Here we are after many days of travel at the historical museum on Madeline Island, one of the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior. The museum is fantastic, with gorgeous Ojibwe beadwork among many other things. We had a wet night at our campsite but now it's clearing...after a delicious fish fry lunch on Lake Superior shore we're ready for action!
Stay tuned for more as I sort through the pictures and the thoughts!
So what's up with my home team? What's up with my Capitals?
horizon to horizon. The sun is pulsing
with warmth and light, lavishing its love on the lush green earth. But then the very next day you
wake up and the sun is gone. The sky is flat and gray, the rain is hard and drenching,
and sogginess permeates every molecule of the material world.
anymore.
playing THEIR game, they feel the power.
force of the universe. Now they're rolling!
chance. They're at the right place
at the right time. They are
CREATING SPACE.
the ice!
threaded through a pair of defenders, or a chippy one from behind the net, or
the long one traveling two-thirds the length of the ice, puck arriving, adhering
to the stick of our brave captain on a breakaway, deking, beating the goaltender, going top-shelf…
In a town long known for its southern efficiency and northern charm, we, in Washington, DC, finally have a team known for both: efficiency (these guys can win!) and charm (yeah, that's right, charming hockey players).
And, being a hockey team, they are northern. Picture-perfect, poster-child northern, in fact, featuring talent and charisma from every slice of global boreality (if it's not a word, it should be), from Siberia to Vancouver (the long way).
Check it out (you should be able to click on the little hockey player icons to get names and hometowns of the players):
Efficiency, charm, plus that northern penchant for the battle. My circumpolar passion fulfilled.
Alexander Ovechkin, pre-"C." Photo from hfboards.com
Maybe you've been watching some Olympic hockey. Maybe you've seen Ovie's stupendous hit on Jaromir Jagr in the Russia/Czech Republic game on Sunday.
In the words of Mike Emrick "talk about dictating the terms!"
In Alexander Ovechkin's words, "I know it was a strong hit, but what can I do? It's the Olympics."
In my words, "My hero!"
Okay, I'm not saying that this is the way we should operate in everyday life in the twenty-first century. But in Scandinavia back in the day, life was hard, almost like the winter Olympics. The weather was cold. Winters were long and dark. You could expect famine, disease and/or injury, and it was only a matter of time before you would be attacked by others who were equally as desperate as you. Survival was a pressing issue in a way that isn't these days for most of us who are just watching the games on TV.
Being a leader meant taking care of business. Your people had to know that, when the chips were down, you would defend them and their interests to the death. And if you wanted to remain a leader, you had to earn their trust again and again. "Turning the other cheek" meant catastrophe for you and yours. Showing mercy to your enemies could result in disaster for your friends or family.
Your neighbor's sheep are grazing on your side of the fence? Get them out of there by any means necessary! And don't miss the opportunity to teach your neighbor a lesson while you're at it. You literally can not afford to let him think that he can get away with this sort of thing. Your life, your family's lives, the lives of your entire household depend on your sheep getting enough to eat. The other guy's flock is his own problem.
Jagr at a happier moment. Possibly a viking hero as well. His comment on the big hit: "Of course I saw [Ovechkin coming]. I wanted to make a play...The hit doesn't hurt. The mistake hurts because they scored a goal on that play...It was a horrible feeling. I felt like I let the guys down. But that's the sport." Quote from interview by John Dellapina and NHL.com. Photo from Wikipedia Commons.
If Ovie had let Jagr - five-time NHL leading point scorer, seven-time NHL all-star, winner of two Stanley Cups and various other trophies - waltz uncontested into Russia's defensive zone, to a one-on-one against his goaltender, Jagr might very well have tied the game. Ovie couldn't stand idly by and let that happen. This is the Olympics, for heaven's sake! Instead, he took drastic action and his hit led directly to a fabulous pass by Semin and a goal by Malkin which brought the score to 3-1 in favor of the Russians. The Czechs never recovered.
But it's Ovechkin's comment that says it all. "What can I do? It's the Olympics!"
It not only expresses the sense of obligation that he felt but also a necessity, indeed, an inevitability. Yes, the hit was hard, but it had to be. There was nothing else he could do. It's almost as if the fact of it exists outside of Ovechkin himself, as an entity unto itself. Almost as if the man is just an agent for some requirement of fate.
In hockey as in viking-era Scandinavia, it helps if a leader is in synch with the supernatural, with fate. In the words of Washington Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau, "there are certain individuals, that...good fortune follows them...but they [also] make their own good fortune..." He was speaking of young Washington prospect John Carlson after he scored a goal in sudden-death overtime to win the World Juniors championship earlier this year - but he could have been speaking of Ovechkin.
This link with fate in no way takes away from Ovechkin's own courage and initiative - on the contrary, these were the very qualities that allowed him to act. People who don't like The Man - and there are plenty of those - will say that it's just his bravado, or his arrogance or something like that. But of course - it takes a dose of arrogance, or we could call it self-confidence - to step outside of what is commonly done and to take fate into your own hands. To be the one who takes on the responsibility to lead is to call attention, both good and bad, to yourself. Ovechkin does it so often! The remarkable thing is that his "taking care of business" so often seems to be laced with absolute joy and lightheartedness. Maybe that's part of what allows him to "synch up" with fate so regularly.
