Several years ago, I experienced what I thought was a major depressive episode, but which turned out to be neurodivergent burnout. My nervous system was shattered, making any sort of stimulation unbearable. When I tried to listen to music, I’d physically recoil, like Nosferatu in a sunbeam, and need to turn it off.
Almost overnight, creating and consuming art became impossible. I lost the ability to read, to write, to form coherent sentences. My world became so small it was like I barely existed. This deprivation made for the most terrifying time of my life.
I remember slamming my hands against my ears a few seconds into a Wardruna track. Warduna! A band whose live performance had left me sobbing and prompted the purchase of a one-way ticket to Norway.
When I was able to listen to music again, I tried to discover what I’d missed, but was quickly overwhelmed and returned to what was familiar. Curiosity is in my makeup though, and before too long, I was tentatively exploring the ever-rising ocean of musical releases.
It’s been difficult to accept that my capacity isn’t what it used to be, and I get easily frustrated by the sifting required to find something precious. Also, since burning out, it’s been more difficult to listen to music at times when I used to without issue. For instance, I often listened to music while writing, but nowadays mostly need silence. I’m still figuring out how to ‘be in the world’ as a late diagnosed neurodivergent, and what my capacity for everything, including music, looks like.
It’s usually right before going to bed, when I feel the urge to discover something new. Earlier this week, I put Nordic Folk into the Bandcamp search and opened new tab after new tab for promising projects, vowing each I’d give them my attention over the coming days.
But I needed quieter days than I’d thought this week. When I did listen to music, I found myself returning to Two Winters, One Midnight Sun by Triveni, a project of Belgian composer and accordionist Barbara Eva Ardenois. Listening to this shimmering soundscape unearthed from Bandcamp’s Nordic Folk hoard reunited me with something I hadn’t felt in ages – bliss.
On her Bandcamp page Ardenois writes: My journey through the Nordic countries began in the autumn of 2021. Over the following seasons, I lived and travelled across Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway, studying traditional music as part of the Nordic Master in Folk Music.
The sound of the kantele, the vast Nordic landscapes, and the stillness of nature left a lasting impression on me. Through dark winters and luminous summer nights, I shaped my musical world where light sparks as a symbol of hope.
In 2023, I created Triveni—named after the confluence of three rivers. In this project, I weave elements of Swedish shepherd music, Karelian kantele improvisations and contemporary classical music, gently blending field recordings and subtle electronics.
My Dreamy Folk Flow draws sonic landscapes for the quiet hours—when light returns or fades—welcoming you to slow down, connect and wonder.
This album is co-created with my two dear friends and fellow musicians, Ingrid Rodebjer (Sweden) and Hanna Ryynänen (Finland). Their improvisations and deep roots in traditional music bring new colours and atmospheric layers to these cross-cultural soundscapes. – Barbara Eva Ardenois
A core childhood memory for me is the ritual of watching Moomin before school, and it took only a couple of episodes before I found myself excited to see one character in particular – the smock-wearing, pipe-puffing, saucer-eyed Snufkin.
I was besotted with the handsome philosophical nomad and his zen demeanour, my little heart fluttering whenever a breeze ruffled his cartoon hair.
Over two decades later, Snufkin’s appeal hasn’t waned. I know, because I’m a mother to Saga, a seven-year-old who’s similarly smitten with his character. Saga was six when she looked at me shyly from underneath her hair, trying desperately not to break into an embarrassed smile. ‘I love him,’ she said with conviction. Her words had a familiar weight, but Saga’s infatuation went a bit further than mine did, as she went on to draw his portrait, complete with flute, something I’d never even considered doing.
When, as a little girl, I found out that I wasn’t the only one who liked him, that to crush on Snufkin was actually a common experience, I was devastated! I felt the same devastation when I discovered I wasn’t the only one who fancied Atreyu from The Neverending Story and Madmartigan from Willow.
Now, as a grown adult woman, Snufkin is no longer my favourite character. His rank has been usurped by two characters in equal proportion: Snufkin’s sister Little My (a character I loathed as a child but can now wholly relate to) and the Groke, whom I also, in ways, relate to. Saga remains devoted to Snufkin, though it looks like he might soon be demoted by the more mysterious Hattifatteners.
Out of curiosity, I looked on Reddit to see what people said about Snufkin’s appeal. On a thread called ‘Why does everyone have a crush on Snufkin?’ the commenter Bunnything wrote: ‘He’s chill and a good listener and generally has a mature understanding of who he is and what he wants.’ Moneymilk69 simply wrote: ‘Oh, to be in Moominvalley.’
