Book post as literature

Busy!

A necessary part of the mainstream author's life, especially of non-fiction, is that they have to promote themselves by writing articles about how they wrote the book that is just being published.

(Obviously it helps if they already write regularly for the papers.)

Johann Hari promoting his new book about drug addiction.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html

Robert Macfarlane promoting his new book about landscape words.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/27/robert-macfarlane-word-hoard-rewilding-landscape

I am reading Macfarlane's earlier book The Wild Places at the moment. It's often a really good book however undisguisedly a book written to the non-fiction formula of today.One of the best things about it is the studied deployment of the enhanced vocabulary that his new book centres on. But I haven't got time to think about the winter night on Ben Hope now, nor the holloways of Dorset.

The promotional-article-about-the-book, as evinced by the above, is also a genre with its own formula. For example, all those sentences that say "I did this interesting thing, I did that other interesting thing, while in still another interesting place I was emotionally stirred by hugely interesting things that I go on about in the book."

At the same time, in this internet world where all digitized products tend to become free, there's an awareness that the article will get more readers than the book itself, and accordingly it had better contain the heart of what the author would like us to know.

Because there are too many books, and we can't read any but a tiny fraction with the attention that they deserve and that all book-lovers would love to give but can't, it's a sensible faute-de-mieux to rely largely on these digests to gain a literate and informed view of what's going on in the world. Many of my clever colleagues in IT read no books at all; they have already forgotten Robert MacFarlane's name, but they remember something about the remarkable words for specific states of rain and ice; not the words themselves, but the fact that they existed.

At last a new Catherine Daly book!... (took me a year to notice, tho)

Busy!


So instead here's a link, to the online PDF of Catherine Daly's Controller / Seedbed , which came out in June 2014 (I think, her first book for about seven years).


https://ia600704.us.archive.org/4/items/limitcyclepress/Catherine_Daly-Controller-Seedbed.pdf


Publisher's site:

Limit Cycle Press (Jukka-Pekka Kervinen):

http://limitcyclepress.blogspot.fi/

William Shakespeare: Hamlet (1600)

Peter O'Toole as Hamlet

[Image source: http://theshakespeareblog.com/2013/12/shakespeares-hamlet-and-the-charisma-of-acting/]


In between the various savageries of Saxo's story of Amleth and of John Marston's Antonio's Revenge there was a play called Hamlet.

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We're just ordinary people....  (John Legend, 2004)


Revenge plays, prior to Hamlet (and after, too) had tended to be violent, rhetorical gorefests. But when we think about Hamlet it always comes as something of a surprise to look back on the final scene and find it studded with corpses. Everyone seemed so normal!

For the ordinary soldiers in the opening scene, taking note of the ghost's alarming appearance, Horatio speaks their thoughts: "This bodes some strange eruption to our state". No-one at that point sees fit to connect the eruption with the recent change of ruler or with the questionable marriage of Claudius to his dead brother's wife that is taking place concurrently. Their interest as commoners is more taken up with the clear preparations for war, including the heightened state of watchfulness in which they participate.

One of the problems that Hamlet faces, we imagine, is that the injunction to revenge feels out of sync with the apparent ordinariness of the court going about its business. After Hamlet has spoken to the Ghost, he returns to a court that outwardly looks innocent. As a matter of fact, it is innocent, all but one man. Nobody abetted Claudius in his crime. No-one suspects it. And Claudius is no Piero (the equivalent figure in Antonio's Revenge), i.e. an out-and-out villain exulting in the powers of hell. (Shakespeare would return to that motif in Iago and Edmund; but Claudius shows no sign of loving evil for its own sake.)

The super-abundant richness of Shakespeare's realization of the Danish court is a matter of people behaving ordinarily. The family scene with Laertes, Ophelia and Polonius is a good example.

Guildenstern, Hamlet, Polonius, Ophelia and Gertrude make unexceptionable conversation about the players and the play they perform. Their remarks are not out of character, but also not narrowly related to the roles these speakers play in the drama (Gertrude's apart, perhaps). A year or two after Hamlet had already been successfully performed, Shakespeare seems to have inserted a highly topical discussion of the children's companies (Harold Jenkins gives the details). In this passage Rosencrantz provides the lively satire, and Hamlet is the casually interested questioner; the tensions between these two characters seem to be put on hold; they can lay them aside and just be ordinary people again. And there's nothing jarring about this - in the world of Hamlet such non-sequitur is characteristic and convincingly naturalistic. It's difficult to imagine any other play, even of Shakespeare's, being so capacious as to allow this. But here everyone, good or bad or mixture of both, can behave in an ordinary way.





