Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
I've just returned from a trip to the mountains of Norway where I hiked from Finse railway station high up in the mountains, down the Aur Valley to Sogne fjord. I spent four days on the hike, and it took me all the way from the Hardanger Glacier at 5500ft (1650m) down to the fjord, which is at sea level. An huge drop in altitude. The gradient down was mostly uniform too, as I followed the course of various waterways as they flowed down to the sea; meaning that I got to see the slow change in climate that comes with altitude change dramatically.
At Finse it was cold: snow & ice persist all year round here and absolutely nothing can grow. I started my walk right at the mouth of Hardanger Glacier: a huge hulk of permanent ice that caps the mountain underneath. To ascend a glacier specialist gear and training is required, neither of which I have, so unfortunately scaling the beast itself was impossible. But I did get close enough to touch it, and to see the immense scale of it up close. And that was my impression of that place: sheer size. The ground is barren, just bare rock and snow, the only features being the impossibly large boulders scattered around as if some giant had thrown them there. And of course that's exactly what happened: the slow but truly immense force of the glacier is able to shape the very earth to its liking. No wonder the locals also ascribe giants to living in these parts ("jotun" in Norwegian).
^The Hardanger Glacier
Once I'd spent enough time with the glacier, I headed out to my cabin for the night, a popular place on account of its proximity to the railway. I shared a cabin with a friendly if unfunny German man, who when I asked him what he did for a living he responded: "A bar. I enjoy it because at the end of evening when I tell people to go... they go!" This was followed by a self-congratulatory laugh which certified him as a paragon of Deutsche wit.
On the second day I set off before Claus could try out any more humour on me, scaling the large massif that sat between the Finse and Aur valleys. On this high plateau huge snow drifts and sky blue lakes dominated the landscape, with my path winding through a tried-&-tested safe route around such obstacles. As I started to descend the snow eventually did thin, and the first greenery started to appear. At this stage it was just simple mosses and lichens, but even these were impressive without any soil to speak of. Then came a boundary, just as at a certain altitude the glaciers could no longer survive, at this one the snow could not either, and as it disappeared grass took its place. You could call it the "snow line" or something, but I'm calling it the "lemming line", for from this point on I was surrounded by the consistent presence of furry little lemmings. I'd never seen one before, but they're incredibly amusing. They scurry around minding their own business, but if you get too close they will always decide on fight rather than flight, squaring up and squealing despite the thousand times size difference. I'm not sure what (if any) predators they have up here, but they're just so stupid. I walked right up to one of them which was squealing at me and just picked him up, at no point did he do anything to escape. Eventually my (longer than expected) day concluded and I found myself the only guest in my cabin, so I ate with the owner and her assistant and her giant Rhodesian Ridgeback. This cabin was old, and ornately decorated with pieces of Scandinavian folkart and taxidermied beasts.
^Land of the Lemmings
The next day I kept following the river down the valley, and as the grasses grew denser and greener, other low plants and shrubs also appeared like heather or blueberries. And the lemming population only grew, scurrying around the grass looking for berries and seeds to eat. The features of the landscape also became more human-scaled, and the desolation of the upper layers turned to a lonely little paradise, if still unable to sustain human life. And just as the landscape itself became smaller in scale, so did the local mythology. "Here be trolls", or rather "Here be jetters": a jetter (pronounced yetter) is apparently a large troll, a few man-heights tall, that carved homes for themselves into the side of mountains which you can see many of dug into the cliffs at this level. But the first real signs of human life came a few hundred feet lower still, where the first small bushes and trees appeared. Here the ground doesn't freeze and plants can properly survive the winter. Farming at these altitudes was, for a time, economical post-agricultural revolution, but has since faded along with a lot of the Norwegian agricultural lifestyle. I came across a tiny stone hut, still preserved, where a farmer would have eeked out a living during the summer months. That night I stayed in a cabin at this sort of level, built within the remains of an old farming village which has since been abandoned. At this level the troll stories had shrunk again, with the ones around here being akin to "brownies" or "house elves", small enough to sneak around and avoid human contact. Even the lemming population had finally gone, and the fauna of the area became much more "normal".
^An uninhabited mountain hut
On the final day I descended right down into what was quickly becoming a gorge valley, with almost the entire day being in steep descent. The weather was fittingly warm and sunny as I walked through progressively taller patches of trees. Here and there were houses where people do still actually live, as you can tell by the Norwegian pennant flown outside to indicate someone's home. Although undeniably still beautiful, the mystery of the environment had lessened, and I could no longer believe stories of trolls and giants of further up. Indicative of this I think was the sacred spring I came to just off the path: a cave in the side of the hill where brown water spews into a sort of stone cauldron (here's my video of it). But rather than a tale of nature and fear, this was culturally a performative place where travellers would go to wish for a safe journey. No one really believed they would see a fairy or whatsuch in such a place, whereas it was so much more believable when I was in the unforgiving wilderness up top. Which made it very fitting that, as the path turned into a track and then into a road and I approached the little town of Aurlandsvangen that sat at the mouth of the river on Sogne fjord, that the town church rang out and beckoned me back into the embrace of "civilisation", where we confine the mysterious to churches and the supernatural to books. Turning to look back up towards the mountain from whence I had come, I realised that such fantasies like "trolls" and "giants" and "glaciers" and "lemmings" had just been silly fairy-tales all along.
