Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
On a map the many fjords of Norway blend into homogeny. Endless winding inlets and islands that crimp the coastline from Oslo to Russia into a glaciated fractal maze. But as I have plied them for the last few weeks I've come to understand their idiosyncrasies and individual perils. When at sea one will always find themselves at odds with nature. Like Odysseus you find that no passage or stop ever runs without a hitch, "plain sailing" is a untenable dream. Every narrow passage, every port, every new sea each comes with a litany of never-before-seen hazards and monsters of the deep. In this age such things may not be as immediate as Scylla nor Charybdis, but dangerous nonetheless. But to appreciate fjords-in-specific you must first understand fjords-in-general.
A "fjord" is not a strongly defined class of geographic features, and can take several shapes and sizes. They emerge in polar regions over which ice sheets used to sit, where the landscape bears the scars of glaciers. They also require hard-rock, something like granite; soft sedimentaries can't stand up to the levels of erosion. Lastly they need a large fetch, that is for those unmarinised, a long stretch of open ocean in the direction of the prevailing wind. This means that the motion of the ocean will be multiplied as there is more water to be pushed towards you. In places like this there are higher tides, bigger swells, and stronger winds which whip up higher waves. Cornwall is a good example of a long fetch, the famous gulf-stream which blows consistently from the South-West across the entirety of the Atlantic bringing high tides, strong winds and rather a lot of rain. Places which satisfy all three of these properties (polar, bedrock, fetch) will generate fjords over a long enough period (probably, geography is fickle). Norway is the prime example, but they are also found on the West Coast of Scotland, British Columbia, the Chilean Canals and southern New Zealand. They are characterised by incredibly deep channels of water that extend far inland, surrounded usually by high mountains and full of rocky islands. There are parts of Norway where you can both be at seawaterlevel but also hundreds of miles from the "sea" (you can read about my previous adventure there here).
The Trondelag was our first visit, characterised by persistent rainfall. Similar to Argyll, the rain here comes pretty much every day. The land is barren and sparsely vegetated with crashing rivers and teetering boulders. Like most of the fjords the Norwegians have erected hundreds of little log-cabins on the many islets, staking a seasonal claim to their own private fiefdom. Once a Viking always a Viking I suppose. The spiny peaks line the horizon like a crosshatch between sea and sky. The beauty of the fjords is that they are the reason life here in the high north is even possible. Their twisting branches provide a barrier between the crashing sea and the settlements: we found that even when the sea itself was in tumult, the fjord-water sits as flat as a slice of brunost. We sat at anchor off Trondheim for several days, with myself having to lead a daring assault of the city is one of our little sea-boats when a shipmate got injured late at night a few hours before we were due to depart. The couple miles of navigation were pretty exciting, attempting to discern which of the twinkling lights was my target as we skimmed across the near-freezing water. At night the persistent cloud-cover makes everything impossibly dark: the mountains disappearing leaving nothing visible but the miniscule cone of light coming from our head-lamps.
We transited through and around several of the Vestfold fjords in the coming days, and I learnt to enjoy navigating there. Unlike in the softer parts of Europe where hidden sandbanks and shallow waters abound and risk grounding you, here the waterline is like a cliff-edge, with the water deepening immediately to hundreds of metres. They often say in navigation that the nearest point of danger is always the seabed, but here the drop-offs are so extreme that you are often closer to the foreshore than the bottom. We never went that far in, but when the visibility did lift I was afforded glimpses down into the deeper stages of the fjords which reminded me of my aforementioned trip to Aurland-Dale: steep sided ravines where snow-capped mountains tumble down to sea-level in a matter of minutes within which navigation is more akin to a maze than the sea.
Now is Oslofjord the capital fjord which again feels very different. Here the land is relatively low-lying, fertile and populated. Houses and villages are strewn along its edges and endless parades of ferries ply back and forth between Westfold and Eastfold. Oslofjord is much "tamer" than her northerly sisters, but she has other tricks up her sleeve. Her sheltered nature in the bosom of the Skagerrak means the tides are negligible and the winds are greatly reduced, however this is the perfect basin in which for fog to form. During our first attempt at entering we were turned back before we entered the narrows at Drobok due to thick fog which sat unmoving in the narrowest stretch of the pilotage, inside of which you could hardly see the bow of the ship ahead. Our second attempt was successful despite patches of fog still hampering us. It was as if the city was being protected by some magic spell, confusing would be invaders and turning them back.
It reminded me of one of my favourite childhood games, the Phantom Hourglass, in which you have to sail your ship through thick seafog through a patch of rocks in order to reach the next region. You can only take a very specific winding route which you have to learn by attaining a chart from an old seafarer who lives on an island to the south lest you find yourself back where you started. It turns out the fog is a magic ward set down by the "ghost ship" in order to prevent free passage and to hide their whereabouts. Such spells are commonly found in fantasy: the spell protecting Hogwarts from Muggle intruders, the barrier protecting Gensokyo from outsiders, the magic forest from any number of Zelda games or indeed Super Mario RPG. They all seek to scare and confuse intruders by disorientating them and defeating them by either getting them lost, running them into deadly danger, or just spitting them out back where they started. The only way through in all these examples is to know the "secret way" (respectively: the appropriate incantation, the Hakurei Shrine, a map of some sort, or from following subtle hints that require prior knowledge to pick up on). The fjords act like magical barriers too, blocking those without the "knowledge of safe travel" from entering, but acting as a highway for locals and those in-the-know.
