A New Chapter

Høyfjell by Hans Gude, 1846 and a view from Veslesmeden into Rondane, 2018

The long summer evenings of hiking in Norwegian mountains are long gone, winter has settled into Amsterdam with a cold, biting wind that makes it easy to sit inside, research and write on a new book. While reading up on the many stories of early hikers into Norway in the 19th century, I come across the story of how Edvard Grieg, the most famous Norwegian composer, came across Gjendine, who was born on a farm in the heart of Jotunheimen and spent her long life there. She had a wonderful voice and was full of songs that Grieg sought to capture in his Norwegian Folk Song series. What better way to accompany the task of writing than by listening to those melodies of a Romantic age. Today the Romantics sometimes have the stigma of being backward looking and not innovative, but emulating the past in their approaches and techniques as artists. We  forget that this was the era where artists showcased their personal feelings and inner worlds for the first time, especially those strong emotions around terror and  awe. Many painters sought to give expression to those feelings through painting Nature’s powerful forces; poets and composers immersed themselves in it for their inspiration. The steam engine, the power horse of industrialisation, made it possible for people to travel further and so the first hikers into Jotunheimen are indeed known to have come in the 19th century. Initially in Norway, travellers would stay at farms, but soon the Norwegian Hiking Association (DNT) was established. The DNT would start to build and buy mountain huts in those places that indeed inspired awe at both the beauty and the beast of Nature’s forces.  And so a gradual change took place. Previously the Garden of Eden was a medieval place, where creatures of all sorts would happily sit together without doing each other any harm; a carefully crafted place and far, far away from the unruly, overgrown, wild and barbaric natural state. In the 19th century precisely this wilderness becomes the attraction. To some extent not much has changed since the 19th century, only today we are so many, that we have to be so careful not to destroy what we seek, by merely wanting to visit. 

Photo credits:

Hans Gude, Høyfjell, 1846 taken from http://samling.nasjonalmuseet.no/no/object/NG.M.04180

View from Veslesmeden is my own from a hike in the summer of 2018