Scandinavian Advent Calendar Day 4
A short note on how and why I share book links
Today we venture into Norway’s literary treasury, and for this first visit I chose to begin with a classic: The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas, a novel first published in 1963 that has haunted readers across languages and decades.
The story, in its barest outline, follows two young girls in a Norwegian village whose brief, intense friendship is shattered when one of them disappears. That is perhaps all I can say without diminishing the experience for future readers. Even as I write this summary, I realize it makes the book sound like a thriller about missing children—when in truth, my experience of it felt closer to reading a modern fairy tale written for adults, something operating according to dream logic rather than conventional narrative expectations. I was surprised, after finishing, to read other summaries and wonder if we’d somehow encountered different books.
What captivated me most profoundly was the language itself. I read Elizabeth Rokkan’s French translation, but having since encountered passages in the English version, I can confirm that the poetry survives translation intact—a rare and precious thing. As with so many Scandinavian authors, nature stands at the novel’s heart, but here the descriptive passages achieve something extraordinary. The deep, ancient forest and the lake’s unfathomable expanse; the waterfall’s deafening roar and then its transformation into perfect silence when frozen solid; the ice palace itself, that intricate structure both utterly real and impossibly imaginary—I found myself lost in these descriptions, and truthfully, I had no desire to return to plot or action. I wanted to remain inside that crystalline world Vesaas had conjured.
This novel thoroughly disrupted my usual reading instincts. The writing carries a mystical quality that made me feel, at times, that the characters were thinly sketched, almost transparent. Yet simultaneously I understood their emotions with perfect clarity, as though I could hear their unspoken thoughts. There is something untamed in how both girls are presented—something that can only be felt, never adequately explained. The wilderness of the landscape surrounding them seems to have permeated their very beings, making them as unpredictable and essential as a snow fox disappearing into whiteness, as unknowable as the dark depths of a frozen lake.
The Ice Palace is decidedly a winter novel, best read when cold presses against the windows and darkness comes early. It requires an open mind and a willingness to surrender conventional expectations about how stories should unfold. It may surprise you—it certainly surprised me—but the surprise itself becomes part of the gift.
I leave you with a passage that seems to contain sound and scent, poetry and physical vibration—words that somehow do more than words should be able to do:
“The pine needles stretch their tongues and sing an unfamiliar nocturnal song. Each tongue is so small that it cannot be heard; together the sound is so deep and powerful that it could level the hills if it wished.”
There, in those two sentences, lies everything Vesaas accomplishes: the individual rendered invisible yet the collective made overwhelming, nature both gentle and terrible, language that makes you feel what cannot quite be said.
Until tomorrow, dear friends—may you savor every word you encounter.
Written by Alexandra Poppy
Writer, reader & curator of The Ritual of Reading
I’m Alexandra, the voice behind The Ritual of Reading. Somewhere between a stack of novels and a half-finished pot of tea, I keep finding traces of the life I want to live—slower, richer, filled with stories. The Ritual of Reading is where I gather what I love: books that linger, places with a past, and rituals that make ordinary days feel a little more meaningful. I write from Paris, where elegant bookshops and old-fashioned cafés offer endless inspiration—and I share it here, hoping it brings a spark to your own days, too.
