Please, gex youz acx xogexhez, Bew Yozk Ximes!

What if I wrote an article about The New York Times and decided to leave out the letters n, r and t and substitute some other letters in their places? It might become the Few Yolk Limes. Or the Bew Yozk Ximes. Ix would be absuzd, righx?

I just read "Pommes de Terroir," a short article about the specialty potato industry in Sweden, in Sunday's New York Times travel magazine. And would you believe it? The writer and editors completely disregarded three letters of the Swedish alphabet!

They just weren't there at all.

It's Spelled That Way for a Reason

The travel writer, Abby Aguirre, went to Skåne, one of Sweden's southern provinces, and visited the municipality of Båstad. Båstad, because of the å in the first syllable, is pronounced almost like BOO-stah." It's not spelled Bastad, as the Times would have it; Bastad sounds more like a snooty British rendering of bastard.

According to Båstad's website, there are different theories for how the town got its name. Like many place names, it could derive from an early resident's name. Båstad could be a shortened version bootho's-sted (the place where Bootho lives). Or perhaps Bodo's-sted. Both are regional names going back at least to the ninth century; we know of them because they appeared in a French chronicle identifying Norman/Viking men with origins in Skåne. Another possibility is that the name is a shortened version of båtställe (båt being the word for boat), probably meaning some sort of boat passage or landing.

But in either case you can see how keeping the å rather than an a in the first syllable of Båstad is absolutely key; spelled with an a it has a completely different pronunciation, one that would not link it to either of its possible origins. Thus, one could say that changing the å to a not only sounds like a nasty insult, but also robs the town of a bit of its meaning and history.

A rose by any other name...would be something else entirely

Continuing on through the Times piece, the sjö in Rammsjö is a word that means sea or lake. Sjo is meaningless and I'm pretty sure it's unpronounceable as well.

Also, a trädgård is a garden. It is composed of the elements träd (tree) and gård (yard).  Tradgard means nothing in Swedish. (In English it might be the name of some product advertised on late-night television, designed to protect your trad, whatever that is.)

Väderö is an island, indicated by the final element ö, the word for island. The first element, väder, means weather. Vader means nothing (unless we're talking about Darth).

Moreover, the name of the Cape on which the potatoes in question grow is, as it says on the sign pictured on page 107 of the magazine, Bjäre, not Bjare. Also, I believe the vodka is named after Börje Karlsson, not Borje, and the potato dealer's name is Göran not Goran. (Not only does ö sound completely different than o, but it also renders the g soft and thus is essential for intelligibility. I ask you: would Jennifer want you to call her Gonnifer?)

Finally, there's no such thing as farsk potatoes. They are färsk: fresh.

A language resonates with the history, the logic and the character of its people

I mention all of this not to be picky, and not to try to seem cooler-than-thou because I
know a little Swedish. I bring it up because I think it really matters.

I mean, come on! Man up, people!

They may inconvenience your typesetter, but the three letters å, ä and ö comprise nearly 10% of the Swedish alphabet. Ignoring them demonstrates a profound lack of respect for the Swedish language and for language in general. I mean, did the folks who standardized Swedish just go on a drinking binge one day and randomly decide to place dots over some of their vowels just for the heck of it? Well...maybe.

But seriously, however it happened, the fact is that Swedish has 29 letters. They are all necessary to differentiate the sounds of the language. A is different than å or ä. O is different than ö.  They look different, they sound different and they have different effects on the consonants that surround them.
And the spelling of a word speaks to the word's composition, its meaning and its origin.

What is a travel magazine for, anyway?

Is it ignorance, laziness, or does the New York Times just not care about getting it right? Maybe it's just taking advantage of the good-naturedness of Swedes, of their willingness to extend themselves to understand us, even when we don't reciprocate. But in this global age, no one – certainly not a publication that considers itself to be relevant to people traveling overseas - can afford to display this sort of ignorance and disrespect. Getting the names right is an important part of showing respect and highlighting the beauty and uniqueness of a place and a people. That, after all, is what a travel magazine should be for.

Excerpt from "The Bear-Wife"

Ragnar came upon Fardan near his hut, where the priest had just concluded the mid-afternoon prayer. Ragnar clapped his shoulder joyously, and the priest nearly buckled with the force of the blow. "Fardan, you must congratulate me. My grandson is born. He is strong like his father and already his eyes are bright and clear as he looks upon the world."

"Ah, Ragnar, that is wonderful news. Accept my sincere best wishes for you and for your grandson."

"I thank you, Fardan." replied Ragnar.

"And might I add, my friend, how pleased I am to see a smile upon your face." said the priest. "I can tell you something that will cause it to broaden even more."

"What could that be, Fardan?" asked Ragnar.

