Europe @ 2.4 km/h (10 page)

In town, at the Jamtli Museum, I watch a video,
Monstrum
Jemtlandia
, in which local residents speak of the devil within. One grizzled veteran, Tomas Gårdvall, delves into the murk of speculation, and surfaces with the observation that some folk regard the monster as a symbol of the collective unconscious (very Swedish, that). Another declares, ‘There are tears in the fabric of reality that can suddenly rip open’. How true, I tell myself, but surely someone out there knows how to drop a stitch in time?

Finally, a commentator surmises that the beast is a visitor from the subterranean ocean into which Jules Verne’s adventurers sailed a raft after descending through an Icelandic volcano in
Journey to
the Centre of the Earth.
Now what did I read at one of those lakeside observation stations? There were fifteen sightings in the 1950s, and 30 in the 1970s, but none at all in the 1960s.

Hang on, wasn’t there a spate of Nessie sightings in the Sixties? Eureka! At last the Grand Unified Monster Theory has taken its serpentine shape. Loch Ness and its Swedish cousin are not two monsters, but one. Only its head and tail live ‘in’ a lake. The extremely long midsection lies under the seabed so that the creature’s head surfaces in Loch Ness and its tail roils the waters of Störsjon
except
when the creature gets tired of facing in one direction and slithers past itself in its subterranean tunnel, as must have happened in the Sixties. If more than 99 per cent of Storsjie is under the earth as well as under water, this would explain why it is so rarely sighted. When I revealed this to the curator at Jamtli Museum, he seemed visibly moved — it is hard to tell whether by intellectual excitement or unalloyed pity — that someone who had come so far should have a clearer perspective than locals who had been cudgelling their brains for so long.

Now we beneficiaries of humanity don’t expect to be honoured with a special stand at the museum, let alone a Nobel Prize. A small sum of money, sent to Wakefield Press and marked for my attention, will be reward enough.
⁷

201 km

Reserved? Mellow? Supposedly not when it comes to sex. But how raunchy the Swedes were I had no idea until I was kept waiting for ten minutes outside the disabled toilet at Sundsvall Railway Station, on the Gulf of Bothnia coast, while a couple in their 30s had sex in the cubicle. I didn’t care what they did or where they did it but, with another basic function to carry out and a train to catch, I wasn’t in the best of the moods when they emerged dishevelled from their chamber of delight.

The man disappeared as quickly as he could so, adopting a stern mien, I said to the woman, ‘You really shouldn’t be in there unless you’re disabled,’ at which a hand flew to her hip and she complained most piteously, ‘I have a handicap.’ In the circumstances this was totally unbelievable but I must say she carried the deception off with a certain bravura.

SOUTHERN SWEDEN, OSLO and DENMARK

Time spent: 23 days

Distance covered: 2092 km

Distance pushed: 126.6 km

Average speed: 2.587 km/h

Journey distance to date: 10,257 km

If a Martian arrived on Earth today — or, perhaps more plausibly, an Earthling living in the year 3000 threw the old time machine into reverse — he, she or it might look at 21st-century Europe and be struck by the strangest of paradoxes. One of the most familiar sights from one end of this continent to the other is the Church — Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox. A house of Christian worship appears on euro banknotes, so presumably these edifices tell us something about Europe.

Yet many people in these countries are ignorant of, or awkward about, their own religious history. I say ‘their’ because the fruits of Western civilisation are sometimes so oddly shaped it is difficult to believe they grew on the same tree. Many form incompatible couples: belief and unbelief; faith and scepticism; commitment and detachment; and so on.

To recognise that Christianity, as adopted and adapted in Europe, has been hugely important in world history is not the same as defending it (you could hardly look at the mass killings associated with the conquistadors of South and Central America and imagine Jesus doing anything but condemning their Spanish — and Portuguese — perpetrators).

Yet, like many a cathedral, Europe is a painstaking work in progress. Efforts to construct a Constitution acceptable to all 27 EU member states continue to grapple with the question of whether ‘Europia’ is a Christian project. History prevents millions in Hungary, Poland, Austria, Italy and Spain from looking kindly on Muslims in their midst. The idea of Turkey joining the EU offends many and, even though it is easy to characterise such people as intolerant, they represent a substantial bloc of opinion.

To the extent that Europeans share their ideals — forbearance, charity, democracy, and even the advocacy of global respect for human rights, all that appears to be left of yesteryear’s ‘civilising mission’ — they do come largely from a Judaeo-Christian inheritance. Christianity played midwife to socialism, in Sweden but also in Britain. So-called Christians benefited from slavery, yes, but it was Christian ethics that eventually abolished the trade.

I am not saying that Europeans were better than others, but their religion taught them to believe that they had a gift of supreme importance for all humankind. And, being systematic thinkers convinced their belief system was best, it made sense to them to try imposing it on more ‘benighted’ parts of the globe.

When the Vikings, the Northmen, adopted Christianity — no less than when the Gothic tribes north of the Alps adopted the state religion of the Roman Empire — the North-South fault line that had run through the Continent became of minor importance compared with the East-West rift.

To understand how people think, you must know what they believe. To gain that knowledge, respect for their greatest statements of faith is essential. Their great public buildings — palaces, churches, museums, stadiums — are statements of faith no less than the words they have left us. It would be churlish to come all this way and pass them by.

