Kingdom of Frost. Bjørn Vassnes
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and poles on the snow. And sunbeams coming at you from every angle, reflected by the snow crystals. Never mind that I hadn’t heard of sunscreen and my face ended up covered in sun eczema: that was just part of the deal. No encounter with nature I have experienced since has lived up to Finnmarksvidda in all its winter glory. That said, I haven’t skied across Greenland or Antarctica, and have resigned myself to the fact that I never will.
So my relationship to the cryosphere is largely positive, meaning that in global terms, I form part of a small minority, along with those of my fellow Norwegians who will gladly pay 70,000 Norwegian kroner (about US$8,000) for the privilege of crossing the Greenland ice on a camping trip.
Given my positive winter experiences, it was odd for me to read fairy tales and stories that described it as terrifying and dangerous, a hotbed of evil, like those of Hans Christian Andersen and C. S. Lewis. In Andersen, the wicked Snow Queen steals children and takes them with her up to her realm of frost in the north, where she travels around by reindeer, just like my neighbors the Sami reindeer herders. In the fairy tale, the boy, Kay, is kidnapped by the wicked queen and taken back to her cold palace in the north, and his friend Gerda goes after them to set him free. And in the Narnia books by Lewis, the White Witch casts a spell on Narnia, throwing it into an endless winter, in which Christmas never comes to light up a cold and dreary existence. These kinds of characters and motifs are familiar to children today through Disney films such as Frozen. It is clear that such stories are written in countries where people have rarely had the opportunity to experience the positive sides of winter and know only of its troublesome aspects: like snow-blocked roads and people breaking arms or legs after slipping on the ice.
The frozen world is also a popular backdrop that thriller writers from Agatha Christie to Jo Nesbø have used to sinister effect. Snow provides a setting for the most ghastly crimes and is often the murderers’ accomplice, hiding their tracks when it settles on the ground like a pure, innocent carpet. Snow, ice, and frost also serve as neat metaphors for cold-blooded acts.
Yet it seems that people have a different relationship to snow and frost in Russia, which has proper winters, just as cold as those on Finnmarksvidda, and which has, moreover, been saved by winter twice in its history: first from Napoleon and later from Hitler. Both saw thousands of their soldiers freeze to death on the merciless Russian steppes. It’s hardly surprising that the Russians’ Grandfather Frost was the one who brought children presents, along with his beautiful grandchild, the snow maiden Snegurochka.
Some believe Hans Christian Andersen drew inspiration for the Snow Queen from the Norwegian goddess Skadi, who was actually a Jotun, but married into the family of the Aesir gods when she wedded the sea god Njord. Skadi was happiest in the cold mountains—she was, after all, the goddess of skiers—and so her marriage to the sea god fared badly. But this relationship reflects a Norse understanding of how the world originated from the encounter between cold (Niflheim, the primordial land of darkness and cold) and heat (Muspellsheim, a sea of frothing flames). Between them lay a vast, bottomless abyss, the Ginnungagap. It was here, in the meeting between fire and ice, that everything began; and it was here, too, that the world got a fresh start after Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods. But frost, Niflheim, and its children the Jotuns became the personification of evil, even though the myth acknowledges that the world wouldn’t have existed without them.
The roots of the evil that fairy-tale tellers and crime writers associate with the Snow Queen’s realm probably lie far back in the northern European myths of the migration period. The old Norse sagas of gods and heroes tell how the Aesir, the good guys, had to battle against the evil Jotuns—who, incidentally, weren’t so evil that the Aesir didn’t occasionally mate and have children with them. The fact that the Jotuns and their female counterparts, known as gygrene in Norwegian, came from the Kingdom of Frost is clear from their names, which originated as personifications of the frozen world.
