One day at the beginning of this century, a tremendous and confusing day with a lot of damp and light in the air, the writer of these lines came flying in from the sea on the sail of a huge ship. Where I came from I don’t know, but I do know where I landed; it was in Torshavn, right on the roof of the old house in Bringsnagøta where I came to the world.
This sail was no dead object, but a living, animate being. It dwelt in the air and was always on a long voyage, but was never completely gone, and once in a dream it returned and took me on its wings, and we sailed westwards, over withered grass roofs and stubble fields and over dark heather that lay as if in silent whispering rage; but then I remember nothing more; I remember only that the sail flapped and rumbled in the twilight and that it was a hazardous and not too cosy journey. Nonetheless it was of a wild and unruly sweetness that can never be forgotten.
In my early childhood I believed that the flying being that had brought me into the world could also come back at any time and take me away from the world, and naturally I was afraid of this demonic flying lizard of life and death, yet I still loved it and longed for it now and then in wild ambivalence.
The old, over-extended house in Bringsnagøta where I was born and spent my first six years was full of nooks and crannies, inhabited by shady beings. The raw materials for these ghosts came from snatches of songs, folk tales or pictures only half- or not understood at all, or from equally incomprehensible incidents in the real world; but most, however, from things experienced in dreams. In the beginning it seems hard to distinguish dream and reality, living a life among phantoms—I was inclined to demonize even those closest to me. Almost all of them led a double life, had a day and a night side. Although this wasn’t the case with my mother, it most certainly was with my father—a carefree young mariner and trader who didn’t follow any pedantic principles when it came to child-rearing. Not only has he saddled me with some of my most tormenting dream-phantoms, he was also the model for some of the worst ones.
Father was as strong as a horse, and fierce in every manner, not least in his games with us children; he pretended to “smother” us with cushions and pillows, lured us into dark corners and closets, from which he unintentionally leapt out and “grabbed” us and now and then he played “dead,” a terrifying comedy that ended with him arising from the dead in one shocking bound, and, roaring with laughter, turning to his disconsolate offspring whom he then, as comfort, tossed in a blanket and placed on shelves or cupboards. Half-sung songs and nonsense rhymes came from him at any time of the day, some fairly cheerful and harmless, such as this one:
And when I am drunk
Then I feel great
Then my heart dances
Like a lamb’s ball on a plate.
Other poems were unsettling and uncomfortable, such as an old magic rhyme he remembered from his childhood in a small remote mountain village and that he enjoyed reciting with rolling eyes and a disconcerting, chanting voice:
Marra marra minni,
ert tú herinni,
út skalt tú fara,
bera bæđi grót og flag
og alt sum er herinni
Naturally, this Marra became a major character in my childhood dream world, a female demon, dangerous and inescapable. It seems to me that for long periods she appeared in my dreams every single night. A child seeks to pacify such ever-present objects of dread as much as possible by ascribing them good intentions and winning qualities. My Marra also let herself be mellowed to some extent, and even if I never became attached to her, I developed feelings for her of a kind that resembled unhappy love. When she showed herself, small and nimble and with screwed-up eyes that were demonic and tyrannical yet not without a certain teasing affection, I had to follow her, and we would move in a slow glide through a half-lit magic world inhabited by strange chimeras. Now and then we went inside strange houses, moving through bright but empty at night rooms where no sound could be heard except the ticking of clocks, or we would float through vast storehouses, through forests of sagging sails, or through the church, where black, extinguished chandeliers and model ships swished close past us. Now and then we took a break, preferably high up on a crag or a roof, among shadow-like silent birds that glanced conspiratorially at us. We also visited the ships that lay at anchor on the ice hole and were transported high up in the mast stops and yards. From up here you could hear mermaids splashing in the green water, and there was an indescribable joy in this.
Although filled with latent fear, this gliding trip always had a captivating poetry to it. I hate-loved them just as I hate-loved my lady companion. These nightly excursions often tended to end in terror though—something or other catastrophic happened, you were sucked into a maelstrom of horror, yet this always meant liberation. You were spun around and fell, drowning, to the ground just as you awoke, howling with fear, still with the frightful phantom girl’s affectionate demon eyes on you.
