The North Behind Solstorm

Pencil illustration of me as a young boy sitting at the kitchen table with my grandfather while my grandmother cooks beside the wood stove. Illustration by Erin E. Forsberg.

I grew up on the coast of Northern Norway, in a world where preparedness was not called preparedness.

It was just life.

One of my clearest childhood memories is my grandfather coming home after a long night at sea with heavy sacks full of fish. For a small boy, this was close to a royal procession. The door opened, the smell of cold sea came in with him, and the house changed speed.

My grandmother would start making fishcakes.

To this day, I am not sure there is a better smell in the world than fresh fishcakes frying on a wood stove. Three frying pans would be going at once, and the whole extended family seemed to orbit the kitchen, each of us waiting for the right moment to steal one straight from the pan without getting caught.

We were not always successful.

My grandmother had a spatula, and she knew how to use it.

On those days, dinner became a theoretical concept. Everyone was full long before the food was officially ready.

But it was not indulgence. Not really.

It was winter work.

Freezers filled with fishcakes, fish balls, fish gratin, and fish fingers. Other fish was smoked, dried, salted, or bokna, partly dried by wind and weather in the old northern way. What the sea gave in season had to be made useful beyond season. Nothing good was wasted if it could be eaten later, traded, preserved, dried, salted, frozen, or turned into something a child would risk his fingers to steal.

Fish was food, but it was also exchange. Fish could be traded for meat from inland farms. Fish could be traded for firewood from neighboring communities. It was a practical circular economy long before anyone needed to give it a modern name.

At the time, I did not think about any of this as a system. It was simply what people did. Only later did I understand that I had grown up inside an old coastal logic: harvest when you can, preserve what you can, share and trade where you must, and prepare for the long winter because the long winter always comes.

Along much of the northern coast, that way of life was normal. A smallholding. A few animals. A kitchen garden. A boat. A shed full of things that might one day become useful again. The fisher-farmer went to sea, and the farm, the animals, the children, the food, the wood, the house, and the thousand daily necessities of survival were carried by everyone around him.

That last part matters.

The old coastal life was not a story of one hard man standing alone against nature. That version is too simple, and mostly false. No one survived the northern coast alone for very long. A boat needed hands. A winter needed stores. A cow needed hay. A child needed warmth. An old person needed checking on. A broken engine, a failed roof, a bad catch, a storm, an illness, or a long dark week without power could turn private trouble into everyone’s problem.

Resilience was not a personality trait.

It was a tradition of work shared across households, generations, and seasons.

It was a hard life.

But it was not helpless.

That distinction matters to me.

Today, we live differently. We have specialized, modernized, centralized, and made ourselves dependent on systems that usually work extremely well. The power is there when we flip the switch. Water runs from the tap. Food waits in the stores. If something goes wrong, most of us have learned to expect that someone else will fix it.

Most of the time, someone does.

Until they do not.

I remember once traveling south to Oslo in early January for a seminar. During the breaks, I kept stepping out onto the hotel veranda. Oslo was cold that day, perhaps ten below, with damp air coming in from the fjord. To the people around me, it was weather to escape from.

To me, it was sunlight.

A colleague from Oslo finally asked why I kept going outside in the cold. I turned and told her the truth: this was the first time in months I had seen and felt the sun.

I remember the look in her eyes when she understood. Not the words, exactly. The reality behind them.

Even in Norway, the North can be difficult to explain to those who have not lived through its winter. Darkness is not just a lack of light. It changes work, mood, distance, time, energy, and the size of every mistake. Add cold, weather, failed transport, enormous distances, and no reliable power, and survival becomes something much more exacting than most modern people are trained to imagine.

Once, in my area, the power went out on Christmas Eve.

It came back seven days later.

This was not pleasant. Let me be clear about that. It was cold. It was inconvenient. Children were not impressed. Old people had to be checked on. Pipes had to be protected. Food had to be moved. Fires had to be watched. People grumbled, because people in the North are very capable of surviving hardship while also making it clear that they disapprove of the arrangements.

I remember clearly that the water in the toilet froze solid, and I had to heat water on the wood stove to thaw it.

But the town did not fall apart.

Everyone had a wood stove. Most had paraffin lamps. Some had a generator. Someone had a gas burner, a boat battery, a shed full of dry birch, fuel in a can, food in a freezer, fish in storage, a neighbor to check on, or an older relative who remembered exactly how things had been done before comfort made memory optional.

In Oslo, seven days without power would have been a catastrophe.

In the North, it was a hard week.

That does not mean people in the North are tougher in some simple romantic sense. I have no interest in that kind of mythology. The weather does not care about mythology. Winter does not care how rugged anyone imagines themselves to be. A storm does not admire courage. Darkness does not reward pride. Hunger is not impressed by good intentions.

But place teaches habits.

Distance teaches habits.

Weather teaches habits.

Poverty taught habits too. Norway’s wealth is young. Not very long ago, much of the country was poor, and the coast in particular learned to live by fish, wood, animals, tools, boats, weather, hands, memory, and the stubborn art of making do.

That older knowledge has not vanished completely. It lingers in woodpiles, boats, freezers, sheds, smokehouses, root cellars, wool clothes, repair habits, and the quiet instinct to keep a little more than you need because the shop may be farther away than the map admits.

This is part of the ground beneath Solstorm.

Skjoldheim is fictional. Yggsøya is fictional. The catastrophe in the book is fictional.

But the habits are not invented.

A house that can stay warm when the wires go dead. A boat that can move without an engine. A shed where useful things are not thrown away too quickly. Food put aside before it is needed. Neighbors who know which door to knock on. A culture where self-reliance does not mean isolation, but the ability to carry your part of the burden when help is delayed.

That is the older northern bargain.

Not independence from everyone.

Interdependence with enough skill, enough stores, and enough stubbornness to endure the waiting.

That bargain also carries an ethic. When survival depends on more than one person, competence becomes a form of care. Storing food is not only for yourself. Keeping tools in order is not only private prudence. Knowing how to mend, fish, split wood, preserve food, read weather, tend animals, check on neighbors, and do the work before the crisis arrives is part of belonging to a place and to the people who live there.

That is one of the foundations of Solstorm.

The saga is not about escaping community. It is about what kind of community can survive when comfort, law, supply, and habit are stripped away. It asks what remains when people must decide, again and again, whether preparedness is only protection of the self, or whether it becomes an obligation to others.

I wanted Solstorm to grow from that soil.

Not from a fantasy of one person surviving alone.

Not from a romantic wish to go backward in time.

Not from the idea that hardship is noble in itself.

Hardship is not noble. It is often frightening, exhausting, unfair, and ugly. But people under pressure reveal what they have practiced. They reveal what they value. They reveal whether old habits were only habits, or whether they were the beginning of law, duty, mercy, restraint, and community.

The world of the saga is harsher than the world I grew up in.

But some of its roots are real.

They smell of fishcakes on a wood stove, cold sea air in the doorway, woodsmoke, salt, wet wool, full freezers, old tools, and a town getting through a dark week by remembering that convenience is not the same thing as resilience.

That memory stayed with me.

Eventually, it became part of Solstorm.

-Tommy

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