Somewhat to the left of the map’s centre is my home. Unlike the outline of Scandinavia, Shetland is not drawn with much accuracy. It looks rather like a boiled egg, sliced into six pieces. ‘The Hetlandic islands and bishopric [are] a fertile country,’ the key declares, and they boast ‘the most beautiful women’. But Olaus clearly did have access to reliable information about the islands because, of the few place names he includes, most are still recognisable. The island of Mui on the east coast is likely to be Mousa, and Brystsund is surely Bressay Sound, on the shores of which Lerwick would later be built. Skalvogh is Scalloway, which would have been capital of the islands at that time, and Svinborhovit in the far south is Sumburgh Head. The little island just below – Feedero – is Fair Isle.
What is striking about the Carta Marina is that it shows the north not as an empty, desolate region, as many in Mediterranean Europe would still have imagined it, but as a place bursting with activity and life: animal life, marine life, human life. This is a map that seems to pulse rather than lie still; it is a restless, dynamic image, infused with the energy of the world it depicts. No one else was in the room with me that morning, and for a long time I stood gazing at it, exploring those shapes and spaces that were at once so familiar and yet so unlike the cartography of today. The purpose of this map was to do more than educate; it was to inspire a reimagining of place, and to turn southern heads towards the north. Despite its many distractions – the beautiful and the monstrous – my own head kept turning towards home.
On a bright, Sunday afternoon I walked from the cathedral down to the river bank, then northwards on the pilgrims’ trail towards Gamla (‘Old’) Uppsala. This is the path along which the remains of King Erik Jedvardsson – later, St Erik – are supposed to have been carried in 1167, towards their final resting-place in the city. The trail follows the river Fyris, where mallards skulked among the frosted bulrushes, then it turns away into the fringes of the city, past a bowling alley, sports centre and car park. Neat rows of tiny cottages and allotments, all closed up for the winter, lead on through tree-lined lanes and smart housing schemes, their windows glittering in the icy sunlight. The trail was busy, despite the cold. Children in down jackets dragged plastic sledges behind them, while parents pushed prams in front; lovers strolled hand in hand, joggers panted past, and elderly couples took careful steps, their walking poles clacking like magpies against the pavement. All of us were headed in the same direction, away from the city, to where the day would open out. Across a busy road, then down a lane, past sleepy bungalows and gardens, the landscape began to change. Trees replaced buildings, and a series of low hillocks rose up on one side of the path. Out ahead, flat white fields stretched towards the horizon.
I left the main trail there and walked up towards the edge of the trees, where several boulders stood, each with coloured pebbles glued on top. According to a leaflet I found nearby this was a ‘place of meditation’, and the pebbles were ‘pearls of life’. They were, it said, ‘an aid for modern pilgrims. For the greatest and most significant of all journeys – the journey inwards’. I thought about that label – ‘modern pilgrim’ – and wondered if it could apply to me. I hoped not, for the mawkishness of it made me wince. But still, the question lingered. There I was, treading a long road towards where, exactly? Looking for what? I’d often on these journeys felt uneasy about my motives and my desires. I’d often questioned what I was doing, and what I was trying to do. But I’d never once thought of myself as a pilgrim. So if that’s what I was, I was either an accidental or a dishonest one, a pilgrim guarding himself against disappointment. For a few moments I stood there, unmoving, as a woodpecker thrummed nearby and a pair of nuthatches scraped at the corrugated bark of a pine.