This complicates our grasp of causality in Hamlet. Everyone knows that there's no clear explanation for why Hamlet delays, or why he decides to assume a guise of madness (in Saxo and Belleforest these matters follow logically from Amleth's situation, but not here). But Hamlet isn't alone in being resistant to explanation. Ophelia, distressed by the nunnery scene, is reasonably perky in the play scene. When we next see her she has gone mad; we can make reasonable guesses about why, but she can't tell us. Nor do we ever really know Gertrude's thoughts after the closet scene. The ghost seems to say that she was seduced before her first husband's death, but she never confirms it. Whether she really loved Claudius, and whether she now hates him, remain enigmas.  Hamlet's accusation to Guildenstern - "You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery" - can be directed to us interpreters too, seeking to prise definite causalities out of an action which proceeds with a marvellous impression of naturalism but with many non-sequiturs. Why does the Ghost say that he comes "to whet thy almost blunted purpose" not before but after Hamlet has just taken steps to confirm the king's guilt, and has just killed Polonius, thinking him to be the king? Or to take a much smaller thing, why does Hamlet reduce Ophelia's "tis twice two months" to "two months"? - what chiefly strikes us is the verisimilitude; this is the slipshod way that ordinary people talk.

The ethos of such a presentation is that people are weak. "Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping?" That sense of vague tolerance for inevitable weakness affects even our judgment of Claudius. He wanted power and he wanted Gertrude, and he did an evil thing to attain this, but what mainly strikes us is a certain helplessness. Claudius knows that his prayers are vain - God doesn't pardon him - but I believe his soliloquy goes a long way towards winning our pardon.
We see that he has a conscience. More than that, we see that restitution would be difficult and perverse, and his reluctance to give up his gains is all too understandable. He, too, is ordinary. Of course we see a more openly ruthless Claudius in the later acts, but even here our condemnation is modified, he hardly seems to exult in what he sees as self-defence; it is only the threatening and murderous Hamlet that he seeks to snuff out.

Hamlet too incurs that complex forgiveability. When at the end of the play, Horatio says "Now cracks a noble heart", the judgment does not strike most of us as a moral affront, we feel it's well justified.* Few will feel that cowardice - his own self-accusation - adequately describes the natural reluctance that he feels to "sweep" to his revenge. Yet Hamlet was cruel, he indulged in misogynistic diatribes, his behaviour (in one way or another) led to Ophelia's death, he cared little for accidentally killing Polonius and not at all for deliberately sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths - surely a disproportionate response to their rather venial involvement in keeping tabs on him.

Pure goodness isn't available here: we see that it's an effect of distance and selection. Hamlet's praise of his father doesn't shake our conviction that this war-like father likely committed a few acts in the course of his career that fully merited significant expiation in Purgatory. As for Hamlet's praise of Horatio, we feel its object squirming. Hamlet, we feel, is choosing for reasons of his own to make a great point of something he can't really know, Horatio being so much his social inferior. We believe, of course, that Horatio's a good sort, but that's a rather different thing from the moral ideal that Hamlet paints.

Yet most of us* are apt to believe that Horatio's testimony about Hamlet is sound. Partly because of what we see - that Hamlet has many lovable and fine qualities - , but also because the play teaches us that we, the audience, can't see the whole of any character.

While Harold Jenkins and Stephen Greenblatt have rightly praised Hamlet's dramatic advance in the depiction of inwardness, we should add that it is also a depiction of inscrutability. The more real the characters appear, the less they can be certainly known. Hamlet tells us much about himself, but we understand more of Hamlet than he is able to tell us; and at the same time we are also made aware of much that we cannot understand, and that the play will never explain. It's the same complex mixture of understanding and ignorance that characterizes our own relations with people we know.


*

* LOATHING HAMLET

The chief objection to D.H. Lawrence, Rebecca West or Simon Critchley, is that their highly negative views of Hamlet unbalance the play. If we can't identify with and feel pity for Hamlet when he's given his terrible mission by the ghost of his father, then all the life fizzles out of this most lively of plays.


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SOURCES AND ANALOGUES

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_of_Hamlet

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/amleth.html

The above is the interesting story of Amleth as it appeared in Saxo Grammaticus, Historiae Danicae aka Gesta Danorum Books III-IV. (written c. 1185-1220). (in the nineteenth-century translation of Oliver Elton, slightly revised by D. L. Ashliman.)

