Like sophisticated gardens encased in glass, islands fascinate us for a reason. They can warp reality with singular perceptions and all sorts of endemisms. Can they also revive the aura of art?

Anthropologists believe that a diminutive humerus bone found on the island of Flores belongs to an adult’s arm and not to a child’s, as initially presumed. The environmental constraints set at an island may have caused homo erectus, which had expanded across Eurasia during the earliest human waves outside Africa, to shrink in size.

Despite the dwarfed body and skull, which counter the narrative of human evolution towards a bigger skull cavity, the hominins of Flores, popularly known as Hobbits, survived for an extended period in a limited landmass that lacked big predators, developing sophisticated stone tools along the way as the rest of our close relatives. They could have survived until modern humans arrived in the area.

Regardless of what caused their demise, whether endemism or a clash with early modern humans, the Hobbits are a fascinating side story of a very particular Odyssey, whether the Flores hominins inspired old human tales regarding small creatures hiding deep in the forest is a matter of wishful thinking —or fantasy. But like in Gulliver’s travels, some islands seem to contain a self-enclosed world of their own where the laws of the mainland don’t apply.

Island effect

In evolutionary terms, the “island effect” refers to a process by which animals evolve a smaller body size due to isolation, though, until the discovery of Homo floresiensis remains, no one thought it could happen to humans. More broadly, the island effect refers to the massive changes that species undergo to adapt to the constraints of any given environment.

We’ve lost any means of relating to the life of our tiny distant relatives from Flores —other than learning about them through tool fragments and remains like the tiny arm bone of an adult. Despite the collected evidence, it all feels so fantastic, and it could be part of the fantasy travel chronicles reaching the Old World before modernity. This Tolkien-worth episode could have enticed Herodotus, Ibn Battuta, or Marco Polo when they chronicled what people they met had seen.

Is there an island effect that inspires artists, writers, and workers in general? When French writer Victor Hugo had to live in exile in 1851 after a coup d’état by Napoleon III that established the Second Empire, he moved to Guernsey and lived there for 15 years. There, he completed Les Misérables (published in 1862). The Channel Islands also helped him complete his poetry work, including Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles.

Many others found their own “island effect.” German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, for example, spent time on and off in Menorca in the early 1930s, where he could focus on his writing while political turmoil advanced through Europe.

Northern islands

There are artists who didn’t opt for the relatively easy and pleasant life of the Channel Islands or the Mediterranean (the Greek island of Hydra, for example, became Leonard Cohen’s early creative haven). Some aimed instead at the bare and rough landscape and survival ethos of the far north. The Nordland region of Norway, with its rugged coastlines and unique light conditions, has also attracted those in search of a contemplative, creative life. Painters like Peder Balke and Norwegian-American Scott Thoe, went to places like Lofoten in search of a simpler, more authentic life.

Kjetil Ingvar Berge, a middle-aged conceptual artist from Bergen, bought a small home in a retired Lofoten community where he often finds the inspiration for his work. He also lives in London but constantly returns to his place in Northern Norway. He likes many things from the north, and, to him, there’s no such thing as “isolation” when he’s there. As soon as he arrives, friends walk in to say hello. Unlike in the city, relations carry more meaning and offer attentiveness in bare environments devoid of stimuli overload.

Across Northern Europe, better tools and animal domestication occurred during the Iron Age, which helped the Norse expand to Northern Scandinavia. Near the coast of Norway, a climatic miracle, the North Atlantic current, allowed permanent settlements north of the Arctic Circle thanks to an oceanic climate with relatively mild winters and a short but pleasant summer. In Lofoten, settlers found abundant fish and favorable sea currents that sped ancient commerce around cod via Bergen to the south. Some of the products reaching Europe from the far north may have felt mundane, like dried cod fish; others, like the unique narwhal tusks, believed to be the best proof in the early Middle Ages of the existence of unicorns, were a testimony of the unknown.

When the city of Bergen became a member of the Hanseatic League, a network of interconnected city-states across the Northern Sea, cod from Nordland reached Britain and continental Europe. Though the area resonates internationally in other ways. It might be true that tourism to the area increased after the global success of Frozen, but cruise ships navigating the majestic Norwegian fjords to Lofoten and beyond were already popular much before Disney’s blockbuster.

Cod fishing memory with Martin Otterbeck

Before modernity, however, the remotest and most sparsely populated islands of Lofoten were known to Europeans thanks to stories by sailors—some of whom had echoes in the Norse Sagas, a collective literary work spread across the Scandinavian world through epic poems—and a pervasive, very valuable product before modern food preservation: cod dried and salted in the far north.

