Kiluna, Sweden in Winter

THE PALACE OF THE SNOW QUEEN:
Winter Travels in Lapland
Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007
$15.95, Trade Paper
ISBN-10: 1-59 376-159-7
ISBN-13: 978 1-59376-159-2

A frequent traveler to Scandinavia, Barbara Sjoholm set off one winter to explore a region that had long
intrigued her. The Palace of the Snow Queen is the result of Sjoholm's travels in Lapland, starting with
her visit to Kiruna, Sweden, to observe the construction of the Icehotel. Over the the course of three winters in the North, she met ice artists and snow architects, reindeer herders, and Sami writers and activists. Throughout The Palace of the Snow Queen, Sjoholm provides a deeply moving look at the people of Kiruna and the Sami struggle to maintain their grazing lands and migration routes in the face of tourism, while focusing on the various political and ideological changes occurring within this icy region. Ultimately, Sjoholm contemplates the tensions between contemporary tourism and traditional culture, and delivers a powerful travel narrative of this comparatively little-known region of Europe.

REVIEWS and PRAISE:

This book is a thoroughly researched, funny, lively and—yes—warm book about what humans can discover and create in the cold. In addition to the reindeer herders, dog sledders and Santa’s elves we might expect to find in such far northern climes, Barbara Sjoholm introduces us to ice sculptors, indigenous filmmakers, a teenage anthropologist and actors in a Sami language version of Macbeth, in other words, more varieties of Northern Lights than we ever imagined. —Rebecca Brown

The Palace of the Snow Queen is an exquisite book.
I would recommend it to anyone interested in Lapland in particular, or travel in general.
—Vendela Vida, author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

From Kirkus Reviews:
An American travel writer details how the Arctic winter in Lapland warmed her heart. With a childhood affinity for Hans Christian Andersen’s "Snow Queen" and a desperate need to emerge from the fog of grief following a painful breakup in 2001, Sjoholm (Incognito Street: How Travel Made Me a Writer, 2006, etc.) sought a dramatic change of scene. So the Washington state native decided to take a Norwegian friend up on her offer to spend Christmas with her. “I wanted extremity and silence, a winter world to mirror my sense of loss,” writes the author, “an absence of sunshine while I found my bearings again.” That three-month sojourn led to another two years later, followed by a third excursion the year after; the experiences of all three trips comprise these engaging tales of winter in the northern reaches of Finland, Sweden and Norway. Sjoholm took off for Sweden in late 2001. Her first stop was the village of Jukkasjärvi to witness the annual construction of the renowned Icehotel, a marvelous 60-room structure of snow and ice built by architects and artists each fall to host about 13,000 visitors then melt the following spring—what the author aptly dubs “a fine example of art for art’s sake.” She then attends an unforgettable performance of Macbeth, staged outside in the Ice Globe Theatre in temperatures as cold as -13° F. Other trip highlights include a visit to the post office in Rovaniemi, Finland, the unofficial North Pole and recipient of all unstamped letters to Santa; an enchanting encounter with reindeer; and a traumatic attempt at dogsledding. Sjoholm also offers thoughtful sociopolitical ruminations on the plight of the nomadic Sami—the indigenous people of Sapmi, which today includes parts of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Kola Peninsula of Russia—and, somewhat paradoxically for one in search of darkness, numerous moving descriptions of the ever-changing, often ephemeral natural light.

An enticing entrée for those in search of extreme weather in a scenic clime.

From Booklist:
The colder the better seems to be Sjoholm’s motto as she travels to Swedish Lapland in mid-November for what she calls the “blue hour, when the slate-colored snow looks colder than white” and to see the building of the Icehotel, a temporary accommodation with 60 rooms in which ice blocks covered by mattresses and reindeer skins are the beds. Made of snow and ice, it melts each spring. Sjoholm seeks to understand how “imagination and hard work” can turn essentially frozen water into architecture. Fortunately, there is more than this to the book. It also provides a fascinating portrait of the Sami, the indigenous people of Lapland, and their history, culture, and struggle to survive in the modern world. And it has its share of entertaining anecdotes, like those about the bachelor party of Englishmen who want to experience an “authentic” Lapland adventure and what it’s like attending the Ice Globe Theatre’s Macbeth while the temperature dips to 13 below. A captivating homage to the frozen far North and the Sami.
—June Sawyers

From The Seattle Times:
This is the coldest I've ever been reading a book, but it was worth it.

In three journeys to Lapland, Port Townsend author Barbara Sjoholm maintains a keen eye for observation, leaving romanticism behind, while still indulging in the swooning beauty of the far north. And she is generous with this beauty, serving it up for the reader from the first pages of The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland.

