Author Archives: Eleanor Kuhns

About Eleanor Kuhns

Librarian and Writer Published A Simple Murder, May 2012

Random thoughts on Scandinavia Trip

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Just a few things I found interesting. I have already commented on how cold it was. The tour guides in every country mentioned a late and cool spring. That probably explains why we saw flocks and flocks and flocks of sheep. And why everyone was wearing a thick sweater.

Other notes about fashion.

Stripes are definitely in. I saw stripes on everything so I guess, without noticing it myself, stripes became the new orange.

The other thing is nail polish. When I saw a woman with polished nails she was almost always American. This does not seem to be a fashion in the Scandinavian countries. I didn’t really see nail salons or colored nails until I reached London. Not that important maybe, but interesting.

We also did not hit hot weather until London. The last time I was in the British Isles, it was cool and rainy even in London. Not this time. Not only was it hot, but the grass was brown and dry. We took a walk in Green Park and it was not that green. Everyone’s climates is undergoing some kind of change.

I also like to try the food of the region. Not a fan of herring. (At least guinea pigs were not on the menus – as they are in Peru) But I had the best cheese ever in Denmark and Norway and some really tasty bread.

One last thing. My Goodreads Giveaway for Death of a Dyer (learned a lot about the dye trade in Peru) lasts until August 23. So far 350+. Be sure and add yourself to the giveaway before it ends.

Osterhout Library

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I had a great talk on Saturday at this very fine and interesting library. It is in a converted church and has stained glass and those wonderful pointed windows. The staff was both warm and gracious (they made a cake with the cover of my first book on it!) and I had a great turn out.

The Orkneys

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Our final stop, before sailing to London and flying out to home, was Kirkwall. It is in the Orkneys. We were told that the Orkneys do not want to separate from Great Britain but remain. That, of course, is not the common view in Scotland. The National Party just had a vote to leave and enter the EU as a separate country. The vote failed but who knows what will happen next time?

Anyway, ruins here make even the Iron Age farm seem relatively recent. There are standing stones, similar to Stonehenge.

standing stones

Like Stonehenge, they line up to the solar equinox. There are a lot of speculations about the purpose of the stones but no one really knows.

We also saw ruins that date to 3000 BC. (Is the US a young country or what?) Trash was used in the walls to insulate inside. Plus, just like the ruins in Crete, there were indoor toilets. What happened that this little luxury went extinct and had to be reinvented in modern times?

neolithic ruins

 

neo ruins two

It is thought that the sea was further away then; again no one is sure. But the water is coming in now and threatening the excavation. The people who lived here ate fish and other things from the sea. No one is sure what happened to these people although there is another settlement nearby and one of the theories is that they moved.

The land upon which these ruins were found has belonged to the same family for generations. Incredible.

It was very cold and windy. We did not hit warm weather until we reached London. And, as with the other places we visited, there were a lot of sheep.

 

 

orkney library two

For all my fellow librarians, here is the Orkney Library. I was told this is the oldest Carnegie in the world. Something that amazed me. I thought all the Carnegies were in the U. S. The Orkney Library looks like it has been added to several times.

orkney library

Next time: some random thoughts.

Iceland

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Iceland is a beautiful country. Very dramatic with steep mountains, volcanoes and then lakes and streams with waterfalls.

waterfall

 

 

 

 

Iceland is a geothermal country and is growing – slowly. Volcanoes are a big part of the landscape. We saw the volcano that erupted in 2010 (I can neither pronounce nor spell the name) and stopped air traffic over Europe. The lava formations do indeed look like trolls, which are huge in the mythology.

lava

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The scale of the image does not show how enormous this outcropping is.

Because of the this activity, all the energy is geothermal. And signs of the geothermal activity are everywhere.

geyser

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This one is at geysir – yes, folks, geyser is an Icelandic name. Another feature is the boiling water and mud that one can see everywhere

fumerole

 

 

 

 

Iceland was very green, with snow on the higher peaks. But it is too cold to grow many things so most of the produce – that is not imported – is grown in greenhouses. Here, even a degree or two can make a huge difference.

We bought more sweaters.

One interesting feature: the livestock. Almost feral horses that are thickly covered with hair. Cattle that are a very old breed (Iceland has strict laws on importing livestock since they want to keep their breeds pure). The cattle look very different from our modern cows. They are horned with long pointed horns, for one thing, and instead of a barrel shape their bodies hang from their prominent hips as though the flesh was on a coat hanger.

And there are more sheep than people: sheep everywhere.

I loved Iceland but I don’t think I could take the cold climate. And, in the north, we had almost 24 hours of day. I cannot imagine coping with 24 hours of night.

Talks

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During these past few weeks, since I’ve gotten home from Scandinavia, I have had a number of talks at various places. This past Monday night, I spoke at the Woods Hole Library in Cape Cog. As usual, I enjoyed myself greatly and had a lot of wonderful questions.

woods hole library

Next up: the Wilkes Barre Library in Pa.

Norway 2

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One of my favorite parts of this trips was seeing an Iron Age farm. Man, times were hard. The people lived in longhouses with sod roofs.

Peopel lived in the south, animals in the north, so the heat from the animals came down, Also the smells and other less nice things. I’ve read about the custom of keeping the animals in the house. Diseases that began in animals then jumped to humans.

But I digress.

