The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/tromso)
One day this August I picked up my phone and called Jens-Roger. “You know I told you the other week that I and my family were moving out?” “Yes, I remember.” “Well, I was thinking that before we leave for good, we should bury our daughter’s placenta. And we all really enjoy your place. Could we find a spot somewhere there?”
It is like living in a lighthouse, surrounded by nothing but the wild, often unwelcoming nature. You merely need to take three steps outside the door to remember where you are. Locals have a saying about that: “Vi vet kor vi bor” (“We know where we live”) and it is often in November that you start hearing it out loud.
Lyonel Perabo’s daily walk to his child’s kindergarten takes him through his hometown’s cemetery, a place to reflect on history and what has been passed down to us.
Twelve years ago to the day, I boarded a flight from the Oslo-Gardenmoen airport in south Norway. I was heading for Tromsø, some 1100 kilometers (roughly 700 miles) north, where I was to start a new year of study and a new chapter in my life. This plane ride was but the last leg of a much longer trip which started all the way in the southern French town of Beziers, where I lived, before leading to Paris, my birth place, and then Oslo, all through a combination of high speed trains, overnight bus rides, and ferries. When I arrived in Tromsø, it was a typical Arctic autumn day, where massive gray clouds had only cold winds to compete with for the domination of the skies. As I left the airport, I grabbed unto my two massive suitcases, and headed for the other side of the island, where the campus was located.
While working in Tromsø’s Polar Museum, Lyonel Perabo considers the way Pagan relics are kept behind museum walls – and how modern Pagans might bring new life into those objects.