Authors: Jan Kjaerstad
Jonas visited him regularly, even though there seemed little point. Viktor never so much as noticed him. Jonas could not get through to him. His friend seemed to have retreated into himself. It occurred to Jonas – talking of blocks of ice – that Viktor might be the counterpart of certain animals who went into hibernation in order to survive periods of severe cold. Jonas sometimes felt like going up to him and knocking on his skull, asking if there was anyone home. Viktor’s case confirmed the truth of a statement with which Jonas would be confronted many times in the course of his life: there are a lot of things for which medical science cannot account. No one could explain, for example, why Viktor did not seem to get any older. Days, years, passed, while Viktor reclined in his armchair, looking as if he was still in his final year at Oslo Cathedral School. Although actually, with his abnormally babyish
features
he looked even younger.
Every time Jonas visited Viktor at the institution, he would read aloud to him from Ezra Pound’s poem, for one thing because there was nothing else to do. He read from an edition of
The Cantos
, the title page of which was inscribed with an all but illegible dedication from the author himself – after some years Jonas succeeded in deciphering the words ‘Roaring madness’ above Pound’s wavery signature. When he eventually closed the book, having decided that he had read enough or because he could not take any more of those unfathomable, lyrical passages, he usually sat for a while quietly staring at the TV screen along with Viktor. The television was always on – Jonas simply turned down the sound when he took out
The Cantos
– and even when Jonas was reading, Viktor would sit there in his Stressless Royal, the
flagship of all armchairs, with his eyes riveted on the screen, as if on it he saw illustrated in minutest detail whatever part of Ezra Pound’s endless poem Jonas was reading.
To Jonas, Viktor gradually came to represent the average Norwegian, a person who sat unfailingly, day after day, in front of the box. When Jonas started making his own television programmes he told himself that it was these people, countrymen like Viktor, he wanted to reach. Like Henrik Ibsen he did not merely want to make them think big, he wanted to
waken
them. Once his acclaimed television series was finished he had a video recorder installed in Viktor’s room and arranged for all the programmes to be taped for his friend. Jonas gave one of the permanent members of staff instructions to play the tapes regularly. ‘We have to see to it that he gets some good, solid Norwegian fare, and not just American fast food,’ Jonas told the nurse.
This notion of television images as nourishment of a sort had not been plucked entirely out of thin air. Whenever Jonas walked into the room and saw Viktor staring fixedly at the screen he had the feeling that the
television
set, or possibly the rays from it were keeping Viktor alive. Or that his friend was actually in a large incubator, an idea which Viktor’s babyish looks – his fine, blonde locks and big, heavy head – seemed to bear out. And yet Jonas also believed he detected signs of mental activity. It sometimes seemed to Jonas’s mind as if, his vegetative appearance notwithstanding, Viktor was staring at the screen in search of help, in search of someone who could save him. As more channels came along and Viktor’s only exercise consisted of finger-hopping on the remote control and a bit of wriggling to adjust his Stressless Royal from one comfortable position to another, Jonas noted that Viktor clearly liked some programmes better than others. One could really have been forgiven for thinking that he was looking for, waiting for, a
revelation
. This observation left Jonas with the disturbing suspicion that Viktor’s mind was perfectly sound, but that he did not feel like letting anyone know this. That it was all an act. Or that Viktor was leading a normal life in a
parallel
world, a perfectly decent life. Jonas was quite prepared to believe that in this other life his friend, who looked so much like a chrysalis sitting there in his Stressless chair, might be a butterfly. However that may be, Jonas
continued
to visit Viktor regularly – until, that is, he ended up in an institution himself or, to be more exact: in prison.
And this last circumstance would prove to be a turning point. At first Jonas thought it must have been the shot on Bergensveien in Grorud that had roused Viktor, but he was woken, or rather: brought to his senses, some time later by another shot. Jonas only heard about it. One day, when the nurse who made sure that Viktor got to see Jonas Wergeland’s programmes regularly
looked in to check on him, she found Viktor pointing excitedly at the
television
screen and uttering the first words anyone had heard him say in more than twenty years: ‘Jeeze, who fired that shot?’
What was on the TV? The aforementioned nurse was able to reveal that she had popped in forty-five minutes earlier to put on a video and that, because she remembered it so well herself, she had chosen the episode dealing with Harald Hardråde. She had even stayed to watch a bit of it before having to tear herself away and continue her rounds.