I suspect most of us, whether we once fancied Snufkin or not, have thought the same.
Autumn and its gales may be here (rejoice!), but I’m sharing this post regardless. I started writing about mosquitoes in September, but glanced away from the page, and October blew in. You know how it is, I’m sure.
A few years ago, I was celebrating Midsummer with family in Sweden. The weather was impeccable, the midsommarstång inspiring to behold, and the mosquitoes, for whatever reason (no repellent involved – I’d forgotten it), keeping a wide berth.
Well, keeping a wide berth from me. I was the only one not being savaged by summer’s least welcome players. My partner at the time – a man of Icelandic stock – was plagued worse than everyone and carries the scars to prove it.
Intriguingly, it may have been an odour in my sweat that was keeping them at bay. This lucky break was an isolated incident, though, as typically I’m swarmed and left with archipelagos of bites which swell to memorable heights.
Legit mosquito sign in Finland. (Wikipedia.)
It’s a little awkward to admit that I typically try to “shoo” mosquitoes away. On the occasion I’ve been beset with rage by their assaults and have slapped them to death, I’ve felt horrible. It’s difficult to reason with yourself when your neurodivergent empathy extends to biting insects. I may have felt differently had I been in Lapland, where mosquito swarms are biblical. I read a comment on Reddit about a couple getting out of their car, only to immediately dart back inside after spotting a fast-approaching mosquito cloud.
It’s not unusual for animals to spend so much time trying to escape mosquitoes that eating becomes impossible, and they starve to death. They can also die from blood loss – a swarm can take as much as 300 ml of blood from a single caribou in a one day.
‘Smoking fire near the cows to keep off mosquitoes and other insects while the cows were milked.’ Eero Järnefelt (1891)
I’m familiar with summer in the Nordics for the most part, but I’ve only recently learned that there are 50-60 species of mosquitoes in the Nordic countries alone. (Imagine how flabbergasted I was to discover over 3,000 species of mosquitoes exist worldwide.) I was also late to learn that it’s only female mosquitoes that feed on blood, while males feed exclusively on nectar.
Any standing water – from a puddle to a gutter to a tyre track – can host a breeding ground and then a nursery for developing larvae. Iceland’s lack of standing water is one reason mosquitoes haven’t managed to get a foothold.
“…as I made my way round their boggy breeding grounds they rose up to meet me in dark, swirling clouds, insinuating themselves in my clothes, choking my mouth and smothering every inch of my skin in bites. As I saw my hands beginning to swell, I ruefully consoled myself with the thought that at least I would not contract malaria, because my tormenters belonged to the genus Aedes which, happily, are not carriers of the disease.”
Walter Marsden, Lapland: The World’s Wild Places
*Soon after reading this – bear in mind Lapland was published in 1975 – I found out that mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria are spreading across Europe due to the climate crisis.
Early explorers of the North described mosquitoes as ‘worse than the cold,’ and ‘the one serious drawback of the north.’ I’m surely not the only one who relishes the vision of fumbling English gentry being set upon by mosquitoes, which have also been called ‘a frightful curse,’ as well as, quite fabulously, ‘…devils…armed with a lancet and a blood-pump…’
“In the summertime in Iqaluit, the capital city of the Inuit-administered Canadian territory of Nunavut, swarms of insects hover above the inhabitants like cartoonish clouds of gloom as they go about their day-to-day lives.“
Kate Press, Briarpatch Magazine
Igah Hainnu Mosquito (2016) Muskox horn, seal whiskers and seal claws
Many indigenous peoples of the Arctic viewed mosquitoes as something sent to ‘test endurance.’ For the Sámi, enduring harassment from mosquitoes was a way of proving hardiness. Young herders and hunters were expected to tolerate swarms during migration and calving season without excessive complaint. Jonna Jinton, an artist living in northern Sweden, endures the biting plague with humour, as demonstrated in this tongue-in-cheek mosquito meditation video.
In the Swedish town of Övertorneå, the community hosts the World Championship in Mosquito Catching, where the winner is the person who catches the most mosquitoes in just fifteen minutes, earning a cash prize and being crowned world champion.
In Finland, one of the Nordic countries I’ve yet to visit, these micro-predators have their own signs, and there’s a history of ‘mosquito bravado.’ Especially among the likes of fishermen and loggers who work amidst clouds of mosquitoes.