Fleeing the wreckage of a love relationship gone south, she heads north, wondering along the way if she will remain as frozen in grief as the ice all around, or find peace in the deep silence and wide space that draws her: "I wanted extremity and silence, a winter world to mirror my sense of loss, an absence of sunshine while I found my bearings again," Sjoholm writes.

As a child, in California no less, she had become fascinated by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, especially "The Snow Queen," about a boy captured by an icy empress who brought him back with her to her palace in the far north. Sjoholm sets out on a pilgrimage to her own ice palace, the Icehotel in a Swedish village, where every year a team of builders and artists come together to build a hotel out of snow and ice.

In Andersen's fairy tale, the queen's ice palace is vast, a great snow hall that includes a frozen sea. "That frozen sea inside a fortress of snow sometimes felt like my heart, and I had a determined curiosity to walk to its center and see if it was really 'cracked into a thousand fragments,' or if it could be made to melt again," she writes.

Her journey starts with her weeks at the hotel, as artists worldwide ready it for an onslaught of tourists. One of the largest snow structures in the world, the hotel with its 60 bedrooms features ice blocks covered by a mattress and reindeer skins.

As she lingers in the north, and the winter dark deepens, Sjoholm finds what she came for, in the daily play of light and sky. "The ever-present thin blue of sky and snow intensified as it darkened. The brief blue hour, softer, more subtle than twilight, resembled the artful tinting of a platinum photograph. The recognizable grew mysterious. The spruce forest thickened. A lone hooded crow flying overhead seemed to pull a smoke-blue shadow in its wake. Blue became a verb, as whiten is, as blacken: The snowy world blued. Blued into black."

While she rhapsodizes about the light, Sjoholm also tells it like it is. When she signs on for a dog-sled tour across the tundra, she doesn't mind telling us it turns out she doesn't much like the dogs. Or that, packing a near-concussion after several bad crashes, she bags the rest of the tour.

She soon encounters the culture of the indigenous Sami people and becomes enthralled with their smoky tents and reindeer meat dinners, swimming in butter. With, she reports, some 200 words for snow, this is a people that know every nuance of their world: Snow that is packed, new, old, fine, coarse, wet, dry, untouched by wild animals, or with traces of their tracks.

It is here that the book sometimes wanders off into cul de sacs, with long descriptions, for instance, of Sami music that inevitably disappoints, since it can't be heard. But particularly for readers from the Northwest, the parallels with the history of native peoples here brings another dimension of discovery to the book.

Somewhere along the way, in three trips through Sweden, Finland and beyond, in reindeer racing, a trip to Santa's Post Office and more, Sjoholm feels the thaw inside she has been waiting for.

"I was out of sight of the Icehotel now, far away on the snow-covered, still-frozen river, sliding along on my simple kick sled, no desire to turn back yet, into the wide world, rejoicing."
—Lynda V. Mapes

From Library Journal:
Sjoholm, Barbara.
The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland. Shoemaker & Hoard: Avalon, dist. by Publishers Group West. 2007. c.320p. maps. bibliog. ISBN 978-1-59376-159-2. pap. $15.95. TRAV

The icy tips of Norway, Sweden, and Finland stretch above the Arctic Circle. The region is home to the Sami, the indigenous people of Lapland, and has become a tourist destination for the hardy and for those who don't know how cold -20°F really is—until they are sitting in an outdoor ice theater watching Macbeth performed in Sami. Sjoholm (The Pirate Queen) escapes the grief of a lost relationship to explore these frozen lands and the people who live there. She spends time in Kiruna, an iron ore mining town near the famous Ice Hotel, which draws tourists to its ice bar and ice beds. She explores the conflicts between visitors who seek both an ideal, untouched wilderness and controversial activities like dog sledding, which negatively impact reindeer herds and migration and the lives of the Sami people. After reading this book, readers get a real sense of life in a dark, very cold, yet also beautiful land.

Recommended for public and academic libraries.
—Melissa Stearns, Franklin Pierce Univ. Lib.

From Bookslut:
The frozen lands of the North have long held an almost mythological fascination for inhabitants of more temperate climates. How many children have grown up on stories of polar explorers, Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytales of the North, or more recently, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, with its armored bears and witches and magical-scientific explanation for the aurora borealis?

In The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland, Barbara Sjoholm draws only occasionally on Anderson’s story of the Snow Queen, as a binding emotional thread running through her travelogue-memoir of her time spent in the far north of Sweden and Finland, in the traditional lands of the Sami. The Palace of the Snow Queen is another fascinating, occasionally mythological account of the North, which is changing like everywhere else to meet the challenges of modern life and global climate change.

