Draugen

Tromsø art museum has some beautiful landscapes of the North, painted in colours which brilliantly capture the light up here. The permanent exhibition on the second floor houses a really impressive collection of oil paintings. Yet the first time I visited, a month or so ago, I was more struck by a small drawing in the show on the ground floor. It was an image of Draugen - The Ghoul of the Sea - and it was done by Theodor Kittlesen. 

Kittelsen, who died in 1914 at the age of only 55, is famous for drawing scenes from Norwegian folk tales, most notably images of trolls. Whenever I'd seen his work before it had been a bit more cartoonish than this Draugen (slightly different from the one above) and seemed a bit lighter. Not only was this image skillfully done, it seemed to have in it all the feeling of a man lost at sea. Or just the feeling of a man lost. It made me question where Draugen came from, whether he had been something else once, a long time ago.

Not so far from here there is an Island where Draugen is known to have surfaced and taken a man down into the water. The place bears his name.

Once you've lived through a north-Norwegian winter you can start to understand where the stories of trolls came from. Everything is on such a vast scale that it seems reasonable to believe humans share the land with something much bigger. In the darkness it seems very clear that certain stones used to be something else. In the days before electricity and motor transport, how many animals and people must have simply disappeared?

As for Draugen; the first time I stood beside the fjord I felt certain I was waiting for something to surface.

Are any of these things real? That seems like the wrong question. I'm not sure we should be so concerned with what is literally true.