Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

The question is, therefore, particularly when one bears in mind the formidable capacity which stories have for forming an individual, whether the most important person in Jonas Wergeland’s life was not, in fact, his mother and whether, by admitting this, I am also shifting the focus of my account. Because most heroic tales can awaken forces which until then have lain fettered inside a person; they can unleash a spontaneous urge to emulate the hero’s deeds — as, for example, when Daniel, tried to imitate the Viking king Olav Tryggvason by walking along the oars while Jonas was rowing, and very near drowned. The great ideal, though, was Einar Tambarskjelve, at least for Jonas who liked archery and who, even that early on, may have been aiming too high. For once, his mother had actually matched the right words with the right person, all the way from Einar’s answer to King Olaf Tryggvason’s question as to what had cracked so loud: ‘Norway, from your hand, lord king,’ and the part immediately after this, when he is handed the king’s weapon: ‘Too weak, too weak the king’s sword is,’ to the words he speaks just before he dies: ‘Dark it is in the king’s moot hall.’ The boys’ blood used to run cold at the savagery of their mother’s stories; folk swearing that they would heap body on body before they would surrender, teeth jangling on ice as men clove open one another’s skulls, foreign weaklings praying to God to be spared from the wrath of the Norsemen. So it was thanks to many years spent in the company of the figures in his mother’s more or less unlikely stories that Jonas Wergeland not only vowed to go to Miklagard, otherwise known as Istanbul, but was also imbued with a latent impulse to become a conqueror, expand boundaries and possibly also a taste for a certain belligerent lack of restraint, like the character in the Icelandic saga who kills a thrall simply ‘because he was there’. When you get right down to it, it would not be altogether wrong to say that it was Jonas Wergeland’s mother who turned him into a potential murderer.

The stories which their mother embroidered upon for the boys had been told to her by her father, the only difference being that Oscar Wergeland had read from the sagas, both from Snorre Sturlason’s tales and from the Icelandic family sagas, so he had passed far more accurate versions of the tales to little Åse and Lauritz — the latter conscientiously followed up this upbringing, of course, by becoming the captain on a succession of DC planes in the SAS fleet, all named after Viking heroes. And Oscar did not just read them stories, he also told them stories from his own life that, in their turn, had given him his insatiable interest in the sagas and the Viking age in general.

In his youth, Jonas’s maternal grandfather had from time to time visited an uncle who had a farm down near Onsøy. On one such occasion, when he was helping prepare the ground for the building of a new house, they came upon the remains of a ship, along with various artefacts. While it could not match the greatest treasure trove found in Norway: gold weighing a total of five and a half pounds, it still fired the imagination; there had been one sword hilt in particular which his grandfather had been much taken with — years later he was still able to sketch it on a piece of paper for his children.

Their mother had to tell this story for Daniel and Jonas time and time again; for all I know she may well have thrown in a couple of elements from Oehlenschläger’s poem about the Golden Horns found in Denmark. Jonas could just picture it: you go out to the field one day to plough or lift potatoes and suddenly you’re unearthing the history of Norway. Jonas never really got that out of his head: it could even be that he also applied it to other areas of his life. After all, since large amounts of gold had been buried during periods of unrest in Viking times, and since most of it still lay hidden in the ground, with a little luck at any time you might stumble on something valuable. Jonas had fantasies of finding treasures of undreamed-of worth if he so much as rolled away a stone in the forest. He also knew how these things would look: exactly like the bowl-shaped dragon brooch Aunt Laura had given his mother, with its pattern of intertwining lines.

As I say, it was his mother, or his mother’s stories that determined where many of the family’s trips took them — even his father and Rakel, who were really both living in worlds of their own, meekly went along with her choices. Daniel and Jonas called these jaunts Viking raids, and that’s possibly quite true: these trips were a combination of holiday and business, colonization and fierce combat — the boys taking care of the latter. In this way the family had covered the length and breadth of southern Norway, seen everything from rock engravings and cairns to ancient roadways and battlefields, from the tumulus at Haug by the shores of Karmsundet just north of Hafrsfjord, to Kaupang in Vestfold, from Raknehaugen Barrow in Ullensaker to the rune stones at Vang Church in Valdres. On these trips they immersed themselves so deeply in the world of the sagas that on one occasion, after they had pretty much cleaned out a roadside hotdog stall, Daniel had burped contentedly and said, ‘The King has fed us well.’

This interest in the Vikings went so far that their mother even took the boys down to the Akers Mek shipyard at Pipervika one day late in the autumn of 1966 to see the oil rig Ocean Viking , which was nearing completion. ‘These will be the new Viking ships,’ she said reverently, having gazed long in wonder at this giant.

And now, on a day in May of that same year — a month full of long holiday weekends — they were on the way to Stiklestad, scene of the famed battle in which King Olaf II was slain. Jonas was in a bad mood. He had been a bit tetchy — spoiling for a fight, you might say — for some time, mourning as he was for his lost love, for Margrete’s treacherous rejection of him and ditto departure from the country. They stopped for the night at Røros, also in its way a historic monument, albeit of more recent date than the Viking remains. The old mining town had an unreal beauty about it, as it lay there bathed in the copper light on the plateau, so unique that it would come as no surprise to anyone that it would soon be added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List, right up there alongside the Great Pyramid of Cheops and the Great Wall of China.

Each time the family arrived at a new place they followed the same two-fold ritual. The first thing they did, therefore, was not to visit the slagheaps or the old mines at Bergstaden but to march straight to the town ironmonger in a body, to check that they stocked G-MAN saws and possibly ask whether they had remembered to place a new order with the wholesaler if they had run out. In other words, half an hour after their bags had been lugged into the guest house, the Hansen family were to be found in the Bergmannsgata premises of M. Engzelius and Son, one of Røros’s time-honoured establishments, asking stern-faced and as with one voice almost, to see their selection of saws, and at least four members of the family breathed a sigh of relief when a baffled sales assistant showed them the wall on which the G-MAN saws were displayed exactly as they should be, because they knew that their mother showed no mercy if anything was missing — particularly if it was the new G-Mini saw, the very flagship of the Grorud Ironmonger’s range, called after the Gemini space rocket and equipped most ingeniously with two different blades, so that it could be used either for meat or logs, an innovation which was nothing short of world-shattering. Entire holidays could be ruined by ironmongers with negligent buyers, or shopkeepers who simply did not stock ‘the world’s best saw’. Sometimes their mother would go quite berserk: ‘Haven’t you heard about the drive to sell Norwegian-made products!’ she would shout, shaking her fists at a terrified shop assistant.