Sea story
I was in Oslo a few years back - called over to see a friend of my mother before she died.
Suzi Enderud had been put on a boat as a child in the Thirties and had lived with my mother’s family until she met and married a handsome Norwegian airman. At the end of the war he became a pilot with Norwegian Airlines and took her back with him to his homeland. They had three children and when he left her for a stewardess from the airline, she picked herself up and joined a tennis club and met and married another Norwegian called Finn.
She must have been ninety when I met her - and she was still baffled by the Norwegians that she had lived among for most of her life . Their idea, she said, of a really good holiday was to go to a cabin somewhere up in the forest and spend the days hiking and when not doing that or being out on the sea in a boat, what they really liked to do was to whittle wood.
The stylish wooden house on the outskirts of Oslo that Suzi and Finn lived in, with room for a grand piano, was full of gnarly bits of branch or root that Finn had whittled into shapes and she looked at them as if they still puzzled her and she was still dreaming of the drawing rooms of a Vienna that she must have hardly known
Her cancer was spreading from the lungs and she had worse days and better days and there were other people on her list that had been summoned to attend, so in between visits out to her house, I went sightseeing around Oslo
I went across the harbour to see the Fram. The Fram had once been the most famous ship in the world - in the days before the Titanic met the iceberg. She was built for Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian explorer who had been taking note of the way that debris from one side of the Arctic circle had a way of turning up at the other side so he concluded that there must be an East to West current of water flowing under the ice that covered the North Pole. He had the idea that if he could build a ship that could embed itself in the ice then he could travel with it - floating over or near the North Pole - and then use the ship as a base to launch an expedition with sledges and dogs and be the first person to set foot over the Pole itself .
The Fram, her name meaning “Forward” in Norwegian, was built to Nansen’s unique design - her hull was heavily reinforced but also rounded. like a colander so that the pressure of the sea ice did not crush her - just pushed her upwards. This made her unstable in open seas but perfect for Polar Exploration and if the expedition did not go completely as hoped, then it was not down to the design of the Fram who survived for three years frozen into the slowly moving sheet of ice.
Later Roald Amundsen took the Fram, the only purpose built ice-boat, Southwards in the race to the other pole
Most days I hung around the harbour eating the sanwiches I had made from the breakfast included with the room and watching the cruise ships and fishing boats in the glittering light of the North . On days the weather wasn’t good, I would go to the Oslo Municipal Art Museum and draw from the paintings. Mostly they were gloomy portraits, the occasional melodramatic scene from Norwegian History with their kings being murdered by Swedes, sparsely decorated interiors and a lot of landscapes - dark dark forests and sometimes of sunshine glinting on a glimmering fjord.
But among a lot of dismal paintings and appearing like a goddess of forests was a medieval carved wood statue of a Madonna with what looked like a shapeless lump - maybe a bag of sugar or a lump of clay
I described this to Suzi - she had a morphine patch to help with the pain and was interested in these things
She explained that the statue was probably not a Madonna with a strangely shapeless child, but must be a statue of Saint Sunniva who once had been the patron saint of all Norway but had later been displaced by the only slightly Saintly King Olaf and she was relegated to being the patron saint of Bergen only. Bergen being up the coast and very cold
Sunniva was born in a palace as a princess and heiress somewhere in Ireland but when she was threatened with being forced into marriage to a Pagan Viking to which she objected - though whether it was an objection to marriage in general or to him being a Pagan, a Viking - or to himself in particular - is not completely clear but in any event - as was the habit of Irish Princesses in those days - she took herself to the sea in a currach
Accompanied by a brother and a few followers, they trusted themselves to the waves and the currents and the Grace of God and perhaps they went North of Scotland and South of Orkney, or perhaps they went some other way around, but they finally reached some islands off the coast of Norway which you might think was Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire ... Vikingwise.
But these islands seemed to be empty except for sheep and they made a home there in a cave and led quiet lives of exemplary piety
Unfortunately the islands were not as unoccupied as they had appeared to be and after a while some local Vikings were complaining to their Jarl that their their sheep were regularly disappearing and that, basically,.they blamed the Christians for this
Sunniva being in great trepidation on hearing that a party of angry men was on the way to their cave, led her folowers in prayers for their Preservation ... and in answer to her prayers that they would not be molested, the roof of the cave fell in a hail of rocks, crushing and killing them all before the raiding party arrived. So that was the end of Sunniva.
Except of course that it wasn’t. A century later when the cave was excavated, she turned up again. It may be that the diggers were looking for treasure, but what they found was the body of Sunniva - fragrant and possibly with a terrible head injury but in every important respect perfectly preserved as if she had just fallen asleep like Snow White in her glass casket.
A strange glow came from the body - a spring of fresh water sprang up on the site - a church was built and the island shrine of Saint Sunniva became a popular place of pilgrimage. Later her relics were all that stood between the city of Bergen and a catastrophic conflagration and the flames were miraculously stopped in their tracks and the city of Bergen preserved from the fire that was always a danger in a city built basically of wood.
The grateful citizens blessed the day that the currents had brought her to their shores and chose Sunniva, the Irish princess, as the patron saint of all Norway of which Bergen was at that time the capital city. Her name means“ Gift of the Sun” and she is always depicted with the rock of her martyrdom by her side
Which is why on the 17th of May, Norway Day, when the country celebrates - well - basically that Norway is not part of Sweden and while most of the people celebrate by dressing in their folk costumes which are long skirts for the women and knee breeches for the men and everything elaborately embroidered and by waving small Norwegian flags ... and while deviations from this custom into - say - bananas or Disney characters are seen as being very poor taste, it is not entirely unknown for a very occasional maverick to dress in a papier mache costume as a boulder
I stayed in Oslo for a few weeks - until after Norway Day - then had to leave and come home and soon after that one of Suzi’s daughters mailed me to say that their lovely mother had taken herself off into an unknown sea
“ In 1922 Nansen was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on conflicts. Among the initiatives he introduced was the "Nansen passport" for stateless persons, a certificate that used to be recognised by more than 50 countries.”
AG 23/06/2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fridtjof_Nansen
https://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/History/antarctic_ships/fram.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunniva
Fram
Fram ("Forward") is a ship that was used in expeditions of the Arctic and Antarctic regions by the Norwegian explorers Fridtjof Nansen, Otto Sverdrup, Oscar Wisting, and Roald Amundsen between 1893 and 1912. It was designed and built by the Scottish-Norwegian shipwright Colin Archer for Fridtjof Nansen's 1893 Arctic expedition in which the plan was to freeze Fram into the Arctic ice sheet and float with it over the North Pole.
Fram is said[by whom?] to have sailed farther north (85°57'N) and farther south (78°41'S) than any other wooden ship. Fram is preserved at the Fram Museum in Oslo, Norway.
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| the Fram |
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