions readers might have, it can also be approached as a political manifesto offering a new and important perspective on the history and present conditions of Sápmi and the Sámi people. In Anyuru’s “Tid: en sång om Trojas murar” the sight of the women leads the narrative voice to reflect on the daily movement of both groups of women in Sweden. The younger mothers are compared to birds lacking wings, and the older mothers to city birds who deafly circle around an urban landscape in a flock. Both groups of women are confined within the contemporary geo-political borders of their new home/country, which entails their learning a new language as well as the ways, customs, and accepted norms of a new culture. There is a sense of hope expressed in the poem that the young mothers might come to feel comfortable in this home. The chance of the older mothers being comfortable and accepted in the country into which they have been transplanted is less likely; they all appear to carry a pervasive longing for a place to which they will never likely return. The younger women, in contrast, seem to embody a sense of desire – something akin to a sense of hope – that they will find their place in this new country as they look out over the land from the rooftops of their tall high-rise homes on the peripheries of Swedish cities. We can see through the poems discussed above that an external traversing through the landscape  – of Scandinavia, in Scandinavia, beyond Scandinavia  – via the trope of the bird in the poetry of Finland and Sweden takes place internally on a variety of levels. Written in Finnish, Sámi, and Swedish over the course of the past two centuries, the poems approached

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here are but a minute sampling of the lyric tradition of both Finland and Sweden in which the trope of the bird serves as a mirroring site for reflection. These readings touched on some aspects of the particulars of the historical moments when these works were written as well as detail specifics of the physical features, motifs, and practices of the specific geographical places in which the narratives of the poems unfold. Each poem is, of course, individual and particular, but reading, hearing, and experiencing the poem always brings it into a shared present and, in this way, is always a point of meeting, a mirror, a reflection. The poems all express and put into practice a desire to be someplace else, and the trope of the bird is the site that stirs the possibility for this desire to be realized. So long as desire exists, the trope of the bird will exist in poetry to mirror this desire, regardless of the epoch or place poets and readers alike find themselves.

Exploring Thomas A. DuBois

This node explores the asserted propensity of Nordic peoples for travel and exploration by focusing especially on the literary products that sustained and expanded this image over time. Medieval texts recount adventurer and merchant forays to the north, east, and west that become symbols for later explorers who come to regard their own travels as atavistic expressions of an enduring Viking heritage. Eighteenth-century explorers in the fields of science and trade, epitomized by Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) and disciples like Pehr Kalm, depict a natural world of fascinating complexity and striking beauty populated by exotic species of plants and animals as well as by cultures of an equally exotic nature. Their texts establish the author as a keen observer and as a canny appraiser, whose insights into foreign parts suggested opportunities for Nordic entrepreneurs eager to partake in the European colonial enterprise. The scientific explorations of the Enlightenment were continued and updated by polar explorers and adventurers of the twentieth century, who became international celebrities in a world of fast-shrinking frontiers and increasing technological advancement. In a modern Nordic world accustomed to centralized heating, commodious mass transit, and all the other creature comforts of an affluent society, the image of intrepidly trekking across uncharted expanses holds particular imaginative appeal, especially when presented to readers from within the framework of masculine heroism. In a decidedly different vein, urbane travelers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – both male and female – ventured south and west to sample the cultural delights and social dynamics of continental Europe and the new social experiments of North America. Rooted, and often routed, in the class performance of the European Grand Tour, their travelogues describe a different outside world, one that similarly serves as a useful foil for contemplating the staid and stifling social strictures of Nordic polite society. Ironies emerge when outsider tourists travel north as well and write about the Nordic region as either a place of rugged nature or of exotic society. These outsider narratives become objects of intense interest and even outrage to Nordic readers by shaping Nordic self-perceptions and presentations thereafter. In all of these works, be they avowedly scientific, mercantile, social, or cultural in stance, the sense of travel described by authors differs from that inherent in the settler’s acts of emigration and immigration as described in the “Settling” node or the pilgrim’s sacral wandering examined in the node on “Sacralizing,” even if at times the boundaries between these acts blur. Exploring implies a transitory relationship to place: a temporary engagement that may be followed by departure – welcome or regretted – or that may be followed by some other subsequent and more enduring practice: settling, dwelling, or sacralizing. In contrast to Dwelling and Sacralizing, but like Settling, Exploring exhausts itself in its performance: the unknown place becomes “explored,” stripped (at least potentially) of its novelty, its threatening nature, or its allure. New places must be found for new explorations, as place becomes a commodity to be experienced and consumed, possessed of a novelty which will eventually disappear. The benefits of such exploration follow the explorer home  – they are goods derived or extracted from the locale. This chapter seeks to characterize and interpret the varied textual expressions of the array of behaviors doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.41dub © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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subsumed under the rubric of “Exploring” as a highly productive and popular practice within Nordic literary approaches to place. On the bucolic peninsula of Bygdøy across the harbor from downtown Oslo stands the site of the official summer residence of the Norwegian Crown as well as the earlier seasonal residence of the joint monarch of Sweden and Norway throughout the nineteenth century. A favorite tourist destination as well as a place beloved by ordinary Norwegians, Bygdøy serves as the home of four museums until recently all located in easy access to one another. For the Norwegian or the tourist fascinated by the region’s Viking past  – and the legacy of North Atlantic settlements discussed in the node “Settling” – the peninsula offers Vikingskipshuset (the Viking Ship Museum), an architecturally serene and inspiring presentation of three ancient ships buried with various treasures and human remains as part of funerary rituals in ninth- and tenth-century Gokstad, Oseberg, and Tune. Sprawling across acres of the island is also the Norsk Folkemuseum [Norwegian Museum of Cultural History], Norway’s most notable counterpart to the magnificent open-air museum Skansen of Stockholm or the similarly bucolic Seurasaari of Helsinki and Frilandsmuseet in Lyngby, Denmark. Each of these park museums seeks to present rural life of the agrarian past by standing as tributes and ostensible evidence of the geographic stasis and continuity explored in the node on “Dwelling,” and central to each country’s national self-image, particularly in the early twentieth century. Significantly, both Norsk Folkemuseum and Skansen have their roots in the royal patronage of the Swedish monarchs, who aimed in an era of mass emigration and the beginnings of major urbanization of Nordic societies to underscore the stable and enduring agrarian heritage of Norway and Sweden, which were joined for the bulk of the nineteenth century into a monarchic union. Finally, perhaps most obscure for the foreign tourist, but most

Figure 57.  The Oseberg ship at the Viking Ship Museum on Bygdøy peninsula outside Oslo. Photo: valeriiaarnaud/Shutterstock

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important for a majority of ordinary Norwegians of the postwar twentieth century, are the Fram Museum and Kon-Tiki Museum, repositories of the boats and other artifacts of modern Norway’s most famous explorers, Fritdjof Nansen, Otto Sverdrup, Roald Amundsen, and Thor Heyerdahl. The Fram Museum [the “Forward” Museum], named for Nansen’s research vessel, opened its doors in the 1930s and documents the quest of Norwegian explorers to become the first Europeans to visit the North and South Poles. The Kon-Tiki Museum, similarly named for Heyerdahl’s raft, celebrates Heyerdahl’s 1947 Pacific voyage that aimed at shedding light on ancient Polynesian migrations and stands as a fascinating early example of the enterprise that came to be called “experimental archaeology” in the later twentieth century. The daring exploits of these men – their seeming unflinching confidence in the face of mortal danger and their singular devotion to the goals of exploration and adventure – captured Western popular imagination and ensured that all four men became household names throughout the Nordic region and often far beyond throughout the twentieth century. Together they bolstered or even created a particularly Norwegian self-image as a nation of intrepid explorers. It is an interesting coincidence or the product of intriguing intellectual planning that each of these varied museums became situated in roughly the same locale across the bay from downtown Oslo. Such geographic contiguity transforms potentially contrasting human endeavors into a series of parallels arrayed in a line for ease of comparison. And although it is possible to reach these museums – these models and monuments of Norwegian self-image – by car, bus, or foot, most modern tourists come to them via boat by boarding one of the small ferries that leave regularly from a pier close to the capital city’s center. Walking down a gangplank onto the ferry, sitting on simple benches in the ferry’s hold or out under the elements on its deck, the passengers undertake a small journey of exploration of their own experiencing a mode of travel closer

Figure 58.  Exterior of the Fram Museum, seen from the water of the Oslo fjord. Photo: Nanisimova/Shutterstock

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to the natural environment than they might be accustomed to and imagining, perhaps, a little of the experiences that faced Vikings, polar explorers, and men of the world as they ventured forth from the comforts of home into the dangers of the great unknown. The Nordic far North holds a special place in the history of Nordic exploration as well as in the process of extractive utilization (e.g., mining) and eventual colonial resettlement that followed. By examining accounts of the North in particular, one can observe shifts in the discourse of exploration that developed over time in Nordic literature, particularly with respect to the region’s geographic periphery. As explained in my own essay contribution to this node, the far North of the region functioned in the medieval period as a literary trope whose main purpose was to construct and reinforce the perceived qualities of the geographic centers of the North. Although the medieval version of the trope was sometimes informed by actual travel and exploration (largely reports gleaned from trading expeditions), its main literary function was to create a space of narrative novelty and contrast, an effect closely related to the shifting ways in which writers and audiences of the South of the Nordic region perceived the Sámi people who inhabited the North. After the seventeenth century, the concept of the far North came to overlap increasingly with perceptions of Sámi culture, even after the region came to be regarded colonially and economically as a location for resource extraction. While medieval writers focused frequently on the North as a locus for the unknown, the wild, and the potentially uncontrollable, other Nordic texts apply similar attention to points elsewhere, particularly toward the east and west. The question of the “Vinland sagas,” accounts of westward exploration and temporary sojourns contained in manuscripts now known as Grœnlendinga saga (The Saga of Greenlanders) and Eiríks saga Rauða (The Saga of Erik the Red), published together in translation as The Vinland Sagas, enjoy a special status in the history of reception of Nordic literature. They became the basis of claims that Nordic settlers had been the first Europeans to explore and colonize the eastern coast of North America centuries before Columbus. Setting aside the much-debated question of the geographic location of the sites described in these medieval texts, it is noteworthy how seemingly cut-and-dried, how documentary these accounts appear at certain points. Consider, for instance, Eiríks saga’s matter-of-fact statement of the decision to journey west from Greenland: Í Brattahlíð hófusk miklar umrœður, at menn skyldi leita Vínlands ins góða, ok var sagt, at þangat myndi vera at vitja góðra landskosta; ok þar kom, at Karlsefni ok Snorri bjuggu skip sitt at leita landsins um várit. (221) (In Brattahlíð there was much discussion that men should go seek Vínland the good, and it was said that one could find prime land there. And it came to pass that Karlsefni and Snorri fitted out their ship to seek out the area in the summer.)

Such seemingly factual details occur alongside others of more fantastic nature, however: Karlsefni employs two fleet-footed Celtic slaves to reconnoiter the lands they come to (Chapter 8; a detail that parallels Noah’s use of doves in Genesis 8:11); one of his men obtains magical assistance for the party by praying to the god Þórr (Chapter 8), and another is killed by a belligerent uniped armed with a bow and arrow (Chapter 14). The periphery is a land of supernatural perils, where people can find themselves suddenly accosted by fabulous beasts straight out of bestiaries and

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manuscript marginalia, the “peripheries” of the manuscript page, as Michael Camille pointed out in his provocative and influential Image on the Edge. Turning to a later period, as I mention in my essay contribution below, Carl von Linné represented a new voice and perspective in Nordic approaches to exploration. Observations now were to be based on empirical data rather than on citation of earlier works, and the explorer – the scientist – aimed at cataloging and defining the entire material world, subjecting it to human control by subsuming it into an overarching archive or system. Under Linné’s leadership, a systematic attempt ensued to collect, identify, describe, and classify every species of plant and animal on the planet, initiating an enterprise that remains central to many branches of modern biology today. One of Linné’s most ardent assistants in this venture was Pehr Kalm. Kalm grew up in the village of Närpes, on the Finnish side of the Swedish realm and studied first at the cathedral school at Åbo/Turku and then at the University of Uppsala, where Linné had come to teach. Like Linné, Kalm combined naturalist and ethnographic interests: he made expeditions to Russia and Ukraine in the 1740s in search of plants that could be put to new agricultural uses, and he subsequently continued these explorations in North America, where he became a close friend of the American Enlightenment thinker and U.S. founding father Benjamin Franklin. Franklin’s adopted city of Philadelphia had been built upon the earlier New Sweden colony of the mid-seventeenth century, and a small remnant population of Swedish colonists remained in the Pennsylvania colony as well as to the east in New Jersey and south in Delaware. Kalm ministered to this population as a substitute pastor and engaged in detailed geographic, biological, and ethnographic investigations before eventually returning to Åbo as a professor of natural sciences. There he published his memoirs in installments as En Resa til Norra Amerika (1753–61; Travels into North America), a work that garnered tremendous interest throughout Europe and was soon translated into German, Dutch, French, and English. Kalm extended the image that Linné had established of the Swedes as acute observers of the natural world: thorough, methodical, and intelligent. As with many of Linné’s friends and associates, he was eventually honored by having a genus of plants named after him, Kalmia, a mark of his significance to the taxonomic project led by his teacher and friend Carl von Linné. Despite the symbolic importance of such Swedish intellectuals, however, ongoing responsibility for the classificatory enterprise they initiated eventually shifted to other European centers; it is significant that the Linnean Society is now headquartered in London and that the major scientific discovery that grew out of taxonomy – the theory of evolution – is associated with the English naturalist Charles Darwin rather than with a Swede. Explorers of the Grand Tour While exploration for scientific and mercantile purposes occupied many Nordic men of aristocratic and clerical stock, other Nordic travelers participated in the increasingly democratized international enterprise of the Grand Tour. The term “Grand Tour” points particularly to English aristocratic practice, when a type of chaperoned sojourn on the continent developed and flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an essential occasion of training for young aristocratic men  – a licensed

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time-out-of-time in a young gentleman’s maturation. Such sojourns were not to be undertaken as occasions of idleness: they were working holidays, during which a man of promise was expected to acquire the skills in European language (chiefly French and Italian), politesse, and artistic appreciation that he would likely not have gained through his more parochial education in England. The Grand Tour attested to English perceptions of themselves as uncomfortable and unschooled in genteel ways, awkward outsiders among the grand of Europe. Through a carefully planned itinerary that included typically Paris, Geneva, Florence, and Rome, the gentleman could acquire refinements that would place him among good company in polite society. Through a similarly compulsory sojourn in Venice, he could further taste of the imagined licentiousness and moral laxity of the sultry Mediterranean. Self-published, often illustrated memoirs of such travels emerged as an important genre within English literature and eventually developed into tourist guides: popular how-to books for the earnest traveler that became essential in the latter half of the nineteenth century as shall be noted below. Neither merchant nor pilgrim nor rigorous man of science, the Grand Tourist was a new kind of traveler, one for whom travel itself constituted a desired end. Through travel, the man discovered aspects of himself and explored his nature as a cultural being. The Nordic region did not figure in the itineraries of many such gentleman travelers: it lay off the beaten track and far from the notice of men of note. At the very outset of the nineteenth century, however, two memoirs appeared that would change this situation utterly: Giuseppe (“Joseph”) Acerbi’s Travels through Sweden, Finland, and Lapland, to the North Cape in the Years 1798 and 1799 (1802) and Anders Fredrik Skjöldebrand’s Voyage pittoresque au Cap Nord (1801–02; A Picturesque Journey to the Nord Cape by A.F. Skjöldbrand). Their works revolutionized both continental and domestic views of the Nordic region. Giuseppe Acerbi, the son of a wealthy gentleman and officer, was born and educated in Mantova (Mantua). In the preface to his travelogue, he writes what can be considered a manifesto for any gentleman explorer, regardless of his destination, but particularly if he dares to transgress the well-established norms of the English Grand Tour: It may possibly excite curiosity to know, why a native of Italy, a country abounding in all the beauties of nature, and the finest productions of art, should voluntarily undergo the danger and fatigue of visiting the regions of the Arctic Circle. He promised to himself, and he was not disappointed, much gratification from contrasting the wild grandeur and simplicity of the North, with the luxuriance, the smiling aspect, and the refinements of his own country. He was willing to exchange, for a time, the beauties of both nature and art, for the novelty, the sublimity, and the rude magnificence of the northern climates. Nor was it probable that such a contrasted scene would prove barren of instruction, or be destitute of amusement. There is no people so far advanced in civilisation, or so highly cultivated, who may not be able to derive some advantage from being acquainted with the arts and sciences of other nations, even of such as are the most barbarous. (vii)

Acerbi’s text parallels those of Linné and Kalm in its mixture of scientific (botanical and mineralogical) data with ethnographic observations of the culture of the peasants, townsmen, and even aristocrats of Sweden-Finland. It was soon translated into German, French, and Dutch, but its open criticisms of the Swedish government and humorous and disparaging views of Swedish gentle society outraged Swedish authorities, and Acerbi was arrested for a time as a

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result. In Finland on the other hand, particularly after the transfer of the Grand Duchy to the Russian Empire, the author’s warm embrace of Finnish culture – his praise of landscape, folk songs, and sauna – earned him perpetual fame and influenced in many ways the work of later Finns like Elias Lönnrot in the collecting and editing of Finnish epic and lyric songs.

Figure 59.  Woodcut illustration from Giuseppe Acerbi’s 1802 travel account.

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Acerbi’s travel companion Anders Fredrik Skjöldebrand, gentleman and officer, evinced a far greater respect for his native Sweden in his own travelogue, which he wrote in French. Voyage pittoresque au Cap Nord naturally covers many of the same general topics as that of Acerbi (albeit in a more sober manner), but is remarkable in particular for the fine engravings that grace its pages. Trained in art on the continent, Skjöldebrand produced a large series of striking depictions of Nordic landscapes, towns, and people, which he transformed into engravings for publication in his book. Here one sees the vedute [vista paintings] of the Italian Grand Tour and the landscape paintings of the Dutch tradition adapted to the Nordic landscape with great swaths of sky and forest, diminutive human figures, and a tranquility that connotes the process of sacralization described in this volume’s final node. In surveying such illustrations and reading his competent French, the foreign reader could taste of the Nordic region without enduring the hardships of true exploratory travel. As Skjöldebrand writes in his introduction, “En un mot, je tâcherai de procurer au lecteur le plaisir de faire ce voyage, sans sortir de son cabinet” (3) [In a word, I will endeavor to procure for the reader the pleasure of making this voyage without ever leaving his study]. Together the works of Acerbi and Skjöldebrand suggest a Nordic region more notable for its nature and its peasants than for its fine society, a place to read about with awe but not necessarily to visit. If English gentlemen suffered from a cultural inferiority complex born of their country’s remoteness from the continent, Nordic writers faced similar and even greater hurdles given their countries’ more peripheral location and the images of magic, crudity, and overwhelming nature that prevailed in the European imaginary concerning the Nordic region. It is in this context that the writings of Nordic travelers like Hans Christian Andersen must be viewed. As Karin Sanders details in her contribution to this node, the continent for Andersen becomes a rich and complex foil for personal explorations of art, history, and human nature, all facilitated by the transformative and edifying experience of travel. The European Grand Tour was an aristocratic prerogative: a protracted, expensive, and generally once-in-a-lifetime experience. As Sanders’s chronicle of Andersen’s travels makes clear, however, technology ushered in a new era through the advent of the train. The nineteenth-century transformation of the railroad from an industrial device used to transport quantities of ore to a mode of travel for men, women, and children occurred at nearly blinding speed during the nineteenth century. As networks of puffing steam engines and well-tended rail lines linked villages to cities and capitals to capitals, human mobility increased as never before. The journey from Copenhagen to Rome, although slow by twenty-first century standards, was now unimaginably rapid and cost a fraction of what it had cost a century earlier. Tourism became a possibility for the bourgeois family of respectable means, while emigration became easier for young men and women who found their prospects at home limited or unsatisfying. A new era of travel had begun, and Europe’s medieval passport laws, designed to keep populations safely in their place and reserve travel for only an exceptional few  – seamen, merchants, pilgrims, aristocrats – were now hastily altered to accommodate a new reality and a new economic enterprise. So massive was the scale of this new interstate travel that European countries largely abandoned passports altogether in the second half of the nineteenth century thus creating a European zone of free travel that disappeared with the First World War and would not fully return until the implementation of the Schengen agreement in 1995.

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Whereas the aristocratic traveler of the past was most often male, trains and a new culture of tourism made travel possible for nineteenth-century men and women alike. Fredrika Bremer forms a bridge between the masculine travel of the Grand Tour and the gender-inclusive travel of the new era as the nineteenth century wore on. Born in the Finnish town of Åbo (Turku) to an aristocratic family and raised outside of Stockholm in a seventeenth-century manor house, Bremer belonged to the class of people for whom the Grand Tour had always been a possibility, even if it was more often a practice for men. Her strong interests in human welfare, and particularly in the rights and experiences of women, lend her novels and eventual travelogues a decidedly socially engaged and critical tone. In 1849–50, she traveled alone to the United States and Cuba recording her impressions in a series of letters to her family that she subsequently published as a book. Hemmen i den nya verlden (1853; The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America) explores the harsh disparity in Antebellum America between the high ideals of liberty and justice, which she had hoped to observe, and the sordid realities of the slave-owning, rapidly industrializing nation. Although Bremer finds America disappointing in some respects, she seems to greet her experiences in America as transformative and exciting, and she writes with verve of greater and lesser events going on around her. Her keen observations allow the modern reader to glimpse the substantive changes of Bremer’s day: the development of commuting, for instance, and the distinctive urban cultures of places like New Orleans, New York City, and Boston. Subsequent travels to Switzerland, Italy, Palestine, and Greece over the years 1856–61, financed by Bremer’s admirers and philanthropist Fredrika Limnell, resulted in a further set of travel descriptions, Lifvet i gamla världen (1860–62; Life in the Old World). Bremer was by no means the only Nordic woman author to travel abroad. As Tone Selboe detailed in her contribution to the Cityscape node (above), and as she has examined in depth in Litterære vaganter, women embraced European travel as a means of self-inquiry and selfrealization. Camilla Collett became one of the most traveled: widowed in 1851, she held virtually no permanent address until her death in 1895. Instead, she moved between the bustling cities of the continent: Christiania, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Munich, Berlin, Paris, and Rome. Selma Lagerlöf used the success from her first breakthrough novel, Gösta Berlings saga (1891; The Saga of Gösta Berling), along with the financial support of Fredrika Limnell to travel to Italy and Palestine. These travels resulted in Lagerlöf’s Antikrists mirakler (1897; The Miracles of Antichrist), which is set in Sicily, and in her two-volume Jerusalem (1901–02), which is set partly in Palestine. The Tromsø native and novelist Sara Fabricius traveled first to Christiania and then to Paris just after the turn of the century. Drawing later on these experiences and writing under the pseudonym Cora Sandel, she composed what is now known as the Alberte Trilogy, which includes Alberte og Jakob (1926; Alberta and Jacob), Alberte og friheten (1931; Alberta and Freedom), and Bare Alberte (1939; Alberta Alone). Bare Alberte, as it happens, is about a woman whose life and perspectives are shaped in part by her travels and observations. The Nobel Laureate author Sigrid Undset likewise traveled to Paris and eventually to New York. Her novel Jenny is set in both Christiania and Rome and presents each location as a source of influences in the life of the novel’s title character. In much of this writing, women authors describe travel as a personally transformative activity: the anonymity it affords offers new experiences of liberation and experimentation as it frees the authors themselves – or their female characters – from the confining social strictures

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of their Nordic hometowns. But it can also be a source of loneliness and melancholy as well. Overall, the literature created by late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century women travelers focuses on internal emotional transformation and discovery rather than externalized exploration of the kind favored by male explorers of earlier eras. Within this array of female travelers, the Danish Karen Blixen (in English writing under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen) holds particular significance. Her work can be regarded as a poignant rejoinder to the Grand Tourist or the chuckling Acerbi or Andersen of previous centuries. With her masculine pseudonym and feminine identity, her transnational experience as a colonist/settler in British East Africa, and her career choice to write and publish in the English-speaking marketplace of the United States, Dinesen embodies the penchant for outward travel and personal transformation that so motivated earlier Nordic explorers. As Susan Brantly shows in her contribution to this node, Dinesen’s work responds to the lingering literary echoes of the Grand Tour (“Those old Milords . . . constantly traveling in Italy, Greece and Spain”) and yet predicts in its frequent sense of loss and alienation the massive dislocations, exile, and grief that were to follow the Second World War and the ever-expanding polity described in modern terms as refugees. For Dinesen and for the other female authors described above, travel brings freedom and transformation, but it also occasions pain and uncertainty as the securities of one’s identity crumble into questions of “Who am I?” Thus, acts of exploration, and the memoirs that recount them, point to the existential perils waiting for any who approach them in a thoughtful way.

Figure 60.  1947 Norwegian postage stamp commemorating Nansen, Amundsen, and Arctic exploration. Photo: Slava2009/Shutterstock

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The Nordic wanderings into the internal exploration of self and status discussed above receive a strident and telling counter in the rise of the great explorers at the turn of the twentieth century. As Henning Wærp discusses in his essay below, Norwegian and Swedish polar explorers took on heightened cultural significance for a world where nature had become seemingly conquered and domesticated by modern technology, science, and society. In the late nineteenth century, August Andrée, Fridtjof Nansen, Hjalmar Johansen, and Roald Amundsen became household names throughout the Nordic region and far beyond as embodiments of idealized masculinity and daring – seeming throwbacks to the grand days of scientific exploration. As Wærp shows, their writing, like their deeds, captured the popular imagination of their day and sales of Nansen’s account of crossing Greenland on skis eclipsed those of Knut Hamsun’s novel published the same year. If Hamsun emerged as the epitome of literary worth in his day – the recipient of no less than the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 – the Norwegian explorers became the epitome of Norwegian popular worth, as measured in book sales, statues, and name recognition. Nor has the literary, journalistic, and cinematic attention abated in the century following their deeds, as Wærp’s essay details. The line between “fact” and “fiction” blurs in the “megatext” of representations surrounding these men, creating a generative image that continues to inspire novels, plays, and other works up to the present day. In a way, such popular and artistic fascination with male explorers of the “Heroic Age” epitomizes the theme of this section: for in it one sees exploration not simply as a detached scientific or mercantile act, but as a charged cultural performance, one that is powerful both for the dangers it poses and for the fame it promises. The explorations of these adventurers were performances of symbolic weight destined to be recounted, reimagined, and endlessly replayed in a long series of literary repackagings that slide playfully across the once-distinct boundaries between novel, news report, and scientific brief. And in so doing, the twentieth-century literature of polar exploration echoes intriguingly the earliest accounts of exploration produced by Nordic writers of the medieval era, those that tell of intrepid Vikings in terms at once both serious and fanciful, both fabulous and mundane. They are works that celebrate the practice of exploration and the transformative potential of leaving the security of one’s home or study for the dangers and thrills of the unknown.

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On July 15, 1893 the following telegram was printed in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet: “Efter att klockan 3.34 f.m. hafva lemnat Stockholm och gjort en lyckad resa, landade ballongen “Svea” kl. 6,8 strax nordost om Dalarö. Den största höjden – öfver 3,000 meter – uppnåddes efter en timmes färd” (Rydén 39). [After having left Stockholm at 3:34 a.m. and made a successful journey, the balloon Svea landed at 6:08 immediately northeast of Dalarö. The greatest height – over 3,000 meters – was reached after an hour’s journey.] The telegram was sent by the Swedish engineer Salomon August Andrée after his first journey in his own balloon, but it was just a trial run. The longer-term goal was not Dalarö but the North Pole. The International Polar Year took place for the first time in 1882–83 with twelve countries participating. The background for the venture was the belief that the solution to many fundamental geophysical and meteorological problems could likely be found near the poles and that an exploration of these areas demanded international cooperation. During the Polar Year, a network of twelve research stations was established throughout the Arctic and subarctic zone, and Sweden contributed a research station, Kap Thordsen, on the island of Spitsbergen. As Per Rydén states, one should situate the Swedish engineer Salomon August Andrée within this modern context; his contribution was an attempt to improve the logistics of polar expeditions. In Aftonbladet of Febrary 16, 1895, he wrote the following: Släden har alltid varit transportmedlet, och den enda skillnaden mellan de olika färderna har bestått i huruvida man framför slädarna spänt människor eller djur. . . . Är det icke på tiden, att vi från början revidera denna fråga och tillse, om vi för att befara dessa trakter möjligen besitta något annat hjälpmedel än släden? Jo, helt visst är tiden nu inne; och vi behöfva icke söka länge, innan vi finna ett hjälpmedel, hvilket är såsom skapadt enkom för ett sådant ändamål. Detta hjälpmedel är luftballongen. (Rydén 96–97) (The sled has always been the means of transport, and the only difference between the various expeditions has consisted of whether one harnesses men or animals in front of the sleds. . . . Isn’t it time that we reconsider this question from the beginning and see whether we perhaps possess some means other than sleds to travel through these areas. Yes, indeed the time has now come; and we do not need to seek much further before we find an apparatus that is specifically made for such a purpose. This apparatus is the hot air balloon.)

Andrée’s preparations with the balloon were based on systematic observations, mathematical computations, and physics experiments. He was generally described as “Engineer Andrée,” a title that reflected the era’s understanding of the engineer as a representative of everything innovative and modern. He worked at a time characterized by national pride and faith in the future, a time when Swedish scientists, explorers, and polar scientists were considered heroes. Andrée’s base for his North Pole expeditions in 1896 and 1897 was located in Virgohavn on Danskeøya in northwest Svalbard and appropriately became a tourist destination. Another expression of the general interest in polar exploration was the appearance of the board game “Huru skall Andrée passera polen?” [How Will Andrée Reach the Pole?] in 1896. doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.42war © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Figure 61.  Topographical visualization of the Arctic area north of Norway, including Svalbard (center top) and Eastern Greenland (left). Photo: Anton Balazh/Shutterstock

During this time period, literary and scientific discourse was challenged by that of journalists. Obviously the telegraph assured that news spread quickly, and Andrée knew how to use the media. Since the balloon would be out of telegraph range during its journey toward the pole, he took carrier pigeons along. The media, however, were not simply a means of communication for the expeditions but also gave rise to a series of its own heroes during this time between 1890–1930, often referred to in the Nordic region as “The Heroic Age of Polar Exploration.” From the perspective of the newspapers, the scientific explorations had to be translated into human dramas. Here the Norwegian polar scientist Otto Sverdrup failed: after a four-year expedition in the Canadian Arctic (1898–1902), his journey and the ensuing book Nyt land: Fire aar i arktiske egne (1903; New Land: Four Years in the Arctic Region) garnered little attention. It did not matter that the scientific results were great if the journey was not associated with new records or drama. Nor did it help that Sverdrup himself did not actively seek attention. The press wanted to have the man, while Sverdrup, rather, stepped aside and directed attention to his actions (Riffenburgh).

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Andrée, on the other hand, was engaging material for the media in part because of his spectacular mode of travel and the fact that he vanished without a trace along with Nils Strindberg and Knut Frænkel. After an attempt to reach the North Pole from Svalbard during the summer of 1896 failed, the expedition during the following summer fared even worse: the balloon lifted off from Virgohavn on July 11, 1897, floated northward, and disappeared for good. The last signs of life were delivered by a carrier pigeon that departed from the Eagle (as the balloon was called) on July 13, 1897. Andrée wrote, “god fart . . . Allt väl ombord.” (qtd. in Nathorst 305) [Good speed. . . . All is well onboard.] For over thirty years, it was a matter of speculation whether Andrée had possibly reached the North Pole. In 1930, however, a Norwegian hunting and science expedition found the remains of Andrée and his two fellow travelers on Kvitøya Island in northeast Svalbard. One could surmise that the balloon had iced over and crashed after four days at around 82 degrees north latitude. The explorers’ three-month hike over the ice finally ended on Kvitøya. One theory – among others – is that the expedition did not have the necessary equipment to survive the winter, and they all died during the fall of 1897. Andrée became a tragic hero. All the preconditions were in place to generate a complex web of stories about him, which together form a “megatext” discourse; the journalism of telegrams, notebooks, commentaries, and reports; the private communications of letters, diaries, remembrances, rumors, and fantasies; and the scholarly reports of search party records, commission statements, historical accounts, articles, and dissertations. There were moreover also exhibitions, exhibition catalogs, photographs, biographies, travel descriptions, documentary films, and feature films. Beyond verbal and visual presentations, there were also musical representations that appeared: Adolf Nordholm’s Vid Nordpolen (At the North Pole), a polka for piano and violin that imagined a hypothetical meeting between Andrée and Nansen at the North Pole; Herman Ahlberg dedicated his march Upp genom luften (Up Through the Air) to Andrée; in 1960 Povel Ramel wrote popular musical revue numbers about the journey; and in 1983 the American composer Dominick Argento composed the song cycle The Andrée Expedition. (Per Rydén gives a broad overview of the expedition’s afterlife in Den Svenske Ikaros: Berättelserna om Andrée (2003; The Swedish Icarus: Stories about Andrée). “Andrée steg upp!” (Strindberg 32) [Andrée took off!] reads a diary entry by August Strindberg from July 11, 1897 in the Ockulta Dagboken (The Occult Diary), which is a point of departure for the author’s interest in the Andrée expedition. As early as 1902, while the expedition members were still considered missing, Vidar Berge published in pamphlet form Den Hemlighetsfulla Nordpolsön: Romantisk skildring af Anders, Sindbergs og Wænckels ballongfärd och öden vid Nordpolen (The Mysterious North Pole Island: A Romantic Depiction of Anders, Sindberg, and Wænckel’s Balloon Journey and Fate at the North Pole). In book form, it consists of 507 pages all told. As is evident from the title, Andrée’s, Strindberg’s, and Frænkel’s names are slightly changed (to Ander, Sindberg, and Wænckel), but one nonetheless immediately recognizes the expedition. The balloon is also called the Eagle, and the expedition is also correctly chronologically situated and makes reference to Nansen’s attempt to reach the North Pole aboard the Fram in 1893. The narrative is quite loose, however. In the course of the first six pages, the preparations are complete and the balloon journey is underway, and that is when fantasy takes over. The

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author seems uninterested in balloon flight or technological questions: just six pages later the balloon crashes, and the rest of the novel takes place at the landing site – a landing site that is not an ice floe, but a volcanic island inhabited by Vikings who have been isolated from the outside world for seven hundred years and speak Old Norse. One way to describe the book is as a fantasy novel with a touch of Viking lore. The novel does not have a happy ending since the real-life members of the Andrée expedition still had not returned home: the narrator leaves Ander, Sindberg, and Wænckel standing on the beach watching a flock of geese flying south: “‘Mot söder! Kanske går deras färd dit hem – till Sverige, det heliga, härliga Sverige!’ nästan hviskade Ander med rörd stämma” (Berge 507) [‘Southward! Perhaps your journey is taking you home – to Sweden: the holy, glorious Sweden!’ whispered Ander with a catch in his voice.] Vidar Berge’s publisher called him a Swedish Jules Verne, though the story is quite unengaging and melodramatic and seems primarily to be an attempt to capitalize on the national trauma of Andrée’s disappearance. What is more interesting, however is that the publication of the book itself marks the beginning of a long series of portrayals of the balloon journey in various genres. In 1908 Selma Lagerlöf published the short story “Luftballongen” (The Hot Air Balloon), and even though Andrée is not mentioned by name, the source of inspiration is obvious. Two young brothers living with their neglectful father, who is a drunk, one day see a balloon in the sky over Stockhom: “Den är mycket vackrare, än de ha kunnat föreställa sig. . . . När gossarna se den, svälla deras hjärtan av längtan att åter börja arbeta på den stora uppfinningen. De känna sig på nytt säkra att lyckas. Bara de äro uthålliga, skola de nog arbeta sig fram till seger.” (245–46) [It is more beautiful than they could have imagined. . . . When the boys see it, their hearts swell with longing to begin working again on this great invention. They again feel sure to succeed. If only they are persistent, they will work their way to victory.] But the story ends tragically: the two boys follow the balloon out onto thin ice and drown. Gunnar Ekelöf’s Andrée-poem has more existential weight than Vidar Berge’s fantasy novel, but then it was also published after the expedition members were found dead in 1930. It is a dramatic poem in which the poet takes on the role of Andrée as he travels southward on the ice: Jag går, jag går Det är en stor, vit öken Den är vit, den har inga skuggor Den är vit, den är alldeles slät Det vita tycks komma från ingenstans Vem vet om det ens är vitt . . . Jag tänker att jag har tio dagar kvar att leva . . . Jag tänker steg efter steg efter steg. (393–94) (I walk, I walk It is a great white wilderness It is white, it has no shadows It is white it is completely flat The whiteness appears to come from nowhere

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534 Who knows if it is even white . . . I am thinking that I have ten days left to live . . . I am thinking step by step by step.)

As Per Rydén claims, the following poem by Nils Ferlin can also be seen in terms of the three men of the Andrée expedition journeying through the ice: Det gingo tre gubbar i snögen, lilleputtgubbar i högan snö. Och de voro så rädda för döden, rädda att döden dö. De gingo med sänktan ögonfrans under vindens skratt. Och jag vet inte alls varthän någonstans i den djupa natt. (56) (Three fellows walked in the snow Lilleputten fellows in the deep snow and they were so afraid of death afraid that death dies. They walked with downcast eyelids under the laugh of the wind. And I do not know at all wherever in the dark night.)

Today the most well-known literary adaptation of Andrée’s story is Per Olof Sundman’s Ingeniör Andrées Luftfärd (1967; The Flight of the Eagle), for which he won the Nordic Council’s literature prize that year. Knut Frænkel acts as the first-person narrator perhaps because unlike both Andrée and Sundman (who kept journals along the way), he did not leave any personal writing behind – only meteorological notes – which allows Sundman considerable narrative freedom. The genre is the documentary novel. On the back page, Sundman writes “Alla personer som nämns vid namn i boken har existerat i verkligheten” [All persons mentioned by name in the book really existed]. For Sundman, Andrée is not a failed pioneer seeking something new, he is just a failure. Several years after the novel appeared, Sundman wrote, I min roman . . . hävdar jag . . . att Andrée vid det misslyckade försöket att starta sommaren 1896 kom till insikt om att hans plan var dömd att sluta i katastrof. Men han hade pläderat så energiskt för sin idé och han hade väckt sådan entusiasm att han blivit sina egna drömmars fånge. Han kunde inte dra sig tillbaka. (Rydén 585) (In my novel … I claim … that as Andrée started his failed attempt in the summer of 1896, he came to the understanding that his plan was doomed to end in catastrophe. But he had fought so energetically for his idea and he had awakened such enthusiasm that he became the prisoner of his own dream. He could not hold himself back.)

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Jan Troell’s feature film Ingeniör Andrées Luftfärd (1982; The Flight of the Eagle) builds upon Sundman’s novel and its understanding of Andrée’s self-deception. His death as a punishment, moreover, is a theme of the film. In 1997 Troell released the documentary film En frusen dröm (A Frozen Dream) about the Andrée expedition, a companion piece to Sundman’s documentary volume entitled Ingen fruktan, intet hopp: Ett collage kring S.A. Andrée, hans följeslagare och hans polarexpedition (1968; No Fear, No Hope: A Collage of S.A. Andrée, His Companions, and His Polar Expedition). Sundman and Troell’s negative assessment of Andrée has long been the predominate view and reached an international audience in the novel by the American author MacDonald Harris, The Balloonist (1976). In 1999, however, the Swedish polar scientist Urban Wråkberg voiced a strong defense of Andrée in connection with the expedition’s centennial. Wråkberg claims that Andrée was a pioneer in aviation research. Knowledge is accumulated by trial and error, and Andrée should therefore be recognized. He was not a dreamer or a sensationalist, but did serious scientific work, Wråkberg claims. This is a perspective and a revisionist account that has since been taken up by Per Rydén in Den svenske Ikaros: Berättelserna om Andrée (2003; The Swedish Icarus: The Stories About Andrée) and Karin Havmose in I ljuset av Andrée. Ingenjörskonst, gränser och vetenskapens praktik (2008; In the Light of Andrée: The Art of Engineering, Boundaries, and the Practice of Science). There are many examples that confirm that polar heroes are regularly subjected to new investigations, and their reputations consequently rise and fall. A new interest in Andrée arose with the publication of the Swedish doctor Bea Uusma’s book Expeditionen: Min kärlekshistoria in 2013 (The Expedition: A Love Story: Solving the Mystery of a Polar Tragedy). It appeared simultaneously in an illustrated version and in paperback and was soon translated into both Norwegian and English. Uusma relates on the opening pages that she came across the story of the expedition by accident: Jag satt i en fåtölj på en tråkig fest i mitten av nittiotalet. Jag drog ut en bok ur bokhyllan. Med Örnen mot polen. Andrées polarexpedition år 1897. Jag började läsa. Sen reste jag mig upp ur fåtöljen ock gick hem. Jag tog boken med mig. Den har stått i min bokhylla sedan dess. I mer än femton år har jag inte kunnat släppa taget om Andrée-expeditionen. (Uusma 9) (It was some lame party in the early nineties; I had ended up slumped in an armchair. I took a book down from a bookshelf: Andrées Story: The Complete Record of His Polar Flight, 1897. I started reading. Then I got up out of the armchair and went home. I took the book with me. It has been on my bookshelf ever since. For over fifteen years I have been unable to stop thinking about the Andrée expedition.) [Uusma 5]

Uusma’s interest is first of all directed towards the tragic ending of the expedition: “I historien om expeditionen finns en gåta, som ingen ännu har lyckats lösa: man vet inte varför de dog. Det är som en medicinsk deckare” (10) [“There is a mystery at the heart of the story of the expedition, which remains unsolved: we don’t know why they died. It is like a medical whodunit” (6)]. Provisions, ammunition, and medicines were left at the campsite and the climate is not described as unusually harsh in their journals – so what then caused their deaths? Uusma sets out to solve the mystery, travels to Svalbard numerous times, does close readings of the diaries and other written material, looks into the diet of those on the expedition, investigates remains and

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autopsy reports – and succeeds in coming up with some new findings. She thoroughly discusses different hypotheses about the three men’s deaths (including hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning in the tent, trichinosis, suicide by morphine, scurvy, lead poisoning from canned food, a polar bear attack, a shooting accident, botulism, and others) and has her own answer to the expedition’s mysterious ending. In an epigraph to the book Uusma states that “Allt i den här boken är sant. Allt har hänt på riktigt. Utom sidan 271 och 272” (4) [“Everything in this book is true. It all really happened. Except pages 240–242” (1)]. On these two pages the writer reenacts the drama and the documentary takes a step into fiction. Since the book has a kind of thriller atmosphere, the conclusion will not be revealed here. More than fifty books have been written about the Andrée-expedition and most of them claim trichinosis from eating polar bear meat as the cause of death; Uusma has another explanation. While Knut Frænkel is the first-person narrator in Per Olof Sundman’s novel and Andrée is the focus of Jan Troell’s documentary film, Nils Strindberg becomes the protagonist in Uusma’s book through the device of a touching love story (the book includes many citations from Strindberg’s letters to his fiancée Anna Charlier back in Sweden). It certainly becomes a tragic romantic love story when Anna Charlier’s heart is placed in Nils Strindberg’s tomb in 1949: Anna had married in England after Strindberg’s disappearance and although when she died at age seventy-eight she was buried next to her husband in Devon, her final wish was to let her heart rest with Nils Strindberg in Stockholm. Uusma takes a critical stand toward the expedition’s preparations and regards them in many respects as inadequate, but in spite of this the book is more marked by fascination than criticism: “Det blev min expedition” (10) [“It became my expedition” (6)]. She tries to connect physically and psychologically with the men, seeking a sense of emotional fulfilment. She describes her obsession as a kind of vampirism, but has to conclude that she never gets close enough. Still she states on the closing pages of the book, “Vi hör ihop. Expeditionen och jag” (284) [“We belong together. The expedition and I” (250)]. Expeditionen is a hybrid text that mixes homage, criticism, self-examination, scholarly investigation, and a search for relics. It can be seen in relation to textual experiments in other postmodern genres that blur the boundaries between original and copy in order to escape the “prison of prior texts.” Within the book category of “travelling in literary footsteps,” Uusma’s Expeditionen has been labeled a postmodern symbiotic text (Leavenworth “The Second Journey” xx). Portraying the journey to the pole June 17, 1896 was an important date in Andrée’s life: it was the day he arrived in Svalbard on the boat Virgo with his balloon onboard. But the date was more important for two others: the Norwegians Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen. In March 1895, they had disembarked from the ship Fram, which was icebound at 84 degrees north latitude, and attempted to reach the North Pole on skis, dogsled, and kayak. They had to take a detour at 86 degrees north, however, and after a great deal of hard work and many dangers, they reached Franz Josef Land in August, where they stayed for the following winter. On June 17, 1896, they happened upon the British

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polar scientist Frederick Jackson and his boat at the southern point of Franz Josef Land and consequently were rescued.

Figure 62.  Position of Svalbard and Franz Josef Land in the Barents Sea/Arctic Ocean. Photo: Serban Bogdan/Shutterstock

The North Pole had not yet been reached. But Hjalmar Johansen and Fridtjof Nansen’s dramatic journey also inspired a series of literary portrayals. Nansen published the formal expedition report in 1897, Fram over Polhavet: Den norske polarfærd 1893–1896 (Farthest North: Being a Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship “Fram” 1893–1896) with a chapter by Otto Sverdrup about the voyage of the Fram after Nansen had left the ship. Hjalmar Johansen published his account, Selv-anden paa 86°14’ (Second in Command at 86°14’), the following year. That same year, another member of the Fram’s crew, Bernhard Nordahl, published the book Framgutterne: Tre Aar gjennem Skrugar og Nat: Beretning om Nordpolsfærden (The Boys of the Fram: Three Years Through Ice Ridges and Night: An Account of The North Pole Voyage). After that publication, it was open season for literary interpretations, and thus far four novels and one play have appeared. All of these focus on the relationship between Hjalmar Johansen and Fridtjof Nansen and their fifteen months use of the same sleeping bag. The double sleeping bag, designed to preserve warmth more effectively, became an appropriate metaphor for the extreme situation in which the Arctic explorers lived – distant from everything and everyone, but extremely close to each other. The whole personal constellation is likely to be of interest for several reasons. One matter is that the stoker on the Fram, Hjalmar Johansen, was promoted to Nansen’s right-hand man on the ski journey to the pole. Another is the fact that Johansen was most likely the strong man (physically as well as psychologically) on this expedition. But just as important is the expedition’s afterlife; while Nansen traveled around on lecture tours, earning a professor’s salary for each lecture in the United States, Johansen ended up divorced and a drunk. After being dismissed from Roald Amundsen’s South Pole expedition, Johansen shot himself in a park in Oslo. The question that the literary adaptations circle around is what kind of shadow Johansen’s suicide might have cast over Nansen. Skrugard (1927; Ice Ridges), the novel by Tromsø-based author Aase Kristofersen, emphasizes both the class differences and the personal characteristics in the relationship between Hjalmar Johansen and Fridtjof Nansen. While Nansen is homesick for his wife and children,

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often lapses into periods of brooding and dejection, and frequently writes in his journal or delivers bombastic speeches, Johansen is described as solution-oriented and energetic. When they return to civilization, however, their roles are reversed – Nansen rises and Johansen falls. Eventually Johansen feels that he is living on Nansen’s charity and has entirely lost all of his honor. Thus Nansen, and not Roald Amundsen, gets the blame for Hjalmar Johansen’s fall. Kristofersen changed the story and fictionalized the names, but there is no doubt that it is the voyage of the Fram that is the inspiration for the novel. A more direct retelling of Nansen and Johansen’s journey on skis to the North Pole can be found in Kåre Holt’s Vandringen (The Journey), a documentary novel whose afterword informs the reader that Fridtjof Nansen’s and Hjalmar Johansen’s books about the voyage over the Arctic Sea formed the basis for the narrative. The fact that Hjalmar Johansen is referred to as Hjalmar throughout the novel, while Nansen is consistently described as The Man indicates that the power relations and tensions between the two men are Holt’s focus. An exploration of the masculine aspects of polar expeditions is brought to the fore though in a humorous way in Tor Bomann-Larsen’s graphic novel Fridtjof og Hjalmar (1986; Fridtjof and Hjalmar). The starting point: why did Fridtjof and Hjalmar turn at 86 degrees north? And the answer: women had been there first! The men find a red lipstick tube lying on the ice, and then a powder compact and a bottle of perfume. There is clearly no point in continuing; the masculine arena has been degraded. In his novel Nansen og Johansen: Et vintereventyr (2002; Nansen and Johansen: A Winter Fairy Tale), the Danish author Klaus Rifbjerg is responsible for a more profound and serious discussion of the connection between masculinity, sexuality, and the Arctic. In the novel, a homosexual relationship develops between the two men during the winter spent in the double sleeping bag. While the first part of the book’s title, Nansen and Johansen, hints at a documentary narrative, the subtitle A Winter Fairy Tale warns of fiction in addition to alluding to Karen Blixen’s Winter’s Tales (1942). In Blixen’s stories, the theme of fate is explored – the possibilities of life and the relationship between man and his destiny. In Rifbjerg’s novel it is Hjalmar Johansen’s life that is followed from childhood on. At age five, Hjalmar’s destiny is sealed when he receives a pair of skis. The skis “rykkede lige ind i bevidstheden og blev en del af ham. Ligesom han mærkede den tørre, trygge varme i faderens hånd, fornemmede han skienes fortrolighed og forstod, at de var hans skæbne – selv uden at ane, hvad skæbne var” (Rifbjerg 11) [slipped into his consciousness and became a part of him. Just as he noticed the dry, safe warmth in his father’s hand, he sensed a communion with the skis and understood that they were his destiny – even without having any idea what destiny was]. Rifbjerg has found little documentary evidence of homosexuality in Nansen or Johansen’s writings or in the secondary literature, but the image of two men in the same sleeping back for fifteen months can of course awaken the imagination. Rifbjerg accordantly poses an interesting challenge to the masculine images and stereotypes that circulate in connection with polar literature. While the novel was well received in Denmark, it was not the case in Norway. The explicit homosexuality was regarded as a degradation of the national project built around the polar heroes. The fact that it was a Dane who stood behind the book did not make matters any better. In 2003, a year after Rifbjerg’s book, the Norwegian author Kyrre Andreassen published the play Polar, which again focuses on the tension between Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar

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Johansen but now in a stylized and minimalized version: two people, F and H, are put ashore on a deserted island with one task – to paint a wall white. They must paint up to a certain latitude: “86 grader, ikke 90” (24) [86 degrees, not 90]. The entire drama plays itself out in the space where they have sleeping bags and provisions. However, the power generator breaks, and it gets colder and colder. Nansen keeps a journal and prepares pompous speeches: “Deres majesteter. Deres kongelige høyheter. . . . Det er en ære å holde et foredrag i et forum som dette” (31) [Your Majesties. Your Royal Highnesses. . . . It is an honor to deliver a lecture in a forum such as this]. A power struggle is underway, and Nansen describes Hjalmar Johansen as his assistant, while Johansen describes Nansen the same way. While Nansen eventually loses heart, Hjalmar is well balanced and in the end is allowed to deliver the final line: “Jeg hjelper deg, jeg. Jeg har et ansvar” (51) [I’ll help you. I have a responsibility]. Using two very different terms similarly thick with connotations – “suicide” and “Nobel Prize” – the Swedish poet Gunnar D. Hansson situates Johansen and Nansen’s destiny in the following way in a poem from 2009: Från augusti 1896, Franz Josefs Land På en dimhöljd ö utan namn stiger den f.d. eldaren och fångvaktaren Hjalmar Johansen iland från sin sälskinnskajak, strax därefter Frithiof Nansen, den i andras närvaro obestridde, deras villkor identiska, den tre år långa isvandringen är över. Tills vidare. Långt senare: den stora råken öppnar sig. Självmord. Nobelpris. (27) (From August 1896, Franz Josef Land On a nameless fog-enveloped island the former stoker and warden Hjalmar Johansen stepped ashore from his seal-skin kayak, immediately thereafter Frithiof Nansen, always first in others’ presence, their conditions identical, the three-year sojourn on the ice is over. For the time being. Much later: the great rift opens up. Suicide. Nobel Prize.)

The isolation and extreme surroundings, together with the marginal situation itself (both mentally and geographically) and the events playing themselves out in places nobody else has ever been – this scenario seems to be an inexhaustible source for literary reworkings, all with varying degrees of fidelity to the actual experiences of the polar explorers and the historical context. (Silje Solheim Karlsen’s doctoral dissertation from 2011 examines the Fram expedition and many of these books in depth.) Not everyone was enthusiastic about the polar heroes, however; a look back to Nansen’s first expedition, the crossing of the Greenland ice in 1888 and its reception, is revealing in this regard.

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In the spring of 1889, Knut Hamsun contacted Lars Holst, the editor of Dagbladet, and offered to write articles for the newspaper. The first was printed on June 20 and was called “NansenBetragtninger” (Reflections on Nansen). Nansen had come back to Kristiania three weeks earlier after having crossed Greenland from east to west on skis. Besides Nansen, the Norwegian Greenland Expedition of 1888–89 was also composed of Otto Sverdrup, Oluf Dietrichson, Kristian Kristiansen Trana, Samuel Balto, and Ole Nielsen Ravna. Nansen’s six men were the first to cross the inland ice and explore this white part of the map. When they sailed into Kristiania Fjord on May 30, 1889, they were met by hundreds of sailboats, while thousands of people waited on land to pay tribute to the voyage. It is this episode that Hamsun comments on rather acerbically in his first article for Dagbladet. Dagen derpaa. Slig Jubel og Henrykkelse har Kristiania vel aldrig før været i, som da Grønlandsfarerne kom tilbage. Der synes aldrig at have hændt større Ting i Norge end at Nansen og Kamerater virkelig kom hjem igjen. Sexti Tusend Mennesker modtog dem paa Bryggen, femti Tusend fulgte dem til Hotellet, ti Tusend raabte niti Tusend Hurra, en gammel pensioneret Oberst fra Kampen skreg sig simpelthen ihjel paa Stedet. (48–49) (The morning after. Kristiania has surely never before been in such a state of jubilation and delight as when the Greenland explorers returned. Greater things seem never to have occurred in Norway than that Nansen and his companions really came home again. Sixty thousand people greeted them at the dock, fifty thousand followed them to the hotel, ten thousand yelled ninety thousand hurrahs, an old retired colonel from Kampen quite simply screamed himself to death on the spot.)

Why this ironic tone? It is possibly a contest between two up-and-coming personalities being witnessed here. Nansen was two years younger than Hamsun, and both of them had their debut publications the following year: Hamsun with a novel and Nansen with an expedition report. Sult (1890; Hunger) was published in an edition of 2,000 copies (and as late as 1897, there were 500 copies left from the first printing), while the 6,621 copies of På ski over Grønland (On Skis across Greenland) were all sold during a few months that fall. Nansen won the competition for sales numbers. It did not help that Hamsun, as the feature writer of the Dagbladet, did what he could to repudiate Nansen and the Greenland voyage. Hamsun’s characterizes the expedition in pejorative tones: “Grunden til al denne heftige Rummel er i så Ualmindelighed denne, at Fridtjof Nansen og fem andre voxne Sportsmennesker har gjort en Skitur tvers over Isen paa Grønland” (49) [The reason for all this great commotion is the unusual act that Fridtjof Nansen and five other adult sportsmen have completed a ski trip across the ice on Greenland]. From Hamsun’s perspective, Nansen’s expedition is a sporting achievement, nothing else. “Thi Manden er Sportsmand” (51) [Since the man is a sportsman]. There are several observations to be made about this characterization. First, Hamsun is probably correct when he claims that the scientific aspects of the expedition were overrated. Nansen had of course stressed the expedition’s scientific value when he applied to The Royal

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Figure 63.  Map of Greenland, with a straight white dotted line added to the southern portion to show Nansen’s approximate crossing route. Original photo: Serban Bogdan/Shutterstock

Frederik’s University in Kristiania for financial support in 1887: “Grønlands indre er et av de fullstendigste terræ incognitæ vi har på vår jords overflate; det frembyr imidlertid så mange videnskapelige oppgaver å løse at det tillike utgjør et av de interessanteste” (På ski over Grønland 24) [Greenland’s interior is one of the most complete terræ incognitæ we have on the surface of the earth; at the same time, it offers so many scientific problems to be solved that it also is one of the most interesting] The scientific results of the expedition, however, were rather meager. “På

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vår ferd måtte der legges mest vekt på å komme frem og berge livet” (På ski over Grønland 532) [On our journey, most of the emphasis had to be on moving forward and surviving], Nansen writes in the conclusion to the 1890 book version. The assessment of the scientific aspects of the expedition has varied with time. In the first Nansen biography, which appeared in 1896, W.C. Brøgger and Nordahl Rolfsen’s goal is to “make clear the scientific import of his work as an explorer” (123). In Roland Huntford’s biography a hundred years later, the scientific aspect is deemphasized; Nansen’s competition with Robert Peary to be the first to cross Greenland, and thus achieve fame, is instead brought to the fore. Scientific discourse, moreover, does not dominate the expedition’s report, På ski over Grønland. On the contrary, the opening pages describe the planning for the journey and the tension that arose since Nansen’s application for support from the University and the government was rejected, and he was advised in both the newspapers and magazines against setting out on such a foolhardy expedition. (One may compare this to the first-person narrator of Hunger’s fight for acceptance.) The entire expedition was about to fail before it even got started; ultimately a Danish coffee merchant, August Gamél, provided the necessary funding. Later the tension stemmed from the trek across Greenland: all of the days among the icebergs, the climb up to the ice plateau, the actual crossing, and eventually the dangerous journey in a makeshift boat to Godthåb on the West Coast. Hamsun’s attempts to rob the expedition of its scientific glory were couched in terms of its being a sporting achievement. From Hamsun’s perspective, there is no reason to give a sportsman so much attention. Here the contradiction in the debate of that time can be seen. As Tor Bomann-Larsen points out in Den evige sne: En skihistorie om Norge (The Everlasting Snow: A History of Skiing in Norway), the 1890s were the decade in which athletics began to challenge intellectual life. Historian Narve Fulsås also draws attention to the conflict between “åndsmenn” [intellectual men] and “muskelmenn” (201) [muscle men] that arises in the newspapers during the 1890s. It is within the context of this dichotomy Hamsun’s mocking article about Nansen in the Dagbladet must be situated. The hegemony of the poets and journalists was being threatened. Hamsun cannot deny that Nansen’s expedition had been daring and dangerous and that it was not just an easy and pleasant skiing trip, but he does not emphasize this fact. This aspect of the expedition is first mentioned at the end of the article: Nansen hyldedes som en Konge for de videnskabelige Tjenester, han havde gjort Verden ved sin Rejse, og for hans Dygtighed som Sportsmand. Hvad det første angaar, da kan dette første neppe opklares helt, før Videnskaben har faaet Rede paa, hvilke Opdagelser det var, han gjorde ubevidst. Og med Hensyn til den anden Sag, saa  – saa er det en anden Sag. Et dumdristig, vel tilendebragt Vovestykke, en halsbrækkende Gjerning, en Sportsaffære, et Lykketreff, noget at beundre. (52) (Nansen was celebrated as a king for the scientific contributions he had made to the world through his journey and for his skill as a sportsman. With regard to the former, this can hardly be adequately explained, until science learns what discoveries he made unintentionally. And with respect to the latter, well . . . that is something entirely different. A foolhardy, well-executed daring exploit, a neck-breaking act, a sporting event, a stroke of luck, something to admire.)

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In Hamsun’s universe, “foolhardy,” “daring exploit,” “neck-breaking act,” and “stroke of luck” are positive terms. Why, then, is this aspect of Nansen’s expedition not emphasized more fully? “Something to admire,” writes Hamsun, but the whole account of the Greenland expedition is characterized by the opposite of admiration. Hamsun’s strategy is likely that it is easier to mock Nansen as an athlete than as an explorer. If one were to focus on Nansen as an explorer, one would perhaps come to realize that there are in fact similarities between Hamsun’s desire to explore “the unconscious life of the mind” and Nansen’s exploration of unknown terrain. The latter also contains an irrational element, a desire to seek out a region of freedom where modern civilization has yet to gain outright ownership. Here one may look at the rationale for the journey as Nansen formulates it in På ski over Grønland: Enten det var eskimoer eller nordmenn, så stanset de ved [isens] ytre rand, og gjennom alle tider har der over innlandet hvilt et slør som ingen har nådd helt å løfte, og bakenom hvilket de villeste gjetninger har kunnet tumle seg. For som alt der er hyllet i mørke, således har også Grønlands innland hatt en særegen tiltrekningskraft på den menneskelige tanke. (295) (Whether it was Eskimos or Norwegians, they both stopped at the outer edge [of the ice], and throughout time there has been a veil covering the interior land that nobody has completely managed to lift and behind which the most extravagant speculation has been free to run wild. Just like everything that is kept in the dark, Greenland’s interior has also had a peculiar power to attract the human mind.)

And one could add that these limitations also lie within the human mind. The daring and groundbreaking aspects of the expedition – the fact that it is not just a ski trip or sporting achievement, but neither is it just a scientific survey – are emphasized by several commentators. Per Olof Sundman, for example, characterizes Nansen’s Greenland expedition in the following terms in Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd: “en enfaldig dumdristighet, en vanvettig galenskap, präglad av upphovsmannens fullständiga brist på reell kunskap om det väldiga och fruktansvärda landskap av is och köld han avsåg att genomkorsa” (29) [ill-considered foolhardiness, wild insanity bearing the stamp of its organizer’s total lack of real knowledge of the vast and terrible territory of ice and cold which he intends to cross (The Flight of the Eagle, 36)]. But, Sundman adds, it is precisely this lack of knowledge that is the actual prerequisite for the expedition. Because who would put his life at risk to explore that which is already known? When Roland Huntford describes the competition between Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1911–12, Scott appears to come off badly because, among other things, he lacks imagination and creativity: “Going where none has trod before, especially in the subtle Polar world, needs originality, perception, adaptability, perhaps a touch of art, none of which Scott possessed. . . . His Naval training had taught him form, routine, discipline, obedience, but stifled independent thought” (167). This observation is striking in comparison with Knud Rasmussen’s eulogy for Nansen in 1930: “Og altid aktiv var han også udrustet med den fantasi, der alene skaber manden af de store dimensioner” (Hastrup 304) [Forever active, he was also equipped with the kind of imagination which alone creates men who are larger than life]. From this perspective, the difference between artists and Polar explorers becomes smaller than Hamsun states. The criticism of civilization and anti-intellectualism that many of the poets of the 1890s advocated can also be found in the polar explorers.

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A passage in Michael F. Robinson’s book The Coldest Crucible shows how Arctic expeditions of the 1890s and after no longer argued for the expansion of society with science as the trusty companion but more often emphasized a critical stance toward society. According to this line of thinking, explorers sailed north not to extend, but to escape the reach of civilization, to find a route that returned them, in a symbolic sense, to the original state of nature (Robinson 123). This type of exploration of and negotiation with modernity – and not simply its celebration – is reminiscent of the ideas with which poets and authors of fiction were occupied at this time. Thus it is probably true that dreaming, imagination, and irrationality were important ingredients in non-fictional Polar literature at the end of the 1800s as well as at the beginning of the 1900s. The dangerous and inhospitable, the beautiful and enticing polar regions had a tremendous grip on the imagination. The expeditions demanded not only technological ingenuity and masculine vigor, but also a boldness of thinking. And in the latter lies a form of the avant garde. Perhaps that precept is probably what Hamsun saw but would not acknowledge when it came to Nansen. The fact is that På ski over Grønland also plumbed the depths of the unknown, just as Hamsun’s Sult, the book without a genre, had done. The polar avant garde It may thus be argued that the polar expeditions at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century have an affinity with the avant garde. The term originally had a military meaning, of course: the vanguard. In aesthetics, however, it encompasses going against tradition and a willingness to experiment with both form and ideas. What the two senses of the term have in common is that they both have to do with moving boundaries and conquering (or exploring) “new land.” If one focuses on this common connection, one can say that the polar expeditions from the end of the nineteenth century on were a type of avant garde: new land was discovered, and human consciousness moved into new spheres. One may note that Roald Amundsen uses precisely a military metaphor in connection with the South Pole expedition in 1910–12 in the book Sydpolen (1912; The South Pole): “Skal en feltherre vinne et slag, må han alltid være forberedt. Flytter motstanderen en brikke, må han sørge for å kunne svare med et mottrekk” (299) [If a general is to win a battle, he must always be prepared. If his opponent moves a piece, he must make sure to be in a position to answer with a counter move]. The general is of course the polar explorer, while the opponent is nature, meaning the landscape, climate, and weather. In addition to this military metaphor, one can detect in Amundsen another image that directs attention toward the other meaning of the avant garde – the movement of intellectual boundaries. In Nordvestpassagen: Beretning om Gjøa-ekspeditionen 1903–1907 (The Northwest Passage: An Account of the Gjøa Expedition 1903–1907), he introduces the ice in the Polar Sea by describing it as the bøyg. In the Norwegian folk tradition, the bøyg is an invisible being that lies coiled up like a kind of snake; if one encounters the bøyg, he cannot continue on any further. As much as an outward impediment, the bøyg is typically viewed as a restriction or a boundary within. This view is precisely the sense in which it appears in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, where the bøyg becomes a weakness or sluggishness that causes one to choose the path of least resistance and instead “to go roundabout.”

