Memories of Elsewhere: Krobo, by Tim Woods

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… 

By Tim Woods:

It didn’t take self-isolation to transport me back to Ghana; I’ve been visiting regularly in the seven years since I left. And more often than not, my memory dumps me on the scrubby slopes of Krobo.

At 345 metres, Krobo is far from the highest mountain in the country. Nor is it the most spectacular, a title belonging to the peaks further north in the Volta Region. There isn’t much in the way of wildlife to draw your gaze: the resident troop of baboons are the only mammals likely to be spotted, although the birds are, as throughout Ghana, spectacular. But one thing Krobo has in its favour is accessibility. In under two hours, you can escape the sweaty chaos of Accra and be out in the wild. Somewhere open. Somewhere green.

And escape I did, as often as possible during my two-year stay in the country. Along with the other Ghana Mountaineers, I spent every second Sunday hiking up the inselbergs south of the Volta River. Iogaga and Osoduku were more challenging, but Krobo was my first hike in the country and remained throughout my favourite. A short, steep scramble through sharp-bladed grass and over dry streambeds takes you onto the summit plateau, where you will find a giant metal cross, a bizarrely located family of terrapins and hazy views south towards the Shai Hills. Coffee too, if you remembered to bring some.

There are more obvious places for my absent mind to wander. England is one, being the country I called home for thirty years longer than I did Ghana. Yet despite the relative brevity of my time there, the country got under my skin with an urgency that hasn’t dulled with absence. Almost as soon as I left, I vowed to return. 

It’s not proven as easy as expected. Two children have complicated all travel plans, even those that only extend as far as the other side of Berlin. Then of course there’s the issue of climate change, that swiftly forgotten existential threat to our species that was demanding that we curb our habits long before some uppity virus turned up. I have long since felt a responsibility to tame my wanderlust, to fly far less often. Travelling to another continent just because I’d quite like to now seems an extraordinary indulgence. It will happen, because my principles aren’t as robust as I’d like. But I’m not yet sure when. 

If, when, I do go back, Ghana won’t be as good as it is in my memory. One advantage of exploring places through reminiscence is the chance to apply filters. From the comfort of my sofa, I can overlook Ghana’s traffic, dust and poverty; tune out the biting insects, the regular sickness, the power cuts. Even hiking virtually up Krobo, it’s easy to eradicate the dust in the throat, the cuts and scratches covering legs and hands, the perspiration stinging eyes. 

It will be different, too; places change when we’re not there. Accra will be shinier, busier, not quite how I left it. Will Krobo also have altered? There was talk of making proper paths up its slopes to attract more visitors, and of introducing a hiking fee to benefit the local community. Noble ideas, but they haven’t happened in my memory. Like many people’s favourite places, I want it to remain exactly as it was when I first encountered it.

But that’s the whole point of memory: to enjoy the good stuff while ignoring the different or uncomfortable or forgettable. Now, when thoughts of happier, freer times are more vital distractions than ever, or in better times when I simply fancy idling, I can relive those Sunday mornings out in the bush. Climbing with friends and catching up on our expat lives. Hoping to spot the baboons before they spot us and scarper. The crisp taste of fresh watermelon on the drive home, and the splash of chilled beer on a burning throat. Thankfully, Krobo will never be too far away for a quick visit. 

***

Tim is an editor on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Love In The Time of Britpop. You’ll find him on Twitter here.

Little Dyke Beach

Photo: Anne Wyman

By Joel Robert Ferguson:

First off, let's say that which can
go without saying, that the stony
beach is not the stretch it once was,
when my legs were brief from ground
to body and I held the mouth 
of a broken shell to my ear 
and heard nothing.

It's a short walk to the beach house
the one we’d always then turn
back at, ever crunching over the pebbles,
blue and pink, that outline the upper
reaches of the inter-tidal, before we return
to the town, the county hospital, where
what must happen will happen.