Returning to the path below, I continued northward through thinning light. The sky was a broad, watery blue, broken only by vapour trails crisscrossing above. The sun slouched over the western horizon, with a pale yellow glow that dragged gangly shadows across the landscape. Everything was more clearly defined in this light; everything seemed more certain of itself. The fields were striped by ski trails and by the memory of ploughs. The stalks of last year’s crop protruded through the snow like the stubborn bristle of a day-old shave. From there I could see what I had come to see: three gently-sloping lumps, with a stone church beyond. These were the ‘Mounds of the Kings’ or ‘Royal Mounds’, one of the most important archaeological sites in all of Scandinavia, and looking out towards them I was struck by two conflicting feelings. The first stemmed from the knowledge that this is an important place – a sacred place, even. Such knowledge brings with it a kind of wonder and mystery, and Gamla Uppsala certainly has both. Yet at the same time that feeling was contradicted by the utterly unexceptional appearance of the place, by the tameness and the tediousness of it. The ‘Mounds of the Kings’ are precisely that – mounds – and are neither dramatic nor particularly engaging, in and of themselves. Were it not for the flatness of the surrounding land, these tumuli would be barely noticeable at all. As it is, they stand out like ripples in a millpond.
It takes a fair leap of the imagination to conjure up, in this place, the scene described by Adam of Bremen in the late eleventh century. Furnished, he claims, with eyewitness accounts, Adam described a temple then standing on this site that was ‘entirely decked out in gold’. Here, ‘the people worship the statues of three gods’, called Thor, Wotan (Odin) and Frikko (Freyr), the last of which was built ‘with an immense phallus’. But as if a giant penis were not bad enough, Adam also reported that during midwinter feasts at this temple, human and animal sacrifices were made. ‘[Of] every living thing that is male,’ he wrote, ‘they offer nine heads, with the blood of which it is customary to placate gods of this sort. The bodies they hang in the sacred grove that adjoins the temple … Even dogs and horses hang there with men.’ This festival would go on for nine days, and by the end of it, scores of human and animal remains would be strung up among the branches.
Gamla Uppsala, then, was once a place of power and worship. It was also, most likely, one of the last real strongholds of paganism in Europe. Here, a distinctly northern mythology held out against the steady expansion of Christianity. According to the medieval Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson, the reason the temple on this site had such significance was that it had been built by Freyr himself. And the god – a king, perhaps, deified after death – was buried here beneath one of these mounds.
The archaeological evidence for a temple at Gamla Uppsala is inconclusive, though there were certainly buildings here before the current church was begun, back in the thirteenth century. There is no doubt, however, that the three central mounds were used for burial purposes, as indeed were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other, smaller mounds in the area, most of which have since been destroyed by agricultural and quarrying activity. Excavations at this site have confirmed that people were cremated here around 1,500 years ago, within large cairns of stone, wood and mud. Because of the intense heat of these cremations, what remains is largely ash and burnt bones, together with a few trinkets, so little can be conclusively determined about the occupants of these tumuli. But it’s been suggested that the mounds may indeed be the final resting places of kings – perhaps Ane, Egil and Adils, of the Yngling dynasty – while those graves in the surrounding area contained people of lower status.
H. A. Guerber has contrasted the ‘graceful and idyllic’ mythology of the ‘sunny south’ with the ‘grand and tragical’ ones of the north. ‘The principal theme of the northern myths,’ she explained, ‘is the perpetual struggle of the beneficent forces of Nature against the injurious.’ The gods themselves came to represent these various forces, and to personify the motivations, the joys, the troubles and the unfairness of the natural and human world. Like the Inuit concept of sila, this was a religion that directly reflected the place in which it developed. The three gods linked to Gamla Uppsala – Thor, Odin and Freyr – are the best known of the Norse deities. Thor, according to Hilda Ellis Davids
on, is ‘the characteristic hero of the stormy world of the Vikings’. Son of Odin and of Mother Earth herself, Thor is violent, defiant and extremely strong. His hammer could kill giants, but it could also bring life, and he was considered ‘both destroyer and protector’.
Freyr, the supposed founder of the Uppsala temple, was a less contradictory figure than Thor. A bringer of fertility and peace, some version of the god may have been recognised for thousands of years, since the very early days of agriculture. Rites and rituals developed as crops were sown and harvested, and these rituals must certainly have included sacrifice. Life grew from death just as summer grew from winter, and here in the north, where the cycle of the seasons is extreme, the propitiation of a fertility god or goddess would have been of great importance. No matter how warm the summer or how good the harvest, still the cold and darkness and fear will return. It’s not surprising that Freyr was worshipped at this time of year; northern religion was surely born in winter.