The programme which resulted in Viktor’s miraculous shout, opened with a boy shooting with a bow and arrow in a clearing beside a river, and the scene had been composed in a way which told viewers this was an art, that it took years of training to become such a fine archer. The boy moved as if in a dance, with everything – from the moment he drew the arrow out of the quiver until it left the bowstring and the bow was lowered – executed in one smooth, fluid action; it made viewers think of the moves performed in
tai chi
, or the
katas
in karate. Jonas realised later, partly because he had made the sound of the bowstring so pronounced, that he must have been thinking not so much about the glorious games of bows and arrows from his own boyhood – which he had also been fortunate enough to be able to relive with Benjamin – as the Indian epic
The Mahabharata
and the marvellous tales from it told to him by Margrete: of Drona who trained the Pandava brothers in the use of arms; of Arjuna and his bow Gandiva which was so formidable that it was recognisable to his enemies by its sound alone. The whole of that
mesmerising
opening sequence, indeed the sound of the bowstring alone – part music, part dangerous threat – spoke of a programme about a heroic warrior. And a brutal death.
At the close of the scene one saw what the boy, Harald Sigurdsson, had been shooting at: a huge sheepskin stretched out on a log wall. Drawn on this golden fleece was a rough map of Europe, with each arrow marking a different place, like a guide to one of the most wide-roving and warlike of all
wide-roving
, warlike Viking lives. The fifteen-year-long voyage which began after the Battle of Stiklestad, would take Harald, half-brother of Olav II, to places known to us today as Novgorod, Jerusalem, Sicily and, above all, Istanbul. One arrow, embedded at York in England, was broken: a token of the
prophecy
which says that he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword. But also of an ambition unparalleled in the history of Norway.
Indirectly, the programme on Harald Hardråde also served as a reminder of Viking times, an age with which all Norwegians were still secretly in love, which is fair enough when one considers that never since has Norway or any other Scandinavian country left such an indelible stamp on the world. By
dint of artful little details, rather like a limning of the biographical account, or a juggling act in the background, Jonas Wergeland managed to say something about the double-edged nature of the Viking culture: bloodthirsty,
plundering
forays which also acted as cross-fertilising cultural exchanges. Viking raids and trading expeditions rolled into one. One caught glimpses, images neatly and almost imperceptibly inserted, of longships – to the Vikings what the horse had been to the Huns – scabbards, drinking horns, runic
inscriptions
, amulets in the shape of Thor’s hammer and small bronze statuettes of one-eyed Odin. But also there, if one looked carefully, were furs and lumps of amber, gold spurs and silver jewellery, scales and Anglo-Saxon coins, carved wooden caskets and chess pieces made from walrus tusks, parchments covered in writing. Wergeland used a sign from the main street in
modernday
York – Micklegate – to illustrate how Nordic words had left an enduring mark on the language and names of England, Ireland and Normandy.
But it was the end of the programme that people remembered best, the original depiction of the Battle of Stamford Bridge. After all, who was Harald Hardråde? Harald Hardråde – or Hardrada – was not only an unscrupulous, power-hungry man, a seasoned and victorious warrior who came home from foreign parts with ships so laden with gold that they listed in the water, he was also the only Norwegian ever to have so much as a little finger in the course of history. When he decided, at the age of fifty, to assert his right to the English throne, he timed it so that Harold Godwinson had to divide his attention between two fronts. Harold, then King of England, was in the south,
anxiously
awaiting William, later to be called the Conqueror. But when Harald Hardråde and his fellow-conspirator, Tostig Godwinson, Harold’s brother, landed in Northumbria the English king was forced to march north to York with all haste. And the bitter and exhausting Battle of Stamford Bridge had only just been won – with Harold losing many of his best warriors, among them some of his indispensable bodyguards – when he received word that William had sailed across the channel and landed in the south. The man who was at that point still King of England had to rush south again, set out on yet another gruelling forced march. Had Harold Godwinson met William and the Normans with a rested and, above all, undepleted army, the Battle of Hastings – although it would have been fought elsewhere and at an earlier date – would in all likelihood have had another outcome. Harold would not have died when that dreadful stray arrow pierced his eye. And the history of Europe would have looked very different.