So what else do hockey players and vikings have in common?
Ovie's mom, Olympic basketball gold medalist Tatyana Ovechkina, knows a few things about bravery and strength. She has been quoted as saying something to this effect: "To be a hockey player, you have to be both brave and strong. Alex is brave and strong."
That's pretty Viking-like, too.
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During one long, lonely February, I sat by my big picture window, day after day, hour after excruciating hour, watching rain pour down from the sky and feeding my insatiable infant son. I survived the ordeal, but only thanks to The Greenlanders. The Greenlanders is Jane Smiley's 584-page novel about the mysterious demise of the Norse Greenland colony. In the light shed by Ms. Smiley's considerable insight, though, that demise becomes considerably less mysterious and considerably more inevitable. More rooted in human ignorance and blindness and cruelty than the historians could ever surmise, much less portray. Was it somehow perverse of me to become so absorbed in this tragic reconstruction of a failed human endeavor at the very time that I should have been celebrating the miraculous beginnings of my own little human endeavor? Maybe so. But I chalked it up to my northern temperament: had Ingmar Bergman ever been required to nurse a baby, he probably would have found himself reading The Greenlanders, too.
Several years later I came across a new translation of some of the Icelandic sagas with a forward by Jane Smiley, and, feeling a connection both to her and to my Scandinavian roots, I picked it up. Right away, I was captivated. The characters were flesh-and-blood, eating, sleeping, thinking, planning, sentient beings, just like we are, but almost in the manner of humanoids from one of Star Trek's alien worlds, their motives occasionally wouldn't quite add up, or their actions would sometimes seem a bit "off." You see, the sagas were written in Iceland about 800 years ago and set 200 years earlier than that. Light-years away from our world. And the sagas are sparse in style; many things are unstated, left between the lines. A contemporary reader would have understood, but the modern reader is left to rely upon her own interpretive abilities and her own detective work. And, indeed, after some investigating, many of the characters did become understandable to me, and even admirable – even those whom we modern folk might characterize as petty, vindictive, cruel or just plain disgusting!
That volume of stories reinvigorated a connection with the people that I only half jokingly call "my Viking ancestors." This connection is, to me, a very tangible thing, and I treasure it. When I'm at home in Sweden I can stand by the graves of my people going back to Viking times and then some. I've always wanted to know them, but is that even remotely possible?
I continued my detective work, reading Old Norse classics like Snorri's Heimskringla and the Poetic Edda, along with books on Norse religion, law and society. By far the most inspirational work of modern scholarship that I came across was Neil S. Price's The Viking Way: Religion and War in Iron Age Scandinavia. Price challenges us to allow those ancient people their peculiarities, to allow them their profound differences from us, to allow them their own stories. Captain Kirk would be proud! Of course, it's easy to honor the prime directive when you know that Scotty can beam you up at any time. But how did things work on the ground? Human and animal sacrifice, piracy, evil sorcery, killings for vengeance or just plain provocation: few stories end – or begin - without blood spillage. At the same time, though, those people were dependent upon each other and they lived at close quarters: warriors and traders, farmers and kings, Christians and heathens, slaves and priestesses. The Viking Age was a productive age of travel and trade, of human craft and expression of all sorts, and its society had a moral equilibrium, one that nurtured it and fueled it and, indeed, drove it, at high-speed, for several centuries. What was it all about?
Characters started coming to me, and that's when The Bear-Wife began. It is set in a transitional time, at the meeting between the old beliefs and Christianity, the old political order and the new medieval kingdoms. It is set in a transitional place, where the rocky Swedish west coast, the open farmland of the south and the forestland of the interior come together. And it is set amidst the most significant transitional condition of all: life itself, which the Norse saw as a state of constant becoming.
Where then, is home - the state of physical and spiritual rest? That is what The Bear-Wife seeks to explore.
The main characters are Geerta, the orphaned daughter of a trader, raised in a heathen household by a Christian servant woman; Helgi, a young Viking warrior groping to understand the spiritual aspect of his vocation; Ragnar, his father, anxious about the plight of his prosperous estate and his chiefdom as he confronts his son's indifference and his own mortality; Fardan, an English missionary priest who struggles to advance his faith in a sometimes hostile setting; and Svanhild, a sorceress and former war-maiden who struggles with the absence of her husband and the uncomfortable nature of her role in society, which is to serve as an intermediary between the human and spirit worlds. And then, of course, there's the bear.
Geerta and Helgi, cast out from their respective worlds, meet at the threshold of the bear's den, a place where death and birth are merged, and where the very human concerns of finding one's place and of fulfilling one's role can begin to be sorted out. Together they restore the bear to his rightful place and in doing so are ultimately able to assume their own "rightful places."
Of course, my characters also operate amidst external events - some historical, some fictional, and some that were hatched in my mind to address the mysterious archaeology of the fictional Ragnar's district. I hope that my characters are not only true to the world-view(s) of the time and place in which they lived, but are also in some way illustrative of a universal human desire to go home in both a physical and spiritual sense, to be at peace with one's duties and one's fate.
