01 Apr The Whispering Lights of Lofoten
Northern lights in Norway. Sketch by Candace Rose Rardon.
Editor’s note: Lonely Planet recently published an extraordinary collection of original tales, The Lonely Planet Travel Anthology, celebrating both the rigors and the life-changing riches of travel. The enchanting story below, by author and sketch artist Candace Rose Rardon, is excerpted from that collection.
If it weren’t for the northern lights, I would never have found myself in Svolvær—the largest town on the Lofoten Islands archipelago in Norway, located just north of the Arctic Circle.
My journey began with a three-hour ferry ride across an unruly arm of the Norwegian Sea called the Vestfjord, every flex of its currents causing a list in the boat and a lurch in my stomach. I spent my first night in a tiny fishing hamlet with an even tinier name—a singular Å crowned with a ring and pronounced “oh”—and it was here I had planned to spend the duration of my five days on Lofoten, not least because of a hostel in the village. For a writer and artist, finding affordably priced accommodation in Scandinavia seemed nothing short of a miracle.
I had arrived in the heart of winter, to haiku days and darkness that drew itself around me like a shroud. Everything was new—the roiling sea, the gusts of snow, a pair of white hares darting in and out of headlights. There were mountains everywhere, sharp and formidable, and even at night, even in the dark, I could feel their presence giving shape to the world. But what impressed me most deeply was the presence of life in such a glacial landscape—many of the neat timber homes had been painted a rich red, a shade I would hereafter think of as Lofoten red, and every window glowed with the soft orange gleam of a lamp. It was like nowhere else I had ever been.
The only thing open on my first morning in Å was the kind of one-stop shop that anchor small towns the world over—a white wooden building housing a general store, gift shop, museum reception, and even the office of a Polish historian specializing in north Norwegian fishing traditions. While I waited for my groceries to be rung up—an eclectic mix of dried apricots, dark chocolate, and other provisions to last me the week—I noticed a printout of activities posted by the door. Despite its remote location and the time of year, Lofoten was brimming with options: from snowshoeing and sea kayaking to winter nature safaris and walking tours. What caught my attention, however, was a guided northern lights tour—for if anything had drawn me to Lofoten, it was the chance see the Aurora Borealis for the first time in my life.
The only issue was that the tour departed from Svolvær—two islands and several bus rides away. With some reluctance, I let go of my plan to hole up in quiet Å for five nights and began working my way up Lofoten’s rugged, windblown coastline, reaching Svolvær two days later. There was no hostel in town, so I settled on the cheapest room I could find at such late notice—a guesthouse about which all I knew was its name: Kunstnerhuset.
Voyaging across the islands of the Lofoten archipelago. Sketch by Candace Rose Rardon.
My decision to join the tour paid off. We had only just set up our cameras about an hour’s drive outside Svolvær when the first faint glimmer of fluorescent green appeared above us. Not a minute later, the auroras arrived in full force, an iridescent arrow shot from one edge of the sky to the other. I had never thought of the lights as moving before—that they actually dance, leaving luminescence in their wake, their shimmering edges as soft as the sand in an hourglass. I had never known they have a path to follow, a set trajectory, a sacred circle of light encompassing the magnetic pole at its center.
I fell asleep that night with a quiet sense of completion, believing I had seen everything I had come to Lofoten to see. I slept in the next day—not a difficult thing to do when the sun doesn’t rise until 10 am—then made a breakfast of apricots and coffee, and spent the rest of the morning working on an illustration commission in my room. At two minutes to noon, I decided to take advantage of being in a guesthouse and asked the owner if I might have a late checkout.
Her name was Bente—“a very traditional name in Scandinavia,” she had told me the night before—and I found her vacuuming another room across the hall.
“Of course,” she said upon hearing my request. “There is no reservation for your room tonight, so please take all the time you need. The room is yours. I won’t be cleaning it until tomorrow.”
