An Arctic Story Teller

By : Liselotte Wiemer

We need stories - false stories or tall tales if necessary -in order to keep life and time and the community going, and to prevent the blood from congealing.

   In one of Jørn Riel´s stories, a young man named Anton - a student who has gone off to Greenland with his soul full of dreams and heroic deeds - decides to give up and return to Denmark. Loneliness, passivity, and not least the winter darkness, darkness day and night - in short, the reality beyond the dreams he has built up - are in the end too much for him.

   But then a snow sparrow appears. And he hears spring in the snow sparrow´s song: Arctic spring. And in the bird´s tiny tracks in the snow he sees the beginning of a connection, that the freedom which the Arctic had offered him corresponded to a longing within him. "And where before he dreamt of the unattainable, now he felt that he was happy with the attainable, that he was at home in the world around him."

   It is plausible to see a sketch of Jørn Riel himself in his portrait of the young Anton - and hardly necessary to add that Anton does not return to Denmark, but lets his meeting with the snow sparrow decide matters.

   Jørn Riel too has restlessness in his blood. He was born in Odense in 1931 and grew up in the Vesterbro quarter of Copenhagen, but before he was out of his teens he had already run away from home several times. At eighteen he succeeded in joining an expedition to Eastern Greenland - and remained up there for the next thirteen years! There he found out in the flesh what it meant to winter alone in the Arctic darkness, and he experienced that total surrender to nature, and to the few people one has contact with, which the Artic landscape demands.

   The tough and gentle, peculiar and close the sometimes even tender relationships among these Greenland travellers, men who have no other stories than the ones they carry with them in their skulls, are what Jørn Riel later portrayed in a long series of affectionate, amusing, and patently false stories. The so called tall tales.

Truth is a lie with a point
The concept of the tall tale has in a strange way melded with Jørn Riels oeuvre. "Skrøner" is the name for the Scandinavian variety of tall tale: stories whose essence lies in entertaining invention, in exaggeration, in the power to evoke a grimace or a shiver of horror - in short, good yarns. Here concepts like truth and morality definitely come second.

   But truth is nonetheless to be found in Riel´s tall tales, for they build on genuine human material. His oddballs from the Arctic - and for that matter from wherever in the world Riel has travelled - are undeniably, for better or worse, people of flesh and blood.

   Here we meet the Count, who left his estate in order to produce Arctic wine. Mads Madsen, who invents a woman named Emma and lets her make the rounds among the men - those whose imaginations are in working order, you understand! Fjodur Icelander with his secret passion for knitting, Black William with his tattoos; and Sivert and Bjørken and Sylte and Anton ... and the good ship Little Mari.

   This ship is literally their only means of contact with the outside world. It is therefore often the starting point of new stories - as when a lawyer arrives to announce an unexpected inheritance, or an English countess decides she would like to bag a musk ox on an Arctic safari. Or as in the gripping story of Alexander the rooster, who is liberated from the ship by Herbert the recluse (thus escaping the soup pot!) and becomes his closest friend and confidant. They philosophize together, go on hikes together, sleep one in an upper bunk, one in the lower. A reflective and very rare rooster indeed is Alexander. But he cannot make it through the winter darkness; his comb begins to droop; his feathers fall out. When the sun finally returns he wobbles to the door, gathers all his remaining strength, and crows three times. After which he drops dead.

   If a story like this one evokes more tears than laughter, that is because, like so many of Riel´s tall tales, it deals first and foremost with human loneliness and the strange ways of love. The same can be said of the horrifying short story "The Pig", in which the jealous Halvor ends by mistaking the pig for his friend. Here the extremities of landscape and feeling turn demonic: once one has entered a certain feeling, one can never get out of it again. The darkness and isolation become an accelerating inner madness.

Longing is a point on the horizon
Jørn Riel´s oeuvre includes no less than three trilogies. The one he made his debut with, Mine fædres hus (The House of My Fathers) (1970-72), dealt with the boy Agojaraq, who was the fruit of a menage consisting of a small group of trappers and a generous Eskimo girl. This trilogy established Jørn Riel as an entertaining storyteller whose work was based on a clearly concrete, immediate Arctic world that he had experienced, a world in which people live their lives and cannot survive without forbearance and humour.

Du bor i dit navn (You Live in Your Name) (1976-78) must be considered partly autobiographical. It is a portrait of Peter Eje, who as a young man goes to sea and - like his father fixes his restless longing on a point on the horizon, well knowing that his goal, the eye of the hurricane, can be found only inside himself: "But there is no window into the closed room of silence, and I will not find my way in alone. So I must be content to stand outside with my longing," writes Peter to his friend Kristian. The trilogy is a mix of genres, in which reminiscence and fabulation contend.

The most beautiful of the trilogies is the large Greenland saga Sangen for livet (The Song of Life) (1983-85), which was issued in one volume in 1989. Here the light touch of the tall tale is transformed into the broader and weightier form of myth in a becoming way. And here the story of the Eskimo people merges with and becomes an emblem of the traveller´s attraction to the horizon.

The first novel of the trilogy, Heq (Heq) tells of how native hunters from North America first reached Greenland about a thousand years ago - led by the young Heq. Heq becomes the prototype, in Riel´s universe, of the person who can survive because he can submit to the mythic forces of life and nature without denying his self. For Heq to be initiated, he must therefore descend into the crevasse, the cleft between the known and the unknown, in order that he may bear the gift of spirit in his physical body. Only then he can hear the song that bestows wisdom and insight. And then he can become the forefather of Greenland´s people, the Inuit, the characters whom we follow through three novels up to our own time.

   The second novel, Arluk (Arluk) takes place five hundred years later, when the Norsemen have been coming into Greenland from the south for a couple of centuries. Arluk is a descendant of Heq; he too bears the gift of spirit and can hear the song, and he too must cross a crevasse. There he loses his whole family; but finally - together with a woman from the south - he begets the child who will ensure that the lineage is continued up to our own time.

   The woman in the third novel, Sore is descended from Arluk´s line. Now tribal warfare and the dangers of nature have been replaced by alcohol abuse and wife-beating. Her family breaking up, Sore attempts a life in Denmark, but must return to "this hopeless emptiness called development". Only when Sore is reunited with her mother, and her mother relates her own and her family´s history, does Sore recover some sense of connectedness in her split life.

History consists of stories
Among the Eskimo people the history of the family line was preserved through transmission, through stories told by the storytellers. For stories shape identity, gather in and renew life. This process is the thread that runs through Riel´s work as well. The snow sparrow has left its tracks. We need stories - false stories or tall tales if necessary - in order to keep life and time and the community going, and to prevent the blood from congealing.

   In one of Riel´s finest novels, Før morgendagen (Before Tomorrow) - about a grandmother and her young grandson who, as the last surviving members of their family, must face death together - it is precisely the stories that keep them going: "Hour after hour she shared with him that inherited treasure which her people had gathered through many generations." And when there is no longer any way back, she lies down at the end and tells him of the journey they will now make, to the wonderful settlement in the south, filled with people, common dwellings, and sunlight.

   Jørn Riel trusts his own story, and that is his strength as a writer. He trusts that his story has the quality which is the decisive power of every narrative: that it bears its own weight. This makes him simultaneously a simple and a clear storyteller. And if on occasion the reactionary-romantic takes over, then at those moments he is also rebuking us, putting his finger on the sore spot of our civilization: the split between us and the strange, living world.

Translated by Roger Greenwald