Prairie kid, born Winnipegger,
downplaying the duress of Confusion Corner,
your feet in the Atlantic, if
the muck of the Minas Basin
at low tide can be called ocean.

It can, if
the roofs and new asphalt
where the old folks used
to lay out the dulse with its snails
drying in the sun (to hell with toxins) 

for sale or snack,
if that dredged-forest could be called land. 

It can.

***

Joel Robert Ferguson is the author of the poetry collection The Lost Cafeteria (2020, Signature Editions). He grew up in the Nova Scotian village of Bible Hill and now divides his time between Winnipeg and Montreal, where he is finishing his Masters in English Literature at Concordia University.

Memories of Elsewhere: New Quay, by Charlotte Wührer

Painting by David Hughes Jones

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… 

By Charlotte Wührer: 

Elsewhere is a beach. Elsewhere is the beach on which I was buried alive up to the neck, given a tail of sand, a mermaid for a minute until the dog came.

Antonia’s fingers went deathly white after a swim, and back then we couldn’t imagine how miserable it might feel to be so cold while everyone else sweated. Ten years later, we’re sorry we didn’t take her seriously until the rest of her body turned blue.

One year, we squirmed into wetsuits, the old neoprene of some a little cracked, and went out in the kayaks to watch the late afternoon sun. A family of dolphins circled us as my kayak slowly but surely began to sink. The sea teemed with jellyfish.

Another year we drank gin from the bottle sitting on the pier, and it got messy. Perhaps it was that summer we also downed endless pints of ale brewed in whisky casks at a pub quiz before rolling all the way down the hill. From Dylan Thomas’s favourite watering hole into the sea. The bats and stars were more visible there than in any other place. We felt very small, and sobered by the dizziness of not knowing where was under water and where was the night sky.

By day we ate crab meat with lemon juice and black pepper from the shell on the porch bench overlooking the sea. Sometimes we wore straw hats. Sometimes we read books. Sometimes we played games. Sometimes we walked along the clifftops. A lot of the time, we were pretty sunburnt and pretty hungover. Late morning, someone would make the first cup of tea and we’d all get into each other’s beds.

Another year: recovered from the mess, we - the same constellation but with a few additions and a couple of gaping absences - let the seagulls circle the mackerel we’d gutted on the hot September tarmac before the house. Rivers of blood ran downhill past the porches of the other terraced houses, down the patchwork slope of the visitors’ car park, past the tourist knick-knack shop and Annie’s fruit and veg store, down the sand and past our barbecued fish and sandy burger baps, until it was reclaimed by the sea. (Do fish drink the water they swim in?)

The sea that comes after this beach can be seen and heard from the house, which belongs to Sophie’s parents. They were teenagers when they met here in the town, probably on the beach. Now they live both in Swansea and in this little house in New Quay, and I’ve been once a year almost every year since I turned eighteen.

If you know the town, the house stands in the middle of the second row of houses on the north side. It’s not hard to find on googlemaps. Find in street view the purple house with the stained glass porch door. The sash windows are old enough for the glass to have suddenly shattered one windy morning as we slept. The key is in a special place not many people would think to ever look. The house feels a little damp even at the height of the hottest summers.

No one wears shoes in the house or on the short walk down to the beach. City codes of acceptable dress are suspended. The dog wears a superman cape that is also a towel over her eyes. Sophie and I drove down once from Bristol, maybe last year, and it took three hours longer than it should have because there was a swan on one lane of the motorway. Police men wearing fluorescent warning vests stood around it scratching their heads. At the Swansea service station, Sophie’s parents pulled up in their car, handed over a large bag of still-warm welsh cakes, Sophie briefly held the family dog like a baby, and then we drove on belting Savage Garden, more excited to arrive than kids going on a family holiday.

***

Charlotte Wührer is a Berlin-based writer and translator from Newcastle-under-Lyme, England. Her writing appears in numerous online and print publications, including SAND Journal, Ellipsis Zine, and Daddy Magazine. She was shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Cambridge Short Story Prize, and is currently working on a flash fiction novella about place and desire.