Another product from my father’s grim archive of old snatches of song was the following verse:
Sivar he killed his father
all for his mother’s best,
and now he enjoys riding on horseback
and putting his luck to the test,
and so cunning Gråmand runs away from Sivar.
No more was revealed about the murderous Sivar and the cunning Gråmand, but there was no forgetting them; they returned to you in dreams, and it was uneasy to sense them in the vicinity. Sivar sneaked around at nighttime, armed with a sailmaker’s knife, on the hunt for Gråmand, who always conveniently managed to escape him, however. These two phantoms were among those who led a double life: Gråmand helped my father in his shop; he was a gentle, whey-faced fellow with a sly glint in his eye; Sivar, a tall, stooping man with big horny hands, was a sailmaker and could be found on the uppermost floor of a storehouse. By day the two antagonists were good friends and drained many a tankard of beer together at the bar, but at night, when darkness and dream ruled, everything became different, the familiar and harmless people of the day became deadly enemies and horrifying things took place. And so I dreamed one night that I was being pursued by Sivar through an endless series of storehouse rooms and up and down stairs, and when I tried to seek refuge in an enormous bed standing in one of the dim rooms I found Gråmand lying there, his throat slit. Great was my joy when in the morning I found the murdered man in good health in the dining room where he sat eating his simple breakfast together with my father. They laughed carefreely at my fearful dream and father felt called upon to sing:
Some are sick and some feel worse,
And some are lying in a hearse.
Another one the objects of fear my father with his half-sung verses inserted in my dreamworld was The Emperor Charlemagne, of whom it was sung:
Karlamagnus eiti eg,
so eri og nevndur av sonnum,
kongur og so keisari
yvir kristnum monnum
This mighty man, the Frankish king Charlemagne, was barely distinguishable from my father. Like him, he had a large lumpy nose and a heather-like hirsute beard and was dressed in a long kirtle of the same kind of checked fabric as my father’s quilt cover. This Charles the Great was also emperor over all the Russians, occasionally referred to as “the Tsar”, and at times also “General Nogi” so it must have been around the Russo-Japanese war in 1904. This emperor had the nasty habit of visiting us at night. He was not alone, but accompanied by a court of select tormentors, half-animal, half-human. One night I dreamt that the emperor was wrestling with my father. This wrestling match, which took place in the bedroom, was all the more violent for me to witness as I was unable to tell apart the two fighters, who were furiously trying to squeeze the life out of each other. They were moving slowly, like slow motion in a film and without a sound and all around them in the half-light were glimpses of horns and hooves and watching eyes. When in the morning I told my mother this terrible dream, to my amazement and indignation she burst out laughing. That was almost always what happened when I confided my dream troubles to the adults; I was laughed at affectionately and was told that I was a chatterbox and full of “fantasy” and when in the evening I lay in bed and could not fall asleep for sheer fear of ending up in the clutches of evil dreams, I was “sung to sleep,” either by my mother or by one or more of her young sisters. All of them loved singing and their repertoire was endless. From time to time two or three of them would sing in harmonies, including Weyse’s melancholy canon, “Jeg har så græsselig ondt i min mave!,” I’ve got such terrible pain in my stomach! And it frequently happened that instead of singing me to sleep, the song-loving girls sang me wide awake.
Down in the cellar, which was partly underground, there was a room that at one time had served as a kitchen. Through the small window, wide open under the ceiling, you could see the feet of people walking past outside in the street. Down here my father held festive gatherings at which there was song and din. This was the time before the prohibition on spirits. Both Sivar and Gråmand attended these underground parties and I nurtured no doubts that the other guests too belonged to the world of demons. In my dreams and imaginings such cheerful company naturally ended up as magical orgies of the other world. The cellar seemed made for such witches’ sabbaths. Here was an anteroom with granite boulder walls and a trampled earth floor called the “Earth Entrance Hall”, from this cavern a door led into the witch kitchen, another into an almost pitch-dark chamber, papered with pictures from various old humorous magazines, and a third into sheer darkness; an unused part of the cellar without windows and too low-ceilinged for an adult to walk upright. “Fear-Aesir” I called this place. A raw vapour of damp and the night, of death and the grave and all the fears of the underworld, reached out from this secret backdoor to the interior of the Earth. In its depths I thought I could glimpse a faint reddish flicker of light.
