by James Raffan
The story that stood out was about the Norse god Odin, the ruler of Asgard, who always had two ravens in his company. These were Huginn and Muninn, his winged eyes and ears, who helped to keep track of goings on in the universe of the gods. Each morning, the saga said, these two ravens would be dispatched by their master to travel the world, then report back each evening with what they had seen and heard.
Odin, in his wisdom, gave these two special ravens the ability to speak human languages, so that they might understand the meanings of overhead conversations. Further, the saga relates, the names of these two birds are significant as well: Huginn is Old Norse for “thought” and Muninn means “memory.” Huginn and Muninn are often associated in Norse mythology with fylgjur, related supernatural beings directly connected to human fate and fortune.
Two ravens on Grímsey, never more than two, I could hear Ingólfur telling me. I could see in my mind’s eye those two ravens sitting on the top of the cliff, talking like two old guys on the bench outside the post office. The story of the raven god suggested that thought and memory could control human fate and fortune. Perhaps the ravens were trying to tell us something.
I left the Culture House and headed through town to have a coffee and cogitate a bit on the Sagas, I settled in on a bench beside Hallgrímskirkja, the imposing church on the hill. In front of it was a well-weathered bronze statue of Leifur Heppni, the man himself, Leif the Lucky, Leif Ericsson—another star in the Sagas—looking very much like a Viking hero, overlooking the harbour. His jaw was set, his eyes firmly fixed on the horizon, and as I looked up at the gulls landing on his head, I saw the purpose of this circumpolar journey as clearly as ever.
The Sagas established that Ericsson and his crew had reached North America five centuries before Columbus. And yet Columbus got the credit for his “discovery” of the New World. Why were these northern voices, these northern stories written in vegetable inks on durable animal hides, not more included in received Western history? Was it because they did not ask or call out for recognition? Was it because they didn’t fit into the Mediterranean exploration myth and mystique? Whatever the case, it seems the people of the middle latitudes have a long-standing habit of ignoring northerners and northern voices.
2: VOICES OF THE SACRED MOUNTAIN
As I moved east toward the rising sun in Norway, a bonus: my spouse, collaborator in life’s adventures, and in-house editor, Gail Simmons, would be with me for a month in Scandinavia. The plan was to celebrate our thirtieth anniversary in Murmansk. We took a daytime flight from Ottawa to Frankfurt, en route to Oslo, where we’d rent a car to head north. It was a surprise to learn that air traffic controllers had routed our flight on an arc that intersected the Arctic Circle eleven thousand metres over the Norwegian Sea.
A lifelong reluctant flyer, Gail nevertheless wanted to travel partway around the Arctic Circle with me. For the flight, she was rendered more or less unconscious by relaxation tapes and a selection of little white pills from our most understanding family physician. I leaned over to point out on her seat-back map screen that we were actually flying over the intersection of 66°33’ north latitude and the prime meridian—no answer.
Lost in my own little reverie, anticipating the tour we had planned that would take us up to the Arctic Circle by road in Norway, then east along the line through Sweden and Finland, followed by a great arc over the top of Scandinavia to Nordkapp and over the border into western Russia, I was caught off guard when the beverage service arrived. I was joined by three impossibly cute polar bears on the side of Coke’s newest soft drink container. I was at the Arctic Circle, crossing into the space the Greeks called Arktikos, meaning “near the bear” (the Great Bear constellation), and there they were, the three proverbial bears.
Sipping my Coke, I reached for the in-flight magazine and flipped to the map at the back. It’s basically the same world image that most Westerners have grown up with, a transverse Mercator projection that represents the middle latitudes most faithfully. The Arctic and the Antarctic are just grossly distorted white blobs on the edges of the page.
If we are to get closer to understanding the role that the North is playing and will play in our future, if we are to embrace the notion of a peopled Arctic, a different map needs to be etched in public consciousness. This is a map that President Grímsson knows well, the so-called polar projection. It is a view of the earth looking down from the North Star, a map with the North Pole in the centre and the equator at the margin, with the parallels (latitudes) as circles and the meridians (longitudes) as spokes on a wheel. There is a similar map for the South Pole; what sets the two apart is that the austral map shows land surrounded by water, while the boreal map is the opposite. Culturally, the poles are opposites as well: the North is peopled.
