In the Hall of the Mountain King

In the Norwegian folktale “Peer Gynt,” a young ne’er-do-well, has a string of adventures in which he barely escapes with his life. In one of the most threatening, he foolishly intrudes into the hall of the Mountain King seeking treasure. The King is an enormous troll who captures the young man and insists that Peer Gynt must become a troll so that he can marry the king’s grotesquely ugly daughter. Peer Gynt avoids death by a gnat’s eyelash as he runs out of the mountain cave with the Mountain King close on his heels.

After today I can understand how the imagination of Norwegians produced trolls. Mind you, Norwegian trolls are not ugly little gnomes that sit in gardens. No, these gigantic creatures are half human, half mountain, with rugged faces made of the cloven granite stones of a cliffside. Today I saw trolls, fierce trolls, with grim faces and skin of stone—trolls festooned with glaciers, with forests for beards, terrifying in their beautiful ugliness, guarding icy lakes, living in perpetual snow, and caring for men no more than we care for the ants we mindlessly crush underfoot. If you use your imagination you can see trolls in the photos I have included. Today in Geiranger I came to understand how one could imagine that these mountains are trolls—or Odin or Thor. A thunderstorm reverberating in these mountains could easily convince one that a Norse deity was beating the hills with his gigantic hammer.

Geiranger could inspire awe in a dead man. There are waterfalls cascading three thousand feet down the mountainsides every mile or so. The most beautiful consists of seven strands, each plunging a half mile down into the fjord. They call this collection of waterfalls “The Seven Sisters.” One large plume on the other side of the ship is called “The Suitor,” sometimes called “The Champagne Bottle,” that spews a single large stream into the pool below. The one beside it is called the Bridal Veil. At the 3,000-foot level on this July day we walked on a frozen lake. I threw a snowball at Glenda. Snowflakes fell around us.

The population of this little town is only about 250, but with two large cruise ships here, plus other visitors from as far away as Japan, the town was teeming with guests as amazed as we were at the extraordinary beauty in this isolated corner of Norway.Read more