David Hughes Jones paints mainly seascapes and landscapes around New Quay in Ceridigion in West Wales and the occasional shipwreck from the past. His subjects are inspired by many years of sailing and messing about in boats, and walking the coastal path. David Hughes Jones Art on Facebook.

Marseille, port city: sails and sunlight

By Anna Evans:

I am waiting to take the bus from Cassis to Marseille. Leaving behind the little streets of the town of Cassis and the cafes with their terraces, where artists came to paint the colourful fishing boats and its perfect bay; to sit by the lighthouse surrounded by waves. The rocks on the beach where I sat and watched the sun set across the rooftops of the town, to the lights of the harbour and the illuminated castle in the darkness. In the little square by the church I read in the warm shade of trees, with cats sunbathing, and the singing cicadas rising, while patterns of sunlight form on the page.

As I wait, I am thinking about travel and new places, of my first visit to the south of France and how it captured my imagination. The flickering colours of the train journey along the coast, where we stood for the whole journey immersed in the scenery passing by. There is always the sense of what lies around the next corner, the changing view that comes from moving on. The excitement of the journey to new, unknown places needs the sense of apprehension to make it more real. I fell for Marseille and for the feeling that travel brings, even then; for the feeling of being away.

The ride is breathtaking. The winding road ascends to the rocky plateau, crossing the Massif des Calanques. Across the rocks, the city stretches out white towards a blue and sparkling sea. From here I glimpse panoramas of the city, the harbour, and the Frioul islands. The descent is exhilarating; spectacular at the bottom of the hill lies Marseille by the water, recognizable by the silhouette of the Notre-Dame church, and a series of high-rise white tower blocks.

Marseille is a city with a certain reputation, a city apart. Perhaps it is for the lure of ports, and stories of voyages and arrivals, that I am drawn to it. A point of departure I return to constantly as an anchor. It is not for a feeling of belonging, of being at home, that I like it. Not for a sense of recognition but for its displacing effects.

Arriving in Marseille and stepping out into the sunlight from the train station, the sensation of heat, of warmth on my skin, surrounding me. Undeniable the feeling of arrival and scattered impressions of the city. If I close my eyes there it is again. Stepping out and feeling the heat as my first and abiding impression. From St Charles station you can stand and look down a hundred steps to a long street pulling you onwards and into the city.

I am interested in this idea of a return, of exploring the memories contained in a place, even if they are not definitive. Later I developed a captivation with the city and for years I imagined moving to Marseille, but I never did it. Something always held me back; this never became my city. The apprehension stronger than the desire to leave. Held back by the idea that there would be time, always time stretching ahead. Not expecting, not realizing that growing older would bring a sense of narrowing horizons, of enclosure, and that I would need to keep wandering inwardly; that settling was for me a myth.  

Then here are two selves, the one that returns, who looks back, and the one who embarked from a train one day stepping out into a feeling of intense heat. I could call myself a writer then. It didn’t matter so much whether I was one. There was always time, time ahead. 

Imagining a small balcony looking out to the street below, to where the street opens out and people gather as the sun begins to set. They draw up chairs to sit and talk, or to sit and look at nothing but the street itself. The sun in the afternoon, the day ending. 

I am careless, the thrill of being away sinks into my bones, as if I were fleeing something, as if I were running away. Drinking small, strong black coffee each morning and wandering the picturesque streets. I abandon myself to swimming in the sea, to the all-encompassing waves, warm, azure and enfolding. There is something intoxicating about being somewhere hot; having lived in cold places all my life, I can understand how a lack of heat could feel like a loss. The heat is alluring to me as the city is; it pervades everything, is inescapable and all-surrounding. 

I remember looking out towards the castle on the rock and out to sea. Walking the streets of the panier, of old Marseille. The buildings, white with shutters and balconies, the sloping, rundown streets and the intense blue of the sky where boats depart for Algiers, signifying another direction. The shape of the buildings, solid and definite next to the perfect clarity of the sky.

