Michael Peverett: a virtual Norrland

Thursday, April 09, 2020

a virtual Norrland

Summer plans for physically visiting northern Sweden being on hold, I've been finding other ways to indulge my Norrland nostalgia.

My marginal notes on Bo R. Holmberg's novel Dagsmeja have begun to sprout pictures and recipes when a simple translation doesn't really do it; it's starting to look quite decorative.

Holmberg's novel is set in Ångermanland, near to eastern Jämtland, where for many years we had our summer cottage. A little south from there is Västernorrland (the old county was called Medelpad), dominated by the large town of Sundsvall, where my mother grew up. So that's the bit of Norrland that I know reasonably well. A little above it are the forbidding distances of what used to be called southern Lapland and is now Västerbotten.

[I often used to wonder how Västernorrland and Västerbotten got their names, when they are on East coast of Sweden. Ultimately it goes back to the time when Finland was effectively a Swedish province. The popular term "Norrland" embraced the distinctively northern parts (many trees, few people) of both Sweden and Finland. So Västernorrland was in the west of Norrland. Västerbotten lay (as it still does!) to the west of the Gulf of Bothnia (Bottenviken), and Norrbotten to the north of it, but these names made more sense when there was also an "Österbotten", historically the corresponding county of Finland, on the east coast of Bottenviken.]

Norrland is a land of dialects, still vigorous today but also with many archaic terms whose memory is cherished. Norrländska describes words commonly used across the whole of northern Sweden, but not in the south. But apart from this there are the more narrowly regional dialects. In my area, that means jämtländska, ångermanländska, and medelpadska. (These are dialects of Swedish, not the Sami languages that also spoken in the north.) Jämtländska was the best known to me. It reflects Jämtland's more westerly centre of gravity, its history of connection with Norway (it has belonged to Norway at one time or another), and its inland transhumance culture. But the other dialects have their own terms. For instance Holmberg speaks of en skryd släkt, a family (descent, lineage, breed) whose members tend to die young. Skryd is an Ångermanland word that bundles the ideas of scantiness, scarcity, and ephemerality: "short-lived" would be the best translation in this context.

Mjölkbord: a milk churn table (they existed in Britain too). Once a common site by country roads. A table where the churns were placed, to make it easier for the dairy vehicle to pick them up and drop them off.

Pinnstol: a chair with the back composed of turned struts.

krimmermössa: literally, a Crimea cap. It meant a popular kind of sheepskin hat without a peak or brim. The term arose in Germany (where the sheepskin really did come from the Crimea).

Here are some other local or northern terms I've encountered so far:

ala to plough, harrow (see päral)
på fyromfötter on all fours
knix bump in the road
lägda field
nipa erosion cliff bank on river bank

Päral

[Image source: https://digitaltmuseum.se/011023835143/paral .]

päral small plough for potato field
päranna potato harvest
pärland potato field
stötting horse-drawn sled e.g. for carrying timber
täv locked-in smell (Ångermanländska)

saxen: I knew this meant "the scissors", but that made no sense in the context of hauling logs. I eventually realized that in this case it referred to timber tongs, as pictured here.

My dictionary gave me translations for the numerous horse terms, but what use was that to me, when I didn't know what they meant in English?

Old Berglund was böjd som en spiskrok, "bent as a poker". That made no sense, until I remembered the shape of the stove poker in our own cottage. It had a crook at one end (to hang it from a rail when not in use) and a crimp at the other end, which was used to lift up the heavy hob rounds in order to access the wood-burning compartment from above. When the stove was cool you would do this to sweep it out. But sometimes you had to do it even when the stove was hot, e.g if the fire didn't draw properly and the kitchen was filling with smoke.