Although more often seen as a satellite photo than as a map, this is the image that has entered our lives with the incredible time-lapse photography of the summer minimum of Arctic sea ice. The polar projection also presents the adjacencies of the eight circumpolar nations and how connected they are by Arctic waters, instead of being strung out horizontally in a way that shows Russia and Canada, for example, as worlds apart when in fact they are neighbours across the pole. Although we tend to think of flights from, say, Ottawa to Frankfurt as following a straight line from west to east on the old school map, in fact the shortest distance between two points on the earth is always what’s known as the great circle route, which, in this instance, goes well up into Arctic airspace.
Arctic as unknown wilderness. Polar regions as amorphous white blobs for text and legends at the top and bottom of our maps. Arctic as place of discovery. Arctic as exotic passage. Arctic as wilderness. Arctic as home of the bear. Arctic as laboratory. Arctic as thermostat, the melting ice an accessible metric of global climate change. And, increasingly, as changes in sea and land conditions have enabled more resource exploration and extraction, the Arctic is registering as a larder, a bank, even a battery.
Such are the shifting ways that this melting ice cap figures in the public consciousness. The Arctic as a homeland for people—more than four million globally at or above the Arctic Circle, including nearly four hundred thousand indigenous people of more than forty ethnicities spanning eight different linguistic groups—seems to be an elusive concept for residents of the non-Arctic to comprehend. And now Coke was connecting the consumption of sugar and caffeine to the preservation of bears that stand for all that is sweet and right and fuzzy and four-legged about the future of the Arctic and the planet. Jeez!
“Can you believe that?” I asked out loud, as I held up the empty can. And still my partner slept.
As we headed north from Oslo’s Gardermoen Airport on Norwegian Highway E6, Gail was coming around. The rumble of the road and a good blast of fresh air washed away the worry of flying. We were like a couple of kids, giddy with the prospect of another Arctic adventure. Rolling north, we might as well have been in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex or at home in eastern Ontario, watching farmers bale hay on neatly ordered green pastures between polite little towns. Thanks to warm equatorial waters surging north on the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift, the rolling green hills looked nothing like the Canadian Arctic.
It was June, and our goal was to be on the Arctic Circle on the solstice, to watch the sun complete its first full circle through all points of the compass in Norway. The joke on the Canadians, who generally think they know a thing or two about long journeys, was that getting to the intersection of Norwegian Highway E6 and the Arctic Circle in the compact coastal country turned out to be almost more than we could handle.
Our maps indicated that it was over a thousand kilometres from Oslo to the Polarsirkel-Senteret near Stødi. Gail and I routinely travelled from our home in Ontario to Nova Scotia, where most of her family lives, a distance of nearly 1,500 kilometres, which we usually did in one day, starting early and driving as fast as traffic and the law would allow, making our way down the St. Lawrence River valley, up and over the di
vide into New Brunswick, and then down the Saint John River valley to Nova Scotia.
Highway E6 was an excellent two-lane all-weather road, but with the undulating semi-mountainous terrain and insanely tight curves—clear mountain air on one side and grey granite on the other—we did well to reach top speeds of ninety kilometres an hour and averaged well below that. The landscape and the picturesque little Norwegian towns, as we made our way north through Ringebu, Folidal, Trondheim, and on, and on, were captivating in their contrast to anything we had experienced at this latitude at home. But on and on we went.
“Remind me what the big draw of being on the Arctic Circle on the summer solstice is?” Gail asked in a voice that was more “Maybe we should stop and continue in the morning” than it was “Gee, this fourteen-hour drive is just what I’d imagined our Arctic adventure would be.”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s something to do with cosmic geometry and experiencing this important line I’m following around the world at the exact moment in the earth’s orbit around the sun that actually defines the Arctic Circle. At every point along 66°33’ north, for the first and only time this year, the sun will be visible all night long. That’s cool, wouldn’t you say?”