"Revenge is best served cold".  The motto suits Amleth, who is very different from Hamlet. It takes him years to execute his monumental revenge; years of patient steady dissimulation. He is apparently in a far more dangerous situation than Hamlet is. His pretended madness is a survival tactic.

As Jenkins points out, it isn't Hamlet's "delay" that is the issue, it's his indecision and procrastination. Delay is fine, so long as you have a definite plan, like Amleth does.

My two-pennyworth on this perennial topic is that anyway the delay isn't noticeable during a performance; Hamlet in play-time is always active, always doing something that either furthers his revenge directly or at least is calculated to confront his enemy. It's true that Hamlet beats himself up for being cold, sluggish, etc, and these statements are a portrait of frustration and impatience under the burden of an unpleasant but pressing duty; but when we're are under that kind of burden even ten minutes spent in idle talk may strike us as culpable procrastination. The impact of these speeches in no way depends on us knowing exactly how much procrastination there has been, and accordingly Hamlet himself provides no specific examples; he doesn't tell us that for a week he's been off hunting or that for a month he's been downloading DVDs. What produces the much-discussed problem is commentators interpreting these speeches in the light of their own inference that a lot of time has indeed gone by  (e.g. from Ophelia's "twice two months", or the return of the ambassadors from Norway); but surely these are unexceptional instances of "double time", typical of Shakespeare's practice throughout his career; no different, really, from Act I Scene 1, where we pass from midnight to dawn in about 8 minutes; and in my opinion not to be taken as hard evidence of Hamlet idling away time.]

In Saxo, the story of Amleth's revenge is only the first part of Amleth's story. He survives to pursue other stories in England and Scotland, finally suffering a violent death himself. The narrative therefore has the distanced effect of a chronicle, somewhat like the story of Lear and his daughters as told by Spenser.

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The story was translated into French by Belleforest in his Histoires Tragiques (1570)

(p. 149 - 191 of the link below)

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1103447/f331.image.r=fran%C3%A7ois%20de%20belleforest.langFR


Belleforest expands on Saxo, mainly only rhetorically, but some details of the expansion make their way into Hamlet, most likely via the Ur-Hamlet . (Belleforest's version speaks of a ghost, but the ghost is unimportant: he's mentioned only at the end of the story, as dutifully placated by Amleth when the revenge has already occurred.)

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The Ur-Hamlet

The Ur-Hamlet is a lost play that already existed in 1589. Harold Jenkins argues persuasively that it was written by Kyd and preceded The Spanish Tragedy.

I've always assumed that the plot-transformation by which the murder of Hamlet's father becomes a secret must have already occurred in the Ur-Hamlet, because almost the only thing we know about it is that it had a ghost who cried "Hamlet, revenge!". Jenkins points out that this is an assumption. Yet it's a natural one. Surely the Ghost must be Ur-Hamlet's father. But if Ur-Hamlet already knew that his uncle had killed his father (as Amleth did), there would be no dramatic need to bring in a ghost to urge what he must already have proposed to himself.  The ghost might, of course, have been just an incidental sensation; but Lodge's allusion suggests that the ghost was memorable.

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Antonio's Revenge

Marston's play, which can be precisely dated to winter 1600-01. Jenkins convincingly shows that it borrowed from Shakespeare's Hamlet , therefore confirming the date of the latter to be 1600 (or possibly, very late 1599). With the corollary, that the material about the "little eyasses" (children's companies such as Marston's)  was a later topical interpolation into a play that already existed - a very unusual thing for Shakespeare.

http://archive.org/stream/antonioandmellid00marsuoft/antonioandmellid00marsuoft_djvu.txt

Above, the 1921 Malone Society reprint of Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge . The text version is like reading subtitles through a snowstorm.  Read the PDF instead.

Compare and contrast Piero with Claudius:

Piero:

Oh, let me swoon for joy. By heaven, I think
I ha said my prayers within this month at least,
I am so boundless happy. Doth she come?
By this warm reeking gore, I'll marry her.
Look I not now like an Inamorate?
Poison the father, butcher the son, and marry the mother, ha?


