Sixty Degrees North (28 page)

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 Davidson, 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.

Despite these differences, there's been a great deal of collaboration and integration between the states since the Second World War, and indeed their development through the twentieth century was remarkable in part for the degree to which each chose very similar political roads. Social democratic parties began forming governments and coalitions across the Nordic countries in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Their response to that crisis shaped the region socially as well as economically, and it continues to do so even today. A comprehensive system of welfare, pensions, social housing and healthcare provision, paid for through high taxation and pursued alongside growth and full employment, gradually transformed these nations from economic backwaters into some of the wealthiest in the world. Each of them today boasts an excellent standard of living, combined with low levels of poverty and high levels of income and gender equality. Recent decades have seen liberalisation in their economies, but the Nordic Model, as it's become known, is still looked upon enviously by social democrats the world over. It is still the goal to which others aspire.

But just as many are eager always to laud the social achievements of these countries, others are equally quick to point to a ‘dark heart' within the Scandinavian system – a rot that threatens to consume and destroy the positive image projected onto the world. Right-wing extremism is one part of that rot, and its growth in the region has been noted with dismay by liberals across the continent. Ethnic nationalism
seems somehow out of place in countries such as these, particularly in Sweden, which until recently had been perhaps the most enthusiastically multicultural and pro-immigration of all European states. There has, undoubtedly, been a change here – a turn towards the right, and a worrying embrace of xenophobic politics among a minority of the population. But ethnic nationalism has been on the rise right across Europe over the past two decades: France, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, and increasingly the UK, have all seen support for far-right parties increase. The difference in Scandinavia is the sense that such parties ought not to exist there. Such is the degree to which tolerance and social cohesion are portrayed as defining Scandinavian characteristics that current trends have begun to undermine what people outside the region understand it to be. Paradoxically, many Nordic nationalists justify their hostility to immigration by highlighting the threat that multiculturalism poses to the society they have worked so hard to create. By allowing those whose culture is illiberal to come in, they argue – and Muslims are most often the target of this troubling logic – liberalism itself is endangered.