Ginunga Gap

by Matti Aikio

As with Matti Aikio’s first two of books, Ginunga Gap is also about murder and love.The hero in the book is the Norwegian blacksmith and fisherman Elias Røsanger who has settled down on the coast of Finnmark, and his closest neighbors there are sea Sámi who live in turf huts right below his house. At this trading center on the Finnmark coast lives parish pastor Peter Hermansen. He is the foster father of the girl Zalincka of vague origin. The pastor deludes her into marrying him, but he dies before the marriage is consummated – whereupon Zalincka finally heads to ‘the city.’ She hopes this mythical place beyond the familiar topography will be able to solve her identity issues.The neighbor of the parsonage is the settled Sámi Sáidi-Erke. He is presented as a lapsed reindeer Sámi, a common explanation for the poverty that spread in the coastal districts of Troms and Finnmark as the Norwegian motorized fishing fleet outstripped the semi nomadic Sámi population’s coastal fishing. And herewith are presented the two opposite poles of Ginunga ruin threatening the settled Sámi population vs. the colonizers’ success. But the situation is not quite that Sáidi-Erke thrives and has many children, even if maybe not all are his own. But thereby the author hints at the favorable mixture of ethnicities which at that moment occurred in the era’s Finnmark coastal district – while on the other hand the hegemon Hermansen dies before he can help himself to an orphan girl he has assumed responsibility for.Into this landscape then moves the mighty Helgelander Elias Røsanger. Since he belongs to the Norwegian colonial power he can freely help himself to all the positions available in the area. Which he he challenges the Norwegian pastor, the bailiff and merchant by himself having a go as pastor and politician – at the same time as he propagates in well-known hegemonic fashion. He gets out of most scrapes but not an unsettled breach of the law. Thereby, this hero too stands with one foot in the Ginunga Gap, as do most of the text’s characters. Røsanger though avoids helping himself to Zalincka who offers herself. Thereby the hero assumes a slightly superhuman aspect, and he has reason to head to the mountains when all his projects unravel. And Zalincka gets the chance to look for a place in a more urban area, far from the text’s Niflheim and Muspelheim – the two polar opposites in the Norse mythological world where Niflheim was the realm of the primordial ice-covered and hostile North, while Muspelheim was the torrid South.

132 pages, Paperback

Published June 15, 2016