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| Svolvær, Lofoten Islands, Norway. |
My friend
Caroline Hatton, a children’s writer and frequent contributor to this blog,
took the photos in this post in June 2025.
Why
Norway? For scenery and Viking history! Under “scenery,” my husband and I
targeted three natural wonders: the Lofoten Islands, UNESCO World Heritage
Fjords, and the Jotunheimen (“home of the giants”) National Park area, home of the
highest peaks not only in Norway, but in all of northern Europe. This blog post
is about the first of those three.
| Lofoten Islands (L), Norway (N), Oslo (O).* |
North of
the Arctic Circle, where the midnight sun never sets in the summer, a mountain chain
rising out of the sea forms the unmistakable, otherworldly landscape of the
Lofoten Islands. According to websites, June is when to see the islands
at their best, as shown by photos of blue skies above nearly vertical,
rock-gray and moss-green slopes plummeting into turquoise bays or onto beaches
of pale gold sand.
But even
then, it can rain, so some hard-to-follow, steep, rocky hiking trails—my
favorite terrains to hate—may be drowned in mud. If you make it to the top for
the magnificent view, the temperamental weather threatens you with high winds,
sudden downpours, and deadly temperature drops. It sounded irresistible!
For the
Lofoten module of our month-long Scandinavia trip, we booked round-trip plane
tickets from Oslo to Narvik, north of the islands, and allotted five days: one
to get there and drive five hours south to the end of European Route E10; three
days to hike and travel back north; and one last day to complete the return drive.
Three days might give us a chance to enjoy one good hike, right?
That was
Plan A.
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| Above Yttersand Beach (at right, outside of the
photo) |
Plan B,
since we awoke each of those three mornings to solid fog down to the ground or pounding rain, consisted of driving slowly along our itinerary as if thru a car
wash, a few short walks, and lots of photos of Mother Nature pouting.
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| Svolvær, Lofoten Islands, Norway. |
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| Bridge between Kvalvika and Sakrisoya. |
Each day did
have lulls in the bad weather and the fog lifted by about 9 p.m., making my
heart leap with joy (photo at the top of this post). We didn’t start hiking
then, even though the sun never set, because a short night’s sleep makes
driving unsafe in the morning.
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| Kittiwakes. |
On the
first non-hiking day, in the town of Å (rhymes with saw), we were delighted by
nesting seabirds, black-legged kittiwakes (
Rissa tridactyla) who had turned
entire rooftops into high-density bird condos.
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| A reading light! |
The
species is listed in Norway as severely threatened. This is due to a decline in
food supply caused by climate change and overfishing, and predation.
On the
second full day, we joined throngs who sheltered from rain inside the museum
near Borg, at the archeological site where the longest Viking longhouse ever
found once stood. A replica of it, a museum, and the historic harbor site form
the Lofotr Viking Museum. What
made my visit most special was learning that the Icelandic saga I had just read,
Egil’s Saga, might have begun where I stood, when it was perhaps Egil’s
grandfather who lived in this longhouse. When done indoors, we started walking downhill
toward the harbor, but gave up because the wind nearly knocked me off my feet
and it was so cold it felt like it was slicing my eyeballs.
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| Urchin mood light.** |
The day
after that, while strolling through Henningsvær, we ventured into a dark space like
a fairy-tale grotto, a shop illuminated by enchanting urchin mood lights. They
were created by local artist Alexandra. She and her partner Matias free-dive to
collect urchins (undesirable because they eat and destroy the oxygen-producing
kelp forest) and turn them into gorgeous decorative
Lofotlys lit by
simple LED tea lights.
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| Empty fish-drying racks |
That
night, we stayed in Svolvær. Our last Lofoten dinner, like previous ones,
included incredibly good, fjord-to-fork fish. After all, fishing is what
Lofoten is all about, from Stone Age humans, to native Sami and Vikings over a
thousand years ago, to today’s stewards of the sea. The top fishing season is
winter. January to April are the best months to air dry unsalted fish hanging
from racks built on seashore rocks.
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| Rorbuer vacation rentals. |
For places
to stay on the Lofoten Islands, the web presents rorbuer as a must. Rorbuer (the
plural of rorbu) were originally fishermen’s shelters long ago, one-room wooden
cabins on a wooden deck on seashore rocks, with boats tied below. Today,
rorbuer essentially means vacation rental lodgings.
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| Upscale rorbu. |
One rorbu
we tried was an original cabin, restored but still cramped, with classy
bedding, a mini kitchen corner and a shower so big it also contained a toilet
and a sink. Another rorbu was a contemporary, modest condo. Our last rorbu was
an upscale, spacious, two-story, three-bedroom, two-bath, sauna, floor-to-vaulted-ceiling
windows, whole-entire-house over water.
There,
I started reading the 1888 book,
Midnight Sunbeams or Bits of Travel Through the Land of the Norseman by
Edwin Coolidge Kimball. He wrote about the Lofoden [sic] "Islands giant peaks
of savage and stupendous grandeur, and that Many consider this the
grandest scenery of the whole Norwegian coast, and affirm that nothing in
Europe surpasses it." Despite seeing more fog than landscapes, I
will remember the Lofoten Islands for satisfying experiences, including glimpses
of splendor.
Footnotes:
*
Credit for the globe image: Rob984 - Derived from Germany on the globe (Germany
centered).svg, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
**Urchin
light photo: courtesy of Alexandra Anker of https://lofotlys.com/.