Interesting review by Lucy Munro of the 2011 Edward's Boys production:

http://www.edwardsboys.org/reviews-and-feedback/review-antonios-revenge/

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ESSAYS AND INTERPETATIONS


Stephen Greenblatt's theory:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/oct/21/the-death-of-hamnet-and-the-making-of-hamlet/

This is a splendid essay so far as it expresses very clearly the question about Hamlet's madness; i.e. that it's necessary to Amleth but perverse for Hamlet; that it's insufficiently motivated once the murder is transformed into a secret murder.

You can appreciate the connection that Greenblatt makes between the unmotivated madness and the new drama of inwardness without having to go all the way with him on his theory that the play has deep connections with the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet in 1596. This was an idea that Greenblatt presumably developed from Ulysses; he extravagantly admires the biographical speculation of Stephen Dedalus and his pals in "Scylla and Charybdis"; just as they admire Wilde's "Portrait of Mr W.H."

(Nor do I feel very persuaded that a mixture of Catholic and Protestant beliefs is meaningfully foregrounded in Hamlet, as Greenblatt argues. - and Peter O'Toole before him...)

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Lena Levin on Julian Jaynes, the Bicameral Mind, and Hamlet:

http://sonnetsincolour.org/2015/03/julian-jaynes-and-william-shakespeare-on-the-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-bicameral-mind/ 

These notes on Shakespeare: full list

J.L. Runeberg: Tales of Ensign Stål (1848, 1860)

Illustration by Albert Edelfelt

[Image source: http://allthingsfinnish.tumblr.com/post/101044861262]

The original title is Fänrik Ståls Sägner – Ensign Stål is the supposed originator rather than the hero. His voice is not often heard, but his shade hangs over the ballad-poems – a figure of undaunted resolve in age.  

Johan Ludvig Runeberg was born in 1804 and died in 1877. He was only a small child in 1808 when the Czar suddenly declared for Napoleon and, since Sweden was now his enemy, invaded Finland without warning. (Finland had for six hundred years been loosely united to Sweden). The Finns defended heroically but they  had been taken by surprise; the Swedish king was not helpful and the war ended in subjection to Russia. This war of 1808-1809 is the subject of Ensign Stål.

Both volumes were eagerly awaited, many of the poems having been published in advance. The subject of Finnish heroism against the oppressor spoke to a young audience who were ardently patriotic. They reacted as Runeberg claimed to have reacted to a neglected history-book:

Oh what a land, what men were these,

How resolute, how glorious!

An army that could starve and freeze

And yet remain victorious!

Onward and ever on I sped;

I could have kissed each page I read.

The hour of danger spurred this band

To bolder resolution.

What love didst thou inspire, O land,

Despite thy destitution, -

A love so strong, a love so sweet

From those thou gav’st but bark to eat!

Runeberg’s work nurtured a new, Scandinavian style of patriotism. “Our land is poor”, he says with pride, but

            We love the thunder of our streams,

            Our torrent’s headlong bound,

            Our gloomy forests’ mournful themes,

            Our starry nights, our summer’s beams...

Patriotism in most countries involves some recognition of the beauty of one’s land (“England’s green and pleasant land”), but in Sweden and Finland the beauty is more intensely experienced. It is omnipresent and has a certain uniformity: the largely poor, acidic soils, and the long winters see to that. There is no rank overgrowth, and birch by a wooden shack by a lake is an extremely sparse symbol that evokes everything.

Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804-1877) was one of the founders of Finnish literature but he wrote in Swedish, which had become the standard language of the educated classes. Runeberg tells us that Otto von Fieandt could speak Finnish to his men, but that remark seems positioned as a further instance of von Fieandt’s likeable eccentricity; I think that is the only reference to the existence of a second language. Though his intensely patriotic vision meant nurturing in poem after poem a sense of the people as a whole community (traitors only to be excluded), it is ironic to reflect that many of the commoners he hymned would have been unable to understand his poems, or he theirs (e.g. the Kanteletar poems collected by Lönnrot). Runeberg, Lönnrot and Snellman (the class of 1822 at the University), were each in different ways preparing the ground for a Finnish nation, but it was a nation that was bound to suffer the consequences of a struggle between two languages.

Runeberg’s cycle of poems has a cumulative impact. The army became itself the image of a united nation seen in its best light; in The Aged Lode, for example, the veteran campaigner’s inner boyishness combines a simple faith, military zeal, humanity to the stricken of both sides, and playful humour. It’s the civvies (pastors, for example), who Runeberg sometimes suggests may be less than humane; cold self-seekers, uncommitted to the common cause. When the doctor sweeps his medicines from the table in Döbeln at Jutas, he becomes a man. 