"Well, Ragnar, it is with great gratitude to the Lord God and the blessed Saint Bede that I am able to report to you that, like yourself, the child's mother has received the sign of the cross and, in so doing, has taken the first step along the path that leads to salvation."

"The child's mother?"

"Yes, your grandchild's mother. She who dwelt among the beasts of the dark forest. She who some called the Bear-wife. Under my humble guidance she has accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior.

"And there is further cause for rejoicing, Ragnar, because your grandson shall be baptized and his soul, although stained with sin, shall be granted salvation, and when the Day of Doom comes, he shall sit with you at the right hand of the Lord God, in Eternal Bliss.

"And so it remains only to bestow this blessing upon your son and upon the others of your family, and the task shall be complete. Your household shall assume its place in Christendom and you shall see what glory awaits."

It seemed to Ragnar that his mind was spinning, that all the world around him was spinning. How had it come to this? Must he endure now, at this moment of joy, the gloating of this wearisome priest, Sven's cast-off, who, he suddenly realized, had convinced him of nothing aside from his own fears? How easy it must have been for Fardan to accomplish this in the heart of the poor orphan girl. Yet even she had shown courage and deserved better.

"The beasts of the dark forest indeed," sputtered Ragnar. "You are the beast. Yes, you, priest! Stalking – terrorizing – here, on my own land - preying upon the fears and the uncertainty of your victims. You are a blight upon us! You are a pestilence! Be gone and let us be!" Ragnar waved him aside and strode off, out of the infield and up the path to the open pasture. 

That high land was empty now of men and beasts, for Ragnar's rams had long since rejoined the rest of the herd for the breeding season. Ragnar came to the stones of the grave-field by the Mirror Tarn and he stood among them, staking his claim, as they did, to all of the windy plateau and the rolling land below.

There lies the valley. There the flat lands stretch toward the sea. There lie the meadows, there runs the river, there stand rock and oak. There lie the stones of Thorbjorn's ship and there the sturdy timbers of Svanhild's altar are planted. There, beside the Old Road, scratched along the ridge-top, dwell Gunnar and his kin. And beyond lies the lake – see it sparkle against the green velvet forest.

This is it. This, to me, is everything there is.

Ragnar sat down upon the damp earth. He leaned on one of the rough, lichen-covered boulders that rested there, one of a ring of stones. Golden grass-strands with their heads of perfect seeds, thick bunches of dark green heather clothed in purple, blueberry shrubs tinged with scarlet, all blended and bowed before his eyes. When was the last time he had looked at these small things, each gleaming like the rarest jewel? They had been here, always, through seasons of plenty and seasons of want, growing from the bones of the earth, and from the bones of his parents and grandparents, their parents and theirs. He delighted in them now, in this still, silent moment. For though he knew in his heart that the turning point of his world had already come and gone, here, in this landscape of cairns and mounds and standing stones; here, at the threshold between this world and the next, was an opening to taste the sweetness of that late-summer blossoming of life, that moment of knowing that the long days are irretrievably gone. It was as if, having climbed for a lifetime, he had at last come up over the crest of the hill and just as he was taking in the panoramic view, he found himself beginning to roll down the other side, wheel upon wheel, faster and faster – and what waits at the bottom?

Around him now Ragnar sensed many voices, many gestures: gentle, harsh, demanding, judgmental - sympathetic. They were gathering behind him now, his forebears: Aelfrid the hero, his great brass-studded shield shattered; Old Ragnar, who had built the hall in which the household still lived, and also Red Thorbjorn, Ragnar's grandfather, drinking and toasting at his return from the lands of the Franks. Although their lives, like Ragnar’s own, had doubtless hurtled from birth to death with barely a pause to reflect, to him they had always seemed as fixed and eternal as the mountain of which they were now a part. But during their lives they, too, must have faced choices. Had they wavered? Had they been afraid? Had they chosen well? Or poorly? He lived with the consequences of their choices, as his grandson would live with his. They had left him here, at their lives' end, but he must go on, with or without their understanding or their approval. It would be for later generations to look back upon him and judge.

As he sat there, resting among the stones, nearly hidden by the tall meadow grasses, two young girls came up the path, walking together towards the Mirror Tarn. They seemed to float across the meadow, golden hair blowing and long, white arms. He couldn’t see what they had in their hands but whatever it was they deposited it there, at the spring, in a manner at once solemn and conspiratorial.

Ragnar waited for them to be done with their small offering, and to turn back toward the settlement. How lightly they tread upon the earth. How simple their desires. A handsome young groom? A new set of ribbons for their hair? He smiled to himself, and felt his heart lighten. Then he rose, gathered himself up, and returned to his hall.

- - - 
Above is an excerpt from The Bear-Wife, my novel set in 10th century Sweden.  I'll be posting updates as the book moves toward publication.  If you like you can also check out this post I wrote about the book a while back.

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. 

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?