No answer.
“It’s all about the obliquity.”
“The what?”
“They call the earth’s 23°27’ tilt—the one that when subtracted from 90° gives us 66°33’ or 66.6°, the latitude of the Arctic Circle, and the point on the earth’s surface at which the sun is visible for twenty-four hours in the Arctic summer—the ‘obliquity.’ By that same geometry, that is the exact line where twenty-four-hour darkness begins in the winter. The obliquity is what defines the Arctic day and night, and it is also the angle that gives us the changing of the seasons. I thought it would be neat to be on the line on the day that the sun is visible for the full twenty-four hours, the longest day of the year.”
“Right. I thought it would be neat not to spend the whole day in the car.”
“Distances are deceiving here in Norway.”
“Right.”
By eight p.m., travelling in fog and light rain, we had made it to Mo I Rana, the administrative capital of Nordland County, which spans the Arctic Circle. But we still had ninety kilometres to go. By then, the road was even more challenging than farther south, with lots of hairpin bends and drivers who were clearly more familiar with the curves than we were. Norwegian roads, like most things Scandinavian, were much more economical in design than anything Canadian.
And, to make the driving even more interesting as we started up switchback grades into the Salffjellet Mountains, the Norwegian Roads Department had taken away the centre line, opting instead to mark a reference line on the edges of the road, so that when approaching a broad-snouted transport bearing down at high speed, you had to focus on the side of the road rather than the centre to stay out of harm’s way. It took some getting used to.
The climb moved us away from bucolic farmland and into more wild country, scrub boreal forest, and eventually an alpine tundra plateau that looked, finally, like an Arctic to which we could relate. In fact, it started to snow as we passed a sign saying “Polarsirkel-Senteret 2 km.” And finally we were there. At 9:37 p.m. on the summer solstice, Gail and I got out of the car and, to the extent that our road-weary bodies would allow, did a little dance right there in the parking lot.
The sign said that the centre would be closing at ten, so we rushed inside the domed-roof building, which looked inspired by a sea turtle, or perhaps a melting igloo. Signs in the foyer welcomed us in Norwegian, English, Dutch, Spanish, German, Italian, and French. A pretty summer student who was closing up the Arctic Circle photo booth apologized that she’d shut down the camera for the night but said that if we wanted to follow the red arrows on the floor and stand in the red box in front of the Polarsirkel-branded northern lights dropcloth, she would be happy to snap a picture with our camera.
Here, Polarsirkel (“Arctic Circle” in Norwegian) is actually a trademark that has been stitched, painted, transferred, tagged, or otherwise affixed to almost every type of merchandise imaginable, from pencils to pullovers. There were playing cards, key fobs, T-shirts, rock candy, stuffed animals, soothers, paperweights, neckties, towels, gloves, hats, underwear, lottery ticket scratchers, erasers, postcards, and more postcards. If you wanted cards postmarked with the Arctic Circle cancelling stamp, that cost a little more.
And you could mail these cards in the big red Arctic Circle postbox, which stood beside the rangiest-looking beanpole of a polar bear (apparently Europe’s largest, although there certainly wouldn’t have been a real bear at this location since the Pleistocene, if then), standing menacingly on its hind feet and stretching from floor to ceiling. I’ve never seen such a tall bear, in the wild or mounted. The specimen’s only redeeming characteristic, besides its impressive height, was a very clean and fluffy coat that had been splendidly finished by the taxidermist with a creme rinse that smelled faintly of lavender.
The staff were now closing the till and locking up. A bit dazed by the inside of the centre, we headed back outside and into the gently falling snow. We took our coffee in Arctic Circle paper cups with us. Given the hour and the overcast sky, the view of the sun in the North for which I had hungered was obscured.
