Review: Atle Næss «The forgotten century. Stories from the 17th century»
Nonfiction
Publisher:
Gyldendal
Release year:
2022
«Gapes at too much.»
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What does the experienced writer Atle Næss do? In my eyes, he does something unforgivable. He takes excerpts from the «Frideric Bollingii Oost-Indiske Reise-bog», adds a dike position schoolbook-like Danish-Norwegian history, stirs it up, boils it up and calls the witch brew «The forgotten century».
Doesn’t taste good
“Forgotten”, like. Has it been forgotten that Norway lost Jemtland and Herjedalen in 1645? Is the Thirty Years’ War, King Kristian Kvart and Christiania forgotten? The only source I can find for the invented «forgotten century» is a themed issue of the history students’ magazine Past, no. 2–2013.
I cannot, with the best of my will, see that Atle Næss’s retelling of 17th-century history contains anything new or unconventional. The beloved Karsten Alnæs has done this before, much better. And even Swedish Peder Englund with his haunting books about the Thirty Years’ War, «Ufredsår» and «Den oövervinnerlige».
Startling thriller
Recycle
The handling of individual fates such as the case is also well-known and well-used: it is gripping, gruesome and generally titillating to read about the ax murder that Anne Holter had committed on her spouse in the gray clearing on 2 May 1623. And it gets worse – or better – when Anne accuses . and sentenced to mutilation, stake and fire for witchcraft and intercourse with the devil. Anne’s fate is well known and described previously in a number of representations. This is history writing on repeat.
The author could profitably refrain from linking the past to today’s debate. Here Thormøhlen appears as ordered. Streets and roads at Møhlenpris in Bergen are named after him, to the great outrage of Black Lives Matter and the Woke movement. Næss writes extensively about Thormøhlen. Whether he was also a slave trader, “is almost a matter of definition.”
And while we’re on the subject: Was there any point in tagging down the statue of Kristian Kvart? After all, it was he, the despotic king, who supported Danish-Norwegian imperialism and the slave trade. And how Norwegian was this gloomy past? Wasn’t Norway itself a Danish colony during the monarchy? Næs chooses the path of least resistance; it’s a little on one side, a little on the other.
Was called a stuffed farmer
Sensible
Regarding cleanliness on our man Bolling’s skip «Sticht van Utrecht», the author notes rather dryly that presumably the bathing day led to a stronger improvement of the hygienic conditions on board.
I could wish that the author, instead of yawning over a hundred years of history at his desk, had continued a journey in the wake of the adventurer and priest Friderici Bollingii.
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