There is something about the blue of the sky that cannot be argued with, that gives it a certainty. 

Now I follow the Rue de Rome towards the old port. Everywhere the buildings with shutters, white and pastel, as if the sun has drained and turned everything a faded white. The harbour lined with boats, their sails blue and white; in lines they point upwards, their forms definite and leaving shadow. The reflections in the water are gentle ripples which turn them back to trees, they are branches bending gently with the movement of water. There is a big wheel circling slowly and up into the blue. I take photographs into the sun to see how they are drenched by light, as though the sun has pulled all the colours out and left only reflected lights. 

Looking down over the port from its vantage point, the basilica of Notre-Dame, again pure white in the heat of the sun. White buildings and shutters, the terracotta of their roofs and balconies. I climb the sloping streets that fan outwards and upwards from the harbour.

In the café near the old port, a young man sits outside a pavement café, gently strumming a ukulele.  He is relaxed, apart from everything, living in the moment. I wonder what his story is. The waitress minding the tables with ease reminds me of the waitress we admired on that first trip, for the art and grace with which she moved around the tables. 

In the morning light, the harbour bears traces of the football match that has taken place the evening before in the stadium across the city. The bars and cafes have spilled into morning as the smell of stale beer across pavements. The early morning brings the setting up of the market, the arrival of fishing boats to sell their catch; and the fisher men and women collide with the departure of stragglers in the cafes, holding on to the last part of night. 

A bus out to the city beach and at the back music playing loudly, the kind that saturates the atmosphere like the sunlight covering everything, transcendent and dreamy music. While the sun beats down outside, around us, we are bathed in music for a few moments, cinematic and ethereal. Trying to work out what song it is, somehow joyous and uplifting, it saturates our eyes in a timeless sound, we smile at each other; this is what we wanted.

Now I take the boat out to an island, passing the Chateau d’If, the legendary prison fortress. On the island, I walk paths across the rocky coves and inlets, pirate beaches. Where craggy rocks create places to climb, secret coves looking down to where the water beckons, the sheltered and secluded azure green of the water.

The boat back towards the city frames another view, the harbour as the jeweled centerpiece of the city, white and blue; sails and strong sunlight. I take a photo and it looks like a painting in oils from a time of ships and sunsets. Turquoise blue and burned terracotta orange like an antique map. 

As the city beckons me back again, to winding streets and afternoon shadow. The wheel turning towards the sun. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

Memories of Elsewhere: The White Arch by Paul Scraton

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… first up, our editor in chief Paul Scraton:

Above my desk, taped to the wall, are a series of photographs and postcards. There is an illustration of the Cow and Calf Rocks on Ilkley Moor, not far from my mother’s house. There are photographs from the Baltic coast, taken during the writing of Ghosts on the Shore. There is a picture of myself and my daughter Lotte, on the night train that was taking us from Paris to Berlin. And there is a small painting of a rugged coastline in Wales, waves breaking beneath a white arch and the faint outline of a rocky outcrop, swathed in clouds, in the distance. 

Like the books on my shelves, these postcards and pictures are triggers of memory. Of journeys taken and the places along the way. Some of them are places visited but once while others are more familiar, locations that have acted as stage sets for many moments at different times of our lives. They are places we return to physically and we return to in our imagination. We remember and, now more than ever, we look forward to when we will see them again.

The small painting of the Welsh coastline has at its heart Bwa Gwyn – the white arch of the Rhoscolyn headland. Since I was a child, the white arch has been a destination. It is not far, perhaps a forty-five minute walk from the house where my Uncle and Aunt live, depending on which route you take and how much time you spend exploring the coves and the beach along the way, or admiring the view from the coastguard lookout point from where, when the weather is right, it feels as if you can make out the walkers on the ridges of Snowdonia right across Anglesey on the Welsh mainland.

