Читать книгу Kingdom of Frost - Bjørn Vassnes - Страница 9

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IN THE REALM OF THE SNOW QUEEN

SNOW IS QUIET. Not just when it falls, but also when it has settled and covers the landscape as far as the eye can see. Like on Finnmarksvidda on a winter’s day, far away from all the houses, roads, and traffic—the way it could be on the plateau when I grew up there in the sixties. There was a silence that was more than the mere absence of sound. Because there was sound: the sound of silence, but most of all the sound of endless space. And of endless time, as if the snow had always lain there peacefully. Which, of course, it hadn’t. Because snow also has another face.

At dawn, as we reached Bæskades, a storm came blowing up. A flaying rush of driving snow whined on the mountaintop. Heavily leaned we into the storm, forced to rest a while, Our reindeer too were weary after many a long mile.¹⁰

It isn’t so long since people traveling in northern Norway in midwinter had to go by reindeer over the Bæskades plateau, just like Nordahl Grieg. As depicted in his poem, idyllically entitled “Morning on Finnmarksvidda,” it could be a grueling experience if the weather gods didn’t smile upon you. A journey that takes two hours by car today in summer conditions could well take one or two days, so it was a good thing there were plenty of mountain lodges en route.

When I traveled over Bæskades in winter as a lad, it wasn’t by reindeer but by a peculiar weasel-like vehicle known as a snowmobil (not to be confused with modern snowmobiles). It was a sort of tracked vehicle in which around ten passengers sat huddled together in a circle, barely catching a glimpse of the white landscape speeding past on the other side of a few tiny round windows, like the portholes on a boat. The snowmobil traveled faster than the reindeer and didn’t tire as easily; it was usually the passengers who had to stop for a break and a drop of coffee. I don’t remember how long the trip took, but it was the better part of a day. And why did I spend two days—there and back—on a trip like that? To stand shivering for hours on end watching somebody go around and around on a skating rink, that’s why.

I was ten years old and lived in Kautokeino, Norway’s most isolated municipal center, especially in winter. It was also the coldest—in competition with Karasjok—with winter temperatures sometimes falling toward −58 degrees Fahrenheit. That was fine by me: when it fell below minus 40, we were given the day off school. We moved to Kautokeino at the end of the 1950s, before the coastal town of Alta could be reached by a road that was open all year round, and when our community could still be isolated for weeks in spring. Then it was impossible to drive either car or snowmobil owing to the spring thaw. The snow grew wet and impassable, rivers and lakes could no longer be crossed, and even the reindeer had to throw in the towel. Today, a situation like that would merit helicopter airdrops and a news feature on TV, and the parliamentary public safety committee would be hauled in for a hearing to find out who was to blame. In those days, it was just the way the world was. The seasons had their rhythm: the snow came in autumn, the water froze, and later, in spring, everything started to thaw again and you just had to stay where you were, hoping you had enough of the bare necessities. It was what we were used to.

Young as I was, I knew no better and thought this was quite normal. As a child, I also got out of doing the most unpleasant chores, like going outside to fetch water from the ice-covered tarns or brooks when the water pipes froze. This was the kind of thing my father often had to do, and once he lost his footing and fell into the water. He ended up under the ice and spent a good while lying there flailing about before hauling himself out, soaking wet in the bitter cold. That he got home without freezing to death and didn’t fall ill tells you something about how hardy his generation was up there in the north. The same must be said of the young woman who set off to give birth at the clinic in Kautokeino one cold winter’s day—alone, on foot, in the snow. She didn’t make it in time and had to deliver the child herself by the side of the road, before carrying it onward to the clinic. Mother and child were doing fine, we were told.

I escaped any such experiences. Even being out in temperatures below minus fifty was actually fine, as long as it wasn’t windy, you were wrapped up warmly, and you took care not to walk too quickly. My most extreme experiences of cold were probably those times I went to Alta to spend hours freezing by a skating rink. The skaters were our biggest idols in the 1960s. Ice—or snow in the case of the cross-country skiers—was where it was all happening in those days. Norway was a winter nation—the winter nation. “There lies a land of eternal snow,” we would sing as we paraded, flags aloft, amid flurries of snow on May 17.

But the hero of heroes was Fridtjof Nansen, who hadn’t just crossed Greenland on skis—without any certainty that it was actually possible, since there were no aerial or satellite photographs then—but spent several winters in the Arctic Ocean, also something of a hit-or-miss affair. When I went cross-country skiing on the endless Finnmarksvidda, as I often did since we only had school three days a week some years, I’d daydream I was Nansen on his way across the Greenland ice. True, I wasn’t hauling any baggage, I knew the weather would hold for the few hours my trip lasted, and Mom was waiting for me back home with hot cocoa, but I was Nansen all the same. Far ahead of me the west coast of Greenland awaited, along with fame and glory.

