Røst's small keys to the Odyssey
- Finn Olav
- Nov 16, 2018
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 28, 2019
Part 2
My connection to the story started with the place where I live and grew up. A tiny
archipelago fare out at sea, distant fore hour with ferry west of the Norwegian coast. It’s a small archipelago called Røst (Roest).
Røst
Røst is the place in Norway with the most sky and the most sea, “and the least in between”, a tourist ones said. This place is not like anything I’ve ever seen anywhere else. And it is not even over touristified. Situated right south of the more famous Lofoten islands an artist ones called it “the final dot of Lofoten”. It’s said that Røst consists of 365 grass-grown islands. Where only one is inhabited nowadays. Actually, it’s several lower islands connected with roads and small bridges.
Nowadays people are totally dependent upon their car. Earlier the boat played a similar role and the sea was the highway connecting you to your neighbour and the rest of the world, the sea was not a limitation as many see it today.
In the West of the today inhabited island Røstlandet there are two larger cliffs. Vedøya and Storfjellet raising 202 meters and 267 meters. Continuing even further west there are three characteristic islands. Nykan. The first one is Elefsnyken with one top. The middle one is Trenyken with three tops. And the outer one is Hærnyken with two tops and a characteristic stone pillar sticking out of one of them looking like a giant troll sitting on the side of the hill. Today this giant natural figure is called Isac. The origins of this name is today forgotten.
I have always wondered why such a spectacular landscape didn’t have any legend or fairytale connected to it. Other places in Norway where you have special landscapes there is always some fairytale connected to the formations, but this landscape had no story. But this I do now hope is about to change forever.
Vedøya
For this story, some traces of a small settlement on the island Vedøya might be of interest. The settlement lies under what used to be a huge bird cliff. There are traces after several smaller buildings around the bay. I have also counted 17 small slipways in the shoreline used to take small boats out of the water. And the most important thing for the people staying there, a very tiny pond with fresh water coming out of the mountain.
The first archeologists who did a check on the site used carbon dating of charcoal from the fireplaces inside the buildings to date the setelement. The first samples examined dated approximately 1000 years old. This would be from the viking period. Then further down in the soyle they found a second layer of coal that dated 2000 years old. It is not typical for the viking age people to reuse older struktures like this since they were pretty superstitious and afraid of ghosts. So they rather build something new. But since there is very little resources around to build from they probably had to reuse. Then one day a man working with archeology for the county came to Røst, for his holiday. He had his son with him. He had the permission to take more samples on the site and in a couple of locations they dug down through all the soyle until they hit the stones in the bottom. There in the werry bottom of the hole they found yet another layer of black soyle containing charcoal. When the samples had been analysed the data showed that it was more than 4500 years but not as old as 5000 years. Pollen samples from the area also suggests that the changing of the vegetation because of human activities started approximately 5000 years back.
The Secrets of the Caves
Some time in the nineteen-eighties some people were visiting a cave 50 km North of Røst. The Kollhellaren or Revsvikhula as the cave also is called, at the Southern tip of the Lofoten mountain range. It was around mid-summer and in the middle of the night. Since the location is North of the arctic circle it's not night as you normally would think. You have midnight sun and a nice evening daylight. At midnight the sunlight was shining straight into the north-facing cave.
With the extra bit of light, they were shocked to see cave paintings that had been hidden in the dark for thousands of years. The years to come came with more cave-paintings discovered along the coast. More paintings were found in several caves from the coast of Trønderlag in the south, to southern Troms as the northern limit.
At the beginning of the nineteen-nineties, the new discoveries were halting. So the archaeologists started looking in a different direction. The islands continuing outside the tip of Lofoten. On the smaller uninhabited island called Mosken, between Værøy and the southern tip of Lofoten, they found paintings, on Værøy they found them too.Then one day the team of people from Tromsø Museum and the Nordland County came to Røst to look for cave-paintings. They had two sites they wanted to explore. The first was the cave “Vishelleren” on Vedøya, where you have the settlements dating approximately 1000, 2000 and almost 5000 years back. Here they couldn't find anything.
Trenyken
The next place they wanted to examine was the cave “Helvete” (Norwegian for Hell) on the island Trenyken. The cave had been known among the inhabitants of Røst as long as we know. People have from time to time gone there and written their names in “Hell”. The landing conditions on the island can be rather rough. And it isn’t every day its possible to go ashore there. So I use to say that the worst thing about “Hell” is to be keeping the boat in one piece while staying there. The island Trenyken is one of three islands in the Røst archipelago that has the Nyken ending in its name. This three islands is lying on a row with Trenyken as the middle one. Trenyken has three very distinct tops. (The name Nyk is believed to mean top rising from the sea. Nyk is also related to the Norwegian word/name Nut, meaning top rising from a mountain or hill). In the middle top that is called Steien (on some maps also called Steigen), you find the cave “Helvete”. The two other tops are Spjuten and Breien. Spjut is the old word for spear. It's the sharp top. Steien means steep and Breien means wide. Tre at the beginning of the name means three.
The cave entrance to “Hell” lies approximately 130 ft above sea level. Then it slopes approximately 65 ft down. Halfway down to sea level. The bottom of the cave is almost flat with a floor consisting of small round stones and white seashell sand. This sand is carbon dated to be approximately 30.000 years old. So 30.000 years back the sea level was 70 ft higher than today, at this location. After this old shoreline was set off inside the cave the Ice age came and pushed a 100 ft high hill of stone blocks in front of the cave. The trip down is steep, muddy and slippery. Then you must pass two bigger rocks before you reach the bigger flat area that is like a small cathedral. Then there goes a more narrow path further in and turning right into a small chamber in the end. Horizontally the cave stretches about 280 ft into the mountain, though it is difficult to define exactly where it begins.
Hein Bjartmann Bjerck who is the number one expert on cave paintings at Tromsø Museum and the rest of the expedition had been planning to stay on Trenyken for several days before I and my father should pick them up. Well inside the cave they only had to turn on the lights they had with them to see that under the newer tagging was cave paintings of several smaller humans and two big humans with something that looked like horns or a crone. In the bottom of the cave, or as the locals say “in the bottom of Hell” they found bones from a big, grey seal (Halichoerus grypus). In the bones there cutting marks showing that this seal didn’t get there by himself. Somebody had transported the seal into the cave and had been cutting in it. The seal was probably sacrificed there in some kind of religious ceremony. Before the museum crew’s pickup, they were unable to get the word out and getting the seal-bones dated. They hoped they would be 30.000 years like the sand, but the carbon dating said about 3600 years old. This is the same age as datings associated with the other cave paintings along the coast.
The scholars say that the cave probably was used in transitional ceremonies like when young boys should become adults. Those people don’t dare to say anything about things that isn't solid made from solid matter, carbon dated and already accepted by the majority of their colleagues.
It seems that the majority of the figures that are painted are in the twilight zones of the caves. I believe that the location of the paintings symbolizes a spiritual bridge from the over-world to the underworld.
The next blog will be about how I got my first introduction to the story that was hidden behind the landscape and the small pieces of historical data that you could read about here.
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