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With the metaphor of the bøyg, Amundsen introduces polar exploration as a struggle for freedom. Polar expeditions have forced the bøyg to “aapne gløt og glimt langt ind i hemmelighederne” (Nordvestpassagen 1) [open and yield a glimpse far into the mysteries]: Og trods al tragisk skjæbne og mismodig venden-tilbake med uforrettet sak er angrepene idelig og idelig fornyet og fornyes den dag idag. Og denne ihærdige utholdenhet har om ikke undertvunget bøigen, saa dog tvunget den til at aapne gløt og glimt langt ind i hemmelighederne. En vældig revne i ismuren blev slaat, da Nordenskjöld fuldførte Nordøst-passagen og rev Asiens fastlande løs av bøigens grep . . . og mangfoldige er de andre revner, slaat av modige og geniale polarfarere, som har søkt at fri verden ut av gaatemørket der nord, – og dyrt er der ofret derpaa. (Nordvestpassagen 1) (And in spite of the tragic destinies and the despondent return without success, the assaults are incessant and incessantly renewed and are still being renewed to this very day. And even if this tenacious persistence has not subdued the bøyg, it has nevertheless forced it to open and yield a fleeting glimpse into the mysteries. A huge fissure in the ice wall was struck open when Nordenskiöld completed the Northeast Passage and snatched the Asian continent from the grip of the bøyg . . . and there are many other fissures struck by courageous and ingenious Polar explorers, who have sought to liberate the world from the mysterious darkness of the North – and costly is the sacrifice thereunto.)

The expeditions required not only good equipment, good preparation, strength, and courage, but also bold thinking. Among other things, these prerequisites are what are implied by the image of the bøyg. In that way, the polar expedition can be understood as avant garde. The poem below by the Swedish poet Carl Snoilsky is a tribute to the Finnish polar explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld’s conquering of the Northeastern Passage in 1878–80: Nordenskiöld broke “köldens reglar” (251) [the rules of the cold], and got past that which blocked the way to the east: Men plötsligt genom ovisshetens skär Ett rykte, som elektriskt tusendubbladt Från Stilla hafvet segerbudskap bär: “Hell NORDENSKIÖLD! Han brutit köldens reglar, Som spärrat väg till fabelstort Cathay: Nu in till Yokohama Vega seglar Vid festsalut och blågult vimpelsvaj!” (250–51) (But suddenly a rumor cuts through the uncertainty, Which electronically amplified a thousand times Bears the victorious message from the Pacific Ocean Hail Nordenskiöld! He has broken the laws of the cold That blocked passage to great and mythic Cathay: Now to Yokohama the Vega sails With a celebratory salute and blue and yellow streamer!)

The vanguard metaphor is also found in Eivind Astrup’s Blant Nordpolens naboer (1895; Among the North Pole’s Neighbors). In 1892, Astrup skied over northern Greenland together with Robert Peary and mapped Greenland’s northernmost border. In the introduction to the expedition’s account, Astrup writes:

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Jeg gikk med revolusjonære planer i mitt hode. . . . besjelet som jeg var av et levende ønske om å prøve mine krefter på nye og ukjente felter, maktet jeg ikke lenger å holde meg selv i tøyler. Jeg måtte ut på en eller annen verdens utpost for der å søke mine lengsler tilfredsstillet i de sivilisatoriske fortroppers store veddeløp. (15; emphasis added) (I went with revolutionary plans in my head. . . . Possessed as I was by a living desire to prove my strength in new and unknown regions, I could no longer manage to rein myself in. I had to go out to one of the outposts of the world in order to have my longings satisfied in the great race of civilization’s vanguard.)

The characteristics of the avant-garde in polar literature lie first and foremost in the accomplishments themselves rather than in the written reports about the journeys. But they also lie in the aura surrounding them, in all the public perceptions of the public back home. There are numerous other examples of authors who let themselves be inspired by the Polar voyages – the Polar explorers became the muses of the poets. For instance, Sigrid Undset describes the British explorer Robert Scott’s expedition and death as “det vidunderlig skjønne sørgespill der nede i sydpolsvinteren” (122) [the wonderfully beautiful tragedy down there in the Antarctic winter], with the addendum: “alle er vi med om å eie denne arv” [we all possess this heritage together]. By depicting the events as a sørgespill – a play with a sentimental plot and a tragic, sorrowful ending  – Undset is writing Scott’s drama into the literary canon. In Hjalmar Christensen’s novel Bastarder: Roman fra det unge Kristiania (1894; Bastards: a Novel from Young Kristiania), Fridtjof Nansen and the outdoor life are juxtaposed to the old guard as a positive alternative to Hans Jæger and the bohemian movement in Kristiania. The cure for “nutidens unge mænd, for hvem det let anløbne, den pirrende duft af begyndende råddenhed har en særlig tiltrækning” (Christensen 208) [today’s young men, for whom easy morals, the titillating whiff of early rot holds a particular attraction] is the outdoor life in nature, says the elderly Consul Krogh. “Lær dem at dyrke sine benmuskler og at ære Nansen” (Christensen 215) [Teach them to strengthen their leg muscles and to honor Nansen]. Sometimes authors quite simply come up short in the face of the innovative aspects of the expeditions, when they discover that the polar voyages themselves seem to have greater lift than poetry. The poet Stein Backe’s prose poem “Roald Amundsen starter fra Kingsbay” (1926; Roald Amundsen Heads out from Kingsbay) serves as an example. The background of the poem is Roald Amundsen’s attempt to fly over the North Pole in a blimp in 1926: . . . se, se, se, dette skip, dette fabelaktige luftskip, reiser sig som en solmyte over verden og hidser din hjerne hvert øieblikk. Det går fra Rom til Petrograd, fra Petrograd til Vadsø, fra Vadsø til Kingsbay. [. . . .] Ha, hvad er det for et gruelig fabeldyr, en ukuelig, altomspendende drage og midgardsorm som reiser sig der i luften mot polstjernen og som rører sig dypt i ditt sovende hjerte! [. . . .] Lytt! Fra Johannesburg til Kingsbay klaprer telegrafen! Mannen på vei til Nordpolen,

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det uvirkeligste av alt uvirkeligt, det virkeligste av alt virkeligt! [. . . .] Han tok virkeligheten i fantasiens tjeneste, han tok fantasien i virkelighetens tjeneste (det var det jeg vilde men så litet maktet) [. . . .] En motor stamper i isødet! (36–38) (Look, look, look, this ship, this fabulous airship, rises like a myth of the sun over the world and excites your mind every moment. It goes from Rom to Petrograd, from Petrograd to Vadsø, from Vadsø to Kingsbay. [. . . .] Ha, what kind of awful mythical beast is this, an untameable, all-embracing dragon and Midgard Serpent that rises up there in the air toward the polar star and that touches deep into your sleeping heart! [. . . .] Listen! From Johannesburg to Kingsbay the telegraph clatters! The man on the way to the North Pole, the most unreal of all unreality, the most real of the real! [. . . .] He put reality in the service of imagination, he put imagination in the service of reality (that was what I intended but managed so little of) [. . . .]. a motor chugs away in the icy wilderness!)

In contrast to Hamsun’s lukewarm comments about Nansen’s crossing the Greenland ice, Backe is captivated by the magnificent and daring aspects of the blimp’s venture. The poet recognizes that the polar voyage is “et virkelig dikt” (Backe 36) [a real poem]. It is not the trials of strength or athletic achievements that are celebrated but the crossing of boundaries, the exploration of the unknown, and the duel with the impossible. Amundsen is juxtaposed to “men of reality,” and thus is put in the same category as poets and intellectuals. The polar expedition puts “reality in the service of imagination.” The expedition thus assumed the character of the avant garde in both senses of the word: as a vanguard in the geographic sense and as a challenger of intellectual boundaries. Birger Sjöberg’s volume of poetry Kriser och kransar (1926; Crises and Wreaths) contains a poem likely written in response to Amundsen’s zeppelin expedition over the North Pole. It is entitled “Nordpolens ungdom” [The Youth of the North Pole] and has the subtitle “Om en vetenskaplig expedition” [About a Scientific Expedition]. It begins: Spräng nu i isen! Kanske vi hitta mitt i de frostblå, de bländande flak röda bevisen. Spana och titta! Styvnade blommor, stelnade druvor, infrusna duvor (150)

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548 (Shatter now in the ice! Perhaps we will find In the middle of the frosty-blue, the dazzling floe Red evidence. Look and see Stiffened flowers, petrified grapes Frozen doves)

Here the North Pole is portrayed as holding the future; the regenerative power of spring and summer can be found deep within the ice. “Youthful memories” and “years of youth” are terms used to describe the North Pole. And it is youth that is associated with the Pole: power and renewal. A celebration of the engineer – and not the artist – as the more imaginative figure is found in Sundman’s Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd: Det finns de, sade han [Andrée], som föreställer sig att det inte finns någon annan skapande fantasi än den som sysslar med litteratur, måleri och musik. Men har någonsin en poet eller en målare haft sådan fantasi, drömt sådana storslagna drömmar som Johannes Kepler  – eller Galilei eller Newton eller Polhem eller Pasteur? (17) (There are those, he [Andrée] said, who imagine that there is no other creative imagination than that which deals with literature, painting, and music. But has a poet or painter ever imagined, dreamed such grand dreams as Johannes Kepler – or Galileo or Newton or Polhem or Pasteur?) Explorers as authors Not only were poets influenced by Polar heroes, but the Polar heroes themselves were influenced by the literature they read. The following passage could have been a prose poem by Ola Hansson (“Notturno,” 1885; Nocturne), Vilhelm Krag (“Nat,” 1892; Night), or Johannes Jørgensen (“Stemninger,” 1892; Moods), but it is rather an excerpt from Nansen’s expedition report Fram over Polarhavet [Fram over the Polar Sea]. Disse drømmeglødende kvelder – for et dyb af skjønhed, med en understrøm af uendelig klage! Den svundne sol kaster sin vemodige glød ind i ensomheden. Det er naturens salme, som fylder rummet tung af sorg over at al dens skjønhed spredes dag efter dag, uge efter uge, år efter år, over en død verden. . . . Rødt brændende blod i vest mod den kolde, kolde sne. Ja havet der hjemme ved soleglad – også dette er jo havet, havet stivnet i lænker, i døden, og snart forlader solen os, og vi blir tilbage i mørket. (1:207) (These glowing evenings – what a depth of beauty, with an undercurrent of an infinite resonance! The vanished sun casts its mournful glow into the loneliness. It is nature’s hymn that fills the space, heavy with sorrow that all its beauty should be spread out day after day, week after week, year after year, over a dead world. . . . Red burning blood in the west against the cold, cold snow. Oh, the sea back home at sunset; this too is the sea, of course – the sea stiffened in chains, in death, and soon the sun will forsake us, and we will be left behind in the dark.)

This passage was written while the expedition was advancing toward the North Pole. Even though the expedition is in unknown terrain, Nansen makes use of adjectives and nouns that were typical of his time (infinite, vanished, mournful; sorrow, beauty, blood, and darkness etc.). And he does so in order to express a mood that was also typical of the period, i.e. melancholy. In other words, Nansen does not manage to match the crossing of a geographic boundary with

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a similar linguistic “dislocation.” The literary diction in the expedition report is in itself innovative to a point, but the register he uses is clearly borrowed from poetry. Vitalism’s worship of the life force (an intellectual current at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth deeply influenced by Nietzsche and Bergson) can be observed in much of the Polar literature. The work of the great Danish polar explorer Knud Rasmussen is a prime example. Min Rejsedagbog: Første Thule Ekspedition 1912 (My Travel Diary: The First Thule Expedition 1912) describes his crossing of northern Greenland from west to east and back again on dogsleds and hunting as a means of supplying food. Rasmussen felt as if he had returned to the Stone Age and was connected to his surroundings by the pervasive vital force. The descriptions of “stormens lunger” [the lungs of the storm] and “den store vinters sus af kræfter i dens mægtige bringe” (Min Rejsedagbog 22, 63) [the great winter’s rustle of forces in its powerful chest] are more than rhetorical flourishes; they are instead an expression that everything and everybody is a part of the stream of life. The book begins in this way: 6. april 1912 I dag begynder rejsen, den store fart norden om Grønland, i forårssol og herlig udfartsglæde. Hej, kammerater, lykkelige mænd på tærskelen til muntre åbenbaringer! Morgenerne skal løfte fligen for det store ukendte, og med solen løber vi vore længsler i møde! Ud i vejret, fulde af appetit på de gryende dage! Muskelspændte, grådige som farende rovdyr hilser vi starten, farten mod nord! Klare i sindet, for alle klude rede til at lænse ind i nye verdener! .... Kan nogen være rigere? (11) (6 April 1912 Today the journey begins, the great rush north around Greenland, in the springtime sun and the joy of departing. Hello, comrades, happy men on the threshold of cheerful revelations! The mornings will lift the veil over the great unknown, and with the sun we run to meet our desires! Now we’re off, full of appetite for the dawning day! With muscles tensed, greedy like roving wild animals, we greet the beginning of our journey toward the north! Clear of mind, ready to run into new worlds! .... Can anyone be richer?)

The exclamation points, the greetings, the choice of adjectives, and the rhythm contribute to a celebration of life and power – an aesthetic vitalism condensed into language. Vitalism builds on the thought that organic life does not just have physical and chemical causes, but is also underwritten by an unknown life force that is contained in the material of life. “Life” becomes a key word for a critique of civilization and culture around the turn of the century. Vitalism becomes in this way a representative for an optimistic liberation of life’s own power. Vitalism manifested itself in different discourses – in that of the natural sciences as well as that of philosophy – but also in physical action such as hiking in the mountains, swimming nude, doing gymnastics, or keeping communal gardens, etc. The following statement by Knud Rasmussen can be situated in this kind of discourse about health: “Dette farende liv gør os til herrer over vore legemer, og vi føler hver dag den glæde, som følger med sunde kræfter”

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(Min Rejsedagbog 95) [This active life makes us lords over our bodies, and each day we feel the joy that accompanies the powers of health]. In 1907, Henri Bergson published L’évolution créatice (Creative Evolution) in which he describes the sympathy among all living things as one of the characteristics of the life force and notes that it cannot be approached by means of intellect alone but requires intuition, which is to say, a combination of intellect and instinct. Western rationalism has, he argues, suppressed the instinctual side. Rasmussen finds it, however, among the Inuit as can be seen, for example, in his description of the expedition’s encounter with a seal on the ice in the Danmarksfjord: “Begge eskimoer blev ved synet af den grebet af den mystiske glædesfølelse, som kun den fødte jæger kender til, på en måde, der måske kan sammenlignes med krigshingstens stejlen ved kendte opbrudsssignaler” (Min Rejsedagbog 86) [At the sight of it, both Eskimos were gripped by a mystical feeling of joy with which only the born hunter is familiar, in a way that can perhaps be compared to the war horse’s rearing in response to set signals]. This observation does not mean that Rasmussen saw in the Inuit only instinct: he was, rather, quite preoccupied with their intellectual culture as well and assembled a large collection of their legends, myths, and stories. Knud Rasmussen grew up in Jakobshavn (Ilulissat) in west Greenland and learned as a boy to handle hunting weapons, kayaks, and dog sleds in the traditional Inuit way. From the age of twelve, however, he was schooled in Copenhagen. There are indications of a tragic discord between his European and his Inuit identity, but it can just as easily be said that there is a competence in both cultures of which he makes use as a polar scientist (Thisted “Voicing” 59). The union of instinct and intellect that he experienced among the Inuit guided him toward the life force with which the vitalism of the time was preoccupied. A polar scientist who travels and lives as the Inuit would be a happy and complete person, Rasmussen argues: “Det ligger måske i, at hans risiko er mer åbenbar, mer nærværende, hans indsats håndgribeligere; og alt dette forenkler tilværelsen i linjer, der direkte går med eller imod” (Min Rejsedagbog 153) [Perhaps it’s because his risk is more obvious, more present, his effort is more tangible; and all of this simplifies existence into lines that run either with or against the grain]. And, he concludes: “Han er bestandig på vej mod det vidunderlige” (153) [He is constantly on his way toward the marvelous]. Knud Rasmussen’s expedition narratives have strong literary qualities that manage to breathe life into even the inland glacier, that layer of ice that the sled expeditions take several weeks to cross: “Den overvælder mig med en slags dump mystik, denne mægtige, hvide bringe, der lader det fine, hvide snefog koge hen over sig; dette ocean af urokkelig ro, der har sit eget urfaste åndedræt, med lugt af gammelt hedenskab” (Min Rejsedagbog 40) [It overwhelms me with a kind of muffled mysticism, this powerful white bosom that allows the fine, white snowstorm to swirl across it; this ocean of unwavering serenity, that has its own primordial breath with the scent of ancient heathenism]. Several generations of Greenlandic authors have been inspired by Knud Rasmussen through both his collection of traditional material as well as his literary descriptions of Greenland’s landscape. Rasmussen himself acknowledges a debt to Nansen – certainly to the accounts of his expedition, but most of all to his crossing of the inland glacier in 1888. In a lecture broadcast on the radio in March 1933, Rasmussen said:

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Jeg var kun ti år gammel, da Fridtjof Nansen gik på ski tværsover Grønland. Åh – for en bedrift! Det gyste i os drenge, der kendte inlandsisen fra de fjeldtoppe, vi havde besteget. . . . Vi kunne slet ikke forstå, at denne skifærd var mulig . . . og vi tog den fremmede mand til os som vores egen . . . vor helt og forbillede. Ham ville vi ligne. . . . Til en begyndelse fik vi alle et par ski. Der havde aldrig før været ski ved Jakobshavn. . . . Den, der overgik de andre, skulle så have den belønning at blive kaldt Fridtjof Nansen. (Rasmussen “Radioforedrag” 220) (I was only ten years old when Fridtjof Nansen skied across Greenland. Oh, what an adventure! We boys, who knew of the inland glacier from the mountaintops we had climbed, shuddered at the thought. We quite simply could not understand how this ski journey was possible . . . and we accepted this unfamiliar man as if one of our own . . . our hero and role model. We wanted to be like him. . . . To begin with, we all got a pair of skis. There had never been skis in Jakobshavn. . . . Whoever overtook the others had the honor of being called Fridtjof Nansen.)

Just as important for Rasmussen as the actual crossing of the inland glacier on skies was the way Nansen describes the Arctic landscape. In a eulogy for Nansen given in 1930 Rasmussen says with particular reference to Fram over Polhavet: “For første gang drages her den arktiske natur ind i litteraturen; den var før kun et billede på rædsler og lidelser. Nu stråler den i uanede farvers rigdom. Den første hvide mand har set ind i Polarlandenes hjerte og forstået deres skønhed” (“Tale ved Mindefesten” 692) [For the first time Arctic nature is brought into literature; before it was just an image of terror and suffering. Now it shines forth in the richness of unimagined colors. The first white man has glimpsed into the heart of the polar lands and understood their beauty]. Rasmussen continues with this Polar prose; it is, indeed, probably true to say that if Nansen is the great Nordic polar scientist, Knud Rasmussen – his many books about Greenland and Canada – is the great Nordic polar writer. Den 5: Thule-ekspedition (The Fifth Thule Expedition), the book about Knud Rasmussen’s journey in 1921–24 from Baffin Bay to the Bering Strait on dog sleds, is his major work. In a speech on the occasion of Knud Rasmussen’s fiftieth birthday, the Danish writer and Nobel Prize winner Johannes V. Jensen observed with regard to that book: Lad mig sige dig nu, at da jeg havde læst dit store Værk om Slæderejsen fra Grønland til Stillehavet, følte jeg mig tilintetgjort, som en lille Student overfor en Navnkundighed og literær Sværvægts-Dommer; det var meget værre, for det var slet ikke Literaturen der talte, men en Fjerdedel af Jorden, Tilværelsen selv og Mennesket, fra Urstadiet og op til Kulturen, direkte Berøring – og hvad har man af skrevne Ting at sætte op mod sligt? (Mindets-Tavle 47) (Let me tell you now, that when I read your great work about the sled voyage from Greenland to the Pacific Ocean, I felt reduced to nothing, like a little student facing a renowned literary heavyweight referee; it was much worse, for it was certainly not literature that was speaking, but a quarter of all the earth, existence itself and the human, from a primordial state up until the appearance of culture, direct contact. And what can one write that can compare to this?)

As Kirsten Hastrup points out, Johannes V. Jensen’s verbal imagery was influenced by Knud Rasmussen’s early books. Jensen’s Bræen: Myter om Istiden og det første Menneske (The Glacier: Myths About the Ice Age and the First Human) was published in 1908, which is to say after Rasmussen’s three books Nye Mennesker (1905; New People), Under Nordenvindens Svøbe (1906; Under the Shroud of the Northern Wind) and Lapland (1907) – books with a significantly

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Arctic and primitive poetic style. The Arctic aspects also appear in Johannes V. Jensen’s stories from Jutland as, for example, in “Rensdyrjægeren” (1938; The Reindeer Hunter). It begins, “Man ved hvor det kan blæse i Jylland, paa det aabne vide Land, støt, uafladeligt, som en Stolpe i Luften, man kan lægge sig paa Vinden saadan en Magt har den” (Himmerlandsk Musik 238) [One knows how it can be windy in Jutland, on the wide open land, steady, unrelenting; like a pole in the air, one can lie down on the wind – that is the kind of power it has]. This sense of wildness creates a connection to another landscape, the Arctic: “Hedemosen har en egen Sjæl, den knytter til Forestillinger langt bagud i Tiden, Afsmeltningen efter Istiden, da Landet var en Tundra, og til arktiske Lande, hvor Naturen er den samme endnu” (Himmerlandsk Musik 238) [The heath has its own soul that is connected to images a long way back in time, the thawing after the Ice Age, when the land was a tundra, and to Arctic lands, where nature is still the same]. Another way to use the polar expeditions can be seen in the works of Thorkild Hansen, who, through a critical investigation of historical documents that he references or quotes, creates a kind of documentary novel. In Jens Munk (1965) the Dano-Norwegian explorer Jens Munk’s attempt to find a new route to China (north around Canada) in 1619, by decree from the Danish King Christian IV, can be readily followed. The expedition did not find the Northwest Passage but sailed into Hudson Bay where, because of ice floes, they were forced to spend the winter at the mouth of the Churchill River. Sixty-three crew members died of scurvy, but Munk and the two surviving crew members managed to set sail and returned to Bergen. Munk, however, fell out of the good graces of the king and received no recognition for his seamanship. For Thorkild Hansen, Jens Munk is a loner with an impossible task but precisely for that reason a tragic hero. The book is a kind of existential, historical narrative; it is the magnificent and often vain actions of significant people, their empty gestures that give human life meaning. In the Arctic wasteland, the circumstances of life are brought into sharp relief, and the personality is subjected to its greatest test. Thorkild Hansen took part in Jens Munk’s commemorative expedition in 1964, whose purpose was to locate the place in Hudson Bay where Munk and his companions stayed during the winter of 1619. This is the kind of second journey – a voyage following in the footsteps of an earlier expedition – that often leads to new literary works. As Maria Lindegren Leavenworth observes in her 2009 dissertation “The Second Journey: Travelling in Literary Footsteps,” the first journey supplies an itinerary that the second traveler repeats, and the first travelogue is continuously used in the second journey narrative for purposes of comparison and contrast. The motivation for the repetition varies: it can be an interest in reliving past experiences, or its opposite, to read contemporary conditions, places, and people through the filter of the past. The second journey may be embarked upon to seek answers to unresolved mysteries, to pay homage, or more strategically to be used as a marketing device for one’s own travel. It can represent a wish to create epiphanic moments when past and present seem to completely amalgamate, with authenticity assumed to be residing in the past. A feeling of disappointment, however, often follows the latter sort of attempt (“The Second Journey” 188).

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Hybrid genres Knud Rasmussen was a member of the Danish Authors’ Society and was fully acknowledged as an author even though he did not write novels or poetry. He found his literary talent in non-fictional prose. It seems as if there were a division of labor involving novelists and poets on the one hand and non-fictional writers on the other. The subjects could be the same, but the choice of genre divided the writers into these two groups. Some exceptions can of course be found, such as the Danish polar scientist Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen: he was the leader of an expedition in which Knud Rasmussen also participated in 1902–04 that went from Upernavik to Cape York on the West Coast of northern Greenland. In 1904, after the expedition had been completed, he published Isblink: Digte fra den grønlandske Polarregion (Ice Glints: Poems from the Greenlandic Polar Region). The Norwegian polar scientist Helge Ingstad also tried his hand at writing fiction with the novel Klondike Bill (1941) and the play Siste Båt (1946; The Last Boat). But it is the non-fictional prose – the many travel accounts and expedition reports – that has earned Ingstad his renown as an author. An interesting combination of science and literature emerge when authors take part in polar expeditions, as the Swedish poet Gunnar D. Hansson did in 2009. He followed the icebreaker Oden for six weeks on an expedition whose task was to explore the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater mountain range that passes over the North Pole from the New Siberian Islands to Greenland, thus dividing the Arctic Ocean into two deep basins. In one of the introductory poems, Hansson writes: “Mentala bilder? OK. En hel isöken full. En bra plats för imagism./ Om man bara vet vad man skall ha den till. Här. Och när man / kommer hem. Två sälar vid iskanten. Klarbär på en vit servett” (11) [Mental images? OK. A whole ice wilderness full. A good place for imagism. / If one only knows what to use it for. Here. And when one / comes home. Two seals at the edge of the ice. Sour cherries on a white napkin]. The book, Lomonosovryggen, asks whether it makes sense to talk about an Arctic poetics, a poetic imitation of nature, a mythology without passion. “Häruppe i norr har jag mycket funderat över om vissa företeelser i litteraturen kan ha sin rot och sitt ursprung i naturens eget sätt att forma sina uttryck” (164) [Up here in the north, I have thought much about whether certain phenomena in literature may have their roots and their origins in nature’s own way of forming its expressions], writes Hansson. “‘I celebrate the Lomonosov Ridge and sing myself ’ – det går ju inte, en centrallyrikens återvändsgränd med tretusenfemhundra meter svart vatten under fotsulorna (just här) och med en isavdrift på ¼ knop” (12) [“I celebrate the Lomonosov Ridge and sing myself ” – it does not work at all an essential lyric’s cul de sac with 3500 meters of black water under the soles of my feet (just here) and with an ice leeward drift of 1/4 knot.] Another poem reads: “Poetry slam, poetry sediment / det är svårt att välja, / särskilt om man inte måste” (14) [Poetry slam, poetry sediment / It’s hard to choose / especially if one doesn’t have to]. The poetry is made concrete and exposed, in the same way as the ice in the Arctic: “Många tror att de rörliga drivisformationerna vid Nordpolen kommer att smälta bort, liksom diktsamlingsformen” (16) (Many believe that the moving drift-ice formations at the North Pole will melt away like the shape of the poetry anthology). Poetry and ice are constantly brought closer to one another until the phenomenon of “ice poetry” appears in a striking metaphor:

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Henning Howlid Wærp Nedsmältningen av isdikter från Norra Ishavet sker på mycket sydligare breddgrader än de bildats, och värmen från denna isdiktssmältning förloras först när dikterna genom Golfströmmens försorg åter närmar sig Svalbard eller Novaja Zemlja och fryser till igen. (25) (The meltdown of ice poems from the Arctic Ocean happens at far more southerly latitudes than those at which they were made and the warmth from this melting of ice poems is first lost when the poems driven by the Gulf Stream again approach Svalbard or Novaja Zemlja and freeze up again.)

Poetry and climate are bound together. The Petrarchan sonnet did not reach any further than northern Norway, where Petter Dass lived, explains Hansson, because the genre was too fond of warm climates: “Rilkesonetten däremot tycks trivas / under den arktiska sommaren, / men flyr söderut redan i juli” (Hansson Lomonosovryggen 38) [The Rilkian sonnet, on the other hand, seem to thrive / during the Arctic summer, / but already flies south in July]. If one were to design a sonnet form for the Arctic, says the poet, it would have to be able to withstand both the cold and polar bear attacks and would need to have an outer door that opens inward so that a snowstorm could not trap the reader inside. Polar expeditions and Arctic settings have been used extensively in crime literature in the recent years. In the Norwegian crime fiction, such novels as Terra Roxa by Jon Michelet (1982), Zona Frigida by Anne B. Ragde (1995), and Hollendergraven (2007; The Dutchman’s Grave) by Monica Kristensen, Svalbard is the preferred arena. Greenland is the striking setting for Danish novels such as Peter Høeg’s Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne (1992; Smilla’s Sense of Snow), in which the protagonist draws on traditional Arctic knowledge – inherited from her Inuit mother – as a basis for her detective pursuits. And in Swedish, Engineer Andrée’s North Pole expedition appears again as in Jan Wallentin’s crime novel Strindbergs stjärna (2010; Strindberg’s Star). Nothing indicates the Arctic will become less literary in the coming years. Mental images, environmental realities, historic occurrences, and a web of discourses make the Arctic a topic that will surely continue to command attention.

Dislocation and identity formation in the work of Isak Dinesen Susan C. Brantly

Dislocation means, quite simply, that someone or something is out of place, not in its natural setting, out of its native context. Isak Dinesen – as she is known in the United States, but Karen Blixen in England and Denmark  – was a dislocated identity herself having spent seventeen years living on her coffee farm in British East Africa.1 Not only was she a dislocated Dane in Africa, but also a dislocated Dane among the British in the colony. This dislocation in turn led to, to put it playfully, a dislocated dislocution when she published Seven Gothic Tales (1934) in the United States in English rather than in Denmark in Danish. Dislocations and their impact on identity are a theme that runs throughout Dinesen’s tales, though it is not always remarked upon by scholars. The theme is especially noticeable in Out of Africa (1937), the title of which denotes dislocation. In the tales as well, there are those who remain in one location and leave their mark on it and are marked by a place, as in “Sorg-agre” (1942; “Sorrow Acre”): “Og dog havde et Folk levet i dette Landskab i tusind Aar, var blevet formet af dets Muld og Vejrlig, og havde selv præget det med sine Tanker, saa at det ikke længere kunde siges, hvor det enes Væsen holdt op og det andets begyndte” (217) [“All the same, a human race had lived on this land for a thousand years, had been formed by its soil and weather, and had marked it with its thoughts, so that now no one could tell where the existence of the one ceased and the other began” (29)]. More or less the same claim is made about the Kikuyu who lived on Dinesen’s farm in Africa: “De indfødte Folk, det var Afrika i Kød og Blod” (Den afrikanske Farm 29) [the Natives were Africa in flesh and blood (Out of Africa 21)]. When the Kikuyu on her farm are threatened with dislocation after its bankruptcy and sale, Dinesen writes: “Det er mere end Jorden selv, som man tager fra de Indfødte, naar man tager deres fædrene Jord. Det er deres Fortid, deres Rødder og Vaner, deres sande Jeg, deres Eksistens” (307) [“It is more than their land that you take away from the people, whose Native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity” (359)]. Identity is shaped by where one is, so that when one is dislocated, taken out of the native context, it will change who one is. Why do dislocations occur? Pellegrina Leoni claims in “Echoes” that “nogle Rejsende bliver trukket fremefter af et Maal der ligger foran dem, saaledes drages Jærnet til Magneten. Andre bliver drevet frem af en Magt som ligger bag dem, og det er paa den Maade at Buestrengen slynger Pilen ud” (Sidste Fortællinger 141) [“some travelers are drawn forward by a goal lying before them in the way iron is drawn to the magnet. Others are driven on by a force lying behind them. In such a way the bowstring makes the arrow fly” (Last Tales 157)]. The source of this observation in Dinesen’s own experience is clear: when Dinesen immigrated to Africa, she was drawn 1.

Isak Dinesen is known by that pen name only for her American audience. England and Denmark know her as Karen Blixen. As a general rule, American scholars refer to her as Dinesen and European scholars refer to her as Blixen. Although the audience for this volume is likely to include both Americans and Europeans, I choose to refer to her as Dinesen in this essay as a sign of one of the many points of dislocation connected to this writer. doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.43bra © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Figure 64.  One of Blixen’s most famous literary places – her African farm – as it appears today in the form of the Karen Blixen Museum in Nairobi, Kenya. Photo: TheLearningPhotographer/Shutterstock

to the adventure as by a magnet. When she left Africa, she was propelled by catastrophic losses that sent her arrow flying back to Denmark. The first type, the traveler drawn forward as if by a magnet, is seeking to expand his or her world through encountering differences in landscape and culture. The journey is voluntary and is undertaken out of a desire to experience the new. As Dinesen describes the participants of the European Grand Tour: “De gamle Milords, som optræder i det attende Aarhundredes Historie og Romanlitteratur, paa evige Rejser i Italien, Grækenland og Spanien, havde ikke et eneste af Sydlændingenes Træk i deres Personlighed, men de blev tiltrukket og fortryllet af en Natur, der i et og alt var væsensforskellig fra deres egen” (Den afrikanske Farm 25–26) [“Those old Milords who figure in the history and fiction of the eighteenth century, as constantly traveling in Italy, Greece and Spain, had not a single Southern trait in their nature, but were drawn and held by the fascination of things wholly different from themselves” (Out of Africa 16)]. Northern encounters with the South change a person, as in the case of Lady Flora Gordon of “Kardinalens tredje historie” (1957; “The Cardinal’s Third Tale”), a noblewoman from the cold Protestant North, who visits the warm Catholic South. She does not appear to let anything of this experience impress or affect her until she presses her lips to the foot of a statue of St. Peter and acquires a feeling of consanguinity with the rest of mankind by contracting syphilis. Her name changes in the sanatorium, and she becomes a different (and more pleasant) person. Of course, this development is something of a joke since such extreme measures are needed to penetrate that particularly rigid and resistant personality. Dinesen made no secret of the fact that she preferred the South (both southern Europe and Africa) to her native North and sprinkles jokes about the fact throughout her work. In “Drømmerne” (1934; “The Dreamers”) Lincoln Forsner, an Englishman dislocated to Africa,

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explains laconically to Mira Jama, “Jeg skal nemlig fortælle Dig, at Landet Europa, som Du jo har hørt om, bestaar af to Dele, af hvilke den ene er behageligere end den anden. Disse to er adskilt af en høj og stejl Bjergkæde” (267) [“Now the continent of Europe, of which you have heard, consists of two parts, the one of which is more pleasant than the other, and these two are separated by a high and steep mountain chain” (279)].2 In “Vejene omkring Pisa” (1934; “The Roads Round Pisa”) the Danish Augustus von Schimmelman admires the thin wrist of the Tuscan Agnese, whom he has mistaken for a young man, and contemplates: hvorledes man i dette Land bestandig fik Bevis for, at dets Beboere havde opbygget Marmorpaladser og filosofiske Systemer, mens hans egne Forfædre i de nordiske Skove havde gjort sig Vaaben af Sten og klædt sig i Huden af de Bjørne, hvis varme Blod de drak. Det maatte ganske sikkert tage tusind Aar at forme en Haand og et Haandled som disse. I Danmark har alle Folk tykke Haandled og Ankler, og jo højere man kommer op i Samfundet, jo tykkere bliver de. (28–29) (how plainly one must realize, in meeting the people of this country, that they had been living in marble palaces and writing about philosophy while his own ancestors in the large forests had been making themselves weapons of stone and had dressed in the furs of the bears whose warm blood they drank. To form a hand and wrist like these must surely take a thousand years. . . . In Denmark, everybody has thick ankles and wrists, and the higher up you go, the thicker they are.) [181]

This is, of course, an elegant way of stating that the Danes are thick headed. Clearly, Dinesen can be quite hard on her native country and is attracted to the more pleasant South. Some critics have seen Out of Africa as an exploration of the narrator’s identity answering the question: “Who was I?” Her encounters with difference are key to this identity formation. The year after Out of Africa was published, Dinesen delivered a speech to students at Lund University in which she said: Det kommer måske til at hænde nogen af Dem . . . at De kommer ud, langt herfra, til lande, som De ikke kender. Jeg kan da fortælle Dem, at De dér kommer til at gøre en mærkelig erfaring. Det vil hænde Dem, ikke alene at Deres omgivelser forandrer sig og er fremmede og ukente, hvorhen De så vender Dem, men at De selv forandrer Dem, i Deres egne øjne, så at De ender med at spørge: “Hvem er jeg? Hvordan ser jeg ud?” Så længe man er barn i sit hjem, så kommer dette spørsmål ikke for; alle ens omgivelser kan besvare det, de er enige, og deres fælles dom er i almindelighed basis for vor vurdering af os selv. Og så længe man er i sit fædreland, er man jo også på en maade hjemme; alle de mennesker, man dér træffer, har nogenlunde samme forudsætninger. (“Sorte og hvide i Afrika” 82) (Perhaps some of you . . . will venture out, far away, to lands that are unfamiliar to you. I can predict that there you will have a remarkable experience. Not only will your environment change and seem strange and unfamiliar no matter where you turn, but in your eyes, you too will change, so that you will end up asking: ‘Who am I? How do I appear?’ 2.

Seven Gothic Tales was written first in English and Dinesen cast it herself into Danish (translated might not be the right word). This was generally her process with a few exceptions, most of which are found in her later tales. Arguably, one can speak of two originals, rather than an original and a translation. In order to remain consistent with the rest of the volume, the Danish is presented first and the English second, although in the case of Seven Gothic Tales the English version may certainly be considered the original.

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Susan C. Brantly As long as you are a child in your own home, these questions will never arise. Everyone around you can answer them. They are in agreement, and their shared judgement is generally the basis for how we evaluate ourselves. As long as you stay in your own country, you are also in a sense home. All the people that we meet there have more or less the same background.) [“Blacks and Whites in Africa” 240]

Traveling to a foreign land can show one who one is in ways that staying at home never will. At home, that which is considered normal is more or less invisible since it is everywhere; cultural consensus makes many things appear natural. Encounters with difference expose things that appear to be normal and natural as culturally constructed. In many ways, Out of Africa represents a contemplation of difference, as Dinesen notes the differences in both the landscape and culture of Africa as compared to her European home territory. For example, the initial landscape description in the book includes the observation: “Træernes Løv var tyndt og let, opbygget paa en anden Maade end Løvet paa Træerne i Europa” (15) [“The trees had a light delicate foliage, the structure of which was different from that of the trees in Europe” (3)]. Dinesen includes several episodes in which an African calls into question what a European would take for granted, as, for example, when Farah sides with Shylock of The Merchant of Venice instead of with the young lovers. On another occasion, Kamante thinks the value of a book lies in its color and hardness rather than its content. These cultural clashes are not presented in order to ridicule the Africans, but “to open up in the reader’s mind other possibilities than the familiar cultural understanding of these things. So, in a sense, Out of Africa is about both constructing the identity of the narrator and deconstructing the identity of the reader” (Brantly 96). Dinesen traveled to Africa and encountered identity-transforming differences, which she attempts to share with her implied readers. She returned to Denmark as another person: Isak Dinesen instead of Karen Blixen. There is another reason for dislocations beyond an attraction to difference: “Andre bliver drevet frem af en Magt som ligger bag dem, og det er paa den Maade at Buestrengen slynger Pilen ud” (Sidste Fortællinger 141) [“Others are driven on by a force lying behind them. In such a way the bowstring makes the arrow fly” (“Echoes” 157)]. Such individuals are dislocated by trauma, crisis, scandal, or any number of things that make one’s original environment uninhabitable. These characters are exiles who may look back upon their previous homes with nostalgia as their journey is not always voluntary and a return home is unlikely. “Nostalgia” derives from the Greek words νόστος, meaning “to return home” and ἄλγος, meaning “pain.” It is a painful homesickness that afflicts the dislocated in both time and space since one can both long for the past as well as a place. A number of Dinesen’s fictional characters have left their homes spurred by trauma rather than a longing to experience the new. Although he lives inland, Niccolo from “Ekko” (“Echoes”) still walks like a seaman despite not having been to sea for sixty-five years after he was forced into an act of cannibalism after a shipwreck. Babette, from “Babettes Gæstebud” (1958; “Babette’s Feast”), has been catapulted into exile by revolutionary conflict and the violent deaths of her husband and son. She spends everything she has in order to cook a real French dinner once more. Babette chooses not to return to Paris, in part, because the world she longs for is lost in time. Her audience at the Café Anglais exists no more. In “Drømmerne” (“The Dreamers”), the loss of her identity as Pellegrina, the great opera singer, sends Pellegrina Leoni

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into a life in which she frequently dislocates herself and adopts different identities on the one condition she never be associated with the original Pellegrina Leoni again. She claims to be exempted from nostalgia, when she tells Niccolo in “Ekko” (“Echoes”) that “det [er] mig hellerikke tilladt at erindre” (Sidste Fortællinger 142) [“remembrance is forbidden to me” (Last Tales 158)]. Nonetheless, in her dying delirium, she joyously returns to both her identity and the moment of the opera house fire, thus suggesting that the dislocation and abandonment of her former identity had caused her pain. Dinesen is surrounded by dislocated Europeans in Out of Africa. Emmanuelson, a Swede, is fleeing from scandals that seem to propel him from place to place, but he stops in his flight to enjoy some fine wine and read Ibsen plays aloud at the farm. The narrator of Out of Africa gives Kasparson an opportunity to speak his native language and sing Danish songs. When they take up coal burning in the forest, she gains pleasure in providing the illusion of home to him: saa at han i den Tid, vi brændte Trækul i Skoven, levede sig ind i en Slags Fantasi: han og jeg var paa Pinse-Skovtur i Danmark. Der var et gammelt, hult Træ i en Lysning i Skoven, som han døbte Lottenborg. Da jeg en Dag gemte nogle Flasker dansk Øl inde i Lottenborg og inviterede ham paa en Bajer der, nedlod han sig til at synes, at det var en god Spøg. (Den afrikanske farm 161) (For all the time of the charcoal-burning he kept up and developed a fantasy: we were on a Witsunday picnic in Denmark. An old hollow tree he christened Lottenburg, after a place of amusement near Copenhagen. When I had a few bottles of Danish beer hidden in the depths of Lottenburg, and invited him to a drink there, he condescended to think it a good joke.) [Out of Africa 183]

The Danish version of this passage underscores the idea of Dinesen’s English texts being dislocated dislocutions, in that the phrase “after a place of amusement near Copenhagen” is omitted, since, of course, Danes would know that. Her English-speaking audience is dislocated relative to the narrator’s native background and therefore must be given the necessary information. Although the narrator of Out of Africa seems to take pleasure in being reminded of things Danish, she does not seem afflicted by homesickness. She imagines herself to be at home in Africa. Dinesen suggests that many of her closest friends in Africa, such as Berkeley Cole and Denys Finch-Hatton fell into the category of those propelled into exile: “De troede, de var Desertører, og at de, som rimeligt var, af og til maatte betale for deres Egensind. Men de var i Virkeligheden Landsforviste, som bar deres Landsforvisning med Taalmodighed og fine Manerer” (178) [“They believed that they were deserters, who sometimes had to pay for their willfulness, but they were in reality exiles, who bore their exile with good grace” (206)]. The arrow metaphor is used explicitly to describe Denys: “Buestrengen blev sluppet paa Broen ved Eton, Pilen beskrev sin Bane og ramte Obelisken i Ngong Hills.” (296) [“The bow-string was released on the bridge at Eton, the arrow described its orbit, and hit the obelisk in the Ngong Hills” (345)]. The farm, for them, becomes a stop on their journeys, a fixed point in their wandering: “For de store Vandrere mellem mine Venner laa vistnok Farmens stærkeste Tiltrækning deri, at den blev, hvor den var, og lignede sig selv hver Gang de saa den igen” (172) [“To the great wanderers amongst my friends, the farm owed its charm, I believe, to the fact that it was

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stationary and remained the same whenever they came to it” (198)]. But it is also a locus of nostalgia, the site of things familiar in an unfamiliar landscape: “For at glæde dem prøvede jeg, mens de var borte, mange Opskrifter ud af gamle sjældne Kogebøger, og gjorde mig Umage for at faa europæiske Blomster til at vokse i min Have” (172) [“To please them I experimented, while they were away, with many curious recipes out of old cookery books, and worked to make European flowers grow in my garden” (199)]. Geese wander the yard to give the place the feel of Denmark; her cellar is stocked with European wine; and her bookshelves with European books. The farm is something of a European oasis in Africa. However, when Dinesen describes her house as a civilized place in the wilderness, she defines civilization in opposition to the barbarian: “Barbaren elsker sin egen Stolthed og hader eller nærer Mistro til alle andres Stolthed. Jeg vil være et civiliseret Menneske, jeg vil elske mine Modstanderes Stoldhed, mine Folks, min Elskers Stolthed, og i al Ydmyghed skal mit Hus midt i Vildmarken være et civiliseret Sted” (216) [“The barbarian loves his own pride, and hates, or disbelieves in, the pride of others. I will be a civilized being, I will love the pride of my adversaries, of my servants, and my lover; and my house shall be, in all humility, in the wilderness a civilized place” (250)]. The description of the barbarian applies to the colonists of British East Africa with whom Dinesen did not get along well and who cared nothing about the humanity and well-being of the Africans over whom they held power. Being civilized, according to this definition, means maintaining an open-mindedness and an appreciation of the independence of those who are different. Dinesen’s European oasis has an open border, welcoming those for whom the European trappings may seem strange. The Kikuyu children delight in the cuckoo clock. Lulu, the gazelle, makes her home in the house until drawn back to her native forest. Through these encounters Dinesen hopes for an alliance, a friendship with Africa: “Disse Aar, da Lullu og hendes Slægt kom og gik omkring Huset, var de lykkeligste Aar af hele mit Liv i Afrika. Derfor kom jeg til at se paa mit Bekendtskab med Skovens Antiloper som paa et Venskabstegn, en stor Velvilje eller Gave fra selve Afrika” (73) [“The years in which Lulu and her people came round to my house were the happiest of my life in Africa. For that reason, I came to look upon my acquaintance with the forest antelopes as upon a great boon, and a token of friendship from Africa” (74)]. But there is an awareness nonetheless that the European presence is alien to this location: “Vi hvide Folk, i svære Støvler, og som oftest i stor Hast, skurrede altid mod Landskabet” (29) [“We ourselves, in boots, and in our constant great hurry, often jar with the landscape” (20)]. The colonists are compared with “en pludselig, forfærdelig Larm” (27) [“a sudden terrific noise” (18)] that alarms and frightens the native inhabitants. On her farm in Africa, despite being dislocated, Dinesen creates the illusion of home, but a home with an open door. Within the first pages of Out of Africa, Dinesen expresses the thought: “Nu er jeg der, hvor jeg skal være” (16) [“Here I am, where I ought to be” (4)]. This sense of belonging to the place is eroded by economic hardships, locusts, drought, and the deaths of friends. Having believed herself to be one with the country, “Nu skilte Landet sig ud fra mig, og trak sig lidt tilbage for at betragte mig, og for at jeg skulde se det tydeligt og som en Helhed” (274) [“Now the country disengaged itself from me, and stood back a little, in order that I should see it clearly and as a whole” (330)]. This string of crises dislocated her from the place she has believed to be her second home, but it is expressed as though the country itself is withdrawing from her. Denys, in his death, follows a different destiny:

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Dengang den blev sat ned i Graven, forandrede Landet sig, og sluttede sig som en Indfatning om den, og det var ligesaa stille som den selv var. Højene stod alvorlige lodret op, de vidste og forstod, hvad vi foretog os i dem. Efter en Stunds Forløb overtog de selv Ceremonien, den blev til et Foretagende mellem dem og ham, og de Mennesker, som var til Stede, var nu ikke andet end en tilfældig Samling smaa Tilskuere i Landskabet. (293) (As it [Denys’ coffin] was placed in the grave, the country changed and became the setting for it, as still as itself, the hills stood up gravely, they knew and understood what we were doing in them; after a little while they themselves took charge of the ceremony, it was an action between them and him, and the people present became a party of very small lookers-on in the landscape.) [341]

Denys is claimed by Africa, as he becomes one with the soil. The human onlookers, among them Dinesen, are rendered irrelevant. Out of Africa begins with the famous line: “Jeg havde en Farm i Afrika ved Foden af Bjerget Ngong” (15) [“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills” (3, emphasis mine)]. The farm is already lost, the narrator dislocated, before the reader is introduced to the experience of life in Africa. Nevertheless, the reader is drawn into this place which is a site of transformed identities and overturned cultural assumptions, but it is also suffused with nostalgia for Africa, the place from which Dinesen has been dislocated by misfortunes. A few pages before the end of the book, Dinesen describes a meeting with an old Kikuyu woman who is carrying the old building materials of her house to a new location. She is being dislocated by the sale of the farm and breaks into tears. The woman reflects the pain of dislocation that Dinesen herself is feeling, but Dinesen reacts with perhaps a tinge of envy because “hun havde da i hvert Fald noget Materiale at bygge sit nye Hus af ” (314) [“after all she had some materials with which to begin her new house” (369)]. When the time finally comes to depart, the iconic Ngong Hills, which met the reader in the first line and loom large in the life and imagination of the farm, are erased: “Bjærgets Omrids blev langsomt glattet og jævnet ud af Afstanden” (317) [“The outline of the mountain was slowly smoothed and leveled out by the hand of distance” (372)]. The identity formed and shaped in Africa must now exist out of Africa.

Absorbing places and the triumph of modernity Hans Christian Andersen Karin Sanders

To allow oneself to be absorbed by places other than those familiar and comfortable is the hallmark of the traveler. During the nineteenth century, Hans Christian Andersen, Danish author of numerous fairy tales, novels, plays, poems, and travelogues was an avid observer of places (Houe). Feeling more at home when abroad, he immersed himself in the physical world of other countries. His use of the fantastic belies the fact that his literary corpus as a whole was contingent upon real experiences in the tangible and material actuality that surrounded him. He did not want to escape the world, he wanted to be in it; he wanted to use it – and he did. But to be in the world often meant to escape the restrictions of a world, the one that he called home. In Denmark, he was met with prescriptive and claustrophobic demands. His many trips away from Denmark therefore allowed him to escape the oppressiveness of cultural orthodoxy and conformity. This essay examines the ways in which Andersen shuffled temporal chronologies and creates anachronisms in relation to the physical reality he encountered on his travels; he produced a kind of socio-anthropological critique lodged in the transformation of material artifacts and places. When Andersen traveled, he made note of “things” large and small – landscapes and cityscapes are mixed with trivial everyday objects or new remarkable technologies. He traveled as a modern man, a man of his time, but often to places that were supposed to take him back in time, to ancient sites or foundations of Western art and civilization. At times he was melancholic but rarely nostalgic for the past, whether in the form of ideas or physical convenience. In his 1838 fairy tale “Lykkens Kalosker” (“The Magic Galoshes”), one learns that the past (the time of King Hans 1455–1513) was “forfærdeligt . . . sølet” (461) [awfully . . . muddy] and that one should be wary of wishing to return to it. Nostalgia for Andersen came with a distinct form of homesickness, one that was usually cured as soon as he sat foot on Danish soil again. He often articulated an astonishing defense of the modern vis-à-vis the ancient. This juxtaposition of the old and the new, the foreign and the familiar, the comfortable and the uncomfortable resonated in his relationship to things. Whether things took the shape of ancient ruins or the form of trains or crinolines, Andersen consistently approached the material reality with a mixture of curiosity, enthusiasm, sometimes annoyance, but always wit. He was keenly interested in the relationship between time and materiality and had an uncanny ability to put material velocity – things-in-motion – into writing. Andersen had a sharp eye for what today in Michel Foucault’s terminology would be called heterotopia. In addition to the ways that concept has been developed in this volume’s previous essays, it is worth emphasizing the temporal aspect here. Foucault notes, “la grande hantise qui a obsédé le XIXe siècle, a été, on le sait, l’histoire: thèmes du développement et de l’arrêt, thèmes de la crise et du cycle, thèmes de l’accumulation du passé” (46) [“the great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past” (22)] and that the twentieth doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.44san © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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century was “l’époque du simultané, nous sommes à l’époque de la juxtaposition, à l’époque du proche et du lointain, du côte à côte, du dispersé” (46) [“the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed” (22)]. According to Foucault’s characterization of each, then, Andersen’s work would resonate with the concerns of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since Andersen’s use of travel, location, and “things” cannot be divorced from his particular (or peculiar) understanding of modernity and since his interest in both cities and nature, archaeological sites and industry can and indeed should be refracted by the same prisms, the reader would do well to follow Andersen on his travel to two places in Europe that may at first glance seem to be poles apart: Greece and Sweden. Yet each is, as will be seen, linked and subjected to Andersen’s specific vision of the modern. When Andersen set foot in Athens in March 1841, he experienced a peculiar sense of double temporality.1 Never before had he been immersed in such deep history, but nonetheless saw the city as being in its infancy. Warned by fellow travelers that Greece was uncivilized, he argued that this ancient land had just begun to make its first steps toward the modern. Although Athens’s streets were full of various second-hand vehicles that all appeared to have been discharged from service elsewhere “og nu på deres gamle Dage at være udvandrende til Grækenland, for at virke paany” (En Digters Bazar 175) [and now in their old age have emigrated to Greece to work once again], Andersen insists on making a case for Greek modernity: Den skrækkelige Skildring, man i Neapel havde givet mig om Grækenland, og om navnlig Athen, fandt jeg at være overdreven til Latterlighed, jeg tror gerne, at for sex à syv Aar tilbage var Alt her i den skrækkeligste Usselhed, men man maa huske paa, hvad eet Aar alene er for et Land, som Grækenland, der er i en Udviklingsperiode, som intet andet Land er det i Europa. Det er som man vilde sammenligne denne mærkelige Fremskriden i aandelig Henseende hos Barnet og den mindre slaaende, hos den voxne Mand; syv Maaneder hos hint ere omtrent som syv Aar hos denne. (177) (The awful description they had given me in Naples of Greece and in particular of Athens, I found to be ridiculously exaggerated. I am willing to admit that some six or seven years ago everything here would have been in a most awful state of decrepitude. But one must remember what a single year means for a country like Greece that is in a state of development unrivaled by any other country in Europe. It is as if one wanted to compare the remarkable progress in mental capacities in a child with the less remarkable progress in a grown man; seven months for the former is approximately like seven years for the latter.)

This remarkable passage warrants parsing. How can a country so ancient and with such deep history be regarded as the child of Europe? How can the so-called cradle of Western civilization be seen as so stunted in its growth as to be likened to an infant among adult (northern) neighbors (an ironic twist of the “cradle” metaphor)? The answer is simple: Andersen and the fellow travelers he cites see the contemporaneity of Greece through the eyes of the modern. For some 1.

Dedicated to a scientist, traveler, and poet (Prokesch-Osten) and to an archaeologist and historian (L. Ross), the Greek segment of A Poet’s Bazaar implicitly indicates that the travel description is meant to draw on science as well as poetry, material culture as well as history. Translations from En Digters Bazar are my own. For another translation see Grace Thornton’s translation, A Poet’s Bazar.

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this perspective meant that Greece was a country of backwardness and decay, not yet modern like other European nations; to Andersen it meant that Greece was a place of new beginnings. Greece, as Andersen explained, was rapidly on its way to modernity. Others saw nothing but rubble and dust. The cradle metaphor connotes origin, but in Andersen’s description, origin and with it antiquity are decoupled from the reality of present-day life. To illustrate this perception, he observes that “Athen er en By, der synes at voxe i de enkelte Dage den Fremmede opholder sig her” (178) [Athens is a city that seems to grow each day while the stranger stays here], that while “kun et Par Aar siden, da strakte sig mellem Piræus og Athen en Sump, uden om hvilken Kameler gik belæssede med Varer, nu er her en fortræffelig Landevei, og en Kahn med Forfriskninger” (175–76) [only a few years ago Piræus and Athens were connected by a swamp, around which the camels wandered with loads of goods; now it has an excellent road and an inn with refreshments]. As a final trump card, he compares café life in Athens with that in Hamburg, Berlin, and Rome. Athens too, he posits, can flaunt that epitome of modernity, the flâneur: Athen har et Par græske, eller egentlig tyrkiske Caffeer, og dertil en ny italiensk, saa stor og pyntelig, at den kunde tage sig ud i Hamborg eller Berlin; den meget besøgte Caffe greco i Rom er imod denne kun et Sandhul under Trappen. Unge Grækere, Alle i national Dragt, men snørede, saa de skulde være blaae og grønne om Ribbenene, med Lognet og Glacé-Handsker, saae jeg her ryge Cigarer og spille Billard. De vare ægte græske Lapse; de behøvede blot at ændre Costume for at være Drivere i enhver anden europæisk Stad. (178) (Athens has a few Greek or more correctly Turkish cafés and moreover a new Italian one, so grand and adorned that it would have been a showcase in Hamburg or Berlin; the much-frequented Café Greco in Rome is but a sand-hole under the staircase in comparison. I saw young Greeks in national dress but strapped in so tightly that their ribs would be bruised blue and green; they peered through a monocle, wore Glacé-gloves, smoked cigars, and played billiards. They are genuine Greek dandies; all they needed to do was change their attire in order to be flâneurs in any other European city.)

The ancient city’s flâneurs, albeit in traditional Greek dress, can be idle and smoke and behave as vainly as any other modern European dandy. In the expanding city, major architectural structures shoot up: a university building (by the Danish architect Christian Hansen), a national theater, a castle for the new king and queen, the royal gardens, and other imposing structures emerge as if by the hour, giving form to a nation whose independence had only been ratified a little over a decade before Andersen’s visit. To Andersen, Athens was small yet cosmopolitan in its own right.2 He deftly contrasts the foreigners who saw only dirt and rubble in Athens with a Greek visitor, a learned man, from the island of Chios, Homer’s birthplace, to whom the new capital is positively awe-inspiring and full of modern luxuries. As Andersen concludes, visitors “dømmer … fra forskjelligt Standpunkt” (179) [judge … from each their viewpoint].3 2.

Andersen compares Athens to the Danish town of Helsingør (Elsinore). Athens at the time had some 4000–5000 inhabitants.

3.

Andersen notes how national identity is hard to establish, how whenever he mentions that he is from Denmark, he is mistaken for an American and how Athens turns out to be full of strangers from home:

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The Greece that Andersen visited had to compete with the ubiquitous Greek imaginary that had been cultivated ever since J. J. Winckelmann. Reality, unsurprisingly, had difficulty measuring up to the illustrious past and the re-imagined ideality of his characterization of Greek culture in terms of “edle Einfalt und stille Größe” (24) [noble simplicity and quiet grandeur]. The contemporary Greeks in particular were often described in the travel literature as being far from noble and grand. The Danish archaeologist Peter Oluf Brøndsted traveled to Greece between 1810–13 and later wrote, Jeg tror ikke at sige for meget, naar jeg paastaar, at der næppe findes een Indvaaner af det nuværende Athen, som jo gerne, hjertelig gerne, solgte Parthenon eller Theseus-Templet til hvilken Fremmed det skulde være at bortføre, hvis dette lod sig gøre, blot han selv kunde stikke Pengene i Lommen. (Hjortsø 23) (I do not think that I exaggerate when I claim that there is hardly any inhabitant in present-day Athens who would not gladly sell the Parthenon and Theses’s temple to any stranger able to carry it off if it could be done, if only he himself could pocket the money.)

To Brøndsted, the Greeks had called the tyranny of the Turks upon themselves through the corruption of their character: “disse negative Sider ere nedarvede fra deres Fædre, hos hvem vi kun mærkede det Negative mindre fordi de herligste positive Egenskaber, Dyder og glimrende fortjenester holdt hine i Tømme” (31) [these negative traits were inherited from their forefathers, among whom one felt the negative less because they were counterbalanced with glorious positive qualities, virtues, and magnificent accomplishments]. Another fellow Dane in Greece, J.F. Fenger, offers a different view (ca. 1830). Although he too had felt the reality of the less-than-ideal, he concludes that the view of the Greeks as “Udskud af Mennesker” (32) [a people of pariahs] is unreasonable. In a rather Janus-faced defense for the Greeks, he writes: Jeg er jo i Grækenland bleven bekuppet, beløiet, udplyndret lige saa godt som de Andre, der raabte Ak og Ve over Nationen, og dog er jeg kommen tilbage, mere Philhellen end da jeg reiste, og den Deeltagelse, som jeg har fattet for dette ulykkelige Folk vil sikkert aldrig uddø af mit Bryst. (Hjortsø 32) (Surely, I too have been tricked, lied to, robbed just as much as any other, who has cried “oh woe” about the nation, and yet I have returned more philhellenic than when I left and the compassion I have gained for this unhappy people will certainly never die out in my breast.)

It is in such disputes that Andersen’s apology for a modern Greece should be seen: the ongoing idealization of the ancient and the prevalent condemnation of the present-day. Indeed, when it comes to a nostalgic preservation of the past some romantics, as Greek urban historian Alexander Papageorgiou-Venetas writes, “practiced ‘abstention-from Greece,’ avoiding confrontation with the present-day in order to preserve . . . idealized vision[s]” (12). To Andersen abstention from Greece was not an option; he immersed himself in the contemporary reality of the place in all its forms. To him the contrast between the modern and the ancient took on “Jeg havde tænkt mig, at jeg i Grækenland skulde føle mig saa fremmed, saa langt fra Hjemmet, og jeg syntes just her at være ganske hjemme” (179) [I thought I would feel so foreign in Greece, so far from home, but I feel very much at home here].

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a decisively theatrical aspect when he stepped out from a performance at Athens’s new theater outside the city and was struck by the contrast between the artificial and the natural: “Den storartede Natur-Decoration spottede de malede Couliser; Eensomheden forkyndte et Drama, der viste, hvor smaaligt alt var derinde, hvorfra vi kom. Just ved Modsætningens Usselhed følte jeg Grækenlands hele classiske Storhed” (180) [The splendid natural decorations mocked the painted sets; the loneliness declaimed a drama that showed how petty everything was back in there from where we had just come. I felt Greece’s classical greatness precisely through the wretchedness of the juxtaposition]. After setting the stage for a modern Athens, Andersen finally turns his attention to “Hjertet af det gamle Athen” (181) [the heart of ancient Athens], the Acropolis. Here his archaeological and material imagination is let loose to wonder at the fact that “Hver Plet er her historisk, ved hvert Skridt træder man her paa en ved Minder hellig Jordbund” (181) [each spot is historical here; with each step one treads upon soil made holy by memory]. During his sojourn in Athens, Andersen visited the Acropolis each day; he even spent the morning of his thirty-sixth birthday (April 2) among the ancient ruins. Sitting on the marble steps high above Athens with views of ancient sites in Peloponnese, Sparta, and Corinth, he found himself propelled into a kind of time travel that linked him to ancient philosophers like Plato and Socrates and other great men who had walked the same paths: “Det var den same Scene de betraadte; jeg følte et Øieblik en Tanke af at være traadt tilbage i Tiden for hine store Minder og Begivenheder!” (184) [It was the same scene they had walked upon; I felt for a moment as if I had stepped back to the time of those great memories and events!] Step by step Andersen takes his reader past picturesque groups of soldiers and a single shepherd on the hill where the apostle Paul had spoken to the Athenians. Andersen finally stands in middle of the Acropolis and in the midst of chaos: Jeg trådte gjennem Propylæerne og stod nu paa en Plads, forstyrret, ødelagt, som jeg aldrig har seet liige. Det var som et Jordsjælv havde rystet de gigantiske Colonner og Carnisser mellem hinanden; her var egentlig ikke længer Vei eller sti; Jeg gik over Rudera af ødelagte Leerhytter fra Tyrkernes Tid, hvor Græs og Acanthus skjød frodigt op; hist og her saaes ødelagte Cisterner, hist og her stode Brædde-Skuur, i hvilke man havde henkastet Menneskeknogler og opstillet Vaser, Basreliefs og Gibs-Afstøbninger; her laae rustne sødersprængte Bomber fra Venetianernes Tid; nogle heste gik paa Græs heroppe; og som i en Gruus-Grav til Venstre stod Erectus Templet med sine Cyratider; en faldefærdig Muursøile fylder Pladsen for den Cyratide, som Elgin har røvet for det engelske Museum. Skelletet af et Æsel laae foran de udgravede Marmortrin. (182–83) (I stepped through the Propylaea and now stood on a square, disturbed, destroyed, of which I have never seen the like. It was as if an earthquake had shaken and mixed the giant columns and cairns; there was no longer a real road or path; I walked over ruins of destroyed clay huts from the time of the Turks, where grass and acanthus were lushly sprouting; here and there one saw broken cisterns, here and there stood wooden sheds in which one had strewn about human bones and where vases, bas-reliefs, and plaster casts had been placed; here lay rusted exploded bombs from the Venetians’ time; a few horses were grazing up here; and as if in a gravel pit to the left stood the Erechtheion Temple with its Caryatides; a dilapidated brick column takes the place of the Caryatid that Elgin stole for the English museum. The skeleton of a donkey lay in front of the excavated marble steps.)