When we recently visited Lofoten, the island archipelago that provided Europe with dried and salted cod for hundreds of years, I failed to connect the reality we found to any personal reference. At least until I entered a few decently furbished supermarkets in Narvik and Svolvær, two towns on different islands. It was very late, but the sun was so high that our circadian rhythm was starting to suffer the consequences of a reality where the sun never sets and, say, if you walk out of your place at 12:30 or 1 PM at night, you could see somebody jogging or walking the dog (as it actually happened).

Inside the supermarket, the seafood area was noticeably bigger than anywhere else compared to the rest of the establishment, with all sorts of varieties of canned, frozen, and fresh fish, all relatively affordable thanks to the favorable USD-to-Norwegian Kroner exchange. I read with surprise two apparently popular cod products, one called “bacalao” as in Spanish, prepared with tomatoes and other ingredients used in, say, Basque cuisine (“bacalao al pil-pil,” of Basque origin, is popular across Spain), and I also spotted cod with the Portuguese denomination, “bacalhau.”

Days after, when we met Martin Otterbeck, an Oslo-based cinematographer and camera operator who converted an old oil tank on the island of Skrova into his one-of-a-kind vacation abode in Nordland, I could connect the dots. Until decades ago, before overfishing and the advent of big factory ships that prepare and can all fish at sea, not requiring the traditional methods that attracted crews from all over Europe, as far as the Iberian Peninsula.

Skrova: a different kind of paradise island

Martin walked us around the tiny island where he spends long periods with his girlfriend, photographer Agnete Brun, daughter of another known photographer in Norway, Johan Brun, who focused on nature pictures later in his prolific career. We visited a neighbor who was finishing the construction of a house annex, confirming what our host was trying to convey —If you choose a tiny island 180 km north of the Arctic Circle, you favor a solitary and calm lifestyle, which will bring you to appreciate a casual visit by one neighbor. On our way there, it was impossible not to stare at the surrounding scenario of high peaks going vertically straight from the water on such a crispy, luminous day. He pointed at one particular elongated, saw-like mountain:

“Look at that gorgeous mountain; I love that mountain. I do not like a 4:3 format; I prefer 19:9, and that mountain is panoramic.”

As Martin’s friend showed us the annex he worked on—made of wood, simple, precise, uncluttered by walls or stuff—he confessed that he wasn’t a home builder but a boat builder. He had merely, he said, built a steep keel upside down. I realized that, during the late Iron Age in Northern Europe, the local population used the same techniques to build the legendary open-keel Viking vessels and their longhouses. One type of construction excelled at sea and helped people from Norland to reach with precision routes as far as southern Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Britain, Normandy, the Iberian Peninsula, and beyond. The ships were low and agile, combining rowing to ease maneuvering in and out fjords, bays, and rivers where they commerced and surprised populations with flash raids and one big sail hanging from a central post.

At land, the longhouses were equally low on the land, using a protective wall of stone and turf to anchor the wooden structure and generate the necessary thermal mass indoors. Longhouses housed a small clan and were kept warm using open fires that also allowed cooking. All fish not consumed right away was dried on roof racks. Being a kid, I vacationed for half a month each summer in Galicia, the Spanish region north of Portugal that retains idiosyncrasies keener to ancient Atlantic cultures than the Romanized variants, such as a more capillary distribution across the territory, vernacular architecture resembling that of Ireland or Wales (including Celtic roundhouses, still used in rural Lugo), and a rich fishing tradition going back centuries, if not millennia. Several “rías,” deep bays piercing the territory to approach the local heartland to the sea, resemble small-scale fjords.

When I was a kid, my grandmother lived at an old house with two of her siblings, an old widow and an old bachelor who had traveled the world but never married. It was a group of houses (“Os Casás”) outside a small “parroquia,” or village, in the interior of Pontevedra, one of Galicia’s four administrative provinces. The place had been connected for centuries to Tui—where the archbishopric had its seat—and Sotomayor (Soutomaior in Galician), a medieval landmark hosting an important castle. The sea had always seemed far away in the tiny village, which hosted the remains of families practicing rural subsistence in a highly divided territory —enough to feed a few cows and plant a few crops to feed them, but little else. In the tenth century, by the way, Tui was raided and destroyed by the Vikings.

Distant murmurations

The house had little. The three old siblings occupied one bedroom each, a private space accessed through a long couloir where us kids weren’t allowed. On the other side of the rectangular layout, left of the front door, the living room connected to an old kitchen that I tried to elude due to the pungent smells: of raw milk straight from the cows kept at the cow stable below; of boiled potatoes and fish, their evergreen dish (and, perhaps, part of the reason there were so many really old people around, some of whom had been born in the late nineteenth-century, back when Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines were Spanish colonies); and unprepared food sitting around.