The third of the Uppsala deities, like Thor, was a complex one. Principally associated with war, Odin was seen as the father of Asgard, the realm of the gods. But that prominence did not make him, necessarily, a ‘good’ figure, as we might understand that word today. In the sagas and Norse poetry, Odin is sometimes portrayed as untrustworthy and treacherous. He is powerful and wise, certainly, but is more than capable of misusing those qualities. At times, Odin displays older, perhaps pre-agricultural, attributes. Like a shaman, he communicates with the dead and can change his shape, sometimes sending forth his soul in the form of an animal. He employs two ravens – Huginn and Muninn (Thought and Memory) – to keep him informed of events in the world, and his great wisdom is not, like the Christian god’s, inherent, but was gained through an act of self-sacrifice. That ordeal, in which Odin hung himself for nine days and nights on the World Tree, Yggdrassil, provides the template for the mass hangings that took place at Gamla Uppsala. Out of suffering would come wisdom, out of death would come life, out of winter would come the spring.
By the time Adam of Bremen was writing, this was already a long-established seat of political and religious power, but it was also a place of tremendous conflict and change. Sweden in the eleventh century was in the middle of a long, difficult conversion from the old religion to the new, a conversion that was not complete until at least one hundred years later, and perhaps more recently still. What we find in Adam’s description, therefore, is not just a scene of heathen worship; we see a moment in which two entirely different understandings of the world are painfully coexisting, and in which both are vying for supremacy. Though the man-god Jesus must have seemed familiar to the Norsemen, with his story of sacrifice and rebirth, much else in Christian teaching would have been alien. And in response to the threat of this new faith, it’s not difficult to imagine that the rituals of the pagans were becoming stricter, more inflexible and, as Adam’s account suggests, more violent. Yet at the same time, both religions were also interacting with and even borrowing from each other. Just as Christianity absorbed some of the old rites, such as the midwinter festival of Yule, so too did the pagans adopt some of the habits of their spiritual opponents. By the tenth century, amulets of Thor’s hammer had become quite commonplace across Scandinavia. Wearing such an item would have been an act of open defiance, mimicking the crucifixes worn by Christian converts. It was a battle of symbols as well as ideas.
By the time I’d walked around the three mounds, and down towards the trees, where magpies and jackdaws scrummed among the branches, I was very cold indeed. My cheeks and forehead stung with the chill, and my fingers were numb inside my gloves. Though the sun glowed a fierce orange, it seemed a pathetic effort, and no match for the bitter blows of winter. I stepped inside the church to rest, and to find some warmth, and sat down on a green-painted pew at the back. Upstairs someone was playing the organ, and the sound roared through the building like thunder. Perhaps the organist thought no one was around to listen, for the music was loud and disjointed and unlike anything I’d ever heard in a church before. There were deep blasts of brooding chords, interspersed with what sounded like circus tunes, that together leapt uneasily around the room.
Without warning, the music stopped, and I heard the thud-thud-thud of the organist descending the wooden stairs from the loft. As he emerged at the back of the church I saw he was a man of about forty in a neat, black suit. He moved towards the altar, and was joined by an older woman with dark hair and glasses. Together they began to prepare the church for a service. She set a short crucifix in the centre of the altar, then returned with two candles, placing one on either side of the cross. The lights overhead were dimmed, and those above the altar made brighter. The woman then returned from the vestry, this time with a microphone and cable, and at the back of the church, close to where I sat, she flicked a switch. An electronic clunk said the PA system was now turned on. The woman lit the candles and then shook the match in her hand until it guttered into smoke. She used a wick on a long pole to light the twelve candles sitting high above the altar. The young man hanging on the cross looked down on all of us from his place on the wall, at the front of the church.
