AS THE HAND GRIPS A SUN-WARM STONE

Stones everywhere.

A lot of people collect stones with a streak of greed, as if each stone grants them ownership of the place where it was picked up. People carry stones in their pockets for no particular reason, as an extra weight, to roll through their fingers during the long wait in a shopping queue or while riding a bus. Stones are placed on windowsills where they collect light and reflect it. Their presence lacks any deeper meaning. They are chosen for their smoothness, their colours, their traces of long-extinct animals, because they glisten, or are matte, because they have a pattern of stripes or because they have no stripes at all, because they exist, the windowsill exists, and so does the light.

When the sun shines on a rock, it accumulates heat. When the ore is heated enough in a blast furnace, iron is extracted and the remainder is glazed to slag. All over Bergslagen, the part of Sweden where iron has been extracted since the twelfth century, one can collect the glass-like slagstones, turquoise or misty green.

The Swedish landscape is a landscape of stones. Rocks have been moved by the ice sheet covering the land 10,000 years ago and have since rolled all over the place, leaving deep scraping traces in the granite, shaping and reshaping the land; stone walls mark borders and stones are erected in order to commemorate.

The Rök Runestone is supposedly the oldest preserved text in Swedish literary history. It’s a block of light-grey fine-grain granite, about 382 cm high (of which 125 cm lies below ground) and, with its 760 characters, it has the world’s longest runestone inscription, dated back to the early ninth century.

Then there is the so-called Hitler stone. Nazi Germany made major orders of Swedish granite before and during the Second World War, especially from quarries in Blekinge, Skåne, Småland, and Bohuslän. The intention was to build Germania, a new world capital. A lot of granite was subsequently delivered to Germany. In 1943, the transport was stopped due to the war, but the Swedish quarries continued to excavate up until the war ended, storing the stone along the Swedish coasts, and the Germans kept paying punctually. After the war, the blocks of granite remained undelivered to Germany.

In one of his first poems to be published, the Swedish poet and Nobel prize laureate, Tomas Tranströmer, wrote:

In the first hours of day consciousness can embrace the world

just as the hand grasps a sun-warm stone.*

[* Translated by Rika Lesser: https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/prelude]

— a picture of a calm and trustworthy relationship between the self and the world. But even though trust in the world is both a universal experience and a deeply private one — and therefore cannot be narrowed down to being simply Swedish — it is obvious how influenced the poet is by the nature that surrounds him. A sun-warm stone isn’t always a good thing.

When the writer Lars Gustafsson taught Tomas Tranströmer’s poem to literature students in Austin, Texas, it appeared that sun-warm stones were to be avoided. The heat made them scorching. What is interpreted as an expression of the poet’s sense of faith and trust in the universe, the being itself, became something deeply uncomfortable in Texas, even a risk of harm. The differences in both culture and climate provoke varying responses based on the reader’s experiences and their body’s memories.

Stones, a Swedish value? Why not? After all, in Sweden the word for stone — ‘sten’ — is even a name.