It’s been a few months since I was in Cave Vatnshellir on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula in Iceland looking at the bones of a fox who died there hundreds of years ago. However, I’ll find that, quite often, I’ll randomly think about this fox which found itself in the Underworld, or, as it’s called in IcelandicUndirheimarnir, before its time.
I imagine what it would have been like for this animal – who weighed less than the carry-on bag I took to Iceland – not to be able to find a way out. I imagine it treading carefully through the darkness, nosing wet lava rock, hearing its own heart thump. I think about the time it would have taken for it to die in a darkness so complete it’s impossible to comprehend unless you’ve been down to where the daylight can’t reach.
Yes, the lava formations in the cave were riveting to see, and yes, the dark was exhilaratingly absolute when the flashlights went out, but the moment we saw the bones, I was all about the fox and I wanted what our guide couldn’t possibly give me – its life story.
I want to think others have walked away from Cave Vatnshellir with the fox on their mind, that I’m not the only one preoccupied with the life and death of this Northern nomad.
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
It was still dark at nine-thirty the other morning in Reykjavik (it would be well after ten before the sun shimmied up to provide the city with its scanty ration of daylight) when I bumbled outside to capture the looming Jólakötturinn (the Yule Cat) sculpture in all its ominous glory.
Every November since 2018, a five-metre-tall iron sculpture, decked out with 6,500 LED lights, depicting Gryla’s child eating floofy familiar (some attribute the inspiration for its ‘floofiness’ from the Norwegian Forest Cat) who eats children who don’t get new clothes for Jól has materialised in the centre of Reykjavik to herald in the season the traditional Icelandic way – with foreboding.
The sculpture cost the city a ‘sensible’ 4.4 million ISK and was fabricated by Austrian company MK Illumination. A garden centre owns it, and they lease it out each year to the city for a ‘steal’ at just over 3 million ISK.
Reykjavik’s Jól décor tends to be conventional, with the city reusing lights and garlands yearly. (Though I favour the cosy understatedness over most other cities I’ve seen ‘glowed up’ for Yuletide.) So, the sculpture’s arrival in 2018 was quite the talking point.
While the Yule Cat gathered much adoration (it was welcomed with a speech and a children’s choir), there was some backlash, too. One critic, Sanna Magdalena Mörtudóttir of the Socialists party, was critical of the city’s priorities and was furious the struggle of the city’s low-income families wasn’t brought up during the opening speech.
While cats have held a prominent role in Nordic society since the Viking Age, it’s unknown how long the Yule Cat has been around. Though it’s theorised he’s been prowling since the Dark Ages. We do know that he’s stalked written records since the 19th Century.
As Kathleen Hearons writes in Head Magazine, ‘Cats were the travelling companion of choice for Vikings – although not for sentimental reasons, but rather to kill mice and be skinned for their fur. Consequently, feline populations grew throughout the Nordic countries when the Vikings settled there. To this day, Reykjavik is “culturally a cat city,” according to Reykjavik Excursions. As of August 2022, there was a cat-to-human ratio of 1-to-10…‘
In bygone times, the threat of the Yule Cat would frighten children (and, without doubt, some adults) into finishing processing the autumn wool before Jól. By the Middle Ages, the export of wool from Iceland played a valuable role in the economy, and having a prosperous wool production was imperative.
Though this fear-mongering technique ensured laziness was all but eradicated in the last part of the year, it was also a superb encourager of family bonding, as everyone in the family had a role to play and would gather around the fire in the evenings to prepare yarn and knit.
In an article for the Reykjavik Grapevine, Ethnologist Árni Björnsson says, ‘After 1600, there are a lot of changes in Icelandic society. Folklore often mirrors what’s happening in society. So, it makes sense that Grýla and the yuletide lads are grimmer during this difficult time for Icelanders. In 1602, the Danes banned Iceland from trading with countries other than Denmark, and this was tough because Iceland relied on many imported goods. To make matters worse, the colder period in Iceland also sets in around 1600.
So, those things we call “jólavættir,” or supernatural beings of Christmas—including the yuletide lads, their ogress mother Grýla, and the Christmas cat—those elements were probably incorporated into the Christmas tradition to keep kids in line. Everyone was supposed to work hard to do all the things that had to be done before Christmas, and some people were lazy, you see. So it was said that if you weren’t diligent at working, the Christmas cat would come for you.’
In 1746, parents were banned by the King of Denmark from tormenting their children with stories of the Yule Cat, Gryla and her thirteen trouble-making lads as youngsters were becoming too afraid to leave their houses.
In 1932, a book was published by the poet Jóhannes úr Kötlum called Jólin koma (Christmas is Coming), and it featured a poem called Jólakötturinn which brings to life – though in the most family-friendly way – the goings about of the malicious moggy. An English translation was published in 2015 for the Icelandophiles out there.
You all know the Yule Cat
And that cat was huge indeed.
People didn’t know where he came from
Or where he went.
– The first stanza from Jólakötturinn
Following the publication of Jólin koma, the Yule Cat was, in the words of Áki Guðni Karlsson, writing for Icelandicfolklore.is ‘firmly established as part of an “old Icelandic” pantheon of Christmas beings for generations of Icelanders.’
You’ve probably encountered Bjork’s dungeon synthy musical adaptation of Kötlum’s poem at some point, though I’ve only recently discovered she wasn’t the first person to put it to music. That honour lies with the late Icelandic singer Ingibjörg Þorbergs. There’s also an exquisite version created by Icelandic folk duo Ylja.
Like his mistress and her thirteen lads, the Yule Cat has long infiltrated Icelandic Christmas paraphernalia and even has his own chocolate bar, ‘Jólaköttur’ (the Christmas version of the famous chocolate bar Villiköttur), a delicious 50g beast of thick milk chocolate, caramel and biscuit all knobbled together with crisp rice.
The innovative chocolate company OmNom released a limited edition winter chocolate bar back in 2018 called Drunk Raisins + Coffee (which featured, among other things, green raisins infused with mandarin juice, cocoa beans from Tanzania, Icelandic milk and Austrian rum) in honour of the Yule Cat and in collaboration with the feral cat rescue organisation Villikettir.
On the OmNom website, Hanna Eiríksdóttir writes, ‘…stray and feral cats are neither evil nor frightening, and they definitely do not eat children. No one really knows how many cats in Iceland are feral or strays,they are thought to be in the thousands. In our minds, the Yule cat is the protector of these Icelandic stray and feral cats. The old folklore reminds us not to turn a blind eye to our little furry friends in need.’
I went back to the Yule Cat sculpture later on in the day. I saw togged-up kids catapulting themselves around in the straw pile surrounding the eternally pissed-looking puss, and now as I write this, I regret not sidling up to the parents and whispering to them, like the total weirdo I am, ‘So, do they think he eats harðfiskur now or…?’
Northern Fever 