It was an almost ecstatic experience to ski across the plateau: nothing but white in all directions as far as the eye could see, just small dwarf and mountain birches dotting the white surface like tiny apostrophes, and here and there the track of a ptarmigan or hare. A view that the Danish scientist Sophus Tromholt, who studied the northern lights and lived in Kautokeino in 1883, described as follows:

Below a white shroud of snow the Land of the Lapps slumbers in its winter sleep. The poor flowers, which a little while ago basked gaily in the sun, have been scattered to the winds, and only the seed remains, buried in the hard frozen earth, longing for far-away Spring, whose gentle breath shall call them into life. The thin birch copses, which used to contribute their share to relieve the desolate landscape with a faint tinge of the colour of Hope, stand enveloped in Nature’s common white garb, woven with the fine threads of filagree hoar frost and glittering ice crystals. The river, too, which spoke so cheeringly in the autumn, is silent, and bound in the iron grasp of King Ice.

Everything slumbers after the short, bright summer’s day; even the wind durst not play with the snow-white cover of Nature’s couch, the very air seems to sleep. Nothing breaks the silence. You may wander for miles over the wastes, but never a sound, save the creak of your foot in the snow, breaks the silence either from heaven or earth.¹¹

This was before snowmobiles shattered the peace of the plateau, and you could hear every tiniest sound in a radius of miles—in other words, almost pure silence. Only the noise of your skis and poles on the snow. And sunbeams coming at you from every angle, reflected by the snow crystals. Never mind that I hadn’t heard of sunscreen and my face ended up covered in sun eczema: that was just part of the deal. No encounter with nature I have experienced since has lived up to Finnmarksvidda in all its winter glory. That said, I haven’t skied across Greenland or Antarctica, and have resigned myself to the fact that I never will.

So my relationship to the cryosphere is largely positive, meaning that in global terms, I form part of a small minority, along with those of my fellow Norwegians who will gladly pay 70,000 Norwegian kroner (about US$8,000) for the privilege of crossing the Greenland ice on a camping trip.

Given my positive winter experiences, it was odd for me to read fairy tales and stories that described it as terrifying and dangerous, a hotbed of evil, like those of Hans Christian Andersen and C. S. Lewis. In Andersen, the wicked Snow Queen steals children and takes them with her up to her realm of frost in the north, where she travels around by reindeer, just like my neighbors the Sami reindeer herders. In the fairy tale, the boy, Kay, is kidnapped by the wicked queen and taken back to her cold palace in the north, and his friend Gerda goes after them to set him free. And in the Narnia books by Lewis, the White Witch casts a spell on Narnia, throwing it into an endless winter, in which Christmas never comes to light up a cold and dreary existence. These kinds of characters and motifs are familiar to children today through Disney films such as Frozen. It is clear that such stories are written in countries where people have rarely had the opportunity to experience the positive sides of winter and know only of its troublesome aspects: like snow-blocked roads and people breaking arms or legs after slipping on the ice.

The frozen world is also a popular backdrop that thriller writers from Agatha Christie to Jo Nesbø have used to sinister effect. Snow provides a setting for the most ghastly crimes and is often the murderers’ accomplice, hiding their tracks when it settles on the ground like a pure, innocent carpet. Snow, ice, and frost also serve as neat metaphors for cold-blooded acts.

Yet it seems that people have a different relationship to snow and frost in Russia, which has proper winters, just as cold as those on Finnmarksvidda, and which has, moreover, been saved by winter twice in its history: first from Napoleon and later from Hitler. Both saw thousands of their soldiers freeze to death on the merciless Russian steppes. It’s hardly surprising that the Russians’ Grandfather Frost was the one who brought children presents, along with his beautiful grandchild, the snow maiden Snegurochka.

Some believe Hans Christian Andersen drew inspiration for the Snow Queen from the Norwegian goddess Skadi, who was actually a Jotun, but married into the family of the Aesir gods when she wedded the sea god Njord. Skadi was happiest in the cold mountains—she was, after all, the goddess of skiers—and so her marriage to the sea god fared badly. But this relationship reflects a Norse understanding of how the world originated from the encounter between cold (Niflheim, the primordial land of darkness and cold) and heat (Muspellsheim, a sea of frothing flames). Between them lay a vast, bottomless abyss, the Ginnungagap. It was here, in the meeting between fire and ice, that everything began; and it was here, too, that the world got a fresh start after Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods. But frost, Niflheim, and its children the Jotuns became the personification of evil, even though the myth acknowledges that the world wouldn’t have existed without them.

The roots of the evil that fairy-tale tellers and crime writers associate with the Snow Queen’s realm probably lie far back in the northern European myths of the migration period. The old Norse sagas of gods and heroes tell how the Aesir, the good guys, had to battle against the evil Jotuns—who, incidentally, weren’t so evil that the Aesir didn’t occasionally mate and have children with them. The fact that the Jotuns and their female counterparts, known as gygrene in Norwegian, came from the Kingdom of Frost is clear from their names, which originated as personifications of the frozen world.

We have Snow the Old (Snær or Snjó in Norse), who is the son of Jokul (glacier) and father to a son, Thorre (black frost), and daughters Fonn (bank of snow), Mjoll (a flurry of fine snow), and Driva (snowdrift). Perhaps all these “children” were originally supposed to be seen as different aspects of Snow, but in the myths, they took on separate roles, only fragments of which are known to us, unfortunately. In some of these, Snow the Old is the king of “Finland”—in this context, the term for northern Scandinavia, about which people knew little other than that it was cold there, with masses of snow. And that other peoples lived there—Finns, Sami, and Kvens—although nobody was quite sure who was who.