Whoever finds discomfiting the splendour of cathedrals, or great art on display there and in the Continent’s museums, can never discover Europe. Whatever you think of them, these are the products of Europe’s brain — as is the European conscience, for better or worse — and the best way to appreciate the thoughts, or beliefs, most commonly held in a population of 700 million is not by performing a partial lobotomy. So, you ask, is religion still an important key to today’s Europeans? And I respond, is the Pope a German?

211 km

Behind the altar of Uppsala Cathedral lies the sarcophagus of the warrior king Gustav Vasa, flanked in his eternal sleep by his
first
two wives. Through a translator I ask an old Swedish man about the two royal spouses. He says the king had them sequentially, not simultaneously — and walks away chuckling.

One of Vasa’s titles was Duke of Finland, a country he conquered. On one side of the tomb are the ducal arms, showing a polar bear (prowling rather than rampant) clutching a sword. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is yet another example of Swedish humour. Now I’m the one chuckling.

Gustav Vasa wasn’t well loved by the princes of the Church while he was alive. He is remembered in Sweden for abolishing many of the Church’s privileges, and so only merits a marble tomb. Gold is reserved for St Erik (Jedvardsson), who lies a few metres from where a mere 750 years ago he was assassinated — the spot in the church’s entrance where I now sit. This church, which took 175 years to build, is named after him and two other saints (Olaf and Lawrence).

In Erik’s time the Christian creed, brought here in the ninth century by a wandering missionary, coexisted alongside the popular belief in the old Germanic gods. Gradually the new faith forced out the old, until in 1593 the Uppsala synod threw in its lot with the Protestants, declaring the Church (and this church) Evangelical Lutheran.

Over half a million people a year visit this cavernous creation, which is longer than a soccer pitch and soars 119 metres into the sky. Many are not religious but they know that this is where Sweden’s most settled beliefs encounter its long and regal history. And it’s a history that, despite Swedes’ proud boast they haven’t been involved in a war since 1809, is surprisingly bloody. Poor old King St Erik found that out a moment too late, of course.

Diagonally opposite the steepled giant stands Carolina Rediviva, the former library of Scandinavia’s oldest university, Uppsala, founded in 1477. Now a museum, it contains a treasure everywhere you turn. This space is as hallowed to academia as the cathedral is to believers. A glass case contains manuscripts from all over ‘the known world’ and all over the millennia, from seventh-century BC cuneiform tablets stolen from Babylonia to 20th-century illuminated texts from Ethiopia. What may just be the biggest book I’ve ever seen — 1 metre tall by a hearty 2 metres across, with the pages lying open — is from the monastery at Mt Athos high above the Aegean Sea.

How much of Europe’s treasures are not Europe’s at all, I wonder. Beware the term ‘the rule of law’ and ‘sovereign state’ when both have been used to justify grand theft on such a scale. Over here is a map dated 1482, based on Ptolemy’s atlas, the
Cosmographia
. So, I wonder, was it rescued from the conflagration that destroyed the ancient library of Alexandria? From this map it seems Ptolemy knew about the existence of the River Ganges — but how? Alexander didn’t get that far east. Could Herodotus have? So many questions …

At the far end of the hall is one of two known surviving copies of a 1539 map, printed in Venice and drawn by Olaus Magnus who had travelled in northern Sweden and in Norway (as we know it today). This was the prototype for his
History of Northern Peoples
, printed in Rome in 1555 and thought lost for ever until this copy of the map turned up in Switzerland in 1961.

Between the cathedral and Carolina Rediviva a sculpted specimen of
Homo sapiens
stands, in a class of his own, outside the botanical gardens he made world-famous. We quote the name of a certain Mr Celsius, from Uppsala, more often but Carl Linnaeus, also from Uppsala, could just be the most influential Swede of all time.

In May 1732 Linnaeus mounted his horse and left Uppsala for the North on the trip of his life. But if the genius who invented the plant and animal classification system still in use today wanted to see the world, he was happy most of the time for it to be brought to him. Why travel to India, Linnaeus asked, when there were ‘the thickest coral layers imaginable along the [Baltic island of] Gotland coast’? We can only guess at what he would have thought of Queensland.

I am here a month after celebrations of the great taxonomist’s 300th birthday. Swedes like to boast, ‘God created, Linnaeus classified’.

213 km

This morning, 16 June, at 12.30 am I saw the first star in the 47 days since my journey began. Before I was so far north that the sun didn’t set at all; now I am just under 60º north of the Equator.

215-218 km

I first suspected that a splinter of illogicality lay embedded in Sweden’s heart when a railway clerk in Östersund told me that on some lines a second-class ticket cost more than a first-class ticket.

For a country so advanced in many ways, I find it enormously irritating that the railways require 72 hours’ notice for wheelchair use. Uppsala is one hour by train from Stockholm, and the chief ticket seller there wanted me to believe they needed three days to bring the external ramp from the capital. ‘But I was barely in the country, let alone this city, three days ago. Did you expect me to ring all the way from Norrland, introduce myself and say which of the dozen or so daily trains I wanted to take from Uppsala to Stockholm tomorrow?’ I asked, arms akimbo. To which she replied, ‘Yes, that is what you should have done’.

Borrowing the muscle power of two willing passengers, I got on the train without any help from this hidebound hierarchy. But now the conductor looked apoplectic because there was no assigned place in the corridor. Did I realise that in the event of fire I would be in the way? he wanted to know. I thought of appealing to the Swedish sense of humour by saying that in that case I would throw myself clear of the carriage, even at the risk of ending up in a wheelchair — and then thought again.