Aftenposten
- Significant ancient find in the high mountains between Sætesdal and Suldal.
- Our forefathers' hunting life through the centuries can be studied there.
- A contribution also to the solving of other riddles.
Aftenposten carried a signed column by curator Eivind Kvaalen announcing a significant ancient find in the high mountains between Sætesdal and Suldal. Kvaalen recounted how, on a trip in 1921, the elderly Targeir Knutsson Hovden told him of animal drawings on a stone in a rock shelter at Storhedder, a place known from Skar's and Knut Loupedalen's legend collections, but neither Hovden nor anyone else could lead him there. In a later passage Kvaalen described the shelter as a room with a hole for hanging a powder horn, mentioned incised bears, animals and ancient names, and mocked the way Gustav Storm and the "critical" scholars would have dismissed it all as poetically embellished legend.
This reading covers three fragments of Eivind Kvaalen's column, which run across column breaks and include stray headline words, some marked [?]; […] marks a word cut off at a column break. Small print in the masthead subscription strip is only partly legible, and the line under the Fellesbanken logo is illegible. The bottom half of the page is a drawing, which is not translated here.
Translation
Significant ancient find in the high mountains between Sætesdal and Suldal.
Significant [?] On a journey in Sætesdal in 1921 I took the opportunity to ask older people about runes, ancient finds and old legends. At the very top of Bykle (Byklom) I heard from Targeir Knutsson Hovden that he had seen drawings of animals on a stone once, when he was herding livestock in his younger years. When I wanted to know where the place lay, he answered that it was in "Storhedder", a place that legend has been very busy with, as one can see from the collections of Skar and Knut Loupedalen. The place name Storhedder tells us at once that this grazing ground for the herds must have got its name from a rock shelter within the pasture. When I asked Targeir whether he
Our forefathers' hunting life through the centuries can be studied there.
Our forefathers' knew of this rock shelter, he answered that it was precisely in this rock shelter that the animal drawings were to be found. But he was by then an old man, and unable to come along the long way. He had moreover forgotten where the rock shelter lay, and did not think himself able to find it. There was nobody else who knew of the rock shelter. I got no further with the question that time, even though I asked after Storhedder everywhere; no one knew it. On a journey through Sætesdal
A contribution also to the solving of other riddles.
[?] can be studied there. […], the rock shelter is like a cottage room, there is a hole in the rock inside it for hanging the powder horn! That there are also incised bears and animals as well as ancient names does not make the matter any better, however concrete all this is. To people like Gustav Storm and the so-called "modern", "critical" researchers, all this would have looked like legend and fairy tale; the place does not exist and the story is without substance, poetically embellished, it would have been said.
Context
What later runic records show at Storhedder
Kvaalen's column reports, on the word of the herdsman Targeir Knutsson Hovden, animal drawings in a rock shelter called Storhedder at the top of Bykle, and its third fragment adds incised bears, animals and "ancient names". The runic database Rundata, compiled long afterwards, registers inscriptions on rock surfaces at Storhedder in Bykle municipality, in the former county of Aust-Agder. One of them, N 194, is transliterated kuni and read as the personal name Gunni, and the database dates it only tentatively to the Middle Ages, with a question mark. A second entry from the same site, N 196, preserves only a few legible runes in its transliteration. Both entries cite the corpus Norges innskrifter med de yngre runer, volume III, and an article on Storhedder by Anders Hagen and Aslak Liestøl in the journal Viking in 1947. These records confirm that the shelter Kvaalen describes carries runic names that scholars published about two decades after his column. They say nothing about the age of the animal figures, so the headline's promise that centuries of hunting life can be studied there remains Kvaalen's own interpretation.
Johannes Skar's legend collection as Kvaalen's guide
Kvaalen supports his claim that legend has been busy with Storhedder by pointing to the collections of Skar and Knut Loupedalen. The Skar he names is evidently Johannes Skar, the Norwegian folklore collector who published eight volumes of Gamalt or Sætesdal, the great collection of tradition from the valley where Kvaalen was travelling. Skar brought out the first volume in 1903 at his own expense, and the remaining seven appeared with the publisher Olaf Norli. The Norwegian encyclopedia Store norske leksikon states that the work was not primarily meant to be scholarly; its purpose was to show the people of Setesdal and others the value of their old folk tradition. That matters for reading this column. Kvaalen treats the stories in a collection made for cultural rather than scientific ends as pointers to a real, findable place, and he combines them with an eyewitness memory from a herdsman to argue that the legend has a physical core.
Gustav Storm and the source criticism Kvaalen mocks
In the third fragment Kvaalen sarcastically predicts that Gustav Storm and the so-called "modern", "critical" researchers would have written off the Storhedder story as embellished legend about a place that does not exist. Store norske leksikon ranks Storm among the most important source critics in Norwegian historiography. His programme was above all a "critical testing" of the sources according to fixed methodological rules, driven by the urge to find sure data behind the sources' confusion and contradictions and to dissolve false formations of tradition. Storm died in February 1903, so Kvaalen's conditional "would have" is aimed at a scholarly attitude Storm left behind, not at a living opponent. The picture is also simplified: the same encyclopedia notes that Storm energetically defended the credibility of Norse tradition on the question of Gange-Rolv as conqueror of Normandy. Kvaalen's column sets a concrete place, a powder-horn hole and carvings against the critics' scepticism, but his portrait of Storm is polemic rather than a balanced account of Storm's method.
Original
Betydningsfuldt oldfund i høifjeldet mellem Sætesdal og Suldal.
Betydnings [?] Paa en reise i Sætesdal i 1921 benyttet jeg anledningen til at spørre ældre folk efter runer, oldfund og gamle sagn. Øverst i Bykle (Byklom) fik jeg høre av Targeir Knutsson Hovden, at han hadde set tegninger av dyr paa en sten en gang han gjette drift i sine yngre aar. Da jeg vilde vite hvor stedet laa, svarte han, at det var i» Storhedder «, et sted sagnet har hat det travelt med, som man kan se av Skars og Knut Loupedalens samlinger. Stedsnavnet Storhedder sier os med en gang at dette driftebeite maa ha faat sit navn av en heller inden beitet. Da jeg spurte Targeir om han
Vore forfædres jægerliv gjennem aarhundreder kan der studeres.
Vore forfædres viste om denne heller, svarte han, at det var netop i denne heller dyretegningene var at finde. Men han var da en gammel mand, og ute av stand til at bli med den lange vei. Han hadde desuten glemt hvor helleren laa, og mente sig ikke istand til at finde den. Nogen anden fandtes ikke som viste om helleren. Jeg kom ikke længere med spørsmaalet den gang, enda jeg spurte efter Storhedder alle steder, ingen kjendte den. Paa en reise gjennem Sætesdal
Bidrag ogsaa til løsning av andre gaader.
[?] der studeres. melig, helleren er som en stoge, der er et hul i fjeldet inde i den til at hænge kruthornet i! At der ogsaa findes indrisset bjørner og dyr samt utgamle navn gjør ikke saken bedre, hvor konkret end alt dette er. For folk som Gustav Storm og de saakaldte» moderne «,» kritiske «granskere vilde alt dette fortonet sig som sagn og eventyr, stedet findes ikke og fortællingen er stofløs, dikterisk utsmykket, vilde det hett.