As I said, these stories now exist only in fragmentary form, so for a more coherent portrayal of how people in Norse times saw the origin of all things, we must turn to a more modern interpreter of myth, author Tor Åge Bringsværd:

In the beginning there was Cold and Heat. On one side, Niflheim, with frost and fog. On the other, Muspellsheim, a sea of frothing flames. Between them was nothing. Just a great, bottomless abyss: Ginnungagap. Here, in this vast emptiness—midway between light and dark—all life would come into being. In the meeting between ice and fire . . . the snow began slowly to melt, and, formed by Cold but wakened to life by Heat, a wondrous being emerged—an enormous troll. His name was Ymir. No greater giant has ever lived.¹²

Out of the melting ice grew something else as well: the cow Audhumla. Ymir got milk from her, and when Audhumla licked the salty, frozen stones around her, a new wonder of creation came about:

The cow suddenly licked some long hair from one of the stones! The next day, a head and face came forth from this stone! And on the third day, the cow eventually managed to lick the whole body free. . . . It was a man. He was tall and handsome. He was called Buri and from him all the gods are descended, those we call Aesir.¹³

Ymir fathered some children all by himself, from his own sweat, and these were the origin of the “clan of the frost trolls,” who were known as Jotuns. The relationship between Aesirs and Jotuns was part conflict, part coexistence—the way it often is between heat and cold. In the end, though, the Aesirs had a showdown with the Jotuns and killed Ymir:

The Aesirs drag the dead Ymir out into the middle of Ginnungagap—the huge vacuum. They place him like a lid over the abyss. Here, they create the world—out of the giant’s corpse. His blood becomes the sea; his flesh, the land. His bones become mountains and cliffs. His teeth and the crushed splinters of his bones become rocks and scree. His hair becomes trees and grass. His brain the gods hurl high up into the air. Thus the clouds come into being. And the sky? It is the skull itself . . . set like a vault, a dome, above all creation. After that, the gods trapped sparks from the heat of Muspellsheim and fastened them to the heavens. There they hang to this day and sparkle.¹⁴

And so the world and its creatures were born from the conflict between heat and cold. Perhaps this was a myth that came naturally to those who lived where it was written down, in Iceland, a land of both ice and fire. However, it isn’t so far from the newer stories modern science has given us: chunks of ice containing organic molecules strike a blazing hot Earth, causing life to come into being.

In one respect, however, Finnmarksvidda differed from the White Witch’s eternal winter: winter always ended. The snow melted each spring, and even though it might last until May, it vanished quickly once the thaw had set in. The big event in spring was when the ice broke up on the great river, the Kautokeinoelva, whose name changes to the Altaelva farther downstream. Mighty forces came into play then, when the ice shattered and huge ice floes were hurled around, often far inland. Fortunately, it was safe to watch from up on the bridge, which was built to bear the brunt of it. The spring thaw was far from silent, and this, too, could make you feel kinship with Nansen, who wrote the following description of the havoc caused by pack ice in the Arctic Ocean (something his polar research vessel, the Fram, was fortunately built to withstand):

First you hear a sound like the thundering rumbling of an earthquake far away on the great waste; then you hear it in several places, always coming nearer and nearer. The silent ice world re-echoes with thunders; nature’s giants are awakening to the battle. The ice cracks on every side of you, and begins to pile itself up; and all of a sudden you too find yourself in the midst of the struggle. There are howlings and thunderings round you; you feel the ice trembling, and hear it rumbling under your feet; there is no peace anywhere.¹⁵

But then it calmed. The river could once more flow down toward Alta, people could take out their riverboats, and on the hills around the river the vegetation began to peep out again after the cold winter. It wasn’t long before the greenery started to appear, as the midnight sun ensured that photosynthesis—and therefore growth—continued night and day. Just a month later, you could swim in the river it was possible to drive a car across in winter. And then, after the first proper summer rain, came the invasion: billions of mosquitoes. We who grew up here became pretty much immune to their bites, but that didn’t stop them from invading every cavity of your body, making it difficult to breathe. It was worst of all out on the cloudberry marshes, the fruit orchards of the plateau where I earned my summer wages. One benefit of the mosquitoes, though, was that they made autumn—and the frost—feel like liberation.

We northerners are alone in experiencing such stark changes between the seasons—from totally white to almost totally green. Farther south, the only alterations are in temperature and humidity—when the dry season is relieved by the rainy season, for example—and to some extent, the colors of the vegetation. But, with the possible exception of the moment the first rains of the monsoon come sweeping across India’s brown-scorched fields, you will never experience anything so absolute as the shift from white winter to green summer up there in the north. Those of us who grew up with it yearn for the changing of the seasons; we sing songs about it, and we feel and believe this is something that all of nature experiences along with us. Or that’s what we used to think before, at least, when we still spent time out in the fields and open country.