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The “earthquake” that hit the Acropolis was not a result of natural, but instead historical forces. Random piles of ancient classical artifacts were mixed with those from Middle Ages and more recent times. The Acropolis seems at first to hold little of genuinely ancient origin but rather numerous incongruous elements from various times: marks left by diverse destroyers, the Venetians, the Turks, and the English. Bits and pieces of the material remains of various cultural and historical places are tossed together into a frenzied heap. Andersen’s friend Ludwig Ross, for example, described how the ruins had been decimated and destroyed, how ancient stones were reused and reset in new buildings as parts of modern staircases or washbasins (Papageorgiou-Venetas 3). The ruin itself was a ruin. On the Acropolis Andersen was spellbound by the anachronisms he observed: marble, plaster, and bones in a temporal-spatial bricolage. As a place of origin, the Acropolis was compromised. Things were missing – like the Caryatid stolen by Lord Elgin and replaced by a mere brick column; other inauthentic artifacts that had been added muddled up any clean and clear sense of a place of origin.4 It is tempting to jump forward to compare Andersen’s description of the Acropolis with his visit to the British Museum almost two decades later. The visit to the British Museum is described in “Et Besøg hos Charles Dickens i Sommeren 1857” (A Visit to Charles Dickens in the Summer 1857) and was originally published in Berlingske Tidende in 1860. Andersen went to the museum, no doubt, to collect trophies for his travel roster thus verifying his having been there. But he also went as someone familiar with museums as fertile locations for literary imagination. The British Museum would not disappoint, of course, and Andersen’s eye for anachronistic/ encyclopedic displays is clearly articulated in the following passage: Jeg veed intet mere Betegnende end at sammenligne det [British Museum] med en mægtig Lærds Hjerne, hvor alt det Læste, Alt i Kunst og Videnskab staaer legemliggjort opstillet i den bedste Orden, og man selv, som et Infusionsdyr, bevæger sig gjennem Aarer og Fibrer. Det brittiske Museum er ligesom Samlingsstedet for Verdenslandenes Herligheder gjennem Aartusinder. . . . Vi vandre mellem Grækenlands Kunst, Skjønhedsskikkelser fra Phidias’ og Praxiteles’ Tider. Her findes Parthenons Basreliefs, . . . Herlighed ved Herlighed. . . . Det brittiske Museum er en sand “old curiosity shop,” der venter sin Digter; det er en Rigdomsskat, som kun Havets Beherskerinde, det mægtige England, kan besidde. (15:176, my emphasis) (I know of nothing more telling than to compare it [British Museum] to a mighty scholar’s brain, where everything that has been read, everything from the arts and the sciences, is embodied and grouped in perfect order, and one’s self, like an infusoria, moves through the veins and fibers. 4.

The missing Caryatid is still placed among the so-called Elgin Marbles at the British Museum. The remaining five are now in the new Acropolis museum with the sixth deliberately marked as “missing,” not by a brick column, as Andersen saw it in situ, but by an empty space in the museum line-up of the remaining five Caryatides. As a symbolic footprint of what was removed by Lord Elgin between 1801 and 1812 and remains unreturned, the power of the absence of the sixth Caryatid speaks volumes about the continually contested cultural history of the Acropolis. The plaster casts that Andersen mentions must have been foreign to the site since, as Papageorgiou-Venetas observes: “No plaster casts were made in Greece itself, even though plaster casts of Parthenon sculpture taken to England by Lord Elgin were sent to Athens and made accessible to the general public although a decree concerning plaster casts of antiquities had been planned since 1845” (117).

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Karin Sanders The British Museum is a kind of collection site for all the world’s splendors extending over thousands of years. We wander among pieces of Greek art, among beautiful forms from the epochs of Phidias and Praxiteles. Here one finds the Parthenon’s bas-reliefs, . . . Splendor upon splendor. . . . The British Museum is a true “old curiosity shop,” which awaits its poet; it is a treasure of riches that only the ruler of the seas, mighty England, could possess.)

The last part of the quotation is a rather generous gesture toward the British Empire’s archaeological politics, and unlike his remarks in A Poet’s Bazaar, Andersen refrains from portraying the British Elgin Marbles as robbery. The use of simile is striking. The museum is compared to a “mægtig Lærds Hjerne,” [mighty scholar’s brain] that is easily penetrated by the spectator-poet. Like an “Infusionsdyr” (a virus), literary imagination bleeds into the veins and fibers of this museum-brain, and Andersen playfully implies that the mighty brain, which can with some justification be read as that of an archaeologist, is in dire need of a poet. By implication, however, the museum is already a text, a massive novel, thick and “messy” like Dickens’s novel by that name The Old Curiosity Shop (1840). “Den “Lærd[e]s Hjerne” (the mighty scholar’s brain) might well have provided some order. After all, the artifacts are read “opstillet i den bedste Orden” [grouped in perfect order]. But by using the “old curiosity shop” to characterize the museum, Andersen informs the reader both of what he sees and of the lens through which he observes it. To return to Greece, one can see that at a time when Dickens had not yet used the term “curiosity shop,” nor had Andersen appropriated the expression, it had been foreshadowed in the bric-à-brac description of the Acropolis. It is the same imagination that is at play. In this description of the museum, Andersen clearly does not use authenticity as the measuring stick for the enchantment of the place. Rather, authenticity to him has to do with the effect of the experience and the pathos that it inspires. Human remains as well as dead animals serve as vanitas emblems and highlight the maimed marble: “hver Søile barbarisk sønderskudt, hvert Basrelief i Frontespice og Frise lemlæstet” (En Digters 183) [each column brutally shot asunder, each bas-relief in a frontispiece and frieze mutilated]. The Parthenon remains aweinspiring, “the temple above all temples,” and Andersen responds with pathos, “Tanken bliver stor i store Omgivelser!” (183) [Thoughts become grand in grand environments!] and “Taarerne strømmede mig ud af Øinene” (184) [Tears streamed from my eyes.] In fact, his description of time and matter has some resonances with another great Greek, the philosopher Heraclites, who claimed that the only constant is change. Chaos, to Andersen, is not chaos in a negative sense, but the necessary path to renewal. From the ashes come new lives, and the chaos that Andersen observed in Greece was associated with the rebirth of a nation. This rebirth, however, was not a repetition or return to something that had previously existed – Greece of old – but rather the materialization of something new: café life in a city of modernity. Andersen’s reverence for the ancient dust of Greece was quite measured. He wrote how in Greece “det støvede skrækkeligt, men det var jo classisk Støv” (176) [it was terribly dusty, but after all it was classical dust]. Here he adds a simple rhetorical qualifier – the adverb “jo” – to the sentence. The unassuming “jo” can best be translated as “after all” and functions here as a mark of irony that will not allow the reader to be awed by its temporal magic. The dust is classic – “after all” – but it is also modern, as Andersen so clearly shows. On the heights of the Acropolis in particular and in Greece in general, Andersen found himself both out of time or in various times

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surrounded by temporal-material accumulations mixed and matched to produce experiences of an anachronistic nature. It is worth noting that Andersen and photography arrived in Athens at approximately the same time. According to Papageorgiou-Venetas: “In 1841, N.P. Lerebour’s Excursions daguerriennes appeared, containing consistently stereotyped pictures of Athens as part of a world panopticum” (108). These daguerreotypes were deliberately taken so as to avoid signs of modern life. Ancient Greece was the focus, and the new technology was able to freeze and transport images of the real in ways until then unrivaled. It is well known that Andersen’s interest in technology also included photography. The word photography, as Papageorgiou-Venetas observes, has an interesting link to the Greek: The term photography, universally understood and used in all languages . . . combines the Greek words for light and painting/writing and characterizes the results of a process by means of which light and chemical substances produce a picture of reality true to the original but much reduced in size. (106)

Andersen’s recording of what he saw and the initial photographs taken for archaeological purposes may at first glance appear to belong to two different registers. After all, the poet was on location to experience aesthetic immediacy and a connection to the classical past. And he is there to write. Travel descriptions, drawings, paintings, etchings, and such had heretofore held the monopoly on transporting images of antique art in situ to the eager readers of the North. With the advent of photography, ancient art could be recorded and made visible, albeit reduced to two-dimensionality. Papageorgiou-Venetas points out that the awareness that it was now possible to capture ever-changing spatial relations and motion in a fixed form tended to arouse feelings of discomfort in the average beholder. But artists and scientists, each in his own way, were fascinated by the visual phenomenon. (106)

Andersen, in his way, gave voice to this fascination. A similar juxtaposition of the old and new, of the original and the constant reworking thereof that modernity brings can be found in his travel description I Sverrig (1852; Pictures of Sweden). Just as was the case with Andersen’s sojourn in Athens and on the Acropolis, his description of Sweden evokes yet ultimately resists the possibility of nostalgia and the celebration of origin. Once more, as was the case with his treatment of the old dust of antiquity, readers are in for a surprise. The natural landscape of Trollhätta with its waterfalls and hills had been invaded by industry, by machinery, by the “Bloodless.” Andersen’s description of the meeting of nature with modernity is worthy of an extensive extract: Vi gik om i Motalas store Fabrik. Hvad der dikker i Uhret, slaaer her med stærke Hammerslag. Det er “Blodløs,” der drak Liv af Mennesketanken, og ved den fik Lemmer af Metaller, af Steen og Træ, det er Blodløs, der ved Mennesketanken vandt Kræfter, som ikke Mennesket selv physisk eier. I Motala sidder Blodløs og gjennem de store Haller og Stuer strækker han sine haarde Lemmer, hvis Led og Dele ere Hjul ved Hjul, Kjæder, Stænger og tykke Jerntraade  – Træd herind og see hvor de gloende Jernstykker presses til lange Jernstænger, Blodløs spinder den gloende Stang. See hvor Saxen klipper i de tunge Metalplader, klipper saa stille og saa blødt, som var det i Papir; hør hvor han hamrer. . . . Alt er levende, Mennesket staar kun og stiller af og stopper! Vandet springer En ud af Fingerspidserne ved at see derpaa, man dreier sig, man

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Karin Sanders vender sig, staaer stille, bukker og veed ikke selv hvad man skal sige af bare Ærbødighed for den menneskelig Tanke, der her har Jernlemmer. (I Sverrig 15) (We now went through the great factory in Motala. What ticks in the clock, beats here with strong strokes of the hammer. It is Bloodless, who drank life from human thought and thereby got limbs of metals, stone and wood; it is Bloodless, who by human thought gained strength which man himself does not physically possess. Bloodless reigns in Motala, and through the large foundries and factories he extends his hard limbs, whose joints and parts consist of wheel within wheel, chains, bars, and thick iron wires. Enter, and see how the glowing iron masses are formed into long bars. Bloodless spins the glowing bar! See how the shears cut into the heavy metal plates; they cut as quietly and as softly as if the plates were paper. . . . Everything is living; man alone stands and is silenced by – “stop!” The perspiration oozes out of the ends of one’s fingers’: one turns and turns, bows and knows not one’s self, from pure respect for the human thought which here has iron limbs.) [Pictures of Sweden 19]

“Everything is living” in this description of modernity and industry. Modernity spins and glows, hammers and sparks, flies and buzzes. Human thought has manifested itself in the anthropomorphized machine, “Bloodless,” who, with his fathom-long iron limbs, is so awe inspiring that he makes one perspire and bow in pure respect. Man, in other words, bows to himself and to the power of the human mind, not so much as mind over matter, but mind with matter. The spirit of the mountain (Trollhätta means the troll’s cap) in the form of an old gentleman reminisces about the depth of time lodged “in the place”: “Her paa Klippeholmene,” sagde han, “var det i hedenske Tider, som de jo kaldes, at Kjæmperne afgjorde deres Strid. Kjæmpen Stærkodder boede i denne Egn, og syntes godt om den smukke Pige Ogn Alfafoster, men hun kunde bedre lide Hergrimer, og saa blev han af Stærkodder fordret til Strid her ved Faldet, og fandt sin Død, men Ogn sprang til, tog sin Brudgoms blodige Sværd og stak det i sit Hjerte; Stærkodder fik hende ikke. Saa gik der hundred Aar og atter hundred Aar igjen, Skoven var da tyk og tæt, Ulve og Bjørne gik her, Sommer og Vinter.” (12) (“Here, on the rocky holms,” said he, “it was that the warriors in the heathen times, as they are called, decided their disputes. The warrior Stärkodder dwelt in this district, and liked the pretty girl Ogn right well; but she was fonder of Hergrimmer, and therefore he was challenged by Stärkodder to combat here by the falls, and met his death; but Ogn sprung towards them, took her bridegroom’s bloody sword, and thrust it into her own heart. Thus Stärkodder did not gain her. Then there passed a hundred years, and again a hundred years: the forests were then thick and closely grown; wolves and bears prowled here summer and winter.”) [14]

The nostalgic gentleman with his tales of myths and folklore now wanders around “his” domain and begins to realize that it no longer belongs to the deep past or to folklore. New technologies and machinery offer competition to what had heretofore been the realm of imagination. The narrator explains: Jernbaner havde han imidlertid endnu aldrig seet, jeg beskrev ham derfor disse udstrakte Veie, . . . “Man spiser Frokost i London, og samme Dag drikker man Thee i Edinburgh.” “Det kan jeg,” sagde Manden, og det sagde han som om Ingen uden han kunde det. “Jeg kan ogsaa,” sagde jeg, “og jeg har gjort det.” “Og hvem er da De?” spurgte han. “En sædvanlig Reisende,” svarede jeg, “en Reisende, der betaler for Befordringen. Og hvem er De?” Da sukkede Manden. “De kjender mig ikke, min Tid er forbi, min Magt er ingen, Blodløs er stærkere end jeg.” – Og

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saa var han borte. . . . Det var Bjergaanden og ingen anden, thi i vor Tid er ethvert oplyst Menneske betydeligt klogere; og jeg saae med en Slags stolt Følelse paa min Tidsalder . . . (17) (He had, however, never yet seen a railway, and I described to him these extended roads. . . . “One takes breakfast in London, and the same day one drinks tea in Edinburgh.” “That I can do!” said the man, and in as cool a tone as if no one but himself could do it, “I can also,” said I; “and I have done it.” “And who are you, then?” he asked. ”A common traveler,” I replied; “a traveler who pays for his conveyance. And who are you?” The man sighed. “You do not know me: my time is past; my power is nothing! Bloodless is stronger than I!” and he was gone. . . . It was the mountain sprite and no other, for in our time every intelligent person is considerably wiser; and I looked with a sort of proud feeling on the present generation, on the gushing, rushing, whirling wheel, the heavy blows of the hammer, the shears that cut so softly through the metal plates, the thick iron bars that were broken like sticks of sealing-wax, and the music to which the heart’s pulsations vibrate.) [24]

The conversation between the poet-narrator and the old mountain spirit may come as a surprise to those who see in Andersen a fairy-tale writer with sentimental tendencies. The traveling mountain spirit has found a serious competitor in the railroad. But even more remarkable is the fact that instead of mourning the loss of the past and its stories, Andersen stresses how he – the narrator – looked with a sort of proud feeling on the present generation. The real world, modernity, is finally fully able to compete with the magic of travel that heretofore had been the exclusive domain of imaginary figures and the supernatural. To “take breakfast in London” and “drink tea in Edinburgh” on the same day, then, is no longer the privilege of the imagination. It can be done in the present. Being in places can suggest awareness, even endorsement of the ontological, a kind of ground zero of essence, substance, and matter, and hence a thirst for the authentic and the uninscribed. Yet, for Andersen, the opposite was true. His interest in materiality was not an interest in the authentic, but an attentiveness to matter(s) inscribed at various times and in various places. Nature, the very concept of which speaks to authenticity, was never (or rarely) nature in the sense of a source or an original starting point. Andersen was constantly searching for secondorder signs in nature, for something altered or added by human hands, for the emblazoned with which to make a conversation that could take different shapes. Be it a mountain, a luminous stone, a waterfall, or a beautiful sky. The same goes for museums. In the British Museum, he was not looking for origin: dinosaur bones, for example, were part of a larger imaginary whole, a surreal assembly of objects invested as much in the future as in the past, waiting, as Andersen pithily said, for a poet to make the associations and connect the dots. For Andersen, then, travel was not just life (as Andersen’s often-quoted bon mot goes: “To travel is to live”). Travel was engagement with matter and time. Traveling among “things” forced Andersen to test his and our assumptions about old and new, about antiquity and modernity, about nature and industry. Travel connected the author and his readers to the unfolding of changing material realities.

Northern bound Exploring and colonizing the Nordic Far North Thomas A. DuBois

In many ways, the Nordic Far North represents a periphery of a periphery: a remote, sparsely populated region, where the strange sunlight regimen, harsh climate, and relatively undisturbed natural landscape associated with the entire Nordic region are all taken to a new extreme. The Arctic, a region defined by the Polar Circle – i.e. the latitude north of which one experiences perpetual daylight in the summer and an absence of sunrise in the winter – encompasses a fairly large portion of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, and a smaller portion of Iceland, and represents a potent symbol of Nordic exoticism and mystique within Scandinavia as well as outside of the region. Population demographics for the Nordic countries are such that only a minuscule portion of the countries’ populations inhabit these most northerly tracts meaning that for many Scandinavians the Far North remains an unfamiliar, largely imagined world. It is perhaps for these reasons that the Far North plays such an important role in Nordic literature: it is a place to which the Scandinavian travels or imagines to experience the strangeness of Scandinavia. It is thus not surprising that the literature that grows up about the region is filled with images of travel and exploration: of people coming to the Far North for a time to see, experience, and retreat. It is a discourse of novelty, of places seemingly new and strange, even if they have existed for centuries or even millenia, with or without human denizens. Only gradually does the North become depicted as a site of settlement in the works of writers who hail from further south. Their voices eventually join those of indigenous Sámi authors writing in response to the incursions, explorations, and extractive strategies of outsiders, and offering instead an engaged and integrated image of life in an environment that others find harsh, unlivable. The Far North becomes grounds of dispute and contention: a place somehow grown too crowded despite its sparse human population in real numbers. Part of the task of this essay is to survey the changing ways in which Scandinavians have imagined the Far North, particularly as a site of exploration. What constitutes or motivates northern “exploration” as an act over time, and once such exploration has occurred, what motivates Scandinavians to write or read about it? When and in what circumstances does “terra incognita” become sufficiently familiar or defined to no longer justify a visit as an act of “exploration”? Put in other terms, how does a seemingly mysterious “elsewhere” – a place of alterity, adventure, and the unknown – become a “here” – a place meaningful and predictable to the human resident or reader? The answers to these questions lie at the very heart of Nordic approaches to the region’s northern periphery as an imaginative space and inform in part other practices of place discussed elsewhere in this volume. These questions also suggest a limit that will be touched upon at the very end of the essay: the time at which a once-mysterious periphery ceases to hold the same allure within the Nordic literary imagination and instead becomes the imagined site of other actions: settlement, dwelling, sacralizing, and forgetting. The earliest textual rendering of the Nordic Far North appears in an account by a Norwegian merchant visiting the court of King Alfred the Great of England around the year doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.45dub © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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890. The learned Alfred was at the time busy producing an Anglo-Saxon translation of the primary geographic work of the ancient world, i.e. the geographic treatise of Paulus Orosius, and found it wanting in its coverage of lands north of the Mediterranean. With an eye to expanding on the classic author’s work, Alfred interviewed the visitor, whom he called Ohtere – a fairly phonetic rendering of the Old Norse name Ottar. Alfred quotes his guest in extenso, giving one of the very first iterations of a Nordic voice in world literature, albeit second-hand, and in translation (Ælfred). The account of Ohtere/Ottar evinces certain features that remain prevalent for many centuries in Nordic texts concerning the Far North. First and foremost, as the merchant/farmer relates, this is a land far removed from the main settlements of his people. Ohtere describes himself as living in Hålogaland, a name which corresponds to a district of northern Norway today, but which in the ninth century referred to a region further to the south comprising parts of Nord-Trøndelag, Nordland, and Troms. Ohtere states without apparent hesitation that “nan man ne buðe be norþðan him” (252) [“no one dwelt to the north of him” (253)]. He tells of having traveled along the northern coast, ostensibly out of pure curiosity, tracing the norðweg, or “north way,” a designation from which the name Norway eventually derives. He tells of having traveled as far north as possible, then due east and south, apparently into the White Sea. Perhaps given the vagaries of translation and the textual agenda of the king, Ohtere provides little detail regarding the topography or physical features of this “weste land” (wasteland), apart from noting the existence of mountains and forests. The landscape is seem only from shipboard, a tendency that will eventually lead the two Nordic governments that claim the region in the medieval era  – Denmark-Norway and Sweden-Finland  – to define their holdings largely on coastal criteria: the Dano-Norwegian kingdom will claim that portion of the north accessible

Figure 65.  A plateau landscape in the far North of Norway. Photo: Maksimillian/ Shutterstock

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via the outer (i.e, oceanic) coast, while the Swedish crown will claim the portion accessible from the Baltic. It will be many centuries before the exact internal limits of these realms are defined: at least in the summer, this is a region accessed primarily from the coast via ship. A second notable characteristic of Ohtere’s account, repeated time and again in later Nordic works, is the notion of this region as the site of uneasy cultural encounters. Ohtere tells of having sailed past Finnas (by which he probably means Sámi), Terfinnas (apparently some closely related population, later identified with the Sámi of the Kola Peninsula), Cwenas (Kvens, a Finnic-speaking population), and into a land inhabited by Beormas (Bjarmians/ Perms), Finno-Ugric denizens of a kingdom that the Norse came to call Bjarmaland, located at the mouth of a river, apparently the Dvina. Of the Finnas (Sámi), Ohtere notes that they possess no settlements of any consequence and that one sees them usually only hunting, fishing, or birding all along the coast north of Hålogaland. The Cwenas, on the other hand, are engaged in intermittent raiding on the Northmen, “Ða Cwenas hergiað hwilum on þa Norðmen ofer þone mor. hwilum þa Norðmen on hy.” (250) [“The Cwenas sometimes make depredations on the Northmen over the mountains, and sometimes the Northmen on them” (251)]. The Beormas, for their part, seem to possess something that Ohtere can recognize as a real settlement arrayed along the river: Ða læg þær an mycel ea up in þæt land. Þa cyrdon hy up in on ða ea. forþæm hy ne dorston forð be þære ea seglian for unfriðe. forþæm þæt land þær eall gebun on oðre healfe þære ea. Ne mette he ær nan gebun land syððan he fram hir agnum hame. (248) (There lay a great river up in that land; they then turned up in that river, because they durst not sail on by that river, on account of hostility, because all that country was inhabited on the other side of that river; he had not before met with any land that was inhabited since he came from his own home.) [249]

These folk, Ohtere notes, seem to speak a language closely related to that of the Cwenas, giving the Northmen’s Cwen rivals a certain advantage in accessing the trading potential and riches of the Bjarmaland kingdom. In Ohtere’s rendering, then, the Norwegian traveler meets with foreign peoples with whom it is difficult to converse and in whom it is difficult to trust. It is noteworthy that although the Bjarmians reportedly tell Ohtere many things about their land and the lands to the south, Ohtere refrains from repeating these details to King Alfred since he has not witnessed them personally (248). This lack of ease or trust regarding neighboring peoples to the north and east is coupled with a third recurrent feature of Ohtere’s account: his clear intent to extract from the region commodities which can furnish an income. However it may have seemed at the outset of Ohtere’s journey, his foray to the north is no idle meandering into the wilderness; rather, it is a planned expedition aimed at identifying and obtaining goods which can be traded in foreign parts, such as the court of the king of England. Ohtere appears markedly mercantile in his account, describing lands and peoples in terms of the merchandise he can procure or extract from them through trade or forced tribute. The Bjarmians are useful as suppliers of walrus tooth and hide, while the Sámi pay tribute to him in marten and reindeer hides, bear and otter skins, feathers, and rope made from whale or seal hide. The Cwenas, as rivals, merit little or no further description in the account.

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Significantly, these same tendencies recur in Egils saga, an Icelandic biography often viewed as the work of Snorri Sturluson and written some three centuries later. In the early chapters of the saga (chapters 7–10), the reader learns of the ancestors of Egill, who live on the Torgar estate, once a noteworthy seat of power for Norway’s localized chieftains (Høgsaet) and located, according to the saga writer, in the region of Hålogaland. Egill’s paternal uncle Þórólfr acquires the right to collect tribute on behalf of the Norwegian King Harald Finehair and does so through annual treks into the region during the winter. By this time in Sámi-Norwegian history, as far as one can tell from the text, such tribute-taking has become customary, and Þórólfr regards it as a basic right that he can take furs and other goods from the population of the region. Because a number of other kings claim the same territory, however, Þórólfr is compelled to periodically patrol the region, killing and looting any other tribute collectors he chances to meet. At one point, he allies with the king of “Cwenland” to drive out a competing merchant presence – the Kirjáler (Karelians), another Finnic people inhabiting the regions to the east of modern-day Finland. The goods obtained from Þórólfr’s trade and tribute-taking are eventually transported to England, where they are exchanged for wheat, honey, and cloth, commodities of great value to Norwegians to the south. It is evident from the saga that its Icelandic writer knows relatively little of this murky north of Norway including it in his narrative largely as a device for demonstrating King Haraldr’s overweening tendencies in relation to chieftains of note and power. Haraldr’s excesses – particularly his insistence on claiming a larger share of Þórólfr’s Sámi loot for himself – will eventually compel Þórólfr’s kinsmen to flee Norway for Iceland, where they become a prominent family during the settlement period. So Þórólfr’s activities in the north – his exploration, intimidation, aggression, and acquisition of wealth – play a textual role little connected to the actual trading relations described as occurring in the North. Already by this time, in other words, northern forays have become literary tropes: they reflect actual northern exploration but exist as independent literary devices and images. The influence of Orosius and of the mappa mundi tradition that derives from classic geography is evident in the two accounts of Nordic geography that Snorri includes in both his Prose Edda and Ynglingasaga. As Kirsten Hastrup has shown, Snorri’s worldview regarded mountainous zones like that of northern Scandinavia as the outer edges of the world, the home of giants and supernatural dangers. Travel into such realms held peril. In Snorri’s Haralds saga ins Hárfagra (Saga of Haraldr Finehair), the young Norwegian prince Eiríkr blood-axe goes raiding in Bjarmaland and on his return journey through Finnmark meets with a beautiful Norse woman, Gunnhildr, who has been apprenticed by her father to a pair of Sámi magicians so that she can learn their arts (125–27). Gunnhildr conspires with Eiríkr to murder the Sámi and eventually becomes queen of Norway and, for a time, queen of Scotland as well. Gunnhildr stands as one of the most reviled queens of Snorri’s Heimskringla, and her propensity to use magic – apparently learned from her Sámi mentors before their murder – recurs as a constant feature of her narrative image in surviving sagas. The Norse dislike of Sámi magic carried over into the Christian era, and eleventh- and twelfth-century Christian law codes from western Norway (the Borgarthings Kristenrett and Eidsivathinglag) repeatedly prohibit Norse consultations with Sámi for magical assistance (Strömbäck 203–05). While society in the Norse portions of Norway is secured by the fusion of law and land into a single administrative unity, the Far North qualifies as space outside of the law, a place for outlaws and lawless acts. This Nordic

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understanding of governed and ungovernable space parallels that of the continental mappa mundi in which peripheral regions like the North were employed as imagistic counters to the centrality and salvific power of the East embodied particularly in the centrally located, sacred city of Jerusalem. In a manner directly parallel to what Michael Camille points out for medieval manuscript marginalia and cathedral decorations, explorations or descriptions of the North serve in saga texts as transgressive elements that underscore by their very irregularity and outlandishness the predictable norms and verifiable verities of the center. With the Swedish focusing efforts primarily on control of the Baltic coast, the region that today is thought of as northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland was largely shared during the early medieval period by Norway and Russia. Trade relations between the Norwegian crown and Bjarmaland – now a vassal possession of Novgorod – are chronicled in the saga of Håkon Håkonarson, who ruled Norway from 1217 to 1263. The saga, written by Snorri Sturluson’s nephew Sturla Þorðarson, includes a number of interesting details about the relations between Norway and Bjarmaland during the first half of the thirteenth century. Sturla recounts a trading expedition to Bjarmaland in 1221, headed by the Hålogaland chieftains Andres Skjaldarband and Ivar Utvik. An earlier expedition had ended in the murder of Norwegians by their Bjarmian hosts, but this expedition ended more positively with the Norwegian crews returning to their homeland with a fine load of skins. A storm at sea, however, takes many of the expedition’s ships, and even though Andres is able to return to Norway in one piece, he vows never to sail to Bjarmaland again (Sturla Hákonar 64, 75–76). It is notable that a list of good works of King Håkon appended to the end of his saga mentions his willingness to accommodate Bjarmian refugees in his realm: “til hans kuomu mar[ger] biarmar er flyithofdu austan fyrir ofrid[i] tartara ok kristnadi hann þa ok gaf þeim einn fiord er malangur h[eitir]” (Sturla Hákonar 209) [There came many Bjarmians who had fled from the east in response to the harrying of the Tartars, and he baptized them and gave them the fjord of Malangen]. By this time, the Norwegian crown is secure enough in its control of at least the coastal districts of the region that it can make land grants such as this one to former trading partners/rivals. Norwegian forays into the north become illustrations of royal initiatives, played out in the North not as a land of value in and of itself, but rather as an interface between two powerful medieval kingdoms to the south, whose spheres of influence – and royal ambitions – overlap in this peripheral zone. The extremes and dangers of the Far North hinted at in earlier texts, become central in the saga of Örvar Oddr, a thoroughly fanciful thirteenth-century saga that depicts Viking exploits in the north and the eastern Baltic over a period of three hundred years – the supposed lifespan of the saga’s hero and namesake, Örvar (Arrow) Oddr. In his 1892 edition of the saga, R. C. Boer suggests that the text’s main character Oddr may represent a legendary transformation of the very Ohtere who first told King Alfred of the region (Örvar-Odds saga xiv). Regardless of whether Ohtere/Ottar and Oddr are in origin one and the same, it is certain that the text’s tone is far distant from Ohtere’s more staid and mercantile account. Oddr meets not only with Sámi and the Bjarmar of Bjarmaland but also the giants of Giantland. In a Sámi village, he plunders a whole set of huts while the Sámi men are away (14–15). Like the earlier Ohere/Ottar, Oddr and his companion Ásmundr have no facility in speaking the Bjarmar’s language: “Oddr mælti þá: ‘Skilr þú nǫkkut hér manna mál?’ Ásmundr segir: ‘Eigi heldr en fugla klið, eða hvat skilr þú af?’” (15) [Oddr said: “Can you make out the language of the people here?” Ásmundr said: “No more

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than the twitter of birds, what about you?”]. But unlike the merchant of earlier centuries, Oddr now strides into the Bjarmar’s land personally, eventually finding a way to pillage a sacred site associated with the dead of the village and bringing back to his ships armloads of valuable treasure. He gains the advantage in his dealings with the denizens of the region by knowing something of their magic ways: he knows, for instance, to throw the slain Bjarmar into the river so that the locals cannot use magic to revive them (18), and he also knows to throw overboard all the spoils taken from the Sámi huts in order to escape a fierce storm at sea. In the Norse-Sámi struggle between might and magic that unfolds in the saga, the Sámi send a wind that blows Oddr and his ships to Giantland, where he and his men are almost killed by the dim-witted but menacing giants who hurl immense rocks at their ships. The saga of Arrow Oddr is light and ahistorical, a kind of romantic burlesque of earlier, more serious sagas, but it nonetheless gives an inkling of the kinds of stereotypes and legends connected with the north in Scandinavian tradition during the medieval period. Its protagonist is a traveler, who explores, extracts, and eventually departs from the dangerous, outlandish realm of the North. The North is less a site in itself than a recipient of action: the place to which brave explorers travel. Sámi oral tradition possesses a parallel set of tales of traveler incursions, albeit from a Sámi point of view, in which the “explorer” becomes instead an invader and in which the north-south center-periphery axis is directly inverted. Legends tell of bands of marauders hailing from the south, known as čuðit, a term derived from Russian ethonyms for Finnic peoples of the region, possibly Karelians, Finns, or Vepsians. Typically, the invaders are powerful but dimwitted, and Sámi heroes defeat them through various tricks and maneuvers (Itkonen; DuBois “Folklore” and “Insider and Outsider”). Magic is decidedly not one of the defenders’ weapons, however: instead, the čuðit are led to their deaths through directing them off cliffs, drowning them in river rapids, stranding them on islands, or otherwise hoodwinking and abandoning them. They succumb to their enemies’ wiles not because of magic spells, but because of their lack of knowledge of the local topography, its characteristics, and its dangers. Place names tie the tales concretely to actual sites in the Sámi lived landscape, places whose physical features often play central roles in the narratives themselves. Anyone familiar with a tale can observe and contemplate its narrative events and veracity by visiting the site where the events took place. While the tales’ widespread distribution and association with longstanding place names attests to their antiquity within Sámi oral tradition, Coppélie Cocq has shown that such tales also became vehicles for discussing intercultural conflicts of later eras as evidenced in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century legends collected by Just Qvigstad in a context of protracted colonial intrusion. Such legends appear also in Johan Turi’s 1910 Muitalus Sámiid birra (An Account of the Sámi) – the first secular book written in the Sámi language. In these Sámi narratives, the North is no longer a narrative device for the characterization of a distant center or ruler. Rather, it is a center in itself, a valued and well-ordered landscape into which “explorers” intrude, driven by greed and folly. As is evident from the above examples, truly detailed or ethnographically accurate outsider accounts of the North do not exist in the medieval period. One step in the direction of factual content, however, occurs in Olaus Magnus’s 1555 Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (A Description of the Northern Peoples), a work discussed in some detail in the introduction to the section of this volume devoted to Dwelling. Exiled from his homeland and culture by the

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Reformation, Bishop Olaus occupied himself in Counterreformation Italy by producing first a map and then a textual compendium of the lands and peoples of the Nordic region. Based partly on his own travels and experiences as well as those of his brother archbishop Johannes Magnus, Olaus also draws heavily on the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus, a thirteenthcentury Danish work that had been rescued from medieval obscurity through its passage into print in 1514. But where Saxo begins his work with historical legends concerning the mythical progenitors of the Danish kingdom, Olaus structures his work more factually and geographically by beginning, in fact, with the Far North. In his work’s very first chapter, Olaus writes of the northern land of Biarmia: Diuiditur autem Biarmia, secundum Saxonem Sialandicum, in ulteriorem, & citeriorem. In hac citeriore sunt montes perpetuis, sed innocuis niuibus offusi, æstiuique ardoris expertes: inter quos inuiis nemoribus, & saltibus abundat: pascuorum feracissima, inusitatisque alibi bestiis frequens, vt inferius libro de animalibus ostendetur. Crebri in ea fluuii, ob insitas alueis cautes, stridulo, spumantique volumine perferuntur. In vlteriore verò Biarmia sunt quidam monstrosæ nouitatis populi, ad quos aditus inuius, & insuperabilibus periculis obfusus est: nec facilè mortalibus patére potest. (Historia 10) (Biarmia is divided, according to Saxo of Sjælland, into two parts, distant and near. In the near region, there are mountains covered in perpetual but harmless snow and bereft of summer’s heat. Amid them [the mountains], impassible forests and woodlands abound, as well as most fertile pastures, teeming with many animals unusual elsewhere. Numerous are the rivers there that flow through rough ingrained courses over sharp stones, with surging and foaming eddies. Indeed, in the distant part of Biarmia, there are certain strange and novel people, to whom the way is untrodden and full of unsurpassable perils. It is not possible for mortal men to surmount them.)

Olaus’s work pays more attention to landscape, climate, fauna, and flora than any prior work touching on the North had ever done. True, this attention does not mean that Olaus abandons earlier medieval fascination with the region and its denizens as supernaturally charged. The magical tendencies of the Biarmi are detailed, including their control over the weather and their ability to magically bind and incapacitate their enemies. Later in his Historia text, when describing the magic practices of the people of Finland and Lapland, Olaus writes of Sámi (Finni) who sell knotted strings to merchants, each knot containing a wind for use when one finds one’s vessels becalmed upon the seas (Book 3, ch. 16). While at times drawing parallels to the works of classical authors like Solinus and Pliny the Elder, Olaus states openly that much of his material is drawn directly from Saxo or from his own life experiences in Sweden. The fact that Olaus had already produced a detailed map of the region (his “Charta gothica” or “Charta marina” of 1539) may also partly account for the cartographic flavor of his text and the north/south (top/down) arrangement of his observations. In his dedication of his work to Prince Adolf (XI) of Schauenberg, Olaus mentions the numerous questions that Adolf had posed during their time together at the Council of Trent in 1545–47 (Historia 1). Olaus’s project is motivated by the nobleman’s queries about “quomodo homines & animalia innumera in Septentrionaibus perpetua frigorum immanitate rigentibus, elementorum asperitatem, cœli’que inclementiam iuxtà paterentur: unde illa vitam sustentarent, & qua ratione quid tellus algida benignè procrearet.” (Historia iii) (how in the northern

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Figure 66.  Olaus Magnus’s 1539 “Carta Marina” map, the visual predecessor to his literary “mapping” of the North in the 1555 Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus. Photo: Public domain from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carta_Marina.jpeg

reaches, numbed with the perpetual excess of cold, countless men and animals may bear both the harshness of the elements and the rigors of the climate; how they live and by what means the cold earth might bring forth anything good.) Olaus writes for a foreign audience, and he responds to that audience’s interest not only in culture, but also in the terrain, climate, and fauna of the region. Olaus’s self-consciousness with regard to this audience is evident throughout, and grows at times markedly defensive. Having described, for instance, the Sámi practice of skiing, Olaus notes that he has heard that Pope Paul III does not believe these reports but that they are true nonetheless (I, ch. 4; 14). Balancing the exotic nature of the locale with textual verisimilitude poses a challenge to writers like Olaus, whose intent is not so much to entertain as to enlighten. In his text, Olaus has become a new kind of explorer: one who observes the oddities of the North and chronicles them with seriousness and sophistication for other learned gentlemen from across European society. Olaus is a man of science writing in the new intellectual environment of the Counter-Reformation, a world far different from the medieval one of saga texts. Given the textual agenda of Olaus’s work, it is not surprising that his Historia became popular reading in many parts of Europe, contributing to the burgeoning interest in the expanding peripheries of the European intellectual world. The image of the purportedly magical

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Far North circulates widely in European arts and letters as a result, and begins to color all international perceptions of the Nordic region as a whole. In William Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, a baffled Antipholus, confronted with strange behaviors occasioned by the existence of his unknown identical twin within the same city, sums up his confusion with the remark: “sure, these are but imaginary wiles/and Lapland sorcerers inhabit here” (147). More ominously, the weird sisters of Macbeth’s first act speak of giving each other winds (101), a reference to the idea of buying and selling winds as reported in Olaus’s work (Book 3, ch. 16). This international interest in the endemic magic of the North eventually proved a source of embarrassment for the Swedish crown. In the distant courts of central and western Europe in the seventeenth century, even the king of Sweden himself became suspected of relying upon Sámi magic to win his battles (Solbakk 166). In response, the grand count Magnus De la Gardie, member of the king’s privy council, commissioned Johan Scheffer, a German scholar then teaching at the royal university in Uppsala, to prepare a treatise about the Sámi in particular, a work that appeared in 1673 under the title Lapponia (Schefferus; Mebius). Scheffer’s work became widely read throughout Europe, receiving translations into English, German, French, and Dutch. An important aspect of Scheffer’s work – which proved even more popular than Olaus’s Historia – is the fact that it reverses the primacy of cultural and geographic categories in the definition and explication of the exotic tendencies of the North. For Olaus, it is largely the northern environment – with its perplexing daylight regimen, unmelting snows, and wild terrain – which shapes the penchant for magic among the resident population. For Scheffer, in contrast, “Lapponia” – the land of the Lapps – is defined quintessentially by the fact that Sámi people live there. The Sámi are the definitive entity, and Scheffer goes to great lengths to distinguish them from the true Swedes of the south through reference to their religion, customs, and language. Such is evident in the full title of his influential work: Lapponia, id est regionis Lapponum et gentis nova et verissima descriptio, in qua multa de origine, superstitione, sacris magicis, victu, cultu, negotiis Lapponum, item animalium, metallorumque indole, quae in terris eorum proveniunt, hactenus incognita produntur, & eiconibus adjectis cum cura illustrantur (Lapland, i.e., a new and most accurate description of the region of the Lapps and of the people, in which many things – the origin, superstition, magic rituals, way of life, work, and affairs of the Lapps, as well as the natural state of their animals and metals, deriving from their lands – hitherto unknown, are recorded and illustrated by means of careful drawings.)

The title, like the book’s chapters, begins with ethnographic and cultural detail, turning only at its end to concrete geographic elements of fauna (ch. 28–30), flora (ch. 31), metals (ch. 32–33), and terrain (ch. 34–35). It can, then, be briefly said that in Historia, place largely subsumes people while in Lapponia, people subsume place. Such an act turns the explorer into an ethnographer: an observer of the strange details of culture. While Scheffer’s tome garnered international notice, it is clear that Scheffer relied mostly on others for the “hitherto unknown” materials presented in his work, a fact which his text freely and explicitly acknowledges. Important among his sources was an overview of Sámi culture written by Uppsala graduate and working minister Samuel Rheen (d. 1680), who wrote an

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account of Sámi culture based on his time serving the parishes of Jokkmokk and Kvikjokk. Also important was the nuanced overview of Sámi culture and religion written by Uppsala divinity student Nicolaus Lundius , a Sámi himself whose father was one of the first Sámi men ordained for the ministry (Mebius 32). These writers brought to Scheffer’s work something that it would not otherwise contain: clear and detailed descriptions of the northern region and its people, set down by eyewitnesses. With Scheffer, the reliance on distant textual authorities like Saxo at last begins to weaken, to be replaced by the valued empiricism of the Enlightenment project. In the aftermath of Lapponia, the Sámi, now defined as culturally deviant idolaters, became viewed as a population to be strictly, uncompromisingly reformed through an imposed regimen of punitive actions designed to criminalize and stamp out those aspects of their culture that differed too directly from the proper conduct of true Christians. In the process, the North becomes defined in cultural (“national”) terms, with the ironic side-effect being that – for the first time in Scandinavian letters – the region becomes unambiguously defined as the province of Sámi people: a “Lapponia” inhabited by the “Lapps.” Ironically, this shift occurs just as the Swedish crown had begun to assert its ownership over Sámi territory: transforming the region from a foreign land that pays tribute in taxes, to crown land upon which Sámi or other people may live with the king’s consent. At the same time as it draws a clear boundary between the Sámi of the north and their various Scandinavian and Finnic neighbors, Lapponia also contains the very first pieces of Sámilanguage literature ever to appear in print, the remarkable lyric songs/poems of Olaus Sirma (Sirma Ovllá). Sirma, like Lundius, was a Sámi divinity student residing in Uppsala with the intent of becoming a minister/missionary to his people. In 1671, he supplied Scheffer with the texts of two Sámi joik songs, along with details concerning their performance and meaning (DuBois “Lyric” 8–12). As Kjellström and colleagues note, Sirma’s texts became some of the very first pieces of any Nordic literature known in central Europe, attaining a fame that would last for at least two centuries (Kjellström 106). The Scottish intellectual Hugh Blair wrote almost a century later: “Surely among the wild Laplanders, if any where, barbarity is in its most perfect state. Yet their love songs which Scheffer has given us in his Lapponia, are a proof that natural tenderness of sentiment may be found in a country, into which the least glimmering of science has never penetrated” (547, n. 9). While outside admirers from Blair to Goethe to Runeberg saw Sirma’s poems as chiefly songs of human love, it is noteworthy that one focuses in fact on a place, the lake Oarrejávri (Finnish: Orajärvi), instantiating for readers centuries later a clear hint at the enduring Sámi poetic practice of inscribing emotion as well as personal history upon the landscape (DuBois “Un chanteur” 312–13). To relate this history of northern exploration and textual depiction without reference to non-Nordic observers would be to miss much of the interest and impetus behind this long series of Nordic writings. Just as Ottar, Olaus, and Scheffer present their accounts with a foreign audience in mind, so too foreign travelers journeyed to create their own stories about the wonders of the north. As the sixteenth century drew to a close, the voyages of the Dutch explorer and cartographer Willem Barentsz aimed at discovering a Northeast Passage that would permit merchant vessels to sail north of Scandinavia and Siberia in order to reach Asia. Jan Huyghen van Linschoten’s account of Barentsz’s 1594–95 expedition combined detailed maps

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and shoreline drawings with ethnographic and scientific notes concerning terrain, culture, and fauna of the region. The Nordic Far North was now a topic of international interest, tied directly to mercantile and scientific pursuits. Later travelers would write accounts that deeply influenced Nordic understandings of themselves and of their lands, framing an image of the North as a place of rugged natural terrain and a peasant life unsoftened by the niceties familiar to more habitable climes. It is also noteworthy, in terms of contrast, that whereas writings of Swedish authors like Scheffer continued to treat the North as a kind of terra incognita, writers in Denmark-Norway busily joined in the more international project of constructing the Far North as an economic, if not cultural, source of riches. Coastal settlers from further south had by this time established a thriving fishery industry along the northern coast of Finnmark, an industry that provided one of the country’s prime exports to the rest of Europe. In the late seventeenth century, a trade monopoly allowed merchants of the city of Bergen to reap immense profits from these fisheries while keeping their payments to resident fishermen artificially low. The intellectually minded amtmann (regional governor) Hans Hanssen Lilienskiold (c. 1650–1703), took advantage of his time as administrator of the Vardøhus district (part of what is today known as Finnmark, Norway) to produce one of the greatest accounts of the region of his day. Lilienskiold had traveled throughout Europe and had close connections with the Danish court at Copenhagen. Nonetheless, as a court official, he willingly moved to the town of Vadsø, a northern settlement with a (comparatively large) population at the time of somewhat more than two hundred. In the long winter nights of 1698–99, availing himself of the various papers and materials assembled at his office’s archives, Lilienskiold wrote and illustrated a massive work eventually entitled Speculum boreale (Northern Mirror). Arranged in two volumes, Speculum describes (in Danish) first the population, then the climate, geography, and cultural life of the region, including detailed accounts of the shamanic practices of the Sámi. This first section is followed by similarly detailed accounts of the region’s fauna and flora, progressing toward the matters that pertained most closely to Lilienskiold’s official duties: details of trade, borders, taxation, salmon fishing, whaling, and regional politics (Hagen 19–20). Lilienskiold’s watercolor illustrations became widely reproduced in later publications while his economic analysis – strongly critical of the abuses of the Bergen monopoly – underscored the fact that the North was no longer a place of the imagination, but rather a concrete and highly profitable component of the DanoNorwegian state. At the same time, Lilienskiold took intense interest in Sámi magic, writing a detailed account of north-Norwegian witchcraft trials which had targeted both Sámi and ethnic Norwegians of the region through the end of the seventeenth century (Hagen). If the texts of Scheffer and Lilienskiold can be seen as harboring the first glimmerings of empirical investigation in Nordic writings on the North, the new Enlightenment ideal soon found its epitome in the 1732 expedition of Carl von Linné (Linnaeus). Full of the vigor and selfconfidence of a twenty-five-year-old scientist, Linné embarked upon his Lapland expedition with the intent of documenting the animals, plants, and peoples of Sweden’s north, now unambiguously conceptualized as the property of the Swedish crown. Writing in a Swedish bristling with Latin phrases and quotations, Linné rejoices in the startling novelty of the biotope he has come to observe. Ascending the great mountain Vallevarre in north central Sweden for the first time, Linné writes: “När jag kommit på sidan av det, tycktes jag föras uti en ny värld, och när jag

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kom upp i det, visste jag ej, om jag var uti Asien eller Afrika, ty både jordmånen, situationen och alla örterna voro mig obekanta. Jag var nu kommen på fjällen” (Ur Lapplandsresan 69) [When I had climbed up its slope, I felt transported to a new world, and when I came further up, I did not know whether I was in Asia or Africa, for both the soil, the situation, and the vegetation were unfamiliar to me. I was now in the mountains]. Linné is a man of science, yet he does not hold himself aloof from emotion or wonder. Rather, he exults in his explorations, pouring his thoughts out in page after page of his detailed travel narrative, complete with diagrams, references, and humorous anecdotes. Linné is a new authorial voice: confident and scientific, chuckling suavely at the superstitions of the Sámi and bent on uncovering the hidden secrets of the unfamiliar yet ultimately comprehensible, physical world that surrounds him. He is an explorer of a new kind, an uncoverer of natural phenomena at work in the physical world. Within only a few decades, the marvelous novelty of the natural North became bound into the borders and legislation of solidifying Nordic regimes. The Treaty of Strömstad of 1751 established at last the official borders between Denmark-Norway and Sweden-Finland, guaranteeing the right of Sámi to cross as needed, a right that later statesmen and various wars would periodically ignore or curtail. A Swedish land grant program, first instituted in 1673 but renewed and expanded in 1749, sought to establish farms and farmers in the region, beginning a transformation of the North of today’s Sweden and Finland from a land of extraction and temporary sojourns to the site of permanent agricultural colonization. In Norway, Peter Schnitler’s 1743 description of Nordland makes careful note of both Sámi and Norwegian place names, fixing an image of population distribution and concentration on the landscape for use by government officials far to the south (Marit Henriksen). Both Denmark-Norway and Sweden-Finland would continually intensify their land-giveaway policies in the following century, aiming at replacing the livelihoods and customs of the Sámi with secure, sedentary peasant culture, a guarantee of stability and social unity throughout their consolidating realms. In so doing, of course, the North is transformed – both legally and also textually – from a site of “exploration” into a site of “settling,” a shift that entails new assertions about the ownership and proper use of the land and its resources. Two works from the beginning of the twentieth century look back at this legal and discursive shift from exploration to settlement – a period that can be termed northern colonization – with contrasting views. Johan Turi tells a Sámi version of the colonization in his book Muitalus sámiid birra (1910; An Account of the Sámi). After an opening section in which he presents his theories about the history and earliest way of life of the Sámi people, Turi turns to the era when settlers began to arrive from the outside. One such settler is recounted in particular, the Norwegian Jubonaš: Okta lea dáhpáhus go bođii dárrolaš Njuorjovuopmegierragii, gos ledje sámit orrume. Ja de dagai dola dasa son vuohččan go bođii dan báikki geahččat, de rokkastalai eatnama ja bijai njálbmái ja máisttašii. Ja sámit doivo, ahte dáža máisttašii dan dihte, lea go šattolaš eatnan. Ja dan dáža namma leai Jubonaš. Ja son ii dahkan maidege dan jagi, muhto bođii fas nuppi jagi, ja de ledje sus guoimmit mielde. Ja sii dahke darfegoađi vuohččan ja vuojehedje sámiid eret das nai. Ja sámit ferteje sirdit gođiid veaháš mátkki duohkái. (13)

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Thomas A. DuBois (It once happened that a Norwegian settler came to the place where the Sámi were living at the Njuorjovuopme uplands. And he built a fire where he first came in order to test the land: he dug a little in the ground and put it in his mouth and tasted it. And the Sámi thought that the Norwegian was tasting it to see if the land was fertile. And that Norwegian’s name was Jubonaš. And he did nothing that year, but came again a second year and then he had companions with him and they made a turf hut at first and drove the Sámi away from there as well. And the Sámi had to move their huts a ways off.) [13]

Jubonaš eventually asserts control of the entire valley by attacking Sámi when their reindeer return to their accustomed places to graze, murdering one of the Sámi herders, and trying to extort payments for damages to his meadow. The presumption and rapacity of Turi’s Norwegian settler sets the tone for a book that seeks in no uncertain terms to tell the Sámi side of a crisis situation: the ongoing loss of lands to settlers, the closure of borders due to the distrust of leaders far to the south, and the rapid degradation of the remaining pasturelands due to protracted over-grazing. Less than ten years later, Knut Hamsun creates his own version of the Jubonaš story at the outset of his novel Markens grøde (1919; Growth of the Soil). The tale of a taciturn but enterprising Norwegian pioneer who arrives in the North to establish a farm, Hamsun’s novel was hailed at its debut as an epic of Everyman, a tale of the hard work of the man of the soil. Hamsun depicts Isak’s arrival in the wilderness, searching for land to call his own: [N]år han stanser hist og her og graver med et jærn i jorden finder han her muldjord og der myr, gjødslet av flere tusen års løvfald og rotten kvist. Manden nikker at her slår han sig ned, jo det gjør han, slår sig ned. . . . Han sover om nætterne på et barleie, han er blit så hjemme her, han har alt et barleie under en berghammer. (146) (He stops here and there and pokes around in the ground with a piece of iron, he finds mold in one place and bog in another, manured by thousands of years of fallen leaves and rotten twigs. The man nods, to say that here he will settle down – and, indeed, he does, he settles down. . . . At night he sleeps on a bed of evergreens; he has come to feel very much at home here, being already the owner of a bed of evergreens under a cliff.) [4]

A Sámi man arrives to inquire what Isak is up to: “Skal du bo her for godt?  – Ja, svarte manden” (146) [“‘Will you be living here for good?’ . . . ‘Yes,’ the man replied.” (5)]. Much like the flustered and frightened Sámi of Turi’s account, Hamsun’s Sámi retreat and adjust, unable to withstand the relentless march of progress. Although Hamsun’s narrative hero is Norwegian through and through, Finns and Kvens played a special role in this northern agricultural expansion throughout the three countries that claimed the North for their own. Excess population from the south and center of Finland was drawn continually toward the North where Finnish and Kven communities became established as significant populations alongside Sámi and the relatively small populations of ethnic Norwegians and Swedes. This migration became complicated but was not curtailed by the transfer of Finland to Russia in 1809, a political shift that eventually cut Finnish settlements off from their countrymen in Finland. The Finnic dialects of the north became languages in their own right: Meankieli (literally meaning “our language”), in Sweden, and Kvääni (Kven) in the north of Norway. In northern Finland itself, Veli-Pekka Lehtola has explored the literature of colonization that grew up in the 1920s and ’30s: tales of exploration, pioneering,

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and perseverance that match and even exceed the high-flown images of Hamsun’s Nobel Prize-winning novel. Where Sámi characters appear in these Lapland novels, such as K. M. Wallenius’s Ihmismetsästäjiä ja erämiehiä (1933; Man-hunters and Backwoodsmen), they stand as foils or contrasts to the novels’ heroic male characters, the Finnish farmers or woodsmen. More often, the main narrative conflict in these tales is a struggle between man and nature: the endless hard work of the settler to eke a life out of the rugged and unforgiving wilderness. At the same time, as Lehtola shows, such works can wax lyrical about the awe-inspiring and powerful nature that surrounds the humble man. In such texts, the northern environment is depicted on the threshold of undergoing transformation from a site of exploration into a place of settlement. The novelty, nature, and independence of the region as a place to be explored (a mysterious “elsewhere”) remains palpable, even while characters struggle – successfully – to domesticate it into settled landscape, a “here,” a discursive construct examined more fully in the section of this volume devoted to Settling. It is telling that (as Lehtola shows, Rajamaan identiteetti 194–207), the Sámi-language literature that develops in this same era and region, expressive of the hopes, perceptions, and ideals of Sámi writers constructs narratives that run distinctly counter to those of the national majority. In these, as in Sámi traditional lore, narratives of exploration – so prominent in other Nordic literatures, as indeed, in broader European and Euro-American arts and letters for centuries – play relatively little role. The north is not an “elsewhere” but a “here” – it is not a place of Exploring but of Dwelling. The occasional tales of Sámi explorations outward from Sápmi are notable in their rarity, although they do emerge in the twentieth century: Stein Mathisen (1994:198–203) has written perceptively on the 1940s recollections of Mathis Aslaksen Eira after his return to Norway from years as part of the U.S. program to teach Alaskan Yupik Eskimos the Sámi art of reindeer husbandry Eira recounted his tales of Eskimo culture with an explorer’s confidence and an ethnographer’s attention to cultural detail, characteristics shared by the autobiography of another Sámi Alaska sojourner, Anders Bær (Bahr). Both men evince an interest in travel and discovery of new places and cultures that match the tendencies of other Nordic explorers of their day and suggest that exploration was not as unusual a Sámi trait as folklore collections tend to suggest. The late nineteenth-century development of railroad service in the region and the connection of railroads to major ports made travel within and beyond the borders of the Nordic states a possibility in a way that it had never been before, and highways, helicopters, and air service in the twentieth century further augment the traveler’s options. After all, as Harald Gaski and Aage Solbakk have noted in their examination of Sámi proverbs (Gaski), the Sámi adage joði lea buoret go oru [migration is better than dwelling] reflects a culture that deeply values mobility, be it within one’s own ancestral lands or perhaps even more broadly ranging out into the wide world beyond the Nordic North. As the stories of Eira and Bær make clear, the twentieth century saw the relentless establishment of new frontiers. The exotic vacation shores of southeast Asia, the new social vistas opened by EU expansion, and the imaginative visions unlocked by space exploration and computer-generated animation – all such phenomena offer the Nordic imagination new sites and experiences through which to continue the ongoing trope of exploration. In this expanding globalized worldview, the Nordic Far North could easily seem an antiquated, anachronistic hinterland, and contemporary authors have explored with insight and lyricism the realities of

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life in this oft-forgotten former periphery. In his immensely successful novel Populärmusik från Vittula (Popular Music from Vittula), Mikael Niemi sketches images of life in a tiny Meankielispeaking village of the Swedish North (Niemi). Remote and seemingly cut off from the urbane South of either Sweden or Finland, Niemi’s Pajala is still not truly isolated: the culture of the South continually makes inroads into the village as when the novel’s young Niila, a quirky boy who speaks a language unintelligible to either the Swedish-speakers or the Finnish-speakers of the district, is finally revealed to have learned Esperanto via a radio education program (36). In Norwegian author Laila Stien’s equally acclaimed Vekselsang (1997; Antiphony), a young Oslo journalist arrives in the North to write a book about the Sámi by interacting with an intergenerational set of local women. As she confronts her own complicity in a colonial past too easily forgotten or simplified by the Norwegian majority, she comes to understand the problematic nature of the “uneasy cultural relations” sketched already so many centuries before in the travel account of Ohtere/Ottar. Exploration, description, and categorization are revealed in Stien’s work as acts of aggression, ones that her character eventually comes to recognize and reject. Tellingly, it is not in the Far North that the novel’s main character meets for the last time the youngest of her interlocutors. Rather, they meet in Oslo where the young Sámi woman has come to study. The North and the northerners are no longer contained, no longer remote, no longer out of sight and out of mind. Yet neither are they an undifferentiated part of the Nordic whole. Because of their ongoing connection with the practice of exploration as depicted and documented in Nordic texts, they remain – as Tim Frandy shows in his contribution to this volume – an enduring image of otherness, part of the way in which the Nordic region thinks about itself through its literature, film, and social policies.

Sacralizing Thomas A. DuBois

As inevitable as settling, dwelling, and exploring may seem to the human experience, the complex array of practices subsumed in this volume under the heading sacralizing prove equally prevalent in Nordic cultural traditions. Past communities and individuals of the region stored memories in the landscape, buried their dead in a significant manner, deposited gifts and sacrifices on mountains or marshes, and cordoned off groves or hillsides or rocks or buildings as crucibles of the sacred, places where supernatural beings were expected to dwell or show particular awareness of the treading of human feet. This section examines the myriad ways in which such sacralization of space has been achieved or maintained over time in Nordic cultures. In a sense, landscape itself, along with the buildings and other manmade structures imposed upon it, become texts: one can read a cathedral or sense the Herderian Volksgeist (the spirit of the nation) in a mountain range, a seashore, or a lake. One can recognize a process of sacralization or a quality of liminality adhering to a particular locale in a narrative tradition rendering it significant to a knowing audience in particular ways. It should be noted in passing that the very terms used here will reflect shifts in sacralizing practices: from a notion of the “sacred” (a term central to the study of religion and one that connotes to the modern reader a theocentric worldview) to invocation of the “liminal” (a term drawn from the ethnographic sciences and more concerned with the explicitly social achievement of difference and awe imposed upon space). Above this very tangible inscription of charged meaning upon place, written texts play a crucial role in sustaining and explaining perceived sacrality (or liminality) from one generation to the next. Memorial inscriptions in runes or granite blocks, saints’ lives inscribed on vellum pages, ecclesiastical records, items of oral literature performed by word of mouth or collected into anthologies, national histories, anthems, works of fiction, and even past and contemporary political rhetoric all often participate in the recurrent process of sacralizing place. Through the entire discussion in this section, the aim to discover those facets of the sacralizing process that have been of most consequence and interest in Nordic societies over time, i.e. to arrive at an understanding of a characteristic Nordic (but not necessarily unique) manner of employing place as a holder of the sacred and a setting for the liminal. Landscapes of power The early chapters of the thirteenth-century Eyrbyggja saga (Saga of the Inhabitants of Eyrr) recount a story of settling much like that depicted in Egils saga. In Eyrbyggja saga, as is often the case in such saga renderings of the history of settlement, a heroic settler casts from his boat something that will help him determine the place where he should build his farm. But whereas the hero in Egils saga launches the coffin and corpse of a deceased leader, in Eyrbyggja saga, the hero Þórólfr casts into the waves the carven pillars of his former temple containing an image of the god Þórr. In following these to shore, he announces his intent to transplant the temple and doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.46dub © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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ritual practices of his home tract to his new environs. This impression is confirmed by Þórólfr’s subsequent acts. He builds a temple and establishes the system of seasonal feasts and sacrifices that he and his countrymen had known in Norway. And one reads of a headland and mountain rendered sacred on his property: Þórólfr kallaði Þórsnes milli Vigrafjarðar ok Hofsvágs. Í því nesi stendr eitt fjall; á því fjalli hafði Þórólfr svá mikinn átrúnað, at þangat skyldi enginn maðr óþveginn líta ok engu skyldi tortíma í fjallinu, hvárki fé né mǫnnum, nema sjálft gengi í brott. Þat fjall kallaði hann Helgafell ok trúði, at hann myndi þangat fara, þá er hann dœi, ok allir á nesinu hans frændr. Þar sem Þórr hafði á land komit, á tanganum nessins, lét hann hafa dóma alla ok setti þar heraðsþing; þar var ok svá mikill helgistaðr, at hann vildi með engu móti láta saurga vǫllinn, hvárki í heiptarblóði, ok eigi skyldi þar álfrek ganga, ok var haft til þess sker eitt, er Dritsker var kallat. (Eyrbyggja saga 9–10) (Þórólfr called the area between Vigra fjord and Hofsvag Þórr’s Ness. On this headland there stands a mountain; Þórólfr considered this mountain so holy, that no one should look at it unwashed, and none should be killed upon the mountain, neither man nor beast, but rather should be allowed to leave. He called that mountain Helgafell and believed that he would go there when he died, along with all his kinsmen on the headland. In the place where Thor had come to land, at the point of the headland, he established a seat of judgment and started a district assembly. That was also so holy a place that he wished to have no one sully or bloody it, and no one should relieve himself there. And for such needs there was a certain island that was called Dritsker [guano rock].)