We have Snow the Old (Snær or Snjó in Norse), who is the son of Jokul (glacier) and father to a son, Thorre (black frost), and daughters Fonn (bank of snow), Mjoll (a flurry of fine snow), and Driva (snowdrift). Perhaps all these “children” were originally supposed to be seen as different aspects of Snow, but in the myths, they took on separate roles, only fragments of which are known to us, unfortunately. In some of these, Snow the Old is the king of “Finland”—in this context, the term for northern Scandinavia, about which people knew little other than that it was cold there, with masses of snow. And that other peoples lived there—Finns, Sami, and Kvens—although nobody was quite sure who was who.
As I said, these stories now exist only in fragmentary form, so for a more coherent portrayal of how people in Norse times saw the origin of all things, we must turn to a more modern interpreter of myth, author Tor Åge Bringsværd:
In the beginning there was Cold and Heat. On one side, Niflheim, with frost and fog. On the other, Muspellsheim, a sea of frothing flames. Between them was nothing. Just a great, bottomless abyss: Ginnungagap. Here, in this vast emptiness—midway between light and dark—all life would come into being. In the meeting between ice and fire . . . the snow began slowly to melt, and, formed by Cold but wakened to life by Heat, a wondrous being emerged—an enormous troll. His name was Ymir. No greater giant has ever lived.12
Out of the melting ice grew something else as well: the cow Audhumla. Ymir got milk from her, and when Audhumla licked the salty, frozen stones around her, a new wonder of creation came about:
The cow suddenly licked some long hair from one of the stones! The next day, a head and face came forth from this stone! And on the third day, the cow eventually managed to lick the whole body free. . . . It was a man. He was tall and handsome. He was called Buri and from him all the gods are descended, those we call Aesir.13
Ymir fathered some children all by himself, from his own sweat, and these were the origin of the “clan of the frost trolls,” who were known as Jotuns. The relationship between Aesirs and Jotuns was part conflict, part coexistence—the way it often is between heat and cold. In the end, though, the Aesirs had a showdown with the Jotuns and killed Ymir:
The Aesirs drag the dead Ymir out into the middle of Ginnungagap—the huge vacuum. They place him like a lid over the abyss. Here, they create the world—out of the giant’s corpse. His blood becomes the sea; his flesh, the land. His bones become mountains and cliffs. His teeth and the crushed splinters of his bones become rocks and scree. His hair becomes trees and grass. His brain the gods hurl high up into the air. Thus the clouds come into being. And the sky? It is the skull itself . . . set like a vault, a dome, above all creation. After that, the gods trapped sparks from the heat of Muspellsheim and fastened them to the heavens. There they hang to this day and sparkle.14
And so the world and its creatures were born from the conflict between heat and cold. Perhaps this was a myth that came naturally to those who lived where it was written down, in Iceland, a land of both ice and fire. However, it isn’t so far from the newer stories modern science has given us: chunks of ice containing organic molecules strike a blazing hot Earth, causing life to come into being.
In one respect, however, Finnmarksvidda differed from the White Witch’s eternal winter: winter always ended. The snow melted each spring, and even though it might last until May, it vanished quickly once the thaw had set in. The big event in spring was when the ice broke up on the great river, the Kautokeinoelva, whose name changes to the Altaelva farther downstream. Mighty forces came into play then, when the ice shattered and huge ice floes were hurled around, often far inland. Fortunately, it was safe to watch from up on the bridge, which was built to bear the brunt of it. The spring thaw was far from silent, and this, too, could make you feel kinship with Nansen, who wrote the following description of the havoc caused by pack ice in the Arctic Ocean (something his polar research vessel, the Fram, was fortunately built to withstand):
First you hear a sound like the thundering rumbling of an earthquake far away on the great waste; then you hear it in several places, always coming nearer and nearer. The silent ice world re-echoes with thunders; nature’s giants are awakening to the battle. The ice cracks on every side of you, and begins to pile itself up; and all of a sudden you too find yourself in the midst of the struggle. There are howlings and thunderings round you; you feel the ice trembling, and hear