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.”

The Lofoten Islands

In August my wife and I joined a party of 20 holiday-makers for a week’s guided walking in the beautiful Lofoten Islands of Northern Norway. (Statistic: The archipelago is around 180km long and sits inside the Arctic Circle between the northern latitudes of 67º and 69º.) The region is home to an ancient fishing industry and the world’s largest cold-water coral reef. It is also embroiled in a national political struggle to exploit the 60 billion barrels of oil reserves thought to be sitting temptingly and accessibly beneath its surrounding waters. The majority of the 24,000 islanders and environmentally-conscious Norwegians, wishing to preserve their traditional way of life, their fish stocks and the islands’ natural beauty, have so far fought off the commercial interests in Oslo pressing to start drilling. We were too late in the year for the midnight sun and too early for the Northern Lights, but we were blessed with abundant sunshine and air temperatures ideal for strenuous walking.

We stayed in the watery town of Svolvaer on the island of Austvågøya. On arrival, we were immediately struck by the pervasive, if gentle, smell of fish until our noses adjusted and we ceased to notice it. From the small balcony adjoining our hotel bedroom we could dangle our feet over the sea and look out across the harbour every evening to watch the imposing Hurtigruten liners dock for short stopovers on their daily sailings up and down the coast of Norway from Bergen in the South to Kirkenes in the far Northeast, close to the Russian border. In the town’s main square there is a large open-air wooden structure, which at first I took to be a tall climbing frame for adventurous youngsters. It is in fact a trellis for hanging out cod to dry in the freezing months of early spring, and there are very many such structures dotted around the town and right across the islands.

The Barents Sea is the main feeding ground for the world’s largest stock of Northeast Atlantic cod. These magnificent fish reach sexual maturity at around 7—11 years, live for up to 25 years and grow to 1.5 meters or more in length. When the urge to procreate comes upon them in early spring, they head south along the Norwegian coast in large shoals, reaching a peak in the period March-April; each year some 40% of all the migrating cod spawn in and around the Lofoten Islands. As soon as they are caught, they are beheaded and hung up on the wooden frames where they rapidly freeze in the dry sub-zero air. During the two months or so of public exposure, they lose 80% of their water content by sublimation, whereupon they are vacuum packed and shipped off to Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Spain to be sold as highly-prized food. We bought some to try and our verdict: it tastes like fried cod from the local chippy eaten cold the following day. As a small business offshoot, the local children are allowed remove the tongues from the heads on  long spikes and sell them as a delicacy to supplement their pocket money.

On our free day – free from guided walking that is -- a group of us took the bus to a nearby town called Henningsvaer. Among its interesting features were an AstroTurf football stadium tightly hemmed in by the sea on three sides, and this handsome building called the Englishman’s Dock.

The building was of particular interest to me because, as a boy during World War II, I was fed daily spoonfuls of cod liver oil and malt to “build me up”; the malt was sweet and made the fish oil more palatable. This ambrosial concoction was manufactured by a British pharmaceutical company called Allen and Hanbury, which in 1903 established a cod-liver oil factory by the dock in Henningsvaer. The original building was destroyed in a British raid in 1941 but has since been lovingly restored and serves as an artists’ cooperative for pottery, photography and glass-blowing. 

During the war, Norway was occupied by Nazi Germany and governed by a puppet regime led by Herr Vidkun Quisling. a Norwegian army officer who collaborated with the Nazis. The British launched a number of naval attacks on Norway in order to tie up the enemy forces defending its 1600 miles of coastline - at its peak there were 300.000 German soldiers maintaining the occupation. One such raid, known as Operation Claymore, was carried out on the Lofoten Islands on 4th March 1941 and took the Germans by surprise. With naval support British commandoes blew up the two cod liver oil factories in Henningsvaer along with another 13 production centres in Svolvaer, and some 800,000 gallons of fish oil went up in smoke, The oil was being shipped to Germany for the extraction of glycerine, a vital ingredient in the manufacture of high explosives. During the raid 18,000 tons of enemy shipping were sunk and, perhaps more importantly, the codebooks and a set of rotor wheels for an Enigma cypher machine were captured, enabling Bletchley Park to provide Allied convoys with intelligence to avoid U-boat concentrations.

Heavy rain marks the spot where you were born

Here’s another story about isotopes, this time in the service of archaeology. Imagine you have a tooth of someone who lived 1000 years ago or more. How could you tell where they came from?

One answer to this question uses the facts that there are two distinct stable isotopes of oxygen (O¹⁶ and O¹⁸), and likewise of two of strontium. It turns out that O¹⁸, having two extra neutrons, is roughly 12% heavier than O¹⁶ and so a water molecule H₂O¹⁸ is likewise heaver than H₂O¹⁶. When rain clouds drive in from the sea, the heavier rain falls first, causing a decreasing gradient in the proportion of O¹⁸ in fresh water and plants as you move inland, and a corresponding gradient in the take-up of the two oxygen isotopes in the teeth of someone growing up there.

A second parameter that distinguishes your region of origin is the proportion of two isotopes of the element strontium. They have 48 and 49 neutrons respectively and their relative proportions in the underlying rocks are mirrored in the top-soil and in the plants that grow there. Ultimately the humans ingest the strontium in the same proportions through the food chain and this can again be measured by the ratio of the two isotopes deposited in their teeth.

Together, the values of these two isotope ratios, for oxygen and strontium, are sensitive enough to locate where the owner of the teeth was raised, on the assumption that most people don’t move far from where they were born until they reach adulthood. This technique was used by Douglas Price and his team at the University of Wisconsin in Madison to shed light on the geographical origins of sacrificial victims cast into the Sacred Cenote, a sink hole in the limestone of the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico believed by local Mayans to be the entrance to the underworld. They analysed 40 ancient human teeth recovered from the lake and concluded that half of them were locals, around a quarter had come from somewhat farther afield, and the remainder from places hundreds of kilometres away, in what are now western Honduras and Mexico’s central highlands. (Taken from a report in The Economist, 3rd August 2019.)