This holy beginning proves problematic, however, when later settlers refuse to respect the sacred boundaries established by Þórólfr by choosing instead to defecate upon the headland itself and thereby provoking the district’s first major battle (Chapter 5). The conflict over sacred space signals a deeper interpersonal struggle about the eventual leadership of the region played out in minute detail in later chapters of the saga. It is noteworthy that Helgafell eventually became the site of an Augustinian monastery in 1184, an institution possessed of a massive library and quite possibly the location of the composition of a number of sagas including Eyrbyggja saga itself (Pálsson and Edwards 3). In medieval narratives such as Eyrbyggja saga, space becomes sacralized and set apart from the ordinary or profane. Places become known as sites where the supernatural is particularly likely to manifest itself, or where supernatural beings make their homes. In the case of Eyrbyggja saga, as in several of the other works described in the pages below, such localization of the supernatural appears to correspond with historical fact as far as can be told from medieval and archaeological evidence regarding pre-Christian religious practices. Specific places were set aside or viewed as a priori supernatural sites that were to be treated and experienced in a different manner, and the practice of doing so was still alive enough in the late pre-Christian era that ninthcentury settlers in Iceland imported the practice to their newfound island. Many pre-Christian sacred places, like Helgafell, eventually became sacred within the Christian tradition as well. The sacralizing at stake in this chapter, however, is more textual than physical: the interest here is in the ways in which narrators and writers have achieved or employed the notion of sacralized place in their literary production, be it works of history or of fiction. The practice of sacralizing, as will be made clear, proves immensely productive in Nordic literature; it is

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Figure 67.  Helgafell in Iceland, showing the visual “centering” of a sacralized place. Photo: Alexey Stiop/Shutterstock

associated with the most potent elements of belief in traditional Nordic worldviews, but is also eventually rendered the vehicle of complex intellectual constructs like nationalism or the writings of postcolonial authors and artists in places like Greenland and Sápmi. Stefan Brink has used the abundant evidence of Nordic place names to shed light on the kinds of sacralizing depicted in Eyrbyggja saga and other medieval works. The act of “helga sér land” – making land holy or sanctifying it unto oneself – is depicted in such Icelandic works as a key step in establishing ownership and rights of use to particular tracts or resources. Use, it seems – be it through the harvesting of naturally occurring foods and animals or the more conscious and laborious work of agricultural cultivation – calls for conspicuous disuse: places protected from human consumption and thereby made heilagr, holy. Such spaces became marked on the land by patterns of daily use, as depicted in Eyrbyggja saga, but also often by place names: specific onomastic terms reflect the kinds of land regarded as sacred and the deities or other sacral beings associated with them. In a wide-ranging review of the extant archaeological and onomastic evidence surviving of such practices, Brink points to the island of Selaön in Lake Mälaren, Sweden, as a prime example of a landscape of power. There, place names relate to social groups and use patterns: e.g., Husby, “settlement of the house(s),” and Karlby, “settlement of the men.” But they also reflect cultic practices: Ullunda, “grove of Ullr”; Odensicke, “oak grove of Ódinn”; Fröslunda, “grove of Freyr.” Throughout the Germanic areas of the Nordic region, islands, headlands, mountains, pieces of arable land, and sites of apparent sacrifice or juridical activity all receive names that designate them as holy and associate them with deities, priests, or sacred activities. Raised burial mounds marked the passing of prominent personages, and sometimes later notables presumed to “repurpose” such monuments as burials for their own dead, a phenomenon that archaeologists term “intrusive burials.” Through such acts of

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sacralizing and memorialization, the landscape became continually redefined as an instantiation of power: a manifestation of the workings of the supernatural and its association with those people fortunate enough to possess special access to it. Whether reading the sagas or perusing the collections of place lore collected by nineteenth- and twentieth-century antiquarians and folklorists, it is easy to see the ways in which place-based inscriptions of sacrality could endure within an area and a population through the visual and experiential presence of landscape features. Toponyms become both a record and an artistic rendering of sacred history as experienced in the locale, and the details of the landscape tie inhabitants to a particular history, a way of explaining and interpreting the locale as a space experienced by human and supernatural actors. Such is common in many parts of the world, but the particular operation of these processes in the Nordic region means that the landscapes of the North become canvases for a specifically Nordic – i.e. localized – rendition of this very human tendency. Whereas the place names of Selaön and other significant sites like it reflect a pre-Christian worldview, many other sites record the arrival and establishment of Christianity as the dominant religion of the region. Churches, often sited on the farmsteads of notable farmers or aristocrats, underscored the establishment of Christian adherence in a given region. As Steven Sondrup discusses in his essay below, settlements associated with bishops’ seats held even greater significance and can be seen as a Christian counterpart to the notion of landscapes of power discussed above. Bishops possessed tremendous authority in medieval society throughout Europe, presiding over substantial land holdings and often figuring as key allies or as hated opponents to local aristocrats or kings. Much of the literature written in the medieval period was produced within monastic scriptoria, and, thus, the sacralizing practices and norms of the Church play a prominent role in the texts that survive from this era. Sondrup’s essay provides a valuable glimpse at the kinds of literary records surrounding one of the most important bishop’s seats in the entire Nordic region, the holy city of Nidaros, modern Trondheim. As Sondrup points out, the Nidaros of the medieval past becomes a prime setting not only in medieval Nordic history but also in Sigrid Undset’s seminal twentieth-century trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter, the work for which Undset was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928. A convert to Catholicism, Undset took pains to try to recover for her Norwegian Lutheran audience a sense of place and sacrality such as had operated in the Nordic region prior to the Reformation. Sites like Nidaros are presented as self-consciously holy places tied up nonetheless with the sometimes sinful and impetuous lives of actual people. It is significant that Undset’s imagined world of the past is described particularly in terms of landscape: she invites readers to perceive in the surviving moldering ruins of a medieval Norway of the past the once grand and imposing social, religious, and cultural structures that imbued the medieval era with a theocentric worldview and a sensibility seemingly far distant from the more secular norms of her twentieth-century Norway. Undset’s writing parallels in this respect that of other European intellectual converts to Catholicism, including the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the early works of the Icelandic novelist and aspiring monk Halldór Laxness. They also hearken back to a mainstay of European romanticism of the early nineteenth century: the fascination with crumbling ruins and abandoned edifices as windows into a past society and worldview. The temporal and ministerial power concentrated in the church or cathedral could be supplemented and, at times, overshadowed, by the supernatural favor attending places sanctified

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through contact with one of God’s elect on earth, the saints. Hagiography, the cult of the saints, offered its own specific practices and conceptualizations for sacralizing space, and these spread to Nordic contexts along with other aspects of the faith during the era of conversions. The earliest recognized saints in the Christian canon were martyrs, and the notion of the place of martyrdom as a repository of supernatural power developed early on in Christian hagiography. In Nordic narratives, as elsewhere in Europe, such places of memorialized violence could give rise to healing springs that then served the faithful as the source of salvific waters. In other cases, the saint’s bodily remains or possessions – relics – were transferred to altars in churches or cathedrals where they could be viewed and venerated by the faithful. Contact with holy water or prayers before a sacred relic were seen as methods of securing divine help in cases of personal crises – e.g., in disease or misfortune – making the altar a site of miraculous action. Occasionally, even invocation of a saint or vow to visit such an altar in the future was credited with miraculous efficacy. Thus, such sites became magnets for appeals for supernatural assistance, with petitioners often traveling hundreds of kilometers in order to beseech or give thanks to a saint, and the important medieval Christian practice of pilgrimage resulted. In his masterpiece De civitate Dei (City of God), St. Augustine exhorted clerics who presided over such places to collect and preserve accounts of miraculous occurrences so as to supplement biblical accounts of miracles with more local or contemporary examples of God’s ongoing interest in his people (DuBois 10). Thus was born the literary genre of the liber miraculorum (book of miracles), which, along with the life story of the saint and specific enumeration of miraculous acts (the vita, “life”), became prime objects of literary production within medieval Christendom. Such literary works flourished in the Nordic region as elsewhere up until the time of the Reformation, and a large body of such texts, written both in Latin and in the vernacular, survives to the present day. Such works narratively transform the site of the holy shrine into a beacon of supernatural benevolence shining forth amid the darkness and brutality of the ordinary world. A fifteenth-century vita and miracle collection pertaining to the twelfth-century King St. Eric Jedvarsson of Sweden survives in the Codex Bildstenianus, now preserved at the University of Uppsala Library (Sands 2008). The work is written in Old Swedish and is probably based on an earlier Latin text. Latin, of course, was the language of all official and sacral discourse within the Western church in the Nordic region as elsewhere, and any work proclaiming the miracles and holiness of a saint needed to be written at some point in that language. For the Nordic faithful, however, Latin was an exotic and often impenetrable code that could make it impossible for an ordinary member of the laity to learn about sacred matters. Thus from a very early period, Nordic hagiographic materials were produced in both Latin and the vernacular, and the Codex Bildstenianus represents a prime example of the latter. Here, in the section of the text enumerating miracles credited to St. Eric, one can read of a farmer cured of a fit of raving: En bonde, som heet Anders i årista i Waxala Sochn, skulle med andra Sochnamannom föra steen til bygning opå Prestabolett och af Gudz lönliga doma wartt han bråt rasander och ropade faseliga, så at hans wenner togo och bundo honom, som then som af diefwulen befången war, då gjorde de löfte til Sanchte Erich för honom och bare honom til Kyrkione och han wartt strax frelster af diefwulen och fick sino helgregda för Sanchte Erichz förskyllen och helga bön. Thette Jerteken lyste han oppenbarliga opå Sanchte Erichz dag, allom them bärandes wittne honom som när och sago thette Jerteken. (Scriptores Rerum 281)

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Thomas A. DuBois (A farmer named Anders, from Årsta in Vaksala parish was working together with other men of the parish bringing stones for a building on the grounds of the priest’s estate. Suddenly, by the mysterious judgment of God, he broke into a rage and shouted terribly, so that his friends had to tie him up, as one possessed by the devil. They then made a vow to St Eric on his behalf, and carried him to the church, and he was immediately saved from the devil, and healed through St Eric’s intercession and holy prayers. He proclaimed this miracle on St Eric’s Day, as did all those who were nearby and witnessed this miracle.) [Sands 223]

Here one can see the interplay of sacralized and profane space (and time) in the medieval Christian worldview. The farmer falls ill on a very ordinary farm, in an ordinary village in the heart of Sweden. The fact that the farm belongs to a priest probably explains in part why the miracle eventually became textually recorded, but it does not seem to play any role in the narrative otherwise: the farm is profane space, where the devil can attack any who are vulnerable to his wiles, even when they are seemingly conducting holy business. In response to this supernatural assault, the faithful in attendance make a vow to St. Eric and then transfer the man to the supernaturally potent space of the church. There he recovers and eventually travels to the cathedral of Uppsala, where he and his comrades apparently delivered their testimony on the feast of St. Eric (May 18) as is indicated in the recorded text. Supernatural power radiates out from sacred spaces (e.g., the church) and finds its enunciation and textual recording in cathedrals and shrines where sacred relics were displayed, but significantly, such power can be brought into action in any space throughout the world simply through the act of fervent prayer. It is the Christian God’s choice, in other words, to act through sacred space, and loss or destruction of that space will not lessen God’s power. Such a perspective appears crafted rhetorically to contrast with medieval narratives of pre-Christian sacred spaces, which are frequently depicted as being definitively desecrated and discredited by Christian missionaries. A comparison, for instance, of the account of the destruction of a sacred stone in the Kristni saga account of the proselyting of Iceland: At Giljá stóð steinn sá er þeir frændr höfðu blótat ok kölluðu þar búa í ármann sinn. Koðrán lézk eigi mundu fyrri skírask láta en hann vissi hvárr meirr mætti, byskup eða ármaðr í steininum. Eptir þat fór byskup til steinsins ok söng yfir þar til er steinninn brast í sundr. Þá þottisk Koðrán skilja at ármaðr var sigraðr. Lét Koðrán þá skíra sik ok hjú hans öll nema Ormr sonr hans vildi eigi við trú taka. (7–8) (By the river Giljá there stood a stone at which [Þorvaldr’s] kin had made sacrifices and which was said to be the dwelling of their familial [supernatural] steward. Koðrán would not let himself be baptized before he knew which was stronger, the bishop or the steward in the stone. At that, the bishop went to the stone and sang over it until the stone broke asunder. Then Koðrán perceived that the steward had been conquered. Koðrán let himself be baptized, as did all his household apart from his son Ormr, who did not wish to accept the [new] faith.)

Sacred space of the pagan past is supplanted, displaced, and destroyed, its demonized resident beings summarily dislodged and rendered harmless ever after. Such accounts reflect the selfconsciousness and perhaps anxiety of medieval Christian writers living amidst a landscape still abundantly stocked with reminders of the pre-Christian past. As will be seen below in the discussion of oral traditions, pre-Christian localizations of the sacred were only partially eclipsed by the new sacralities of church and shrine, and medieval narratives of their complete displacement were perhaps in some respects wishful thinking.

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The idea within Christianity of visiting sites of manifest (Christian) supernatural power gave rise to an immensely important element of popular piety, the pilgrimage. The pilgrim’s journey became a prime activity of Nordic clergy and laity alike during the centuries following Nordic Christianization, and records of such travels occasionally survive in collections of miracles or official church proceedings regarding the canonization of saints. One of Europe’s earliest surviving pilgrim’s guidebooks or “itineraries” is that of abbot Níkulás Bergsson of the Benedictine monastery of Þverá, in Iceland dated to c. 1157. In his text, Níkulás describes carefully the routes and holy places of his four-year journey from Iceland to Norway, south through the entirety of Italy, east to the Holy Land, and finally back to Iceland (Bergsson 1821). Visiting the Church of St. John Lateran in Rome, for instance – which at that time was the seat of the papacy and was also dedicated to St. John the Baptist – Níkulás carefully notes the sacred relics to be viewed there: “blod Christi ok klædi Mariu ok mikill hlutr beina Johannis Baptiste. Þar er Umskurdr Christi ok miolk or briosti Mariu; af þorngiord Christz ok af kyrtli hans ok margir adrir helgir domar vardir i eino gullkeri miklo” (23) [the blood of Christ and the dress of Mary and a large share of the bones of John the Baptist. There is the foreskin of Christ, milk from the breast of Mary, pieces of Christ’s crown of thorns, fragments of his tunic, and many other relics conserved in a great golden vessel]. Snorri Sturluson includes a detailed account of the travels of King Sigurðr Jórsalafari (“Jerusalem-goer”) in the Haraldssona Saga portion of his Heimskringla of c. 1225 (Sturluson 736–68). There, the twelfth-century Sigurðr is said to have combined pilgrimage to the Holy Land with participation in the Crusades whence he returned to his kingdom of Norway according to Snorri’s text with a fragment of the Holy Cross to deposit alongside the relics of King St. Óláfr. His exploits became best known to later Scandinavian audiences through their retelling in Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsen’s drama Sigurd Jorsalfar (1911), a work which debuted at the National Theater in Christiania/Oslo in 1899 accompanied by Edvard Grieg’s memorable orchestral suite by the same name. The most famous Nordic pilgrim – a woman of seminal importance in Nordic Christianity and the focus of an extended discussion in volume 3 of this series – was St. Birgitta (c. 1302–73). After a full life of secular duties including bearing and raising eight children and advising a wayward king, Birgitta made pilgrimages to Nidaros and to Santiago de Compostela together with her aging husband and entered the monastery at Alvastra as a resident guest. Birgitta abandoned her native Sweden in 1349 in anticipation of the Jubilee Year of 1350 and traveled to Rome to take advantage of papal indulgences offered to pilgrims if they visited particular basilicas and cathedrals during the year. She remained in Italy for the rest of her life apart from a two-year period (1371–72) during which she made a further pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Birgitta became internationally famous for her vivid visions, which sometimes struck her during ordinary daily activities or contemplation but also occasionally occurred when she was visiting sacred places. When looking at the site regarded in Christian tradition as the place of Christ’s birth, for instance, Birgitta received a striking vision of the Nativity, one which influenced later artistic and theological understandings of the event (Birgitta VII: 21; Harris 202–04). Birgitta seems to have shown a strong sense of sacred space and the heightened potential of communication with the divine, which such locales could afford. It is noteworthy that in all of these cases described for Christian practice, however, space itself is largely subsumed under the rubric of holy relic: i.e. it is the presence of a relic that confers sacrality on most of the places described above, or, in

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the case in which a place is holy in its own right, its sacrality is treated in relic-like fashion, as something to be preserved, viewed, and even possibly transferred. Sacralized space in Nordic oral literature If the discussion above describes a Nordic landscape shaped by the sacralizing agendas of the wealthy and powerful, the valleys, rivers, hills, and mountains of the region also give voice to a more democratized sacralizing as well (a notion which might be supported more fully by a shift to the term “liminalization”). As Timothy Tangherlini shows in his essay below, in the spare but memorable narrative economy of the oral legend, supernatural threats are situated in socially recognized liminal spaces: crossroads, outskirts, unsettled grounds, and burial mounds of the past. These places hold supernatural connotations, be they of a lingering, apparently pre-Christian nature or of a robustly Christian ethos, in which famous saints like King St. Óláfr or King St. Eric of Sweden are said to have erected ancient bridges or churches for the good of their flocks. The sins of corrupt laymen and the clandestine murder of unwanted infants are punished with haunting and unrest at the sites of wrongdoing or at places where hauntings tend to occur – e.g., along roads leading through forests or outside of graveyards. The burial mounds of the pre-Christian past are viewed as the homes of subterranean supernatural beings, while transgressions of human propriety are punished whenever a person happens to cross between the secure centers of daily life and the remote and threatening liminal spaces of the locale. Physically betwixt and between, these sites express and symbolize a key social status, the dangerous yet predictable aberrance of transgressive behaviors.

Figure 68.  Burial mounds at Old Uppsala. Photo: Sophie McAuley/Shutterstock

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The literary uses of liminal space It is noteworthy that, just as Steven Sondrup’s essay begins with Undset’s modern view of the city of Nidaros, so Tangherlini’s exploration of Danish legendry above begins with Isak Dinesen’s (Karen Blixen’s) retelling of the legend of Sorrow Acre. Repeatedly in the history of Nordic literature, the sacralized spaces of the past become sources of material for later authors to be mined for their intrinsic interest and also for a sense of connectedness to a Nordic past, one integrated unmistakably into the landscape. In her essay on images of bogs in Danish literature of the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, Karin Sanders explores these literary transformations of past oral literature and of the crucial concept of liminal space within Danish literary history in particular. As Sanders shows, romantic writers like Hans Christian Andersen and Steen Steensen Blicher depict the bog as a troubling or transformative site of past sacrality, a place in which to explore ancient practices of sacralization or to examine the psychological tensions between the notions of good and evil, civilized and wild. In the postmodern literature and film of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the bog becomes a site of “disruption, irrationality, and mystery,” but also of the possibly liberating aspects of chaos, akin to the ultramodern Internet. The authors discussed in Sanders’s essay continue an age-old process of sacralizing the bog but with a self-consciousness that renders the act not only a creative gesture but also a canny acknowledgement of past practices. The myriad literary uses of the bog described in Sanders’s essay could be paralleled by other romantic, modern, and postmodern works that take up other sacralized spaces of the past: the forest, the sea, the mountainscape, or the wilderness. The literary production of the Nordic region from the nineteenth century onward shows a pronounced awareness of past practices of sacralization, and a penchant for revisiting these in novel ways. In this way, the sacralized landscape with its liminal zones, inscriptions of power, and symbolic weight, remain active parts of the region’s literary culture. The rise of nationalism The notion of a sacrality extending beyond specific sacred sites to the very borders of a political state enters European consciousness both through the Hebrew scriptures and through the epics of the Classic world, particularly the Æneid. In the works that came to be known by Christians as the Old Testament, the entirety of the land of Israel stands as a sacred legacy, bequeathed to a particular linguistic/cultural/religious group  – the Jews  – through divine election. God promises Israel to “his people,” making all prior claims on the landscape null and void. The weight of this narrative of God-given rights cannot be underestimated for European states from the medieval period into the nineteenth century: it provided an enduring and appealing image of an engaged and partisan God acting in favor of a single ethnic entity and guaranteeing that population’s sovereignty in the material world. The image found imitation in political rhetoric throughout Europe, particularly in areas in which differing ethnic groups or populations of differing religion vied with each other for control of territory.

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No less influential to medieval and early modern writers were the works of Classical antiquity. In the Æneid, the geographic area that will eventually become the city of Rome is marked off by gods and by destiny as the capital of the future Roman state signaling, as in the Hebrew scriptures, divine election. As noted above in the chapter on settling, medieval Nordic authors like Snorri identified particularly with Troy, which was seen as the origin of the Nordic rulers. Olof Rudbeck offered a creative and for a time quite influential fusion of biblical and classical material toward the justification of Swedish state sovereignty by reading the landscape of Sweden as the historical Atlantis of classical literature and as the earlier Garden of Eden of Genesis. Rudbeck’s Atland eller Manheim appeared in installments from 1679 to 1702 and represented one of the most influential Nordic works of its day. It theorized and sacralized Sweden – and particularly the area around Uppsala, where Rudbeck lived and worked – as the very birthplace of mankind and the center of the ancient world. Crucially, sacrality here is not confined to particular buildings or landscape features: rather, it suffuses the entire landscape rendering it distinct from all others on earth. These literary adaptations predate by centuries the era regarded as the beginning of political nationalism in Benedict Anderson’s influential Imagined Communities (1983) and clearly inform many aspects of Nordic intellectual and literary production in the medieval and early modern eras. Nonetheless, it is important to note the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a key moment for the development of many of the modern elements of romantic nationalism, an ideology associated particularly with the eighteenth-century Baltic German philosopher and anglophile Johann Gottfried von Herder and embraced fervently in all the Nordic countries over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nordic statesmen and intellectuals came to see in nationalism a justification for a set of political and social acts which they hoped to put into practice, ones that would transform the multiethnic empires of prior Europe into a tapestry of linguistically distinct nation states each equipped with its own singular language, literature, and lands. A detailed discussion of the rise of nationalism as a temporal turning point in Nordic history belongs more to the project of the third volume of this series, but its geographic dimensions deserve attention here. The notion of a “national landscape” is evident in the poetry of Johan Ludvig Runeberg, the nineteenth-century “national skald” of Sweden, whose allegiance was complicated by the political realities of his day. Runeberg’s native Finland, long a part of the kingdom of Sweden, had become an acquisition of the Russian empire, and czarist policy sought to replace Finns’ loyalty to the old regime with a fresh embrace of the new. Runeberg, as a Swedish-speaker, harbored natural linguistic affinities with the now-distanced nation to the west, and his poetry depicts a world in which Finland still remains part of the heartland of the Swedish realm. He is able to do so within an environment of mounting political censorship and repression through locating his romantic fervor not in language or lore so much as in topography: in Runeberg’s works, the Nordic landscape – inspiring, powerful, nurturing, and at times lethal – becomes a stand-in for other forms of political identification. Consider, for example, his famous poem “Vårt land” (Our Country), first published in 1848 as the prologue to his popular Fänrik Ståhls sägner (The Tales of Ensign Stål). The poem opens:

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Vårt land, vårt land, vårt fosterland, Ljud högt, o dyra ord! Ej lyfts en höjd mot himlens rand, Ej sänks en dal, ej sköljs en strand, Mer älskad än vår bygd i nord, Än våra fäders jord. (1) (Our land, our land, our native land! Let the dear words sound forth! No hill rises toward the heavens No valley slopes downward, no shore is washed That is more beloved than our settlement in the north, The land of our fathers!)

Performed as a choral work for the first time in 1848 with a melody composed by Fredrik Pacius, “Vårt land” is conspicuous both in the prominence it accords to the landscape and the scant reference it makes to any political state such as Sweden, Russia, or Finland. The words finska folket (the Finnish people) occur only once in the poem’s eleven stanzas, although its description of the native land as “tusen sjöars land” (land of a thousand lakes) can be regarded as particularly apt for Finland. It is only in the Finnish translation, which is commonly attributed to the German-Finnish immigrant and Fennoman Julius Krohn and which was produced a generation later, that the word Suomi (Finland) first appears in the hymn that eventually becomes the Finnish national anthem. As a consequence, Runeberg’s stirring words can be easily applied to much of the Nordic region, and Pacius’s choral rendering became a popular song not only in Finland but also in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway where the local landscape – its “moar, fjäll, och skär” (moorlands, fells, and scattered islands) – could be regarded as reflecting the native land extolled in the text. Runeberg’s poem becomes part of a nineteenth-century discourse that locates the essence of the nation fervently and enthusiastically in the mountains, hills, lakes, and valleys of the natural terrain, both in its grandeur and in its occasional poverty and simplicity. The development of a pan-Nordic vocabulary for the nationalist experience of place is evident when we compare “Vårt land” with the poems that become the national anthems of Denmark and Norway (see also the discussion of these in Louise Mønster’s essay in the Landscape node of this volume). Adam Oehlenschläger composed his “Der er et yndigt land” (There Is a Lovely Land) in 1819, a text that eventually was set to music in 1835. In Oehlenschläger’s text, Denmark is notable for its beautiful landscape (described in the poem’s opening stanzas) and then for its past heroic populace. It is an historic place – gamle Danmark (“old Denmark’; italics added), one steeped in medieval history. Yet these fierce warriors find rest in the Danish trees, beaches, hills, and valleys a restfulness that is still available to the Danes of the poem’s present: Det land endnu er skiønt, Thi blaa sig Søen belter, Og Løvet staar saa grønt; Og ædle Qvinder skiønne Møer, Og Mænd og raske Svende Beboe de Danskes Øer. (“Fædrelands-Sang” 159)

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598 (That country is still lovely, For blue waves of the sea lap And leaves remain so green, And noble women, pretty maidens And men and hardy boys Populate the Danish islands.)

Here the aesthetic beauty of the landscape merges with that of the populace, creating precisely the kind of mystical union of place and people that Herder extolled in his philosophy and that captured the romantic imagination. Here is nation in its dual meaning of place and population, combined in a manner that asserts unitary ownership and unbroken continuity from a golden past to the present and future. “Ja, vi elsker dette landet” (Yes, We Love this Land), Norway’s de facto national anthem, was written by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson in 1859 and first composed as a choral piece in 1864 in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Norwegian constitution. Bjørnson describes a Norway rising “furet, værbitt over vannet” (rugged, weathered, above the sea), united through the valiant efforts of the pagan King Harald Fairhair, hallowed by the martyred blood of the holy King St. Óláfr, and defended ever after by Norway’s ardent farmers and farmwives, sharpening their axes to meet the invading foe. As in Oehlenschläger’s poem, landscape and people fuse in Bjørnson’s anthem, taking on particular ethnic content as the text declares: “men i verste nød blåøyet / frihet ble oss født” (but in the greatest need, blue-eyed / freedom was to us born). The poem’s speaker exhorts its Norwegian audience: Norske mann i hus og hytte, takk din store Gud! Landet ville han beskytte, skjønt det mørkt så ud. (216) (Norwegian man in house and cabin, give thanks to your great God! He wished to protect the country although prospects looked dim.)

The simple, unitary equation of land and people enshrined in the Herderian nation construct found challenges even in the nineteenth century. In the generation following Runeberg’s “Vårt land,” Zachris Topelius produced a new model of the Finnish nation through his children’s school primer Boken om vårt land (1875; The Book about our Country). Topelius’s seminal text served as the main primer for elementary school reading throughout Finland, with a Finnish-language edition soon appearing alongside the original Swedish and similarly entitled Maamme kirja. In a context of increased tensions between Finland’s Swedish-speaking and Finnish-speaking populations, Topelius could no longer skirt the question of Finland’s cultural diversity. Instead, he celebrates it: devoting chapters to discussion of both Swedish-speaking and Finnish-speaking districts of the Duchy and exploring as well the considerable cultural variation of the Finnish-speaking regions. Lavishly illustrated with fine engravings of peasant life and landscapes, the work contains a subtle shift in directionality in its sacralizing agenda. Here is a landscape sacralized not due to its own beauty or due to the warrior deeds of previous

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generations, but by the accumulated force of human labor and dwelling. The terrain of Finland is holy because of the sweat and love it has received from countless previous generations of Finns struggling to eke out a living in a country of rocky soil, harsh weather, and long periods of darkness. This shift away from themes of war and blood is sustained in later works during the twentieth century. A Finnish Ministry of the Environment project from the early 1990s, for instance, identified 27 geographic areas for the designation “national landscape,” each representing in some way a characteristic interaction of man and nature in a particular locale. The sacralized land is no longer kept free of human interference, as in the remote past; rather, the fact that it has been shaped by human endeavors is identified as a key to its value. The Ministry’s grand catalogue of designated areas, published in English and entitled National Landscapes (1993), acknowledges the project’s place in the history of nationalized and sacralized space, declaring with literary self-consciousness “It is time to rewrite the Maamme kirja” (Härö and Mansikka 6). One can see in recent work by Nordic cultural geographers precisely this kind of reassessment of the complexities of landscapes as elements of mental culture in the modern Nordic region (Jones and Olwig 2008). Nordic government programs found broader international audiences through programs like the UNESCO World Heritage list, established by a UNESCO convention in 1977 in order to recognize and preserve geographic areas as “part of the world heritage of mankind as a whole” (UNESCO 1977). The sacralized space of the nation becomes in the World Heritage list both an acknowledged element of a particular state’s identity and self-image, and yet, at the same time, a contribution to the novel concept of “world heritage,” promoted by the United Nations and increasingly important in a context of globalization and tourism. Such list-making and celebration are important components of the modern sacralization of place in Nordic societies, ones that entail considerable literary production in terms of applications, analysis, and advertisements. Nordic contributions to the worldwide list have included ancient sites like Birka in Sweden or Alta in northern Norway, medieval sites like Denmark’s Jelling Mounds and Roskilde cathedral, and homespun embodiments of Nordic daily life of the past, such as Bergen’s Bryggen waterfront, the painted houses of Sweden’s Hälsingland, or the old wooden buildings of Finland’s village of Rauma. These latter examples in particular seem to represent a specifically Nordic approach to sacralized space: such places are seldom overwhelming natural wonders like the American Grand Canyon, nor unparalleled human constructions like the Egyptian Pyramids or Chinese Great Wall. Rather, they are pleasant natural locales in which human populations have lived simple lives for untold centuries. They show a balance of human activities and natural processes and they invite the Nordic viewer to contemplate an imagined continuity that stretches deep into the region’s cultural past and that comprises all the region’s flora and fauna as well as the human community. As a literary ideal and as a political movement, nationalism reflects the continued use of the landscape as a device for sacralization in the modern era, as Elisabeth Oxfeldt demonstrates cogently in her essay contribution here, “Nation and Sacrifice.” Examining key works of the Danish and Norwegian authors Kierkegaard, Ibsen, Solstad, and Hamman, Oxfeldt explores the romantic embrace and postmodern problematization of biblical images of a promised land, one for which the loyal citizen should gladly sacrifice all, even to the point of surrendering one’s

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life. As Oxfeldt shows, the sacralized essence of the nation can come to be recognized as readily in the urbane capital city as in the rustic mountains. And the once-secure localization of the nation in a given landscape becomes intriguingly or worryingly challenged by a postmodern world of cosmopolitanism and by flows of capital and contaminants that disregard the political boundaries of the conceptualized nation state of the twentieth century. Multiethnic challenges The nationalist ideology of nineteenth-century anthems can jar the modern ear, particularly in a modern Nordic region no longer possessed of a narrow set of human phenotypic characteristics. In 1994, during a media campaign to convince Norwegians to vote for accession into the European Union, the popular Norwegian singer Ole Paus composed a new song that has emerged increasingly as an alternative national anthem for Norway. The words of “Mitt lille land” (My Little Country) continue to invoke the fervent love of landscape characteristic of nineteenth-century romantic poetry, but present the “little country” as humbler, less imposing, and decidedly less militant. The song’s opening verses read: Mitt lille land Et lite sted, en håndfull fred slengt ut blant vidder og fjord Mitt lille land Der høye fjell står plantet mellom hus og mennesker og ord Og der stillhet og drømmer gror Som et ekko i karrig jord (Paus) (My little country A little place, a handful of peace Flung out amid plains and fjord My little country Where high mountains stand fixed Between houses and people and words And where silence and dreams grow Like an echo on barren ground)

In the years following the song’s initial debut, the news program for the Norwegian television station TV2 created a series of short videos in which different Norwegian artists performed the song. Performances featured singers emblematic of Norway’s modern-day cultural and ethnic diversity, accompanied by often troubling images of interethnic strife, wounded children, ecological destruction, and other details that suggested a Norway facing vexing and complex questions. When adapted by singers like the Nicaraguan-Norwegian Maria Mena, the Indian-Norwegian Samsaya Sharma, the Gambian-Norwegian Haddy N’jie, or the NorwegianSámi Mari Boine, “Mitt lille land” and the landscape poetry it echoes take on new meanings. Illustrative is Mari Boine’s Sámi-language version, which intercuts images of the singer with

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footage of indigenous religious practices elsewhere in the world and images of mining-related explosions and waterfowl struggling in the aftermath of an oil spill, a detail indicative of the destructive potential of Norway’s chief source of wealth (Boine). Together these performances pointedly reject the racist implications of Bjørnsen’s “blåøyet frihet” (blue-eyed freedom), while extending the concept of national belonging to the entirety of the Norwegian populace, regardless of cultural origins, home language, age, or sexuality. Maria Mena’s performance of the song, uploaded in June of 2011, is accompanied by a more insistent and seemingly ominous rhythmic musical setting and focuses on images of vulnerable populations – the homeless, disabled – depicting a gray urban landscape of modern Oslo (Mena). It is telling that Mena was selected to sing her version of the song in the Oslo memorial service for the victims of the terrorist attack in July 2011, making her brown-eyed persona and syncopated musical rendering of the song emblematic of the Norway that the organizers wished to celebrate and affirm. In a YouTube version of the song uploaded July 2011, Mena’s images are replaced by footage of commemorations and expressions of sorrow related to the tragedy: in a sense, Mena is erased, to be replaced by national symbols. Given the fact that the terrorist act had been motivated by racist viewpoints and an exclusionary model of Norwegianness, the choice of Mena as a performer represented an important counter to the terrorist’s claims. At the same time, it is telling that the song’s textual depictions of Norwegian natural landscape remain unaltered and that images of the landscape and of the broader population, come to displace images of Mena herself: the landscape, it would seem, can continue to represent the nation, even while the phenotypic characteristics of the human nation change. It is still a sacralized landscape that appears the apt vessel for such a message of national unity and identity, albeit a landscape portrayed as smaller, frailer, and more ironized than in past formulations. Postcolonial challenges So natural does the equation of nation and landscape become in Nordic – as in other – European literary traditions, that it becomes difficult at times for the modern reader to recognize the practices of erasure and denial that were necessary for the easy equation of singular ethnic and linguistic polities with particular bodies of terrain. To assert, in other words, that the physical land of Sweden is the God-given inheritance of a Swedish-speaking population, one must deny the equally valid (or perhaps more compelling) claims of Finnish-speaking and Sámi-speaking populations to the same areas. The postcolonial enterprise in twentieth-century and twentyfirst century thought has been to “decolonize” our understandings of the world, rendering evident the political motivations and effects of sacralizing acts of the past, particularly those that commence in the early modern era with its commodification of the natural resources and policies of territorial and intellectual colonization. The final three essays of this section each take up aspects of this decolonization as it has unfolded in Nordic literary contexts. Troy Storfjell’s essay on “worlding” demonstrates the ways in which works of Nordic literature have participated in projects that define certain lands – and cultures – as marginal, exotic, secondary. Such places become foils for those areas defined as central. The political dimensions of a logic of sacralized

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regions on the outskirts of settlements, so abundantly realized in Nordic oral literature of the past (as Tangherlini’s essay shows) and so avidly adapted to later intellectual and political ideals (as explored in the essays by Sanders and Oxfeldt) are laid bare by postcolonial analysis, as political ramifications become recognized as latent political motivations. In the essays by Tim Frandy and Kirsten Thisted, two of the most palpably disenfranchised populations of the Nordic region – the Sámi of northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and the Inuit Greenlanders of Kalaallit Nunaat – are shown in their responses to hegemonic discourse. As Frandy shows, Sámi can reject the intellectual abstractions of the landscape that render the Tana River somehow “wild” and “free” rather than as more pointedly a source of local sustenance and livelihood. As Thisted shows, the romantic nationalist elision of landscape and population can be problematized by works that explore the fictive qualities of such elision and its inapplicability to people of mixed cultural or linguistic background. Postcolonial voices – both scholarly critiques and creative interventions  – help a Nordic public see the ongoing processes of sacralization that both limit and motivate their understandings, both within Nordic literatures and in the wider world. In giving the last word in this volume to such postcolonial examinations, we hope to underscore the importance of place to Nordic ways of thinking and the historical implications of such thought, ones explored further in the project’s third volume.

Niðaróss cathedral Steven P. Sondrup

Sigrid Undset’s classic novel Kristin Lavransdatter, published in three volumes between 1920 and 1922, describes a brief sequence of events that have notable historical antecedents and important religious and social consequences. It is particularly memorable in terms of the arrestingly close proximity of the fictional narration to the historical sources that the author carefully studied, thus mediating between the remote past and the aesthetic present of the reader.1 The background of the novel centers on the farmstead Husaby in Trøndelag and the relatively nearby cathedral city of Niðaróss (Trondheim). In the first part of the second volume, Husfrue (1921; The Mistress of Husaby), in the section entitled “Syndens Frukt” (“The Fruit of Sin”), Kristin is portrayed on a painful and perilous pilgrimage to Niðaróss and its magnificent cathedral as partial atonement for her prior indiscretions. As she approaches the city, she beholds a nearly overwhelming site beneath her path across a hill. Kristin stod på Feginsbrekka og så kaumpangen ligge under seg i gylden kveldssol. Bortom elvens brede, blanke slyng lå brune gårder med grønne gresstak, mørke løvkupler i hagene, lyse stenhus med takkede gavler, kirker som satte upp svarte spånkledde tygger, og kirker med mattskinnende blytekning. Men over det grønne land, over den herlige stad, reiste seg Kristkirken så kjempeveldig og strålende lys så det var som allting lå den for fote. Med kveldssolen rett på sitt bryst og skinnende vindusglass med tårn og svimlende spir og gyldne fløyer lå den og pekte opp i den lyse sommerhimmel. (114) (Kristin stood on the hill at Feginsbrekka and looked down at the town lying at her feet in the golden evening sun. Beyond the wide glittering curve of the river lay brown farm buildings with green sod roofs; the crowns of the trees were dark and domelike in the gardens. She saw light-colored stone houses with stepped gables, churches thrusting their black, shingle-covered backs into the air, and churches with dully gleaming roofs of lead. But above the green landscape, above the glorious town, rose Christ Church so magnificently huge and radiantly bright, as if everything lay prone at its feet. With the evening sun on its breast and the sparkling glass of its windows, with its towers and dizzying spires and gilded weather vanes the cathedral stood pointing up into the bright summer sky.) [399]

Christ Church, her spiritual goal, rises before her eyes as the physical embodiment of her religious yearning. It summons everything around it into its sphere of sacred influence and communal sanctity. The entire town is perceived as subsumed into the spatial as well as the historical realm of the Cathedral, which Kristin judges could not have been built by mere humans without the spirit of God having worked within them. The Cathedral – Christ Church – is not only the

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Kristin Lavransdatter is not only Undset’s most well-known and widely-translated novel but is also typically understood to have played an important role in her having been awarded the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature, which gave particular recognition to her powerful and generally accurate portrayal of the Nordic Middle Ages. doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.47son © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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most arresting edifice in her gaze, but its sacral importance as the center of Christian worship throughout Norway comes ever more forcefully to mind. Though committed to writing long before the pilgrimage Sigrid Undset narrates, Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar (The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason) – one of the sagas comprising Heimskringla, a history of the kings of Norway typically attributed to Snorri Sturluson – merits an examination in terms of some of the historical events that played a role in the very old history of the Cathedral.2 The saga in question portrays Óláfr, a figure intimately associated with the early history of the Christianization of Niðaróss and indeed with much of Norway. The saga recounts his birth into a royal family between 964 and 969 (the exact date is not known), his flight as a child with his mother to the court of Valdemar in Kiev, his enslavement, and his subsequently purchased freedom. It continues with a narration of his exploits as a Viking and a self-confidently fearsome warrior. More importantly, however, is the account of his conversion to Christianity and ensuing baptism. Tradition holds that it was the result of the near immediate fulfillment of a prophecy about his triumph over enemies that led to his conversion. His subsequent fervent and far-reaching activities as a Christian missionary – not altogether in intent unlike those of Haraldr Hárfagri (Harold Fairhair) – and his reign as the king of Norway were also foretold. Snorri’s account of Óláfr’s rise to fame and eventually to his claiming the throne of much of Norway draws heavily on four antecedent narratives, the most prominent of which is Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar (1190; originally written in Latin but preserved only in an Old Norse translation: AM320, 4to; supplemented by Stockholm 18, 4to).3 Oddr stresses Óláfr’s role as the apostle to the Norwegians and identifies his extended biography as a means of preserving the memory of Óláfr as an ardent missionary. The other three synoptic accounts – Theodoricus Monachus’s Historia de Antiquitate Regum Norwagiensium (1183–88; An Account of the Ancient History of the Norwegian Kings) and the two anonymous texts Historia Norwegiæ (c. 1160–75; History of Norway), and Ágrip af Nóregs konunga sǫgum (1190–1200; A Compendium of Norwegian Kings’ Sagas) – offer a few relatively brief glances at various episodes in Óláfr’s life and religious development. Using these sources as points of departure, Snorri portrays how Óláfr as king of Norway (995–1000) sought on the one hand to unify the nation and on the other to consolidate his power and authority by developing a network of loyal supporters and allies, which he accomplished in large measure by establishing Christianity as the politically sanctioned religion of the realm (Winroth 121–41).4 In that religion consists not only of a commitment to shared beliefs and practices but also and perhaps more centrally to the foundation of community, Óláfr used his zealous missionary efforts like other Nordic kings as a means of forging political alliances. 2.

Heimskringla was written in Iceland around 1230. The title is taken from the first two words of one of the manuscripts: kringla heimsins < circle of the world.

3.

The four accounts are written from different points of view and with contrasting narrative goals in mind but nonetheless provide generally similar accounts that augment one another with particular details.

4.

Anders Winroth’s The Conversion of Scandinavia is a detailed study of the Christianization of the entire Nordic region from the eighth century on. It deals with many complex social, political, and cultural aspects of the conversion and provides a compelling discussion of what conversion means in a particularly penetrating way. Many of the points made in that volume have been relevant for the present essay, particularly chapters 8 and 10 (120–44).

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The challenge of the institutionalization of Christianity along the West Coast of Norway and in Norse insular colonies was accomplished by two in many respects divergent strategies: persuasion based on formidable oratorical and occasionally seemingly divinely inspired eloquence (more typically in Oddr’s depictions) and in contrast coercion, intimidation, and brutality (more frequently mentioned by Snorri). One of the most famous examples of Óláfr’s persuasive power as a speaker, Oddr reports (Chap. 35), took place during the second year of his reign at the meeting of the great assembly that gathered at Staðr. He thanked those who had heeded his summons and promised that he would be speaking in the name of God. He spoke so forcefully that even those who had come hardheartedly were so moved that they readily accepted his message. It seemed as though Bishop Martin had visited him in spirit with the promise of help in strengthening his words with divine power.5 A great multitude accepted his message, were forthwith baptized, and remained several days with him and the local bishop. On other occasions by contrast, however, Óláfr stood and addressed the farmers forcefully telling them that they had the option of accepting Christianity and being baptized or going to battle against him and his men. Sometimes even more aggressive tactics were deployed. Snorri’s Óláfs Saga Tryggvasonar, for example, reports that under the guise of making an offering to Þórr, a Nordic heathen god, Óláfr destroyed the statue of the god and ransacked the temple. Óláfr konungr gengr nú í hofit ok fáir menn með honom ok nǫkkurir af bóndum. En er kongungr kom þar, sem goðin váru, þá sat þar Þórr ok var mest tígnaðr af ǫllum goðum, búinn með gulli ok silfri. Óláfr konungr hóf upp refði gullbúit, er hann hafði i hendi, ok laust Þór, svá at hann fell af stallinum. Siðan hljópu at konungsmenn ok skýið ofan ǫllum goðum af stǫllum. En meðan konungr var inni i hofinu, þá var drepinn Járnskeggi úti fyrir hofsdurunum, ok gerðu þat konungsmenn. En er konungr kom til liðsins, þá bauð hann bóndum tvá kosti, annan þann, at þeir skyldi þá allir við kristni taka, en at ǫðrum kosti halda við hann bardaga. (Óláfs Saga Tryggvasonar 317–18) (King Óláf now entered the temple, accompanied by a few men and some of the farmers. And when the king came to where the gods were, he found Thór sitting there as the most honored of all the gods, adorned with gold and silver. King Óláf lifted up the gold-adorned rod he held in his hand and struck Thór, so he fell from his pedestal. Then the king’s men ran up and shoved all the gods from their pedestals. And while the king was inside, Járnskeggi was killed outside in the front of the temple door, and the king’s men did that. And when the king had rejoined his force he offered the farmers two alternatives – either to accept Christianity or to go to battle with him.) [Snorri Heimskringla 207–08]

Unorganized and untrained, the band of farmers opted – albeit probably not sincerely and inwardly – for the former, and all who were there were baptized. As a result, in large measure of Óláfr’s missionary endeavors, great throngs of people are reported to have accepted baptism – willingly or under duress – and Christianity emerged culturally as the dominant religion in the region and thus the celebration of the mass became the central public religious rite, though pagan practices continued undercover. 5.

St. Martin was Bishop of Tours, died in 397, and became one of the most familiar saints of the medieval Christian community. He was particularly well known for destroying pagan temples and altars and most especially for having a pine tree sacred to the pagans cut down.

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The success of Óláfr’s two-fold proselyting – inspiring eloquence on the one hand and coercive brutality on the other – is reflected in the dual nature of the sacralization: from the point of view of the willing and committed insider, it is perceived as a divinely sanctioned expression of belief, but for those affiliated as a result of intimidation, it rather appears as an indiscriminate and arbitrary hostility. Óláfr’s proselyting was ultimately aimed at winning the pagan’s abrogation of one conception of sanctity and replacing it with another. Major accounts of Óláfr’s reign proclaim and praise his stature as the missionary king – the Apostle of the North – who played the leading role in the Christianization of Norway and in large measure the banishment of the public practice of heathen rites and rituals. Recent scholarship has tended, however, portray his role in somewhat diminished terms (Winroth 126–28; Antonsson 68). The twelfth- and thirteenth-century narratives, for example, often depict situations so as to mirror biblical events and relationships and are laden with hagiographic tropes and commonplace references. The destruction of the statue of idols and of various sanctuaries as well as the conversion of large crowds appear to be artful contrivances intended to be understood as parallels to the stratagem of other well-known and earlier European Christian missionaries. Although it is clear that Óláfr contributed in various ways to the dissemination of Christianity in Norway, the question of the degree to which his efforts were motivated by a desire to save the souls of his countrymen or were also a means of unifying his political support at very least invites careful consideration. The brief seventieth chapter of Heimskringla reports on an event that had both political as well ecclesiastical import. Óláfr founded the city of Niðaróss, the city that eventually became the most important center of both ecclesiastic and political power. He laid out plans for building lots, erected a royal residence with abundant provisions for a winter’s sojourn, established the first de facto capital of Norway, and issued a decree proclaiming that Niðaróss should become, if not a commercial center, at least a market town. As a result of these royal initiatives, Niðaróss, which had been a modest community primarily defined by shared legal precepts and social values, was gradually becoming a royal domain. The area was transformed from a largely agrarian region to a commercial center; trade on a significantly wider scope ensued; and more influence from abroad changed the rapport of residents within the emerging city and with the world beyond. Although commercialism’s emphasis on the goods of this world as opposed to Christianity’s stress on riches stored up in heaven seemed to represent competing social values, the apparent dichotomy was readily resolved: the wealthier the community, the more impressively magnificent its houses of worship could be. Sacralization should, thus, not be perceived in terms of a dialectical relation opposing spirituality to materialism, but rather as a social process that entails a complex relationship in which the one feeds reciprocally into other, often in complex ways. The gradual transformation underway had other fundamental religious implications with regard to the gradual acceptance of Christianity. The prominence of regional chthonic fertility gods whose influence had continued to bear sway – albeit to a large extent in the interior agrarian areas – diminished in the coastal regions around Niðaróss as the economic need for their veneration receded. The new sacred spaces that opened with the accelerating disappearance of public pagan rites were a manifestation of a new conception of and relationship to nature and divinity and an apprehension of the sacral. As a corollary to the new religious orientation, a concomitant change in the individual’s fundamental social

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attitude emerged that to varying degrees stressed Christian humility in contrast to pagan heroism and familial honor. These transitions implicated a repudiation of the one and the widespread acceptance of the other, the abrogation of one conception of the holy and the veneration of another. Although this generalization is in a broad sense true, the shift from one tradition to another did not take place with any immediacy either with regard to the individual or the community. Christianity was not accepted all at once, but various elements of pagan beliefs long coexisted with Christian doctrine in an often vast and extensive mixture (Winroth 126–27). Old systems of belief were gradually consigned to subordinate positions only in many cases to reappear later in a recognizable but nonetheless reconceived forms. Conversion was typically a process rather than an event. These historical events pertaining to the founding of the city in the eleventh century had all taken place long before Undset’s imaginatively conceived fictional moment in the fourteenth century when Kristin hearing the vesper bells enters the courtyard of Christ Church. After walking around the great edifice three times in prayer, she sinks to the sanctified ground kissing the stone portal under the weight of the sin for which she is seeking absolution. The trees with dark foliage, the gardens, the venerable manors, and the light-colored houses she had seen as she approached what had grown into a town still bore testimony of Óláfr Tryggvason’s longsince division of the land and founding of a commercial center. It was, however, Christ Church’s beaming and effulgent spires and massive presence that invited to sanctity, which was at the heart of its appeal as a destination for pilgrims making their way to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion and piety. Undset’s twentieth-century imagination of the fourteenth-century resplendent edifice prompts the question about what led to its construction not only from an architectural point of view, but more importantly from the perspective of social and cultural need. The immediate occasion for building what has often been identified as one of the largest cathedrals in the Nordic region was that of having a suitable place to house the body of St. Óláfr. Born in 995, Óláfr Haraldsson (not to be confused with his earlier namesake, Óláfr Tryggvason) was part of a company of Vikings who harried along the Baltic and North Sea coast, spent time in England, and was baptized in Rouen, at least in part to secure the loyalty of followers. He returned home to Norway in 1015, declared himself king, and exercised more political authority than any of his predecessors. He subdued the local aristocracy and following generally in the footsteps of his namesake widely enforced the acceptance of Christianity throughout the realm, although questions remain as to the extent to which he was personally involved with the particulars. The rancor and resentment of the nobility resulting from his heavy-handed rule finally reached the point where they sided with Knud the Great and drove Óláfr into a brief exile. After returning to Norway, he endeavored to win back his kingdom but was killed on July 29, 1030 in the Battle of Stiklestad, in which some members of the Norwegian aristocracy took up arms against him. Hagiographic accounts speak of an eclipse of the sun accompanying his death – not unlike the darkness the Gospels portray at the time of the Crucifixion (Matthew 27:45; Mark 15:33; Luke 23:44) – and of his body being surrounded by heavenly light. Óláfr was secretly buried in the sandy soil near the Nið river, but one year and five nights later his body was exhumed at the behest of Grímkell, the former English monk whom Óláfr himself had installed as the first bishop of Niðaróss. The body was incorrupt as if he had just died, and the hair

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and fingernails had continued to grow. The almost immediate reports of miracles were taken as signs that God did not wish to see the body buried in the sandy soil near the river. The remains were forthwith translated to the Church of St. Clement in the royal residence where it was prepared for the enshrinement. There Bishop Grímkell hailed Óláfr’s sanctity. The continuing circulations of accounts of miracles, the enduring presence of the incorrupt saintly body, and the rise of a growing and influential cult of followers all contributed to Óláfr’s being recognized not long after his death as the rex perpetuus Norwegiæ(the Eternal King of Norway).6 Clearly objective meaning cannot be attributed to a time and place that bear witness to the miraculous. Thousands of faithful pilgrims made their way to the shrine, which in such a remarkable way has long been taken as a manifestation of God’s mercy, while the more skeptical may construe it as a remarkable source of legend and folklore. In either event, Níðaróss had as a result of social change become something quite different from what it had been. The changed social and political position that Óláfr occupied in death was at least in part a result of the influx of the thousands of pilgrims who flocked to the city to venerate the patron Saint of Norway. Because the number of the devoted who wished to worship in Niðaróss increased, the city grew, and the Church of St. Clement proved inadequate for the shrine of such a Saint. At some point late in the eleventh century (probably between 1070 and 1090), work on a stone cathedral was begun under the aegis of King Óláfr the Gentle, nephew of the revered former king. The small stone cathedral was dedicated to the Holy Trinity and was popularly known as Christ Church. Although still far from what the cathedral eventually would become, it was nonetheless the largest church in Norway, a fact that gave the city a prominence it had never before enjoyed.7 An event particularly important in the history of Niðaróss Cathedral took place in the spring of 1153, when Cardinal Nicholas Breakspear – the future Pope Adrian IV – made his way from Rome to Niðaróss in order to establish an archbishopric in Norway and consecrate Jón Birgisson as the first archbishop. The ecclesiastical reorganization in effect removed Norway and the North Atlantic islands – Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes, the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man – from the recently founded archbishopric of Lund. The elevation of this vast area to an archdiocese confirmed the change of the see of the new archbishop to its rightful status. In all probability, Niðaróss was selected for this singular honor instead of Bergen, Stavanger, or Oslo because of the prominence that had already accrued to it. Sometime around the year 1220, the archbishop of Niðaróss spent three years in England and became well acquainted with recent architectural developments there. Upon his return to Norway, new plans for the expansion of the Cathedral were developed that included an eight-sided presbytery, the 6.

There are numerous ironies associated with the reign of St. Óláfr. In spite of his being named the rex perpetuus, subseqauently canonized, and widely venerated, there is relatively little he did to promote Christian sanctity throughout his realm. He appears to have used his position as king to promote political alliances – as had been done before – and pursue political ends. His influence after his death seems to have been greater than he could have imagined it during his life.

7.

Ekroll’s The Medieval Cathedral of Trondheim: Architectural and Ritual Constructions in their European Context is a comprehensive study of the history, architecture, and cultural significance of Cathedral of Trondheim (Niðaróss). Øystein Ekroll‘s chapter “The Shrine of St Olav in Nidaros” (147–207) presents a detailed account of the shrines (coffins) constructed for Óláfr as well as the body of the Saint they were designed to contain.

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now famous octagon with an elevated middle section above the shrine of St. Óláfr (Ekroll 127– 207). When work on the chancel was at last completed, attention was once again returned to the nave, which shows the conspicuous influence of Lincoln Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. The Niðaróss Cathedral is not only memorable as an architectural monument but also as an edifice whose history is interwoven in many complex and far-reaching ways with the development of Nordic – and most particularly Norwegian – culture extending from the Middle Ages through a period of relative neglect down to the twentieth-century recognition. Among the particularly notable and earliest of these is the role it played in the history of skaldic poetry. Although the dating remains uncertain, the drápa “Geisli” (Ray of Light) was first recited by its author, Einarr Skúlason, in the Cathedral most likely in 1153. Einarr, a priest and prolific poet, is remembered for his thorough mastery of the complex conventions of skaldic verse. “Geisli,” moreover, exhibits his remarkable facility at making the adaptations of traditional skaldic imagery and subject matter drawn from varied aspects of pagan culture that were necessary for its use in a cathedral that had so recently been made the seat of the archbishop. On the occasion of the ceremonial recitation of the poem, the archbishop, Jón Birgisson, was in attendance along with the three brothers who were jointly – although often with considerable difficulty – sharing the position of king of Norway: Eysteinn, Sigurðr, and Ingi. Of the three, Einarr was most closely associated with Eysteinn, who appears to have commissioned “Geisli.” The degree to which this gesture led to the composition of a poem on a thoroughly Christian topic in a previously pagan meter and its recitation in the hallowed premises of the Cathedral is indeed striking. The Cathedral, thus, is not only widely known and venerated for its architectural grandeur but also for its literary prominence. Einarr’s recitations of “Geisli,” a poem about the Cathedral in the Cathedral, is a powerful example of the role that literature can play in establishing and perpetuating a sense of the sacred. St. Óláfr’s life and miracles had been understandably taken up in many literary works in both Latin and the vernacular. The written accounts that circulated before the composition of “Geisli” regrettably have not survived. Two skaldic poems  – Þórarinn Loftunga’s “Glælognskviða” and Sighvatr Þórðarson’s “Efridrápa Óláfs helga” – had been composed before Einarr’s (the former shortly after St. Óláfr’s death), and lavished great praise on Óláfr’s rapidly growing reputation. A detailed inventory of the miracles performed also appears to have been made. Sagas, accounts of his life, poems, and texts of a wide variety of other sorts appeared during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. It is clear that Einarr drew upon these as well as on the established conventional sources, e.g. the biblical book of Psalms and Latin liturgical texts. Einarr seems to have been fully aware that he was laying the foundation for an entirely new kind of skaldic poetry that was grounded in Christian belief rather than pagan traditions and thus required a new diction and a fresh context in which kennings could be forged. Though facing many challenges associated with his adaptation of the conventions grounded in pagan mythology, the poem is in the well-established dróttkvætt alliterative meter, which would have been easily recognized and understood. Only one complete manuscript of the poem survives (Bergsbók Holm perg. fol.), but Flateyjarbók GKS 1005 fol. contains the entire poem except for stanzas 31 through 33 and is generally considered the superior redaction (Chase “Einarr Skúlason” 6).

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The poem clearly has the life, miracles, and reputation of St. Óláfr as its central focus. It lauds both the final political unification of Norway at Óláfr’s hand as well as his holiness and sanctity, which transcend national boundaries. He emerges in the poem as a ray of light – geisli – offering protection to the faithful. The central part of the poem is built on blocks of three stanzas, which portray a particular need (St. Óláfr’s intervention) and praise of the miraculous outcome. It is far, though, from simply a superficial catalogue in that Einarr’s subtle variations and sense for the engaging narrative command unflagging attention. At one point – perhaps beyond the initial end of the poem, i.e. in stanza 65 – Einarr departs from this pattern to reflect his awareness of the importance of place in which his initial recitation is taking place: the sanctified space of the Cathedral, which looms very large and is in many respects one of the subtle topics of the poem. Heims hykk hingat kvedǫ́mu hǫfuðsmenn í stað þenna – snarr tyggi bergr seggjum sólar – erkistóli. Hérs af himna gervis heilagr viðr – sem biðjum yfirskjǫldungr, bjarg, aldar, oss – píningar krossi. (60)8 (I know that the rulers of the world brought an archbishopric here to this place; the quick prince of the sun [=God (=Christ)] saves men. Here there is holy wood from the Cross of torture of the maker of the heavens [=God (=Christ)]; supreme king of men [= God], protect us as we pray.) [Chase Einarr Skúlason’s Geisli 115; “Einarr Skúlason: Geisli” 60]

The structure of the stanza is straightforward in that each half stanza (helmingr) contrasts earthly powers with the divine by pointing out the superior strength and transcendent significance of the latter: leaders of the world (Cardinal Nicholas Breakspear) established the archdiocese in Níðaróss, but divine intervention on the part of Christ (expressed in the kenning “quick prince of the sun”) provides for salvation; similarly, a man (probably a reference to King Sigurðr Jorsalafari) brought a sliver of the True Cross to Níðaróss, but Christ (again evoked with a kenning: “maker of heaven”) defends us while we pray. Each half stanza references the sacred place of this initial recitation, Níðaróss Cathedral, in that it was the recipient of human bequests – the archdiocese, the sliver of the True Cross – for the redemptive power of Christ. The composition and subsequent recitation of this first major Christian skaldic poem represents far more than just a shift in poetic subject matter. It suggests rather the assimilation by ascendant Christianity of poetic forms and traditions still deeply rooted in the collective memory of the rapidly receding pagan past. Skaldic poetry continued to be written on Nordic themes, but during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as well as beyond, a significant corpus of poems on Christian themes also emerged. The efforts to understand the pagan past in terms 8.

The text of “Geisli” and relevant commentary are quoted from Margaret Clunies-Ross’s Poetry on Christian Subjects, volume 1. The text and commentary in that volume were provided by Martin Chase. He published as an expanded version of his contribution to that volume in his doctoral dissertation Einarr Skúlason’s Geisli: A Critical Edition.

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of a Christian framework continued as an important strain of Nordic cultural history. There is no ironic disjunction in the fact that the Snorra Edda (The Prose Edda), whose purpose is to preserve traditional mythological subject matter, was written just decades later. It is surely noteworthy that Snorri recognized Einarr as one of the especially accomplished skalds if Snorri’s very frequent citation of Einarr’s works in Snorra Edda can be taken as an indication of his judgment. “Geisli” in a very real sense gave rise to a new range of topics that eventually flourished alongside the more traditional ones that Snorri was endeavoring to perpetuate. Efforts extending from his euhemeristic approach to mythology found their way into a wide range of works during the ensuing centuries, particularly those endeavoring to ensure a continuing sense of pride in the Nordic past within an evolving Christian society. Among the many shifts in the religious and cultural significance of the Cathedral was that occasioned by the Reformation. Upon King Christian III’s ascension to the throne of Denmark – of which Norway had at the time long been an integral part – Protestantism was established as the religion of the realm (1536). He seized vast tracts of property formerly held by the Catholic clergy and abolished the Catholic archdiocese of Niðaróss and in its stead established a large Lutheran diocese. The Cathedral itself also fell on hard times in terms of maintenance and general interest. Tradition holds that many of its treasures were lost at sea while being transported to Copenhagen, but the conjecture, however, is widely disputed. A series of fires did considerable damage and by 1708 only the walls were left standing.

Figure 69.  Side view of the Nidaros Cathedral during the period of disrepair in the 1800s. Photo: Riksantikvaren.

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During the nineteenth century as but one manifestation of national pride, a movement arose to restore the Cathedral to its former glory. As is so often the case with building projects of this magnitude – even in the twentieth century – decades were required to complete the project. By 1969, most of the restoration was complete, but the final statue was at long last not put in its place until 1983. Popular tourist brochures suggest that the Cathedral hosts more than 400,000 visitors each year. All do not come as religious pilgrims, of course, but rather more as tourists anxious to see what is now the restoration of one of the great cathedrals of the region from the Middle Ages, the Cathedral that had been described in such deeply engaging and often reverential terms by Sigrid Undset. Her meticulously researched historical fiction from the early twentieth century serves well to awaken a vivid interest in not only the rich history of the edifice but also in its renewed and present grandeur. But there are still those whose motivation is profoundly religious, and the Cathedral is prepared to minister to their needs. It has assumed an ecumenical function in that services for several denominations are held there. Once again the meaning of what was once a uniquely sacred space has assumed some of the social importance that once characterized the region. The Niðaróss Cathedral is recognized throughout Norway as the national Cathedral, and although specific mention of the edifice was removed from the constitution in 1908, article 12 of the 1814 constitution had specified that coronation and anointment of the king was to take place in the Niðaróss (Trondheim) Cathedral. Despite the change, King Olav V (1958) was nevertheless blessed in the Cathedral, as were King Harald V and Queen Sonja (1991).

Figure 70.  Contemporary view of the Cathedral. Copyright: Finn Bjørklid/Creative Commons

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One may well wonder whether the perception of the Cathedral in general that Sigrid Undset projected into the mind of her fictional character Kristin Lavransdatter may not have been conditioned by the tradition of the glowing light that is reported to have surrounded the body of St. Óláfr or even by that of Einarr’s poem “Geisli.” A brilliant evening illumination appears to embody much that defined the Níðaróss Cathedral at the time it was built and more recently since its thoroughgoing restoration. Its towers and dizzying spires recall a term of ancient Germanic

Figure 71.  Tower at the restored Cathedral. Photo: Finn Bjørklid/Creative Commons.

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origin that may be most easily recognized in its modern German form Ort (Proto-Germanic = *uzda-; Old Norse = oddr; modern Swedish = udd) meaning specifically the point of a spear, but more generally the outermost point of the spire, in this case a point that had been cut out of secular space and whose meaning was distinguished from ordinary and quotidian political procedures through the Christian proselyting, the sanctification of the space by the body of a saint, Protestant disregard, and finally full restoration and national recognition. In a relatively late essay (1952) on Georg Trakl, Heidegger writes of the Ort [place]: “Der Ort versammelt zu sich ins Höchste und Äußerste. Das Versammelnde durchdringt und durchwest alles” (33) [“The Ort gathers unto itself into the highest and the most extreme. Its gathering power penetrates and pervades everything” (154)]. Although Heidegger’s analysis narrowly applies to a discussion (Erörterung) of Trakl’s poetry, a broader application does no harm to its intent. In the case of Niðaróss Cathedral, the looming spires – both in the modern as well the historical and etymological sense – are apt. The history of Trondheim, both that which anticipated the construction of the great Cathedral as well as that which was part of its medieval glory, its decline, and its renewal are gathered together and bonded by the view of the spires. It is no wonder that Sigrid Undset in her brief but important evocation of the city portrayed the spires moving heavenward as the gathering together of the space that the Cathedral occupies, which has given it meaning for centuries.

