The church is very simple. The paintings are light, not heavy-handed as later ecclesiastical paintings in other parts of the world can be. Folk art. The design of the church – like all the Gotland churches – is symmetrical, pleasing. The paintings are rather childish, like the art we call naive.
I feel a sense of mystery in this church. It’s a small achievement, to have figured out how to get to it, to have reached it on a bicycle. I don’t quite feel a direct link to the generations that have sat here, to the people who built and painted the church in the thirteenth century – even before Chaucer was born, for instance. When I was young, I felt, or imagined, such nebulous connections. I felt them in Gortahork in 1978, when I listened to Joe Mac Eachmharcaigh telling his stories.
There was no word for this: for the sense of being awestruck, of hearing the voices, many voices, of the past, transmuted over centuries. It was like listening to the dead, although the story was as alive as the dogs barking in the winter townlands, or the waves crashing against Bloody Foreland. It was like meeting the poets of the thirteenth century, and every century since then. It was like touching an invisible glinting chain that goes back through the ages, and getting an electric shock from it: small, thrilling, like the shock from some sea creature in the depths of the ocean.
Now I try to regain feelings of that kind, feelings that came easily and spontaneously when I was in my twenties, starting my journey. But they elude me. Sensitivity diminishes with age. Nevertheless I feel something for which I have no adequate words, as I sit on the old painted pew in the dim, silent, clean church. Appreciation. Gratitude. Delight that such a building, such a church, exists, sitting out here in the middle of the summer fields, preserved intact since 1281, in spite of the battles, the Reformation, the tribulations, the economic upheavals, of the centuries.
It’s awesome that our world contains such places. Of about a hundred medieval churches on Gotland, more than eighty survive and still function.
There was a sign saying ‘Prylbutik 300 metres’. I cycle around but can’t find anything. It would be nice to sit here, in the sunshine, on the bench that has been thoughtfully placed close to the church, overlooking the cornfield, and eat a sandwich. (Later I realise that ‘Prylbutik’ means a sort of flea market, a junk shop; it probably opens only at weekends, when people like to root around and find old things.) Hejdeby seems to be nothing but a townland, containing the church, a farm or two, a house.
So I cycle back to Visby, the walled medieval city, where there are supermarkets and restaurants and nice places to eat.
Some of this memoir was written at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig; The Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators, Gotland; and the Haihatus Artists’ Residence, Joutsa, Finland.
Thanks to Helena Wulff, who read the manuscript and made suggestions, and to my editor, Patsy Horton of Blackstaff Press.
Bo, aged about twenty
Bo and I, waiting to get married
Our wedding, Uppsala, Sweden, 1982
Bo and I with our son Olaf
With our two sons at Olaf’s First Communion, 1992. From left to right: me, Olaf, Bo and Ragnar.
Bo lecturing, UCD, 1990s
Bo and a storyteller
In Iceland, 1991
Bo in his library, 2012
Bo, c. 2000
Islandbridge, 2013