It’s a walk I’ve made so many times I cannot remember. But I can picture moments, still hear snippets of conversation; I can remember the first time I ever dared to walk the narrow path above the arch, the sea on either side of me as kayakers rocked and rolled in the swell, waiting their turn to pass beneath. This stretch of coastline, like all stretches of coastline, has its share of stories and legends, the mythology of Saints and the tragedies of the open water. They mingle with the personal stories, those we experienced and those we heard second hand, from family members and friends. The stories pile up on top of each other, adding texture to the place like the heather and gorse on either side of the worn footpath, soundtracked by the waves, the distinctive call of choughs by the cliff-edge and the whirring blades of a sea rescue helicopter. 

I look at the painting of the white arch above my desk, along with the postcards from Prague and Gdansk, the photographs of Rannoch Moor and the Baltic coast, and I think about what it is about certain places that means they remain with you even after you’ve left. It is, I think, about how they make you feel, from the people you meet or those who travel with you, the atmosphere of the cliff-top path, the wide city street or the narrow alleyway, and the stories you hear and the ones that you write for yourself. 

I look at the painting and I am walking again, out from the house and across the fields, around the headland and skirting the beach. Through the houses on the far side, the path rises up to the lookout point and from there I can see the mountains and the islands, the ferry leaving Holyhead and the route of our walk. Bwa Gwyn is not far away now. The path drops down and swings round. Past the place where we once saw the wild goats, clinging to the grassy slope. A little bit further and the white arch will appear before us. The sea is rough. The sea is calm. The white arch stands above it. The white arch is waiting. We’ll be there again. Soon.

***

Paul Scraton is the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) and the novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). His first book to be published in German (translation by Ulrike Kretschmer) is Am Rand, about a long walk around the edge of Berlin. It is out this month from Matthes & Seitz. 

The Grey Headlands, from Country Music by Will Burns

By Will Burns:

Green lizards sunned themselves
on the tennis court of the abandoned chalet
with its almost-French name.
Gatekeepers hid themselves in the dying grasses.
Like the ground, the butterflies were dust –
on this island the soil is suffering its own crisis.
The steep fields had once more offered up
their customary, well-protected crop.
Before the end we would beg for rain,
having long forgotten
the words for the relevant gods.

***

Country Music is the debut collection from the poet and friend of Elsewhere Will Burns, published in April by Offord Road Books. We are big fans of Will for how his work captures a sense of place and of memory, and for showing us a way of looking at the world, of noticing things, that informs our own explorations of place and spaces.

The collection is wonderful and a fine addition to any library of place writing. If you want to know more about Will and his work, read our Five Questions… interview or our review of the album Chalk Hill Blue, a collaboration with the musician Hannah Peel.

Ravens and Bones – Icelandic sagas and places

Photo: Kai Müller

Our books editor Marcel Krueger has a new book out this week – Iceland - A Literary Guide for Travellers is published by I.B. Taurus on the 19 March. In this expanded excerpt he writes of his fascination with the Icelandic sagas and how they influence place names in Iceland today

Islands are places apart where Europe is absent.
– W.H. Auden, Journey to Iceland

Writing about an island should be easy. After all, it is surrounded by the sea, neighbouring lands far away. The boundaries are set. The outlook can only ever be inwards, away from the tides. 

Nothing could be further away from the truth in the case of Iceland. This is an island of many identities, of constant flux, just like its unruly volcanic ground. It was the last place in Europe to be settled, but the first democracy; a backwater under foreign rule, its population almost eradicated by catastrophe and neglect; emerging as a progressive Nordic democracy after the two World Wars; and finally from being one of the poorest members of the European Economic Area to becoming a major global financial player, only to be brought crashing down again by greed and failing banks. Today, Iceland is once again reinventing itself as the one destination on everyone’s holiday bucket list. To say that Icelanders have developed a certain resilience and ingenuity over the centuries, and a very peculiar way to express it, would be an understatement. An island settled by explorers and raiders, the view of its people was never just inward – and it manifested itself in a rich oral and literary heritage, something that to this day links Icelanders past and present. 