Nation and sacrifice Abraham and Isaac in modern Scandinavian literature Elisabeth Oxfeldt

Place, myth, and sacrifice are inextricably linked in conceptions of the modern nation. As Anthony D. Smith has defined it, the nation is “a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy, and common legal rights and duties for all members” (14). The focus of this essay is on the Old Testament myth of Abraham and Isaac and how it has worked and continues to be linked to the space of the nation as a foundational story – a myth of origin – explored, renegotiated, and rewritten in modern Scandinavian literature and narrowed down, in this case, to Danish and Norwegian literature. The Genesis tale about Abraham and Isaac connects the notions of sacrifice and nation.1 For his willingness to sacrifice his own son, God blesses Abraham as the father of nations: “Through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed” (New International Version, Genesis 22: 18). In the context of the modern nation state, the concept of sacrifice is usually interpreted in allegorical, secular ways; the national citizen is regarded as “sacrificing” a child by permitting injury or death to children or young people through warfare, poverty, abuse, or neglect. Smaller “sacrifices” involve forgoing something of value for the common good. This attitude might pertain to the generous giving of alms or simply to paying one’s taxes. The individual’s willingness to “sacrifice” serves to strengthen the social cohesiveness of the nation; the nation becomes “blessed” in an overall secular way as unified and inviolate – as “secured as by a religious feeling or sense of justice against any defamation, violation, or intrusion.”2 On a more colloquial level, it becomes “blessed” in the sense that like-minded people provide each other comfort and joy. Fellow nationals conceive of each other as friends and family and act neighborly towards each other on a daily basis. In spatial terms, his behavior is connected to horizontal imaginings. As Benedict Anderson has argued, the modern nation state is conceived as “a deep, horizontal comradeship” (7). It is imagined as “horizontal-secular” (37) as opposed to previous religious communities and dynastic realms, which were supported by a vertical imagination. In fact, in the modern nation state, the vertical imagination often indicates anti-social and anti-national behavior. As the following literary examples will show, this may be illustrated through characters engaging excessively in various forms of vertical movement such as mountain climbing and air travel, leading them to leave their fellow nationals behind. The fact that one uses a religious myth and its particularly religious vocabulary to interpret and describe events taking place in the modern nation reveals how dominated current thinking 1.

I should emphasize that this is an analysis of a literary reception of the myth and not a theological reading of the text as historically significant for the Jewish people – neither on the part of the authors discussed, nor on my own part.

2.

This is Webster’s third definition of “sacred.” The first is “consecrated to or belonging to a god or deity; holy” and the second is: “of or connected with religion or religious rites.” doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.48oxf © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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is by myth and religion even in what one perceives as secular nations. The roots of modern nationalism, as Hans Kohn has pointed out, revert to the ancient Hebrews and the Greeks: “Three essential traits of modern nationalism originated with the Hebrews: the idea of the chosen people, the emphasis on a common stock of memory of the past and of hopes for the future, and finally national messianism” (11). Thus, the religious imagination does not just provide a set of allegories for the nation, but continually lends the nation status as sacred and blessed. At the core of a modern Scandinavian literary tradition engaging the myth of Abraham and Isaac, one finds Søren Kierkegaard’s Frygt og Bæven (1843; Fear and Trembling). Henrik Ibsen most notably responded to Kierkegaard’s text with Brand (1866), and twenty-first-century authors continue to adapt the Old Testament myth by including direct and indirect intertextual references to both Kierkegaard and Ibsen, whose works by now have become foundational texts in Scandinavian literary history.3 This essay explores four modern Scandinavian engagements with the Old Testament myth by focusing on Kierkegaard’s Frygt og Bæven and Ibsen’s Brand as exemplars of nineteenth-century adaptations written during a time of secularization and nation-building. Subsequently Dag Solstad’s Armand V: Fotnoter til en uutgravd roman (2006; Armand V: Footnotes to an Unexcavated Novel) and Kirsten Hammann’s En dråbe i havet (2008; A Drop in the Ocean) will represent twenty-first-century revisions of the myth written during an era of globalization. While Kierkegaard’s and Ibsen’s texts indicate a nationalization of the myth in which Copenhagen and the Norwegian mountains, respectively, serve as national “sacred” and “blessed” sites, Solstad’s and Hammann’s texts illustrate that the nation can no longer be imagined as a bounded community. In a global world, the national citizen is threatened by war, hunger, and pollution taking place outside the boundaries of the nation. Children continue to be sacrificed – at home and abroad – but nobody is blessed. Contemporary Abrahams cling to traditional notions of an identity-providing national space – in the Norwegian case, the pristine mountains, and in the Danish case the urban capital – but they end up evicted, uprooted, and homeless. Søren Kierkegaard’s Frygt og Bæven Kierkegaard’s Frygt og Bæven explores the relationship between religious and social thinking in the modern nation state. As a religious individualist, Johannes de Silentio insists on vertical thinking situating the individual in an absolute relationship to God. The individual is to disregard family, state, and society and is to consider his love for God above his love for fellow human beings. Silentio asks whether there is “en teleologisk Suspension af det Ethiske” (148) [“a teleological suspension of the ethical” (46)] that turns Abraham into a father of faith rather than a murderer. At the same time, he is certain that contemporary Copenhageners are to refrain from emulating Abraham’s preparedness to sacrifice his son. The story of Abraham and 3.

The degree to which Ibsen “responds” to Kierkegaard has been a source of contention since Brand’s publication. In this article, my perspective on intertextuality, dialogue, and adaptation is not based solely on authorial intention, but also on the notion of common discourses operating within particular groups of people at particular times.

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Isaac – when recounted with present-day urgency and relevance – is to foster admiration, love, and faith, but not murder; congregation members of the Danish church are to be left in awe, but to stop short of emulating the actions of their holy hero. At the same time Silentio posits a colloquial version of Abraham: The Danish “Spidsborger” [bourgeois philistine], possibly a Copenhagen “Rodemester” [tax collector] who works in a specific section of the city and spends his leisure time in the city’s rural outskirts, along Strandveien, and in Frederiksberg (Frygt 133–34; Fear 32–33). One of the main characteristics of Silentio’s everyday “knight of faith” is his steadfast grounding in his community: his footing is sturdy and belongs entire to finitude (Frygt 134; Fear 32); or put differently, “hans Gang er ufortrøden som et Postbuds” (134) [“his gait as undaunted as a postman’s” (33)]. On his walks through his Copenhagen neighborhood, he is dependably engaged in and familiar with his surroundings. Coming across a building site, he discusses the building about to be constructed as if he knows all about the profession. Nothing lies beyond his grasp (Frygt 134; Fear 33). At home at night he gazes out the window at his neighborhood observing, “Alt hvad der foregaaer, at en Rotte smutter ned under Rendesteensbræt, at Børnene lege, alt beskjæftiger ham med en Ro i Tilværelsen” (135) [“everything that happens – a rat scurrying under a gutter plank, children playing – everything engages him with a composure in existence” (33)]. Silentio’s everyday knight of faith is the good, urban, and urbane neighbor. Loving one’s neighbor literally becomes a matter of loving the people next door and not caring about those living outside one’s own vicinity. With an inaccurate reference to Rousseau, Silentio explains that the God-loving individual may as well stay at home; a proclaimed love for the Kaffirs, for instance, is a dubious type of love most likely serving as an excuse not to love one’s neighbor (Frygt 160; Fear 60). Rousseau’s reference in Emile ou de l’Education is to the Tartars,4 but the point is clear: love for God comes first, then comes charity towards one’s neighbor, understood literally as the person living next door and not in Africa or Asia or some other distant place. The Godly dimension of the everyday knight of faith’s thinking is linked to his ability both to enjoy and forego the small things in life. The bourgeois philistine, for instance, enjoys food and sharing his culinary fantasies with others. His sublime effort to believe by virtue of the absurd, claims Silentio, may be expressed through his faith that his wife, tonight, will serve him “et stegt Lammehoved med grønt til” (134) [“a roast head of lamb with vegetables” (33)]. Here is the sacrificial lamb, served potentially on a dinner plate in a Biedermeier home: “Tilfældigvis eier han ikke 4 Sk., og dog troer han fuldt og fast, at hans Kone har hiin lækkre Ret til ham. Har hun den, da skal det være et misundelsesværdigt Syn for fornemme Folk. . . . Hans Kone har den ikke – besynderligt nok – han er aldeles den Samme.” (134) [“As it happens, he does not have four beans, and yet he firmly believes that his wife has that delectable dish for him. If she has it, to see him eat would be an enviable sight for distinguished people. . . . If his wife doesn’t have it – oddly enough – it is all the same to him” (33)]. Silentio depicts ultimate faith as a state of mind that has only positive social consequences. A modern Abraham is a jovial fellow citizen – a fellow Copenhagener, the Copenhagener who during the nineteenth century is established as a Danish archetype.

4.

Compare Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling 60 n91.

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The depiction is not without irony, but Silentio sets up two realms of absurd logic and a willingness to sacrifice. One is serious and pertains to Abraham; the other is somewhat ironic and pertains to a capacity to believe in miracles – lamb for dinner – and an inclination to forego this thought the moment it proves futile. The great man of faith  – Abraham  – gains God’s blessing for all nations in the theological sense of the word, it might be said, while the everyday knight of faith gains a blessing for his local environment in a quotidian sense of the word. He makes people comfortable and happy.5 He walks around in his environment with confidence and joy and engages in small-talk with like-minded citizens. The fact that he may be a tax collector contributes to the understanding of his being part of a nation state in which people willingly contribute to a central governing institution – in this case an absolute monarchy about to turn into a constitutional monarchy. Henrik Ibsen’s Brand In Brand, Ibsen imposes the religious realm of sacrifice upon the everyday social space of his contemporary knight of faith, Brand. Vertical, religious thinking is made to co-exist with the horizontal, social thinking that characterizes modernity and the nation-state (Anderson). In Brand, place is of utmost importance, and the issue is no longer cozy, conversational Copenhagen, but a freezing cold Norwegian west-coast mountain region. In this area, people are constantly exposed to the perils of their physical surroundings. The drama’s opening scene presents frail human lives facing snowstorms, rainstorms, waterfalls, fog, bogs, darkness, cliffs, and avalanches. As the drama progresses, rockslides, hurricanes, and starvation are also introduced. In contrast to this landscape is a general notion of the South, a place in which Brand has previously lived and to which he could return. In the mountain region, Brand establishes himself as a minister, marries Agnes, fathers Alf, and follows a call to a local parish. Living in the climatic and geographic surroundings of this particular place is so strenuous for Alf that the local doctor urges Brand to move south to save the child’s life. Brand wavers but ends up prioritizing what he perceives as his calling to this particular place: “Her blir jeg dog. Her er mit Hjem, / og i mit Hjem min Krig skal frem” (Brand 306) [“Here I stay. This is the place where I belong. / Here the flag of my crusade shall first be raised” (Brand; Oxford Ibsen 145)]. Brand primarily conceives of “here” as the individual’s religious “home” in which he stands in an absolute relationship to God and cannot be held accountable by community ethics. From his own point of view, Brand’s situation is similar to that of Abraham; he reflects upon “Isaachs Ræddsel” (294) [“As he tested Abraham” (Oxford Ibsen 138)], and views his son’s eventual death as a sacrifice proving his faith in God. Yet, “here” and “home” also carry national overtones brought forth in at least two different ways. In contrast with “Sydens Land” (210) [“the south” (86)] and “sørpaa, mot de rige Strande” (306) [“south, to richer and to kinder shores” (145)], Brand’s “here” represents not just his local “Fædrebyggd” (298) [“the place where he was born” (140)], but a greater northern region: “vor 5.

In Webster’s the first definition of “blessed” is “holy; sacred; consecrated” while the second definition is “enjoying great happiness; blissful.” The fourth definition is also relevant: “bringing comfort and joy.”

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Del af Norden” (445) [“our northern shores” (233)]. In addition, this mountainous region is associated with national romantic landscape paintings pointed out by Einar as he explains that his attraction to the mountains was the desire to paint “Skjønhedsvældet / paa Granemo, langs Skogens Elv, / i Skyflukt under Himlens Hvælv!” (208) [“beauty / Among the pine forests, by the forest streams, / In the clouds coursing the vault of Heaven!” (85)]. As a minister, Brand throws himself into a battle in an attempt to counteract the horizontal logic of the state. Whereas the bailiff wants to build bridges in order to establish a solid infrastructure between people living in hamlets, along fjords, and on mountain plateaus, Brand wants to build vertical bridges connecting heaven and earth (303–04; Oxford Ibsen 143). Thus, the relationship between nation and sacrifice becomes one in which Brand in his own view sacrifices his son in order to gain God’s blessing for his people. By emulating the behavior of Abraham, he sees an opportunity to establish himself as a father of a particular northern nation, thereby imbuing his people with the right kind of religious thinking – against the social imagination represented by the official nation state. Fighting as a minister within the state church, Brand is neither Abraham situated in a realm entirely apart from contemporary social space, nor is he the bourgeois philistine chatting jovially with everybody around him and fantasizing about having lamb for dinner. Symbolizing Brand’s religious, anti-social status is the fact that he is a vertical climber rather than a horizontal walker. The drama ends on a notoriously ambiguous note with its main character dying. Brand leaves the state church and continues his vertical climb to an ice church located on a mountain top so high that it points all the way into heaven; in other words, he enters a liminal space supposed to put him in contact with his God. On this journey, he is accompanied by the Gypsy child Gerd. Brand is so touched by the sight of the ice church that he breaks into tears, and everything begins to melt, literally and symbolically. Gerd grabs a rifle and shoots at an eagle. Combined, Brand’s tears and the shot set off an existential and physical avalanche. Brand ends up dying, buried in snow as a voice cries out: “Han er deus caritatis!” (474) [“God is Love” (250)]. The scene may be interpreted as indicating that Brand was wrong – he should have loved his child, his wife, and his community members above everything else. The blessings he attempted to provide for his community should have been of the colloquial rather than theological kind; he should have made his contemporaries happy and content rather than try to secure that their souls would go to heaven. While this is a common interpretation, little attention has been paid to the national aspects of this ending. Brand’s death together with notions of compassion and a blessed people is in fact intimately tied to a Norwegian landscape as it is brought about by natural forces that throughout the drama have characterized a particular northern region. It is ice, snow, and cold that ultimately kill Brand – or viewed conversely: for which Brand ultimately dies. He is so tied to the natural characteristics of the North that he is willing not only to sacrifice his son and his wife but also himself. Brand’s sacrificial site in the narrowest sense is his home – where Alf dies. In a broader sense, his home represents his parish and the archetypical landscape of his nation. When this environment turns out not to provide solid grounds for his endeavors, it pertains first and foremost to his religious, anti-social ambitions – his need is to climb. But in a national perspective, it is also interesting to note that Brand dies in the company of Gerd – his Gypsy (tater)

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kin.6 Gerd’s existence and her entangled relationship to Brand, leaving them metaphorically as “brother and sister” (Templeton 86) or perhaps even as biological half-siblings (Bø 237), counteracts a national romantic notion of a homeland inhabited by one people. Gerd may be viewed as the non-stereotypical, non-Herderian Norwegian, who causes Brand, believing in pure categories to die. Gone is Kierkegaard’s homogeneous Copenhagen, where one may expect to encounter only like-minded people. Placing the notion of nation and sacrifice in a context of nation building and forced assimilation of minority groups, Ibsen ushers in a new era in which the homeland’s reliance on commonality – common myths, common memories, common culture, common rights, and a common economy (see Smith) – evidently leaves citizens on shaky ground. The home of the national citizens – whether it be their house, their city, or their nation – provides no stable boundaries, and, as will be seen, the notion of the home increasingly has to be relinquished as the world becomes globalized. Dag Solstad’s Armand V.: Fotnoter til en uutgravd roman Solstad is one of Norway’s greatest chroniclers and since his debut in 1965, he has devoted his literary career to interpreting modern Norwegian life, primarily through novels. Armand V. is fundamentally destabilizing and deconstructive. In its form, it insists on fragmentation and consists only of footnotes to a non-existing text – the non-excavated novel. With regard to content, it is about the twice-divorced ambassador Armand who is approaching retirement age. He has enjoyed a successful career within the Norwegian diplomacy, abiding by ideologies and politics with which he has not always personally agreed. At the end of his life, his careerchoice is especially challenged as his son volunteers as an elite soldier in an unspecified country, most likely Afghanistan, only to return blind. Armand interprets his son’s injury in a nationalmythical context pertaining to both Abraham and Brand. Having moved to London, he takes his blind son to see Ibsen’s Brand. Armand var i egenskap av norsk ambassadør invitert på premieren på National Theatre, og sønnen var med ham, med sin hvite stokk. Under forestillingen fulgte de begge intenst med . . . Armand fordi han hadde et bestemt forhold til dette stykket, og lurte på hvordan dette glimrende ensemblet ville greie å forholde seg til det som Armand kalte vår tids Brand-uforstand. (208) (As Norwegian ambassador, Armand was invited to the premier at the National Theater, and his son accompanied him – with his white cane. During the performance, they both paid close attention . . . Armand because he had a certain relationship with this piece and wondered how this magnificent ensemble would succeed in relating to what Armand called the Brandstupidity of our times.)

Armand’s reference to a current Brand-stupidity is ambiguous, as it may refer to contemporaries being stupid in a way similar to Brand as well as their not having a proper understanding of Brand. The first type of Brand-stupidity pertains most directly to an acceptance of the 6.

For a more detailed analysis of the Gypsy-motif in Brand viewed intertextually in relationship to Frygt og Bæven (among other modern texts), see Oxfeldt “Literary Intertextuality” 68–71.

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U.S. sending “our” sons off to war in countries like Afghanistan (209). Armand sees that in a global perspective: nations do not have equal sovereignty. As a Norwegian, he has low national self-esteem since he hails from a small, insignificant country (228). From his point of view, the U.S. takes on the role of God. The narrator puts it in one of several metapoetic comments: “Alt avhenger av sønneofferet. Gud = USA. Gud = USA. Det betyr at Armand godtar USAs dominans” (199) [Everything depends on the sacrifice of the son. God = USA. God = USA. That means that Armand accepts U.S. dominance]. Armand is to accept the dominance and sacrificial demands of the greatest power of the West, and in the end, Armand does – mirroring the acceptance of his own nation. He feels a deep rage against the U.S. (209) but decides not to vent it in public since it would force him to resign as ambassador. His social role and Norwegian identity are at stake. The second type of Brand-stupidity emphasizes Ibsen’s overall engagement with the Abraham-figure and whether readers understand the author’s intention. Considering the fact that Ibsen nationalizes the myth by evoking a national-romantic, archetypical landscape and introducing issues of integration of the cultural Other, Armand V. can be read as a further variation on this constellation of problems in which the porosity of national boundaries pertains to domestic as well as foreign-policy issues. Of utmost importance in Armand V. is the notion of “abroad.” It is no coincidence that in the novel’s opening scene, Armand has just flown in from abroad and that he is an official representative of the nation by attending a performance of Brand at the National Theater of another nation. His son, too, was sacrificed abroad, in another nation. Armand V. lives the paradoxical life of an ambassador constantly representing his own nation yet barely living in it. Armand is a cosmopolitan at home in all capitals of the world who knows how to seek out the pleasures of western global high culture. When Armand decides to become an ambassador at the age of twenty-eight, it is precisely the cosmopolitan lifestyle that appeals to him. Cities like Paris, Rome, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City attract him, and so does the thought that “hele Verden sto åpen for ham” (113) [The whole World was open to him]. Yet, once Armand grows older, he sees the ways in which the world is open (with the U.S. in particular deciding when and for whom to open and close doors [219]), and once he allows his own son to be wounded in war, he becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the notion of an open world and seeks grounding in his home land.7 In an attempt to counteract a growing sense of national unease pertaining specifically to being Norwegian and more generally to being part of a globalized world pitching the West against the Rest, Armand resorts to walking. Setting his foot on the pavement (tracing the same routes at regular intervals) and hiking in the mountainscapes typical of Norwegian national romanticism constitute two different types of physical grounding in Norway – the former more pedestrian than the latter. Armand’s odd way of meticulously walking to his son’s apartment to pay his rent while noting the names of the same stores and public buildings every time he passes them, suggests a man who lives a disembedded ambassador’s existence intermittently needing to ground himself in his country of origin. To Armand, this certainty and stability of place appear to provide him with a fixed sense of identity. As a city walker, Armand is reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s everyday 7.

For an interpretation of this scene, see Oxfeldt “Roman og nation” 156.

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knight of faith – the “Rodemester” [tax collector] – who is assigned a particular area of the city. The difference, however, is that Kierkegaard’s knight of faith comes across as diegetically contemporary as he traverses “his” area of Copenhagen. Armand, on the other hand, seems out of touch with contemporary time and place and caught in a nostalgic game as he trots the trottoir in his fashionable, Italian designer shoes. As the aging Armand retraces the steps of his younger self, the cosmopolitan stomps against the provincial, and a twenty-first-century lifestyle clashes with that of the mid-twentieth century. Oslo, in addition, is no Copenhagen. It is neither the site of the archetypical Norwegian citizen nor of the like-minded. Armand’s relationship to urban places – sidewalk and buildings – is positive, but his relationship to people is adversarial and unneighborly. On one of his walks, he witnesses a young man running to escape from two other men. Posing no questions, Armand sticks out his foot and trips the man. He then realizes the man has stolen an old lady’s handbag. The old lady howls and finally calms down. As he passes her, Armand ignores her “uten . . . å si henne noen trøstens ord, noe han kanskje burde ha gjort” (26) [without uttering any words of comfort, something he perhaps ought to have done]. Armand does not spread comfort and joy; he is simply an uprooted man seeking a sense of stability in the introverted activity of jogging his memory as he walks the streets of his university days – days characterized by complete faith and optimism in Norway’s future (83). Towards the end of the novel, the desperate Armand resorts to the mountains. While the urban walks are depicted with painstaking realism, the mountain hikes bring the reader into a national-romantic landscape imbued with mythical elements pertaining to the nation as well as the Bible. After the military accident, Armand takes Are to the mountains insisting on daily hikes in order to give his son some practice walking with a cane while Armand describes the surrounding landscape to him. The mountain hikes during which the father leads the son to places outside the latter’s knowledge and control, evoke Abraham’s journey with Isaac. Significantly, they come across a herd of goats which read in the context of the Old Testament myth (with its reference to the fortuitous ram in the thicket) signals that Are is out of mortal danger (204). On a second level, the mountains evoke the Asian mountain plateau where Are was indeed wounded (207), the place where Are, in Armand’s mind, was “sacrificed” (184). Finally, on a third level, the mountains signify Norway in serving to ground both Are’s and Armand’s identity after they have experienced the consequences of war and sacrifice outside their own national boundaries. They both end up living in London, but the novel concludes with Armand once more hiking in the Norwegian mountains (233) and walking his habitual route in Oslo to pay his son’s rent (236). This time Armand is wearing his hiking outfit rather than his Italian designer wear, and he decides to sleep over in his son’s apartment. The decision to dwell in the apartment may be interpreted as one final attempt to revert to a time characterized by faith in a Norwegian national identity and future. Are’s landlady, however, stares down the Norwegian ambassador the next morning as he is back in his elegant suit, tie, coat, and cashmere scarf about to catch another plane abroad. He is not welcome under her roof, and she lets him know she will soon terminate Are’s rental agreement. The activities – walking and spending the night in student lodgings – that connect him to his youth are no longer available to him. His realistic grounding in the Norwegian cityscape will soon be a thing of the past. Continuing to flirt with the symbolic mountain region, however, remains a possibility.

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Armand ends up evicted and homeless. He maintains a certain amount of faith in the Norwegian mountains, and they are imbued with mythical connotations relating them to both a romantic conception of the nation (as in Brand) and the Asian mountain plateau where his son was “sacrificed” in war. The Norwegian mountains, in other words, merge with Asian mountains of contemporary warfare as well as the Biblical Mount Moriah – where Isaac was to be sacrificed. As Isaac’s life, however, was spared, as is Are’s (although he loses his eyesight), a bit of hope remains regarding Norway as a nation as well. In the role of a contemporary Abraham, Armand ultimately suggests that he can gain a blessing for his nation if only this nation stops submitting to the wrong God in an equation where God = USA. Kirsten Hammann’s En dråbe i havet Kirsten Hammann’s En dråbe i havet (A Drop in the Ocean) thematizes nation and sacrifice in a global context, emphasizing questions of contemporary child sacrifice understood as children dying all over the world due to war and pollution. The novel stresses how these catastrophes can be imagined as situated far away at the same time it is clear that their consequences – emotional and physical – cannot be contained within national boundaries. En dråbe i havet can be read as a novel of contamination by pointing out how foreign objects, people, thoughts, and perspectives constantly invade the readers’ innermost space thoroughly disturbing their comfort zone, not least that of the home and the nation. The novel’s protagonist, Mette Mæt, resembles Silentio’s knight of faith transposed to a globalized Copenhagen at the beginning of the third millennium. In many ways, this transposition is still the self-contained and self-satisfied Copenhagen of the Biedermeier period; it is, however, a Copenhagen in which “alle selvfede og almindeligt fede danskere” (Mors) [all self-satisfied and generally fat Danes] are aware of people starving in the third world.8 Like Kierkegaard’s modern knight, Mette is about coziness and scrumptious dinners. Spending ample time on planning and enjoying playtime with her five-year-old Sofie, traversing all of Copenhagen to find the perfect coat for fall, engrossing herself in baking and cooking, and communicating frequently during the week with her husband, Martin, by means of text messages (while he lives and works in Århus), Mette lives up to everybody’s expectations of the perfect woman, not least her own. As Mette, however, becomes increasingly aware of 815 million Africans starving (22), she decides to write a book about Third-World issues. While carrying out research for the book, Mette gets in contact with Stig Danielsen, a man supposedly employed at an aid organization. He provides insight into the life of “De Andre” (22) [the Others] and supplies her with films of Africans starving to death, of children being hacked to pieces with machetes in Rwanda, and other gruesome incidents. Mette is horrified at the thought of how children are abused in war, through poverty, starvation, violence, and 8.

The quotation is taken from the title of Camilla Lærke Mors’s review of the novel. Although the novel does not overtly thematize a particular Danish identity (above a general Western identity), the notion of the self-satisfied Copenhagener as a Danish archetype is implicit in the text. This is picked up on in various reviews equating the “typical” Copenhagener with the “average” Dane.

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sexual abuse, but she still finds it difficult to care about children other than her own Sofie. It is difficult, she admits, to think in terms of “menneskebørn,” “Alles børn,” and “Jordens børn.” (69) [“human children,” “everybody’s children,” and “the world’s children”] for more than just fleeting moments. Still, egged on by Stig, Mette eventually develops a plan: she along with Sofie will trade places with an Ethiopian mother and her three children for two whole days while Martin is away in Århus. The plan is to be carried out by means of a virtual-reality room secretly installed at a Copenhagen hotel. En dråbe i havet develops into a sci-fi novel as Stig introduces Mette to “Sesam” – a state-of-the art, high-tech site that will allow Mette to enter various lives of misery. According to Stig, she will be able to confront the world in a risk-free manner without ever leaving Copenhagen. It is pure illusion; yet the experience, he promises her, will transform her (113). The ontological status of the room and Mette’s experiences become increasingly mysterious as the boundary between reality and virtual reality gradually breaks down. Objects, germs, and people start crossing the line, and Mette eventually brings the Ethiopian family home. Having installed them in her apartment – forcing them against their will to inhabit the space of her Self – she plans on going back to “Sesam” with Sofie so that they can experience two days in an Ethiopian village. To Mette, the plan is of Biblical dimensions: Hun må bevise, om ikke andet så for sig selv, at hun er villig til at ofre noget. Men skal Sofie virkelig med? Hun ser sig selv lægge sin lille datter på bålet for at fedte for de store ulandsguder, de, som kaster bjerge af skyld over Mette, fordi hun rager til sig og tror, der kun er ingenting efter døden og dermed ingen regning at betale i Helvede. (241) (She had to prove, if not to others, then to herself, that she is willing to sacrifice something. But should she really bring Sofie? She envisions placing her daughter on the bonfire in order to ingratiate herself with the great gods of developing countries, those who cast mountains of guilt upon Mette because she hoards and thinks there is nothing at all after death and thus no bill to pay in Hell.)

Indirectly the link to the Abraham-and-Isaac myth is established through Mette’s conceptions of sacrificing her daughter on a fire. Personifying the gods in the real world (of the fiction) are Stig and his two technical assistants located in New York from where they watch “deres forsøgsmus” (244) [their guinea pigs] run around in hotel labyrinths. As in Armand V., Western power is perceived as being located in the U.S. Yet while Solstad focuses on the U.S. as a political power transforming the lives of Scandinavians through participation in international warfare, Hammann focuses on the U.S. as a media power, changing the lives of Scandinavians and others through global awareness and ensuing guilt feelings. The guinea pigs of Stig and his assistants, as it turns out, are all Western women like Mette herself, whose last names also mean “full” in their national languages. The religious allusion regarding the sacrificial journey is further expanded as Mette lies to Martin and calls him to say that she and Sofie will be staying with a couple of friends on the island of Funen. Acquiescing and sensing no danger, Martin asks whether they are not the ones who have goats (260). As it turns out, Sofie will get burnt, but in a place where there are no goats to take her place.

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When Mette enters the hotel room with Sofie, she ends up not in an Ethiopian village, but on an Indian dump. The site abounds with fires, but rather than placing children on them, children are placed by them, left to inhale toxic fumes as people try to survive by recycling electronic and chemical waste. Mette tries to prevent Sofie from breathing the fumes, but she is also aware that this type of pollution has global consequences: Flammehæmmerne og tungmetallerne og dioxinen, den, som kommer, når man afbrænder pvc, og som kan vandre helt op til Nordpolen og slå isbjørnene ihjel. Alt det plastic og gummi, de brænder af her, forsvinder jo ikke, det bliver til røg i luften og aske på jorden og siver ned i grundvand og flod og det hele. (274) (The flame retardants and the heavy metals and the dioxin, which results from burning PVC and which can travel all the way to the North Pole and kill polar bears. All the plastic and rubber they burn off here does not disappear, as you know, it turns into smoke in the air and ashes on earth and seeps into ground water and rivers and everything.)

Gone is Kierkegaard’s neatly bounded Copenhagen, and gone are the pristine mountains of Ibsen’s Brand. Instead the reader is faced with a global environmental issue that is most devastating to those living in its vicinity but from which no one can escape. And as Sofie later puts it, these sites are devastating to children – even those who have not yet been born but may be born deformed in the future (303). Thus, while Armand V. transposes the Old Testament myth of sacrifice into a globalized world by focusing on wars fought internationally beyond the borders of one’s own nation, Hammann transposes it into the same globalized world by focusing on poverty, industrialization, consumption, and pollution that erase national borders. Mette finally escapes the Indian dump carrying Sofie through the flames. They arrive back in Copenhagen with just minor burns; yet, Mette’s greatest shock is still to come. Martin is furious and insists on a divorce while claiming that he no longer loves her. By lying to Martin, Mette has transgressed an ethical boundary, but the specifics of her project end up undermining not just the idea of a happy marriage, but also the idea of the nation as both an imagined and a territorial community. Mette contaminates domestic space by placing Ethiopians in the family’s Østerbro apartment and by conflating Copenhagen and the Third World through her journeys in and out of the mysterious hotel room. Suddenly Kierkegaard’s “Kaffirs” have become not only neighbors, but cohabitants. Mette’s community increasingly becomes the global community, and when she arrives at the point where she is willing to “sacrifice” her own daughter for the sake of other, less fortunate children, her husband strongly objects. Yet, as the novel repeatedly points out, Mette is average, and her experiences serve to depict a contemporary situation that cannot be ignored. Martin’s urge to divorce her reflects a need to be in control and to set impossible boundaries. En dråbe i havet ultimately points to a postnational era during which the concept of the nation still holds sway over the reader’s imagination, both emotionally and politically, but during which global events increasingly determine everyday experiences. Read against the myth of Abraham and Isaac, En dråbe i havet problematizes two aspects of the blessed nation. For his willingness to sacrifice his own son, God blessed Abraham and all nations. Yet, today readers are constantly reminded that some nations are more blessed than others in terms of wealth, resources, and overall living standard. This awareness of global

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injustice wears on the sense of blessedness for the wealthier nations as well. Feelings of guilt are incompatible with happiness and contentment. At the same time, the novel illustrates that the national territory per se is not blessed in the sense that one may feel particularly protected in that place. Boundaries are porous, no sites are pure, and all nations are sites of contamination. Armand V. and En dråbe i havet show that transnational communication, international politics, global pollution, and the world’s social injustice inspire and provoke versions of the Old Testament myth in which the conceptions of sacrifice and nation are problematized in a way entirely different in an age of globalization than in its nineteenth-century versions. Whereas the earlier texts point to a moment of crisis emphasizing vertical, religious thinking and the horizontal, social imagination of the nation, current versions point to geopolitical circumstances that pit the national home against international, transnational, and global forces. The national child is no longer sacrificed in a sacred place, but rather in ambiguous and indeterminate places linking the nation and the global community – whether this be a mountain plateau in Afghanistan or a virtual-reality room in Copenhagen. A reading of the four texts also opens possibilities for a national comparison in which Copenhagen is imagined as the quintessential national space in Denmark. It is depicted as a site of homebodies with no desire to leave their comfort zone. The quintessential Copenhageners [i.e. Danes] happily interact with their area of the city by moving through it on a daily basis – on foot in Frygt og Bæven, and increasingly on bicycle and by public transportation in En dråbe i havet – and by always behaving jovially towards their neighbors understood as like-minded people. The great Copenhagen paradox, one might argue, is that the city is imagined, described, and treated as entirely down-to-earth, secularized, and culturally homogeneous – and as such a sacred, inviolate space. The threat to a Copenhagen (Danish) identity arises when the outside world forces its way into the Copenhagen imagination, which is exemplified most strongly in Hammann’s depiction of a virtual-reality hotel room serving as an extreme zone of ambiguity. The Norwegian imagination, by contrast, posits the mountains as their truest national space (as Louise Mønster discusses at length in this volume). This space is fundamentally different as it is imagined more symbolically and dialectically. It is not a place of birth and life-long dwelling. Brand arrives there after having lived in the South, and Armand goes there on a break from his ordinary life. As national space, the mountains are perceived as sacred, not in the sense that they are set off as a cozy site away from the rest of the world, but in their inherent liminality. They constitute a site where people consistently have to negotiate between the secular and the religious, the individual and the social, the domestic and the culturally foreign, and between nature and culture. Brand is unable to find a balance and dies; Armand seems to find stability and momentary peace when he hikes on mountain plateaus – more horizontal than vertical – in the company of his son, while staying at an ex-lover’s lodge. At this point his sense of identity feels secured since he is able to identify with his nation, his past, his “loss” (of a son), and his closest friends and family. The threat to Armand’s sense of identity arises as he travels too far and too frequently away from his home – not as his home is invaded by foreign elements. Norwegian identity is perceived as a constant balancing act, whereas Danish identity is imagined as stable, but under threat. On a political level, Norway has to balance its sovereignty vis-à-vis participation in international constellations; Denmark has to find a way of living neighborly with

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neighbors who are not all native Copenhageners. This, at least, is one conclusion one can draw by comparing a Kierkegaard-Hammann trajectory to that leading from Ibsen to Solstad. Overall, the four literary works illustrate how an Old Testament myth helps Danes and Norwegians make sense of their role and identity in a contemporary world. As specific literary reworkings of the myth, they illustrate how in an age of post-nationalism and globalization, one maintains a sense of the self-generative nation by consistently engaging in an intertextual dialogue with nineteenth-century literary Nordic and national classics.

Legend and liminality Timothy R. Tangherlini

In her famous short story “Sorg-Agre” (1942; “Sorrow Acre”), the Danish author Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) writes, “Et Barn af dette Land vilde kunne læse i det store aabne Landskab som i en Bog” (217) [“a child of the country would read this open landscape like a book” (29)], implicitly acknowledging the close connection between storytelling and the physical environment. Dinesen then goes on to recount a story based on a widely attested legend about a manor lord’s capricious and cruel treatment of his peasants, in this case a mother trying to save her son from punishment for a crime he likely did not commit. The legend is found in numerous variant recordings in Danish folklore collections. A fairly typical variant reads as follows: Dæ wår en kael i Balom, han wå komen te å slå en mand ijæl, mæn mæ vile håj han no æt gøjer et. Han blæw ilivæl dömt te døø, å de blæw hans moer gråww sæle æwer. Så gek hon te kongen å klawet hend nø, å båj ham så mendele om, te hend sön måt blyw fri. De låwet kongen hend åse, mæn o dænd betengels te hon skuld slå en fæn veer, fra æ soel ståj åp å te dænd gek neer, å dænd wå så stoer, te fiir mand ku ha arrbær nåk mœ-en daw. Væn hon kund gøjer de, så skuld hend sön blyw fri. Så gaw hon sæ i laww mœ-et, å hon blæw åse fære, mæn da hon skor dænd siist hanndfuld a mæ æ sægl, så foeld hon om å vå dø mæ de saam. Hon blæw begrawet å Balom kjæregor, å dæ leger en liigstejen å hend graw. Å dænd æ hon atæjjnet mæ en neeg å en sægl i æ arrm. Æ fænn, wå hon skoer et, dænd kænder di gåt ino dærniir. (Evald Tang Kristensen Danske Sagn 4:1222; hereafter abbreviated DS) (There was a farm hand in Balom, he had happened to kill another man, but he really hadn’t wanted to. But he was sentenced to death anyway, and then his mother got so upset. So she went to the king and pleaded her case and asked him please to let her son go free. Then the king made a deal with her but on the condition that she reap a field of wheat, from when the sun rose to when the sun set, and it was so big that it would have taken the work of four men for an entire day. If she could do that, then her son would go free. And so she set herself to the task and she finished it too. But when she cut the last handful of wheat, she fell over and died on the spot. She was buried in Balom cemetery and there’s a headstone over her grave. The field that she reaped is well known down there even today.)

This variant, told by a farmhand, Karl Andresen, is relatively short and focuses on the experience of the woman, a significant shift in perspective from that of the privileged perspective of the manor lord and his progressive-minded nephew in the Dinesen short story. The narrative emphasis on the peasants’ point of view, however, is characteristic of folk tradition. People tell stories about people like themselves and the threats and challenges they encounter in their daily lives. Consequently, the vast majority of Nordic folklore collected during the nineteenth and early twentieth century from predominantly poor, rural dwellers reflects the concerns not of the “nation” as proposed by the collectors and folklorists of the time, but rather the concerns of the rural poor. For these Nordic storytellers, storytelling offered an important forum for developing an understanding of the shifting boundaries of political, economic, social, and religious institutions

doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.49tan © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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that characterized the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a study of Bolivian copper miners, Michael Taussig reveals how people rely on the cultural reservoir of traditional beliefs and expressive forms both to comment on and interpret change. This same process applies to Nordic rural populations whose stories form the core of most Nordic folklore collections. In many cases, change engenders fear, and many stories about change are formulated as explorations of threat. This exploration of threat relies on a conceptualization of an in-group (usually the teller and her audience) and an out-group (in this case, the privileged and arbitrarily powerful aristocracy), where the out-group more often than not threatens the integrity of the in-group by violating the boundaries of the in-group. Not surprisingly, these encounters are situated in the narrative at contact areas, either physical or figurative (or both). These fraught boundaries between groups are known as liminal spaces (van Gennep; Turner Forest). Exploring the location of the encounter, the type of threat, and its physical manifestation, along with the strategy employed by the in-group actors in the story to counteract the threat, provides important clues about the negotiation of cultural boundaries enacted in folklore. In the above story, for instance, the threat to the peasant woman’s family comes from her aristocratic employer, and the action is contested on the very fields that were the subject of significant friction between the disenfranchised poor and the landed gentry. The class tension that animates the story is written into the physical landscape at the limin or threshold where the contest over the ownership of both the fields and the agricultural produce based on the labor input of the peasants is manifest in the singular effort of the woman to reclaim her future through her physical toil. The woman’s triumph comes at unconscionable expense but signals the remarkable strength of the peasant in the face of overwhelming odds; ultimately, she is able to reclaim the land for the people who work it despite the fatal consequences of her work. Of all the folk narrative genres, legend is the one that most consistently engages the question of liminality, describing the cultural boundaries of the in-group by considering the dangers that exist at the edges of society, conceptualized both metaphorically and physically. The legend genre is a common folk narrative genre in the traditional expressive cultures of the Nordic lands. Legends are stories that are told as true, often in a conversational mode. These narratives tend to be highly localized in making reference to nearby landscape features or place names and they are usually anchored in recent history. Just as plant species diversify into genetically distinct populations (oikotypes) as they adapt to their physical micro-environments, legends also adapt to their micro-environments, reflecting not only the historical and geographic environments of the storytellers, but also the cultural environment as well (von Sydow; Tangherlini Interpreting Legend). Consequently, studying legend from nineteenth-century rural Denmark, for instance, offers a nuanced view into the fears and hopes of the disenfranchised rural poor. The structure of legend is relatively straightforward, and most legends are mono-episodic. The orientation of a legend provides the “who, what, where, and when” of the story, usually centering on a main character from the same background as the storyteller and her audience. The complicating action of the story presents a challenge – usually in the form of a threat to the integrity of the main character’s community. In the Scandinavian tradition, these threats tend to be directed at the economic well-being, the physical well-being, or the continued fertility of the community, or a combination of these. Frequently, the threat takes the form of a supernatural being. The complicating action of the story requires some form of action; this means that legend

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can be seen as a locus for the exploration of the range of possible actions given a threat to the integrity of the community. Michel de Certeau recognizes this role of storytelling, suggesting that stories represent “repertoires de schemas d’actions” (L’invention 42) [“repertories of schemas of

Figure 72.  Jens Peter Pedersen (1836–1900), lathe turner and storyteller from Ilbjærg in northern Jutland. A prolific source of local legends, Jens Peter lived alone in a small house near the town of Sæby. (Photograph used by permission of Dansk Folkemindesamling)

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action” (Practice 23)]. The resolution of the story – the “what finally happened” – presents an evaluation of the strategy proposed to combat the threat presented in the complicating action. As such, the legend should be seen as a highly ideological story. Not surprisingly, these stories are often deployed rhetorically as part of the ongoing negotiation of cultural ideology (norms, beliefs, values) that characterizes community life. Land and the changing landscape are often features of nineteenth century legendry. This can be attributed to the dramatic shifts in land ownership presaged by Nordic land reforms, such as the reapportionment of the fields in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the rise of the smallholder as a player in the increasingly open economic markets of the mid-nineteenth century, the significant change in transportation networks due to technological developments such as the train, and the draining of the bogs and reclaiming of the heath in Denmark that turned large swaths of previous wasteland into productive arable land.

Figure 73.  Railroad crossing in Ry, Denmark, ca. 1908. Photo: Knud Nielsen Baunsgaard/ Ry Lokalarkiv

The changing relationship to “the wild” – those areas that were not cultivated and thus marked as both “uncivilized” and dangerous  – also emerges as a frequent topic in legend. In many Danish legends about robbers, their dens are situated in forests along the shortest travel routes between market towns. The forests, thus, become a perfect representation of the border between “civilized” towns: For mange år siden, för den nye landevej blev lagt gjennem Fyen fra Middelfart til Bogense, gik vejen mellem disse to byer norden om Båring gjennem Båring skov og langs med den vej fra Kattegat, som strækker sig ind mod byen og kaldes Båring-vej. Den del af Båring skov, som vejen gik igjennem, hed Kragelund, og her havde en röverbande sin hule. . . . röverne . . . plyndrede og dræbte dem, der kom der forbi. (DS 4:1566)

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Timothy R. Tangherlini (Many years ago, before the new highway was built across Fyn from Middelfart to Bogense, the road went between these two towns north of Båring, through Båring woods along the road from the Kattegat, which stretches in towards town and is called Båring road. The part of the Båring woods that the road went through was called Kragelund, and a robber gang had its den here. . . . the robbers . . . plundered and killed those people who came by.)

Robbers here threaten not only the economic integrity of the newly developing broad-based market economy – a development that held both economic promise and financial worry for most rural dwellers in the nineteenth century – but also the physical well-being of the newly minted market actors, the smallholder. The robbers, of course, transgress the rules of proper economic behavior by making their money through theft and not work. Consequently, the legend inscribes the transgressive behavior of the robbers into the landscape at a border area itself, the forest. The transgressive nature of robbers is made all the more clear in stories where one particularly psychopathic group of robbers uses the forest to conceal the murder of children: Der var 12 rövere i Ry skov, og anføreren det var den trettende. Der gik en vej igjennem skoven, og de havde spændt snore med klokker ved, så de kunde høre, når der kom nogen. De havde gjort akkord med Fanden, og så skulde han lære dem, hvordan de skulde bære dem ad med at komme til at flyve. De skulde have fat i en frugtsommelig kone og skjære barnet ud af hende, og var det så et drengebarn, skulde de tage hjærtet af det og spise, så kunde de flyve. Så tog de først 13 kvinder af dage, men i dem alle var der pigebörn, og det fik de da ikke noget ud af. Endelig var der en mand, som hed Store-Johan, han var noget i komplot med dem, og han solgte hans kone til dem. De bandt hende splitternøgen til et træ og skulde så til at skjære i hende. Men i det samme kom der nogle herregårdsskytter ridende, og de jog dem derfra, og så blev röverne fangede og manden med. Konen døde, og det viste sig, at hun var med to drengebörn, men nu havde de jo ingen ting ud af det. Der er en vise om det, som a har hørt, men a véd ikke, om den er trykt. (DS 4:1584) (There were twelve robbers in Ry woods, and their leader was the thirteenth. A road went through the woods and they had strung up a rope with bells on it so they could hear when somebody came by. They had made a pact with the Devil, and he was supposed to teach them what they needed to do so they could fly. They had to get hold of a pregnant woman and cut the child out of her, and if it was a male child, they were supposed to take its heart and eat it, then they could fly. So they killed thirteen women, but there were girls in all of them, and they didn’t get much out of that. Finally there was a man who was called Store-Johan [Big Johan] who was in cahoots with them, and he sold them his wife. They tied her stark-naked to a tree and were going to cut into her. But at that moment some riflemen from a manor farm came riding by, and they chased them away, and then the robbers and the man were caught. The woman died, and it turned out that she was carrying two boys, but now they didn’t get anything out of that.)

Here the robbers cross all of the boundaries of the in-group, threatening in one fell swoop the economic and physical integrity of the community as well as the future of the community itself (it is after all baby hearts that they are after), in order to guarantee their own success. The rapid shift in economic structure away from the collective (fælleskab) as the primary market actor to the individual as the primary market actor also emerges here as a profound threat to the community, and is situated firmly in the liminal space of the “wild” forest. The forest is also the site of other transgressions: well into the nineteenth century, many forests were off limits for most

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people as they were reserved as hunting preserves of the landed aristocracy and the royals. Forests were also vigorously protected sources of lumber. Forests, of course, are not the only locus of theft in legend. The fields themselves, as in “Sorrow Acre,” were often the site of transgressive and threatening behavior. Perhaps the bestknown cycle of legends that explore claims of land ownership involve the repartitioning of the fields. As part of the process of shifting from a split field system to a unified field system, all of the small strips that a farmer plowed were measured and given a productivity valuation – the new apportionment of the fields relied on these measurements. Unfortunately, the process was greatly dependent on the field surveyors who were not beyond corrupting influences. Indeed many legends tell of the haunting of corrupt field surveyors: I begyndelsen af dette århundrede, da jorderne blev udskiftede, kom der til Stistrup i Fovlum en autoriseret landmåler, som kaldtes Holm (Skov, Foss?), og han begik bedrageri ved udskiftningen. En mand og hans to sönner var blevne uenige med deres nabo om retningen af skjellet. Det var i Stistrup udmark. Manden og sönnerne var med der ude og gjorde sig så brøsige, at det til sidst blev, som han vilde have det. Men da så landmåleren kom ned i Fovlum Korre, gjorde han også der bedrageri, og ved nordre enden af korren kan enhver se den dag i dag, at det ikke er, som det skal være. Der var et gammelt digehæv rundt om korren, og jeg er født lige ved det dige, så jeg kjender god besked om sagen. I udmarken er det også let at se, at der er fejl. Den landmåler går igjen på Stistrup-vejen ad Fovlum til, og hvem der kommer ad det strøg ved den tid, han går der, bliver vildfarende. Man hører en ynkelig stemme, der siger: “Ryk i kjæden og hold i stangen. Stistrup udmark og Fovlum Kårrr! (DS 5:1443) (At the beginning of this century, when the fields were partitioned, an authorized surveyor came to Stistrup in Fovlum. His name was Holm (Skov, Foss?) and he engaged in a swindle with the partitioning. A man and his two sons had gotten into a disagreement with a neighbor about the proper boundary. That was in Stistrup outer field. The man and his sons were out there and were so gruff that they finally got it the way they wanted it. But when the surveyor got down to the town pond in Fovlum, he also did a little swindle there too, and at the northern end of the pond, everyone can see, even to this day, that it isn’t the way it should be. There was an old embankment around the pond, and I was born right near it, so I know quite a bit about the affair. It is easy to see in the outer field that there’s also been a mistake. That land surveyor walks again on Stistrup road toward Fovlum, and anyone who goes on that stretch of road while he is out walking loses his way. One hears a pathetic voice that says, “Pull the chain and hold the post. Stistrup outer field and Fovlum town pond!”)

The boundary has been shifted to the benefit of one person at the expense of another. The manipulation of a zero-sum game such as this (where one person is made worse off if another person is made better off) provides one of the clearest discussions of the worries attendant the shifting organization of the rural economy, away from the collective and toward individual market engagement. Interestingly, the threatening nature of economic reorganization is expressed overtly in the shifting boundaries where the limin, the threshold, is at once the location of and the focus of the threat. The fields were not always dangerous and could also be the place where significant wealth could be found. That wealth is tied up with the land should not be surprising as the majority of the rural economy was based exactly on that concept – extracting wealth from the land. In legend, the guardians of cultivated land were the hidden folk. Hidden folk (or mound folk) often

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made their homes in Nordic legend out on the fields and lived lives that more or less paralleled the lives of humans: En gang, da jeg kjørte fra Kalundborg, var jeg da næsten kommen til broen ved Ågerup mølle, og det var så mørkt som en bælg. Så så jeg nede ved broen, at der var noget, som gnistrede. “Det var også godt” tænkte jeg, “nu kan du få tændt din pibe.” Jeg troede begribeligvis, at det var et menneske, der røg tobak. Så gav jeg da pillekerne et rap og nåede snart broen. Ja, det var rigtig nok nogen, der røg tobak, men mennesker var det ikke. Det var bare små puslinger med mørke tröjer og hvide bukser, og hver af dem havde en sølvpibe (pibe med sølvbeslag). De bakkede godt, og når ilden gnistrede, så kunde jeg så rivelig se dem. De gik på kanten af vejen, én for én, og de skulde formodentlig til gilde i en höj der omkring. Jeg sagde god-aften, men de svarede ikke, og jeg turde nok ikke vove at bede om ild på min pibe, bæsterne de fnyste og skabede sig, og jeg lod dem jo løbe, så det varede ikke ret længe, inden jeg kom fra djævelskabet. Men det kan nok hænde sig, at jeg var ikke rigtig glad, förend jeg kom hjem til vor mo’r. (DS 1:270) (Once when I was driving from Kalundborg, I’d almost gotten to the bridge at Ågerup mill, and it was dark as pitch. Then I noticed that something was sparkling down by the bridge. “That’s good,” I thought, “now I can get my pipe lit.” I thought that it was possibly people who were smoking. So I gave the horses a whack and soon reached the bridge. Well, it was right enough that it was someone smoking, but it wasn’t people. They were small little ones with dark sweaters and white pants, and each one of them had a silver-clad pipe. They were puffing away and when the fire sparked I could see them well. They were walking along the side of the road, one behind the other, and they were presumably going to a party in a mound near there. I said good evening, but they didn’t answer, and I didn’t dare ask them for a light for my pipe, the horses were snorting and restless, and I let them run, so it didn’t take long before I got away from that devilishness. But I wasn’t really happy until I got home to mom.)

Interaction with the mound dwellers could have significantly positive repercussions, such as stories of assisting them by repairing peel boards or acting as a midwife: Henne i Voldum var der en karl, der drev og plöjede imellem Voldum og Hvalløs, og der lå en bitte höj tæt ved. Så, mens han var henne ved den anden ende, kom der en rage op, og den var i stykker. Han gjör den så ved. Om middagen drev han hjem til Voldum og kom der ud igjen om eftermiddagen. Da lå der en kage ved höjen på det sted, hvor rågen havde ligget. Han skar hul på den og spiste, og det gik ham så meget godt. (DS 1:400) (Over in Voldum there was a farmhand who was plowing between Voldum and Hvalløs, and there was a small mound that lay right close by. So when he was down at the other end of the field, an oven rake came up and it was in pieces. So he fixes it. At noontime, he drove home to Voldum and went back out there in the afternoon. Then there was a cake lying there at the place where the [oven] rake had lain. He cut into it and ate it and things turned out really well for him.) I Funder ved Silkeborg boede en gang en jordemoder, hvis navn var Gjertrud Ruds. En gang kom der bud til hende fra en mand, der hed Anders Borring, om hun vilde forløse hans kone. Jordemoderen gik straks, men på vejen mödte hun en stor skruptusse, der sagde, hun var en bjærgmandskone, og tillige bad hende, om hun vilde forløse hende, når tiden kom, hvilket jordemoderen lovede. Nogen tid efter kom en bjærgmand til jordemoderen og bad hende, om hun vilde følge med og hjælpe hans kone, som hun havde lovet. Hun fulgte med manden, og han førte hende ind i en bakke, hvor hun forløste hans kone. Da hun var færdig og skulde

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til at gå, gav bjærgmanden hende en pose fuld af hövlspåner. Jordemoderen vilde ikke rigtig have dem, men bjærgmandskonen bad hende om at tage dem, hun skulde nok få sin ulejlighed betalt, sagde hun. Jordemoderen tog så posen, men da hun kom hjem og åbnede for den, var hövlspånerne blevne til blanke sølvpenge. (DS 1:1124) (Once a midwife, whose name was Gjertrud Ruds, lived in Funder near Silkeborg. One time, a message came to her from a man whose name was Anders Borring, asking her to deliver his wife. The midwife left immediately, but along the way she met a large toad that said that she was the wife of a mound man and asked her to deliver her as well when the time came, and the midwife promised to do so. A little while later, a mound man came to the midwife and asked her to come and help his wife as she’d promised. She followed the man, and he brought her into a mound where she delivered his wife. When she was done and was going to leave, the mound man gave her a bag full of wood shavings. The midwife didn’t really want them, but the mound man’s wife asked her to take them, she’d be paid for her inconvenience, she said. The midwife took the bag, but when she got home and opened it, the wood shavings had turned into shiny silver coins.)

These stories, engaging in low-level economic interactions across group boundaries, although threatening, could have significant positive outcomes. In these stories, crossing this limin is a positive act. In many other stories, the hidden folk are more threatening, kidnaping a young woman into their community or dancing her to death under the mound at midnight thus depriving the community of her future productivity and her future fertility. Intriguingly, stories of kidnap by an out-group at the limin can be found in contemporary Nordic tradition as well, with the hidden folk being replaced by immigrant traffickers (Tangherlini “Trolls to Turks”). Hauntings – such as the revenant of the land surveyor – are common features of the Nordic legend tradition. Ghosts and revenants in and of themselves exist on an interesting boundary, namely the boundary between the living and the dead. When they appear in the physical landscape, they mark those areas as liminal as well. With the land surveyor, it is not surprising that he appears in the fields, as the fields are sites of great economic concern. A manipulation of the boundaries can spell ruin for one person and the wealth of ill-gotten gains for another. But ghosts appear in many more places than just the fields. Among the most common ghosts are those that appear in farmhouses and barns: Den gamle justitsråd på Skårupgård han kom kjørende med 4 hovedløse bæster til Todbjærg kirke. Han kom altidens ud af den nordre port, og der ved porten var der en stald, den stalddör kunde de aldrig holde lukket. De havde en karl, der lukte den, eftersom den sprang op. Men en aften, efter at han var kommen i seng, kom der noget efter ham, og det løftede hans seng rent op til stængerne og klemte ham så hårdt. Så råbte karlen, om de vilde da ikke lade være at løfte ham derop. “Nej, du har pint os, men nu skal du dø, för vi skal dø.” Så blev karlen klemt ihjel, for det han vilde lukke porten, og siden prøvede de aldrig på at lukke den. (DS 4:650) (The old counselor from Skårupgård came riding with four headless horses to Todbjærg church. He always came out of the northern door, and there by the door was a stall, they could never keep that stall door closed. They had a farmhand who closed it and after that it sprang open. But one night, after he’d gone to bed, something came after him, and it lifted his bed straight up to the rafters and crushed him quite hard. Then the farmhand shouted and asked them to stop lifting him up there. “No, you’ve tormented us, but now you’ll die before we die.”

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Timothy R. Tangherlini Then the farmhand was crushed to death because he wanted to close the door and then they never tried to close it again.)

In many of these cases, the haunting remains unresolved with the ongoing threat of disruption bubbling just below the surface. Ghosts were not theologically sound per se in the aftermath of the Reformation. But the usefulness of ghosts as a conceptual category of folk belief almost guaranteed their survival (so to speak) in narrative tradition. Recognizing that it would not be successful in eradicating these beliefs, the Lutheran church had to find a way to make the ghost theologically acceptable and did so by aligning ghosts with Satan. This alignment also made it possible for the Lutheran minister to play a key role in reestablishing order at the limin by conjuring down the haunts: Mølleren i Aastrup Mølle . . . han bliver syg og ligger for Døden. Saa havde han 800 Rigsdaler i ene Sølv, og dem vilde han have med sig i Graven, saa han forlangte, de skulde lægge dem i Kisten til ham, som da ogsaa blev gjort. Nu kommer Præsten derned til Begravelse, og han fik det at vide med de Penge. Men saa vilde han ikke kaste Muld paa ham, andet end de Penge skulde tages af Kisten. De bliver ogsaa taget af, og han bliver begravet. Men saa Natten efter, . . . da kommer der en grumme stor sort Hund ned til Aastrup Mølle, og han gjorde saadan et Spektakel . . . , te de kunde da ikke være der. Han forlangte jo at faa Pengene igjen. . . . De gaar saa til Præsten og . . . nu skulde han nok møde i Aastrup i Aften. Gjengangeren kom ved et vist Klokkeslæt, og Præsten kom ogsaa. De taltes saa ved, Præsten og Gjengangeren, men kunde ikke blive enige, og saa manede Præsten ham ned paa Dæmningen. (DS Ny Række 6:191) (The miller in Aastrup mill . . . gets sick and is lying at death’s door. He had eight hundred rixdollars in pure silver, and he wanted them with him in the grave, and so he requested that they should be placed in the coffin with him and this was done too. Now the minister comes down to the burial, and he finds out about this money. But now he won’t cast dirt on him unless they take the money out of the coffin. It’s taken out and he’s buried. But then that night, . . . a big black dog arrives at Aastrup mill, and makes such a ruckus . . . that the people couldn’t stay there. He wanted the money back. . . . They go to the minister, and . . . he said he’d come to Aastrup that evening. The revenant came at a certain stroke of the clock, and the minister came too. They talked to each other, the minister and the revenant, but they couldn’t agree, and so the minister conjured him down on the millpond dam.)

It is not uncommon for haunts to be conjured on the edge of town or at borders such as the dam in the above story. Although most people are buried in consecrated ground, revenants often resist such places for conjuring, and the minister has no choice but to put them down elsewhere – border areas are the most common, recapitulating the fraught nature of these thresholds. Perhaps one of the most threatening figures in Nordic legend tradition is the Devil. Satan’s impact on the landscape was significant. Places became charged with danger through the narrative encounter of in-group members with this most threatening figure in spaces. Churches are often the locus of these encounters: En aftenstund var en del unge karle forsamlede i Lyndelse kro på Fyen. De morede sig med at spille kort. Allerbedst de sad, kom én ind og gav sig til at spille med dem. Efter at de havde spillet en stund, opstod der strid imellem dem. I sin iver tabte kortgiveren nogle kort på gulvet. Han vilde da böje sig ned og samle dem op, men så nu, at den fremmede havde et låddent ben med hestehov, så han altså var selve Fanden. De lod da gå bud til Stenløse præst med

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anmodning om at komme og drive ham ud. Præsten kom. Med en knappenål stak han et hul på ruden, og herigjennem drev han Fanden ud af kroen. (DS 6:478) (One evening, a group of farmhands were gathered at Lyndelse Inn on Fyn. They were enjoying themselves playing cards. As they were sitting there, someone came in and started playing with them. After they had played for a while, they got into a fight. In his excitement, the dealer dropped some cards on the floor. He wanted to bend down to pick them up, but now he saw that the foreigner had a shaggy leg with a horse’s hoof on the end, so he was the Devil himself. They sent someone to get the Stenløse minister with the request that he come and drive him out. The minister came. He poked a hole in the windowpane with a pin and he drove the Devil out of the inn through that hole.)

In other cases, a local minister agrees to race the Devil through the landscape, inscribing threat into the landscape along the way: Der var en mand, der boede i Teglgården, en bitte herregård imellem Buderup og Skjørping, og han havde givet sig Fanden i vold. Men Fanden var gået ind på den akkord, at han nok skulde vise ham et tegn, för han kom og tog ham, sådan at han kunde være noget belavet på rejsen. Så var det en søndag morgen, hans pige skulde hen og hente hans søndagsklæder til ham, han vilde til kirke, og da hun nu først kommer med et par hvide hoser til ham, var de røde for hans öjne. Så siger han, at hun skulde hente ham et par andre, sådan nogle vilde han ikke have. Hun hentede et andet par, men de var også røde, og alle dem, hun kom med, de var røde. Så bliver han helt kjed af det og siger, dede han vilde ikke til kirke i dag, hun skulde lægge dem væk igjen. Dernæst gjente han alle folkene til kirken, de skulde af sted hver én så nær som den pige, der havde givet ham hoserne, hun skulde blive hjemme. Nu skulde hun hente ham et fadfulder sur mælk, sagde han til hende, og der kom han sådan en mængde sølvpenge i. “Nu skal du tage mig en ske,” sagde han, og så vilde han til at søbe pengene i sig, men han kunde ikke søkke dem. Så skød han fadet hen til pigen, nu kunde hun tage dem. Straks efter kom den stadseste befordring ind i gården og holdt uden for den store dör. Hun troede, det var store fremmede, de fik, og den mand, der sad i vognen, kom også ind til herren, men hvad han gjorde ved ham, det så hun ikke, hun hørte derimod nok, at han klagede sig, og han havde heller ikke stunder at gå ud af dören med ham, men ud af en karm vinduer, og så af sted med ham, og det gik i en fart, for da de kom til den bæk, der er mellem Skjörping og Teglgården, da kjørte de æpå en eg ved Hvældam, der stod jo sådan noget egepurkler og egeværkeri den gang ved den bæk, og grøttede den, så den kom halvt af og hængte sådan og groede i mange år, og for det Fanden havde kjørt på den, var der vel ingen, der turde tage den. . . . den gang pigen kom ind i værelset, hvor Fanden havde taget ham ud fra, da så hun hjærnen sidde åpå væggene, så han må have taget noget hårdt ved ham. (DS 6:139) (There was a man who lived in Teglgården, a little manor farm between Buderup and Skjørping, and he’d given himself to the Devil. But the Devil had agreed to give him a sign before he came and took him so that he could be somewhat prepared for the trip. Then one Sunday morning his hired girl was to go and get his Sunday clothes for him, he wanted to go to church, and when she brings him a pair of white stockings first, they looked red to his eyes. He says to her that she should get him another pair, he didn’t want ones like that. She got him another pair, but they were red too, and all of the ones she brought were red. Then he gets quite upset and says that he doesn’t want to go to church today and she should put them away. After that, he chased every one off to church, they all had to go except for the girl who’d given him the stockings, she was to stay home. Now she was to get him a big bowl of sour milk, he said to her, and he put a bunch

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Timothy R. Tangherlini of silver coins in it. “Now I want you to give me a spoon,” he said, and he wanted to spoon the money into himself, but he couldn’t swallow the coins. So he pushed them over to the girl, she could have them. Immediately, the finest carriage drove into the courtyard and stopped in front of the main door. She thought that it was important guests and the man who was sitting in the wagon also went in to see the lord, but she didn’t see what he did with him, but she did hear that he complained quite a bit and he didn’t have the chance to leave out the door with him, but rather had to leave through a corner window, and then off with him, and they went fast because they drove over an oak by Hvældam. When they got to the stream that runs between Skjørping and Teglgården, there were some scrub oak trees and other oaks down by the stream at that time and they cleaved an oak tree so that it almost broke in two, and it hung down and grew like that for many years, and because the Devil had driven over it there was no one who dared take it. . . . When the girl went into the room where the Devil had taken him, she saw his brains hanging on the walls, so he must have grabbed him pretty hard.)