Runeberg’s idea of a nation (symbolized by the army) is inclusive. He finds room for the dim-witted (Sven Duva), the vagabond (Number Fifteen Stolt), the camp-follower (Lotta Svärd), the renegade eccentric (Otto von Fieandt), for aged veterans and untried youths. Runeberg is inspiring his readers, teaching them what to think and how to feel, but the emphasis is usually on warmth and comedy, not on austerity. It is a martial ideal, but also a civilized one.

Thus, of the treachery that relinquished Sveaborg, Stål says:

Young man, you love the ring of verse,

Our past you love right well,

It may be sometime you’ll rehearse

This tale you’ve heard me tell.

Speak of his guilt, which none deny,

But hide his name, then, as do I.

Let not his kindred share the blame,

None else his guilt should own,

Or blush with sympathetic shame;

Its weight be his alone.

The traitor, nevermore has he

Son, father, kin or family.

The civilisation comes out in the total exoneration of kindred; the unsparing zeal in the separation of the scapegoat.

One should be ready to die for Finland. In The Cloud’s Brother this is presented with compelling seriousness, when the dead hero’s girl says:

Dear he was, when to my bosom folded,

Dearer than all else the world had given,

Doubly dear he now is in his glory,

Coldly clasped unto the cold earth’s bosom.

Sweeter far than life I found that love was,

Sweeter far than love to die as he did.

But this powerfully unsmiling poem of 1835, though Runeberg included it in Ensign Stål, is different in tone from the rest: its locale is much vaguer and more distant than the events of 1808, and this sanctions a ferocity that the author did not permit elsewhere.

Many another poem celebrates death in the cause of one’s country, but the starkness of The Cloud’s Brother is modified by a change of focus; for example, Munter makes comic capital of its subject (a man of few words), or The Girl of the Cottage laments that her non-returning lover ran away from battle and did not die as she had supposed.  

Ensign Stål is a cycle with other intent than accurately recounting the war of 1808-09. Runeberg slightly idealizes it; his war is terrible but not obscene. He also artfully mixes up the chronology so we see the war in fragments, returning again and again to Siikajavi, Oravais, and Virta Bridge. These vivid glimpses permit the controlled release of shaped symbols; a chronological view would have emphasized the disaster rather than the heroism (and complicate matters by forcing attention onto such matters as the Swedish king’s failure to provide timely support). The magnificent triumph celebrated in Döbeln at Jutas is held at arm’s length from the “bloody rout” of Oravais, which in fact followed only a few days later; the shadow of Oravais, here, would have imposed unwanted complexities. 

Runeberg’s desire to mould a nation leads to a number of scenes in which the army unites men of different ranks. He is wise enough to steal the power of class prejudice; to make us cheer when Von Konow is struck by his corporal, or when Von Essen’s stallion is raced without his permission for a patriotic wager. In The Ensign at the Fair the figure of the general is at first presented coldly, hinting at arrogance. We are shocked when he scatters the grenadier’s coins, and reconciled when he proclaims the grenadier his comrade and takes him into his carriage. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. Runeberg has tried to identify the general’s stiffness with a principled military pride, but the offer to make the man his pensioner leaves a taste in the mouth. Stål’s earlier words still ring:

“Strut and sparkle there! You once were one of us,” within I said;

“Not so proud but better garnished with the drops of blood you shed.”

Is it possible now, in peace, to truly resurrect the comradeship of war?

It is a proud freedom, though a freedom displayed in sacrifice, that animates the cycle. One of its most powerful images comes in Döbeln at Jutas. The poem begins comically with a cleric (between mouthfuls of roast beef) bemoaning Döbeln’s unregenerate state. Döbeln is laid up with fever, but the army is in sore straits without him. After the scene with the doctor, Döbeln rises to unite his troops again. We pass down the tattered ranks with him:

Illustration by Albert Edelfelt

[Image source: Wikimedia Commons]

Such an old veteran was Number Seven,

A corporal in von Kothen’s regiment.

The single shoe he wore was badly riven,

His other bare foot left a bloody print...

Such are the soldiers with whom Döbeln wins his brilliant victory. Afterwards he stands on the deserted field at dusk, and makes his address to God:

Our duty’s done, my soldiers are victorious,

And that which now is left concerns but me.

I’m called freethinker, and I count it glorious;

Free-born I am, and so my thought is free....

You have restored my country, by no merit

Of mine, for every other hope was hid.

Do You, all-seeing, look into my spirit,

If gratitude be there for what you did.

