How I Came To Write 'The Bear-Wife'

During one long, lonely February, I sat by my big picture window, day after day, hour after excruciating hour, watching rain pour down from the sky and feeding my insatiable infant son.  I survived the ordeal, but only thanks to The Greenlanders.  The Greenlanders is Jane Smiley's 584-page novel about the mysterious demise of the Norse Greenland colony.  In the light shed by Ms. Smiley's considerable insight, though, that demise becomes considerably less mysterious and considerably more inevitable.  More rooted in human ignorance and blindness and cruelty than the historians could ever surmise, much less portray.  Was it somehow perverse of me to become so absorbed in this tragic reconstruction of a failed human endeavor at the very time that I should have been celebrating the miraculous beginnings of my own little human endeavor?  Maybe so.  But I chalked it up to my northern temperament:  had Ingmar Bergman ever been required to nurse a baby, he probably would have found himself reading The Greenlanders, too.

Several years later I came across a new translation of some of the Icelandic sagas with a forward by Jane Smiley, and, feeling a connection both to her and to my Scandinavian roots, I picked it up.  Right away, I was captivated.  The characters were flesh-and-blood, eating, sleeping, thinking, planning, sentient beings, just like we are, but almost in the manner of humanoids from one of Star Trek's alien worlds, their motives occasionally wouldn't quite add up, or their actions would sometimes seem a bit "off."  You see, the sagas were written in Iceland about 800 years ago and set 200 years earlier than that.  Light-years away from our world.  And the sagas are sparse in style; many things are unstated, left between the lines.  A contemporary reader would have understood, but the modern reader is left to rely upon her own interpretive abilities and her own detective work.  And, indeed, after some investigating, many of the characters did become understandable to me, and even admirable – even those whom we modern folk might characterize as petty, vindictive, cruel or just plain disgusting!

That volume of stories reinvigorated a connection with the people that I only half jokingly call "my Viking ancestors."  This connection is, to me, a very tangible thing, and I treasure it.  When I'm at home in Sweden I can stand by the graves of my people going back to Viking times and then some.  I've always wanted to know them, but is that even remotely possible?

I continued my detective work, reading Old Norse classics like Snorri's Heimskringla and the Poetic Edda, along with books on Norse religion, law and society.  By far the most inspirational work of modern scholarship that I came across was Neil S. Price's The Viking Way:  Religion and War in Iron Age Scandinavia.  Price challenges us to allow those ancient people their peculiarities, to allow them their profound differences from us, to allow them their own stories.  Captain Kirk would be proud!  Of course, it's easy to honor the prime directive when you know that Scotty can beam you up at any time.  But how did things work on the ground?  Human and animal sacrifice, piracy, evil sorcery, killings for vengeance or just plain provocation:  few stories end – or begin - without blood spillage.  At the same time, though, those people were dependent upon each other and they lived at close quarters:  warriors and traders, farmers and kings, Christians and heathens, slaves and priestesses.  The Viking Age was a productive age of travel and trade, of human craft and expression of all sorts, and its society had a moral equilibrium, one that nurtured it and fueled it and, indeed, drove it, at high-speed, for several centuries.  What was it all about?

Characters started coming to me, and that's when The Bear-Wife began.  It is set in a transitional time, at the meeting between the old beliefs and Christianity, the old political order and the new medieval kingdoms.  It is set in a transitional place, where the rocky Swedish west coast, the open farmland of the south and the forestland of the interior come together.  And it is set amidst the most significant transitional condition of all: life itself, which the Norse saw as a state of constant becoming. 

Where then, is home - the state of physical and spiritual rest?  That is what The Bear-Wife seeks to explore.

The main characters are Geerta, the orphaned daughter of a trader, raised in a heathen household by a Christian servant woman; Helgi, a young Viking warrior groping to understand the spiritual aspect of his vocation; Ragnar, his father, anxious about the plight of his prosperous estate and his chiefdom as he confronts his son's indifference and his own mortality; Fardan, an English missionary priest who struggles to advance his faith in a sometimes hostile setting; and Svanhild, a sorceress and former war-maiden who struggles with the absence of her husband and the uncomfortable nature of her role in society, which is to serve as an intermediary between the human and spirit worlds.  And then, of course, there's the bear.

Geerta and Helgi, cast out from their respective worlds, meet at the threshold of the bear's den, a place where death and birth are merged, and where the very human concerns of finding one's place and of fulfilling one's role can begin to be sorted out.  Together they restore the bear to his rightful place and in doing so are ultimately able to assume their own "rightful places."

