Sixty Degrees North (27 page)

When I lived in Fair Isle, I felt proud to be part of something that I believed in completely; and I still believe in it, though I am no longer there. That island came to mean more than any other place to me; that community left me changed forever. When I think of Fair Isle, as I do almost every day, each thought is bound by gratitude and by love, and each thought is sharpened by the memory of leaving. When I moved away, after three years on the island, it was with intense sadness. But I did so because, to put it simply, I was no longer fully there. For the last of those years I was living alone, and that was a long way from ideal. I began to miss my family and friends in Shetland, and I began to spend more time visiting them. Were Fair Isle more accessible, that would not have been a problem. But Fair Isle is not accessible. Travelling back and forth is difficult and expensive, and the weather makes it unreliable. The island can be cut off for days at any time of year, and in the winter it can be weeks. In the end I took what seemed like the most sensible option, and I moved back to Shetland. It was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do.

Beneath dim orange lights in a corner of the University of Uppsala's library building, the Carolina Rediviva, hangs a glass-fronted case, and inside that case is a map. At 1.7 metres wide and 1.25 metres tall, the map is impressive in its scale, but it's even more so in its content. Though slightly faded and honeyed by age, the image itself is clear. It shows the northernmost parts of Europe – the Nordic countries, the Baltic region, Scotland and Iceland – and it shows them all in their right places. Known as the
Carta Marina
, and printed in Italy in 1539, this was in fact the earliest map to show the north with such a degree of accuracy. A masterpiece of cartography, it was created by Olaus Magnus, a Swede living in exile in Rome.

Olaus Magnus was born in Linköping, southern Sweden, in 1490. He was educated in the church and became a Catholic priest, employed by Gustav Vasa for diplomatic work in Scandinavia and on the continent. When the Protestant Reformation began in Sweden in the late 1520s, however, Olaus and his brother Johannes, then archbishop of Uppsala, were forced to flee, and their possessions were confiscated. The pair finally settled together in Rome, and when Johannes died in 1544 Olaus was given the title – by then entirely symbolic – of archbishop. He was unable to ever visit this city or his home country again.

Despite this, Olaus remained obsessed with Sweden and the north. He produced the
Carta Marina
in the early years of his Italian exile, and then in 1555 he published his
History of the Northern Peoples
, a work in twenty-two books that brought together much of the information and misinformation about the region that was then in existence. It covered politics, geography, history, natural history and folklore, alongside observations based on his own extensive travels. It was for a long time the most significant and widely-read work available on the north, and together with this map comprised something like an extended love letter to his homeland. According to Barbara Sjoholm, both ‘are products of an exile's recollection and imagination, produced in part to make a case for his country, and also as an act of memory and longing.'

The
Carta Marina
almost disappeared forever, after all of the known originals were lost before the end of the sixteenth century. But in 1886, one was located in Munich, where it remains today. And in 1961, another was found in Switzerland. That copy – this copy – was purchased immediately by the University of Uppsala and brought back to where, in a sense, it belonged.

The map is illustrated with an extraordinary degree of detail. Each country is adorned not just with place names
and geographical features, but also with buildings, animals and people. Uppsala is there, with its cathedral clearly visible; so too is the castle at Raseborg in Finland, close to where Ekenäs would be built shortly after the map was produced. At the southern tip of Greenland, a Norseman and Inuit are fighting; and in the eastern Baltic, Swedish and Russian troops face each other across the water. But the map, like the books, blends together the familiar with the mythical. In the far north and in the ocean, geography and fantasy become entwined. More than a dozen marine monsters populate the North Atlantic – some of them attacking ships, some attacking each other. Several of these creatures are presumably whales, drawn by someone who had never seen a whale. Others have less obvious origins. According to the map's Latin key, these include ‘Rosmarus, a sea elephant' and ‘The terrible sea-monster Ziphius', which boasts a tall fin, stripes, a spiny mane and webbed feet. At its side is ‘Another grisly monster, name unknown'. The ocean, according to the
Carta Marina
, is a terrifying place to be.

Somewhat to the left of the map's centre is my home. Unlike the outline of Scandinavia, Shetland is not drawn with much accuracy. It looks rather like a boiled egg, sliced into six pieces. ‘The Hetlandic islands and bishopric [are] a fertile country,' the key declares, and they boast ‘the most beautiful women'. But Olaus clearly did have access to reliable information about the islands because, of the few place names he includes, most are still recognisable. The island of Mui on the east coast is likely to be Mousa, and Brystsund is surely Bressay Sound, on the shores of which Lerwick would later be built. Skalvogh is Scalloway, which would have been capital of the islands at that time, and Svinborhovit in the far south is Sumburgh Head. The little island just below – Feedero – is Fair Isle.

What is striking about the
Carta Marina
is that it shows the north not as an empty, desolate region, as many in
Mediterranean Europe would still have imagined it, but as a place bursting with activity and life: animal life, marine life, human life. This is a map that seems to pulse rather than lie still; it is a restless, dynamic image, infused with the energy of the world it depicts. No one else was in the room with me that morning, and for a long time I stood gazing at it, exploring those shapes and spaces that were at once so familiar and yet so unlike the cartography of today. The purpose of this map was to do more than educate; it was to inspire a reimagining of place, and to turn southern heads towards the north. Despite its many distractions – the beautiful and the monstrous – my own head kept turning towards home.