En route to the monument that marks the actual circle, we found ourselves surrounded by stone cairns—what Canadian Inuit call inukshuks, meaning “likenesses of men.” As we walked up a rise, imagining that we were moving step by step along the Circle itself, things got even stranger. The scope of the phenomenon was staggering. All the way from this land surrounding the Polarsirkel-Senteret across reindeer pastures to the next ridge, which had to be at least a kilometre away, visitors had built these little monuments to mark the occasion of reaching the Arctic Circle. Where we expected to see evidence of the Sami, the Scandinavian indigenous people, we instead found a collection of lithic graffiti—”I was here” markers littering the tundra.
Returning to the car, we scared a couple of ravens chowing down inside a Dumpster outside the centre’s cafeteria. They croaked and then lifted on wings that fluttered and squeaked in the still cold air. They circled once and then settled on top of the nearby monument, on the Arctic Circle marker. Thought and memory, in silhouette against the midnight sky.
The following day, we continued north above the Arctic Circle, still under an overcast sky, on the twelve-car E6 ferry from Bognes to Skarberget. “So where’s this sacred mountain?” Gail asked as we chugged across open water. “What’s it called again?”
“Stetind. And it’s over there,” I replied, checking my compass and pointing through the mist and rain in what I thought might be an easterly direction across Tysfjorden. “It was voted Norway’s national mountain back in 2002. The Norwegian tourist brochure says it is visible for kilometres in every direction around here. Fishermen in boats on the open sea are supposed to use it as a marker, so surely we’d be able to see it from here, if the clouds weren’t so low.”
There were two compelling reasons to move north from the Polarsirkel-Senteret, instead of moving east or even west along the Arctic Circle. The first was an absence of roads in very rugged terrain. The other reason was to see if we might catch a glimpse of this sacred mountain and, after that, to get a view into the world of Norwegian enviropolitics as seen through the eyes of an inspiring young activist called Ingrid Skjoldvær, who lives near there.
Stetind is not the highest mountain in Norway, nor is it the most impressive—but, because of its smooth granite sides, it is perhaps Norway’s most difficult challenge in technical rock climbing. Leading the team that first summited Stetind’s 1,391-metre peak by its sheer west wall in 1966 was Arne Naess, the father of the deep ecology movement.
Naess, like Norwegian president Gro Harlem Brundtland, who was the first female prime minister of Norway and chair of the 1983 World Commission on Environment and Development, was a philosopher and environmentalist who
called for a comprehensive examination of the causes of environmental degradation and decay rooted in the very DNA of developed Western societies. Naess died in 2009 but only after engineering a seismic shift in thinking about the relationship between people and place.
The year before he died, Naess gathered with a Sami shaman and healer, Eirik Myrhaug, and various other philosophers and teachers of friluftsliv, a distinctly Scandinavian philosophy of outdoor living, to redouble their search for new ways to move the principles of deep ecology into the mainstream. At this meeting they created the Council for Eco-philosophy, which they hoped would be a platform from which their messages might be more broadly communicated. The first communiqué of the council was the Stetind Declaration, which I held in my hand and pondered as the car ferry chugged on and we strained to see the mountain through the fog.
Like the Apostle’s Creed or any other affirmation of faith, the declaration was meant to engage the convictions of individuals in working toward a new public consciousness. It reads, “We have gradually come to realize that our way of life has fatal consequences for nature and humankind, and therefore all life on Earth. The challenges that we face, as individuals and community, are not merely of an economic and technological nature. They concern our basic values and our fundamental conception of what it means to be human.” And it goes on to acknowledge a set of related precepts and to assert a series of commitments related to renewing global understandings of the relationship between nature and humankind.
This declaration was duly signed by its creators and was then set adrift on the waters of the World Wide Web for others to embrace. Long before climate change would become a world issue, Naess and the other participants in the Stetind seminars were raising the contradictions of recycling in a carbon-dependent world of rampant consumerism. With this communication they did their best to lead by example and to spread the word. Above the Arctic Circle on Norway’s rugged coast, looking back across Tysfjorden into swirling mists obscuring a view where the mountain should be, it’s as if these voices were lost in the wind. But not completely.