A Dance with the Devil

January 21st 2023

It's Saturday morning, the thermometer just outside the window reads -7°C and we have a whole day of outdoor activities ahead of us. So put on all your layers and get ready.

I'm heading to Bygdøy, a peninsula in the Oslo fjord, and home to the most expensive real-estate in the entirety of Norway. I'm mainly here for the Norsk Folkemuseum, an open-air museum with relocated buildings from rural areas of Norway.

The thin blanket of snow is especially crunchy and opinionated today — I enjoy crunching my way through the otherwise quiet streets of this patchwork town.
One of the unassuming wooden huts here is said to house the dark origins of an old Norwegian myth ^[ref]:

Back when these timber beams kept the elements at bay in Hol, some three hundred years ago, there was a wedding here. The beer flows freely, there's music and there's dancing.
There's an argument, too, and in the middle of the hall a circle forms around two young men, facing each other, knives out. The music stops. Screams of two women pierce the silence, but a ring of brooding, broad-shouldered men enforce the border of circle.

The village butcher descends into the cellar to fetch a beer for the victor of the fight that ensues. Down in the damp basement, he finds a fiddler leaning against the cask of beer. He holds the fiddle the wrong way around, with the neck towards his chest, playing a tune the butcher has never heard before. It's haunting and beautiful and it flows through the room like water. He's tapping the rhythm against the wooden cask, but as the butcher turns to look, he finds not a human foot but a horse's hoof.

The butcher runs back up the stairs, shaken by the encounter, and finds one of the young men lying on the floor, dead.

The tune he heard that night, the Fanitullen, is still played in Hallingdal to this day, or so they say.

All of which is to say: When I walk up on the porch of this tiny wooden house, the wood under my feet creaks so deeply that for a second I can feel the basement's evil spirits in my very bones.
After a good two hours of walking through the freezing empty streets of centuries past, I see the outlines of the crown jewel of this collection — the old stave church of Gol — peeking out between the trees.

I make it to the top of the hill, and there it is, against a sky with the first traces of dusk, and it's just so beautiful, and maybe that's already enough to keep the devils in the cellar.
I spend the rest of the long sunset wandering around the island, skirting around the plentiful "private property" signs and find a snowy frozen beach looking out over the grey-gold water.

The nudist beach is devoid of nude people, but apart from that it's all 5/5, very good, would walk the icy shore again.
There's a woman sitting out there, on broken concrete in the water, alone. I wonder if she's cold at all, and what's going through her mind.