Of course, my characters also operate amidst external events - some historical, some fictional, and some that were hatched in my mind to address the mysterious archaeology of the fictional Ragnar's district.  I hope that my characters are not only true to the world-view(s) of the time and place in which they lived, but are also in some way illustrative of a universal human desire to go home in both a physical and spiritual sense, to be at peace with one's duties and one's fate. 

What will you take with you?

In one burial a spear had been hurled over the head of the deceased and lodged in the wall of the grave chamber. In another the deceased is a male Sámi wearing typical Norse women's clothing. Another is a double cremation where, after the fire, the man's and woman's remains and effects were carefully separated out and buried apart from each other, in contrasting fashion, again with some normally female-associated goods placed with the man and vice versa. These burials are among those discussed in Neil Price's The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia.

Thanks to the wonderful people at my local library, I finally got my hands on a copy of this book--the first edition, that is, not the second, although I suspect I may have to purchase the latter at some point. It's a big, big book, with lots of information that's new to me. I appreciate Price’s introduction to scholarship on the noaidi - the "Sámi shaman." I'm still 100 pages shy of the finish, and I feel like I'm reading a detective novel, trying to make some guesses of my own in advance of the thrilling conclusion. I just read about the Sámi view of the Northern Lights and it kind of blew my mind. I woke up this morning with it all spinning around in my head.

In the meantime, though, the burials have really captured my imagination. Archaeologist Dr. Price discusses several Norse and Sámi graves in connection with his topic. They include intriguing assemblages of grave goods, and show evidence of what must have been profound, meaningful funerary rites.

He has singled out graves that he believes may house the remains of sorcerers or spiritual specialists, and as these people operated toward the outer limits of human society, their graves are bound to be extraordinary. Still, it seems to me that graves in general represent a category that is fair game for both religious symbolism and intimate associations.

Even within the general body of Norse graves that I've read about from this period there exist enormously varied burial practices - aside from clothing, grave goods, and their arrangement within the graves there are differences in topographical situation, shape, lining, markers, etc. And, of course, there are both inhumation and cremation graves.

The lack of standardizaton has posed problems for those trying to "make sense of" these graves in the light of known mythologies. Ellis-Davidson simply wrote that differences indicate the presence of strong family traditions. Some contemporary scholars look at regional patterns in burial preferences as one way of trying to delineate different political/social/religious spheres of influence within Scandinavia of the period. I don’t have enormous experience in this area, but in reading accounts of graves here and there, exact parallels among them seem to be relatively rare. Perhaps the more "run-of-the-mill" graves simply don't get written about. The ones on the farther reaches of the bell curve, however, seem to be numerous and remarkable.

An acquaintance back here in the 21st century recently encountered numerous deposition options for a relative’s ashes, including the possibility of housing them within the structure of a birdbath! I guess I've been lucky so far – I haven’t had to delve into this subject in a personal way - but I was very surprised to hear that the birdbath option is a standardized one available through a local funeral home! 

If, however, most of our burials today seem unremarkable when compared with those of the past, it is perhaps partly because we entrust them to corporate entities. What if, instead (and I’m not suggesting that we actually do this), we buried our own loved ones ourselves? Not only would we be forced to plan every aspect of the disposal of their physical being, but we would also have a more intimate, tactile, and perhaps, profound, association with death itself. How would this impact our view of death? How would this be manifested in our choices of grave types, sites, or grave goods (or lack thereof)? Would our final resting situations remain as uniform as they are today? Or would our choices be as baffling to future archaeologists as those of our ancestors are to us?

References

Ellis Davidson, Hilda. The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Price, Neil S. The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Uppsala, 2002.

Söderberg, Bengt. Aristokratiskt rum och gränsöverskridande. Stockholm: Riksantikvarieämbetets förlag, 2005.


Photos: A Viking-age grave at Li, Fjärås, Sweden; A Bronze-age stenhög (stone burial cairn) overlooks the sea from the Swedish west coast; More Viking-age graves at Li; A kyrkogård (churchyard), Kungsbacka, Sweden. Click the photos to enlarge.

Layers

On a large plateau with a view over the Kungsbacka river and the fjord beyond, there was a village. It had been there, as far as anyone supposed, for generations, stretching back deeply into the Middle Ages. Around a dozen farms with their barns and stables; home fields held closely and outer fields escaping to the river, where hooves sunk into the soft ground. Fences of wood and stone, ditches, paths. Every so often a house burned, fell into disrepair, or was deemed obsolete, salvaged, and rebuilt. Again and again houses rose upon the remains of their predecessors. Like the cells of a human body, the houses were replaced, but still it was the same village; still it was Varla.