“We were breathing hard now, sweating in the afternoon haze and mobbed by a few thousand mosquitos each. Every square inch of exposed skin was smeared with Vietnam-issue jungle juice, stuff that dissolves plastic buttons and burns like acid in your eyes. It kept the actual blood loss down to a level that didn’t threaten death, but that wasn’t the real problem. It was the psychological warfare, airborne water torture. You felt the constant patter, and knew that your back was crawling with living grey fur, hundreds of relentless snouts probing for a chink in your armour. A hand wiped down a sleeve would come away sticky, smeared with corpses, and you strained them through your teeth.”
Nick Jans, The Last Light Breaking: Living Among Alaska’s Inupiat Eskimos
In the 1970s, the Inuk community leader Abe Opic wrote an essay called What it means to Be an Eskimo, where he, justifiably, compared white people to mosquitoes: “There are only very few Eskimos but millions of whites, just like the mosquitos. It is something very special and wonderful to be an Eskimo – they are like snow geese. If an Eskimo forgets his language and Eskimo ways, he will be nothing but just another mosquito.”
Michael MassieThe Endurance Game, 2016, serpentinite, bone, birch, ebony and brass
The Inuit have several stories about how mosquitoes came to be. The one you’re about to read was told to the Greenlandic/Danish explorer Knud Rasmussmun by Inugpasugjuk, a member of the Nattilingmiut Inuit community.
There was once a village where the people were dying of starvation. At last there were only two women left alive, and they managed to exist by eating each other’s lice. When all the rest were dead, they left their village and tried to save their lives. They reached the dwellings of men, and told how they had kept themselves alive simply by eating lice. But no one in that village would believe what they said, thinking rather that they must have lived on the dead bodies of their neighbours. And thinking this to be the case, they killed the two women. They killed them and cut them open to see what was inside them; and lo, not a single scrap of human flesh was there in the stomachs; they were full of lice. But now all the lice suddenly came to life, and this time they had wings, and flew out of the bellies of the dead women and darkened the sky. Thus mosquitoes first came.
If you do head to the far North, where the waters lie still and light lingers long into the night, wear long-sleeved shirts (doubling up is advised), socks, and trousers made from dense material. Wear a head net if you have access to one and remember that repellent loses its effectiveness when you begin to sweat. If you think you can escape them by going a bit further North, I should warn you that these blighters are now appearing in places where it was once too cold for them, which is, to put it lightly, worrying as fuck. We all know the North is warming, but the migration of mosquitoes makes it ever more painfully real.
I don’t want to abandon this post without attempting to lighten the mood (for you and me), so if you’re interested in seeing what it’s like to sit in a Finnish forest during summer, this gentleman can show you.
It’s just over a year since I first visited Skógar Museum in Iceland, and I’ve been thinking about one of my favourite artefacts (out of the fifteen thousand residing there) – a toy ‘horse’ made from a sheep’s jawbone by the museum’s founder, Þórður Tómasson. There’s probably not much to know about the ‘horse’; however, I’m one of those highly annoying people who feed on minute, possibly inconsequential details about things I get attached to.
In her fantastic (although sometimes challenging to get along with) book The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: Travels Among the Collections of Iceland, A. Kendra Greene writes lyrically about ‘Iceland’s biggest museum outside of Reykjavik,’ calling it ‘…a museum of old rituals, of daily chores, of things to do and things undone. This is a museum of kinship, of who we are by way of who’ve we’ve been.’
Something I appreciate about the museum, and which Greene highlighted, is that it’s ‘without sequence…you can start anywhere.’ I recall my first trip and can grin to myself, right now, as I curl over my laptop, at the memory of flitting around, bedazzled and delighted by all the curious things and stuff left behind by Icelanders of another time.
Greene writes about meeting the then 95-year-old Tómasson, but apparently, ‘the language yawned‘ between them, and there was little to say, which I found a bit sad. I was strangely affected to learn of the passing of a man I’d never met and whose museum I visited first the first time two years after his death (he died in 2022 at the age of 100). I would have loved to have met him, even just to shake his hand and say ‘I’m not often happy, but what you have built here has made me very, very happy, especially the jawbone horse.’
Thus far, 2024 has been disorientating, exhausting, painful, maddening and swift. So swift. Too swift. Since doing my initial ADHD assessment over a year ago, I’ve been struggling to come to grips with the reality that I’ve been living with this condition my entire life, and it’s only just coming to light as I hurtle towards my 40s. I’ve also been grieving everything that ‘could have been.’ But I’ll write more about this on my other blog awyrdofherown.blog when possible.
