The story about Nils Bayer in eighteenth-century Trondheim is, of course, just as much fiction as the story about Odd Singsaker’s hunt for Julie Edvardsen’s kidnapper. Most of the people described in the novel’s sections set in 1767 are pure fabrication. But what’s true is that back then Trondheim was a small town of barely five thousand inhabitants, and the upper class consisted of very few people, many of whom are still well known today. These individuals had an enormous influence on the history of the city; it’s nearly impossible to imagine a Trondheim of 1767 without them, and for that reason they could not be entirely excluded from this novel. In Death Song, I’ve chosen to approach this challenge in two ways.
First, even though all the key players in the story are fictional, they do possess some traits that I’ve borrowed from real people. Trondheim was the first town in Norway to have a police chief, and that occurred as early as 1686. In 1767, Trondheim’s police chief was Søren Madsen Næbell (who lived until 1780). Like Nils Bayer, he paid far too much for this official post, and subsequently had constant money woes. He was also a quarrelsome man who clashed with many of the other public authorities in town. But unlike Bayer, there are no indications that he had any sort of drinking problem. On the contrary, he was a highly enterprising and moral police officer who did much to shape and elevate the status of the police force in Trondheim.
The wealthy gentleman Søren Engel was not closely modeled after a real person, unlike Nils Bayer, although his name bears a similarity to that of the far from impoverished Thomas Angell (1692–1767). Angell was somewhat older than Engel, and in reality he died in Trondheim the same year in which the story takes place. He is still known today for having willed his entire fortune to the city’s poor.
I should also mention that in 1767, Trondheim had a town physician by the name of Robertus Stephanus Henrici (1715–1781). He had very little in common with the novel’s Dr. Fredrici except for the fact that during certain periods he had financial problems, and he was very generous about giving medicine to those who needed it in town. The pastor at the hospital church was a Sami man named Andreas Porsanger (1735–1780). The Wessel family did own the Ringve estate, but in 1767 there was no Preben Wessel whose son had gone missing.
I also included a number of historical figures in the background of my story. For instance, the founders of the Royal Norwegian Scientific Society were Bishop Johan Ernst Gunnerus (1718–1773), Chancellor Gerhard Schøning (1722–1780), and State Councilor Peter Frederik Suhm (1728–1798). In addition, the founder of the newspaper Adresseavisen was Martinus Nissen (1744–1795).
The geography of eighteenth-century Trondheim is documented in several excellent maps. And so the town in which Nils Bayer finds himself is quite similar to the one that actually existed in 1767. However, back then there was no tavern called the Hoppa in Ila. At that time, Ila was a quite new and not very developed suburb. But toward the turn of the century and well into the 1800s, that part of town grew rapidly and gradually became known for its hostelries. One of the taverns that Nils Bayer visits does have its roots in real life. The inn at Brattøra was established in 1739 and during its first years was the ferryman’s residence. Much later, the building was moved to the Trøndelag Folk Museum in Sverresborg, where it continues to serve as a pub under the name of the Tavern.
As far as the town’s police chief is concerned, he did not live in the same place as Nils Bayer, nor was his office located in the same place as in the novel. And if Søren Engel had actually built a mansion in Midtbyen in 1767, he would have been the first to own one of the huge wooden mansions that today characterize the old section of Trondheim. The building known as Stiftsgården was finished in 1778, while Hornemannsgården was constructed a few years later.
I should also mention that in the eighteenth century no one spoke—much less wrote—the way they do in my story. If I had attempted to imitate speech patterns from the 1700s, the modern reader would have found the novel very hard to comprehend. Nevertheless, I’ve tried to include a few archaisms where appropriate. Bayer’s free use of Latin and French phrases was originally inspired by what is perhaps one of the world’s very first crime fiction stories—Maurits Christopher Hansen’s novella Mordet på Maskinbygger Roolfsen (The Murder of Machinist Roolfsen, 1840), in which Latin and other foreign words abound. But it’s also in keeping with the zeitgeist of the eighteenth century, which was an era when a learned man had to master three or four languages simply to keep up with the times.