My family and I celebrated Christmas in Norway this year, which brought a number of new experiences, including far more communal singing at work parties than I’d anticipated! It was in one of these early Christmas festivities that I first heard the song I’ll now always associate with Advent and Christmastide in Norway: the Nordnorsk julesalme (North Norway Christmas Hymn). Among the many new traditions and customs of a holiday in a new place, this one was my favorite.
Praise and Place
This song made an appearance at every julefest and church service I attended in the month of December. Some of that might be because it’s a beautiful song– the melody is lovely, no matter the instrumentation or singers. More importantly, it seems that some of this popularity for the song has to do with its specificity and its connections to north Norway. The lyrics, quoted in full below in English (but with the Norwegian from the Norwegian Church hymnal here), highlight things like the cold, the darkness, and the sparsity of the winter landscape:
Blessed be the day over the fjords.
Blessed be the light over land.
Blessed be the eternal words
of hope and an outstretched hand.
Guard what little you gave us
the day you carried us here.
So we know you never will let us
expire in need and toil.
We lived hat in hand,
but had such strong faith.
And one thing we know is true:
We are unyielding, just like you.
Now we face the hardest time.
We struggle to make our way
towards light and advent time.
The way south to Bethlehem is long.
God’s peace upon mountain and hill.
Let it grow where we build and reside.
God’s peace on the animals in the stall
and a frozen and meagre soil.
You see us in the land of polar night,
you bless with eternal words,
the houses, the mountain, the water
and the people who live here in the north.
(Translation from Lyrics Translate, with some slight modifications by myself)
There is something particularly meaningful in singing about light over the land in a season when such light is dim if it exists at all, in singing about God seeing us in the darkest polar night. And that was the first thought I had about this song: when was the last time I had sung a hymn this shaped by place and time? Would there even be an equivalent song that reflects my usual context of upstate South Carolina and the challenges to faith there? So much of American Christian music is shaped by CCM culture, a generic commercial framing that has had an outsized influence on American evangelicalism (Leah Payne’s book God Gave Rock and Roll to You gives a great overview of the development of this industry). The specificity of a hymn or praise song like this, naming the challenges to faith in a specific place, felt incredibly moving. To be seen in our specific geographic settings and challenges- isn’t that part of the beauty of our God? That He became incarnate in a specific place and time and meets and sees us in our own as well.
To be fair, there is also beauty in music that addresses the breadth of the church as well: songs that point us to things that we know to be true across time and geographic difference. This is part of the beauty in the liturgy or in singing familiar songs in new congregational settings. There has been a different sort of beauty in singing songs we know from back home in Norwegian, or in reciting the Apostles’ Creed and Lord’s Prayer in Norwegian. But from my work in historic Christianity, I’d somewhat anticipated those experiences, the beauty in the continuity across place and time within the global church. Perhaps because my experiences within the American church involve worship music so detached from place, I hadn’t anticipated the way that a song naming the challenges of one specific place and time would be meaningful to my faith.
Place and History
In researching for this post, however, I found that the history and contexts of the Nordnorsk julesalme challenged my initial impressions of the song. While I’d assumed the Nordnorsk julesalme was quite old, as it turns out, the song was written in 1985 by Trygve Hoff, for a children’s Christmas show (Lyset i Mørketida, “Light in the Dark Time”) on NRK, Norway’s national broadcast service. The Christmas show looked at Advent traditions in historic Norway, and the Nordnorsk julesalme was meant to reflect advent in northern Norway in the 1700s and 1800s. As Trygve Hoff’s daughter Sibeth Hoff explained it in an interview for the hymn’s 30th anniversary, the hymn was meant to reflect a regional view of faith and of Advent: to connect the humility of the season (with God become human) to the divine presence revealed in the beautiful landscapes of the north. Kjell Arne Røvik, an academic at the University of Tromsø, explains the hymn as a tribute from the people of a rural area to the Lord, who came to a rural area- a “bottom-up” perspective that is meaningful to the people of northern Norway, particularly since the hymn is in a northern dialect. What I’d assumed was a historical hymn reflecting introspection into the faith of the authors was actually more like a reimagining of historical faith, using an imagined historical experience to articulate regional and national identity.
After its premier in 1985, the hymn fell into relative obscurity for the 1990s- but a resurgence of interest in the 2000s has led to the inclusion of the hymn in the Norwegian Church’s hymnal and to widespread national popularity: the bells on Oslo’s City Hall played the Nordnorsk julesalme every day of Advent and Christmastide in 2015, and the song’s popularity has not decreased in recent years. The controversy around the song has also increased, with a pair of 2013 articles in NRK, released around the time the hymn was incorporated into the Norwegian hymnal, debating whether it was blasphemous or not to imagine and sing about the past and to compare people to God. Those opposed to the hymn take issue with claiming the people of the North are unyielding or stubborn like God, while supporters see this line as pointing towards the meaning of Christmas, where God became like us in the incarnation. Regardless, many see the hymn as articulating a particularly Norwegian understanding of Christmas: as God come to a humble and hard-working people, in a surprising setting, giving light in the darkest of times.
Past, Present, Place, and Praise
Does it matter that the particularity of this song reflects not contemporary experience, but historical imagining of the past? In some ways, as a newcomer to the region, some of the elements of the song are perhaps not as historical as others: food and heat are certainly easy to come by in north Norway in the 21st century, but the darkness of the polar night and the treachery of icy ground remain the same. This sort of particularity in the hymn still feels helpful to me, rather than dangerous. The starkness of the dark winter landscape, in which warmth and light feel far away, gives a rich new theological meaning to the practice of Advent. The darkest day of the year falls right before Christmas, and you truly feel that darkness in a new way when the sun hasn’t risen for a full month.
But I do think the hymn’s critics are right to warn about the dangers in romanticizing history in the service of faith, especially when the particularities of place overlap with national identity. It feels important to reflect on the challenges to faith in our specific places and contexts, and I wish we did more of this in the American church. But it also feels important to reflect on those challenges in a way that encourages not national pride in overcoming things like harsh dark winters or wars in a distant past, but in a way that encourages a focus on the hope we have in Christ that allows us to praise God in darkness, whether literal or metaphorical. When particularity points us towards our place in the church universal, it can only be a good thing; when particularity points us towards ourselves, it is far more dangerous.
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