WOMEN CHURCH WORLD

In Iceland, at the Valþjófsstaður door

Passage of Generations

 Passaggio  di generazioni  DCM-011
07 December 2024

September in Iceland is the most beautiful month, and on this everyone agrees. In September, if you lift your eyes to the sky, it's likely you'll see the Northern Lights -no apps needed-, just make sure thereyou are not in a well-lit place, and hope the fox feels like sweeping the snow for you—a fox that uses its tail as a broom. Ths is the fox that leaves strange red, green, and purple streaks in the sky, luminous trails enhanced by sophisticated photography, giving the impression of strobe lights, like in a nightclub, especially when you’re near a glacier or in the middle of nowhere.

This is the fox—at least that is how certain stories told to children go. I would have told them to my daughter too, if she had stayed awake even one evening, if at least one night I could have carried her in my arms through Reykjavík's darkest neighborhoods, looking for the right spot to show her the fox, or maybe just its tail.

However, we spent September together in Iceland due to my writing residency; my daughter was sleeping at night, which is a good thing, I know, because when children sleep, mothers rest, and there is a slightly better chance they will not fall over. However, on Sunday mornings, we were awake, very awake, my daughter and I, and we would go around museums just like when I was a child and the museum in my town was open and exceptionally free on Sunday mornings. I would go with my mother, and it was a celebration, like going to the cinema.

So, one Sunday morning in Reykjavík, just before leaving Iceland, my mother, daughter and me set off to see a door with a complicated name, like all Icelandic names, a medieval door made of pine wood, in Romanesque style, dating back to the 1200s.

It was a newspaper that gave me the inspiration. The journal was preparing an issue dedicated to doors, and I had chosen it, the door of Valþjófsstaður, the most famous in Iceland, because it was just a few kilometers from the place that had been my home for a month. In addition, because of the story it depicted, which is that of a knight killing a dragon to free a lion, and the lion goes to die on the knight's grave. A traditional, epic story of heroes within two circles, one after the other. However, were there really only two? One of the theories about the door, which is now preserved in a museum, is that there were three scenes, and that there was a third circle, which is now lost.

I follow my daughter through the rooms of the museum. She ran with a pencil in her hand while I held the notebook they gave us both at the entrance. In Iceland, they are attentive to children and there is always something to entertain them. In the notebook, she should mark with an X everything she sees, be that helmets, jugs, or banners. There are no doors to mark off in the notebook, yet we came here to see just that, the door. There were three of us at the start, my daughter, and my mother, but now I no longer see her, I have lost her, we have lost her. However, wasn’t it always like this with my mother? We get distracted for a moment and no longer see her. She is still getting ready, yet she tells you to start going, or she is lingering with a friend on the street, or she is buying something trivial and beautiful. “I’m coming, I’m coming” – my mother’s voice. Then she always arrives, really arrives, even this time. She says, “Did you see that little room? There’s an incredible statue”. My mother experiences everything with too many notes, she will never know how to ration her emotions, and that is her beauty, even though when I was younger, I thought it was her limit. How much it made me angry, that excess of hers. I rejected it by default, I rejected it because I thought it was the only way to differentiate myself, and because I thought, perhaps not entirely wrongly, that I could only be young in this way, by being different from the one who gave me life.

 “Did you see the statue?” I follow my mother, and my daughter follows me. One after the other, three nesting dolls in a row, to reach where the oldest one has led us, to a wooden triptych from the 1500s depicting Mary, the Baby Jesus, and Saint Anne. The grandmother, the mother, and the son. “Images of all three together are rare,” my mother is saying with enchanted eyes. Mother, daughter, and granddaughter on one side and the other of the glass, like a mirror. If only there were a door in the displaycase, we could switch places, we on the other side, with a book, a crown, and a mantle. They on this side, a pen and a notebook, a bag with some water, and a mobile phone.

I recall a photo, one of the dearest I have, of me, my mom, my grandmother, one in the arms of the other. Three nesting dolls, just like we once were, one inside the other, before we were born. It is a Polaroid from the early Eighties; I must have been four or five years old. Below, my mother wrote in block letters: the three generations. We were one the door of the other, from each of us was born another woman who gave birth to another, and now I know that this matrilineal thread is shining and precious, now I know that much of what I have comes from there. I close my eyes, I add my daughter to the photo (how I would have loved for my grandmother to have met her, how I wish she had not died before her birth. Yes, this way the photo would be complete, and yet it’s so rare for there to be four generations, there is always either the root or the fruit missing, but the thread is the same and this is how women have recognized each other in families, one after the other, and have watched each other’s backs.

Now, let us say nothing more. The little girl is running into another room, disturbing the many silent and attentive visitors, but they do not protest, do not complain, we are in Northern Europe afterall. The little girl runs, and now it is us who follow her, because we have to look after her, of course, but also because she is right, she is showing us the way: it is over there where we need to go back, to see the door we came here for. The one the newspaper sent me to see and write about. It is always the fruit that protects the tree, never the other way around, now I remember. As for the doors, they are never the ones you expect, and now I know this too.

By Nadia Terranova
Writer, author of numerous novels, she has also written several books for children and young adults, and is the winner of the Premio Strega Ragazze e Ragazzi [Strega Prize Girls and Boys] and the Andersen Prize. Her latest book is Etna. La lingua del fuoco [Etna. The Tongue of Fire], published by Humboldt.


The only remaining one, for centuries a door of a church


The door of Valþjófsstaður takes its name from an ancient estate located in Fljótsdalur, a municipality with 524 inhabitants. Carved in wood in the 12th century, it was initially used in a manor house, and later as the door of a church with wooden planks dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It measures 206.5 cm and is made up of three dovetail boards. On the front, there are two round and carved spaces, with a silvered iron ring with grooves between them.

The upper roundel depicts a well-known medieval story, Le Chevalier au Lion, in three episodes. Below, we see a knight with his hunting falcon. He has killed a dragon that has captured a lion, and then the lion is depicted with gratitude, following the knight. In the end, the lion lies by the knight’s tomb, mourning him. On the tomb, runes are inscribed: “Here lies the powerful king who killed this dragon”. In the lower roundel, there are four intertwined dragons.

Many medieval Icelandic churches were decorated with wooden carvings, but the Valþjófsstaður door is the only surviving carved one. Sold to Copenhagen in 1852, it returned to Iceland in 1930. The current church (in the photo), which was consecrated in 1966, is made of concrete and can accommodate 95 people. It houses a copy of the door.