ever since. To my amazement, an outdoor barbecue is just getting under way outside the clubhouse. My teeth are chattering so violently I can barely speak English, much less Welsh. No one is speaking Norwegian.
As the club’s pro – a tipsy, monolingual American – hands out tournament prizes, a woman leans over with the unsolicited information that few Norwegians eat potato skins. I ask her how it is that the crowd of about fifty or so all understands English.
‘Oh, we’re a bi- or probably trilingual society,’ she explains. I feel a sudden, deep shame for my country’s linguistic myopia, and turn suddenly on Lynn, who’s also a learner, and comment on the temperature in Welsh. We exchange a few of what Iori notes in passing as ‘cat on the mat’ sentences, but quickly peter out.
By the time Lynn drops me off at Rosemary’s house, where I am to stay while I’m in Norway, it’s midnight. Rosemary herself is in Denmark, but her three daughters, ages fourteen through twenty, welcome me with touching formality. They and two friends are sitting around the kitchen table, and when I arrive everyone shifts effortlessly into perfect English. Almost too perfect. Maybe it’s creeping exhaustion, but their conversation sounds like the soundtrack from a dubbed film, a half-beat too slow, as if the dubbers were reading the script for the first time.
Liv, the eldest, to Lisa, the middle sister: ‘I believe we are going to the same party tomorrow night.’
Lisa: ‘Yes, I believe so.’
Liv: ‘Shall we go there together?’
Annett, the youngest, to me: ‘Would you care for a cup of tea?’
I really need to go to bed. Liv shows me to her room, a little-girl-gone-to-college sanctuary with pink walls, teddy bears, sociology texts, and University of Wales, Cardiff drinking mugs. As I turn out the light I notice that someone has pasted fluorescent stars to the ceiling. Without my contacts, they look like the real thing.
Ailadrodd to Repeat
My second day in Norway, my second golf course. Lynn, who picked me up early this morning at Rosemary’s, points it out – a tiny, green blotch – from our vantage point on the Kongens Utsikt, or King’s Viewplace. Somewhere far below Iori is teeing off for the nineteenth time this weekend. I’ve always considered golf an irredeemably pointless sport: so much lawn, such little holes. Why bother?
I keep these thoughts to myself as Lynn outlines the day. We’re to meet Iori, have lunch, see Oslo. It’s to be an all-Welsh affair once the golf ends. But for now Lynn and I are perched on a vertiginous, rocky ridge above lake-fronted farmland, just northwest of the city. From the escarpment we can see strands of shocking yellow fields threading through the billiard-table backdrop, red roofs of farmhouses, and a very blue lake splayed into fingers, each one dotted with small, forested islands that look like hunkered-down porcupines. In the far distance are snow-topped mountains. All is bright and faultless and northern.
I tell Lynn a story about gateposts in the Welsh county of Dyfed. Many of the decorative stone balls placed atop Dyfed gateposts are of unequal sizes: one is large, the other small. Legend holds that this tradition is based on a Viking practice of sticking a female head on one side of the entrance to a conquered property, and a male head on the other. All along the Welsh seaboard the English versions of Welsh place names descend from the Scandinavian: Anglesey, Bardsey, Swansea, Fishguard. Apparently I’m not the first to make the trip between Wales and Norway, though the others travelled in the opposite direction, with a somewhat more active intent.
Lynn tells me he started the Cymdeithas Cymry Oslo twelve years ago with Iori, and that they now have about fifty members, mostly expatriates.
‘We’ve got ambassadors, artists, teachers, you name it. A sophisticated crowd, it is. Very different from a lot of people back home. These are the ones who left.’
He adds that a number of Norwegians also belong to the society, including a fifteen-year-old boy who’s already gotten a degree in Maths from the University of Oslo and is now going for another in Welsh. More shades of Mark Nodine and his kind. I switch the subject by asking if his Norwegian friends make the distinction between Welsh and English, and Lynn vehemently shakes his head no. Then he looks me in the eyes and squints, perhaps against the strong Scandinavian light, perhaps at the benightedness of his hosts.
‘What I tell ’em, my lady, is “Have it your way. You Swedes,”’ he says, winking, ‘“are all alike.”’
By eleven o’clock we’ve tracked down Iori in the midst of the relentlessly scenic golf course. At three we’re still there. I divert myself from impending starvation by picking Lynn’s wallet, which we found last night in the boot of his car (eventually I give it back). I’m at the point of telling them that golfers who played on Sunday were brutally attacked for breaking the Sabbath in Aberdyfi, Wales in 1927, when Iori saves himself by finally announcing it’s time for lunch. He then proclaims an uncompromising ban on English. For two and a half hours, through lasagne, salad, coffee and towering soft icecream cones, I have no problem understanding Iori’s soft-spoken Welsh. He teaches English in Oslo, and his measured sentences, slowed to a student’s ear, nail their targets in my brain. Diwylliant, he tells us, is his favourite word in the language.
‘It means culture,’ he says, ‘but it really means to “un-wild”. Isn’t that wonderful?’
The word conjures forests and wolves and people tearing meat from bones with their teeth. The hairs on the back of my neck recall some dim, ancestral impulse and flex into attention.
Lynn and I, meanwhile, are handicapped by our one-track vocabularies and find each other mutually incomprehensible. Since neither of us knows enough Welsh to find alternative routes for our thoughts, if we don’t comprehend the other’s phrasing the first time around we’re out of luck.
(Thank you, Vortigern. Had a proto-Welsh king of that name, active c. AD 420–50, not seen fit to grant British land to Germanic mercenaries – an incident depicted throughout the ages as ultimately leading to the Britons’ loss of the island to the Anglo-Saxons – Wales might never have been ‘Englished’, Lynn and I might not have been able to communicate at all, and that would have been a terrible shame.)
Surprisingly, Iori is the first to crack and abandon what for him is his first language. Sprawled on the back seat of Lynn’s car on the way into Oslo, he interrupts Lynn’s painfully faltering monologue and shouts,
‘GOOD GOD, EDWARDS, it’s like listening to the dog barking.’
Lynn takes this well. As we near Vigeland Park in the city centre, Iori lapses back into Welsh one last time and unexpectedly recites R. Williams Parry’s poem ‘Ode to the Pylons’, dedicated to the high-tension wires that cantilever across the broad, flat sweep of his native Anglesey. I can’t understand a word, but sense that the sounds take him to a place a little more gwyllt (wild) than this tidy Norwegian highway. To an island that was once a centre of learning for the druids, and even now retains a cool remoteness from the twentieth century, though those pylons carry electricity produced by a nuclear power plant not far from Iori’s home town of Amlwch. If you count the druids – and the Romans, who flamboyantly exterminated them there in AD 61, most certainly did – that makes two unholy power sources from one island.
I have requested a tour of Vigeland Park, an outdoor sculpture extravaganza and the chef d’oeuvre of the Norwegian artist Gustav Vigeland, and am no longer surprised to find these two golf-mad, former rugby players know it well. In 1921 Vigeland made an extraordinary contract with the city of Oslo: he agreed to