One day, perhaps, all of this will be as distant and unfamiliar as whatever it was that happened out there among those trees, one thousand years ago, or within those mounds, five hundred years earlier. One day, the ruins of this building may be as blank and mysterious as the broch on Mousa, which would still have been in use at the time of Christ’s death. All of this ceremony, these rituals of allusion and metaphor, will no longer be understood; its meaning will have withered into nothing. How easily we unlearn our codes; how easily a sacred tomb becomes a pile of earth, or a crucifix two planks of wood. Like trying to resurrect the dead from memory alone, our interactions with places like Gamla Uppsala or Mousa will always be thwarted. For the whole is not present in the scraps that remain. It is not present in the stones or the ash or the trinkets or the words. Though we may excavate and examine, take things to pieces and put them together again, so much always will be unrevealed.
Looking back now, my father seems increasingly mysterious to me. I knew him only as a child knows a parent, which is barely at all. And sometimes, when my mother speaks of him, I feel she could be describing a stranger. That awful distance, between the fragments that I still carry and the man that he once was, grows greater each day. The erosion of memory eases grief in time, but is also its own kind of loss. ‘I fear for Thought, lest he not come back,’ declared Odin, in the poem ‘Grímnismál’, as he fretted over his two ravens. ‘But I fear yet more for Memory.’
The ability to remember and to think, to imagine, are tied tightly together. They are the root of both our salvation and our fear, and the one must be balanced by the other. In the coldest moments of winter we can close our eyes and think back to sunshine. But such memories would be intolerable were it not for the vision of summer to come, and the belief – whether religious or scientific – that it will come. Similarly, the pain of loss can be endured only because we can remember the absence of that pain, and so can foresee the day we might awaken whole once more. Rituals are conceived in the darkest hours of winter and of grief, when certainty is hardest to hold on to, and when we imagine not the return of summer or the passing of pain, but the opposite. Through repeated acts of metaphor, fear can be translated into hope, much as memory and imagination can be translated, through acts of metaphor, into writing. Each is a kind of ordering – an effort to forge calm from chaos and meaning from its absence. Each, too, is a kind of faith. My own writing, born in grief, is no exception.
From behind me, three women entered the church, talking in hushed voices. One of them dropped coins into a little box, picked up a candle and lit it, then placed it carefully into a holder nearby. As the congregation began to arrive for the afternoon service, I stood up to leave, pausing for a moment beside four tall clocks near the entrance. Each of these clocks was handsomely made, but none was working. The only explanation for their presence was a
notice on the wall, in English, that read: ‘One thing is for sure, we are all going to the death in a speed of 60 minutes per hour. This watches (and time) stands still – do the same and give your own time a thought.’
As I stepped back outside, the snow on the Royal Mounds sparkled blue in the bitter light. Every contour had its shadow; every dip and curve in the land was emphasised. Turning back towards the city, I could see the cathedral spires and the pink of the castle in the distance. And as I walked away, on the path through the fields, the church bells behind me began to ring.
In their dealings with the outside world, the Nordic countries have all taken slightly different approaches. Of the three that sit upon the parallel, Sweden and Finland have both been members of the EU since 1995, though neither ever joined the European Community prior to that. Between them, Finland has perhaps been most enthusiastic about its place in Europe, embracing the euro right from its launch, while Sweden has chosen to retain its own currency. Norway, on the other hand, has kept out of the EU altogether, yet was a founding member of NATO in 1949, which its eastern neighbours have never joined. Buoyed since the 1970s by its extraordinary oil wealth, Norway has, on the surface, appeared the most aloof of these nations, but this is deceptive. The Norwegian oil fund, worth well over half a trillion dollars, is believed to be the largest stock market investor in Europe. The country may sit outside the EU, but its fingers reach across the continent, and all around the world.
Sixty Degrees North Page 19