Locals who subsequently hear the story cannot help but interpret the landscape in the context of these narratives of threat, narratively represented by their reluctance to salvage the damaged oak tree. Moving from town to town was also a fraught endeavor. Even though transportation networks were becoming increasingly modern, moving through the landscape, from the farm to the market and back represented not only a physically dangerous journey but an economically dangerous one as well. Waterways, which form a natural boundary in the physical landscape, not surprisingly act as the locus for dangerous encounters with the supernatural: Ved Sjelle bro løber en å, og dem, der boede ved åen og kjendte det, de kunde høre på den, når den vilde have nogen. Efter gammel snak skulde den sådan råbe om aftenen, og der druknede også tit nogle. De kunde altså høre det på den, når den vilde have et offer. Sådan var det en nat, der kom nogle Molboer og kjørte til Randers med fisk, og da var strömmen så svær, at de plat der ned mand og kone og hest og vogn og druknede. Folkene der omkring kunde høre næsten en hel time, te konen skreg, og de mente, at det var hendes skjörter, der havde holdt hende op, men mandens röst blev snart forstummet. Hun drev ned efter Flöjstrup, og der fandt de hendes lig. (DS 2:50) (Near Sjelle bridge runs a river and those who lived near the river and knew it could hear when it wanted someone. According to old talk it was supposed to call out at night and people often drowned there too. You see, they could hear when it wanted a victim. That’s the way it was one night when some Molboers came driving to Randers with fish. The current was so strong that they splashed down in there, man and wife and horse and wagon and drowned. The people around there could hear for almost an hour how the woman screamed and they believed that it was her skirts which had held her up, but the man’s voice soon became quiet. She drifted down past Fløjstrup and they found her body there.)

The horrific cries of the woman being born up by her skirts as she slowly drowns while drifting downstream echo through the countryside providing a travelogue of despair for the smallholder as his life and his fortune are destroyed by the caprice of the land and nature. Capricious and malevolent forces are not only situated away from the center of town on the roads, in the fields, in the streams, woods, or mountains. Witches live in the community itself and wreak their insidious form of havoc from within. Often, witches engage in simple theft: “En kone fra Bedsted brugte, når hun kjærnede, at sige: ‘Smör fra Hurup og smör fra Grurup og smör

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i min bitte kjærne.’ På den made blev hun ved, og sådan drog hun smör til sig fra de forskjellige steder i omegnen.” (DS 7:609) [A woman from Bedsted used to say, when she was churning: “Butter from Hørup and butter from Grurup and butter in my little churn.” She continued like that, and that’s how she pulled butter to herself from the different places in the area]. At other times, witches’ targets are far more vulnerable, here including both young girls and cows: Der boede en gang en præst her i Glenstrup, som var meget fattig. Så havde hans kone klaget sig længe for, at de havde så lidt mælk, det kneb for at få smör og sådanne sager. Men så en dag kommer præsten ned ad gården, og da sidder hans datter der ude ved en hyld og malker mælk ud af hylden, præstens kone var naturligvis en heks, der havde sendt hende ud at malke, men det kjendte præsten ikke noget til. Præsten kom fra marken og så det. “Hvad er det, du sidder og bestiller her, min pige?” siger han, “hvem har bedt dig det?” Det havde hendes moder, men nu vilde koen ikke give mere mælk, for nu kom der blod. Ja, hun skulde blive ved, så længe der kom noget, enten det så var blod eller mælk. Så blev hun ved, og så døde koen. Det skal have været en gårdmands ko her oppe i byen. Han bliver så elendig over det, te han mistede hans helsen og døde omsider. Den hyld står ved præstegården endnu, den står særskilt i det vestre hjörne af kålhaven. (DS 7:576) (A minister who was very poor once lived here in Glenstrup. His wife had complained for a long time that they had too little milk, they had a hard time getting butter and other such things. But then one day the minister comes out into the farm and his daughter is sitting by an alder tree and is milking milk out of the alder. Naturally, the minister’s wife was a witch, and she had sent her out to milk, but the minister knew nothing about this. The minister came from the field and saw this. “What’s that you’re sitting and doing here, my girl?” he says, “Who asked you to do this?” Her mother had, but now the cow couldn’t give any more milk, because now there came blood. Yes, she should continue as long as something came, if it was either blood or milk. Then she continued and then the cow died. It was supposedly a farmer’s cow here in the town. He gets so upset about it, that he lost his health and died a little later. The alder tree stands in the parsonage even now; it stands a little apart in the western corner of the cabbage patch.)

The folk belief tradition recognizes explicitly the liminal nature of the witch, refusing her access to the house by marking the very threshold of the room as inaccessible: I Visby ved Tröjborg var der en kone, som mange anså for en heks. Vor nabo påstod, at han havde fået troen i hænde ved at prøve et spil med hende. Hun kom der en gang, og da hun vilde gå, sagde han: “Gud være med jer!” Så kom hun tilbage igjen og kunde ikke komme bort… Det samme siges to korslagte synåle eller halmstrå på dörtræet at kunne bevirke, og ingen heks kan overskride dörtærskelen, för de borttages. (DS 7:237) (In Visby near Trøjborg there was a woman who many suspected of being a witch. Our neighbor claimed that he had proved this allegation by playing a little game with her. She came once, and when she was leaving, he said, “God be with you!” Then she came back again and couldn’t leave…They also say that two needles or pieces of straw, placed in the shape of a cross on the threshold, has an effect so that no witch can cross the threshold until they’re taken away.)

This emphasis on the threshold of the house also extends to the protection of infants from the tendencies of hidden folk either to abduct or to switch them: I et barselhus, da al ting var overstået, lagde jordemoderen sig ved barselkonen, som lå med hendes nyfødte barn i hendes arme, og de andre koner satte sig på en anden seng. De faldt alle

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Timothy R. Tangherlini sammen snart i sövn, ti de havde våget længe; men barselkonen, som formodentlig ikke sov hårdt, vågner ved nogen forlen (puslen), som hun fornam hos sig, og ser til hendes store forfærdelse, at hendes barn er borte. Idet hun ser sig om, far hun öje på ellekonen, der sidder med hendes barn på dörtærskelen og er i færd med at hviste (kaste) hendes ben over; ti formedelst deres korte ben kunde de ikke på anden måde komme over nogen dörtærskel. Da gav barselkonen et stort skrig og råbte med höj röst: “Det skal Jesus forbyde dig!” Da slap ellekonen barnet og forsvandt. Barselkonen sprang da op af sengen for at få hendes barn igjen, og jordemoderen og de andre koner blev så forskrækkede, at de næsten ikke vidste, hvad de greb til. Faderen tøvede ikke med at få præsten hentet og barnet döbt. (DS 1:975) (In a birthing house, after everything was done with, the midwife lay down next to the mother who lay with her newborn child in her arms, and the other women sat on another bed. Soon they all fell asleep since they had been at it for a long time; but the birthing woman, who apparently wasn’t sleeping too soundly, wakes with some sort of rustling that she felt near her and she sees to her great horror that her child is gone. While she looks about, her eyes fall on the elf woman who is sitting on the threshold with her child and is in the process of throwing her legs over; because of their short legs they couldn’t get over the threshold in any other way. Then the birthing woman screamed loudly and cried with a loud voice: “That shall Jesus forbid you!” Then the elf woman dropped the child and disappeared. The birth woman jumped out of bed to get her child again, and the midwife and the other women got so scared that they almost didn’t know what was going on. The father didn’t delay with getting the minister and having the child baptized.)

Although the threat appears at the threshold of the woman’s own house, the strategy for beating back the attack succeeds and the integrity of the small family – and by extension the entire community – is protected, at least for now. The landscape presented in Nordic legend is one replete with threat at the boundaries. Shifting parameters of in-group membership are constantly negotiated in any culture at any time. Legend offers a powerful forum for the exploration of these issues. In nineteenth century, Denmark, storytellers and their audiences used stories to mark the landscape as fraught with danger and ripe with possibilities. By exploring things at the edges – at the limin – people are able to express both their hopes and their fears. More importantly, they are also able to present strategies and explore the potential outcomes of these strategies for countering these borderland threats. In so doing, the boundaries start to move. Sometimes the once-threatening landscape becomes tamed; at other times, the threat becomes reinforced in the landscape. In either case, a child of the country reads and rereads, tells and retells the landscape as an open book of continuing threat and triumph.

Liminality The uncanny bog Karin Sanders

Bogs are slippery places, strangely time-warped and peculiarly liminal. Neither water nor land, they constitute a threshold between surface and depths. They bring about spatial and temporal disorientation. Here time is eerily suspended. In folklore, bogs and wetlands are inhabited by seductive elves recognizable only by their hollow backs. They trick the eye and mind and seduce innocent men into a certain death by way of so-called “elf-shots.”1 The mist and fog that rise from them have been seen in popular imagination as something primeval but also indeterminate and unlimited, and the vapors that emanate from them are known as “misty maidens,” “white ladies,” and “brew of the bog woman.” Less poetically, the depths have been imagined to be latrines full of human waste. The Roman historian Tacitus describes Germania as “terra . . . paludibus foeda” (Germania 270) [a land . . . foul with bogs], which suggests an ominous landscape, and in Beowulf, it is clear that omniscient forces are harbored there. If one walks into a bog, one may sink below its surface and disappear forever or rise again from its darkness some hundreds or thousands of years later as an uncannily well-preserved mummified image, as if the bog had taken on the task of producing three-dimensional photographs in nature’s own darkroom. The unique property of the bogs allows for uncanny preservation and with it comes a suspension of ordinary temporal chronologies. Things and humans from various pasts can resurface and interact with ever-shifting presents. Bogs are wetlands that consist in part of acidic peat. They are located in cold temperate climates such as northern Europe, where they are found not only in Ireland, Scotland, northern Germany, and Holland but also in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Latvia, and Estonia as well as western Siberia and North America. In Denmark the so-called raised bogs have played a particularly important role for archaeological research, and the surfacing of artifacts such as religious votive objects and human sacrifices that have been preserved for centuries, have ignited significant literary interest. During the Iron Age bogs were sacred places for worship and understood to be spiritual depths into which both votive objects of various kinds and humans were placed. They were seen as gateways to another world and channels of communication to the spiritual powers of the hereafter.2 Once a year, the image of the goddess Nerthus, a female deity surrounded by a 1.

For a fleshed out description of the bog and its properties and myths, see Kaul, 18–43. Some short sections in this essay are culled from my book Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination.

2.

The Danish archaeologist Christian Fisher writes: “When we excavate graves from that time [the Iron Age] we feel that we are approaching the spiritual world” (7). Another Danish archaeologist, Flemming Kaul, writes: “In all cases one can presume that through the bogs people thought that they had a link with something much more than the spirits of human beings, that this was a gateway to another word beyond the world of men. . . . The bogs and the forces found in them or beyond them were perhaps more integrated in a wider religious system where the bog was regarded as an especially sacred place” (21). See also J.R. Beuker, 12–17. And in V.T. van Vilsteren’s, “Discoveries in the Bog: History and Interpretation,” we read: doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.50san © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Figure 74.  Danish bog. Photo: Dhoxax/Shutterstock.com

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certain mystique, was carried around the fields to ensure fertility. During this period, no weapons were to be carried since peace and harmony had to prevail. To conclude the ritual, the goddess was returned to the bog, and humans were sacrificed in her honor.3 In Tacitus’s Germania (c. 96 CE) – the first ethnographic probing of the northern European region and its religious and cultural practices – one may learn of the practice of a people in the ancient North for whom human sacrifice in holy wetlands was apparently common: distinctio poenarum ex delicto. proditores et transfugas arboribus suspendunt, ignavos et imbelles et corpore infames caeno ac palude, iniecta insuper crate, mergunt. diversitas supplicii illuc respicit, tamquam scelera ostendi operteat, dum puniuntur, flagitia abscondi. (280) (The nature of the execution varies according to the offence: traitors and deserters are hung from trees; cowards and inept fighters and notorious evil-livers are plunged into the mud of bogs with a hurdle on their heads: the difference of punishment has regard to the principle that crime should be blazoned abroad by its retribution, but abomination hidden.) [281]

At the end of the late Roman Iron Age, these deposits in the bogs seem to have declined and, as the archaeologist Flemming Kaul explains: Sacrificial acts and rituals were no longer performed in the bogs and wetlands, but were moved into or close to the property of the magnate, perhaps in specially appointed places or houses. The social condition and political relations changed, and in this dispensation there was no longer room for the sacred bog. (39)

Not surprisingly, bogs, swamps, and wetlands offer a rich source for the imaginary. From medieval sagas to nineteenth-century romantics and on to twenty-first century postmodernists, bogs, swamps, and wetlands have served as eco-libraries full of stories to be dug out and read. The psychological possibilities of the bog seem to be irresistible. And the peculiar materiality of the bogs, their in-between-ness, allows the spatial and the mental to mingle and turn “deeply” uncanny. Mysterious reappearances, strange transformations, and dangers of all sorts are linked to bogs. But if bogs are no longer places for sacred practices, what kinds of stories can they tell? To answer this question, one should consider how bogs have been used in Danish literature from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. After a so-called bog body (mummified human remains) was unearthed in a bog in Jutland in 1835, she was given the name Queen Gunhild. Her name was inspired by the medieval Jómsvíkinga Saga, which tells the story of how Queen Gunhild of Norway during the Viking Age was lured to Denmark by King Harald Bluetooth under the pretense of a marriage offer only to be drowned in the bog. Known to be cunning, power-hungry, and untrustworthy, Gunhild led a dramatic life. In The Bog People, the archaeologist P.V. Glob explains: Historical sources describe Gunhild as a beauty, refer to her love of pomp, and characterize her as shrewd, witty, clever, merry and eloquent, friendly and open-handed to everyone who would “The lowering of fog over the water only contributed to the ominous character of the bogs. In historic times, this often led to superstitions about bog ghosts and mythical creatures” (22). 3.

Indeed, as some have argued, it might have been a privilege to be hung and then placed in a bog grave. Hanging was not seen as degrading until Christianity made it so in an effort to stamp out pagan beliefs and practices. See Kaul, 39.

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do what she wanted, but cruel, false, malevolent and cunning if anyone crossed her. She seems also to have been dissolute and domineering to a high degree. (41)

This interpretation took hold in the public imagination not least due to the thrilling prospect that here was a body that had returned from the dead to speak visually about past passions and crimes – among the royals. A host of literary scholars, antiquarians, poets, and dramatists quickly saw her remains as a chance for eroticizing the past. For example, in 1841 – six years after the discovery – Danish author Steen Steensen Blicher published a poem in the journal Brage og Idun entitled “Dronning Gunhild” (Queen Gunhild) in which he described Gunhild as a femme fatale from the past, a temptress decked in luscious fur and jewelry and given to depraved desires. The Queen, the poem suggests, was appropriately punished when she was condemned to death in the bog. Stripped of her seductive power as well as of her clothes, she became abject and disgusting; she was joined in marriage to a realm that corresponded to her character: dark and foul – a cold and rigid monstrosity. Doubly submersed in the bog and in Blicher’s words, the powerful saga queen became a disempowered bog queen. In 1846 another Danish author, Christian Hostrup, gave Queen Gunhild a dramatic part in his comedy En Spurv i Tranedans (A Sparrow in Crane Dance). As in Blicher’s poem, the Queen is once again eroticized. The dramatic but comic scene in which Gunhild here materializes takes place at the end of the first act on a moonlit night in a swampy opening in the woods. A student, Halling, who is known to be in love with the daughter of one the pillars of society, runs into a young tailor, Peter Ravn, near a stake in the bog. While they discuss strategies for proposing to young girls, a church bell is heard chiming in the distance. Suddenly a voice resonates from below asking the men to rock the stake in the soft soil, and the Queen rose as a dea ex machina out of the stage floor and exclaims: O hvor det letted! Nattens kølige luft slaar mig imøde, Svaler min brændende Kind, Fylder friskkvægende mig den gispende Lunge. Endelige ser jeg dig atter, grønkronede Skov! Dig, buede Himmeltag!” .... Dybt, dybt laa jeg dernede, levende jordet, Lænket imellem Liv og Død til forsmædelig Kval, Laa, medens Aar, Aarhundreder skifted, Knuget af Jordens Vægt, Træt af at stønne: Luft! Luft! Og aldrig faa Lindring. (150) (Oh, how it released me! The crisp breeze of night meets me And cools my burning cheek Fills with air my gasping lung Finally, I see you again, green-leafed forest You, orbit roof of heaven! .... Deep, deep down I lay, buried alive, Chained between life and death in loathsome torment,

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I lay, as the years and the centuries passed, Burdened by the weight of the soil, Tired of moaning: Air! Air! And never getting any relief.)

To both Hostrup and Blicher, there seems to have been a direct correlation between the typical traits of bogs and the characteristics of the bodies that emerge from them: they are uncanny and uncouth. They represent a past that threatens the present even if, as in the case of Hostrup’s comedy, it comes about in a rather hilarious fashion as the Bog Queen rises from the stage floor. More importantly to Blicher and Hostrup, the bog is no longer a sacred place, but represents a kind of historical repository from which they can draw rather profane material to articulate concerns of a human nature. To their countryman, Hans Christian Andersen, bogs were murky and ominous places fertile with literary potential. But to him the association between humans and bogs produced a split that needed to be mended. He therefore used bogs and swamps as social metaphors (he called himself a swamp-plant) and as images of mentalities: dark, subconscious spaces that hold secrets and stories. In his fairy tale “Dyndkongens Datter” (1858; “The Bog King’s Daughter”), for example, he suggests that bogs are nebulous sites with paradoxical elements. To demonstrate how this is accomplished, he intertwines a range of geographies (north and south) and time periods (past, present, and future) in an ambitious attempt to weave a tale that introduces two competing bog narratives: one drawing on the Old Testament and ultimately on Christianity, the other on folklore and Nordic mythology. Andersen’s narrator proclaims Genesis to be the “ældste og længste Eventyr” (201) [“oldest and longest fairy tale” (553)]. It in part recounts the story of an Egyptian princess taking the infant Moses out of the Nile and into her home. The other tale is not universally known, “maaskee fordi det er næsten indenlandsk” (201) [“possibly because it is almost domestic” (553)]. It is the story of another Egyptian princess who is however submerged in the so-called Wild Bog located in the north of Jutland, the Danish peninsula: hvem som helst, der traadte ud paa Hængedyndet, gik det for tusind Aar siden som det endnu gaaer dem, der komme her, de plumpede i, og sank ned til Dyndkongen, som de kaldte ham, der regjerede nede i det store Mose-Rige. Gyngekongen kunde han ogsaa kaldes, men vi synes nu bedst om at sige Dyndkongen; og det kaldte Storkene ham ogsaa. (202) (if they stepped out on the surface of the great bog: a thousand years ago – as today – they would slowly sink into the muddy ooze down to the bog king. That was the name given to the ruler of the great bog. Some called him the swamp king, but we prefer the bog king and the storks agree with us.) [554]

As told by the migrating storks, the young Egyptian princess dressed in swanskin flies into the Wild Bog in search of a lotus flower that is said to be capable of healing her dying father, the Egyptian king. But as she reaches for the flower, the princess is caught by the arms of the bog king, raped, and in due time (the reader is left to imagine the customary nine months) a lily rises out of the bog water and opens its petals to reveal a small beautiful baby girl, the fruit of the violent deed. A stork, one of the fairytale’s narrators, brings the baby to a childless wife of a Viking chief. The little girl’s double ancestry is soon unmistakable: in the daylight she has a beautiful appearance like her mother but at night a dark, wild, and evil character like her father. In the darkness, she looks like a slimy frog from the bog but with eyes that reveal her mother’s

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gentle soul. She is a beautiful young Valkyrie in the daylight but ready to kill with a heart that is cold and black like the mud of the bog; at night a sad-eyed frog that speaks mutely of grief over its/her evil deeds. To resolve the disparity, the girl (whose Old Norse name, Helga, means holy and sacred) must pass through a sacral process. This was the time of Viking raids and the worship of Odin and Thor, but also just when Christianity was introduced to Denmark. A young Christian priest, handsome like the Norse god Balder, is taken prisoner by Helga’s Viking foster father and readied to be sacrificed on Odin’s alter. Eager to insult and kill him, she proclaims, “Du er jo bleg som Hø! Træl! skjægløs!” (218) [“you look pale, slave! Beardless fool!” (568)]. She, though, is sprayed by water and thus baptized by the priest, who, although tempted by Helga’s daytime beauty, sacrifices his life while saving hers after an attack by robbers. Her tears over the priest’s death finally free her from the gruesome duality and allow her to return to the bog to release her mother, the Egyptian princess. Mother and daughter – mirror images – embrace. The mother’s tale of her captivity in the bog is peculiar and complicates Andersen’s use of time and place: it becomes clear that at the time of the rape, the realm of the bog and Egyptian burial traditions are interlocked. The mother describes the rape in frightening terms: “Ud derfra traadte den tusindaarige Drot, Mumie-Skikkelsen, sort som Beg, sortglindsende som Skovsneglen eller det fede, sorte Dynd, Dyndkongen eller Pyramidens Mumie, jeg vidste det ikke. Han slyngede sine Arme om mig og det var som om jeg maatte døe. (223–24) [“Out stepped the ancient king: a mummy, black as pitch, glittering like the black slugs that creep into the forest. Whether it was the bog king or the mummy from the pyramids, I did not know. He flung his arms around me, and I felt that now I would die” (574)]. The bog, then, represents the merging of two realms – Danish and the Egyptian – that are individually problematic and must be resolved by a third, the new religion brought by the Christian priest. Helga’s conversion, however, and her symbolic baptism remain incomplete. After returning to Egypt, where she brings life back to the semi-mummified king, she sees the spirit of the dead Christian priest and persuades him to take her to paradise, if only for a moment. Warned that she must come back immediately, she lingers nonetheless and returns only to discover that the three short minutes she had spent in paradise has lasted hundreds of years on earth. In the meantime, her life history has become the story of Helga-from-the-bog. It is now printed on the walls of monuments and passed down from generation to generation. Finally she understands humility, kneels, and prays; her soul shoots like a ray of light to heaven as her body becomes dust and leaves nothing but a withered lotus flower where she once stood. Just as the bog had functioned in the Iron Age as a place of worship, Andersen uses it as a place from which a new religious practice must free itself. In another tale from the bog, “Pigen, som traadte paa Brødet” (1859; “The Girl who Stepped on Bread”), Andersen again employs the bog as a material realm from which one must be lifted in order to reach a higher spiritual existence. The bog is tied to folklore: “Du har vel hørt om Pigen, som traadte paa Brødet for ikke at smudske sine Skoe, og hvor ilde det da gik hende. Det er baade skrevet og trykt” (254) [“I suppose you have heard about the girl who stepped on the bread in order not to get her shoes dirty, and how badly she fared. The story has been written down and printed” (606)]. Yet to Andersen the folktale tells only half the story, and the question

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becomes: “Hvor kom hun hen?” (255) [“Where did she disappear to?” (607)]. Andersen answers the question by raising the girl from the bog psychologically and spiritually. To lift the girl psychologically means to lift her from the folklore realm into the presumed higher form of the art tale. But first she has to linger in a bog “cesspool” with a smell so horrible “saa at Menneskene maa daane derved” (255) [“that a human being would faint if he got even a whiff of it” (607)]. The girl’s vanity, however, is not cured by this submersion in the bog (we are a far cry from the bog as a holy place), and she is turned into a rigid statue with Medusa snakes for hair, a kind of “souvenir” that appeals to the Devil’s great-grandmother, who places the girl and her fossilized bread pedestal in the Devil’s entrance hall. Suspended in this limbo with a soul as hardened as her stiff body, her story becomes a ballad and then, like that of the bog king’s daughter, a folktale. The folktale is told to a little girl who (even on her deathbed as an old woman) never forgets the petrified girl in the bog; her dying tears at long last melt the heart of the girl in the bog and lift her from her dark prison transformed into a lonely and voiceless little bird. The girl-as-bird seeks final redemption by gathering breadcrumbs for a starving sparrow until they weighed as much as the bread that she had stepped on. Lifted from the demonic bog, the girl-as-bird finally flies into the sun, presumably for eternal salvation. In both of Andersen’s tales, the liminality of the bog is used to describe unruly characters in need of stabilization. They are split or evil and are beyond the realm of the proper. In this process, Andersen overlays the pagan sacral bog-of-old with a veneer of Christian belief. At the same time, his psychological elevation and religious transmutation of his bog-protagonists are romantic (and neo-Platonic) to their core; and his meta-commentary on the making of tales demonstrates his continual recasting of folktales into art tales. The bog as a Nordic place of literary interest is of course not exclusively a Danish phenomenon. In the Swedish poet Thomas Tranströmer’s “Elegi” (1954), for example, the bog body known as Bocksten Man is located at the center of a deep silence that “resonates” with the immobility of a stilled landscape. In the poem, the ancient dead human is fused with nature and shares a materialized mental property as the “hand” of an orchid rising out of the soil from the world below: “Orörlig skog, orörlig vattenyta / och orkideens hand som sträcks ur myllan” (28) [“Unmoving woods, unmoving water surface / and stretching from the earth the orchid’s hand” (16)]. To Tranströmer, nature (and here specifically the bog) takes on a metaphysical aspect; it is alive yet foreboding death. In spite of the fact that in Finland bogs cover 30 percent of the nation’s surface, the Finnish literary scholar Lea Rojola has shown that they have been relatively neglected as a national landscape (in favor of woods and lakes). She notes how the obvious liminality of the wetlands has been regarded in Finnish literature as dangerous and decadent; only when civilized, tamed, and cleared can the nation rise from it. Such is the case in Eino Leino’s novel Jaana Rönty (1907), in which the bogs connote degeneration. The female protagonist Jaana is linked to depraved and bestial behavior. As Rojola demonstrates, she is associated with the bog as a representative of ordinary Finnish people, of the nation, which has degenerated from its original, authentic national culture and turned into a wild, bestial creature. . . . The images that Leino uses to describe this “new” degenerated nation originate from the marshes and the marshes partially function as an explanation of the horrible degeneration of the Finnish nation and its people. (112)

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In other Finnish novels mentioned by Rojola, like Irja Salla’s Unissakävijä: romaani (1943; Sleepwalker), the gendering of the bogs offers a potential for female characters to subvert societal restraints and expectations. Here the bog represents a place of individual desire, even if of a deadly kind. Outside of the Nordic region, bogs have also inspired a great deal of fiction. A few examples will suffice: in Ireland, most famously, Seamus Heaney has used bogs as the very “matter” for his poetics. To him, the pen is a spade and language is the layered soil into which the pen digs and from which the poetic imagination culls words and things to speak about in the present. In France, Michel Tournier in his 1970 novel Le roi des aulnes (translated first as The Erl-King, then as The Ogre) has used the bog as a place into which a young holocaust survivor escapes. In Canada, Anne Michaels’s novel Fugitive Pieces (1966) allowed a holocaust survivor to reemerge from the bog as living testimony to the historical atrocities committed during World War II. The bog thus functions for all these writers as a powerful place for mnemonics. The same is also the case in Danish novelist Ebbe Kløvedal Reich’s massive novel Fæ og Frænde: Syvenhalv nats fortællinger om vejene til Rom og Danmark (1977; Farm and Family: Seven-and-a-Half Nights’ Stories about the Roads to Rome and Denmark) where the unique properties of bogs are used as sites for remembrance and as storage places not just of ritual artifacts and bodies, but also of ideas. The material element of the bog, sphagnum, is here known as Hundekød (Dog’s Flesh) and given life and voice capable of making a pact with the human inhabitants. Dog’s Flesh has the ability to hold onto the flesh and skin of a dead body but is also part of something much larger, a mental concept: “én eneste stor idé, fordelt i alle de små mosplanter, den består af: Ideen om at nedsænke og udødeliggøre alverden i ferskvand” (31) [one great idea, distributed among all the little moss plants of which it is made: the idea to submerge and immortalize everything in fresh water]. Like a sponge, the bog material starts as a flexible plant, which matures until it is full-grown and able to absorb “både vand og træer og dyr og mennesker” (32) [both water and trees and animal and humans]. As a tweaking of the Christian burial ritual – “Af vand er du kommet, til vand skal du blive, af vand skal du igen opstå” (32) [Of water you have come, to water you shall return, and of water you will be resurrected] – the bog connotes (preChristian) death, preservation, and resurrection. In Kløvedal Reich’s novel, then, the deposit in the bog of an Iron Age man (later known as the bog body Tollund Man) and the unearthing of his remains some 2000 years later become a symbolic resurrection that allows the bog man to be both a witness from the past and witness of the present and “the whole hideous history” in-between. The bog becomes part of a national story rooted in place and practice, a mnemonics that urges the Danes to bear in mind who they are/were at a time in the early 1970s when Denmark opted to join the European Union. This national vision is a far cry from the postmodern optic of the final examples here where bogs are used to allow for an anarchic and chaotic temporality: simultaneity of past and present as well as fecundity of disorder. This can be seen, for example, in the ways in which the past – harbored symbolically in the bogs and swamps – undermine and rock the foundation of the modern. In the Danish auteur Lars von Trier’s film Riget (2003; The Kingdom), the swamp underneath the sane, rational medical institution of the main national research hospital in Copenhagen, Rigshospitalet, known colloquially as Riget, emits vapors of disruption, irrationality, and mystery that permeate, mingle with, and threaten normality and rationality. Here

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wetlands present fuzzy morphologies and continue to be easily co-opted by historical, cultural and psychological anxieties. A similar use of the bog as a liminal place and space is found in the Danish author Camilla Christensen’s novel Jorden under Høje Gladsaxe4 (2002; The Earth under Høje Gladsaxe) in which a suburban community has been built on the remains of Iron Age settlements, on bogland. Here high-rise buildings represent the precariousness and fragility of the present. They are under constant pressure of the past. For both von Trier and Christensen, wetlands translate to skepticism towards definitive spatial and temporal boundaries. Both suggest that the architecture of modernity, in spite of its newness, is a place with a deep unruly past that “whispers,” leaves traces, and is potentially treacherous. To Christensen, the high-rise complex is almost already a ruin and will eventually, the novel predicts, disappear just as did the other worlds built on bog-land. In this place in time (past, present, and future), things are ephemeral; they are never permanent, but  – like time itself  – changeable, always on the move. For the people living in the high-rises, the liminal bog outside their windows is symbolically matched with another kind of liminality inside their apartments: the Internet. The computer allows the main character in Christensen’s novel, an old woman named Gunhild after the old saga queen (the very same that was used by both Blicher and Hostrup) to fall into a peculiar “time travel” as she, mesmerized, browses in an erotically charged computer search where bog and cyberspace are meshed. Information on the Internet about death-ice-holes, for example, provides the key to understanding how to put an end to the continual cycles of resurrections from the bog. On the Internet, Gunhild finds herself in various previous forms originally dating back to her earliest life as a young Iron Age woman sacrificed to the bog. She finally entices a male inhabitant in the high-rise building to slip through the portal of the bog back in time some 2,500 years, to penetrate its temporal void in order to access the time and the place where she died her first bog-death, and to release her finally by making love. Christensen’s use of the Internet as a realm that corresponds to the bog (a place of searching and “digging”) does not display nostalgia for the past; on the contrary, there is a certain kind of nostalgia for the future as if it can remedy the traumas of the past. Yet to search the Internet is also to tap into a realm that like the bog struggles with its own organic “vernacular” of worms and viruses; it is a postmodern digging into a realm in which things can be found, combined – and lost again. Finally, a slightly different use of the bog as a liminal place can be seen in the Danish author and essayist Suzanne Brøgger’s work. Her last name sounds similar to the present tense of the Danish verb “to brew” (at brygge), and in several of her works she deliberately plays off this phonetic resemblance to suggest an incarnation of herself as a bog-brewing writer. She notes that the English word bog means “book” in Danish and perhaps even originates from Old Norse: “Og hvorfor så ikke læse mosen som en bog?” (10) [So why not read the bog as a book?]. She continues to do just that. In her memoir Sølve (2006), the walls of her house and home, built near wetlands, present the “writing” of previous generations of inhabitants and various happenings in the bog. To give us these stories Brøgger proposes a kind of skywalking: “hvor alt finder sted samtidigt” (9) [where everything happens simultaneously]. The bog is seen 4.

Høje Gladsaxe is a satellite community outside Copenhagen.

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as “kaos-land” (14) [chaos-land]: “lumsk and livsfarlig, som et kæmpe mørkt gab, der kan sige haps og opsluge hvilken som helst vejfarende, der altid lokkes til at fare vild. Kun mosekonen har følt sig hjemme i den tåge, som hun efter sigende brygger for at vildlede” (14–15) [devious and life-threatening, as an enormous dark chasm that can say “gotcha” and gulp up any traveler, inevitably lured off course. Only the bog-woman feels at home in the fog that she is said to brew in order to mislead]. To “brew to mislead” is an obvious meta-commentary and warning to Brøgger’s readers that what we read, her “brew,” is not to be taken entirely at face value. Her intent is philosophical. To her, the murky ancient wetland is transformed into the invisible reality that makes it a “tredje sted – mosen – som et hverken-eller” (15) [third place – the bog – as an neither-nor]. The bog, then, to Brøgger, is rich and productive, an a-chronological display case of sorts. The bog hides a “virkelighed, vi ikke kan se, men som er der hele tiden” (17) [reality that we cannot see, but one that is here all the time]. It is fertile and sexual and, yes, sacred: “i mosen kunne man ane den underlige sammenhæng mellem kønslige overskridelser eller forbrydelser og bruden som det offer, man kastede i vandet for at gøre mosen hellig” (18) [in the bog one can intuit the strange connection between sexual transgressions or crimes and the bride as the victim thrown in the water to make the bog sacred]. While silence is the modus operandi of the bog, to Brøgger silence is impossible. Her bog/book subsequently offers a boisterous narrative full of multilayered histories, the author’s own and those of the place in which she lives. To conclude: the reader has seen how the entropy (randomness and disorder) that bogs represent makes a strictly chronological, historical reading difficult and renders them particularly well suited to test the viability of the kinds of reconsiderations of chronological models that many critical theories have called for during the past decades.5 If human sacrifices in the Iron Age were most likely meant to recreate order, the boggy wetlands in which they were placed did not provide peaceful graves on which epitaphs secured and anchored the remains with name and identity. Things that reemerge out of the bog, in other words, seem perfectly suited to complicate a neatly layered sense of history. Bogs, then, subvert the proper “order of things,” and allow preserved artifacts and bodies to emerge, un-naturally and out of time in order to disrupt the logic of “normal” historical processes.6

5.

I am thinking here of Fernand Braudel and others. See for example his On History.

6.

Similarly, as Jennifer Wallace has argued: “the excavation of perfectly preserved bodies disturbs the boundaries we maintain between what is natural and what is unnatural” (55).

Worlding Troy Storfjell

In the summer of 2011, an interesting item appeared in Nordlys, the largest daily newspaper in Tromsø, Norway. In a carefully argued, page-long article, Ph.D. stipendiat Tone Kristine Thørring Tingvoll took the editors of the paper to task for the way they had treated special characters of the North Sámi alphabet in an article she had written for them several weeks earlier. That article had reviewed the installation Kuben that artist Odd Marakatt Sivertsen had exhibited at the Riddu Riđđu Festival in Gáivuotna/Kåfjord during the previous month. The main point of contention in Tingvoll’s complaint was that the Nordlys editors had rendered the North Sámi character đ as d thus transforming Riddu Riđđu to Riddu Riddu. Where originally the name had meant “little storm on the coast,” the Norwegianized rendition simply meant “beach beach.” In other words, it was nonsensical. What made Tingvoll’s second article so interesting, though, was how she tied this typographical substitution to a much longer history of colonial dispossession and effacement. Om Nordlys og andre aviser velger å opprettholde argumenter som at “vår font takler ikke samiske ord” innebærer det å akseptere usynliggjøringen av den språklige og kulturelle virkeligheten i vår region. . . . I verste fall er dette en form for sensur som normaliserer fornorsking, usynliggjøring og forvregning. (46) (If Nordlys and other newspapers choose to continue with arguments like “Our font cannot deal with Sámi words,” it amounts to accepting that the linguistic and cultural reality of our region is rendered invisible. . . . At its worst, this is a form of censorship that normalizes Norwegianization, erasure, and distortion.)

Tingvoll’s point was that by treating the Sámi linguistic content of the Riddu Riđđu Festival as irrelevant, the newspaper was participating in a long tradition of marginalizing discourse that has configured Sámi cultural space as peripheral to the Norwegian metropolitan norm. Her critique sheds light on the cultural politics of such things as newspaper fonts’ character range, seemingly innocent editorial decisions, and the acceptance of marginalization and the overwriting of place as normal. In postcolonial critical terminology, the process to which she is calling attention is known as worlding. Worlding is the process whereby a local space is situated within a larger world system and inscribed as marginal and as distant from the source of its own meaning. For instance, when Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) writes, “Jeg havde en farm i Afrika” (15) [“I had a farm in Africa” (3)], she is embarking on an inscription of a local space in the Gikuyu highlands, “ved Foden af Bjerget Ngong” (15) [“at the foot of the Ngong Hills” (3)], as part of a global imperial system that locates that place’s center in the far-away European metropole. When she continues writing, “Nu er jeg der, hvor jeg skal være” (16) [“Here I am, where I ought to be” (4)], she participates in a new discourse of belonging and order that re-writes the Gikuyu homeland as a European colony, as a place always already marginal to the source of its own meaning. These highlands are no longer the homeland of the Gikuyu, whose status is reduced to being doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.51sto © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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“squatters,” but rather the place where European aristocrats and coffee plantation owners belong, where they ought to be. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak labeled this discursive move worlding, describing it as a process through which “Europe has consolidated itself as sovereign and subject by defining its colonies as ‘Others’” (128). In describing the writing of Captain Geoffrey Birch to his colonial superiors in India during the early nineteenth century, Spivak argues that the captain “is actually engaged in consolidating the self of Europe by obliging the native to cathect the space of the Other on his home ground. He is worlding their own world, which is far from mere uninscribed earth, anew, by obliging them to domesticate the alien as Master” (133, original emphasis). In their compendium of postcolonial critical theoretical terms and concepts, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin gloss worlding as “describ[ing] the way in which colonized space is brought into the ‘world’, that is, made to exist as part of a world essentially constructed by Euro-centrism” (225). In other words, worlding overwrites an existing, local and Native place as peripheral to a distant center and thus alienates not only the place, but also the Natives who live there. The worlded space is a dependent space not only economically and politically, but also in terms of meaning and legitimacy. It can no longer establish the criteria for measuring its own value or provide the key to its own reading. At best it can aspire to be a “near-image” (Spivak 128) of the colonizing metropole, a sort of second-rate substitute for the authentically European. As the inscription of colonial discourse on colonized space, worlding can occur in many ways, some of the more straightforward of which are exploration and mapping, specimen collecting, and travelogues (Ashcroft et al. 226). A study of worlding in Nordic contexts would certainly want to pay attention to travel writing, immigrants’ letters, and explorers’ and merchants’ journals as well as to scholarly and bureaucratic texts, and would need to acknowledge such colonial narratives as the early seventeenth-century memoirs of Jón Ólafsson Indíafara, which document the range of Danish imperial activities in Iceland, Spitsbergen, Vardøhus and Tranquebar on the Indian subcontinent, and J. L. Carstens’s eighteenth-century text En almindelig Beskrivelse om alle de Danske, Americanske eller West-Indiske Eylande (ca. 1740; J. L. Carstens’ St. Thomas in Early Danish Times: A General Description of all the Danish, American, or West Indian Islands), which details a colonial society based on the slavery and sugar plantations. The worlding of peripheral Nordic spaces vis-à-vis Nordic centers is most voluminous and longstanding, though, in the colonial inscription of the far north. Going back at least to the sixteenth century, a long tradition of Nordic inscriptions of Sápmi (the lands of the Indigenous Sámi; see figure 56, referenced in an earlier essay) has overwritten the region as peripheral parts of Nordic states, paradoxically both domestic and exotic when viewed from the southern centers of Copenhagen and Stockholm and more recently Oslo and Helsinki.1 Beginning with Sebastian Cabot’s 1553 expedition of discovery along the Arctic coast, English and Dutch merchant-explorers competed with each other and, increasingly, with the monarchs of Denmark, Sweden, and Russia for colonial mastery of these distant lands. King Christian IV’s 1599 trip beyond North Cape to Vardøhus, for instance, functioned as a sort of exclamation mark at the 1.

Russia of course also colonized portions of Sápmi, and employed its own tropic moves of worlding. However, this analysis is primarily concerned with worlding in Nordic literary history.

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end of a century of exploration and “authoritative” travel writing on Sápmi and the far north by mercantile explorers from England and the Netherlands, as well as competition, war, and intrigue over the interior of Sápmi involving Russia, Sweden, and Denmark-Norway. During this period the Arctic peripheries of Europe emerged as the site of composite and contradictory anxieties and contested inscriptions. Through his authoritative presence and display of military power, Christian IV overwrote the coast of Sápmi (and its adjoining seas) as Danish (or at least as peripheral parts of the Danish empire), thus capping a mercantile and imperial textual production in which one can trace the genealogy of an Arctic ambivalence that construes the land and its inhabitants both as beyond the pale of Europe and its civilization and as simultaneously internal to European polities. In other words, Sápmi has been worlded and configured as peripheral to the sources of its own meaning as existing for, and deriving its legitimacy from, the southern metropoles. Successive Lappmark plakats (proclamations) claimed much of the interior of Sápmi for Sweden although it remained for an army of civil servants to world this area as a special “external-internal” part of the kingdom. As such, it emerged as a place where the legal, cultural, and linguistic norms of Sweden might be set aside, but which nonetheless fell under the authority of the Swedish monarch. The presterelasjonene, or reports of clergymen serving beyond the Lappmark frontier, on which Johannes Scheffer (Schefferus) based much of his authoritative 1673 Lapponia, are prime examples of this sort of appropriation-by-documentation. Carl Linnæus’s Lapplandsresa år 1732 (The 1732 Journey to Lapland)2 also follows this worlding strategy in which the colonial master represents himself as the master of science and scholarly knowledge (Spivak 135) while also construing Sápmi as a peripheral, objectified, and colonized space whose primary meaning derives from its utility for the Swedish metropole. In this often-entertaining journal, the father of modern scientific taxonomy catalogs the geography, flora, fauna, and Native inhabitants of the northern interior then undergoing colonial transformation and appropriation by fixing them as objects of Enlightenment knowledge and metropolitan governance. Indeed, the twenty-five-year-old scientist’s journal is a striking example of what Michel Foucault referred to as the classical period’s impulse to “découvrir le langage arbitraire qui autorisera le déploiement de la nature en son espace, les termes derniers de son analyse et les lois de sa composition.” (Les mots 77) [“to discover the arbitrary language that will authorize the deployment of nature within its space, the final terms of its analysis and the laws of its composition.” (Order of Things 62)] Through systematic codification based on empirical observation and an analytic practice rooted in the bourgeois logic of use-value and commodity- or exchange-value, Linnaeus re-orders the sensuous world of Sápmi into a systematized panoply of knowable and usable things existing for the benefit of the Swedish kingdom. Lapplandsresa aspires not only to mastery over nature, but also to mastery over the Sámi, their language, and their material culture, all of which are cataloged and represented in the rational order of the Enlightenment. Interestingly, though, Linnaeus’s rationalist exercise is haunted by 2.

Linnæus’s journal, Iter lapponicum, was translated by James Edward Smith and published in English in 1811 as Lachesis Lapponica. In 1889 it was included in Carl von Linnés ungdomsskrifter, andra serien, edited by Ewald Ährling, and published in Stockholm by P.A. Norstedt & Söners Förlag. 1913 seems to be the first time it was published on its own in Sweden; for Swedish citations, here the 1965 edition was used.

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a counter-discourse of fancy and whimsy that is nearly romantic in its nostalgia for an Ovidian Silver Age, its casting of plant reproduction in terms of romantic narratives, and its exoticization of the Sámi. Regardless of the ambivalence this counter-discourse reveals in relationship to the rigors of reason, it only serves to underscore the peripheral position of Sápmi, which is inscribed as a strange and mysterious place full of wonder but also of chaos and waste. An even more transparent act of worlding was Major Peter Schnitler’s extensive cartographic and ethnographic work in Sápmi during the 1740s, which led to the extension of a border between Norway and Sweden through Sámi homeland in the Strömstad Treaty of 1751. In this case metropolitan knowledge – in the form of an extensive cataloging of fjords, rivers, lakes, mountains, and forests – directly enabled the extension of colonial administrative control into the heart of Sápmi thus rendering these places either Norwegian or Swedish and effacing their Sámi-ness. Despite its famous Lappecodicillen, which granted a number of rights to the Sámi to cross the newly established border, the border treaty ensured that from that point on one would begin more and more to speak in terms of Swedish Sámi and Norwegian Sámi – and, of course, correspondingly in other parts of Sápmi, of Russian and Finnish Sámi. Beginning in the sixteenth century, and increasing in numbers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, waves of Finnish-speaking immigrants had settled in areas of Finnmark, Troms and Nordland, coming to be known as Kven. With the rising spirit of nationalism in Norway during the nineteenth century, authorities adopted a policy of Norwegianization designed to transform the Kven and the Sámi into ethnic Norwegians. Based initially on a fear of the Kven as a potential security threat due to their assumed sympathies toward Finland and thus to the Russian Empire, of which Finland was then a part, this apprehension was also directed at Læstadianism, a Lutheran pietistic movement with particular appeal to Kven and Sámi parishioners in northern Norway (as well as to Sámi and Finns in Sweden and Finland). As these fears grew, so did the intensification of Norwegianization in schools in so-called overgangsdistrikter, or districts slated for transition from “foreign” to Norwegian, in 1851 (Eriksen and Niemi 4, 5, 11). Initiated with the motive of teaching Sámi and Kven children Norwegian in order to better integrate them into the state, Norwegianization took a moderate approach at first with much instruction and learning material in the students’ native languages (4–6). However, as the fear of the Kven potential to unravel Norwegian dominance increased and as the more moderate approaches to Norwegianization seemed less than successful, more funds were appropriated and stricter methods adopted during the 1880s and ’90s (6–14). In part these fears stemmed from an uneasy recognition of the interloping status of Norwegians in the region, as a stiftskapellen (arch chaplain) Christophersen revealed when he said that the poor results of Norwegianization efforts were “et Vitnesbyrd om at igrunden er Nordmændene de Fremmede i disse Egne” (qtd. in Eriksen and Niemi 6) [a testimony that, fundamentally, Norwegians are the foreigners in these parts]. The increasingly harsh Norwegianization policies were thus an attempt to inscribe Finnmark as Norwegian in an effort to overwrite the nagging historical realization that it was, in fact, not. In part, Norwegianization, which by the end of the century forbade all use of Sámi or Kven in the schools except in special circumstances as an auxiliary language in religious instruction (9), was also an effort to save the Sámi from the otherwise inevitable extinction to

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which the increasingly hegemonic discourse of Social Darwinism doomed them at the hands of nature (13). As Johan Sverdrup, Norwegian prime minister from 1884 to ’89, put it, “Den eneste Redning for Lapperne er at absorberes med den norske Nation” (Gjengset 140) [“For the Lapps the only salvation lies in their assimilation into the Norwegian nation” (Smith 16)]. This agenda had a different motivation than that which lay behind the attempt to Norwegianize the Kven, for they were seen as capable of outdoing the Norwegians for hegemony in Finnmark and thus had to be Norwegianized to save Norway (Eriksen and Niemi 12, 13). Although some wondered if the Sámi were capable of advancing from their lowly cultural status, even with the help of Norwegianization (13), the policy remained in effect until the midtwentieth century. Not only did it serve to alienate the Sámi within their homeland, but it also led to problems of self-esteem as many internalized the message that their culture and language were inferior. For a century being Sámi meant suffering the indignities of being the target of a state program of assimilation that was part of being a colonial subject. It was having to endure the violence of colonial inscription on one’s self. Sámi scholar Vuokko Hirvonen has pointed out how the scholarly work of the so-called lappologer [Lappologists] constitutes a discourse that “depict[s] the way outsiders have looked at the Sámi for centuries” (31). She herself encourages the application of postcolonial criticism to analysis of this discursive tradition and finds much of value in the approach. She writes, “Just like Said’s critique of Orientalism, the Sámi critique – especially of the Lappological research tradition – is, essentially, directed at the foundations of the colonialist use of power and the sets of values that have resulted from this use of power” (33). And historian Bjørg Evjen points out how much of the work of scholars like the linguist Just Qvigstad was heavily informed by an understanding of the Sámi as a culture in the process of dying out (60–61). Indeed, despite the sympathies of many of the Lappologists, their work was part of an inscription of Sámi space as superannuated and disappearing to be replaced, inevitably, by Norwegian space. Some scholars did more than produce scholarly texts about the Sámi, though. In 1881 Lappologist Jens Andreas Friis’s popular novel Fra Finmarken: Skildringer (From Finnmark: Portrayals), better known by its subsequently revised title Lajla, was published in Norway. Lajla told the story of a Norwegian girl adopted by reindeer herding parents who grew up as a Sámi daughter of the Arctic vidde plateau. The novel (and its later operatic and cinematic adaptations) represents a complex textual bricolage of the discourses of Lappology, the noble savage, and social Darwinism, and, moreover adds the name Lajla/Laila to the lexicon of Norwegian proper nouns.3 The novel helped popularize the image of the Sámi as anachronistic remnants of an earlier time sadly destined for erasure by the inevitable trajectory of historical progress. The foremost Lappologist of his day and a professor of Lappish and Kven at the University of Christiania beginning in 1866, J. A. Friis was strongly influenced by Rousseau and had studied under the Norwegian missionary to the Sámi, Niels Vibe Stockfleth, as well as the Finnish folklorist and author of the Kalevala, Elias Lönnrot (Lindkjølen 9, Beyer 563). Based on his numerous research trips to Finnmark, Friis had already published a number of scholarly texts on the 3.

It is possible that Friis borrowed this name from the Arabic “Leila,” meaning night. However, if this is the case, he is still to be credited with introducing it to the Nordic region (Kruken 175).

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Sámi including a Sámi dictionary and grammar (Lindkjølen 10–11). He was a staunch opponent of Norwegianization, argued for the release of Sámi prisoners held after the Kautokeino uprising of 1852, and engaged in a long series of fund-raising campaigns for the relief of Finnmark and the education of promising Sámi youth (Lindkjølen 12–15, 23–25). In order to help bring about more just legal treatment for the Sámi in Finnmark in questions of land tenure and traditional usage, Friis also created an ethnographic map (Lindkjølen 29). Although he was sympathetic to the plight of the Sámi, Friis remained firmly situated within nineteenth-century Norwegian discursive formations. He saw culture as evolutionary with different cultural formations and modes of production occupying different evolutionary stages. For him, culture was hierarchical and had a temporal dimension in which the industrialized capitalism of the West formed the most modern incarnation of human development. In his opinion, there was thus an inevitability to Sámi cultural change. Pastoralist reindeer-herding was doomed to give way to “modern” Norwegian lifestyles, and Sámi culture would succumb to the more advanced culture of the Norwegians. For Friis the most important goal was to ensure that this transition caused as little harm and difficulty to the Sámi as possible. He sought, therefore, to institute a just and humane legal apparatus that would ensure that Sámi rights were protected during the change. In general, Friis’s various philanthropic campaigns and texts portray the Sámi as wholly dependent on external (Norwegian) aid if they were to better their situation and advance up the cultural ladder toward modernity. For Friis, this was clearly imperative given his belief in the inferiority of Sámi culture (Lindkjølen 28–29). At the same time, however, Friis’s cultural evolutionary ideas were tinged with romantically nostalgic representations of Sámi reindeer herding. This lifestyle may have been doomed to extinction by the inevitable march of human progress, but that extinction was also to be lamented. As he writes in Lajla, “Nomadelivet har sine tillokkelser ikke bare for fjellsamen, men jeg tror for alle Adams barn, hvilket som helst kulturtrin de enn inntar” (45) [The nomadic life has its attractions, not just for the mountain Finn, but, I believe, for all of Adam’s children, whatever cultural stage they may occupy]. Of course, this attraction is that of the adult for childhood, and there is thus no possibility for a wholesale return to the earlier stage in cultural evolution any more than there is for a grown man to return to the life he enjoyed as a small boy. In his novel, which has been credited with providing the Norwegian reading public with the basis of its understanding of the Sámi, Friis’s scholarly authority makes itself felt in numerous historical and scholarly-sounding passages, thus creating a sort of ethnographic authenticity that frames a melodramatic narrative of hidden identities, ethnic conflict, and apparently hopeless loves that suddenly work out. Because of its authoritative use of Lappological discourse and the authority of its author as a leading scholar, the novel Lajla was particularly successful in framing the reading public’s understanding of Sámi space as temporally removed from, and destined to give way to, Norwegian space. Its inclusion as required reading for generations of students in Norwegian schools has helped to ground a national understanding of the Sámi in terms laid out in Friis’s novel (Lindkjølen 68–69). Knut Hamsun’s novel Markens grøde (1917; Growth of the Soil) also participates in the worlding of Sámi space. Not only does it overwrite Sápmi as Norwegian space through the rhetorical logic of the settler narrative, it also situates the colonial north within a larger world system of globalized capitalism to which the wandering “Lapp” and the Norwegian settler alike

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remain peripheral. In the first of Markens grøde’s worlding moves, the colonizing settler Isak inscribes the wilderness of Sámi space through his appearance and penetration of the allegedly unsettled land, thus, authorizing its entry into history. The novel’s famous opening lines read: Den lange, lange sti over myrene og ind i skogene, hvem har trakket op den? Manden, mennesket, den første som var her. Det var ingen sti før ham. Siden fulgte et og andet dyr de svake spor over moer og myrer og gjorde dem tydeligere, og siden igjen begyndte en og anden lap å snuse stien op og gå den når han skulde fra fjæld til fjæld og se til sin ren. Slik blev stien til gjennem den store almenning som ingen eiet, det herreløse land. (145) (“That long, long path over the moors and into the forest, who has trodden it? Man, a human being, the first one who came here. There was no path before him. Later a few animals followed the faint tracks over the heaths and moors and made them clearer, and still later a few Lapps began to nose out the path and to use it when they were going from one mountain to another to see to their reindeer. This is how the path through the great common, the no-man’s-land owned by no one, came into being.”) [Growth 3]

The negation of a pre-existing Sámi presence so clearly articulated here is, however, shortly undermined when two lapper stop by Isak’s campsite inquiring whether the newcomer is here to stay. Yet, despite the aboriginal presence of the Sámi, Markens grøde dispossesses them of the land through the trope of anachronistic space in which the territory of the Indigene is ascribed to a past that is actually prior to history, thus leaving the landscape of the present for all intents and purposes unoccupied and waiting to be inscribed and settled by the colonizer (McClintock 145). In making use of the settler narrative, Hamsun’s novel deploys a number of settler tropes as defined by postcolonial critic Alan Lawson, including those of the dying race, indigenization of the settler, and incorporation of the settler with the land. Lawson comments on the colonizing work done by these narrative tropes: “For the settler, too, the land had to be empty. Empty land can be settled, but occupied land can only be invaded. So the land must be emptied so that it can be filled, in turn, with both discourse and cattle” (27). The first of these tropes, that of the dying race, figures the Indigene as predestined for extinction by the teleology of progress and history with the result of effectively suppressing the active participation of the settler in making the Native disappear. In the second trope, that of the indigenization of the settler, he (and the subject usually is a man) takes the place of the recently vanished Native in mimicking his predecessor and, thus, distancing himself from the metropole. This strategy is a way of substituting his own claim to legitimacy for that of the authentic Native. If successful, it leads to the trope of incorporation with the land where Indigenous people and inscriptions of place are almost erased. Their lingering presence as a faint haunting of the periphery of the settler’s space, actually works in the discursive favor of the settler as an Other who affirms his selfhood by marking him as not-quite Native – and thus still superior. Although all three tropes are used in Markens grøde, that of the dying race is the least obvious. The indigenization of the settler is, in many respects, the project of the entire novel beginning with its opening lines that declare Isak to be “den første som var her” (145) [“the first one who came here” (3)]. It moves through Isak’s organic understanding of the land, his use of the Indigenous turf gamme (a type of Sámi dwelling), and his single-minded focus on his farm,

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which he understands perfectly. The outside world by contrast remains largely a mystery to him. Through its appeal to the discourse of patriarchal domination, penetration, and insemination of the land, the novel establishes Isak and his son Sivert as legitimate masters by portraying them as firmly rooted in the place they have colonized by rights of their hard work and fruitful procreative success. Though Markens grøde does not actually claim that the Sámi are doomed to disappear, it presents some interesting variations to the trope of the dying race. Its opening lines about the “first man” serve to deny Sámi presence, and even though this denial is complicated by the appearance of two wandering Sámi on the next page (147), the novel continues to counter the aboriginal presence that permeates the text (Jernsletten 83–84) by dismissing them as untrustworthy vagabonds, associates of the villainous crone Oline, and, in the second half of the novel, by largely ignoring them. By this point the textual effacement of the Sámi is nearly complete, and they are all but forgotten and are relegated to the extreme peripheries of the bustling Nordland community around the Margrave, Isak’s prosperous farm, where, after the death of Oline, they are reduced to slinking and lurking in the shadows of the new lords of the earth. The worlding of Sápmi appears complete. Yet Markens grøde performs a second narrative act of inscribing Indigenous space within a global system to which it is peripheral. This occurs in the ongoing story of the boom-and-bust cycle of copper mining in the mountains above Sellanrå, which is ultimately abandoned in a global economic downturn as the Swedish-financed operation is undersold by American mining in Montana. Although Hamsun’s anti-capitalist utopia of Sellanrå is not ultimately destroyed by global systems of trade and production, it is situated nonetheless in a binding though ambivalent relationship with these larger systems. The money from the sale of mining rights has made so much of Isak’s development of his pioneer farm possible, and the wealth that the enigmatic Geissler derives from his own speculations also contributes to growth at the Nordland farmstead. However much the former sheriff may contrast Isak’s and Sivert’s sphere of agricultural production with the bourgeois realm of capital and exchange, the one is clearly situated within the grasp of the other. Nordland is marginalized in relationship to distant global centers that authorize its meaning. In addition to the colonized Sámi, the settlers’ society itself is worlded. Sápmi is, of course, not the only colonized and worlded place in the Nordic region’s far north. Greenland, whose colonization began in 1721 through the efforts of the Harstad-born Norwegian pastor Hans Egede, has also been the focus of a long series of marginalizing overwritings. Among the more complicated of these are the texts of Knud Rasmussen, a DanishGreenlandic explorer and ethnographer of mixed ancestry. Rasmussen’s work on Greenland attempts to “preserve” the folklore with its anachronistically archaic present on behalf of a future when Greenlanders will have been alienated from their traditions by the inevitability of colonial progress. It creates an authoritative Danish text that documents the world of the Inuit even as it opens up multiple spaces for counter-discourses (Thisted “Voicing” 63). Among the many interesting and complicated aspects of Rasmussen’s oeuvre is the role his writing played in developing a pan-Inuit identity. It has continued to figure prominently in much of the anti- and postcolonial work of Inuit not only among those from Greenland, but from Canada, Alaska, and Siberia as well (66–67), illustrating not only the polyvalence of his own works, but also the ways in which resistance can emerge even from within worlded space.

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Nordic acts of worlding are, moreover, hardly limited to treatments of the Arctic. As part of the Danish and Swedish colonial enterprises, Nordic texts worlded the western coast of Africa (particularly in and around the current nation of Ghana), the Danish West Indies, Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) and Frederiksnagore (Serampore) in India, and, of course, the North American mainland (both through the colonization of New Sweden and through Nordic participation in English and American colonization of the continent. Nordic texts also participated in the worlding of places beyond the grasp of Nordic empires, most famously in Isak Dinesen’s (Karen Blixen’s) autobiographical memoirs of her time in the Ngong Hills of British East Africa. For all the popularity it has maintained over the years, Out of Africa has increasingly figured as the object of polemical scholarly debate among African, European, and American critics who alternately condemn and defend both the text and the baroness herself (for more on this text, see the essay on Dinesen in this volume’s Exploring node). Kenyan writer and intellectual Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o considers the book to be a particularly insidious example of imperialist discourse and argues in Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms that: Out of Africa is one of the most dangerous books ever written about Africa, precisely because this Danish writer was obviously gifted with words and dreams. The racism in the book is catching, because it is persuasively put forward as love. But it is the love of a man for a horse or for a pet. (133)

Abdul JanMohamed is more forgiving of the text’s deployment of outdated Eurocentric imagery in finding a clear undermining of the colonial project and colonialist discourse in its “light-hearted mockery of respectability” (52) and its acknowledgment of the foreignness of the English and European presence in the Kenyan highlands. Susan Brantly goes even further in defending Out of Africa in her book Understanding Isak Dinesen, pointing to the narrator’s subtle deployment of an irony that distances her from the colonial violence which is sometimes narrated and referring to many of Blixen’s personal letters for evidence of the author’s strongly critical views on the British regime in East Africa. Yet whether one finds the text dangerously racist, defensibly ambivalent, or clearly sympathetic to the plight of the colonized Gikuyu people, it seems obvious that the text engages in a worlding of the Ngong hills and, more broadly, of British East Africa and ultimately the entire continent. Through the centrality and privileged position of the European narrator herself, the text presents Kenya as subject to foreign control of the most intimate spheres of village and family life. This is the worlding of the text’s opening sentence: “I had a farm in Africa,” where the European control and re-organization of Africa and Africans is manifest. Furthermore, in inscribing the landscape as the site of an atavistic paradise for European aristocrats to live out their fantasies of hunting, dining in elegance on the savannah, and otherwise escaping bourgeois modernity, Out of Africa constitutes the East African colonial space as bearing meaning primarily for the role it plays in European imaginations. The animals, trees, hills, and Native peoples of Kenya exist as supporting characters and backdrops in a European drama with their space cathected on a nostalgic, Eurocentric plot that serves as a savage mirror that both reflects and enhances the nobility of the Baroness and her aristocratic companions.

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There is yet another worlding move in the text, one on which JanMohamed comments when he writes: Although the respectable world lent itself to easy mockery, it was a powerful force that finally destroyed Dinesen’s secular utopia. Ironically, precisely because she could not keep up the mortgage, she was forced to sell the farm to urban developers who subdivided and turned it into a suburb of Nairobi. (52)

The vagaries of the global coffee market bring an end to the European aristocratic paradise of Blixen’s farm. The subsequent development has dire consequences for the Gikuyu squatters who are relocated to a Native reserve through the Baroness’s intervention, which ameliorates some of the suffering. Here the material reality of the capitalist metropolis intrudes abruptly on both Blixen’s nostalgic dreams and Gikuyu village life by forcefully disrupting each and worlding Danish settler and Kenyan villager alike. It marginalizes them in their homes by showing each how the center of their space is located elsewhere. This move, in which settler narratives world settler society by revealing its own precarious dependence on an outside world that is less than flatteringly portrayed, can serve as a segue to a powerful anti-colonial tactic. Typically worlding is presented as a colonizing exercise, and both Markens grøde and Out of Africa can easily be read as colonizing texts. However, the case can be made for a more subversive deployment of worlding in counter-hegemonic texts that seek to expose the workings of colonial and imperial history on the intimate spaces of the lives of the colonized as part of an anti-colonial strategy. The case can clearly be illustrated by two texts that can be juxtaposed to those of Blixen and Hamsun: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (1993) and Matti Aikio’s Bygden ved Elvenesset (1929; The Village on the River Spit). Ngũgĩ’s text has already been mentioned for its highly negative reaction to Out of Africa. As part of an overall challenge to Eurocentric visions of the continent, the essay “Biggles, Mau Mau and I” narrates a textbook case of worlding. Describing his own childhood experience in an elite boarding school in British East Africa, the Kenyan author describes how – even as his older brother fought as one of the Mau Mau rebels in the highlands – Ngũgĩ lived a life steeped in the ritual and rhetoric of Britannia and empire. One of the most cherished parts of his schoolboy experience was particularly complicated and contradictory, though. The pulp fiction action-adventure series about the British airman-slash-secret-agent Biggles drew the young Ngũgĩ in like few other written texts had. He writes: I met Squadron-Leader James Bigglesworth, DSO DFC MC, at one time of the Royal Flying Corps, later the Royal Air Force, and known to his readers as simply Biggles, at Alliance High School, in Kenya, back in 1956. I followed his every adventure in Europe, Asia and Africa. . . . The shelves in the school library could not have enough of Biggles to satisfy the thirst and hunger for adventure of a sixteen-year-old boy. . . . Through him I could even fly an aeroplane and travel to all those places and emerge triumphant against all those crooks – mostly Germans, at least not English – bent on ruining the world as made by Pax Brittanica. (136)

Ironically, at the time that the young Ngũgĩ was immersing himself in the fictional world of Squadron-Leader Biggles, the RAF was bombing his brother and the other Mau Mau rebels in their highland strongholds. What made it possible for the sixteen-year-old Gikuyu to manage

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these contradictions, he writes, was that in the world of his colonial school and the stories of Biggles, “Englishness represented a human ideal” (139). To aspire to be an ideal human was to identify with Englishness, which transcended the sticky particularities of contemporary politics and conflicts. It was an extreme case of worlding in which not only the social, economic, and political realities of Kenya were determined by a distant center, but also in which the psychological and spiritual realities were inscribed by the imperial system. Matti Aikio, the first Sámi novelist, also highlighted the effects of worlding on the colonized space of the Sámi in northern Norway. A contemporary of Hamsun’s, Aikio published his first novel in 1904 and came to be known in Kristiania (Oslo) as samenes dikter, or the poet of the Sámi. Although his early writings tended to support the ideologies of colonialism, progress, and racial hierarchy, by the time he wrote his final novel, Bygden på elvenesset, in 1929, Aikio had adopted a much more clearly anti-colonial stance by representing the authority of the colonial masters with considerable irony. In the ethnic conflict that is much more central to this text than it had been in his early writing, Sámi characters are several times depicted as exacting just and violent retribution from their Norwegian masters while absolutes of ethnic and racial categorization are themselves undermined by the presence of ethnically and racially ambiguous characters who resist Norwegian colonialism from an unclear cultural space. Finnmark is portrayed as teeming with diversity – reindeer herders, farmers, sea Sámi, Kvens, Russians, and Norwegians – some of whom descend from the early poor who were sent north from the poorhouses and prisons of the southern cities and towns, while other more powerful immigrants are recent arrivals from the south. One of the major Norwegian characters, the merchant Hooch, descends from earlier Dutch explorers and traders and invokes the early modern history of Finnmark’s colonization in the contests between Denmark, Sweden, England, the Netherlands, and Russia that determined its fate. In the present, Hooch is part of a small colonial elite, and the novel explores the many and diverse workings of power that world Karasjok as peripheral to the sources of its own meaning. In both Ngũgĩ’s and Aikio’s texts, the narrative representation of worlding serves an anticolonial purpose, and here it is similar to the anti-capitalist agendas of Blixen’s and Hamsun’s representation of the worlding of the global market. These texts document the invasive and persistent presence of the imperial world in the local and intimate space of the colonized by cutting through colonial ideology’s insistence on the naturalness and justness of the status quo and through this consciousness-raising, opening the space for a clearly articulated resistance. In Aikio’s novel the colonial administrative system once revealed as artificial and unjust is subject to a series of both violent and non-violent acts of resistance from the beating and ganning [hexing] of administrators to clever acts of mockery too subtle for the colonizer to understand. And Ngũgĩ’s criticisms of Blixen and exploration of Biggles’s insidious powers of fascination give way to his assertion in a subsequent chapter that Nelson Mandela is the universally emblematic figure of the twentieth century and that “South Africa is a mirror of the modern world in its emergence over the last four hundred years” (148). This amounts to an insurgent inscription of postcolonial African space that seeks a center for not only its own meaning, but also for the entire world’s within the continent itself. As Moses Isegawa writes of Ngũgĩ’s transformation of postcolonial thought, “For anybody who has not worked it out: the days of ‘Please sir, can I have a little more?’ have given way to ‘Give me my fair share or I will kill you, motherfucker” (xviii–xix). It’s a none-too-subtle change.

