Scrolls: Vikings or Peace Brokers? by Christine Hemp

 

If I hold up a toothbrush next to a pencil, a fire hydrant to a tennis shoe – or a Viking ship to a musical instrument, I am forced to see each of those disparate things with a new eye. Yesterday at the Viking Museum in Oslo we marveled at the ships dating back to 850 A.D., their hulls swelling with elegant lines, their scrolled mastheads writhing like serpents.  Discovered near Oslo at the turn of the last century, the boats turned out to be burial sites. Like Egyptian pharaohs, Viking kings were interred with their riches, both practical and decorative –  gold, jewelry, sleds, horses, and even their slaves. Each king was buried in the vessel which had ferried him far into unknown waters.

While we admired the lean, fair ships and the contents of the burial caches, my teenage nephew Håkon told me about the Vikings’ vision of the Afterlife: “They believed that heaven included a big feast in a hall with lots of drinking, a massive amount of food,” he said. “Then, afterwards—after the feast— they’d slaughter all their friends. Those who survived would get up and do it all over again the next day. This was their idea of Paradise, unending feasting and killing. That’s what waited for them on the other side.”

I imagined the Vikings, complete with helmets and armor, celebrating the carnage – both the meat they ate and the men they’d killed.  Håkon went on to say, however, that only the Vikings who had died in battle were meant to enjoy such heavenly pleasures. (No mention of what the women had to look forward to.) Apparently it was shameful for a warrior to expire in bed—of illness or even quietly at sleep. No wonder they fought with such enthusiasm in real life!

“It’s – how do you say it in English?—a paradox,” Håkon went on, “that Norway claims these bloodthirsty Vikings as our national emblem, when we as a country are peaceful people. I think there is something perverse about celebrating the Vikings as our heroes.”   I told him that the U.S. –and most of the world, really—perceives Norway as the peace-brokers of the planet.  It is indeed a paradox that such a country has its origins in rape and pillage. One placard said that the Viking warriors often claimed whole towns and slaughtered monasteries as well as women and children.

To hold up the contemporary Norwegian next to the marauding Viking is like –yes—comparing apples to oranges. Today each Norwegian is cared for physically and economically by the state (Norway’s state-owned oil supplies has rendered it one of the world’s richest nations) and the people are particularly mindful of preserving the land and resources for future generations. There’s even a Seed Vault tucked away in the northern mountains near  Longyearbyen.  It’s rather difficult to see a marauding Viking in the intelligent, fit, and mindful Norwegian of today. Holding up one beside the other, however, reveals not only the contrast, but something else as well.

Today my husband Ole, a bowmaker, and I had lunch with his friend and colleague Jacob, a violin-maker in Oslo. We discussed the current news, the trial of the man who gunned down over a hundred teenagers at a Norwegian youth camp not quite a year ago, killing 69 and injuring over 100. The man had also ignited a car bomb outside government offices, killing eight people and injuring over 200.  An unspeakable tragedy, it has also been a terrible stain on the country’s self-image. Shortly after the bloodbath, when it was clear that a Norwegian and not an outsider had committed the carnage, the country could barely accept it. The Prime Minister said it had turned a “paradise into hell.”

Sometimes we cannot reconcile such brutal contradictions, especially in a society that prides itself in being “civilized.”  But by holding both the peace and pandemonium in the palm of our hand, we can actually come closer to accepting the incongruities in our own lives, each with its ragged edges. And maybe for Norway –to hold that terrible truth up to the light – it (and we) can appreciate even more the incredible bounty and beauty and concord this country has carved – like a maker shaping his violin out of a felled tree. Not either/or but both, and…

For each of us is both the elegant violin scroll as well as that ship’s serpent masthead – going for the melody as well as the mayhem. When we can accept this, perhaps we can praise more loudly, love more deeply, and be more attentive to the moving tides that swell in all of us.

 

 

About Christine Hemp

Poet and writer Christine Hemp has aired her poems and essays on NPR’s Morning Edition; she has sent a poem of hers into space on a NASA mission to monitor the birth of stars; and her essays have appeared in such publications as the Iowa Review, Yale Anglers Journal, and the Boston Globe. Her awards include Harvard Extension School’s Conway Award for Teaching Writing, a Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship for Literature, and an Iowa Review Award. Her poetry collection, That Fall, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2011. Hemp teaches at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
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