It even was Varla in the 1960s, when I was there. Hand-in-hand my grandfather and I took sugar cubes and apples to the horses stabled down the dusty road. With trepidation I observed the hay-bailing machine in the summer pasture, suffered a wasp-sting and burning nettles, but nothing clouds the sunshine in my memory.

Today much of the plateau is covered with typical, tasteful, functional Swedish homes, lining up along the streets that arch their way around the hilltop. In between now and then, though, came the archaeologists, looking for history and traces of earlier times.

Who lived there before? Would you believe it? Women in woven aprons and bronze brooches, keys dangling, in longhouses by hearth-light weaving sails for the ships that plundered and traded. Men in peaked Viking-helmets and riders with iron spurs and gleaming silver buckles of twisted animal limbs. Meat roasting in pit-ovens and bread baking on heated stones. Wells dug, and wells filled in with refuse. Births, deaths and burials following upon each other as times and habits went through their slow changes.

Is my Varla is gone? Is it gone, too, the Varla that nurtured the Bronze Age, the Vendel Age, the Viking Age and generations more? Once again we’ve built upon past structures seemingly obliterated. I wonder if, this time, it is still the same village. Is the old grown new again, or is it just layers?

Climate Change in the North

Perhaps you’ve seen An Inconvenient Truth. I did, and I applaud the recent nomination of Al Gore for the Nobel Peace Prize. He truly has, as Norwegian environmental minister Börge Brende said, “som ingen annan satt klimatfrågen på agenden” (like no one else put the question of climate on the agenda).

The images from his movie---refugees fleeing flooded metropolises, massive droughts, and other cataclysms--are frightening and unforgettable. Now, thanks to the report recently issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, rationality and science are making even stronger headway.

The official report isn’t as tough to wade through as I had anticipated. With my interest in the North, I slogged through the chapter on Europe trying to get an idea of the ramifications of global climate change for Scandinavia.

Northern areas will be subject to more precipitation in the winter, when saturated soils are less able to absorb the extra moisture, setting up conditions for increased flooding. On the flipside, warmer and drier summers with increased evaporation could lead to greater concentrations of harmful nutrients (especially nitrogen and phosphorus) in the water. Longer summers will leave forests vulnerable to damage from insects and fungi that are new to northern regions, and stressed, dying, and drying vegetation could be susceptible to forest fires. Because of the warmer weather, all crops, annual or perennial (such as grapes and other fruit, for example), will be more susceptible to disease outbreaks.

Rising sea levels (7-23 inches by 2100 even if the polar ice remains largely intact) will cause disruption of human settlement and activities, and also will inundate and displace wetlands (disrupting breeding and nursery activity of fish, among other outcomes) and lowlands (including many agricultural areas), erode shorelines, exacerbate coastal storm flooding, increase salinity of estuaries, and threaten freshwater aquifers. The report mentions the Baltic, with its low tidal range, as particularly vulnerable, but it’s unclear to me how other factors, including glacial rebound, might mitigate the situation. Perhaps that depends on how quickly waters rise. There will also be (for all parts of the world) an increase in the likelihood of rare and extreme weather events, and the report states that coastal areas around the North Sea will be especially vulnerable to storm surges.

It seems widely accepted now that melting snow and ice (in particular, the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves) will also contribute to the rising seas, bringing levels higher than those allowed in the IPCC report. According to Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, Svante Axelsson, the general secretary of Swedish environmental organization Sveriges Naturskyddsföreningen or SNF, counts Göteborg (Gothenburg) among the cities that will be flooded. Many believe that the melting of certain amounts of the Greenland ice could disrupt the Gulf Stream, thrusting the North Atlantic and northern Europe, including Scandinavia, into another Ice Age. This scenario is explored in An Inconvenient Truth.

Although the IPCC report expresses some optimism around the ability of humans, with the help of science, to adapt to changing conditions, statements such as the following indicate just how many variables there are: “A northward change in temperature patterns may not necessarily correspond to a simple shift in latitude of suitable areas for unusual crops because many plants are sensitive to photoperiod and adapted to a combination of temperature and photoperiod ranges. New genotypes therefore might be necessary to meet this new agricultural frontier, provided that the available soils are suitable for the crop.” (5.3.2.1.3) And, regarding fisheries: “a poleward movement of species in response to climate warming is predictable on intuitive grounds. Habitat, food supply, predators, pathogens, and competitors, however, also constrain the distributions of species. Furthermore, there must be a suitable dispersion route, not blocked by land or some property of the water such as temperature, salinity, structure, currents, or oxygen availability. Movement of animals without a natural dispersal path may require human intervention; in the absence of intervention, such movement may take hundreds or thousands of years.” (5.3.2.2) I wonder if our politically and ideologically fractured world is up to the challenge of cooperating to implement these types of survival strategies.

