Sami storyteller Stina Fagertun and musician Øistein Hanssen have been bravely facing the Scottish climate (colder than the Arctic they assured the audience) to deliver story and song across our Saltire nation this October. Subtitled The Sun’s Rising, their final outing of the Scottish International Storytelling Festival 2023 concerned itself with life in the land of the midnight sun, and long polar night.
Both performers enjoy an abundance of charm. Hanssen is delightfully versatile with all manner of native instruments and boyish in his love of his peoples’ music. Fagertun, petit of scale (like my great grandmother), but grand in presence, enjoys the twinkling eye and easy manner of a born tale-teller.
Opening Northern Treasures, Hanssen huddled around an artificial fire, introducing the crowd to a different night sky, and constellations understood by different names, and formations. An opening serenade played upon a flute hewn rather than soldered, and a wordless joik made this opening a particularly memorable, thrilling and lovely experience.
With Fagertun’s first appearance, the pair made a brief semblance of two travellers meeting around a fire, though this conceit mostly vanished by the end. Nevertheless, the pocket storytelling powerhouse made merry, taking the audience and a brave, little girl on a quest to find the sun’s ring. Hidden by a wicked troll witch, our hero would need help from all manner of animals before finding her precious. The Sun duly re-introduced to the sky and the enraged troll was duly turned to stone.
Native to Tromsø, Norway, Fagertun accounted for the sheer number of monoliths and other standing stones through the abundant stupidity of trolls through the ages. Such wry, and ready humour was threaded through the show without making light of stories which have followed the Sami, Kven, and Norse peoples down through the long years of their intertwined histories.
The model for Northern Treasures followed from there, blending more fascinating music from Hanssen with further tales plucked from Fagertun’s deep repository. There was scope to play with the lighting more during the show, to better emphasise the night and day themes running throughout. The opening, in particular, might have felt a touch more arresting with the Netherbow bathed in shadows.
However, this is a small note on what was otherwise a lovely, and enchanting hour of story and song from a land where neither sunrise nor sunset are firm fixtures of daily life. Haste ye back Hanssen and Fagertun!
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