On a bright, Sunday afternoon I walked from the cathedral down to the river bank, then northwards on the pilgrims' trail towards Gamla (‘Old') Uppsala. This is the path along which the remains of King Erik Jedvardsson – later, St Erik – are supposed to have been carried in 1167, towards their final resting-place in the city. The trail follows the river Fyris, where mallards skulked among the frosted bulrushes, then it turns away into the fringes of the city, past a bowling alley, sports centre and car park. Neat rows of tiny cottages and allotments, all closed up for the winter, lead on through tree-lined lanes and smart housing schemes, their windows glittering in the icy sunlight. The trail was busy, despite the cold. Children in down jackets dragged plastic sledges behind them, while parents pushed prams in front; lovers strolled hand in hand, joggers panted past, and elderly couples took careful steps, their walking poles clacking like magpies against the pavement. All of us were headed in the same direction, away from the city, to where the day would open out. Across a busy road, then down a lane, past sleepy bungalows and gardens, the landscape began to change.
Trees replaced buildings, and a series of low hillocks rose up on one side of the path. Out ahead, flat white fields stretched towards the horizon.

I left the main trail there and walked up towards the edge of the trees, where several boulders stood, each with coloured pebbles glued on top. According to a leaflet I found nearby this was a ‘place of meditation', and the pebbles were ‘pearls of life'. They were, it said, ‘an aid for modern pilgrims. For the greatest and most significant of all journeys – the journey inwards'. I thought about that label – ‘modern pilgrim' – and wondered if it could apply to me. I hoped not, for the mawkishness of it made me wince. But still, the question lingered. There I was, treading a long road towards where, exactly? Looking for what? I'd often on these journeys felt uneasy about my motives and my desires. I'd often questioned what I was doing, and what I was trying to do. But I'd never once thought of myself as a pilgrim. So if that's what I was, I was either an accidental or a dishonest one, a pilgrim guarding himself against disappointment. For a few moments I stood there, unmoving, as a woodpecker thrummed nearby and a pair of nuthatches scraped at the corrugated bark of a pine.

Returning to the path below, I continued northward through thinning light. The sky was a broad, watery blue, broken only by vapour trails crisscrossing above. The sun slouched over the western horizon, with a pale yellow glow that dragged gangly shadows across the landscape. Everything was more clearly defined in this light; everything seemed more certain of itself. The fields were striped by ski trails and by the memory of ploughs. The stalks of last year's crop protruded through the snow like the stubborn bristle of a day-old shave. From there I could see what I had come to see: three gently-sloping lumps, with a stone church beyond. These were the ‘Mounds of the Kings' or ‘Royal Mounds', one of the most important archaeological sites in all of Scandinavia,
and looking out towards them I was struck by two conflicting feelings. The first stemmed from the knowledge that this is an important place – a sacred place, even. Such knowledge brings with it a kind of wonder and mystery, and Gamla Uppsala certainly has both. Yet at the same time that feeling was contradicted by the utterly unexceptional appearance of the place, by the tameness and the tediousness of it. The ‘Mounds of the Kings' are precisely that – mounds – and are neither dramatic nor particularly engaging, in and of themselves. Were it not for the flatness of the surrounding land, these tumuli would be barely noticeable at all. As it is, they stand out like ripples in a millpond.

It takes a fair leap of the imagination to conjure up, in this place, the scene described by Adam of Bremen in the late eleventh century. Furnished, he claims, with eyewitness accounts, Adam described a temple then standing on this site that was ‘entirely decked out in gold'. Here, ‘the people worship the statues of three gods', called Thor, Wotan (Odin) and Frikko (Freyr), the last of which was built ‘with an immense phallus'. But as if a giant penis were not bad enough, Adam also reported that during midwinter feasts at this temple, human and animal sacrifices were made. ‘[Of] every living thing that is male,' he wrote, ‘they offer nine heads, with the blood of which it is customary to placate gods of this sort. The bodies they hang in the sacred grove that adjoins the temple … Even dogs and horses hang there with men.' This festival would go on for nine days, and by the end of it, scores of human and animal remains would be strung up among the branches.

Gamla Uppsala, then, was once a place of power and worship. It was also, most likely, one of the last real strongholds of paganism in Europe. Here, a distinctly northern mythology held out against the steady expansion of Christianity. According to the medieval Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson, the reason the temple on this site had such significance was
that it had been built by Freyr himself. And the god – a king, perhaps, deified after death – was buried here beneath one of these mounds.

The archaeological evidence for a temple at Gamla Uppsala is inconclusive, though there were certainly buildings here before the current church was begun, back in the thirteenth century. There is no doubt, however, that the three central mounds were used for burial purposes, as indeed were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other, smaller mounds in the area, most of which have since been destroyed by agricultural and quarrying activity. Excavations at this site have confirmed that people were cremated here around 1,500 years ago, within large cairns of stone, wood and mud. Because of the intense heat of these cremations, what remains is largely ash and burnt bones, together with a few trinkets, so little can be conclusively determined about the occupants of these tumuli. But it's been suggested that the mounds may indeed be the final resting places of kings – perhaps Ane, Egil and Adils, of the Yngling dynasty – while those graves in the surrounding area contained people of lower status.