Fishing for meaning on the Deatnu River Sámi salmon harvesters, tourist anglers, and the negotiation of place Tim Frandy

Antti Tuuri’s critically acclaimed collection, Tenoa Soutamassa (2008; Rowing the Teno), focuses on the Deatnu River (as it is known in Sámi; in Norwegian: Tana; in Finnish: Teno) – a 1200-kilometer, free-flowing river that forms the border between Norway and Finland, and is widely recognized as the world’s finest environment for threatened wild Atlantic salmon. The river bears many different meanings for those who have found their way to its shores. The Deatnu’s reputation as a tourist destination precedes it for Tuuri, who only reluctantly accepts a friend’s invitation to fish on a river known for long queues of fishermen who line its rocky shores waiting for a fifteen-minute turn to cast in hopes of catching a hungry salmon. The majority of these tourists are Finns, avowed “meat fishermen” who angle at higher rates than elsewhere in Europe (Burgess 47). Tuuri first visited the Deatnu in 2000 and returned every subsequent summer for nearly a decade, hiring guides to row as he fished for the large migratory salmon that swim upstream to spawn.

Figure 75.  Fisherman wading in the Deatnu (Tana) River in Northern Finland/Norway. Photo: Alexei Novikov/Shutterstock

Sometimes compared to Ernest Hemingway, Tuuri is known for his novels and short stories of war, fishing, and rural life in southern Pohjanmaa (Ostrobothnia), works that feature minimalistic prose, underlying humor, and compassion for human imperfection. Tuuri’s portrayals of rural life have characterized and helped establish the popular image of rural Finland at home as doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.52fra © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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well as abroad. He has received numerous honors including, among others, the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize (1985) and Finlandia Prize (1997). Tuuri’s representation of the Deatnu is no small matter since it has reflected and shaped popular discourse about Finland’s Far North. It is emblematic of larger and problematic cultural phenomena, however, that Tuuri’s literary representation of the Deatnu bears such cultural significance when local perceptions of the river and its cultural, economic, ecological, and even spiritual importance have been historically marginalized. The Deatnu is a colonized and contested place, with a long history of tourist-fishermen visiting its shores and crafting their experiences into travelogues documenting their adventurous exploits in far and distant lands. Yet Sámi voice plays altogether too little role in these kinds of literary productions – and not for lack of interest. There is no shortage of Sámi discourse about the Deatnu, which exists less in prose and poetry than in oral literatures, spoken discourse, cultural practices, multimedia arts, and vernacular expressive culture. In his essay “Sámi Literature in Turbulence,” Sámi scholar Veli-Pekka Lehtola details the many challenges writers of Sámi literature face: a lack of funds for Sámi-language publishing, the diversity of Sámi languages and dialects, language loss and multiple second languages across international borders, and the complexities of consolidating resources across the four countries in which Sámi people reside. He also suggests that prose is arguably too Westernized a genre since Sámi people have naturally gravitated toward traditional arts, documentary films, performing arts, and contemporary audiovisual and multimedia art as vehicles for expressive culture (74). For these reasons, an examination of insider/outsider concepts of the Deatnu River must include a wide range of expressive genres, including oral tradition, joik-songs, and representations in non-fiction and personal accounts. As will be made clear here, Sámi people not only regard the Deatnu and its salmon differently than the tourists do, but the differences in discourse reflect the traditional ways that Sámi people have maintained, renewed, created, and adapted deep and complex relationships with their lands over the span of generations. One must understand Tuuri’s writing within this context of cultural negotiation, as can be seen in the interactions he depicts. Tuuri enjoys a particular affinity with one guide, Mauri Kaitsalo, an ethnic Finnish resident of Inari who, though not a native of the Deatnu, builds boats, guides fishing expeditions during the summer, and cuts reindeer meat during the winter. Tuuri is endlessly impressed by Kaitsalo’s sharp understanding of local ecology and often mentions one of Kaitsalo’s particular habits as he guides: whenever he passes near a buođđu fish dam (a traditional Sámi device for catching salmon by using a series of underwater barricades to guide salmon into nets), he motors over the netting to look for fish. Tuuri writes: “Väylän reunassa oli lohipato ja siinä verkot. Mauri ajoi veneellä verkkorivin vierestä ja huusi, että padossa oli muutama titti. Kysyin, kenen pato se oli, Mauri sanoi sen kuuluvan Norjan puolen saamelaisille: se oli siis Norjan puolella valtakunan rajaa” (32) [At the edge of the channel there was a salmon dam, and inside it were nets. Mauri drove the boat away from the row of netting and yelled out that there were some diddi (1–3 kilogram salmon) in the dam. I asked whose dam it was. Mauri said it belonged to some Sámi people from the Norwegian side: it was therefore on the Norwegian side of the national border]. Something of this particular image touches the complexities of the Deatnu as a place. It is a place of sportsmen and traditional Sámi net-fishermen, a place of guides and tourists, a place where people catch salmon and where salmon catch people – or as Tuuri writes, “Teno

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on omansa ottanut” (13) [The Deatnu has taken you as its own]. The Deatnu is a place where worldviews often violently collide: some locals report that tourists have pulled guns on them during conflicts over fishing spots. In Tuuri’s contact with Sámi netters, guides, and tourist fishermen, in a place both at Finland’s northern periphery and in the heartland of Sápmi, the Deatnu reveals itself as a place where people negotiate and vie for control of its usage, meanings, and future. Many people speak about the Deatnu in terms of two types of salmon fishermen – indigenous Sámi netters and tourist anglers (Burgess; Somby) – but the reality is more complex than this. Anglers and netters cross ethnic lines – many people both net and angle – and recreational and harvest fishing often exist within the same nuclear family or are conceptually blurred in a single person’s fishing practices. Even among those who net salmon (most of whom occasionally angle as well), there are divisions and differences between those who use fish dams, those who use drift nets, those who use stationary gill nets, and those who use seines. Concealed in Tuuri’s image of Kaitsalo peering into the buođđu are centuries of conflict and collaboration all over access to the salmon, all leading to today’s tourist industry that exists as – in the words of the Sámi elder and politician Veikko Guttorm – “a political hot potato” (96). Since the minutia of fishing techniques is an expressive performance of one’s own relationship with the environment, Tuuri’s example is a tangible manifestation of different ecological worldviews and values coming into conflict. While Tuuri muses over the imagined liminality of the northernmost border of the European Union, he is admittedly out of his element at the Deatnu, showing none of the confidence evident in his collection of fishing stories from further south, Perhokalastus Pohjanmaalla (Fly Fishing in Ostrobothnia). After catching one salmon, Tuuri remarks that the fish was not really his own, but belonged to the guide who had placed the lure in front of the hungry fish (22). He even confesses not to know what a diddi is in spite of the fact that diddi and the loanword in Finnish, tintti, are well-known words to all local salmon fishermen. While Kaitsalo is using the nets to glean information about the recent behavior of the salmon, Tuuri remains obsessed with an unusual concern: where the imagined border lies in the river. Tuuri perhaps needs that border to understand why he is on the Deatnu – a place where he feels compelled to fish in order to justify his desire for recreation, the same desire Kaitsalo later derides as a “futile tourist fancy” (80). Tuuri explains: niin kuin nuoruuteni Pohjanmaalla olin hankkinut haulikon ja kantanut sitä mukanani metsäretkillä, koska metsissä ei voinut kulkea asiatta, ja mestästäminen oli asiallinen asia, Tenon rannoille ei tuntunut olevan oikeuttaa ajaa etelästä yli tuhat kilometriä, jos vain istuisi jokirannalla. (132) (just as in my youth in Pohjanmaa, I received a shotgun and carried it with me on my excursions into the forest because in the forests one cannot simply walk around without a purpose, and hunting was an objective purpose. It does not seem like you have the right to drive all the way from the south to the shores of the Deatnu, over a thousand kilometers, if you are only going to sit on the riverbank.)

Tellingly, Tuuri does not really understand why he is there, and this realization sets him apart from both local Sámi people and the other legions of tourists that he distances himself from.

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In one early passage in his book, Tuuri describes a strange encounter in Njuorggán (Finnish: Nuorgam), Finland’s northernmost village. Tuuri tells of one unnamed but esteemed person who had made prior arrangements to give a speech at the unveiling of a monument in recognition of the northernmost point in the European Union. Tuuri writes: Muutama kymmenen ihmistä oli kokoontunut lähelle Norjan rajaa, missä muistomerkki oli vielä peiteltynä. En jaksanut kuunnella puhetta, kävelin niin pitkälle, että se ei kuulunut ja seisoin katselemassa jokilaaksoa ja Norjan puoleisia korkeita törmiä. Sitten muistomerkiltä alkoi kuulua yksinlaulua; joku mies siellä lauloi Finlandiaa kovaa ja korkealta. Kävelin lähemmäksi ja näin, että laulaja oli Sakari Kuosmanen, joka oli asetellut matkaradion kivelle ja pannut taustakseen soimaan Finlandian kasetilta. Kuosmanen lauloi niin, että rantatöyrät mäikkyivät, sen jälkeen lähdettiin porukalla kahveille, jotka Nuorgamin kyläyhdistys tarjosi kääretortun kera. Kun palattiin Alakönkäälle, Kuosmanen istui jo nuotiopaikalla kalakavereittensa kanssa. Kuulin, että hän oli yhtenä omistajana Lohirannan lomakylässä Nuorgamista muutama kilometri Utsjoelle päin, ja kalasteli pitkiä aikoja kesäisin Tenolla; mukana oli muusikoita ja Kanadan kaukaloissa rikastuneita jääkiekkoilijoita. Sellaista joukkoa ei odottanut juuri Tenon varressa tapaavansa. (25–26) (A few dozen people had gathered near the Norwegian border, where the monument was still covered up. I could not bear to listen to the speech, and I walked far enough away that I would not be able to hear it, and I stood watching the river valley and the Norwegian side’s high banks. Then, from the monument I began to hear a solo; some man was there singing the Finlandia loud and on high. I walked closer and saw that the singer was Sakari Kuosmanen [a famous Finnish actor and singer], who had placed a boombox on a rock and put on a cassette of the Finlandia for accompaniment. Kuosmanen sang so that the steep banks resounded. After this we left with the whole gang for coffee and jellyrolls that the Nuorgam village association was serving. When we returned to Alaköngäs, Kuosmanen was already sitting around the campfire with his fishing buddies. I heard that he was one of the owners of the Lohiranta resort located a few kilometers out of Nuorgam in the direction of Utsjoki. And during the summer, he fished long hours in the Teno; he had with him musicians and some hockey players who had become rich in Canadian ice rinks. Such a party one would not have expected to meet on the Teno.)

The dedication in Njuorggán is filled with overtones of wealthy southerners, orchestral accompaniments of nationalistic hymns, and a carved stone monument in a region with many great boulders of much more import that mark historical events, etymological legends, and ancient sacred sites called sieiddit. Quite literally, the monument marks Njuorggán as a distant outpost of a powerful state that still controls its peripheries. It alleges that the Deatnu is not the center of its own world, of Sápmi, the traditional homeland to the Sámi people. Tuuri distances himself from this sort of nationalistic fanfare, as does he from the type of tourism found, for example, in Olli Kauhanen’s nonfictional collection, Kuukkelin Kutsu (The Call of the Siberian Jay). Aside from the fishing, Kauhanen dwells coldly on the cost of various items of tourist equipment, takes note of which towns have liquor stores, guffaws at locals who do not remember his face and feed him the same sunny lines about the year’s salmon run, and celebrates men who drink themselves into incapacitating hangovers (Kauhanen 14–15, 19–21, 39–40). As tourists who retreat from civilization’s burden of being civil, Kauhanen’s party – like

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Tuuri’s companions in Njuorggán – bring with them a cultural occupation of the Deatnu. They desire to overrun its rocky shores and outnumber locals for their own purposes of sport angling – purposes that are backed by the state through its resource management policies. In this regard, tourist fishing is very much a colonial act, and an extension of the legacy of appropriating Sámi resources for the benefit of non-Sámi people. These colonial appropriations did not originate in Finland, nor has northern Scandinavia as a whole been untouched by foreign influences. In fact, English sporting gentry began to venture on summertime fishing excursions to Norwegian rivers beginning in the 1830s. These early expeditions served as Arctic safaris in which a member of the gentry traveled with small parties and local guides to pursue trophy game and fish and to validate their status at the top of social hierarchy by staging a symbolic conquest over primordial nature. The earliest of these salmon excursions began in Scotland, and not until the 1830s did they cross the North Sea into Norway and creep northward up the coast as they exhausted salmon stocks in river after river. One Scotsman, John Francis Campbell, led an expedition to the Deatnu in 1838, as did Edward and Albert Brettle in the spring of 1850, Stephan Henry Thomas in 1855, and – most importantly – Henry Pottinger in the summer of 1857 (Solbakk Čáhcegáttesámiid Kultuvra 48–50). These early expeditions employed locals to guide and lodge them by giving them half of the catch of salmon, which ranged between 1000–2000 kilograms. Pottinger’s subsequent publications in the country gentleman’s newspaper, The Field (1858) and in the book Flood, Fell and Forest (1905) popularized the Deatnu river and ushered in a new era of fishing traditions in Sápmi. Tourism altered aspects of the national understandings of northern resources: net fishing was perceived as a threat to the growth of angling as a pastime and idealized fair fight with the salmon. Consequently, fishing techniques and technologies changed and boat sizes also decreased to facilitate trolling (138). Local historians Ronkainen and Särömaa write, “Siihen aikaan kirjoittajat uskoivat vakavasti, että maailman joet oli luotu vain englantilaisten urheilijoiden huvituksia varten. Muualta maailmasta kun ei vastaavaa urheiluhenkisten ihmisten rotua löytynyt.” (14) [At that time, the writers sincerely believed that the rivers of the world were created only for the amusement of English sportsman. It was as if there was no equivalent breed of people to be found anywhere else in the world]. The English sportsmen desired to go to the wilderness to survive ascetically, in spite of the environment and not in harmony with it, and to prove their own worth through the performance of ritual subjugation of the wilderness. To complete the ascetic experience, their journals documented their “suffering.” In his travelogue, Pottinger complains incessantly about mosquitoes (96–103) and the impossibility of bringing a veritable mountain of luggage, including two beds with frames and legs along on the wilderness excursion (77–79). Others likened Norwegian bread to “roasted sawdust,” (Ronkainen and Särömaa 25) and pine for English flour (34). On the Finnish side of the border, the situation was somewhat different. Unlike Norway, Finland had only a few quality salmon rivers, and the idea of fishing as sport or leisure was slower to take root among the ethnic Finns. All of the northern river systems on the Gulf of Bothnia (the Oulu, Kemi, and Tornio rivers) hosted quality salmon habitat until they were dammed in the 1950s. Finns caught salmon in ways similar to Sámi people: with driftnets, fish dams, seines, spears, and with hook and line (Sirelius; Vilkuna). When the Pohjolan Voima and Kemijoki power companies began building hydroelectric dams in the 1940s they promised

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fish ladders for salmon migration, which they had no intention of ever constructing, effectively destroying the salmon stocks in these rivers (Vilkuna 380–95; Tiuraniemi 15–16). At that time, many of the Finns who had relied on the salmon fisheries in these river systems began to travel north to the Deatnu. Not needing guides, this new generation of tourists required only roads to reach the Deatnu (Ronkainen and Särömaa 242). The subsequent increase in tourist pressure on the Deatnu is at the heart of many of the fishing conflicts today. The Deatnu has been the life-blood of the local Sámi residents for millennia, and salmon are more important than recreational or economic resources. Utsjoki elder Ilmari Tapiola explains, “The river is important, it gives life” (Salin, Helander, and Mustonen 292), and Sámi artist Hans Ragnar Mathisen calls the Deatnu eanuid eadni, or “the mother of great rivers.” Sámi relationships to the river and to its salmon are complex – a fact reflected even in the rich lexicon of words for salmon, rivers, and river topography in the North Sámi language. In his classic study of North Sámi nature words, Sámi scholar Nils Jernsletten explains the different words for salmon: luossa (a large salmon), diddi (a salmon weighing between 1–3 kg), lindor (a male salmon, slightly larger than a diddi), goadjun (a large male salmon), duovi (roe salmon), čuonžá (a fat salmon with neither semen nor roe, that swims into the river in autumn), vuorru (a salmon that lives in the river during the winter), šoaran (a vuorru that swims to sea in the spring and returns in autumn) (95–97). The diversity of salmon terminology is a reflection of the nuanced relationships that Sámi people maintain with their environment and traditional economies. Where outsiders see one type of fish, Sámi people see diversity. This diversity, in turn, mirrors how Sámi people construct their own identity relationally with the salmon, with the river, and with the land. Sámi literature, art, and expressive culture remain generally concerned with matters not present in the writings of Antti Tuuri or other travel writers. Rather than focusing on the liminality of the location and the isolation of the individuals fishing on a wild river in a wide landscape, rather than focusing on personally restorative dimensions of recreational fishing and adventure, and rather than lamenting the gentrification and corruption of Deatnu salmon fishing into an unrecognizable monstrosity, Sámi discourse about the Deatnu tends to prioritize the transmission of traditional knowledge, the continued connection to place, and the way that these continuities perpetuate community, shared values, and human relationships. For instance, in Konrad Nielsen and Samuel Norvang’s “Goargŋun, Oaggun ja Káfestallan,” [“Poling, Angling, and Stopping for Coffee”], two main characters angle for salmon, as one teaches the other how to best position the boat for fishing, pole and row in rapids during different weather conditions, and details the physical constitution of the river. In stark contrast to the tourist literature, in which the catching of a single fish fills pages of text, Nielsen and Norvang’s brevity stands out: “De roahkasta ja oažžu dan guoli gitta” (qtd. in Solbakk Joddu 41) [“Then it was hooked and they got the fish”]. They discuss firewood and tinder gathering, navigating specific rapids, and the importance of stopping for coffee while fishing – an old Sámi custom connected to the traditional sense of time, pacing, and behavior during wilderness excursions. For an outsider, such a story might appear to be plotless, meandering, and about all manners of things that do not involve salmon fishing. Nielsen and Norvang, however, use their story to communicate the interconnectivity between salmon fishing and Sámi ways of being, and the story, steeped in Sámi artistic aesthetics, at once documents and transmits traditional knowledge for a greater audience.

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If, as Veli-Pekka Lehtola suggests, Westernized literary prose is discordant with traditional Sámi discourse, we must be inclusive of Sámi literatures outside conventional Western genres in order to recognize alternative and indigenous textual discourses on their own terms. Aage Solbakk’s Čáhcegáttesámiid Kultuvra (Riverbank Sámi Culture), for instance, is a multi-generic ethnographic, literary, and folkloristic anthology that is pluralistic and postmodern, and built upon Sámi discourses, epistemologies, ontologies, and cultural worldview. Unlike single-authored, linear, and event-driven narratives, Solbakk embraces multiple authors and voices as he creates a pastiche that invites interpretation and co-creation of the meta-narratives that define the Deatnu as a place. The work simulates the transmission of traditional knowledge through the sometimes-contradictory juxtaposition of oral histories, storytelling traditions, local history, cultural practices, scientific knowledge, and examples of belief and worldview. What emerges is an abstraction of place that permeates all aspects of Sámi culture. Solbakk prefaces his book with a traditional Sámi luohti (commonly called a joik)  – a distinctive type of folk song and powerful symbol of Sámi identity – from Otto Donner’s book Lappalaisia Lauluja (1876): Luossa vuodjá čázi botni miel dat gievrras guolli ja divrras guolli Mii manná Jos livččii čađa eatnan deatnu De ohpit son manná gitta geahčái Ja čáhpot nu sakka Ja de šaddá nu ahte Ii eambbo bora ge šat Ii heađis ge Ja máhccá son fas vuolás Gos lea boahtán Ábi viidodagas Gos leat ollu luosat Ja fas šaddá seamma šealgat Mo ovdal lei Go áhpásis fas boahtá Go silddiid oažžu borrat De fas buoidu Ja šaddá seamma láhkai Mo ovdal lei (10–11) (The salmon swims along the bottom of the water the powerful fish and the precious fish, which goes as if the great river guides it through the land to the source and its color tarnishes so and it happens that it can no longer eat not even in distress and then he returns again downwards

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from where he has come from the expanses of the sea where there are many salmon and again he changes, becoming just as bright as he was before when he again comes to his sea when he gets to eat herring so he again gets fatter and becomes the same as he was before.)

The salmon is given agency and identity in this luohti, which highlights the importance of knowing the salmon, its desires, its struggles, and its pleasures. Nowhere in the luohti is the catching of salmon in any sort of hierarchical relationship with the anthropocentric universe. Instead, it is the nature of the salmon that defines the physical space in which humans reside. Solbakk relates another story, told by Johan Balke, a minister in Kárášjohka from 1880–88: Lei čakčat, go luossa lei jo geargan gođđamis ja lei njiedjan deatnoráigge vulos guhkás. De gávnnai sáiddi bajás vuodjamin. Luossa jearrá: – Gosa don vulget? – Johkii mun vulgen, celkkii sáidi. – Don johkii vuoget? Mainna hámiin don vulget johkii? – Gal mus lea čáppa hápmi, celkkii sáidi. Šelges siidu mus lea maiddái. – Ii dus leat mihkkige buiddiid, celkkii luossa. – Mus lea buoidi vuoivasis, velkkii sáidi. – Hei, hei doinna buiddiin johkkii. Eanebuš buoidi mus lea cuohpas dalle go mŧn vulgen bajás, muhto geahča makkár hápmi mus dál lea! Saidi jurddašišgođii: Gal ii veaje mu vuoivvasbuoidi ollet johkagierragii. De jorggihii ruoktot ii ge vuolgán šat goassige eambbo. Dat báiki gos soai gávnnadeigga gohčoduvvo ain dál ge Sáidenjavvin, aiddo Sieiddá bokte. (124) (It was autumn when the salmon had already finished spawning and had descended a long ways down through the Deatnu. There it found a coalfish swimming upstream. The salmon asked: – Where are you off to? – I’m going to the river, said the coalfish. – You’re going to the river? How will you look, as you go up the river? – Well, I have a beautiful appearance, said the coalfish.  – I even have a shimmering side. – But you don’t have any fat at all, said the salmon. – I have fat in my liver, said the coalfish. – Ha! With that kind of fat, you’ll get upstream!? I had more fat in my meat before I set off upstream, but look at how I’m looking now! The coalfish began to think: Yes, my liver fat won’t be enough to get me to the river’s headwaters. Then it turned back, and didn’t try to go further upstream ever again. That place where they met is called even now Sáidenjavvi [Coalfish Riffles], right through the Sieidiguoika [Sieidi Rapids].)

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Balke’s story is not simply of entertainment value, but rather encodes and transmits important cultural knowledge within a narrative structure. It presents the differences in strength, lifecycle, biology, and habitat for these two different fish. It distinguishes between two types of rapids, the weaker njavvi and the more powerful guoika, and linguistically encodes useful ecological and cultural information about how to locate these fish in one habitat, and by extension in many more. Perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates the importance of knowing the land – or more precisely, knowing the animals and understanding their relations to the land. This knowledge is the basis of the Sámi sense of identity. To know the ecology is to know one’s place, which in turn is to know one’s self. Juxtaposing these traditional genres with local history, contemporary practice, and Western scientific knowledge, Solbakk creates a mirror of contemporary Sámi discourses of salmon, while inviting reader interpretation to create sense, order, and meaning within his non-linear and multi-voiced work. Solbakk details the technical nuances of how salmon are dammed, netted, angled, and trolled for. He describes the arrival of the English tourists and the subsequent tightening of fishing rights for Sámi people over the past 150 years. He details the biology of salmon and the science behind salmon runs and ecological threats to Atlantic salmon. He tells of how and when salmon are traditionally eaten and preserved on the Deatnu. He describes the material culture surrounding salmon fishing from boat building, to net mending and constructing the legs for the fish dam. He further illustrates that Deatnu as a place includes the reindeer in the forests and on the tundras, the game in its forests, and cloudberries in the marshes, which represent other aspects of the fisherman’s life that exist in balance with salmon fishing. Solbakk’s work includes the feats of heroic men who once delivered the mail on the river, making the 400 kilometer trip between Ohcejohka (Utsjoki) and Gáregasnjárga (Karigasniemi) twice a week, even as it details the spiritual landscape of the region: sacred sieidi stones, lessons in the pre-Christian religion of the Sámi people, and a depiction of an historic noaidi [shamanic] salmon drum. Solbakk’s narrative of the salmon culture does not represent the place as a blank matrix in which people can project their own wilderness fantasy; instead, the region’s complex of cultural practices, sciences, histories, and geographies are projected into its people. This theme of being shaped by the land is common throughout Sámi literature. Paulus and Inger Utsi write: “Like a crooked birch tree / at the edge of the tundra / my life too / is bent by the wind” (qtd. in Gaski In the Shadow 115). Or, in Beaivi, Áhčážan (The Sun, My Father), Nils Aslak Valkeapää shows a literal refiguration of his body in accordance with the nature in which he lives: “Duolmmun dáid geđgiid/juovaid/juolgevuođut/geđgiid hámagin (poem 141) [I walk on these stones / the rocky ground / my feet / shaped by these stones]. For Solbakk, salmon fishing is a component of a broader system of holistic land use connected to both physical space and the cyclical change of the seasons and passage of time. The salmon are still an important part of local diet, of informal and capital economy, of shaping seasonal folklife, and of defining group identity along the watershed. The annual salmon runs mark space, measure time, and define work schedules, and the practice of salmon fishing invites Sámi people to reflect on their own cultural identity, history, continuity, and change. Whereas outsiders see netting practices as the remnants of an archaic culture soon to be effaced by the march of human progress, Sámi people understand salmon fishing represents a living and

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dynamic performance of sustainable human relationships with the land. Where outsiders see a bounteous empty space to fill with their own primordial fantasies and a vast wilderness at the world’s periphery that kindles romantic self-awakening, local Sámi see how the land is already filled completely, infused with traditional knowledge and innumerable markers of personal and communal history that perpetuate and creatively remake Sámi culture for future generations. Outsider representations of the Deatnu have come to define its meaning throughout much of the Nordic states as a periphery that people visit to test the limits of themselves. It is a place where English tourists took incomprehensible amounts of salmon from the river and tested their own mettle, where male tourists like Kauhanen gather without women and children to drink and perform masculinities, and where contemplative authors like Antti Tuuri can seek isolation and awakening. Yet for Sámi inhabitants on the Deatnu, the river is no periphery, and the landscape is no empty vessel ready to be filled with new meanings born of the excesses of adventure, ego, and stiff drink. Instead, the land is a metaphorical extension of one’s self, and a deep understanding of the land is an almost spiritual understanding of one’s own self and one’s own community. Tellingly, it is the travel literature that has gained wider recognition as a literary genre. These writers need not ruminate on the colonial overtones to tourist fishing and the general purposing of the north to benefit the south, nor even on the reasons they choose to not fish in their home waters, but instead drive to the northernmost border of Finland in pursuit of another community’s fish. But local writers like Solbakk have a discourse and audience of their own, integrating traditional knowledge and methodologies of indigenous knowledge production into their structure to achieve specific artistic and political aims, both inside and outside of their community. These discourses, these art forms, remain quietly submerged in the Deatnu’s frigid waters, netted alongside the diddi in the buođđu trap, waiting in watch as generations of tourists gaze down from their boats, never fully understanding, perhaps not even caring about, what it is they are seeing.

De-framing the indigenous body Ethnography, landscape, and cultural belonging in the art of Pia Arke Kirsten Thisted

The camera zooms in on a photograph of a Greenlandic landscape laid out on the floor on a black piece of cloth. Now a woman with black hair and the distinct features of a Greenlander (the artist) enters the video frame crawling on the photograph. She pats the landscape, strokes it with her hands, sniffs it, and tries to suck it in. She lies down on her back, as if she were trying to be in the landscape, pressing herself against it, trying to come into contact with it, become one with it – but ends up by tearing the image to pieces. Slowly and methodically the photograph is shredded into a collection of strips that the artist rakes together around herself. At last she seems to achieve some small degree of physical contact – not with the depicted landscape, however, but with the material the landscape was printed on. She crawls out of the video frame again, and a heap of white strips of paper lies behind her on the black underlay. The video, shot in Copenhagen on March 25, 1996, is called Arctic Hysteria. It is an important work not only in Arke’s own body of work, but also in the broader discussion about the representations and self-representations of Arctic/Indigenous peoples. Likewise, Arke’s art is central for the understanding of key topics and conflicts within the Greenlandic/Danish narrative community concerning the history of “Danish Greenland.” Narratives were at the core of Arke’s art: the stories others told about the Greenlanders, the stories the Greenlanders told about themselves – not to mention the stories which were not told. She worked with books and images that she located throughout Europe and created books and images of her own. In this way, she transgressed established genre lines just as she transgressed the boundary between Dane and Greenlander. Greenland and Denmark represent a typical colonial (and postcolonial) relationship  – even after the official termination of colonialism – in that the interaction is characterized by highly asymmetrical power relations. This assessment applies not least in terms of the power of representation. Politically the Greenlanders were represented by the Danes, and to a certain extent they still are in terms of international affairs and matters of security. To the outside world Greenland is first and foremost known through literary and visual images created from an outside, primarily Danish, perspective. A well-known example is Peter Høeg’s novel Frøken Smillas Fornemmelse for Sne (1992; Smilla’s Sense of Snow). These days, global warming draws the Arctic into the media spotlight. In Greenland especially, the large glacier at Ilulissat in the Disko Bay and the hunters in the northernmost settlements of Avanersuaq (Thule) attract the international media. Greenland is inscribed within a broader discourse about the Inuit, who not long ago were called Eskimos and considered primitive. With his famous concept of “Orientalism,” Edward Said has described how the “Orient” has been constructed by external representations in which one text and one image lead to the next and the next and the next in an infinite intertextual chain of production. Something similar can be said of the Arctic (Thisted Udforskingen 214ff.). Whereas Ann Fienup-Riordan writes about “Eskimo-Orientalism,” I have used the term “Arctic Orientalism” (Image, Power); Gísli Pálsson calls it “Arcticality”; and Hans Hauge, doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.53thi © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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“Nordientalism.” In a Danish-Norwegian context renowned figures like H. J. Rink, Fridtjof Nansen, and Knud Rasmussen must be credited with showing the Inuit respect and for having changed the discourse from the derogative “primitive peoples” to the positive naturfolk [people of nature], a term borrowed from the German Naturvolk (Thisted “Impact of Writing”; “Danske Grønlandsfiktioner”; “Migrants”), a discourse within which culture was good, civilization bad (Robertson 29). Neo-romanticism escalated in the civilization critique of the 1970s and ’80s, and in a Danish-Greenlandic context, the word Inuit [people] accrued connotations like menneskelighed/medmenneskelighed [real or genuine humanity]. The Inuit became emblematic of something the “civilized” world had lost, a still-living memory and corrective for the modern world (Thisted “Inuit Nunaat”; “Power to Represent”). As Ann Fienup-Riordan so aptly summarizes it: “Euro-Americans gradually transformed the image of the Eskimo from subhuman to superhuman” (14). The discourse about what now are called indigenous peoples was characterized by such an idea of these peoples as the carriers of a vulnerable and unprotected true humanity, and it included people living under such different conditions as the Amazonian Indians, the North American Indians, the Sámi of the Nordic region, and the Inuit of Greenland, Canada, and Alaska. Thus, the term Naturvolk and even the term “indigenous” have ambivalent effects because, on the one hand, they convey the Inuit’s close relationships with nature and support their land claims, but on the other hand they lock them securely into this contrastive relationship with the “civilized” world, making them one with the nature in which they live in the same way as the seals, polar bears, and walruses are considered to be part of the Arctic environment. This characterization becomes deeply problematic when the Arctic is described with an “anthropological present” without a sense of the huge upheavals that have occurred as a result of contact with European culture (Gant “Omskrivninger”; Thisted “Inuit Nunaat”). In most of these representations, the Greenlanders are depicted as caught within the so-called fatal impact or pure-or-poor syndrome. They were assumed to be lost in translation between tradition and modernity, always assumed to be the victims of modernity rather than producers of it. With the strong emphasis on the past as the cultural background that made the Greenlanders a people in their own right – distinct from the Danes – the Greenlanders have, to some extent, been co-producers of this discourse. The national model that was imported to Greenland via Denmark was ethnically and culturally based (Thisted “Nationalfølelse”), and the postcolonial confrontation in Greenland, leading to home rule (in 1979) and eventually to self-government (in 2009), was an unambiguously nationalist endeavor in the struggle to establish an ethnically based nation (Gad). Arke was, as it will be shown, highly critical of the assumptions about the correlation between place, identity, language, and culture that undergird this idea of nation. Embracing “the mongrel” Pia Arke died of cancer in 2007 when only forty-eight years old. At the time of her death, she was a well-known and respected artist both in Greenland and Denmark. However, it was not until after her death that her name became widely recognized, mainly due to the Danish curatorial collective “Kuratorisk Aktion” and their large-scale retrospective exhibition Tupilakosaurus:

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Pia Arke’s Issue with Art, Ethnicity, and Colonialism, 1981–2006, mounted in Copenhagen in the spring of 2010 and later in that same year in Nuuk and Umeå. The title Tupilakosaurus (which combines tupilak with “dinosaur”) was the name of one of Arke’s own exhibitions embodying her sense of science, history, and irony. A tupilak belongs to the Inuit oral tradition and is a kind of voodoo or black magic directed against an enemy. (Today, representations of these spirits are carved in ivory or wood and sold to tourists who believe them to be guardian spirits.) Dinosaurs are also something familiar, but what happens if the two are combined in a search for a Tupilakosaurus to classify, register, and bring into order the regime of scholarly knowledge? Likewise, what happens to the people living in a given landscape when this landscape is mapped and explored by a foreign power? What is history – whose story, whose history? What happens when one participant in the cultural encounter has the power to define and represent the other? And what happens when these conditions are changed? These were (some of) the key questions for Arke in her work. Arke was born in Scoresbysund/Ittoqqortoormiit in Northeast Greenland. Her mother was from Northeast Greenland, her father from Denmark. Due to his work as a telegraphist, her father was constantly moved to different localities in Greenland, and Arke spent most of her childhood in different places in West Greenland (including Thule) and in Denmark. She was christened Pia Gant, but in 1983, she took her mother’s maiden name. Actually, this is spelled Arqe, but Arke realized that the Danes were not able to pronounce it correctly, and she therefore changed it to Arke. Names are important in Greenland; Arke knew all about that, and the incident illustrates how she negotiated her identity by trying to formulate a position that was neither Greenlandic nor Danish, not even the sum of the two. It would rather add the two together without adding them up. This all took place before Homi K. Bhabha’s famous texts about living in a “third space,” in the “in-between,” or “interstices” between established cultures and identities reached Scandinavia. However, it was exactly such a third space Arke tried to create for herself with her new name. She cherished the concept of the “mongrel,” which she made a sort of leading note for her investigations of the concepts of “culture,” “identity,” and “belonging.” As was expected of an artist with her background, Pia Arke started her artistic career painting pictures of seals, ulus (the half-moon shaped women’s knife), and women flensing seals. Soon, however, she started to ask why, due to her background, people expected her to paint pictures of this sort and why she herself even expected it. And why were these pictures so marketable? Why did art produced by Greenlanders so often end up being considered in terms of ethnography rather than art appreciation? Pia Arke investigated these questions in her essay Etnoæstetik, which was submitted as her thesis to the Department of Theory and Communication at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. The essay was first published the same year and drew a good deal of attention in Greenlandic art circles, not least because it explicitly questioned the way the Danish artist and art historian Bodil Kaalund had presented Greenlandic art both as a curator and in her very influential book on the subject, Grønlands kunst, (1990, 2011; Art of Greenland). Kaalund was considered an ambassador for Greenland and for Greenlandic art, and many readers – both Danes and Greenlanders – felt Arke’s criticism to be very unfair. It took some time, however, before people began to see and openly discuss the more far-reaching perspectives of Arke’s considerations that were not aimed at Kaalund personally but at the discursive practices framing Greenlandic art evidenced in Kaalund’s work.

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Along with the memories of the vanishing hunting culture and its tools and techniques, the Inuit language and the Arctic landscape are considered central aspects of Greenlandic identity. Arke suffered from a lack of competence in the Greenlandic language. East Greenlandic was her mother’s first language, but since the family moved from East to West and from North to South Greenland where the dialects are very different from one another and had also spent time in Denmark as well, Danish became the easiest language of communication. This verbal deficiency, of course, also had to do with the fact that Arke’s father was Danish and that Danish was the language of power and status at the time. Very few Danes learned Greenlandic, and among Greenlanders fluency in Danish was considered a necessity for succeeding in the modern world that had finally been opened to Greenlanders by the end of the colonial reign and the inclusion of Greenland in the Danish state in 1953. Many Greenlanders of Arke’s generation were enrolled in “Danish classes” where Danish was not only a foreign language, but the language of all teaching and communication. However, when Arke’s generation reached puberty, the pendulum had just begun to swing in the opposite direction: the quest for Home Rule started as a campaign centered on language politics. Suddenly, proficiency in Danish no longer represented the same cultural capital as before, especially if one’s competence had been achieved through the loss of Greenlandic. In many ways, these were difficult times for people like Arke, who found themselves in the category of “Danish speaking Greenlanders.” In a time when the focus was on the investigation of the Greenlandic background and heritage, Arke had to accept the fact that the Greenlandic literature and other sources of Greenlandic history were a closed book to her. Instead, she turned to Danish and English books re-investigating the explorers’ and administrators’ descriptions from a Greenlandic perspective. The colonial contact zone became the focus of her interest. Landscape, memory, and culture The relation between man and the Arctic landscape was at the center of Arke’s interests from the very beginning of her artistic career. One has to remember that this was long before global warming became a public issue. In the 1980s, the Arctic landscape was still represented as untouched and unresponsive to human influence. That the Inuit had been able to survive in the hostile and desolate environment where so many famous European men had lost their lives was something that made the Inuit very special in European eyes. Survival at the limits of human existence was a familiar topic in narratives about the Inuit. It is easy to picture a lonely sledge making its way through the frozen white landscape where it seems nearly impossible that anything living could exist or that food could be procured. Or perhaps one sees some fragile little kayaks in the middle of a great fjord, icebergs and mountains towering over them, unaware of their presence. One of the icebergs could collapse at any moment smashing the kayaks to pieces. Arke wanted to contest this severe image of the Arctic landscape by exploring new ways of communicating with it. In one of her first projects, she painted big squares and rectangles in strong, bright colors on cliffs and took photos with and without people posing in this new “remade” landscape.

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In 1988, she began to experiment with the pinhole camera. She built a plywood box  – 165x140x170 cm – large enough that she could stand and move around inside it. There was no lens in this very basic camera but in one of the walls there was a thin metal plate with a very small hole. This hole was covered until the picture was taken. On the opposite wall, the black and white film was mounted. When the picture was to be taken and the light poured in through the hole, it hit the film on the opposite wall of the camera box. The exposure time was more than fifteen minutes and by sitting inside the camera while the picture was being taken, Arke could watch it forming. It was also possible for her to shade the light with her body thereby producing a very direct, bodily influence on the finished work (Gant “Arketypiske,” Kleivan “Hulkamerafotografier”). The results are beautiful, rather blurry representations far from any exact reproduction of the landscape. They are, though, a representation of the meeting between the landscape and the human imagination and emotion. It was Arke’s plan to have the camera transported to all the places where her family had lived in her childhood, but only the first step of the project was realized in Nuugaarsuk, South Greenland, in 1990. However, with an ordinary camera, she managed to go back to the other places, and with her lens she explored what it means to have a homeland and inquire whether it is ever possible to return to such locations of memory. The series of photos are sometimes called “Imaginary Homelands,” i.e. the same title as Salman Rushdie’s famous essay (Jørgensen “Islands”). However, it was the photographs she had taken with the pinhole camera in Nuugaarsuk that kept inspiring her. She continued working with the concept, and in a series of new photographic works taken in 1992, the image forms a gentle, dreamlike background for portraits of modern, urban Greenlanders. It is hard to tell whether the people are coming out of the landscape or disappearing into it – or if the relation is in fact purely imaginary, a postulated link between persons and landscapes created by images and artwork. The last interpretation seems supported by the disengaged expression on the people’s faces, almost as if they were unwilling to cooperate in the project. In some of the images, the artist poses alone, in some with a cousin; Arke also explored different effects and connotations by posing in front of the photographs in the nude or wearing her usual urban clothes. The iconic Arctic landscape is here taken at face value as exactly what it is: an icon, represented by the picture. This strategy was definitely a departure from what other Greenlandic artists were doing at the time, such as Aka Høeg (born 1947), a very well known and established artist who represented Greenland and Greenlandic art on many occasions. In Høeg’s work, the Arctic landscape is the link that connects the modern Greenlanders with the previous generations in an unbroken chain, no matter what the cultural changes may be. It was this melting of place, landscape, and people that Arke contested – thereby contesting as well the ways in which Greenlanders themselves cooperated in maintaining colonial representations and thus benefitting from the cultural capital of the exotic Other (Arke Etnæstetik 23f.). The theme took on an even more direct turn in a series of new variations from 1993. In a famous image, the artist is sitting with her back to the camera, facing a photograph of the Nuugaarsuk photo with a kamik (thigh boots made of seal fur and embroidery) from the west Greenlandic national costume placed on her head. The photo is also entitled “Put your Kamik on Your Head so Everyone Can See Where You Come From,” a reference to a commentary by Arke in the Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq (see Kleivan). Thus, the image was a comment

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on the constant talk about ethnicity, which it seemed impossible to escape at the time. Everyone asked the artist where she was from and the people revealed their prejudice by applying the word “Greenlander” to her. In another work, The Three Graces (1993), Arke poses together with her cousin and a childhood friend from Scoresbysound/Ittoqqortoormiit in front of the same photostat image of the Nuugaarsuk landscape. Each of the women hold an object that is supposed to symbolize her ethnicity: an East Greenlandic drum, an East Greenlandic mask, a doll wearing the West Greenlandic national costume: all the paraphernalia of culture. There is something provocative about the women’s direct stare, reproducing the direct gaze of the Greenlanders in ethnographic photographs taken by European ethnographers. Due to the late colonization of east Greenland and Thule, ethnographers, explorers, and administrators in the early twentieth century were met by a culture that in fact was far from untouched. It nevertheless in some ways resembled the pre-colonial lifestyle in which people still remembered their old traditions.

Figure 76.  The Three Graces (1993). B/w photograph of cut-up and reassembled photograph.

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Photographs of the time were expected to depict the culture of the west Greenlanders when they first met Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Since they embodied the idea of people of nature (Naturvolk) in fashion at the time, Greenlanders were intensely studied and photographed. In contrast to the European versions of the same motif of the Three Graces, there is no play, nor sweetness in the postures in Arke’s work. While the Three Graces are usually depicted as absorbed in each other’s company and touching each other affectionately, these three women stand at a cool distance from one another (Olsvig). They wear European clothes, and it is obvious that the picture is taken in a studio since the floor on which they are standing is visible. However, when the work was exhibited and reproduced in the newspapers, the bottom of the image was often cut off so that the impression of being in a studio was reduced (Kleivan). The newspapers were, so-to-speak, trying to re-situate the women in a “real” Arctic landscape where they were thought to rightfully belong. Thus, the reviews unintentionally demonstrated the existence of the very same problem that Arke was trying to highlight. Re-framing/De-framing the colonial representation For a long time, Arke had a life-sized poster of a particular photograph on the wall of her apartment in the Frederiksberg district of Copenhagen. The picture shows an east Greenlandic woman photographed up against a cliff with her arms raised and hands behind her head. The photo is cropped so that woman in full is not seen but only her upper body, which is naked. It shows that she has been breast feeding; she is not old, but neither is she a classically voluptuous nude. From the expression on her face, it is clear that she is not enjoying the situation. The spectator gets the impression that she may not have chosen this pose herself – there is an element of violence in the photo. The glimpse of the European skirt the woman is wearing adds to the photo’s feeling of nakedness and vulnerability. The photographer wanted to focus on the “traditional” part of her appearance: the tuft of hair decorated with beads, the beadwork around her neck, and her naked breasts. However, somehow the nakedness does not seem natural to the woman: it seems likely that she has been asked to remove her blouse for the sake of the photo. The photograph kept fascinating Arke. She was angry with the photographer for having taken the photo in the way he did. But Arke was also glad that the photo had in fact been taken because even though the woman’s name and story is unknown, her features are not – and she communicates very powerfully with the viewer in spite of the awkward position and situation. The photo was taken by the medical doctor Thomas Neergaard Krabbe who in the beginning of the twentieth century travelled to many parts of Greenland and took numerous photos, which were later published in his book Grønland: Dets Natur, Beboere og Historie (1929; Greenland: Its Nature, Inhabitants, and History). The photos are ethnographic images in the sense that they represent the alien, non-European natives photographed by a European with the intention of documenting the existence and characteristics of the people in question. Usually the photographer is invisible, as opposed to the Greenlanders who are most literally exposed to view. However, there is a photo taken in East Greenland in which Krabbe actually photographed himself. He is seen posing with binoculars while scanning the fjord where the kayaks

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pass by. He is fully dressed in a black suit with a bowler hat, necktie, and everything. The photo stands out as a representation completely different from the photos taken of the Greenlanders. The two photographs represent a classical opposition between the white man who sees and documents and the natives who are seen and documented (Thisted “Postkolonialisme”). Arke came to terms with the picture of the naked East Greenlandic woman by integrating it into her own composition. In her work “Krabbe/Jensen” (1997), she combined the picture of the woman with another of Krabbe’s pictures: a photo of a man shot at the same spot. The photo is cropped in the same way showing the man with his torso naked except for a thin leather harness for carrying amulets. Both of the subjects stand frozen in their poses, but especially after being combined with the photo of the man, that of the woman makes clear that not even she is yielding unconditionally. There is a directness in these people’s eyes that makes an enduring impression and challenges the viewer. The photos are disturbing because of the tension between the individuality and willpower of the subjects and the way the photographs are aimed at an impersonal registration of “types” and physiognomies – a little like butterflies pierced on a pin. The photos seek to document the people and call attention to their existence, but because of the way the photos have been taken, they tend to reduce the individual human beings into bodies and the bodies into ethnographic objects.

Figure 77.  Krabbe/Jensen (1997). Photographic collage.

The artist reinforces this effect by adding a third image in the middle, a photo taken by the telegraphist Sven Lund Jensen in Scoresbysund/Ittoqqortoormiit in 1947. This photo is a more amateurish shot of the subject of the snapshot, even though it is evident that the young woman in the picture is posing for the photographer. This picture has a far more private character; the photographer wanted to photograph this particular young woman (Pia Arke’s mother). The emotional distance that characterizes the two other photographs is therefore replaced here by attention and communication. The woman is smiling accommodatingly and is coquettishly – perhaps a little shyly – tilting her toes in her kamiks. There is no doubt that this picture was

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taken by a man, probably a man in love. With the contrast between this picture and the two others, the artist raises questions about the kind of cultural encounter represented. Because the photographer’s presence is so easily sensed in the center photo, even though he cannot be seen, the presence of the photographer in the two other pictures can also be surmised. In this way, he loses authority as an objective recorder. The questions start automatically: Who was he? With what right did he arrange his “objects” in this way? What were these persons thinking while they were being photographed? Why did they participate? What form of communication was there before and after the pictures were taken? With these two types of photography confronting yet nonetheless in dialogue with one another, Arke opens a means for a postcolonial interpretation of the well-known old photographs, which have been reproduced time and again without anyone questioning the form of representation and dominance they express. The images are no longer neutral representations of a certain culture, but rather the outcome of a strongly asymmetrical meeting of cultures in which one side took control of the other and assumed the right to define its members through the gaze. By reframing the old pictures in this way, the artist thereby in fact manages to deframe the bodies captured within them. “Arctic hysteria” It was the discussions of identity and representation that brought Arke to the concept of Arctic Hysteria, which she explored in a series of works around 1995–99. Perlerorpoq is a term that the Inuit used to describe a certain kind of insanity (in European books it was characterized as an Arctic disease). Perlerorpoq refers not just to any mental illness, but the special illness of hysteria, which in Europe was associated with women. It is obvious how this way of describing the illness worked as a means of marking a boundary between the civilized controlled European man and the effeminate, irrational, uncontrolled natives. Arke was especially taken by the constant emphasis on nakedness and thus the fact that the victim of this disease becomes insensitive to the cold and runs around naked and barefoot in the snow. In a rather ironic and humorous photomontage called Arctic Hysteria IV (1997), Arke opposes the warmly dressed polar explorers with their private snapshots of more-or-less naked Inuit women. These were the kind of photos they took for their private collections and gave them titles like The Mistress of the Tupik, An Arctic Bronze, and Flash Light Study, thus associating these women with classical sculptures and paintings of exotic women. These men obviously had painters like Gauguin and his images of the tropics in mind. So what kind of Arctic hysteria is addressed here? The women who undress or the European male fantasies they represent? Who is actually stripped in this montage? As Iben Mondrup has pointed out, the naked women make visible the lustful erections hidden under all those furs. Far from simply condemning this type of sexual relation, Arke is curious about it and avoids the moral outrage so often found in postcolonial studies. Curiosity also characterizes the video Arctic Hysteria, the description of which opened this essay. How does it feel to take upon oneself this subject position of the cultural and sexual “Other”? This is what Arke sets out to do in her courageous video, in which she is literally

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putting herself and her own body on stage and at stake. Western representations of the “oriental” or “exotic” Other have been criticized by both Western and non-Western critics. What Pia Arke does, however, reaches far beyond these intellectual considerations that often reproduce the dichotomy rather than deconstruct it, i.e. James Clifford’s critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism: “Indeed his [Said’s] critical manner sometimes appears to mimic the essentializing discourse it attacks” (262). Rey Chow makes a similar point, while also drawing attention to the aspect of gender. In an essay entitled “Where Have all the Natives Gone” (1994), Chow wrote about how the natives are constantly exploited, even by those non-Western intellectuals who set out to do the opposite. First, there were the imperialist forces of domination. Second, there was the cultural domination in the form of subjection, in which “we” give “them” a voice, whereby the “natives” end up as fixed points of authenticity for the scholars’ critical discourse. In other words, the Western representation initially constructed the savage, then the noble savage. But then, ironically, the “native” is exploited a third time by the anti-imperialist nature critic himself. Chow’s example is Malek Alloula’s book The Colonial Harem (1986), originally published in French in 1980. Alloula’s material consists of the postcards with pornographic overtones that French soldiers sent home from Algeria between 1900 and 1930. In their online advertising material, the publishers quote a review from Village Voice: “Imprisoned by the photographer’s eye these women reclaim their historicity through the pages of this powerful book. The Colonial Harem deserves a central place in the growing literature of decolonization” (“The Colonial Harem”). Rey Chow is not so impressed. If Alloula is really so offended by these images, why re-circulate them? Alloula’s entire message could have been delivered verbally. The critic takes upon himself the fate of the exposed women claiming that at some point he, as a colonized male, must have been equally exploited. However, what emerges is not an identification between the critic and these women’s images, but an identification between the critic and the gaze of the colonial photographer of the images of the women, who remain frozen in their poses. Alloula wants to respond to the white man, but in this process, the women are made a transparent medium, a homoerotic link between the white man and the brown man in a classical “Fanonian” constellation of repulsion and attraction between the colonizer and the colonized. In her article, Chow asks how the native can be represented without exploitation: How would we write this space [of the native] in such a way as to refuse the facile turn of sanctifying the defiled image with pieties and thus enriching ourselves precisely with what can be called the surplus value of the oppressed, a surplus value that results from exchanging the defiled image for something more noble? (124)

By refusing to stay in her frame and incarnate the passive victim on display, Pia Arke gives at least one possible, powerful answer to that question. In the above-mentioned essay EthnoAesthetics, Arke, identifying with “the mongrel,” situated herself as “neither . . . the ethnographic object, nor the ethnographic subject” (28). From this position, the artist is able to break free from the frozen posture and enter the scene on her own terms. In the video, the artist tries to be in the landscape, to touch it, to feel it and to smell it, but there is absolutely no response. The only way of interacting with the icon is by tearing it apart. This became the most radical use Pia Arke made of the Nuugaarsuk pinhole camera photo.

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Fredric Jameson states that “the visual is essentially pornographic” (emphasis original) (qtd. in Chow 123). The act of staring, therefore, is basically an act of violence. In Arke’s video a naked body is the object of the gaze, yet there is absolutely nothing pornographic about it. By being totally naked and yet totally unflirtatious, uninviting, and unimpressed, the artist turns the violent gaze back on the viewer. All the time she is obviously very well aware that she is being watched, but unlike the pornographic movie, she is manipulating the spectator, not the other way around. When the native refuses to cooperate, the image dissolves before the viewers’ eyes, and the stage is left empty – and open. Open for new images and interpretations, with the old dichotomies finally – and effectively – deconstructed. Family albums Even though the relation between Greenland and Denmark and between Greenlanders and Danes has undoubtedly been asymmetrical as far as power is concerned, Arke insisted on perceiving the history of Greenland and Denmark as a shared history as opposed to some sort of “interconnected” histories. To Arke, it was important to stress the fact that the colonial process had resulted in family relations and family ties  – not the family ties that officials talk about at celebrations, but rather the concrete results of the Danes’ presence in Greenland. In many cases they are acknowledged, but in many others they are not, as in the case of the siblings Arke discovered when she began digging into her own family history. The Danish presence in Greenland is usually discussed in very abstract terms: power and economy, ideas and ideology, maps and resources. Arke wanted to call attention to the concrete specifics: the flesh and blood of human beings who exist as a result of the encounter. Hence she uses her own naked body in some of her works, in which the spectator is confronted with a nakedness that suddenly becomes uncanny (as opposed to the nakedness of the “primitives” in the ethnographic photos) because this body is far-too familiar and yet put in the primitive’s place. As she stated in her book about the settlement Scoresbysund/Ittoqqortoormiit where she was born: “Jeg gør kolonihistorien til en del af min historie på den eneste måde, jeg kender til, nemlig ved at tage den personlig” (Scoresbysundhistorier 11) [“I make the history of colonialism part of my history in the only way I know, namely by taking it personally” (Stories 13)]. The book Scoresbysundhistorier (2003; Stories from Scoresbysund) has rightly been called “Pia Arke’s major work” or even “crowning work” (Tupilakosaurus: Pia Arkes opgør 39). It is also the one among Arke’s works that has already undergone the most thorough analysis (e.g. Jonsson; Sandbye). Scoresbysund/Ittoqqortoormiit is a settlement established by the Danish colonial administration. The name means, “Those who live at the place with big houses.” Officially, it was founded due to the overpopulation of the existing colony Ammassalik/Tasiilaq further south. In reality, the settlement was entirely a question of the dispute with Norway over the right to Northeast Greenland. The conflict ended as a result of the decision of the International Court of Justice in Den Haag in 1933 that gave Denmark sovereignty over all of Greenland. While the official history of Scoresbysund/Ittoqqortoormiit is a success story of wealth and prosperity, the statistics and many documents told quite another story of famine, disease, and poverty. Arke secured a rich trove of old photos, letters, and diaries from the basements and

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attics of relatives of the Danes who had been in Scoresbysund/Ittoqqortoormiit at the time that supported this unacknowledged history. With this material in her suitcase, she set out to tell the untold history – or rather histories – of the place. One should have expected that people would have remembered and told this story, but they had not. When Arke wanted to communicate with them, some suddenly claimed to have lost their memory or momentarily forgotten their awareness of Danish. A conspiracy of silence seemed to envelope the place – as if Danes and Greenlanders had agreed to let these histories rest. When confronted with a photo like the one of “the forgotten” – a miserable crying, ragged, and filthy boy – all parties (Greenlanders just as eagerly as Danes) want to explain the picture away. Could the boy have trained to be a shaman? Could he just have had a bad day? Or maybe his parents were lazy and incompetent? Finally, Arke’s mother breaks the silence: “Det er da klart, hans forældre var meget fattige, det var meget normalt. Hans far var syg af tuberkulose, han døde også tidligt” (Arke Scoresbysundhistorier 96) [“Obviously his parents were very poor. That was very normal. His father had tuberculosis, and he also died early” (Stories 98)]. Her mother is, however, irritated and annoyed when she provides this answer, probably because her daughter in this way forces her to speak the obvious and yet unspeakable. The colonial history is embedded in shame. It may be that the Danes involved with it respond with other versions of denial than the Greenlanders’ denial, but denial is the common ground. It is, therefore, not only the Greenlanders’ names that have been forgotten, but also the names of the common Danes, those who were not the main protagonists of history and ended up in the basements of oblivion. As Arke experienced when she took all the old photos to the elderly collective in Scoresbysund/ Ittoqqortoormiit and tried to have the people in the photographs identified, some simply could not be recognized. These were typically Danes and children who were not standing next to their mother. About them it was said: “Der var så mange, og de lignede alle sammen hinanden” (21) [“There were so many of them, and they all looked alike” (21)]. Even though it has been very convincingly demonstrated how Danes and Greenlanders were by no means living under equal or even comparable conditions no matter how much they were befriended and became family, Arke’s project tries to recall their histories on equal terms. There is something revealing and relaxing about this method of approaching Danes and Greenlanders side by side. They may not have been one another’s equals in their own time, but they are made equals from the perspective of the artist who places their pictures in the exact same position with the recalled names written in her handwriting across the photos. This is another very effective way of rewriting history and reframing the Greenlanders. In Arke’s description, the Greenlanders enter history as individuals whose destinies at some point in history have been closely tied to the place where they were living but without the aura of a supposed mystical relationship between them and the landscape. The artist is therefore also very skeptical about Bella’s genealogical record sent to her by Bella’s adoptive parents in Provence. Bella is the grandchild of one of Arke’s maternal aunts, and the genealogical table is one of many Arke received after the rumor spread that she was investigating the family relationships of Scoresbysund/Ittoqqortoormiit. This particular table attracted her attention because it is so beautiful. It is as Arke writes, a piece of art, a linograph executed by a Scottish artist in 1978 on the initiative of Bella’s adoptive parents. The genealogy is printed on a background of an Arctic landscape with fjords and mountains, and the whole is framed by a frieze with bears, seals, and

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birds resembling the East Greenlandic style known from utensils, on which similar figures are used as ornaments carved in ivory. However, there is something wrong with the whole thing, Arke claims, because the icons for men and women are the same whether they denote persons living around 1800 or around 1970. All the women wear kamiks and have big top-knots; all the men wear polar bear trousers and sealskin anoraks. But the woman in whose honor the genealogy has been made lives in Copenhagen and works at the hot-dog stand right across from the train station in Hellerup, one of the very well-to-do areas north of Copenhagen! Conclusion Obviously Arke’s art speaks from the perspective of the culturally mixed, displaced/migrated Greenlanders. In Greenlandic literature, she has a parallel in Ole Korneliussen, who from his home in Copenhagen likewise has tried to negotiate the essentialist view of Greenlandic identity as expressed both in European representations and in Greenlanders’ own discourse aimed at nation-building. Actually, Korneliussen (ironically) reminds his fellow Greenlanders that what characterized the Inuit was their willingness to take a risk and to set out to see and experience something new. Therefore, it is also today the migrant Inuit spread around the globe who are the true heirs of the forefathers who set out from Alaska and travelled all the way across the Arctic until they reached a – temporary – limit at the Cape Farewell (Korneliussen Tarrarsuummi tarraq (Danish: Saltstøtten: Roman; English: Pillar of Salt); Thisted “Stepping” and “Migrants”). When the people of Scoresbysund/Ittoqqortoormiit first signed up for the expedition and resettlement, it was in the same spirit. As the old father in one of Pia Arke’s stories tells his sons when they blame him for the decision: “sket er sket og vi maa tage hvad der kommer” (qtd. in Arke Scoresbysundhistorier 42) [“what has happened, has happened, and we must take what comes” (Arke Stories 44)]. The people of Scoresbysund/Ittoqqortoormiit are far from seeing themselves as victims, and rejecting that role seems to be part of their reluctance to speak about the past. It took a while before the Greenlandic audience took Korneliussen to heart. However, just as Korneliussen is one of the most renowned writers in Greenland, the young generations have no difficulty identifying with the art of Arke. Many feel themselves to be in a similar inbetween position even though both their parents are Greenlanders and their language may be Greenlandic. Their culture, however, is urban, and they have little or no contact with the old hunting culture. Such young Greenlanders are cosmopolitans. They are globally oriented; many of them travel, if not in real space then at least in cyberspace; and they are not reluctant to settle elsewhere, at least for a while. To return to the video Arctic Hysteria once more, the artist’s tearing apart of the iconic landscape leaves no mystery. The message seems to be that there is nothing there, neither “behind the veil” nor in the culture’s inner core. No secrets, no special, privileged relationship between the artist and the Arctic nature. This kind of statement is consistent with the thinking of Frantz Fanon, who tried to make his contemporaries understand that if the black man would not subscribe to the idea of a privileged whiteness, then neither could he claim any privileged blackness (Larsen and Thisted). However, this is clearly a provocative thought within the

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discourse of indigenous peoples, where the relationship between nature, people, and culture is still considered essential, even when life has become modern and urban, and nature is no longer a necessity for daily survival any more than it is for anyone else on the planet. In a famous essay, “A Global Sense of Place,” geographer Doreen Massey called on academics to begin looking at space in a new way. She further developed her ideas in the book For Space (2005). Instead of trying to cram the diversity of life into narratives of homogeneity – one place, one history, one identity  – space should, according to Massey, be seen as something always under construction, constituted through interactions, and characterized by “the contemporaneous existence of a plurality of trajectories; a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (12). With her provocative photos, books, and performances, Arke was using aesthetic representations for the exact same purpose: to call attention to the multiplicity of diverging and even conflicting identities and histories that have formed the Greenland (and the Denmark) known today and to open our perceptions of these places in order to include the multiplicity both in the present and in the future. Similarly, she was asking what it actually means to be indigenous and whether this is a discursive framework that the modern Greenlander should want (or can claim) to remain enclosed within. At a time when Greenland has gained self-government and the initiative to industrialize and exploit the subterranean resources is taken not by foreign powers but by the Greenlanders themselves, her discussion of these central questions is as relevant as ever. Acknowledgements A previous version of this essay appeared under the same title (“De-Framing the Indigenous Body: Ethnography, Landscape, and Cultural Belonging in the Art of Pia Arke”) in the 2012 monograph on Pia Arke’s art, entitled Tupilakosaurus: An Incomplete(able) Survey of Pia Arke’s Artistic Work and Research. This slightly altered version is republished with permission from Kuratorisk Aktion, Copenhagen.