My personal fascination with Iceland began, as for many others, with the Norse myths and the sagas, with stories about Odin and Loki, about Víking raids and the discovery of Vínland. Kevin Crossley-Holland says it best in the introduction to Norse Myths – Tales of Odin, Thor and Loki (2017):

When I think about the Vikings or talk about the Vikings my eyes brighten, my heart beats faster, and sometimes my hair stands on end. Energetic and practical and witty and daring and quarrelsome and passionate, always eager to go to the edge and see and find out more: that’s how Vikings were. Their tough and stubborn and often beautiful women managed self-sufficient farmsteads in Norway and Sweden and Denmark and Iceland and Greenland, and were at least as capable and outspoken as their men. And for around three centuries – from the beginning of the ninth to the end of the eleventh – many of their husbands and not a few of their sons and daughters sailed south and east and west in their elegant and superbly made clinker boats as mercenaries, traders, hit-and-run raiders, settlers and rulers. And of course they took their gods and beliefs and language with them.

This is, of course, an idealised view of the Víkings and their mythology; but as the country settled by them is as much shaped by storytelling as it is by tectonic activity, Norse lore always served me well as a beeline into both country and Icelandic literature over the years. After all, its mountains and rivers, shores and valleys have all been named by the settlers and writers recording the tales of the settlement. It is both the otherworldliness of the landscape and the outward-looking culture of Icelanders that has made me return to the island time and time again.

There is some literary evidence that Irish monks, the so-called Papar, arrived in Iceland before the Norsemen somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries; however no archaeological evidence has been found to this day. The real show began in the ninth century, when the first Norwegian travellers and explorers, arrived. Their names and those of the areas in which they made their homes during this so-called ‘Age of Settlement’ were recorded in a number of chronicles written down between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, like The Book of Icelanders (Íslendigabók), The Book of Settlements (Landnámabók) and The Book of Flatey Island (Flateyjarbók). As Robert Ferguson puts it in The Hammer and the Cross (2009):

The Book of the Settlements [Landnámabók] is a full and often dramatic account of the colonisation of Iceland. Based on a lost original from the early twelfth century it contains the names of over 3,000 people and 1,400 places. 

According to the Landnámabók, Iceland was discovered by a man named Naddodd, who was sailing from Norway to the Faroe Islands when he lost his way and came to the east coast of Iceland instead. Only observing it from the safety of his ship, Naddodd called the country Snowland (Snæland), The first proper settler however was Hrafna (‘Raven’) Flóki Vilgerðarson, named after the fact that he took ravens with him on board ship and released them periodically. When they didn’t return he knew they’d found food and land. Hrafna-Flóki settled for one winter at Barðaströnd in the southern Westfjords region. His journey and stay did not start out well however: his daughter drowned en route, and then his livestock starved to death during the harsh winter. The Landnámabók records how this led Flóki to give the country its name: 

The spring was an extremely cold one. Flóki climbed a certain high mountain, and north across the mountain range he could see a fjord full of drift ice. That’s why he called the country Iceland, and so it’s been called ever since.

After that hard winter however the whole island started to turn green, making Flóki realise that it was habitable, so he returned to Norway to spread the word about this new fertile island he had discovered – but kept the name. The first permanent settlers after Flóki were Norwegian chieftain Ingólfur Arnarson and his wife Hallveig Fróðadóttir, who arrived around AD 874. According to the Landnámabók, Ingólfur threw his two highseat pillars (crucial parts of a Víking chieftain’s hall) overboard as he neared the island, vowing to settle where they landed. After wintering on the south coast in the first year, Ingólfur sailed along the coast until the pillars were found in a place he named Reykjavík, or Smoky Bay, after the geothermal steam rising from the earth – a place that would become the capital of modern Iceland. He was followed by many more chieftains, their families and slaves, who settled all the habitable areas of the island in the next decades, mostly along the fjords and river plains. These settlers were primarily of Norwegian, Irish and Scottish origin – most of the latter being female slaves and servants raided from their homelands. The stories of the Settlement Age and the next 200 years are recorded in the sagas, the most important Icelandic literary heritage – a fascinating canon of heroic and family stories written down between the ninth century and the fourteenth century, its structure and composition unlike anything written in contemporary Europe of that time. According to the sagas, the new immigrants arriving from Norway were independent-minded settlers fleeing the harsh rule of King Harald Fairhair, a man who makes an appearance in almost all of the Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur). 

