Norwegian connection

"Returning from 14th-century Norway" was not an allusion to the fantastic kind of time travel performed by the incredible Dr. Who, but to the kind of "beyond time" journeying that occurs when a reader is thoroughly immersed in a spellbinding book.

Iceland was the setting for a Storyfest Journeys seminar earlier this month in Skalholt, Iceland, west of Reykjavik. The organizers of this gathering, each of them skilled and well-travelled storytellers and writers, maintain that sense of place is integral to storytelling, and to that end Iceland is the ideal setting for immersing storytellers in the richness of the Icelandic sagas and folk tales. This year, however, there was a new component: a seminar on the novel by Nobel prize winner for literature Sigrid Undset: Kristin Lavransdatter, set in 14th-century Norway, the epic tale of a medieval woman living in a time rich with myth and story. Undset's historical research for the novel was exacting but it was her reading of that greatest of Icelandic sagas, Njal's Saga, that inspired her to unfold the tale of Kristin. Although the landscape of Iceland differs considerably from the mountains and valleys of forested Norway, the physical and historical connection are strong, Iceland having begun to be settled in the 9th and 10th century by families opting to leave Norway rather than submit to the oath of loyalty to King Harald the Fairhaired.

So it was that five women gathered in Skalholt to discuss our reading of Sigrid Undset's trilogy while two other groups worked with Njal's Saga and with folk tales that had originated in different parts of Iceland. Interspersed with our conversations, writing, and telling were three day trips to different sites intimately connected with Iceland's historical sagas.

This was the setting and this the bare description of what we did there, but the power of the experience was such that I am still on this journey even after having returned home.

While recovering from jet lag, and sorting through the trove of material that came back with me (fortunately Customs does not ask what travellers carry back in their dreams and imaginations, or I'd still be at the airport telling my own saga), I wandered into what the local shopping mall offers as its version of a bookstore, and found there a book by a writer whose work I've followed off and on for years, reading what I could: Travels with Herodotus by the late Ryszard Kapuscinski. Tom Bissell, in his NY Times book review, quotes from one of the passages I had noted as especially significant for the telling of stories, referring as it does to the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another: "The knowledge takes the form of various tales. People sit around the fire and tell stories. Later, these will be called legends and myths, but in the instant when they are first being related and heard, the tellers and the listerners believe in them as the holiest of truths, absolute reality."

"People sit around the fire and tell stories." The knowledge that is transmitted is not only the dates and places of battles and "to prevent the traces of fhuman events from being erased by time", but the knowing of place and of being human, and the mingling of memory and imagination. Just as Odin kept two ravens on his shoulders, Hugin and Munin -- Thought and Memory -- for each was essential to wisdom, so we need stories to remind us, and to help us think about, what it means to be human in this eventful and strife-torn world.