The slave may court his god with genuflexion;

I cannot cringe and grovel for protection,

I seek no favor, ask for no reward.

I would but stand here happy in your presence,

With fervent heart but yielding no obeisance;

That prayer a free man’s soul may still afford.

You gave me courage, when our foes assembled,

To lead my men unswerving through the fight.

My body failed me and my sinews trembled;

Your strength upheld me in my own despite.

The army was beset from every angle,

But with my help today it broke the tangle,

The road to glory opened out anew.

But You it was who saved us and none other,

How shall I speak to You? My God, my brother,

Giver of victory, my thanks to You!

         

[Most of the poems – all the ones I’ve quoted – were impressively translated into English verse by the resourceful Charles Wharton Stork. Runeberg’s metrical schemes are varied and often demanding. Clement Burbank Shaw picked up the remainder; he did a reasonable job, but is driven to excessive inversion. The combined collection was published in Finland by Söderström & Co., 1952.]

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Runeberg Torte (Runebergintorttu / Runebergstårta)

[Image source: http://www.kotikokki.net/reseptit/nayta/7807/Runebergin%20tortut/]

This is a Finnish seasonal cake typically eaten between early January and February 5th (Runeberg's birthday).

The connection with Runeberg is that it appears in his wife Fredrika's recipe book. According to legend, Runeberg liked eating it for breakfast, along with a glass of punsch.

Runeberg torte is flavoured with arrack. Punsch, the Swedish "national drink", is flavoured with arrack too.

Arrack is a strong SE Asian liquor. Its slightly surprising place in Nordic cuisine dates from 1733, when the Swedish East India Company began importing it from Java. The taste for it quickly caught on, and persists to this day (as in the confectionery below).

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Stål's Penny (Ståls Penning). This was a gilt commemorative medallion issued in 1945-1947 to raise money for the care of Finnish war orphans, both in Finland and Sweden. The obverse shows a baby reaching for a budding twig, designed by the sculptor Wäinö Aaltonen. The reverse says "Commemorating 1940s aid to Finland" --- more or less: minne is a difficult word to translate into English --, and round the outside is a quote from "The Cloud’s Brother": Sweeter far than life I found that love was (Mer än leva fann jag var att älska).

This particular one belonged to my great aunt Lydia Gulliksson, who worked with Finnish refugee children at an orphanage in the backsticks of Medelpad (N. Sweden).

in eastern Jämtland

FORS SOCKEN I JÄMTLANDS LÄN SIGILL +  FISKET FÖRLORAT

This is the seal of Fors parish, the easternmost parish in Jämtland.  The name "Fors" referred, no doubt, to the mighty waterfall Storforsen on the Indal river. 

The motto "Fisket förlorat" (the lost fishery) was coined at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the immediate aftermath of Vild-Hussens inadvertent destruction of Storforsen. 

The salmon fishing at Fors was famous and had been economically important. After the reformation, the crown took over control of the fishing rights from the church, and there were quite a number of lawsuits with local bondsmen. 

Vild-Hussen's project was sponsored by the farmers upstream, at Stugun and Ragunda; they couldn't float their timber over the falls without it being smashed to pieces. And of course they had no salmon. 

You can imagine that Vild-Hussen's controversial project was a lot less popular among the men of Fors. Even if it had gone according to plan, the salmon would no longer mass below Storforsen.  

When Ragunda lake drained in a single night, it produced a bow-wave that swamped farmland and swept away livestock all the way down to the sea, forty miles away. Salmon were found in the tree-tops.

Because of the run-off and because the river now had a new river-bed for part of its course, it took years for the muddy water to clear. During this time there were no fish. When the salmon came back they passed upstream of Fors, establishing a new ground below Hammarforsen (beside Hammarstrand). 

Of course you could still catch some salmon in Fors, or indeed anywhere downriver. My grandmother remembered how, while hay-making in the Indal farms, they all moaned about being fed salmon every night. 

(My grandparents, like other townsfolk of Sundsvall, often had a working holiday in the Indal valley. And in my mother's school there was a holiday in early October so that pupils could dig the potatoes on nearby farms.) 

I bought this precious tee-shirt in the summer cafe behind Fors church. I went there with my sister in July 2013, the last time that I've been in that part of the world. 

(Information sources: http://www.hasjo.com/jamtlandshistoria.pdf ; http://www.jamtli.com/dodafallet/8949.historien_om_doda_fallet.html )