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the power of independent local farmers and chieftains gave way to the growing power of a handful of families and their leaders. This period is known as the ‘Age of the Sturlungs’. The fighting became a proper civil war that ravaged the country. The Age of the Sturlungs also saw a veritable proliferation of sagas being written down, maybe in an attempt to reunite the country by making the stories of heroic deeds widely available. It also saw the emergence of the first giant of Icelandic literature, polymath Snorri Sturluson. A member of the Sturlungs and a politician, he is today best known as the author of the Prose or Younger Edda (Snorra Edda, thirteenth century), one of the two sources that have introduced the Norse pantheon and mythology to the modern world – the other being the Poetic or Elder Edda (Ljóða Edda), an anonymous collection of poems from around the same time. In the Prose Edda, Snorri might have recorded his own assessment of the age he was living in based on a quote he took from the Elder Edda: ‘A sword age, a wind age, a wolf age. No longer is there mercy among men.’

Highly-accomplished literary works of that time include Egill’s Saga (Egils saga Skallagrímssonar), the life of the warrior-poet Egill Skallagrímsson; the Saga of the People of Laxárdalr (Laxdæla Saga, a triangular love story set in West Iceland; the Saga of Gisli Súrssonar (Gísla Saga Súrssonar), the tragic tale of a heroic outlaw in the Westfjords; and the Story of Burnt Njál (Njáls Saga), generally considered the high point of Icelandic literary art, a complex and rich account of human and societal conflicts playing out across the fertile fields of south Iceland. 

Closely related to the sagas are the Eddas, among the main sources for the knowledge about Norse gods we have today. The Poetic or Elder Edda is a group of more than thirty poems on gods and human heroes preserved in oral tradition until they were recorded by an unknown chronicler (or group of chroniclers). The Prose or Younger Edda is the work of Snorri Sturluson and the most important source of modern knowledge on this subject, and also contains a guide to poetic diction and the kennings, a typically two-word metaphor found in Norse and Icelandic that stands in for a concrete noun: ‘bone-house’ (body), ‘whale-road’ (sea), ‘wave-horse’ (ship), ‘sky-candle’ (sun).

The sagas are still a central part of Iceland’s culture and continue to be taught in its schools, and most people are familiar with a good number, if not all of them. The sagas are certainly known to a much greater extent than British people are familiar with famous works of medieval literature. One key to understanding the power of the sagas lies in their relationship with the landscape itself. The sagas explain how place-names all around the country came to be: some of their explanations about events and characters gave names to natural places – like farms, hills or bogs – and have a historical basis, while others were invented by a saga-author but are nevertheless still used to this day. Because of this and despite their age, the sagas still live on in many of the local areas in which they are set – and have a life over and beyond the printed page. Not only have they served as inspiration for countless modern literary works, art and music, but there are also many new saga trails criss-crossing the country today, and living history museums, saga theatres and cultural centres allow both scholars and visitors to learn about the stories in the actual landscape where they took place. For me, it is often difficult to think of an analogy in another country where a corpus of medieval literature is so close to people’s hearts on a national scale.  It is always a delight to come back to the island and reconnect with its names and places.