I was so moved by her kindness that I felt compelled to continue our conversation. I asked Bente how long she had owned the guesthouse.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I just work here and live in the manager’s apartment. The house is owned by the North Norwegian Art Center. They also own one of the galleries you might’ve passed in town. In fact, the name of the house, Kunstnerhuset, means ‘artist house’ in Norwegian.”
This would have been serendipitous enough for me, but Bente continued. “We actually have two studios upstairs. I can show them to you, if you like?”
I told her that I would like this very much. The studios were located at either end of the house, with several bedrooms for artists set in between. In the first studio we visited, several easels stood around the space, as though in conversation with each other, and the air was thick with turpentine. The room had white walls, high peaked ceilings, and windows that stretched to the roofline, not unlike those of a cathedral—and I could not have imagined a better focal point for such an altar: the magnificent snowy peaks surrounding Svolvær.
Lofoten-red homes in the snow. Sketch by Candace Rose Rardon.
We returned to the first floor, and almost as an afterthought, Bente said, “You should see the guestbook.” She led me into the living room, where among a pile of magazines and coffee table ephemera lay three very substantial books. The one that Bente handed me had a thick leather-bound cover, with a decorative seal and accompanying border that seemed almost Polynesian or tribal in design. Its name—Gjestebok, Kunstnernes Hus, Svolvær—had been embossed below the seal in gold. In the afternoon sunlight, both the leather and gilded letters seemed to glow.
Sipping a cup of Earl Grey tea, I soon realized this was no ordinary guestbook. Knowing it was a house for artists, I perhaps should have been more prepared for what I encountered—that on every timeworn page, next to each name and note of thanks, there would be art.
The book spanned nearly forty years—from the house’s founding in 1954 all the way to 1992—and held art of every medium: pen and ink, pastels, watercolors, acrylics, crayons, and collage. There were portraits and pop-up glaciers, seagulls and seascapes, and those same red cabins I myself had grown so fond of. Some of the drawings were humorous—cartoons of bad weather reports, two cats pawing at a pot of fish stew—but others moved me with their beauty, washes of delicate color depicting Lofoten’s unique blend of sea, sky, and soaring peaks.
I could feel the weight of history in my hands—the dozens of languages and nationalities represented, and the myriad visions of Lofoten they’d left behind. As John Kendrick from Lake Placid, New York, wrote in February of 1976, it was “beyond beauty, beyond description.”
But it was another note—one of the few others in English—that left me in tears. On May 17, 1954, an artist named Frank Schaeffer had written: “Coming from the far south, I have been the first painter who had the privilege to live in this home. Back in my homeland, Brazil, I will never, never forget the time I spent here, maybe the most fruitful for my work I ever lived. To express my gratitude and admiration I find no words.”
Realizing how far I’d been hunched over the guestbook, I leaned back in my chair and took a final sip of tea. It was then that I remembered something my two northern lights guides had shared with me the night before, on our initial drive out of Svolvær.
“If you are on the plains up in Finnmark,” they said, referring to the northernmost corner of the country, “then you can actually hear the sound of the lights. It’s like a humming—the humming lights, the whispering lights. One of the indigenous tribes of Scandinavia, the Sami, have known this for as long as they have been around, but two years ago, it was proven [by scientists] without reason for doubt. The reason it makes sound is the discharge of electrons into the atmosphere, but the Sami people also have their stories: that the Aurora is their ancestors, their past going over the sky, watching over them.”
I thought about the seemingly random sequence of steps that had led me to this place—stumbling across the printout of activities in Å, scrambling for a last-minute hotel in Svolvær—and wondered if there hadn’t been a subtle magnetism at work; that just as the auroras rely on science as much as they do on serendipity, so too does our own trajectory through the world orbit a sacred, invisible center. We move, we dance, we take risks and leaps of faith, and yet still we stay our course.
I’d journeyed to Lofoten to see the northern lights, but it was the light of these souls of artists past I now know I was meant to find—my own whispering guides watching over through time.
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Reproduced with permission from The Lonely Planet Travel Anthology, published by Lonely Planet, © 2016 Lonely Planet.
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