Around midnight last night, too tired to read, I flickered around on Pinterest, looking for… I’m not even sure what. At some point, I landed on this knitted cape, leading me toLittle Scandinavian, where I ended up on a post about The Scandinavian School in London, which looked like everything I would want for my daughter in a school, but whose gigantic fees were painful to read. It’s ridiculous, laughable even, that I let the fees of a school in a city where I don’t even live upset me.
I should have gone to bed then but didn’t. My mood was wounded. So I decided to scout out an image for the cover of my next book and ended up on The Public Domain Review – a treasury for the insatiably curious creative – which I combed through for Nordic bounty.
While I furiously bookmarked articles and added, to my already gridlocked desktop, old photographs of Norwegian fjords and Icelandic fishermen, I thought about producing an art appreciation post of some of the stuff I unearthed.
For the longest time, ‘art appreciation posts’ and ‘I-saw-these-things-and-thought-you-might-like-them-too’ posts were the lifeblood of my blogs. But then I gradually stopped making them, and I’ve missedmaking them, and am now on a mission to eradicate the idea from my head that making them ‘is not a good use of my time.’
The first thing to catch my attention on The Public Domain Review was this striking, slightly sinister portrait of French geographer, glaciologist, and photographer Charles Rabot. This picture led me to a stupendously readable essay about Rabot by Erica X Eisen (whose other work I’m going to consume with gusto). Rabot had a ‘particular affinity for Norwegian culture…’ and his awe of ‘boral landscapes’ and ‘nostalgic yearning’ for the north is something I strongly identify with:
‘They are so beautiful, so magnificent, those deathly solitudes, so strange in their fleeting finery of brilliant colors, that they always leave one with a burning desire to see them again.’ – Charles Rabot
Eisen’s writing is astute and memorable – the following passage in particular ‘If there are any people to be seen in these snow-pied expanses, they are tiny afterthoughts so overwhelmed by the whiteness around them that any individuating features are obliterated completely — to the extent that these figures seem less like the protagonists of the shots and more like another accidental void bitten into the negative by the frost.’
The first person to climb Kebnekaise, Sweden’s highest mountain, in 1883, Rabot was also friends with the most swoon-worthy of Norwegian explorers, Fridtjof Nansen who’ll be much more thoroughly swooned over in another post where I’ll look at the bizarre but beguiling topic of fancying long-dead polar explorers.
When I searched Iceland on The Public Domain Review, ‘ volcano chaser and pioneer of volcanic photography,’ Tempest Anderson showed up with one of the most gloriously surreal photographs I’ve ever seen.
Very much intrigued by the name Tempest, I was convinced there’d be a riveting origin story, so was a bit put out to find it was simply inspired by a prominent West Yorkshire family.
Yet there’s no doubt the man led a life not dissimilar to a windstorm—his list of occupations and accomplishments is…extensive. York-born and bred Anderson was a leading eye surgeon as well as a photographer, an inventor of photography equipment, a consulting physician to a lunatic asylum, a prison medical officer, a Sheriff of York… the list ploughs on. At 43, unmarried and restless, Anderson decided he’d use his spare time to study volcanology and chase volcanic eruptions. The photographs he shot in Iceland were taken using one of the earliest panoramic cameras, which, unsurprisingly, Anderson had developed himself.
I’ll keep coming back to look at these lantern slides depicting Norway from the early 20th century, and I know each time I do, they’ll thrill me all over again. By the way, for full disclosure, I had to Google what a lantern slide is.
Lantern slides are positive, transparent photographs made on glass and viewed with the aid of a “magic lantern,” the predecessor of the slide projector. Lantern slide plates were commercially manufactured by sensitizing a sheet of glass with a silver gelatin emulsion. The plate was then exposed to a negative and processed, resulting in a positive, transparent image with exceptional detail and a rich tonal range. – Constance McCabe (National Gallery of Art.)
Produced by British photographers Samuel J. Beckett and P. Heywood Hadfield in my favourite part of Norway – Sogn og Fjordane (now known as Vestland) – these bold, crazily vivid lantern slides are held at the county archives in the fjord village of Leikanger, somewhere I’m going to absolutely seek out when I’m next over by way of the Sognefjord. Right now though, I’d very much like to know what the woman on the steps was thinking when this picture was made. Also, image 4 – haunted to my core.
Hadfield was a surgeon on a ship cruising the Norwegian fjords and an amateur photographer in his free time. Little is known about Beckett, but copies of books by both men (The Fjords and Folk of Norway by Beckett and Fjords of Norway A Cruise On The SS Ophir by Heywood) are available on Abebooks and eBay and are very kindly priced for books printed well over a hundred years ago.
More Recommended Reading From The Public Domain Review
Northern Fever 