Among the things I remember, near the pantry, located in the kitchen’s dark corner, there was the entire half of a salted big fish hanging from a rusted metal hook —other Spaniards kept their jamón hanging in the kitchen, though Galicians preferred their salted cob. Where was that cod coming from? Had it been fished near Lofoten, or did it come from the banks of the Gran Sol west of Ireland? I did not know, though a distant cousin of my father was married to a fellow who seemed straight out of one of the Walter Scott novels that I read in comic version at the time; he wore an old school cap, his voice was raspy and deep, and he didn’t talk much but seemed to say a lot with a simple smile. Above all, he was missing one finger in one hand and two in the other. He was a fisherman, spending months each year fishing in the banks of the North Atlantic from Terranova to Norway.

During our trip through Lofoten, we stayed several days in an off-grid cabin neighboring an old farm sold recently by the original owners. When talking to the old owner’s son about life there decades ago, he recalled a cramped, difficult life that somehow brought memories to him that resemble mine in rural Galicia as a little kid in the eighties.

Perhaps there’s a connection between the big, salted cod hanging at my grandmother’s home—the same way it had hanged at the same place generations before—and the stories around cod fishing in remote Nordland islands, some of which hosted sparse populations multiplying when, in winter, North Atlantic cod traveled to the shallow waters of Lofoten to breed. When people in the area use the word “bacalao” casually, buying even the pre-cooked variety at their local stores, there’s more to be told than meets the eye.

Tiny universe

We knew little about Skrova, a 2.5-square-kilometer (0.97-square-mile) island group connected by ferry to the town of Svolvær via Ferry and a mere 200 inhabitants. Located in the middle of Vestfjorden and protected by the outer—bigger—Lofoten islands from the open Atlantic, it has the least rainfall and the most hours of sunshine in the archipelago. Henrik Lande Andersen, a friend who had contacted us a few years back to explain his endeavors in Lofoten and encourage us to come, mentioned the reality-warping character of Skrova and its eclectic population.

Smaller and flatter than the surrounding islands, Skrova’s shape is that of a crab opening its claws to form a protected, calm natural harbor that turned the place, despite its Lilliputian size, into the largest fishing village in Lofoten since it gained privileged trading rights in the mid-eighteen century. Fishing, fish farming, and whaling remain a living reality in Skrova, though there’s little to be seen to the untrained eye when reaching the harbor, especially out of season.

It would have been difficult to spot the past reality in today’s picturesque Skrova, especially in summer, when tourists arrive by ferry to walk around the series of little islands connected by small bridges and containing just one fishing factory. Walking with Martin Otterbeck, we climbed one road amid rocks and meadows full of wild plants topped by lila flowers. To the left, long wooden structures resembling the bones of a warehouse sat empty and purposeless, though Martin gave them meaning for us: in season, these structures are used to hang the cod to dry it with the local weather, just as ancient Vikings did.

Instead of fish, what we found in the structure was a photographic exposition displaying the island’s fishing legacy. As a photography aficionado, I have been wondering about the effects of having a ubiquitous supercamera—the one contained in our smartphones—in the banality of photography. Does a portrayed reality resonate the same way (or more) when it’s photographed ad nauseam by people, and then shared on social media?

According to Susan Sontag, a fine theoretician of photography, among other things, taking a picture is never banal and always shows one intention, one way of looking into the world. Though photographs derive directly from reality, they are a partial and artistic representation of it. That’s why Sontag didn’t appreciate those photographers trying to convey “reality,” for it’s impossible to do so. The “real” doesn’t equal reality.

Photographing Skrova

Skrova hosts temporary and semi-permanent exhibitions by prominent photographers. To us, it felt like a refreshing way to pay attention to the pictures we were seeing in the middle of a magic environment. One temporary exhibition hinted at the Scandinavian appreciation for all-things-plain: it was a series of carefully framed depictions of Volvo cars in their “plain” environment.

Norwegian photographer Agnete Brun, who happens to be Martin’s partner, had photographed several of the village’s oldest people, who appeared in big portraits on advertising panels. There was a permanent exhibition depicting the island’s fishing history, with a selection of landscapes, panoramas, and still-life pictures of fishermen at work.

During our walk through the expositions at Skrova, I felt that time and perception were warped. We observed pictures of old inhabitants, rugged sailors, and the waters surrounding the island packed with boats fishing cod during winter. We got to know the work of Nicolai Marcelius Helgesen, Anders Beer Wilse, and Sven-Ivar Carlsson. The three visited Skrova on several occasions, and their pictures preserve today a near past in which, according to our host Martin Otterbeck, local sailors “had perfected the Viking ship over the generations.”

When you visit a place like Skrova, something stays with you. Few places blend the remoteness of Canada’s Big North, a surrounding landscape of rocks amid nature of Yosemite, and the silence of the islands and waterways of the Pacific Northwest, from the north of Vancouver Island to the remotest Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte) islands, the places visited by young George Dyson on his self-made canoe, as described by Kenneth Brower in The Starship and the Canoe.