More thoughts of Norway

By the end of the week our walking group had become more like an extended family. We were a friendly and talkative crowd, mostly ‘getting on’ in years but willing to share personal stories between gasps for breath on the guided walks. These were circular rambles and scrambles on various islands typically between 7 -- 10 miles long and involving a lot of up and down, especially for those who chose the harder walk instead of the easier one on offer each day. Our two leaders were experienced guides and very concerned for our safety. Many of us were retired but had led interesting lives in a variety of jobs and personal roles. There was usually some tempting activity laid on after dinner each day - a talk, a museum visit, a boat trip - which heightened the feeling of full-on engagement during our waking hours.

The landscape had a marked individual character and the walks offered some spectacular views of the spiky mountains of the islands and complex patterns of waterways between them.

One interesting feature of the rural Norwegian landscape is the limited choice of colours for their painted wooden houses. There are just three acceptable hues: red (verging on maroon), yellow or white. The red paint is the cheapest, and was made traditionally from a mixture of blood and oil from fish or whales; the more expensive yellow paint is from powdered ochre, again bound with fish oil; and the white is made from zinc oxide, which is costly enough to signal your richer status in the community. It is not widely known that Norway still has a small whaling fleet and in 2018 it caught and killed 434 minke whales. Back in the 1950s Norway had around 350 whaling vessels, but the fleet has now declined to just 11, which may explain why its catch fell well short of the quota of over 1200 controversially set by the Norwegian Fisheries Department. It may also explain why whales’ blood is no longer used to make the red paint for the houses and farm buildings.

I know of one counter-example to the limited colour palette for Norwegian country homesteads: In the summer of 1958 I worked with 3 student friends in the virgin forests high above the village of Frønningen on the Sognefjord. Our main job was to encourage natural regeneration by chopping and spreading the abandoned tops of the winter-harvested pine trees. The vast estate of 30 square miles was then owned by Johan Rumohr, who played the part of a benign but almost feudal laird and lived in a grand and ancient house called Frønningen-Godset (trans. Manor):

Logging provided the main livelihood of the families that lived and worked there. They cut down trees in the autumn and winter, transported them in spring down the rivers in spate from the melting snows, and cultivated their small-holdings and worked in the saw mill in the summer. Johan’s younger son, Knut Rumohr, who had become an established artist in Oslo, returned to Frønningen in that summer of 1958 with his newly-wed wife Aagot. He was closely involved with the local community and not only cut everyone’s hair, including ours, during his visit, but had previously supplied a range of outdoor paints in harmonizing pastel shades with which the villagers were encouraged to paint their fjord-side houses. The village of Frønningen lining the edge of the fjord presented an impressively artistic and colourful aspect as we four students approached by boat, which was then, and in fact still is, the only way to get there.  

We returned to Frønningen as a family 50 years later -- part of my wife’s ambitious project to take me back to the haunts of my youth -- and I was moved to find that the areas of forest in which we had worked had regrown to full maturity; sadly however, the sustainable logging activities had long since ended, the saw mill was derelict and the villagers had all left. Knut’s son Vilhelm, who now lived alone in Frønningen-Godset, invited us to stay in one of the empty houses and gave us a warm welcome. His father Knut had died by then, but we met his mother Aagot and his sister Liv, who came for a visit during our stay. Since foreign competition put the timber industry out of business, Vilhelm has worked hard to restore Frønningen’s fortunes with hydroelectric projects and by providing facilities for visitors’ to stay for hunting, fishing and artists’ retreats.

Back home from our holiday with memories fading, overtaken by the daily round, my thoughts were returned to Lofoten in an unexpected way. I became a Robert Macfarlane fan when my son Lachlan presented me with a copy of The Old Ways -- A Journey on Foot several years ago. A Good Reads review extols its virtues:

“In this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of pilgrimage and ritual. Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive voice, The Old Ways folds together natural history cartography, geology, archaeology and literature. His walks take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas.” 

Five years on and Macfarlane has done it again with Underland, recommended once more by Lachlan, this time as an audiobook beautifully read by Roy McMillan. This exploration of mankind’s relationship with a darker world of caves, potholes, catacombs and mines is a breath-taking story of hidden beauty, danger, mystery and unpredictable forces - but definitely not for the claustrophobic. It embraces a broad sweep of human experience from our atavistic past to the modern science of our anthropocene era, and speaks with passion, precision, human warmth and poetry. One of the chapters describes Macfarlane’s treacherous overland journey from the town of Å on the southern tip of Lofoten to the Refsvikhula Cave, an inaccessible prehistoric site on the western coast protected from a seaward approach by a dangerous maelstrom. Over 3000 years ago our ancestors braved the journey and left their mark with scores of red stick figures, both males spread widely over the cave walls and females cleaving together.

I have recommended Underland to anyone who might be interested, including Peter Gill, a fellow walker on our holiday. He sums up his response to the book better than I could my own:

“Thank you for pointing me in the direction of what I can only describe as Robert Macfarlane's masterpiece. I have been enthralled by his words as he weaves his way through landscapes, mountains and, of course, caverns. Truly poetic prose and so sympathetically read. However, as one progresses through the depths it becomes increasingly clear how much planning has gone into each chapter and the book as a whole coming to a final dark but rather inspiring crescendo. I am constantly amazed by his breadth of knowledge in so many fields whilst presenting it with such lyricism. Having reached the end I want to start it all over again.”