Tonight, I had Norwegian folklore on my mind, and I found this amusing video on YouTube. It concerns the Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen (1857-1914), one of my favorites. He was an imaginative illustrator, and sometimes — in my opinion — he was ahead of his time, employing stylistic techniques that would become popular later on.
I came on an anecdote involving Kittlesen in my reading recently. The author Sigrid Undset, when she was a girl, went with her mother and sisters to spend a summer holiday at the seaside. They were very poor after the death of her father, but the cottage was available cheap. To her astonishment, little Sigrid found that their closest neighbor was the artist Theodor Kittlesen and his family. She made friends with Kittelsen’s daughter, and was introduced to the great artist, whom she greatly admired. At that point in her life she was contemplating becoming an artist herself. After a while she worked up the courage to show Kittlesen some of her own drawings.
“You have talent enough, poor thing,” Kittlesen sighed. He went on to warn her that art was no easy career.
I often slough off my responsibilities on Fridays by posting videos, just as high school teachers used to wheel out the film projectors when they were too hung-over to teach that day. Tonight, for some reason, a short film about the Fantoft Stave Church, near Bergen, Norway. In winter, because it’s winter now.
This is a polite little film, clearly intended not to offend.
Because there’s a small detail the video leaves out. They tell you it burned down in 1992, and was rebuilt. True as far as it goes.
They do not tell you how it burned. It was not an accident.
A heathen burned it down, on purpose, to strike a blow against Christian oppression.
I saw the building during its reconstruction. My first trip to Norway was in 1995, along with my dad. While we were visiting a cousin in Bergen, he took us to see the building as it stood at the time.
Not much to see then. I remember black plastic sheeting covering the roof.
Photo: La Rochelle, France. Credit: Rafael Garcin nimbus_vulpis. Unsplash license.
There is no reason whatever why you should be interested in Norwegian New Year’s customs, but it’s something I’ve got at hand (in the form of Sverre Østen’s book Hva Dagene Vet [What the Days Know]), published 1988 by Ernst G. Mortensens Forlag, and I haven’t got any other ideas. I translate from his account:
The day is dedicated to Saint Sylvester, who was pope from 314—35, and bore the responsibility of leading the church from the period of persecution to the new period of peace.
On the last day of the year people ate oatmeal and herring, as they believed their ancestors had done. The oats symbolized gold and the herring silver; which is to say, wealth.
Many believed that empty pockets and cupboards today portended poverty, which may have been the reason many did a great deal of shopping in the last few days.
It seems to have been particularly common to throw shoes: They would sit on a stool at the door with their backs to the living room. Grabbed their left earlobes with their right hands, and tossed a shoe with their left hand over their right shoulder. If the toe of the shoe landed pointing toward the door, they would quit and find a new job. But if the toe pointed inward, they would continue there until the next “moving day.” [It was the custom in old times for all farm workers to move to a new farm, if they chose to change jobs, on one single day of the year. I can’t remember which day it was. lw]
New Year’s Eve is haunted, but one can scare off ghosts by strewing beans around the house during the day and saying this: “With these beans I redeem myself and mine.” The spirits will then pick up the beans and not bother the family over the coming 12 months.
New Year’s Eve was often a dangerous evening; all kinds of witchcraft was about. To keep witchcraft away, they fired shot after shot over the house roofs. In later times it became the custom to “shoot in” the new year.
And on New Year’s Day?
One custom was to keep the door shut to make sure the first person across the threshold in the new year was not a woman. That would be bad luck. The best thing would be a dark-haired man. He would bring good fortune.
It happens occasionally that I discover that a movie I worked on as a script translator is now available in this country. In the case of Gold Run, the movie has in fact been out for a couple years and I hadn’t noticed it. So I watched it over the weekend.
I think what I did on this one was actually an editing job. If I remember right, the script had been translated by AI, but back then the production people were still willing to run it past actual human beings, to avoid major incoherence. I think I worked the whole script, and I thought it was a pretty good one.
Viewing it did not disappoint. This is a solid, exciting film.
Movie fans interested in the subject have been able, in the past few years, to get a pretty good education about the Norwegian response to the German invasion in 1940 . The King’s Choice (which I didn’t work on) and Atlantic Crossing (which I did) told the story of the royal family, on the crown prince’s and crown princess’ sides respectively. Narvik (which I also worked on) told the story of the doomed military defense. And now Gold Run follows another important facet of the story – the (genuinely) amazing story of how the Norwegian government managed to get its entire gold reserve to the coast and off to England, with the Germans on their heels.
The unlikely hero of the story is Fredrik Haslund (Jon Øigarden), a financial secretary for the Norwegian Labor Party. As the bigwigs (Labor is in power) rush to get out of Oslo, they dump the job of evacuating the gold onto Fredrik’s narrow shoulders. Somehow, with the help of an exasperated army officer and his troops, he manages to get the boxes of gold onto trucks to transport to Lillehammer, where they think it will be safe. But the Germans keep coming, so it all has to be put on a train for transportation to the coast. Fredrik is an OCD type, and there’s dark humor in the way he insists on checking every box off his inventory before it can be transferred (multiple times) from one place to another – even with German fighter planes overhead.
For a more assertive – if secondary – protagonist, we also have Fredrik’s sister Nini, who is, we are told, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and whom I suspect to be entirely fictional, added solely for purposes of inclusivity. Also there’s the poet Nordahl Grieg, who did exist (though he didn’t look like this). His Wikipedia page says he was on the gold ship, though I don’t know if he was actually as much involved in the gold run as this movie makes him. Grieg was a committed Communist and a stalwart supporter of Stalin, by the way.
There’s also a nice subplot about a nerdy bank teller and a rugged truck driver thrown together by chance or fate, who learn to respect each other through shared dangers.
And dangers there are. The closer they get to the coast, the closer the German planes are, until we see Fredrik and Nini breaking into a bank in Ålesund with a battering ram as the city burns around them.
This is the first time I’ve seen a film I’ve translated that was exactly like the script I worked on. And it’s quite a good script. This is a very solid, exciting war movie.
My only disappointment was a personal issue I’d forgotten. At the end, Nordahl Grieg reads one of his own poems, about the feeling of being conquered, and vowing to come back again someday. When I translated the script, I composed a lyrical translation of that poem which I thought was quite good. I had the whisper of a dream that when the film was made, somebody would notice how good my translation was and use my words in the subtitles.
Alas, as I pretty much expected, it was not to be. The lyrics they use are a literal translation (and flat wrong in one line).
Ah well.
I do recommend Gold Run. I saw it on Amazon Prime, where I had to pay a rental fee.
I’m late posting tonight, because I got in late, and anyway it felt like a Saturday to me. I was doing a Saturday thing, in my subjective world.
I think I’ve mentioned that I’m now editing the magazine of the Valdres Samband, one of many US organizations composed of descendants of immigrants from various regions of Norway (I’m not a Valdres descendant myself, which will tell you how desperate they were for an editor). Today, in that capacity, I attended their annual Stevne, which means their annual get-together, in Minneapolis. I also delivered my world-renowned lecture on Viking Legacy, and sold some books.
The video above does not represent what we were actually doing today. There was no dancing, though I’m sure it would have been welcome. But we did have a fiddler entertaining us during dinner on a Hardanger Fiddle, the instrument being played in the video, which (appropriately) was actually posted by the Valdres Samband several years back.
If the tones of the Hardanger Fiddle sound vaguely familiar, that may be because (at least according to what I was told) one was used for the theme music of the Riders of Rohan in the Lord of the Rings movies.
The Hardanger Fiddle is a uniquely Norwegian instrument. Below the usual four strings, it is strung with four or five more. These lower strings are not played directly, but resonate harmonically with the main notes, producing a weird, haunting droning sound sometimes compared to the bagpipes.
My Haugean pietist ancestors, by the way, would have been shocked by this, and might have smashed the fiddle if they could get their hands on it. They believed that dancing was bad in itself, but that Hardanger Fiddle music was positively demonic. Master fiddlers were regarded as a kind of wizard.
My great-grandfather Lars Swelland and his wife Martha, in happier times.
I didn’t post anything in remembrance of the 80th anniversary of D-Day yesterday, for which I apologize. It’s not that I wasn’t thinking of the observance. I flew the flag at my house. It’s just that I didn’t know what to say about it – and still don’t. The scope of the sacrifice overwhelms me. It’s not enough to say that we need to be worthy of it all – the fact is, we’re not worthy, and as a civilization we’ve stopped trying to be. If those boys (most were just boys), European and American, could have seen what their children and grandchildren would do with the world they saved for us, they’d have turned back in disgust.
Instead, purely for the sake of my sanity, I’ll turn to smaller-scale matters. I’ve often written here of the occupation of Norway. It ended in 1945 – there’s a year yet to go before they celebrate the 80th anniversary of their liberation. Which they’ll do on May 8, 2025.
My own family has little to report (that I know of) in the whole story of the war. My dad served in the Japan occupation forces, and saw no action. One uncle on my mother’s side was a Marine in the Pacific — I know nothing about his service. One of Dad’s cousins was killed in the war (more about that later), but I never heard much about him. I believe one of my cousins on Karmøy Island was a War Sailor, a merchantman under military command. If you saw the miniseries War Sailor (which I helped translate), you know about that perilous service.
And then there was my great-grandfather Lars Swelland, of whom I’ve written here before – but that was in the days of the old blog host, and the post seems to have disappeared when we migrated. I’ll just recap his story briefly; perhaps I’ll flesh it out at another time.
In brief, Great-grandfather Lars lost his heart for America after his wife died and the Great Depression hit. Having missed one mortgage payment on his farm, and getting a single dunning letter from the company holding the note, he packed up, boarded a train, and traveled to New York, where he got on a ship back to Norway, ignoring all telegraphic pleas from his family and the mortgage company, who tried to tell him it wasn’t as bad as he thought. (The family lost the farm.) In Norway he did not return to his home farm, but settled in another town – Tysness, near Bergen, to live the rest of his life in poverty. He died during the war, out of communication with his children. I have a letter his landlady sent to my grandmother once the war was over, and I’ve translated it thus:
Tvedt, 6 February, 1946
Dear Sofie!
[I] can easily understand that you will wonder who is sending you this letter. It was here at my home that your father Lars Svelland lived. I have thought so often about sending you a letter, but somehow it never happened. As you have probably heard from your sister Millie, your father is dead. He died 14 August, at 1:00 midday, 1942. He asked me to greet you all, but we were caught up in all the worst of wartime, and were unable to send letters.
Your father died of a stroke, bleeding on the brain. He lay [in bed] 3 weeks, and was very sick, but he was so thankful; never a complaining word. It was his right side that was completely paralyzed, and he had so much trouble speaking. But after he had lain there 2 weeks, it happened that he got his voice again, and I was so happy, believing he had come back again, but God had other ideas.
And I thank God that he got his voice again. Then he was able to thank Jesus, and then he prayed the Our Father, the Lord’s prayer, and that is the holiest prayer we can pray. He had several times when he felt poorly, when he was plagued by the spirit of doubt, but at the end he was quite all right.
But in 1940 he [had] had a hemorrhage; it came on so suddenly. He spit up a great mass of blood. He recovered somewhat after that turn, so that he was up [and about], but never got his strength [back]. But remarkably, his weakness got better after he’d had the hemorrhage, so that he could eat more ordinary food.
The day he had his fatal attack he had been out fishing a little, and he ate so well at supper with fresh fish.
But Sofie, you would never believe how glad I am that God ordained it so that he was able to come home again and die at home, so that I could care for him. It would have been so terrible to think of if he had fallen into the sea. Now God was so kind that he came home again, and [I] was able to hear him thank Jesus, so that if you are not able to see your father again in this life, you will meet him at home with Jesus.
And he lived as a Christian and died in faith in the completed work that Jesus has done for all who receive Him in faith.
Your father sang so often the song, “I Know a Rest So Fair and Long in David’s city afar; there I will rest from the press of time, and shine myself like a star.” Yes, now he has [gone?; hard to translate] out, and he is shining like a star.
Sofie, I have found a letter which you sent your father, dated 1934, and that letter was so beautifully written that I wept happy tears, and among other things, you ask whether he has forgotten you [all]. But he thought much about all of you, so you were not forgotten by him, and especially when the war broke out with America, you were even more in his thoughts. As long as there was a radio in the parish, he walked a long way to hear how it was going. But then the Germans came and everyone had to turn their radios in. Yes, that was a hard time, when the war was going on, a hard time for Norway, but like a miracle it is over. But now it has come about that we have gotten more food, so the people are so thankful. The Germans took everything from us, so that if the war had been any longer, there would have been genuine famine, and not a little of it. You can judge whether we were in want. People around the countryside are directed to use [oil] lamps. This past winter we got 1 liter of oil per month. There was nothing for lighting; now we get 25 liters, and before the war people could get as much oil as they wanted. Yes, it was cruel to be without any light [over] the long winter nights.
But in 3 years there will be electric light here, and also for cooking. But it has been a difficult time. That can be forgotten, but what the many prisoners have had to endure, that is completely horrible; [they] were tortured to death and the poor mothers who grieve the loss of their boys. It is only God who can comfort the many who sit longing for their loved ones. I see from Millie’s letter that your sister has lost her boy; may God give comfort and help her in her sorrow. Your father always believed that the young sons of his children would have to go out, and spoke and thought so [much] about them; now he was not able to live to see the peace for which he longed so much. It would have been so precious if he had lived, but the Lord’s ways are not ours.
[I] hope you are able to understand my letter, even if it is not so well written.
[I] enclose a little picture which is a passport photo we all had to have when the war came.
It is my custom, every May 17, to make some kind of mention of Norway’s Constitution Day, celebrated each year on this date. I’ve told the story of the holiday many times – this year I’ll restrict myself to saying that Norway celebrates its Constitution Day as its major national holiday because of a historical anomaly – we had a constitution for almost a century before we got independence. So Constitution Day became the traditional patriotic holiday.
The video above is rather nice – lots of natural beauty, in which Norway is excessively rich. If you’d like a translation of the lyrics, you can find it here.
The Syttende Mai present I received today was a good writing session. I actually gave myself the shivers reading the current draft of The Baldur Game. I suppose that’s insufferable, like comedians who laugh at their own jokes. But writing at my level offers few tangible rewards. And finding the same exhilaration in your own writing that you get from your favorite authors’ is as delicious as it is rare.
To make things even better, I had a thought today – not as common an occurrence as you might imagine. (G. B. Shaw once said that he’d made an international reputation by thinking once or twice a month.) I can’t remember what provoked the thought (perhaps it was the creative thrill I described above, but I’m not sure). But it suddenly appeared, fully formed in my head, and even after several hours I can find no fault with it. It goes like this:
No work of art is ever fully original, nor should it be. Art is a multimedia matrix of interactive themes and influences — all hyperlinked, in a sense. Taken all together, great art participates in an infinitely greater tapestry.
Me with two of the Five Foolish Virgins bauta stones in Haugesund, Norway, a year ago. This is one of the photos I used in my lecture.
Sorry about not posting last night. I got back from Moorhead pretty late, having burned both gasoline and élan vital.
My “new” car ran just fine – wait a minute, I don’t think I’ve written about the new car here. It’s a 2005 Subaru Forester XT. Burgundy in color. Been wanting a red car for a long time, and the word on the street is these are pretty reliable. Which will make for a nice change. Also lots of room for Viking impedimenta. Anyway, she ran fine. I call her Sigrid the Haughty.
Fargo-Moorhead is about a four-hour drive from here. Although my speaking engagement was in Moorhead, Minnesota (which we like to call the Soviet Zone), I’d made a motel reservation in Fargo, North Dakota (the American Zone), just across the state border. Because I just sleep better knowing the taxes are lower. I had no complaints about the motel room until 2:00 a.m., which my phone rang. The clerk said my neighbors were complaining about the noise. This confused me, as I was asleep, and alone. It only occurred to me later that they might have been talking about my snoring. Naw, what are the chances of that?
The bygdelags are a Norwegian-American institution. Originally, as I understand it, they were organizations allowing people who came from particular regions of the old country to maintain contact over here. Nowadays they concentrate more on genealogy and keeping traditions alive. They meet for annual gatherings known as stevnes. I’d lectured to the Tre (Three) Lag Stevne twice in the past. This year a couple more lags had joined in, so it became the Flere (Several) Lag Stevne, and we were meeting in Moorhead.
I arrived in plenty of time for my 10:45 time slot, and set up my book table. When the room cleared after the previous speaker, I hurried in to set up, only to encounter something I’d never experienced before when lecturing –
Everything worked. The first time.
I plugged my laptop into the projector line and there was my image on the screen. No problem. You have to understand, I always bring my own projector in case of technical emergencies – because in my experience, something always goes wrong with projection systems. Belt and suspenders is my motto.
But they’d been running the stevne for two days already, and they had everything taped down, ready to plug and play. It was too good to be true, I thought. Surely I was being set up by fate for disaster.
But no, there was no disaster. My lecture went great. The room was nearly full. The audience was attentive, and they laughed in the right places. My talk was basically a condensed version of the account of my trip to Norway I posted here a little more than a year ago. I was worried it might be self-indulgent, too much like a neighbor’s home movies.
But you can tell when your audience is with you, and I had this bunch, apparently, at God dag. The only thing that bothered me was a distinguished-looking gentleman in the front row who seemed to be dozing off. But he came to me afterwards, when I was selling books, and told me he’d attended both my previous lectures and was a big fan. Said he enjoyed my talk very much. We discussed Haugeanism.
I figure he probably just dozed off because somebody kept him awake with their snoring in the next room the night before.
Another audience member told me that what made my lecture enjoyable was that I supplemented my photographs with stories and history. Stories make all the difference. That makes sense to me.
Anyway, it was a good day, and I sold a reasonable number of books. I’m very grateful to the Flere Lag Stevne.
I did something today I never do. I quit a book I actually liked. I’ve outgrown the idea that you have to finish every book you start reading. Life’s too short, especially at my age. So if I think a book is badly written, or if it offends me, I’ll just remove its download from my Kindle.
But why would I drop a book whose values please me, and which I find well-written?
Because I’m a wimp. Which will not surprise our regular readers.
I should at least give the author credit. He’s one of my favorites, James Scott Bell. The book is Can’t Stop Me. It’s about an ordinary guy, a lawyer and family man, who is suddenly targeted by an old college acquaintance who seems to have no purpose other than to force himself into his life. The stalker employs innuendo and suggestion to threaten the hero, always keeping within legal limits. The worst thing is, he happens to know the hero’s oldest and darkest secret.
This is an old book of Bell’s which he’s revised slightly for re-release. It shows some signs of being early work, but is overall very well written.
And it gave me the willies. This kind of story – the kind where ordinary people face dangers they’re not prepared for, really bothers me. I suppose it’s because I know I wouldn’t survive ten minutes in such a situation.
A writer ought to have thicker skin.
Anyway, if you’re braver than I am, I recommend it, even though I chickened out a third of the way through.
In other news, I remembered today that I need to renew my passport. I’d put it away with the unpaid bills so I wouldn’t forget it, and got so used to seeing it there that I forgot it. I should have done it earlier – now I’ll be passportless for a short while. Not that I expect to need it. I tend to use a passport one time before it expires. This one I’ll probably never use at all.
But I like to have one. I’m an international man of affairs, after all. I never know when I’m going to be summoned to receive a medal from the king of Norway.
But 130 bucks for a passport? I’m pretty sure my first one, back in the ’80s, cost $40.
Speaking of Norway, I mentioned Mosterøy in Norway in yesterday’s post, and said not to confuse it with Moster on Bomlø. I visited that Moster last summer too. It was the home of the mother of King Haakon the Good (who was related to Erling Skjalgsson’s family). They do a historical play in an amphitheater there every year (video above). My two guides, Tore-Ravn and Einar (the two on the left in the photo below, with the historic Moster Stone), are extras in the play, and take great pride in it.
Tonight’s post is probably of limited interest, but I’m between books again. I found this drone video of Hodnefjell farm on the island of Mosterøy, (not to be confused with Moster on Bomlø, where St. Olaf instituted Christian law in Norway) a place where some of my ancestors on my dad’s side lived. These were the most historically significant ancestors I’ve heard about. I’m sure I’ve written about this before.
According to Sigve Bø, my guide last year, the Hodnefjell family (if I remember correctly) had converted to Moravianism in the early 19th Century, a serious matter in state church Norway. But they heard about the lay evangelist Hans Nielsen Hauge and wrote to him, inviting him to visit them. He came and stayed with them on their farm. They were so impressed with his teaching that they converted back to Lutheranism and became “friends of Hauge.”
They had a neighbor named John Haugvaldstad who also became a Haugean. He disliked farming and left for Stavanger (leaving his incompatible wife, who’d never much liked him either. They lived separate lives but never divorced). There he became a successful businessman and the de facto leader of the Haugeans after Hauge’s imprisonment.
The Haugean circle in Stavanger had much to do with arranging the first organized party of emigrants to leave Norway for America. This group sailed in 1825 on the sloop “Restaurasjon.” The party was made up of Quakers and Haugeans, all looking for greater religious freedom in the US.
