The World Wakes Late

Some weeks ago we moved to a new house. It sits between two streams at the bottom of a slope. We used to have the evening sun, now we're on the other side of the mountain and we get the morning sun. Not that it ever gets dark anymore.

Our house sits in amongst some trees down near the edge of the fjord. One wall of our livingroom is made almost entirely of windows. Sometimes the water out there is calm and clear and gently rippling. It is as if it could absorb your pain. The mountains opposite are almost perfectly reflected in its surface. Later in the same day the water might be streaming past the house until it seems for all the world as if you were standing on the deck of a boat. Today the weather has jumped back a season. While I write this the fjord stretches out like dull grey paint into a mist of snow.

I've starting getting up at 5am. Around that time, some days ago, I watched a heron fly by just metres away. A few days later, while we were getting ready for work, a massive white hare came loping down the hill and around the outside of our house. There were flecks of brown across his back where his fur was starting to catch up with the changing colour of the landscape.

The snow took a long time to melt. Even once it was gone the earth took a long time to recover. It's only in this last week that the grass has started to turn green again, and now suddenly everything seems to have come alive in a matter of days. Rocks have changed colour with moss and lichen, dandelions have appeared near our old house and reindeer have returned to the area. For the moment they're grazing in a field nearby, but soon they will disappear up into the mountains.

The trees are finally growing leaves, and soon our house will be hidden from view. We'll still have a view of the water and the sky, but no longer a view the mountains. We'll walk down to the water when we want to see the landscape. We'll walk the stone beach when the tide is out. 

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.