Works cited Preliminary bibliographic notes The alphabetical order used for this bibliography is as follows: a á b c d ∂ ð đ e é f g h i í j k l m n o ö (German) ó p q r s t u ü ú v w x y ý z þ æ(ä) ø (ö,œ,ǫ) å

Icelandic and Faroese names have been alphabetized according to first name, not family name. Definite and indefinite articles have been ignored when alphabetizing titles. Titles in Nordic languages follow the customary local minimal capitalization rules, but colons have been substituted for periods and are followed by capital letters. The medium should be assumed to be text unless otherwise indicated. In the essays of this volume, parenthetical English translations of Nordic titles use either italics or quotation marks when a published translation has been included in this Works Cited. Translations are alphabetized by original author name, not by that of the translator. Places of publication retain native spellings when listed in original languages; translations into English are listed with the English equivalents. All passages translated into English in the main text that are not followed by a page citation should be assumed to be the contributor’s own translation. Titles of normally independent works published within a collected-works edition will use a semi-colon to separate the individual work title from the title of the collected works as a whole; both are italicized. Films are alphabetized by title, not director name. Aanrud, Hans. A Girl of Norway. Trans. Dagny Mortensen and Margery W. Bianco. Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1935. Aanrud, Hans. Sidsel Sidserk; Fortællinger. Vol. 4. Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1933. 7–111. Aarseth, Asbjørn. “Berlin als Kulturmetropole und das ‘Schwarze Ferkel’  – Norweger in Berlin.” Wahlverwandtschaft: Skandinavien und Deutschland 1800–1914. Ed. Bernd Henningsen. Berlin: Jovis, 1997. 347–52. Acerbi, Giuseppe (Joseph). Travels through Sweden, Finland, and Lapland, to the North Cape in the Years 1798 and 1799. London: [J. Mawman], 1802. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Grete Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Robert Hullot Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Adorno, Theodor W. Ästhetische Theorie; Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann et al. Vol. 7. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. Adriansen, Inge. Nationale symboler i det Danske Rige 1830–2000. København: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2003. Ahlberg, Herman. Upp genom luften: Marsch för piano. Perf. Bengt Forsberg. Sweden: Nosag Records, 1997. Ahlstrand, Jan Torsten. Svenskt avantgarde och Der Sturm i Berlin / Schwedische Avantgarde und Der Sturm in Berlin. Osnabrück: Verlag des Museums- und Kunstvereins Osnabrück, 2000. Ahlund, Claes. Den skandinaviska universitetsromanen 1877–1890. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1990. Aho, Juhani. Helsinkiin. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1997. Aho, Juhani. Juha; Kootut teokset. Vol. 9. Helsinki: Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö, 1952. 5–181. Aho, Juhani. Papin rouva; Kootut teokset. Vol 2. Helsinki: Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö, 1952. 143–396. Aho, Juhani. Yksin. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2003. doi 10.1075/chlel.xxxi.59.ref © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Andersen, Hans Christian. “Fodrejse fra Holmens Canal til Østpynten af Amager i Aarene 1828 og 1829.” H.C. Andersens Samlede Værker. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 9. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 2005. 165–257. Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Girl Who Stepped on Bread.” The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories. Trans. Erik Christian Haugaard. New York: Doubleday, 1983. 606–13. Andersen, Hans Christian. “Gurre: Aftenlandskab.” Digte 2: 1840–1875. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 8. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 2005. 44–46. Andersen, Hans Christian. “En Historie fra Klitterne.” H.C. Andersens samlede værker. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 2. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 2003. 303–33. Andersen, Hans Christian. “I Danmark er jeg født.” Digte 2: 1840–1875. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 8. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 2005. 165. Andersen, Hans Christian. The Improvisatore. Trans. Mary Howitt. New York: Harper, 1845. Andersen, Hans Christian. Improvisatoren; H.C. Andersens Samlede Værker. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol 4. København: Det Danske Sprog og Literaturselskab, 2004. 55–361. Andersen, Hans Christian. I Sverrig; H.C. Andersens samlede værker. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 15. København: Det Danske Sprog og Literaturselskab, 2006. Andersen, Hans Christian. “Jylland.” H.C. Andersens samlede værker. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 8. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 2005. 320–21. Andersen, Hans Christian. Kun en Spillemand; H.C. Andersens samlede værker. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 5. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 2004. 11–295. Andersen, Hans Christian. “Den lille Havfrue.” H.C. Andersens samlede værker. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 1. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 2003. 154–75. Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Little Mermaid.” The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen. Ed. Maria Tatar. Trans. Maria Tatar and Julie K. Allen. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008. 119–55. Andersen, Hans Christian. “Lykkens Kalosker.” H.C. Andersens samlede værker. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 1. København: Det Danske Sprog og Literaturselskab, 2006. 460–85. Andersen, Hans Christian. Lykke-Peer; H.C. Andersens samlede værker. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 6. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab/Gyldendal, 2004. 263–347. Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Magic Galoshes.” The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories. Trans. Erik Christian Haugaard. New York: Doubleday, 1983. 82–107. Andersen, Hans Christian. “Malerie fra Jyllands Vestkyst.” H.C. Andersens samlede værker. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 7. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 2005. 242–43. Andersen, Hans Christian. O.T.; H.C. Andersens samlede værker. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 4. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 2004. 363–631. Andersen, Hans Christian. “Phantasie ved Vesterhavet.” H.C. Andersens samlede værker. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 7. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 2005. 240–41. Andersen, Hans Christian. Pictures of Sweden. London: Richard Bentley, 1851. Andersen, Hans Christian. “Pigen, der Traadte paa Brødet.” H.C. Andersens samlede værker. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 2. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab: Gyldendal, 2003. 254–61. Andersen, Hans Christian. A Poet’s Bazaar: A Journey to Greece, Turkey and Up the Danube. Trans. Grace Thornton. New York: Michael Kesend Publishing, 1988. Andersen, Hans Christian. Shadow Pictures: From a Journey to the Harz Mountains, Saxon Switzerland, etc. Trans. Sven Hakon Rossel and Monica Wenusch. Wien: Praesens, 2011. Andersen, Hans Christian. Skyggebilleder af en Reise til Harzen, det sachsiske Schweitz, etc. etc., i Sommeren 1831. Ed. Johan de Mylius. 2nd rev. ed. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 2003. Andersen, Hans Christian. “Skyggen.” H.C. Andersens samlede værker. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 1. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 2003. 411–421. Andersen, Hans Christian. “Sneedronningen.” H.C. Andersens samlede værker. Ed. Klaus P. Mortensen. Vol. 1. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 2003. 303–29.

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Location index

A Aastrup  636 Acropolis  316, 318, 566–569, 567n4 Afghanistan  362, 620–621, 626 Africa  123–124, 327, 329, 353, 401, 528, 555–561, 583, 617, 651, 659–661 Agora  73 Agunnaryd  360 Akranes  43 Alaköngäs  665 Alaska  17, 453, 585, 658, 673, 684 Algeria  293, 681 Algiers  93 Alps  100, 304, 324–325 Alta  599 Alvastra  593 Amager  148–149, 162 America, see United States Anacapri  109, 117, 120 Andermatt  325 Antarctica  294 Arab Peninsula  314 Arabia  314 Arboga  210, 215 Arcadia  36, 251, 480 Archipelago Blekinge  161 Bohuslän  82, 93, 163 Finnish  131, 135, 290 Stockholm  131, 152–154, 159, 166, 168, 170 Arctic  1, 28, 294, 366, 524, 528, 530–531, 538, 552–554, 572, 652–653, 655, 659, 672–673, 675–676, 678, 683–684 Arctic Ocean  1, 537–538, 553–554 Arendal  194 Arnarstapi  45 Asia  119, 366, 581, 583, 585, 617, 660 Astoria, Oregon  449, 453 Athens  315, 438, 563–566, 564n2, 564n3, 567n4, 569

Atlantic Ocean  131, 155, 173–174, 176, 178–179, 183–184, 186–187, 205, 378, 419, 428 North Atlantic  1, 14, 53, 305, 176, 414–415, 520, 608 Atlantis  71–72, 76, 146, 155, 174, 419, 596 Australia  177, 449, 454 Avanersuaq  124, 549, 551, 672, 674, 677 B Babylon  221–222, 333 Baffin Bay  551 Balom  628 Baltic Region  5, 9, 14, 22, 415, 576 Baltic States  23, 187, 464 Baltic Sea  1, 9, 22–24, 83, 127, 129, 131, 221n3, 385, 574 Baltic Coast  9, 576, 607 Baltics, see Baltic States Barsebäck  372 Bedsted  638–639 Belarus  375–377 Bensalem  71 Bergen  102, 357, 552, 582, 599, 608 Bering Strait  551 Berlin  206, 220, 235, 237, 248, 262–274, 275–276, 332, 527, 564 Biarmia  578 Birka  599 Bjarmaland  574–576 Blekinge  161, 385 Blue Grotto  42, 111–113, 117, 120, 317 Bodarne  215, 217 Bogense  631–632 Bogstad  35 Bohuslän, see Archipelago, Bohuslän Bokna Fjord  158, 353 Boknafjorden, see Bokna Fjord Boknfjorden, see Bokna Fjord Borg  92–93, 166–167, 169–171, 243, 348–349, 415–418, 475 Borgarfjǫrð  416 Borgøye  348

Bornholm  469 Boston  527 Bovbjerg  86–87 Brattahlíð  522 Britain  124, 152 British Columbia  449 British East Africa  528, 555, 560, 659–660 British Isles  24, 186–187, 415 Brittany  362 Bruges  220, 226 Brunnsparken  247–250, 256 Bryggen  540, 599 Buderup  637 Butte, Montana  453 Bygdøy  520 Bø  362 Båring  631–632 C Calabria  122, 323 California  53 Canada  17, 130, 449, 454, 551–552, 648, 658, 673 Cape Thordsen 530 Cape York  553 Capri  42, 109–122, 317 Caribbean  123 Carthage  222 Cato, Wisconsin  451 Caucasus  275 Chaamba el Mohabi  326–327 Charleston, South Carolina  194 Charlottenborg  57 Chernobyl  364, 366–367, 372–379 Chicago  352, 447–448, 452 Chile  109, 441–443 China  162, 290, 357, 552 Christiania, see Oslo Churchill River  552 Colorado Springs  79 Copenhagen  24, 29, 36, 38, 49, 61–62, 65, 80, 80n1, 83, 86, 93, 105, 147–148, 162, 176n4, 177, 180, 202–203, 222, 236, 239–241, 265, 267–268, 270, 277, 281–282, 294, 332, 361, 372,

Location index

736 381, 386–387, 389, 391, 393, 423, 436, 441–443, 469, 471, 526–527, 550, 559, 582, 611, 616–618, 620, 622–626, 648, 649n4, 652, 672, 674, 678, 684–685 Corinth  566 Cuba  319, 527 Czechoslovakia  443 D Dakota territory  79, 422, 426 Dalarö  530 Damecuta  117 Danmarksfjord  550 Danskeøya  530 Danube  111 Deatnu River  602, 662–671 Delaware  523 Den Haag  682 Denmark  1, 7–11, 14–15, 17–18, 23–25, 35–38, 56, 59, 62, 64–65, 68–69, 72, 80–83, 80n1, 85, 88, 90, 92–93, 95–96, 99, 101–105, 104n4, 106n8, 107n9, 146, 148, 152–154, 160, 162, 176n4, 179, 187, 200, 262, 280, 285, 288, 321, 325, 328, 361, 372, 381, 385, 387– 388, 391, 394–395, 421, 424–425, 427–430, 437, 441–443, 463, 471, 520, 538, 555–560, 555n1, 562, 564n3, 573, 582, 583, 597, 599, 611, 626, 629, 631, 640, 641, 643, 646, 648, 652–653, 661, 672–675, 682, 685 Disko Bay  672 Djúpalón  47 Dovre  47, 418 Dublin  362–363 Duvemåla  433 Düsseldorf  348–350, 352 Dvina River  574 E Ecuador  183 Edinburgh  570–571 Egypt  64, 646 Ellis Island  277 Elsinore  56, 68–69, 385, 564n2 England  57n4, 152–153, 352, 524, 536, 555, 555n1, 567–568, 567n4, 572, 574–575, 607–608, 653, 661 Estonia  5, 9, 247, 641 Etna  323 Eton  559

Europe  7–9, 11, 18, 22, 25, 33, 35– 36, 73, 96, 116, 124, 131, 155–158, 176, 184, 187, 205–206, 210–211, 221, 237, 239, 262, 266–267, 272–273, 275, 296–297, 301, 312, 318–319, 355, 362–364, 366, 375, 381, 394, 415, 418, 432–434, 438, 440, 445, 447, 456, 458, 463, 500n6, 506, 519, 523–524, 526, 556–558, 563, 579–582, 590–591, 593, 595–596, 641, 652–653, 660, 662, 672, 680 F Fagerstrand  352 Fanø  86 Far North  522, 572–573, 575–576, 578, 580, 582, 585–586, 652–653 Faroe Islands  8–11, 13, 15, 23–24, 123, 125, 127–128, 146, 154–155, 173–175, 176n4, 177–180, 182–187, 361, 462, 608 Faroes, see Faroe Islands Faxaflói  43 Feginsbrekka  603 Fellingsbro  210, 214 Fenno-Scandinavia  130, 146 Finland  1, 5, 8–11, 14–17, 23–24, 39, 130–132, 135–137, 140, 145–146, 187, 205, 220–221, 222n4, 225–229, 227n11, 229n12, 236, 239, 290–291, 339–340, 342, 344–346, 360–362, 366, 411, 413, 447–449, 451, 453, 459, 471–472, 477–478, 486–487, 489, 494, 497, 500–501, 504–505, 510, 510n2, 517–518, 524–525, 572–573, 575–576, 578, 583–584, 586, 596–599, 602, 641, 647, 654, 662–666, 671 Finnmark  17, 187, 575, 582, 654–656, 661 Fitchburg, Massachusetts  449 Fladstrand  152 Florence  211, 524 Forsmark  366 Forum Romanum  316 Framnäs  465–466 France  115, 152, 186, 245, 266, 471, 648 Franz Josef Land  536–537, 539 Fredensborg  62 Frederiksberg  617, 678 Fredrikshavn  152

Friedrichstrasse  267, 273 Fröslunda  589 Funen  61, 83, 148, 624, 631–632, 636–637 Fyen, see Funen Fyn, see Funen G Gausdal  455 Gáivuotna  651 Gáregasnjárga  670 Geneva  237, 524 Germany  5, 9, 11, 23–25, 101, 206, 263–264, 266–267, 270, 272–273, 349, 465, 467, 471, 481, 504, 641 Ghana  659 Gikuyu  651 Giljá River  592 Giza  45 Glenstrup  639 Gobi Desert  149 Gokstad  520 Gomorrah  222 Gothenburg  150, 201, 208, 210 Gotland  9, 14, 418 Graceland  144 Great Plains  422 Greece  146, 174, 314–316, 322, 324, 438, 527–528, 556, 563–566, 564n3, 567n4, 568–569 Greenland  1, 8–11, 14, 17–18, 23–24, 47, 85n4, 123–124, 146, 186, 294, 314, 361, 411, 522, 529, 531, 539–543, 545, 547, 549–551, 553–554, 589, 608, 658, 672–678, 682, 684–685 Grimsta Harbor  132 Grimstad  151, 153 Grurup  638–639 Gudbrand Valley  103 Gulf of Bothnia  489, 666 Gulf of Finland  149 Gurre  34–35, 56, 56n2, 58, 59–69 Göteborg, see Gothenburg Gåvasten  168–169 H Haapavesi  494 Halland  385 Halle, Germany  101 Hamburg  80, 85, 211–212, 220, 564 Hancock, Michigan  449

Location index Hebrides  608 Heimværet  156 Helgafell  46, 417, 588–589 Hellebæk  60 Hellerup  684 Hellnar  45 Helsingborg  387 Helsingør, see Elsinore Helsinki  137–138, 202, 205, 220–233, 221n3, 222n5, 223n6, 223n7, 227n11, 236–239, 244, 247, 247n4, 249, 251, 343n4, 520, 652 Hemsö  128, 154, 157, 159, 163, 466 Hiroshima  326–327, 370–371 Hlíðarendi  458, 466, 475–476 Holland, see Netherlands Holmen  386 Holmens Canal  148–149 Holstein  57, 59n5, 82, 264, 387 Holsten, see Holstein Hudson Bay  149, 552 Husby  589 Hvolsvöllur  476 Hälsingland  599 Häme  340 Hämeenlinna  340 Härnösand  78 Hørup  639 Hålogaland  573–576 I Iceland  1, 8–11, 14, 23–24, 43–52, 123–125, 146, 173, 186–187, 206, 241, 361, 363, 411, 414–418, 434, 436, 456–457, 471, 475, 478, 572, 575, 588–589, 592–593, 604n2, 608, 652 Ilulissat  550, 672 India  124, 440, 482, 652, 659 Ingolfshofdi  125 Iowa  420, 448 Iran  439–440, 443 Ireland  14, 124, 366, 414, 641, 648 Israel  595 Italy  42, 49, 110–114, 150, 174, 264, 314–316, 318, 320–321, 324, 326, 462, 467, 524, 527–528, 556, 578, 593 Ithaca  186, 363 Ittoqqortoormiit  674, 679, 682–684

737 J Jakobshavn, see Ilulissat Jelling Mounds  599 Jerusalem  320, 449, 527, 576, 593 Johannesburg  546–547 Jutland  28, 38, 57, 80, 82–88, 84n2, 90–94, 101, 104, 146, 276, 389, 464, 504, 552, 630, 643, 645 Jylland, see Jutland Jämtland  378 Jökli  34, 52, 55 K Kajaani  340 Kalundborg  634 Kamchatka  186 Kangasala  136–137 Karasjok, see Kárášjohka Karelia  16, 146, 239, 340, 504 Karlby  589 Karlsefni  522 Kashmir  205 Katrineholm  210 Kattegat  411, 631–632 Kautokeino  656 Kárášjohka  661, 669 Kemi River  666 Kenya  556, 659–661 Kerimäki  363 Kerlin  362 Kiev  376, 604 Kingsbay  546–547 Kola Peninsula  25, 146, 574 Kongeå River  83 Königsberg  247n4 Kragelund  631–632 Kristiania, see Oslo Kristiania Fjord, see Oslo Fjord Kristiansand  357, 477 Kristnihald  34, 52, 55 Kronborg  56, 387 Kuopio  345 Kvitøya  532 Kymmendö  154, 159 Kåfjord, see Gáivuotna L L.A., see Los Angeles Lake Esrom  60, 62 Lake Gurre  62, 64–66 Lake Mälaren  210, 381, 589 Lake Saimaa  131–132 Lake Vänern  210, 213–216 Landsort  152–153

Langeland  147–148 Lapland, see Sápmi Lappmark  653 Lapponia, see Sápmi Latin America  1n1, 328 Latin Quarter  223 Latvia  5, 9, 641 Lauenburg  83 Leipzig  72 Lida River  215–216 Lidköping  209–210, 214–215, 217–218 Lincoln, Nebraska  424 Lithuania  5 Litla Dimun  154 Lofoten  155 Lomonosov Ridge  553 London  176n4, 226, 236–237, 248, 262, 272, 332, 523, 570–571, 620, 622 Los Angeles  453 Lund  557, 608 Luxemburg  268 Lyngby  520 Långörn  249 M Madeira Islands  150 Maine  447 Malangen  576 Malmö  381, 388–391, 393 Manhattan  277–278, 281–282, 284, 420, 451 Mantova  524 Marieholm  215–216 Mariestad  210, 214–216 Marina Piccola  121 Marstrand  165, 170 Massachusetts  422, 446 Mecca  149 Mediterranean  8, 186, 247, 292, 314–315, 319, 322–323, 366, 524, 573 Mediterranean Sea  293, 323 Merdø  194 Mexico  393 Mexico City  621 Miami  453 Michigan  420, 449 Middelfart  631–632 Middle East  318 Midgaarð  291–292 Midwest  11, 420–421, 434, 436, 443, 448, 452–453

Location index

738 Minnesota  420–422, 432–433, 448, 451 Monte Pincio  332 Monte Solaro  121 Monterey  278 Moscow  232 Motala  569–570 Mount Cenis  98–99 Mount Somma  320 Mount Ventoux  97 Munich  527 N Naantali  477 Nagasaki  370 Nairobi  556, 660 Naples  110–111, 114, 293, 322, 324, 563 Nebraska  79, 420, 422–429 Nemi  321 Nerstrand, Minnesota  451 Netherlands  24, 57n4, 302, 653, 641, 661 Neva River  231 New Atlantis  71 New Jersey  523 New Orleans  194, 527 New Sweden  523, 659 New York  176n4, 206–207, 262, 275–288, 332, 352, 420, 449, 451, 527, 624 Newark  288 Newfoundland  420 Ngong Hills  559, 561, 651, 659 Nidaros  590, 593, 595, 603–604, 606–609, 608n7, 611–612, 614 Niger River  149 Nile River  503, 506–507, 515, 645 Nineveh  221–222 Nissum Fjord  87 Niðaróss, see Nidaros Njuorggán  665–666 Njuorjovuopme  583 Nord-Trøndelag  573 Norden  7, 9, 11–13, 12n6, 18, 22, 24, 35, 37–38, 42, 123, 126, 202, 205–206, 290, 304, 361–362, 506, 619 Norderney  92n8 Nordland  187, 294, 304, 482, 573, 583, 654, 658 Normandy  415 North America  11, 123, 187, 237, 319, 419–420, 425, 432–433,

439, 443, 445, 449, 454, 519, 522–523, 641 North Atlantic, see Atlantic Ocean North Cape  524, 652 North Dakota  420 North Pole  521, 530, 532, 536–538, 545–548, 553–554, 625 North Sea  24, 84, 127, 129, 354–356, 359, 607, 666 North Zealand  56, 65–66 Northeast Passage  545, 581 Northwest Passage  186, 544, 552 Norway  1, 8–12, 14–15, 17, 23–24, 35–37, 42, 47, 56–57, 82–83, 95–96, 99, 102–103, 105–106, 107n9, 124–126, 137, 146, 151–153, 155–156, 158, 161, 187, 194, 236, 245, 290, 294, 348–352, 354–359, 361–363, 366, 376–377, 381, 411, 413, 415, 418, 422–425, 428–429, 437, 440–441, 445, 447, 455, 460, 462–463, 467, 471, 477–482, 484, 510n2, 520–521, 531, 538, 540, 542, 554, 572–573, 575–576, 582–585, 588, 590, 593, 597–602, 604–612, 620–623, 626, 641, 643, 651, 653–655, 661–662, 666, 682 Novaia Sembla, see Novaja Zemlja Novaja Zemlja  149, 554 Novgorod  16, 304, 576 Nuugaarsuk  676–677, 681 Nuuk  17, 674 Nystad  345 Närpes  523 Nørrebro  442–443 O Oarrejávri  581 Oddesund  92 Odensicke  589 Ohcejohka  670 Ontario  449 Oregon  420–421 Orkney Islands  608 Oseberg  520 Oslo  22, 36, 151, 202, 349, 353, 359, 440–441, 483–484, 520–521, 537, 586, 593, 601, 608, 622, 652, 661 Christiania  447, 527, 593, 655 Kristiania  35–36, 224, 235, 242, 440, 540–541, 546, 661 Oslo Fjord  36, 521, 540 Ostrobothnia  487, 662, 664

Oulu River  220, 223n7, 340, 666 P Pacific Ocean  183, 304, 450, 521, 545, 551 Pacific Northwest  450 Palermo  323 Palestine  320, 527 Paris  109, 114–117, 138, 140, 176n4, 202, 206, 208, 212–214, 221–224, 223n6, 227, 231, 235–237, 239–242, 245, 248, 262–269, 272, 275, 332–334, 363, 524, 527, 58, 621 Pennsylvania  523 Petrograd, see St. Petersburg Pisa  557 Pohjanmaa  662, 664 Poland  5, 23, 187, 237 Polar Sea  544–548 Prague  440 Provence  683 Prussia  262–264, 272 Q Queensland  449 R Ramundeboda  215 Randers  84, 638 Rauma  220, 599 Red Lodge, Montana  453 Reykjaholt  417 Reykjavík  34, 43–44, 49, 52–53, 202, 241, 363 Rinkeby  438 Rio de Janeiro  194 Rocky Mountains  421 Rogaland  352 Rome  42, 109, 111, 114, 116–117, 119, 206, 262–264, 316, 320–321, 332, 462, 524, 526–527, 564, 593, 596, 608, 621, 648 Rondarne  102–103, 481 Rudkøbing  148 Rungsted  96 Russia  5, 10, 16, 23, 25, 137, 186, 231, 267, 366, 415, 504, 510n2, 523, 576, 584, 597, 652, 652n1, 653, 661 Rwanda  623 Ry Woods  632 Ryfylke  348, 352 Ryfylke Fjord  354–355

Location index Røros  355 S Saarijärvi  464 Sahara  149, 326 St. Gotthard  98 St. Petersburg  132, 202, 220–223, 227, 229, 231–232, 231n17, 236, 546–547 St. Thomas  652 Saltholm  149, 385, 392, 394 San Francisco  279 San Michele  109–110, 115–119 Sandø  160 Santiago, Chile  441–442 Santiago de Compostela  593 Sauda  353 Savonia  486–487 Savonlinna  132 Sáidenjavvi  669 Sápmi  10, 17, 41, 117, 143, 314, 361, 510–512, 510n2, 517, 524, 551, 578, 580–582, 585, 589, 652–656, 652n1, 658, 664–666 Scandinavia  7, 15, 27, 157, 236–237, 239, 264–265, 266, 275, 286, 348, 359–360, 366, 369, 371, 374–375, 377, 379, 387–388, 390, 413–414, 419–421, 433, 445, 447, 463, 472, 481, 503, 512, 517, 572, 575, 581, 666, 674 Scandinavian Peninsula  25, 153 Schleswig  13, 82–83, 387 Schleswig-Holstein  57, 264 Schwarzwald  157 Scoresbysund, see Ittoqqortoormiit Scotland  82, 86, 173, 414, 463, 575, 641, 666 Seattle  453 Seine River  334 Selaön  589–590 Serampore  659 Shetland Islands  608 Siberia  16–17, 82, 294, 581, 641, 658 Sicily  110, 323, 527 Sieidiguoika  669 Silkeborg  84n2, 634–635 Siø  148 Sjelle  638 Sjernarøy  158 Sjælland, see Zealand Skagen  80, 83, 85–87, 89–91, 152

739 Skagerak  152 Skjørping  637–638 Skåne  41, 372, 381, 385, 470 Slesvig, see Schleswig Småland  433, 475 Snæfell  43, 46–47, 52 Snæfellsjökull  34, 43–45, 45n1, 47–53, 55 Snæfellsnes  46 Sodom  222, 232 Sointula  449 South Africa  353, 661 South America  182–183 South Dakota  420, 422, 433–435 South Greenland  675–676 South Pole  521, 537, 543–544 Soviet Union  366, 449 Spain  86, 239, 270, 309, 528, 556 Sparta  566 Spitsbergen  530, 652 Spring Creek, South Dakota  422 Stavanger  24, 290, 348, 354, 356, 358–359, 362, 608 Stenløse  636–637 Stistrup  633 Stockholm  9, 24, 70, 201–203, 208–210, 220–224, 228, 235– 236, 241–244, 314, 438–440, 466, 477, 520, 527, 530, 536, 652 Stromboli  49 Strängnäs  210 Suomenlinna  227 Superior, Wisconsin  449, 453 Svalbard  8, 124, 530–532, 535–537, 554 Svartbäcken  222 Sweden  1, 7–11, 14–17, 23–24, 28–29, 38, 41, 69, 72, 105, 116–117, 130, 137, 146, 148, 152–154, 161, 187, 208, 210, 214–216, 219, 236–237, 243, 280, 290, 293, 314, 332, 344, 346, 361–362, 366, 368, 371–375, 378, 381, 385, 388–389, 391, 393–394, 411, 413, 419, 433, 437–440, 443, 445, 449, 462, 465–466, 471, 473, 475, 477–478, 489, 504, 506, 510, 510n2, 514, 517–518, 520, 523–524, 526, 530, 533, 536, 563, 569–570, 572, 576, 578, 580, 582–584, 586, 589, 591–594, 596–597, 599, 601–602, 641, 652–654, 653n2, 659, 661 Sweden-Finland  17, 524, 573, 583

Switzerland  318–319, 325, 481, 527 Södermanland  210 Sønderjylland, see Schleswig Sörmland  470 T Tabriz  432, 439 Tampere  360 Tana River, see Deatnu River Teheran  439 Telemark  352 Teno River, see Deatnu River Tharangambadi  659 Thule, see Avanersuaq Tiber River  111 Tinnoset  352 Todbjærg  635 Tornio  462 Tornio River  666 Toronto  449 Tórshavn  176, 179, 183n8 Trapobana  71 Trollhätta  569–570 Tromsø  527, 537, 651 Trondheim  590, 603, 608n7, 612, 614 Tsjernobyl, see Chernobyl Turkey  111, 322 Turku  221, 249, 419, 523, 527 Tysfjord  353 Tysvær  348, 352 Tåsinge  148 U Ukraine  376–377, 523 Ullunda  589 Ultima Thule  174 Umeå  674 United States  153, 162, 277, 279–280, 282, 285, 319, 352–353, 360, 372, 393, 419–422, 427, 423–436, 439, 441, 443, 445, 447–449, 451–455, 527–528, 537, 555, 621, 623–624 Uppland  470 Uppsala  9, 72, 310, 419, 432, 439, 462, 523, 580–581, 591–592, 594, 596 USA, see United States Utah  436 V Vadsø  546–547, 582 Vallevarre  582

Location index

740 Valsäng  362 Vardøhus  582, 652 Vendsyssel  81, 89 Venice  524 Verona  220 Versailles  114 Vesterbro  281 Vestervig  92 Vesuvius  120, 319–320 Viborg  84, 239 Vienna  275 Vimmerby  477 Vinland  420, 522 Virgin Islands  124 Virgohavn  530, 532 Visby  639 Voksenåsen  35 Voldum  634 Vordingborg  56, 60, 65 Vänersborg  213–214 Västergötland  210, 215 Västerås  211

Västmanland  210 Västra Hamnen  393 W Wadden Sea  80 Wadköping  211 Warsaw  240 Washington  450 Weimar  220, 262, 273 West Berlin  272 West Indies  88, 659 West Jutland  86–87 Westphalia  82 White Sea  573 Wisconsin  420, 448, 451 Y Yokohama  545 Yugoslavia  389

Z Zealand  56, 59, 65–66, 69, 83, 148–149, 381, 387, 394, 578 Þ Þingvellir  205–206, 417, 436 Ø (Ö) Örebro  210–211 Øresund  7, 56, 69, 364, 381–394 Øresund Bridge  148, 381–382, 387–389, 391–392 Österskären  166 Øyvære, see Øyværet Øyværet  155–156 Å Åbo, see Turku Åboland  345 Åland Islands  345, 361 Århus  276, 623–624 Årsta  592

Person index

A Aanrud, Hans  455–456, 477 Aasen, Ivar  15, 481 Acerbi, Giuseppe  475, 524–526, 528 Adorno, Theodor  259, 259n16 Adrian IV (Nicholas Breakspear)  608 Agricola, Mikael  16 Ahlberg, Herman  532 Aho, Juhani  128, 131–132, 137–138, 140, 222–223, 223n6, 450 Aidt, Naja Marie  288 Aikio, Matti  660–661 Alexander I  137 Alexander II  225–226 Alfred the Great  572–573 Algreen-Ussing, Frederik  65 Alloula, Malek  681 Alm, Gustav  228 Almqvist, Carl Jonas Love  132, 201, 208, 214, 217, 264, 368 Amundsen, Roald  521, 528–529, 537–538, 543–547 Ancher, Michael  90–91, 91n6 Andersen, Hans Christian  28, 38, 42, 58, 63–66, 68–69, 81, 83–87, 84n2–3, 91, 101, 110–111, 113, 123–124, 148, 162, 204, 263–264, 273, 275, 289, 316–319, 322, 334–336, 385, 394, 462, 464, 472, 526, 528, 562–569, 564n2, 564n3, 567n4, 571, 595, 645–647 Andersen, Hendrik Christian  73 Andersen, Vilhelm  107n9 Andersen Nexø, Martin  469–471 Anderson, Benedict  82, 196, 382–384, 596, 615, 618 Andrée, Salomon August  529–536, 548, 554 Anyuru, Johannes  503, 513–517 Appadurai, Arjun  25, 27 Arbuthnot, John  463 Ari Þorgilsson hinn fróði  415 Arke, Pia  672–685 Arkio, Tuula  501 Arrebo, Anders  126, 303–304, 307

Asbjørnsen, Peter Christen  463, 481 Ashberry, John  286 Askildsen, Kjell  160–161 Astrup, Eivind  545 Atterbom, P. D. A.  263 Auerbach, Erich  35, 212, 217 Augé, Marc  20n3, 25n5, 363, 381, 387 Augustus  119–120 Auster, Paul  276, 286–287 Ásta Sigurðardóttir  202 B Bachelard, Gaston  21, 25, 25n5, 39, 70, 502 Backe, Stein  546–547 Bacon, Francis  71, 121 Baggesen, Jens  98–100, 304–305, 307, 314 Bakhtin, Michail  208n1, 217, 230 Balke, Johan  669–670 Balto, Samuel  540 Balzac, Honoré de  231 Bang, Herman  203–204, 265, 275, 321, 324–325, 386–387 Barentsz, Willem  581 Barthes, Roland  189, 390 Bateson, Gregory  398 Baudelaire, Charles  65, 110, 223, 267, 275, 302 Beck, Ulrich  183–184, 364, 377 Beck, Carl  194 Beckett, Samuel  260 Behros, Fateme  419, 432, 439, 443 Bellman, Carl Michael  37, 201 Benedictsson, Victoria  40, 265 Benjamin, Walter  109, 189, 272 Berge, Vidar  532–533 Bergman, Hjalmar  201, 208, 211–213, 212n2 Bergman, Ingmar  40 Bergmann, Guðrún  45 Bergroth, Kersti  232, 239 Bergson, Henri  549–550 Bergsson, Níkulás  593 Bergsøe, Vilhelm  321

Bering, Vitus  186 Beyer, Christian  63 Bhabha, Homi  437, 674 Birkholm, Jens  267 Bjerke, André  483 Bjerne, Ulla  202, 239–240 Bjerregaard, Henrik Anker  105–106, 481 Björling, Gunnar  205, 247–261, 247n3–4, 248n5, 248n7–8, 249n9, 250n11, 251n12–14, 258n15, 259n16 Bjørneboe, Jens  129, 189, 196–199 Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne  105, 265, 481, 598 Blair, Hugh  581 Blicher, Steen Steensen  38, 80–81, 83–86, 88–89, 92, 92n7, 101, 595, 644–645, 649 Blixen, Karen (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen)  28, 92n8, 190, 270, 306, 327–328, 528, 538, 555–561, 555n1, 557n2, 595, 628, 651, 659–661 Boberg, Thomas  328 Bobrikov, Nikolay  225, 227, 227n11, 229, 237 Bodelsen, Anders  280 Boine, Mari  600–601 Bomann-Larsen, Tor  538, 542 Borg, Alexandra  243 Borges, Jorge Luis  397 Boye, Karin  42, 71, 76–79 Brahe, Tycho  93, 312 Brandes, Georg  56n1, 66, 91, 264–266 Branner, Percy  240 Branting, Anna  238, 241–242 Brecht, Bertolt  109 Bredsdorff, Bodil  28–29 Brekke, Toril  277–278 Bremer, Fredrika  40, 319–320, 420–421, 462, 527 Brenner, Arvid  270 Bringsværd, Tor Åge  280, 286–287

Person index

742 Brochmand, Jesper Rasmussen  178n5 Brorson, Hans Adolph  37 Brøgger, Suzanne  279–280, 285–286, 649–650 Brøgger, W. C.  542 Buell, Laurence  366, 367, 372, 374 Bundgaard, Anders  381 Burton, Dorothy Skårdal  421 Butschkow, Julia  273 Bær, Anders  585 Bærentzen, Emil  86–87 Bø, Gudleiv  107n9, 620 Bønnelycke, Emil  267–269, 276 Börge, Göran  110 C Cabot, Sebastian  652 Calatrava, Santiago  390–391 Campanella, Tommaso  71 Canth, Minna  451 Carlsen, Henry  387 Carson, Rachel  372, 374, 378 Carstens, J. L.  652 Casey, Edward S.  20–21, 20n2, 25n5, 157, 182, 198, 249n9 Caspari, Theodor  104n4 Cerio, Edwin  109–110, 113, 119 Certeau, Michel de  20n3, 25n5, 282, 286, 404, 630 Cervantes, Miguel de  39 Cézanne, Paul  254 Chirico, Giorgio de  119 Chow, Rey  681–682 Christensen, Camilla  284–285, 649 Christensen, Hjalmar  546 Christensen, Inger  303–304 Christian II  9, 148 Claussen, Sophus  265, 312, 324, 334 Clifford, James  681 Cohen, Margaret  189, 195 Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle  115 Collett, Camilla  40, 202, 235, 242, 332, 481, 527 Collett, Jonas  235 Collingwood, W. G.  475–477 Condorcet, Nicolas de  73 Conrad, Flemming  101–103, 104n3, 105n5, 105n6, 106, 106n8 Conrad, Joseph  166, 187, 192–193, 195, 197, 199 Conwentz, Hugo  369

Cooper, James Fenimore  192 Copernicus  93 Cresswell, Tim  19, 33, 214 Creutz, Gustav Philip  35 Cronon, William  411 Crutzen, Paul J.  411 D D’Allesandro, Luciano  121 Dagerman, Stig  156, 158–159, 271 Dalager, Stig  287–288 Dalai Lama  149 Dalgas, Enrico  80, 80n1 Damrosch, David  176, 176n4 Darwin, Charles  466, 523 Dass, Petter  126–127, 291, 294, 304, 554 De la Gardie, Magnus  580 Defoe, Daniel  149, 186 Deleuze, Gilles  70, 72, 128, 146–147, 162, 189, 340, 407 DeLillo, Don  287 Dencik, Daniel  394 Descartes, René  198, 310 Dickens, Charles  226, 237, 275, 567–568 Dietrichson, Oluf  540 Diktonius, Elmer  247–249, 249n10 Dinesen, Isak, see Blixen, Karen Ditlevsen, Tove  471 Djurhuus, J. H. O. (Janus)  128, 155, 173–176 Donner, Jörn  272 Dos Passos, John  276, 387 Dostoevsky, Fyodor  217, 220, 223 Douglas, Norman  109, 114, 119, 122 Drachmann, Holger  58, 66–67, 69, 81, 90–91, 91n6, 190, 193, 196, 265–267, 266n1, 273, 294, 323 Dreyer, Dankvart  86, 263 Droste-Hülshoff, Annette von  82 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste  126 Duun, Olav  15, 155–157 Dylan, Bob  276, 280 E Eco, Umberto  71, 77 Edfelt, Johannes  271 Edmond, Charles  49 Egede, Hans  314, 658

Egill Skallagrímsson  417, 575 Egner, Thorbjørn  474, 477 Ehrensvärd, Carl August  314 Eichner, Susanne  392–393 Eide, Knut  352 Einar Már Guðmundsson  363 Einarr Skúlason  609–610, 610n8 Eira, Mathis Aslaksen  585 Ekelund, Vilhelm  267 Ekelöf, Gunnar  247n1, 533 Ekman, Kerstin  201, 204, 208, 210–211, 216, 275, 364, 373–374, 377–378 Eliot, T. S.  397 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  57 Engel, Carl Ludvig  227, 273, 299 Eno, Brian  401 Enquist, Per Olov  273 Erasmus  73 Erdeös, Levente  110 Essendrop, Jens  479 Ewald, Johannes  96–98, 103, 105, 653n2 F Falkeid, Kolbein  330 Fanon, Frantz  684 Fenger, J. F.  565 Ferlin, Nils  534 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence  280 Fersen, Jacques d’Adelswärd  42, 109, 110, 114–116, 119 Fitzgerald, F. Scott  287 Flaubert, Gustave  132 Flygare-Carlén, Emilie  93, 128, 163, 163n1, 171 Fløgstad, Kjartan  15, 290, 352–355 Fosse, Jon  93, 290, 350 Foucault, Michel  21–22, 25, 25n5, 35, 70–71, 78–79, 152, 177–180, 179n6, 208–209, 208n1, 216– 217, 249n9, 340–341, 502–503, 502n1, 516, 562–563, 653 Fox, George  352 France, Anatole  115 Franklin, Benjamin  523 Franzén, Frans Michael  314 Frasca, Gonzalo  400 Frederick the Great  272 Frese, Jacob  251n14 Friedrich, Caspar David  33, 112 Friis, Jens Andreas  655–656, 655n3 Frost, Lars  113

Person index Frænkel, Knut  532, 534, 536 Fuentes, Carlos  71 G Gaimard, M. Paul  44, 49 Ganande, Christian  368 Garboe, Rasmus  60 Garborg, Arne  15, 222, 265, 290, 350–352, 481 Gaski, Harald  459, 585 Gauguin, Paul  680 Geijer, Erik Gustaf  263, 368 Gertten, Fredrik  389–390 Gessner, Salomon  475 Ghosh, Amitay  187, 197 Giddens, Anthony  497–498 Gilpin, William  475 Ginsberg, Allen  276, 279–280 Glob, P. V.  643 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  42, 110, 259, 259n16, 506, 581 Goldschmidt, Meïr  38, 81, 88–91 Gomperz, Heinrich  251, 251n13 Gorky, Maxim  109, 115 Greene, Graham  109 Gress, Elsa  280 Grieg, Edvard  593 Grieg, Nordahl  190–191, 270 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm  463–464 Grundtvig, N. F. S.  57n3, 101–102, 297–298, 300, 311, 313 Guattari, Félix  70, 72, 340 Gude, Hans  348 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich  198 Gummerus, E. R.  110 Gunhild  643–644 Gustaf III  137 Gustafsson, Lars  71, 272 Gustav Vasa  9, 221 Guttorm, Veikko  664 Guðrún Bergmann  45 Gyllembourg, Tomasine  40 H Haanpää, Pentti  144 Hagbom, Hanna  344n5 Hallberg, Ulf-Peter  110, 273 Halldór Laxness  34, 52–55, 205–206, 419, 436–437, 590 Hallgrimur Helgason  361 Hammann, Kirsten  616, 623–627 Hammershaimb, V. U.  176n4

743 Hamsun, Knut  203, 224, 270, 276–277, 306, 440, 482–483, 529, 540, 542–544, 547, 584, 656–658, 660–661 Hannes Sigfússon  43 Hansen, Christian  564 Hansen, Erik Fosnes  190, 564 Hansen, Martin A.  160–161 Hansen, Maurits C.  478–479 Hansen, Povl  56n2 Hansen, Thorkild  124, 552 Hansson, Gunnar D.  539, 553–554 Hansson, Ola  265–267, 325, 548 Harald Bluetooth  643 Harald Fairhair  575, 598, 604 Harald Finehair, see Harald Fairhair Haraldr Hárfagri, see Harald Fairhair Harris, MacDonald  535 Hartmann, Godfred  68 Hauch, Carsten  58, 65, 67, 69, 312 Hauge, Alfred  352 Haugen, Paal Helge  280 Haussman, Georges-Eugène  227 Hayles, N. Katherine  383 Hazelius, Artur  466 Hákon Hákonarson  576 Hedin, Sven  270 Hegel, G. W. F.  193, 263–264, 272 Heiberg, Gunnar  264–265 Heiberg, Johan Ludvig  58, 61–62, 64–66, 69 Heidegger, Martin  19–20, 20n1, 25, 25n5, 46, 154, 157, 162, 261, 400, 614 Heidenstam, Verner von  73, 329, 369, 374 Heinesen, William  128, 173, 175–176, 176n4, 180, 184, 190 Heise, Ursula K.  20n2, 25n5, 377 Hemingway, Ernest  662 Henningsen, Agnes  202, 237, 240–241 Henriksen, Leif  356 Heraclitus  363 Herder, Johann Gottfried von  16, 105, 368, 463, 506, 596, 598 Herodotus  72 Hertervig, Lars  348–350, 352–353 Hertzberg, Fredrik  260–261 Heyerdahl, Thor  190, 521 Hill, Joe (a.k.a. Joel Emmanuel Hägglund)  419, 452

Hitler, Adolf  270 Hoel, Sigurd  483 Holberg, Ludvig  42, 72, 314, 463 Hollo, Anselm  280 Holst, H. P.  80n1 Holst, Lars  540 Holstein, Ludvig  56 Holt, Kåre  538 Hopkins, Gerard Manley  590 Hopper, Edward  361 Horace  186 Hostrup, Christian  644–645, 649 Hoydal, Gunnar  128, 173, 182–184 Huitfeldt, Arild  59 Huxley, Aldous  77 Hyry, Antti  488–493, 496–501, 498n4 Hämäläinen, Helvi  232 Høeck, Klaus  279–281 Høeg, Aka  676 Høeg, Peter  554, 672 Håkon Håkonarson, see Hákon Hákonarson I Ibsen, Henrik  40, 42, 93, 151–152, 154, 239, 264, 301, 448, 451, 467–469, 479, 481–483, 544, 559, 599, 616, 616n3, 618–621, 625, 627 Ingemann, B. S.  56, 299–300 Ingstad, Helge  553 Ivalo, Santeri  222–223 J Jackson, Frederick  537 Jacobsen, Jørgen-Frantz  128, 173–176, 176n4, 180, 184 Jacobsen, J. P.  35, 58, 61, 65–67, 329–330 Jameson, Fredric  682 Jansson, Tove  473–474, 477 Jarl, Stefan  364, 373–375, 377–378 Jensen, Axel  1n3, 326, 328 Jensen, Carsten  129, 187, 190, 196–197, 199–200 Jensen, Johannes V.  108, 190, 276–278, 292–293, 328, 551–552 Jensen, Thit  241 Jensøn, Christen  479 Johansen, Hjalmar  529, 536–539 Johnson, Eyvind  268, 332 Jotuni, Maria  486, 488–493, 496 Joyce, James  227, 309

Person index

744 Jón Birgisson  608–609 Jón Stefánsson  475–477 Jón Þorðarson  418 Juel, Poul  478 Juel-Przybyszewska, Dagny  265, 275 Juslenius, Daniel  419 Jæger, Frank  68 Jæger, Hans  546 Järnefelt, Arvid  202, 221–222, 224, 229–233, 229n12, 229n13, 230n14, 230n15, 230n16, 231n17, 488–489, 498 Jørgensen, Johannes  320, 548 K Kaitsalo, Mauri  663–664 Kallifatides, Theodor  419, 438–440 Kalm, Pehr  462, 519, 523–524 Kamprad, Ingvar  360 Kant, Immanuel  73, 247n4, 396 Karri, Unto  232 Kauhanen, Olli  665, 671 Kearns, Lionel  280 Kellgren, Johan Henrik  310, 313 Kennedy, John F.  281 Kepler, Johannes  548 Kerouac, Jack  275, 280 Khemiri, Jonas Hassen  262, 437 Kielland, Alexander  128, 190, 352 Kierkegaard, Søren  35, 59, 60–61, 66, 203, 263–264, 273, 275, 599, 616, 616n3, 617n4, 620–627 Kilpi, Volter  190 Kingo, Thomas  298–299 Kirk, Hans  190, 192, 423 Kivi, Aleksis  38, 128, 135, 493 Kjærstad, Jan  358, 400 Kleinschmidt, Samuel  17 Klitgaard, Mogens  387 Kløvedal, Troels  190, 648 Knorring, Sophie von  262–263 Knud the Great  607 Kock, Captain Johan  229–230, 229n13 Kontio, Tommi  223n6 Konupek, Michael  419, 440–443 Kopisch, August  111–113 Korneliussen, Ole  684 Koskenniemi, V. A.  202, 220–224, 221n3, 223n7, 228 Krabbe, Anne  59

Krabbe, Thomas Neergaard  678–679 Krag, Vilhelm  548 Krasilnikoff, Arthur  331 Kretzer, Max  220, 223 Kristensen, Tom  113, 268, 270, 309, 333–334 Kristensen, Monica  554 Kristofersen, Aase  537–538 Krohg, Christian  242 Krohn, Fennoman Julius  597 Krupp, Friedrich Alfred  113, 119 Kruse, Lars  91, 91n6 Kuosmanen, Sakari  665 Kurikka, Matti  419, 447–449 Kurjensaari, Matti  232 L La Capria, Raffaele  119–122 La Cour, Paul  315–316, 318–319 Lacis, Asja  109 Lagerkvist, Pär  128, 190–191 Lagerlöf, Selma  28–29, 41–42, 132–133, 320, 527, 533 Laitinen, Kai  137n2, 220, 224n8 Larbaud, Valery  73 Larsen, Carl Emanuel  45 Larsen, Thøger  312 Larsen, Gunnar  483 Larsson, Carl  466 Laugesen, Peter  275–276, 279–280 Leavenworth, Maria Lindegren  536, 552 Lefebvre, Henri  20–21, 20n3, 20n4, 25, 25n5, 35 Lefebvre, Martin  58 Lehtola, Veli-Pekka  584–585, 663, 668 Lehtonen, Joel  128, 132, 134, 233, 488, 494 Leino, Eino  143, 222–223, 222n5, 225–228, 226n10, 227n11, 290, 338–340, 338n1, 343, 347, 493, 647 Lerebour, N. P.  569 Leth, Jørgen  279 Lethbridge, Emily  476–477 Lie, Jonas  187, 189, 192–196 Liksom, Rosa  144, 232 Lilienskiold, Hans Hanssen  582 Limnell, Frederika  527 Lindgren, Astrid  473–474, 477 Lindquist, John Ajvide  128

Linné, Carl von, see Linnæus, Carl Linnerhjelm, Carl  475 Linnæus, Carl  314, 462–463, 519, 523–524, 582–583, 653, 653n2 Ljung, Per Erik  381, 385 Lo-Johansson, Ivar  470–471 Loe, Erland  361 Lorca, Frederico García  277 Lord Elgin  567, 567n4 Lucretius  312 Lundbye, Johan Thomas  58 Lundegård, Axel  40 Lundin, Claes  72 Lundius, Nicolaus  581 Lundkvist, Arthur  75, 309 Luxemburg, Rosa  268 Lüttge, Peter  272 Lönnrot, Elias  16, 291, 368, 449, 458–459, 463, 504–505, 525, 655 M Macpherson, James  463 Magellan, Ferdinand  183, 186 Magnus, Olaus, see Olaus Magnus Mahjoub, Jamal  93–94 Mahloujian, Azar  419, 439–440, 443 Malaparte, Curzio  110, 115–116 Mallarmé, Stéphane  248, 248n5 Malmberg, Bertil  270 Mandela, Nelson  661 Mann, Thomas  204 Manninen, Otto  128, 143–144 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso  115 Marlin, Måns  391 Martinson, Harry  71, 74–79, 331, 371–372 Marx, Karl  189 Massey, Doreen  25, 685 Mathisen, Hans Ragnar  667 Matras, Christian  307 Mattelart, Armand  73–74 Mattson, Helmi  419, 449–450 Mayer, Auguste  44 Mehren, Stein  308–309 Mellin, Gustaf Henrik  150 Melville, Herman  187, 192–193, 195 Mena, Maria  600–601 Michaels, Anne  648 Michelet, Jon  554 Mitchell, W. J. T.  20n4, 57, 69 Moberg, Vilhelm  190, 419, 432–434, 436–437, 439

Person index Moe, Jørgen  463 Monachus, Theodoricus  604 Mondrup, Iben  680 Montesquieu, Baron de  463, 475 Morante, Elsa  109 Moravia, Alberto  109 More, Thomas  70–71, 146 Moretti, Franco  22, 25n5, 195 Mumford, Lewis  279 Munch, Andreas  98, 100 Munch, Edvard  265, 350 Munk, Kaj  68 Munk, Jens  186, 552 Munthe, Axel  42, 109–110, 115–119, 122 Mylius-Erichsen, Ludvig  85, 85n4, 553 Mörne, Arvid  290, 338n1, 343–347, 343n4 N Nansen, Fridtjof  521, 528–529, 532, 536–544, 546–548, 550–551, 673 Napoleon  10 Nero  320 Neruda, Pablo  109, 119, 309 Nesch, Rolf  350 Nesser, Håkan  286 Nexø, Martin, see Andersen Nexø, Martin Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o  659–661 Niebuhr, Carsten  314 Nielsen, Frederik  294 Nielsen, Hans-Jørgen  279–280, 282–283, 335–336 Nielsen, Konrad  667 Nielsen Baunsgaard, Knud  631 Nielsen Brun, Christiern  59 Nielsen Ravna, Ole  540 Niemi, Mikael  586 Nietzsche, Friedrich  47, 267, 549 Nikolai II  225, 227 Norberg-Schultz, Christian  25, 25n5 Nordbrandt, Henrik  322 Nordenflycht, Hedvig Charlotta  35 Nordenskiöld, Adolf Erik  545 Nordholm, Adolf  532 Nordrup, Carl  56n2 Nordström, Ludvig  42, 71–74, 77–78 Norvang, Samuel  667

745 Nummi, Markus  223n6 Nyrop, Kristoffer  59 Næs, Kate  280 Næss, Arne  379 O O’Brian, Patrick  197 O’Hara, Frank  286 Oddr Snorrason  604 Oehlenschläger, Adam  38, 61–62, 64, 91, 101, 105–106, 147, 263, 368, 597–598 Ohtere  573–574, 576, 586 Olaus Magnus  17, 126, 462–463, 466, 474, 577–581 Olav V  612 Olwig, Kenneth  84 Onerva, L.  222–223, 228–229 Orosius, Paulus  573, 575 Orri Vésteinsson  418 Orwell, George  77 Oxenstierna, Johan Gabriel  37 Óláfr Haraldsson  607–610 Óláfr Tryggvason  604–607 P Pacius, Fredrik  597 Palma, Rubén  419, 441, 443 Palme, Olof  439, 443 Papageorgiou-Venetas, Alexander  565, 567n4, 569 Paul III  579 Paus, Ole  600 Peary, Robert  542, 545 Pedersen, Jens Peter  630 Peerson, Cleng  352 Peter the Great  226 Petersen, Storm  276 Petrarch  97 Petterson, Per  484–485 Peyrefitte, Roger  114 Pindar  8 Pio, Louis  419, 447–448 Plato  71–73, 310, 506, 566 Pliny the Elder  7, 578 Ploug, Carl  88 Pontoppidan, Henrik  38, 80–81, 91–92, 92n7, 267, 275, 325 Pottinger, Henry  666 Prince Adolf  578 Proust, Marcel  118, 204 Ptolemy  27, 362 Pushkin, Alexander  226, 226n10, 231

Q Quinn, Anne Kyyrö  361 Qvigstad, Just  577, 655 R Ramel, Povel  532 Ramus, Jonas  419 Rasmussen, Halfdan  68 Rasmussen, Knud  543, 549–551, 553, 658, 673 Reich, Ebbe Kløvedal  648 Reiss-Andersen, Gunnar  308 Reuter, Bjarne  190 Rheen, Samuel  580 Richardt, Christian  68, 80–81 Rifbjerg, Klaus  273, 278, 538 Riis, Jacob A.  276, 419, 451–452 Rilke, Rainer Maria  109, 248n5 Rimbaud, Arthur  309 Rimbereid, Øivind  127, 290, 356, 358–359 Rink, H. J.  673 Riou, Édouard  49–50 Ritter, Joachim  33, 57, 65, 97 Rodenbach, George  226 Rosenfeldt, Hans  391 Ross, Ludwig  563n1, 567 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  38, 150, 617, 655 Rudbeck, Olof  42, 72, 419, 596 Runeberg, Johan Ludwig  128, 135–136, 139, 142, 251n14, 464–465, 505, 509–510, 581, 596–598 Rung, Otto  276 Runia, Eelco  340, 342 Rushdie, Salman  676 Rutanen, Mikael  419, 453 Rydberg, Viktor  300 Rølvaag, Ole Edvart  190, 419, 421–423, 425–426, 429–431, 433–437 Rørbye, Martinus  86 S Saaby Christensen, Lars  273, 307 Saarikoski, Pentti  232, 362–363 Said, Edward  438–439, 441, 655, 672, 681 St. Birgitta  593 St. Eric Jedvarsson  591 St. Martin  605n5 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de  73 Salomaa, Hiski  419, 453

Person index

746 Sandel, Cora (a.k.a. Sara Fabricius)  202, 238, 242, 245, 527 Sandel, Maria  202, 242–244 Sandemose, Aksel  128, 189, 191, 196–197, 305–306, 467–469 Sartre, Jean-Paul  160 Sarvig, Ole  271 Savinio, Alberto  119–120, 122 Saxo Grammaticus  126, 296, 462, 578, 581 Scheffer, Johann (a.k.a. Schefferus, Johannes)  17, 580–582, 653 Schelling, F. W. J.  263–264 Scherfig, Nikolaj  391 Schildt, Göran  190 Schildt, Runar  228 Schiller, Friedrich  506 Schimmelman, Augustus von  557 Schiøtz, Aksel  64n6 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  263 Schmitt, Carl  186–187 Schnitler, Peter  583, 654 Schönberg, Arnold  66 Scott, Robert  543, 546 Scott, Walter  82, 84 Seeberg, Peter  271 Selander, Sten  370–371 Shakespeare, William  400, 463, 580 Sharma, Samsaya  600 Sibbern, F. C.  263 Sibelius, Jean  227n11, 229n12 Sighvatr Þórðarson  609 Sigurðr Jórsalafari  593, 609–610 Sillanpää, F. E.  128, 134, 134n1, 140–141, 488–489, 498 Sirma, Olaus  17, 581 Siwertz, Sigfrid  267 Sjón  336, 337 Sjöberg, Birger  201, 208, 212–213, 314, 547 Sjöström, Victor  151–153 Skjöldebrand, Anders Fredrik  475, 524, 526 Skram, Amalie  40, 190, 196, 242, 265 Smidt, C. M.  63, 67–68 Smirnoff, Karin  237, 244 Smith, Adam  73, 484 Smith, Anthony D.  615 Snellman, Johan Vilhelm  263 Snoilsky, Carl  320–321, 545

Snorri Sturluson  49, 416–417, 575–576, 593, 596, 604–605, 611 Solbakk, Aage  459, 585, 666–671 Soldati, Mario  109 Solstad, Dag  273, 362–363, 599, 616, 620, 624, 627 Sonne, Jørgen  318–319 Spegel, Haquin  126 Spengler, Oswald  197 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty  652 Staël, Madame de  42, 110 Staffeldt, Schack  98–100 Stagnelius, Erik  304, 307, 505, 507–510 Steensen-Leth, Bodil  273 Steffens, Henrik  262–263, 273 Stein, Björn  391 Steinfeld, Thomas  115–116 Steinunn Sigurðardóttir  52 Sterne, Laurence  314 Stevens, Wallace  65 Sthen, Hans Christensen  297 Stirner, Max  259 Stockfleth, Niels Vibe  655 Storholmen, Ingrid  364, 372, 374, 376–379 Stridsberg, Sara  278–279 Strindberg, August  40, 70, 73, 92–93, 128, 154, 157, 159, 163, 166–167, 171, 203, 220, 222–223, 244, 251n14, 265, 268, 272–273, 275, 333–334, 466, 474, 477, 532 Sturla Þórðarson  417, 576 Sundman, Olof  534–536, 543, 548 Sverdrup, Johan  655 Sverdrup, Otto  521, 531, 537, 540 Swedenborg, Emanuel  37, 301–302, 311, 314 Söderberg, Hjalmar  203–204, 223–224, 228 Södergran, Edith  40, 42, 309 Sørensen, Poul  280 Sørensen-Fugholm, P.  68 T T-bone Slim (a.k.a. Matti Valentine Huhta)  419, 452 Tacitus  641, 643 Tagore, Rabindranath  258, 258n15 Talvio, Maila  221n3, 222–223, 233 Tang Kristensen, Evald  458, 463, 628 Tarvas, Toivo  232 Taube, Evert  170

Tavaststjerna, Karl A.  222, 265 Tegnér, Esaias  432, 465–466, 505–510 Tervapää, Juhani (pseudonym for Hella Wuolijoki)  341n2 Theocritus  251n14 Thiele, I. M.  61 Thomissen, Hans  297 Thor Vilhjálmsson  48 Thorild, Thomas  37 Thorvaldsen, Berthel  42 Thrane, Marcus  419, 447–448 Tiberius  109, 111, 114, 119–120 Tolstoy, Leo  231n17 Topelius, Zacharias (a.k.a. Topelius, Zachris)  128, 136–137, 140, 472–473, 598 Tournier, Michel  648 Trakl, Georg  614 Trana, Kristian Kristiansen  540 Tranströmer, Tomas  129, 647 Trap, Jens Peter  86n5 Trier, Lars von  648–649 Troell, Jan  535–536 Tuan, Yi-Fu  25, 25n5 Tullin, Christian Braunmann  35–37, 96–97, 103 Tunbjörk, Lars  361 Tunström, Göran  280, 287 Turèll, Dan  279–281 Turi, Johan  17, 413–414, 460, 461, 577, 583–584 Turner, Victor  89 Turtiainen, Arvo  232 Tuuri, Antti  662–667, 671 Tygstrup, Frederik  21–22 U Uddgren, Gustaf  265 Undset, Sigrid  527, 546, 590, 595, 603–604, 603n1, 607, 612, 613–614 Uppdal, Kristoffer  352 Uusma, Bea  535–536 V Valeur, Michael  396, 401, 403 Valkeapää, Nils-Aslak  461–462, 503, 510, 512, 517, 670 Vallgren, Carl-Johan  273 Veblen, Thorstein Bunde  419, 429, 451–452 Verhaeren, Emile  73 Verne, Jules  34, 49–52, 533

Person index Vesaas, Olav  158 Vesaas, Tarjei  15, 156–158 Vigdís Finnbogadóttir  51 Vigeland, Gustav  265 Vinje, Aasmund Olavsson  102–103 Virgil  419 Voltaire  71, 436 W Wadskiær, C. F.  60 Wallenius, K. M.  585 Waltari, Mika  223, 223n6, 228, 232 Wamberg, Jacob  33–34, 57–58 Warhol, Andy  276, 279–280 Weber, Max  197 Weiss, Peter  271, 273 Welhaven, Johan Sebastian  98, 100, 102–103 Wenders, Wim  273 Wergeland, Henrik  98–100, 150–151, 300–301, 481

747 Wessel, Johan Herman  36 Westermarck, Helena  202, 238 Westman, Lars  389 Westö, Kjell  227 Whitman, Walt  258, 258n15, 276, 278 Wilde, Oscar  115 Wildenwey, Herman  312 Wilkuna, Kyösti  223, 228 Williams, Raymond  234 Williams, William Carlos  276 Winther, Christian  65 Winther, Sophus Keith  419, 422–423, 425–426, 428–431 Wivel, Ole  90 Woolf, Virginia  234–235 Wordsworth, William  38 Wuolijoki, Hella  290, 338, 340–341, 341n2, 343, 347 Wägner, Elin  202, 236–237 Y Yeats, William Butler  206

Z Zamyatine, Yevgeni Ivanovich  77 Zola, Emile  224 Þ Þórarinn Loftunga  609 Ø (Ö) Örbäck, Johnny  390–391 Ørsted, H. C.  263 Å Åkesson, Anna  202, 237

Nordic Literature: A comparative history is a multi-volume comparative analysis of the literature of the Nordic region. Bringing together the literature of Finland, continental Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Sápmi), and the insular region (Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands), each volume of this three-volume project adopts a new frame through which one can recognize and analyze significant clusters of literary practice. This first volume, Spatial nodes, devotes its attention to the changing literary figurations of space by Nordic writers from medieval to contemporary times. Organized around the depiction of various “scapes” and spatial practices at home and abroad, this approach to Nordic literature stretches existing notions of temporally linear, nationally centered literary history and allows questions of internal regional similarities and differences to emerge more strongly. The productive historical contingency of the “North” as a literary space becomes clear in this close analysis of its literary texts and practices.

ISBN 978 90 272 3468 1

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia