If you have been to the North, you will know that you are at its mercy. In winter the sun barely peers over the horizon; in summer the nights stretch on and on into dawn. The cold won’t nip your nose: it will kill you. Volcanoes erupt and swallow the land. Humanity’s neat ideas about nationhood and identity seem especially fragile: human beings are not the ones in control. In The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat, a collection of stories “from the North”, the editors – Ted Hodgkinson (senior programmer for literature and spoken word at London’s Southbank Centre) and the Icelandic writer Sjón – find a common thread of storytelling across these chill and beautiful lands.
For the book’s purposes nine regions and cultures are included: not just Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and Finland but also Greenland, the Faroe Islands, the Åland Islands and Saami Norway in that country’s far north; a huge geographical span brought together in narrative and united against the elements. The old Nordic sagas are full of magic and terror: their modern equivalents, this book reveals, have many of the same sensibilities.
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