But it was not so much this, which can never be anything but speculation, albeit interesting speculation – questions are always more important than answers – as the scenes of the battle which stuck in people’s minds. Earlier,
Harald Hardråde and Tostig had beaten the armies of the Earls of
Northumbria
and Mercia at the battle of Fulford Gate, whereupon York surrendered without a fight and accepted Harald as king. On the morning of Monday, 25 September 1066 – one of the most important dates in Norwegian history, right up there with 17 May 1814 and 9 April 1940 – the Norwegians reached Stamford Bridge, about a mile outside of York, either because they were on their way to the town to hold council or to receive hostages from the villages around the bridge, which stood at a spot where many roads met. The
question
has been raised as to what would have happened had it not rained before the Battle of Waterloo, but one might just as well ask how history would have turned out if the sun had not been shining before the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Because, since the day was uncommonly hot, Harald’s and Tostig’s men had left their vital coats of mail in the boats, in the over two hundred ships anchored at Riccall, where a third of the seven thousand strong army was gathered.
To begin with at Stamford Bridge all Harald and Tostig could see was a cloud of dust. Then they began to make out the glint of weapons – like a wall of ice in the sunlight, a mirage in the heat – as Harold Godwinson’s vast army advanced on the other side of the little River Derwent. Instead of running back to the ships and putting on their chain mail or making a temporary retreat downriver, the Norwegians sent messengers to summon the rest of the army. Then they took up their positions, shield to shield. Rather than run they would all fall together, one on top of the other as Harald had said on a previous occasion, when faced with another apparently superior foe. In the end, after a long, fierce battle, it was Harold Godwinson’s cavalry which tipped the scales. Only thirty or so Norwegian ships sailed back across the North Sea. Harald Hardråde had meant to win the whole of England, but all he got, in the words of the English king, was six feet of its soil – or a foot more because he was so tall.
The truly unforgettable thing about the programme was the way that Jonas Wergeland depicted that mighty battle, over ten thousand men clashing in a hellish, bloody melee, with just one person, Harald Hardråde himself. No one knows for sure where the battlefield lay, nor whether the wooden bridge of that time crossed the river at Danes Well or somewhere else. But Jonas Wergeland used the present stone bridge which, with its patina, could easily pass for a thousand-year-old bridge. He specifically wanted to feature the bridge because of the classic Viking legend which told of how a giant, a
red-haired
berserker, had single-handedly defended the bridge for several hours before being killed by a sneak attack from below – an event which is actually pictured on the sign outside the Swordsman Inn at Stamford Bridge today.
Wergeland decided to have Harald Hardråde take the swordsman’s place. Actor Normann Vaage, tall and well-built and blessed still with the agility of his young days as a promising gymnast, was perfect in the part.
In the programme Harald Hardråde, clad in a blue tunic and silvery helmet, was seen standing on the parapet at the centre of the bridge, battling on alone with a fearsome two-handed sword that sang as it cut through the air. Jonas Wergeland shot this stylised spectacle from the bank of the river in order to get the whole bridge in the shot. One saw Harald, the universal warrior, executing a kind of sword dance. His actions were as acrobatic as they were measured and balletic – again: like the moves in the more
meditative
forms of the Asian martial arts. And even though there was no sign of the pennants or the barricades of spears or the rain of arrows or the wall of raised shields or the rocks thrown by slings and catapults, viewers were treated – thanks to the soundtrack, a marvellous recreation of the hideous din of battle, with lots of ringing swords and screams and thundering hooves – to the illusion of a real battle. Nothing like it had ever been seen on
television
before. Jonas Wergeland made viewers see the horde of adversaries, he had them biting their nails, even though Harald Hardråde was quite alone, hacking and slashing at thin air. The Norwegian king fought in lone majesty on a bridge in England, one which also represented a decisive crossroads in European history, but people at home had a clear, vivid impression of a battle surging nerve-rackingly back and forth, and no one could help but see that Harald Hardråde was a splendid warrior, displaying as he did, with his lithe, supple movements, all the resourcefulness and skill in arms he had developed as commander of the Nordic division of the Varangian guard in
Constantinople
. Harald Hardråde – or Jonas Wergeland, as Kamala Varma once pointed out – seemed to possess one of those astras spoken of in
The Mahabharata
: a weapon that can create mighty illusions.