I was very interested in the loom. The weaving was done top to bottom. The warp threads at the bottom were hung with weights. Weaving, which for me is a fairly quiet operation, must have been noisy.

loom weights

One of the things I found interesting was the green tape and the interpreter’s green shirt. I knew from my research for “Death of a Dyer” that there was no green dye in Europe. In Peru they used some plant but that had not been discovered in Europe. But they did have yellow, blue (indigo) and red (madder).

yarns

So, where did they get green? Here is a better shot of the green tape.

green tape

I asked the interpreter and he referred me to the Archaelogy Department. Answer: they over dyed, beginning with yellow and then blue.

For pictures of the dress and shoes I refer you to the blog by ArchaeoFox.

Norway

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After Copenhagen, a city I loved, we went to Norway. We stopped at several cities: Oslo. Kristinsand and Stavanger. Another wonderful country.

One of the things we saw in Oslo was a stave church. Only a few of these remain.

stave church

The pointed roofs are absolutely characteristic but of course they have tons of snow. This stave church was on the way to an Olympic style ski jump. I would never do it; just looking down at the run up made me queasy. It was about half an hour out of Oslo – the Norwegians love their sking. As we saw in Copenhagen, there are lots of buildings hundreds of years old – like this stave church.

baker

All the buildings here are very very old and are still in use, mostly. The inhabitants can do anything they like inside but the outside has to remain as it was. This was a medieval bakers. He went out of business several hundred years ago but the pretzel still remains.

viking ship

As one would expect, Vikings are very important to Norway’s history. This is NOT a reproduction; it is a ship, one of three, pulled out of a bog. From the 800s. Yipes! Hard to believe anyone sailed in these little tiny things – and crossed the Atlantic besides and made a colony in North America.

But how did people live?

open air museum

This shack housed about 15 people with their animals. There was no chimney, just a hole in the sod roof which had to be closed during bad weather. Infant mortality was 50%.

The good old days were terrible!

Copenhagen and random thoughts

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I love Copenhagen as a city. I suppose its greatest claim to fame is Hans Christian Anderson, the author of such tales as “The Little Mermaid” and “The Ugly Ducking.” As any one who has read these stories will tell you, they are much darker than their Disney versions. There is a statue of the mermaid in the harbor and she is little.

little mermaid

I would have like seeing the museum but it was outside of Copenhagen and we didn’t have the time.

This is also a very green city- and by that I mean it is rapidly attaining full sustainable energy. There are not that many cars = probably because they are so highly taxed. In the harbor, on reclaimed land, there are wind turbines. Here is an idea I thought very cool as a form of tree irrigation.copenhagen irrigation

All the trees have these gigantic bags of water around them as a form of irrigation. They are also working on fresh fruits and veggies grown in the city. As someone who has a large garden every year, I found this fascinating. These igloos dot the city and when you get closer they are full of growing things. Plus, they play music to help the plants grow.

copenhagen greenhouse

So, there has to be something I didn’t like, right? It was cold! We stopped for lunch at a cafe. Note the blankets on the chairs, the jackets everyone was wearing. And there were heaters every few feet. I want to add, this is the beginning of JULY!

copenhage cafe

In all fairness, all of Scandinavia was cold. We’d brought jackets, long pants and sweaters and we still had to buy new sweaters. In Iceland, the tops of the mountains were covered with snow.

iceland snow

So, I loved everything about Scandinavia but the climate.

Scandinavia Cruise – Denmark

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I haven’t blogged for awhile. My husband and I went for a cruise in Scandinavia. (Disney cruise – we are all about Disney!) First up: Copenhagen.

I loved this city. It is old, with a lot of medieval remnants.

copenhagen building

medieval carving

They all seemed very old to me – until we saw neolithic ruins later in the trip. But more about that later.

One weird sight: old buildings with new things like a Macdonalds and an electric billboard.

copenhagen old and new

There are bike lanes everywhere and man, are the riders aggressive. If a pedestrian strays into their space, they will curse and sometimes try to push you out of their way. One of our bus drivers called them anarchists on wheels and they are. They don’t stop for red lights or anything!

copenhagen bike lane

A tiny lane for cars and a tiny lane for pedestrians and a wide lane for bikes. There are more bikes than people in Copenhagen – which means some people have two or three.

Witches – Salem and more

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I ‘ve had a couple of questions about my most recent book, Death in Salem. Why didn’t I fully explore the witchcraft angle? Well, as I’ve said in earlier posts, Salem by 1797, was a very cosmopolitan city. It was not only the sixth largest, one of the most diverse (with the first East Indian immigrant populations in the US) but it was also the wealthiest. Salem’s witchcraft past was more an embarrassment.

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House of one of the judges.

 

The witchcraft spell has never completely left Salem, however. On one of our tours, the guide was the descendent of one of the accused witches. Reminders of this past abound.

IMG_2540

 

Graveyard includes memorials to those that were executed.

 

 

Although Salem became something other – a huge center of shipping and trading, however, the belief in witchcraft did not fade. In an earlier blog I wrote about trials that continued, right up to one in Russia in 1999.

And I wonder what is behind these accusations? Belief? Greed, malice, revenge? Hatred of women. With Gamer gate and all of the Internet attacks on women we certainly cannot discount that as a motive.

Christianity certainly plays a part.I think most of us are familiar with the quote from the Bible about not suffering a witch to live. During the middle ages and right up to modern times this has been used to execute any number of innocent people, primarily women.

I will blog  in the future about my research into witchcraft and goddesses – I think the two are tied. I decided, that since I did not explore witchcraft and the psychologies behind it in Death in Salem, I would do so in the next book. That book, titled The Devil”s Cold Dish, will be coming out next year. Spoiler alert: it does not take place in Salem.