I write from what might well be Alice's domain of Wonderland, or to be more precise, perhaps, I have gone through the looking-glass. By the time you read these lines I shall be back in Germany, but now it is midsummer's night in Tromso in the north of Norway; I am at 69 degrees north latitude, 250 miles inside the Arctic Circle, and while no walruses or carpenters are on the beach, the scene is otherwise exactly as described in Lewis Carroll's rhyme:
The sun was shining on
the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to
make
The billows smooth and
bright And that was odd,
because it was
The middle of the night.
Midsummer's Day, celebrated on the feast of St John on June 24th, is a good approximation to the summer solstice. Around this time of year, as we know, the inclination of the Earth's axis is such that the noonday sun shines directly on the Tropic of Cancer at 23 degrees north latitude. A side-effect of this astronomical arrangement is that north of the Arctic Circle for a period around the solstice, the sun, day or what really should be night, does not set. And so it is at present here in Tromso.
This perpetual sunlight gives one an eerie feeling. It is 1 a.m. as I write, and the sun is high, shining brightly from a cloudless sky upon the Tromso fjord. There are pockets of snow left over from the harsh Norwegian winter on the mountains round about, and yet the midnight sun is warm and welcoming. No one in Tromso, so it seems, has any need for sleep this time of year, and for those of us who cannot allow such astronomical idiosyncrasies to interfere with life's routine, going to bed when the sun is in the sky does not seem right; the clock may say it's bedtime, but both the heart and head say otherwise.
Only one traditional feature of what they call "St Hans Aften" is missing. You may remember from Jostein Gaarder's novel Sophie's World that on such a night as this the chief protagonists "passed Lysaker and Sandvika; little by little they began to catch glimpses of St John's fires, especially when they had left Drammen far behind." But tonight, no St John's fires are here in Tromso. The populace is far too busy for such trivialities; they are in the local hostelries celebrating Norway's win against Brazil in France - and here am I, an eccentric scribbling for The Irish Times, among them.