Norwegian Woods (OT)

Albert Engström's satirical cartoons and caricatures ridiculed the powers that be, including priests, rulers, burgess and officers. His best-known character was 'Kolingen', a tramp who always observed and made fun of the upper classes from an outsider's point of view.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela painted some powerful interpretations of the Finnish national epic, The Kalevala. Among the most moving of these was the Symbolist painting Lemminkäinen's Mother, in which youthful bravado and recklessness have driven the hero to destruction. The scene is set in the realm of the dead, by the river of Tuonela, from which there is no return. And yet the power of a mother’s love transcends the bounds of humanity, and the dead awaken to life. The film takes the viewer deep into another world, into limbo, into a land that does not exist.

The Troll Wall was first climbed in 1965 by a Norwegian team. The Norwegian team, consisting of Ole Daniel Enersen, Leif Norman Patterson, Odd Eliassen, and Jon Teigland, finished one day ahead of the British climbers Tony Howard, John Amatt and Bill Tweedale, who established the most popular climbing route on the wall, the Rimmon Route. As of 2003, this route was reported unclimbable because a rockfall in September 1998 destroyed five of its pitches.

The wall saw its first winter ascent in March 1973, when Wojciech Kurtyka from Poland spent 13 days repeating the 1967 French Route with Marek Kęsicki, Ryszard Kowalewski, Tadeusz Piotrowski (all Polish).

In 1979, the wall was free climbed for the first time by local climber Hans Christian Doseth and Ragnhild Amundsen.

Today, there are many routes on the wall, ranging in length and difficulty. The classic Rimmon and Swedish routes were normally free climbed in a day or two until being heavily damaged by the 1998 rock falls. The longer and more engaging aid routes, such as the 1972 test piece Arch Wall (climbed by Ed and Hugh Drummond in 20 days), or the 1986 Death to All/Pretty Blond Vikings, which cuts through the steepest part of the wall, require advanced knowledge of big wall climbing and several days on the wall.

Due to the serious character of the wall, in addition to a cold and damp climate, new routes on Troll Wall are rare. In February 2002, a Russian team established the Krasnoyarsk Route during 19 days. The 1,200 metres (3,900 ft) long Krasnoyarsk, graded f6c+/A4+, is generally thought to be the hardest aid route on the wall and was awarded first prize in the 2002 All Russia Winter Mountaineering Championships.

In July 2010, Arch Wall, previously a serious aid route of difficulty up to A4+, saw its first all-free ascent by local climber Sindre Sæther and his father, Ole Johan. Arch Wall is about 1,200 metres (3,900 ft) of climbing over 37 pitches, and it took the two a total of 36 hours of climbing to reach the summit.

In July 2012, Sindre and Ole Johan Sæther repeated the feat by free climbing the Krasnoyarsk Route.

The most recent contribution to climbs on the Troll Wall is Katharsis, established by Polish climbers Marek Raganowicz and Marcin Tomaszewski over 18 days in January and February 2015. According to Planetmountain.com, the new route shares the first two pitches of the French Route, before forging a line between the Russian Route and Arch Wall. The team reported of difficulties up to A4/M7.

On 11-26 January 2017 Polish climber Marek Raganowicz made the first solo ascent of the wall in winter.

A monumental novel about reimagining our place in the living world by one of our most “prodigiously talented”(New York Times Book Review) novelists.

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers—each summoned in different ways by trees—are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.

In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity’s self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us?