If we are in denial, or, on the other hand, overwhelmed, perhaps it is due to difficulty in making our way through the IPCC report, or our tendency to see a movie as entertainment. Or the multitude of other problems that humanity faces. Or perhaps the enormity of the problem makes it too hard to grasp.

To me, the smaller scale changes hit closer to home than the large. When I think back to the beauty of my favorite childhood places, it really hurts me to imagine that they may cease to exist, or become so changed as to be unrecognizable. I remember so clearly the beautiful, marshy land on the Kungsbacka fjord with its distinctive smells, sights, and bird sounds. Will they be inundated by rising waters? What about the red-granite island covered in purple heather where we used to swim—will it become nothing but an underwater danger spot on the navigational chart? And with hotter, drier summers, will the buckets of blueberries we picked as children be reduced to handfuls? Or will the entire area revert to an Ice Age?

I don’t know how many people care about the little things. Judging from the runaway development we experience here in the U.S., perhaps not many. Of course, if your life and culture are close to the land, as is the case with farmers, fishers, hunters, etc., you will be among the first to feel the pain. Ultimately, though, we all will feel it, as will our children, grandchildren, and on down the line.

Are there places that you care about? Places that you remember or places that you enjoy now? Places that you hope your children will be able to enjoy as well? If so, please take a moment to prod your elected officials, if you are lucky enough to have them. Let them know that you want to see some action. Presumably with a problem so large, there are many ways forward, and we should probably walk them all. What about Al Gore for Climate Czar?

"Extended Forecast" by Ricardo Levins Morales. Click on the image for more information.

What is a spindle whorl and why invoke it here?

The spindle and its accompanying whorl comprise a simple, elegant tool that has been used for spinning fibers into thread for at least 9,000 years. The spindle itself is, in the words of Webster’s, a rounded rod, usually wooden, tapering toward each end, for twisting into thread the fibers pulled from the material on the distaff. The whorl is a weight, usually stone or ceramic, that is fitted onto the spindle to increase and maintain the speed of the spin. Basically doughnut shaped, it can be flatter or more conical, plain or elaborately decorated. It is an entirely portable ensemble: the distaff may be tucked into a belt or held under an arm, while the spindle and whorl are controlled by the spinner herself, suspended from the thread that is being spun.

I say, “the spinner herself.” We don’t know who used the earliest spindles, which were developed in Mesopotamia for spinning the relatively short fibers acquired from animals. (South Americans developed the technology somewhat later.) It is clear that within the Northern European world spinning has been a task reserved for, or, if you prefer, relegated to, women. Indeed, before the introduction of the horizontal loom, weaving—the twining of weft threads around the warp--was also women’s work. Women’s graves from pagan Scandinavia and its related North Atlantic settlements often contain spindle whorls as well as loom weights from (vertical) warp-weighted looms. Excavated from far-flung Norse settlements, they substantiate the presence of women in these places.

Textiles, relative to stone, metal, and even wood or leather items, are impermanent. They burn, molder, and rot. They leave few traces of their existence. Similarly, traditional women’s work, though fundamental to human survival, seems to disappear without a trace in the historical record. Spindle whorls and loom weights, whether deposited in a grave or abandoned in a turf longhouse near a choppy northern sea, document and eulogize my great-grandmothers.

Spinning is a feature of the cosmos. The weighted spinning developed by our ancestors elegantly utilizes force and gravity to “turn” one thing into another thing entirely. The creative work of the spindle and whorl is accomplished through motion, yet the worker remains rooted at the center of being and becoming. If we believe in the holistic nature of the universe we must be onto something. What it may be, remains to be seen.

References

Gibson-Roberts, Priscilla A. High Whorling: A Spinner’s Guide to an Old World Skill. Cedaredge, CO: Nomad Press, 1998.

Jesch, Judith. Women in the Viking Age. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1991.

Jochens, Jenny. Women in Old Norse Society. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995.

McGovern, Thomas H. “The Demise of Norse Greenland” in Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga. William W. Fitzhugh and Elisabeth I. Ward, editors. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

Schoeser, Mary. World Textiles: A Concise History. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003.