Attempt not to Vomit

While I was in Sweden, I saw a number of things that were so fundamentally foreign I couldn’t really fix them in my mind. These things were so outside my experience that I have difficulty managing to explain or describe them now. As I try to wrap my mind around those strangenesses, I find myself guessing at details that should be certainties; I am one of those explorers who, having visited a distant land, reports that the natives are headless and have faces in their chests.

One of the things that seems vague even now are the trolls. I have a feeling that asking the two who travelled to Sweden with me would reveal very different experiences, but we’d all agree that there were trolls along the roadside as we bussed through the forests around some of the rural towns along the way to Jonköping.

The trolls themselves were between twenty and thirty feet tall, mottled green and brown, looming over the roads just outside the treeline. They all of wood, but exposure to the elements seemed to have covered the whole in a thin layer of forest-green moss, blurring the trolls’ hunchbacked outlines, rendering them indistinct green silhouettes against their evergreen backdrop.

After the trolls, we drove through an out-of-the-way lakeside town, the lake so broad that the opposite bank was lost in the thin afternoon mist. The road wound round the lake’s edge, and on one bank we saw something like the trolls. In loops curling from the grass, as though breaking the surface of some green lake, we saw the surging undulations of a strange serpent state. Even the word “statue” feels wrong, as though it bespeaks an inanimate quality they didn’t really have, but it’s as close a word as I know.

These were objects so strange I couldn’t quite parse them, outcroppings of a culture and a history breaking the surface of an otherwise quite familiar place. Amid all this alienness, there was one element that resonated so strongly with home that it feels out of place when I think of it now. 

While we were walking through Jonköping, we passed a roundabout that had at its centre a ring of ogham stones. For anyone not Irish enough to have encountered ogham before, it’s a written form of Irish inscribed onto the corners of upright pillars of rock. It’s easier to see from an image than a description, so check this one out:

In its own way, the ring of ogham in Jonköping was out of the ordinary; the “stones” themselves were a shining metal, the ogham notches down their edges pointed towards the circle’s centre and were so uniform and evenly spaced that we wondered whether or not it actually said anything. If it did, it was beyond my learned-in-a-week-when-I-was-sixteen ability to decipher.

It’s hard to communicate quite how much the ogham reminded me of home, having spent so long being wowed by Sweden’s free gingerbread, trolls and sea monsters. Similarly, it feels weird to describe a place that is, on the surface, so similar to Ireland as being so alien, but I suppose the overall similarity serves to highlight the difference.

I’ve since spent a little while trying to find any notes on just how ogham ended up in Jonköping, or when the metallic “stones” were erected. Sadly, my research skills aren’t quite up to it. If there are any Swedes out there who happen upon this, I’d love to know about the little shred of home that caught me so off-guard while I traipsed across your country.