In the autumn, the Earth Entrance Hall was where the slaughtering took place. Father, who was a farmer’s son, would have sheep sent for slaughter from his home village and he slaughtered them himself. This would happen in the evening in the light of a large petroleum lamp with “sun burners” that gave out rainbow haloes in the cold, damp air and glistened imposingly on blood and colourful entrails. On such festive occasions there was no end to my courage; I dared to enter the night of Fear-Aesir and took pleasure in challenging its forces of darkness.
One night I dreamt that I confidently walked into this underworld and went down a long flight of stairs. Here, in the depths, was Hell, a vast, low-ceilinged room illuminated by large lamps. Many men were at work here, like people in a workshop. They looked at me in a friendly way. Here it was generally light and agreeable and there was nothing to fear, I strolled curiously around the enormous copper-red floor that seemed to be without end, it gave me a certain tingling feeling of happiness, especially when I discovered that I could raise myself slightly from the floor and hover freely in the air among all the friendly lamps. The men working regarded the flying visitor with cheerfulness. One of them was the Devil himself. I wasn’t at all frightened of him; he resembled my father and, like him, sang as he worked, and to top it all off, he was singing a Christmas carol, I knew it quite well, “The Three Holy Kings So Glad of Heart”.
But when I told my mother about this dream the following morning, she fell deep into thought, looked searchingly at me and hugged me close with a sigh. For once, I had succeeded in having one of my dreams being taken seriously and not dismissed as simply chatter. It flattered me and felt like a triumph; I enjoyed being the object of my mother’s concern, even if this time the reason felt slightly irrational, and I did not hold back in my depiction of Hell’s cosiness and the Devil’s harmlessness and goodwill.
This dream of a visit in red, well-bred Hell also made a certain impression on my father. He laughed hard at the fact that the Devil had resembled him, but it still didn’t sit too easily. Probably after a general discussion of this precarious dream, my good parents came to the conclusion that my Christian upbringing had been woefully neglected and that something should be done to remedy the situation. My mother saw to it that two small hymns were added to my bedtime prayers: “Nu lukker sig mit øye, Now closes my eye” and “Sig månen langsomt hæver, The moon slowly rises”. These two pious evening songs which my mother hoped would keep evil forces away from me were just a bother to me. I found them terribly serious and tear-jerkingly sad, particularly the latter (which is a true gem in the world of hymns as regards both lyrics and melody, however!). It was likely also on this occasion that a holy picture was hung by my bed, a photograph in a glass frame of a marble angel in a flowing “nightdress” and with half-unfurled wings. It was to be my “guardian angel”. I cultivated a sort of dutiful respect for this picture, but never really cared much for this stiff angel with the unsympathetic eyes that didn’t actually look at you. I was much more attached to my mother and my young singing aunts, and, in utter secrecy, to the appalling but always exciting Marra.
And the cure for evil spirits my father enacted after my visit to Hell was much more effective and full of tangible medicine for soul and body. He took me out on a long walk in the mountains. It was Sunday and bright sunshine. We climbed a high cliff with bilberry sprigs at the top and a broad view of the sky and the sea. Here, with a serious and courteous gesture, my father got out a psalm book and raised his resonant voice in a song of praise. There was no requirement for me to join in, and no exhortations were made, no prayers offered up and no words uttered as to what these psalms and high hymns said about the almighty God, lord of Heaven and Earth, who makes his carriage of blue sky and mercifully wishes to preserve the petals of our flesh. It felt as if you could glimpse his crown of glory in the ravenous swirl of colours that surged before your inner eye after looking at the sun.
After this transfiguration on the Mount we went swimming under a mountain stream where I, howling with fear-soaked joy, was dipped in wild foaming water.
These prayers of praise in the mountains or by the shore, in which my brother, two years my junior, was later included, became a lasting tradition that carried on through many years of our childhood. Through this we became in a particularly effective way familiar with the classical Danish (and Dano-Norwegian) psalms, Klingo and Brorson and Petter Dass, Grundtvig and Ingermann and also learnt to swim into the bargain.