Sjoholm, a writer and translator, first decided to visit Sweden in winter to escape everything familiar after personal unhappiness and then the events of 9/11. The Palace of the Snow Queen opens in Kiruna, Sweden, where she goes to see the Winter Place or Icehotel, the first and most famous ice hotel. Every winter, over 13,000 people spend a night in Icehotel, not because it is comfortable but because it is an experience.
                       
She learns about reindeer and about dogsledding, an import for tourism that negatively impacts the reindeer herds of the indigenous Sami. And she learns about the Sami themselves, who have grown increasingly dependent on tourism and not are always accepted by Swedes and Finns. There is cultural tension here, and the pressure of commercialism complicates the issues further.

At the same time, the North is a place of artistic innovation as well as commercialism. Sjoholm describes an international film festival about indigenous peoples, shown on an outdoor screen of snow at the Icehotel, and a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in Sami, with the actors clothed in elaborate fur and wool costume over long underwear.

“After this,” Sjoholm writes, “it would be hard to see a production of Macbeth where frost did not hang in a cloud around an actor’s mouth and to feel the play was historically accurate.”

The North Sjoholm describes is not a wasteland to be braved by intrepid explorers but a place of surprising and unusual creativity, producing both traditional and experimental art.

Sjoholm’s writing is beautiful and vivid, with a precise and emotionally effective command of the language. Along with her own emotional journey, likened to Gerda in Anderson’s “The Snow Queen,” she weaves in observations on the power of snow and ice over human experience, as well as reflections upon history. Her portrait of the challenges facing the different cultures she encounters—both from tourism and exploitation and from global climate change—is equally compelling.

There are not many books I read in a weekend, pausing only to eat and sleep. This is one of them. The Palace of the Snow Queen is a spectacular book, not to be missed by anyone fascinated with the North, or anyone who enjoys reflections on culture, art, and history.

And it’s a good story.
—Melissa A. Barton

From The Olympian/Kitsap Sun:
Port Townsend writer Barbara Sjoholm has a knack for winding her life’s narrative into explorations of intriguing locales. In the engaging memoir Incognito Street, she reviewed how her travels as a young adult shaped her career as a writer, translator and publisher.

In The Pirate Queen, she used her travels across the northern seas of Europe to intertwine personal musings with the nearly forgotten but thrilling lives of seafaring women of the past. And now, in The Palace of the Snow Queen, she takes a series of winter journeys through Lapland—a moniker that loosely covers the regions of Scandinavia that are north of the Arctic Circle.

Sjoholm set out in 2001, post-9/11, following the devastating break-up of a long-term relationship. There’s nothing like cheering yourself up by heading to a land where every 24-hour period features two whole hours of daylight. The snow and the ice are the literal frosting on the proverbial cake. But she wasn’t exactly heading out to the boonies. The Far North of Europe boasts cities of some size: ports, university towns, year-round mining operations, and growing tourist centers. In fact, this notion of Lapland as a “destination” has been recorded over the centuries in books by adventurers and proselytizers, and it was central to the famous Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, “The Snow Queen.” Now it is at the center of an ongoing struggle as governments, entrepreneurs, artists, and the native Sami redefine what “destination” might mean.

As Sjoholm retools a vision for her own future, she explores these competing visions for the future of the Far North, too. Is it in the extraordinary Icehotel, a concept that incorporates environmental art into high-end seasonal lodging? This phenomenon arose in the early 1990s and with the support of a major corporate sponsor quickly developed into a world-famous destination. Is it in the lure of the snow-covered tundra, the reindeer herds and the Northern Lights, which tour operators offer in package deals via dogsled or snowmobile? Is it in the Indigenous People’s Film and TV Production Festival, which welcomes filmmakers from the Brazilian jungle one year and aboriginal Australia another, and is held outdoors in Finland in January?

Or is it in the optimistic vision that Swedish planners project of reinventing an environmentally cutting-edge community when the entire town of Kiruna (population 27,000) is relocated? (The inescapable irony here is that the relocation is occurring to allow for the expansion of the local mine—already the world’s largest underground mine.)

But just as the Sami have many different words to describe snow of different qualities, Sjoholm, too, picks up on the subtleties. In The Palace of the Snow Queen, she gives us a nuanced consideration not just of a landscape, but of the people who shape it and are shaped by it, who move through it and are moved by it.

I highly recommend this book, but don a pair of warm socks before you sit down to read it!
—Barbara Lloyd McMichael