Dortmund: A winter diary

By Paul Scraton:

In the bowels of Dortmund station I look at a map of the city and try to get a sense of this place I’ve arrived in for the first time. The orientation points are limited by a lack of natural landmarks, like a river or a coastline, and my own ignorance. There’s a harbour, a river port through which much of the coal and steel that made this city once moved. There’s a ring road where the city walls once stood, surrounding what the historic old town that was very much destroyed by the bombing raids of the Second World War. And there is the Westfalenstadion, now named for a financial services company, home to a football club who have taken the name of Dortmund around the world and whose stickers in distinctive black and yellow occupy every lamppost, bus shelter and abandoned shop front in the city.

Our hotel is in the Nordstadt, divided from the city centre by the railway lines that function in the way that rivers do in other cities. Instead of bridges, there are long and dark tunnels underneath the tracks, giving each side a distinct feeling of being over here compared to over there. I am in the city for a panel discussion on the subject of borders at the Dortmunder U, an impressive arts space that occupies the giant brick building that was once a brewery. It is on the other side of the tracks from the hotel, and it feels fitting somehow that we have to cross beneath the tunnel to reach it, the lonely walk beneath the tracks as a reminder that borders and boundaries can take different forms in different places.

But we have some time before we need to make that journey, and so we walk out from the hotel in search of the harbour. From the docks at Dortmund it is a 269-kilometre journey along the Dortmund-Ems Canal to reach the North Sea. Unlike many canals, obsolete soon after they were built thanks to the coming of the railway, the Dortmund-Ems waterway was dug out of the western German soil in the 1890s precisely to alleviate the demand on the railway network, such was the freight transportation needs of the industrial city and the surrounding area. It helped turn the Port of Dortmund into one of the largest inland ports in Europe, with eleven kilometres of piers and one which, despite a decline since a peak in the 1970s, continues to move some three million tonnes of goods a year.

As we follow streets between the docks, past abandoned warehouses and coach parks for vehicles with number plates from Serbia, Croatia and Kosovo, it reminds me of Liverpool and Rostock, of Gdansk and Belfast, with that similar feel of port areas that still have enough cranes and shipping containers to suggest that work is being done but a distinct lack of people. And in the spaces where once they might have worked, other businesses have moved in. A bicycle parts wholesalers. A club venue with a view over the water and no neighbours to disturb. A portacabin and patch of wasteland behind a high fence, a place to park your caravan or camper van over the winter. Cranes move, high above on the other side of the street at the Container Terminal. The port functions. 

From beside the Container Terminal the road rises up, past the ornate old harbour administration building, to lead us back towards the Nordstadt and our hotel. From the bridge we can see across the port and over towards the city centre, the huge U atop the former brewery clearly visible. We have started to find our orientation points. 

The next morning, we move once more beneath the railway tracks to walk through the pedestrian area of the city centre, almost entirely rebuilt during the West German economic miracle to replace the medieval core that had been blown to pieces during the bombing raids. With its mix of mid- to late-twentieth century shop fronts it reminds me not only of other city centres I’ve passed through in this part of the world, but also those of my childhood, of parts of Manchester or Liverpool visited on Saturday afternoon shopping trips. Can you choose twin cities based on a feeling? Despite a light drizzle, the streets are busy, with shoppers and those who, judging by their hats, scarves and shirts that peak out from beneath heavy winter jackets, are getting ready for tonight’s game. I can’t help but feel that the fans of Liverpool FC and the two Manchester clubs who, in recent years, have come to Dortmund to support their team, would also have also found much to remind them of home. 

Back at the Dortmunder U we take an elevator to the very top floor and step out onto a roof terrace beneath the giant letter that is visible from across the city and look down on the ring road and the city centre and its collection of glass and steel office blocks that speak to the new industries that have replaced the old. There’s no interest here in managed decline. I can see the television tower and the railway tracks, and the cranes of the harbour. Over there, in the gloom, the groundskeeper will be putting the final touches to his Champions League stage set. I have been in the city for less than twenty-four hours, and I’m still ignorant of Dortmund, of what the city is and what it means to the people that live here. But I also know that when I return to the station and look at the map, I’ll already have a better sense of what I’m looking at than I did yesterday.

It’s a start. 

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Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).