From a tiny cabin by the ocean

My name is Sven. To some I am known as Stockholm Sven, and to others, Sven One-Eye or Sven the Seal Fucker. I arrived in Spitsbergen in 1916. I was thirty-two years old and hadn’t amounted to much.

I have some sense of what is said about me, by the few who might say anything at all: that I lived and trapped alone in the great bay and hunting grounds of Raudfjorden, in the farthest North; that I was the pitiable victim of a mining accident; that I had irrepressible eccentricities and abjured society. This is all true, in a way, and yet less than true. And let it be struck from the record that I was a talented and enthusiastic cook, as some have claimed, for that is a flagrant falsehood.

I expended the greater part of my life in Spitsbergen, an island archipelago due north of Norway whose uppermost reaches are but a handful of degrees from the invisible Pole. These days the place is called Svalbard by politicians, generals, and cartographers. Or, by all but the most precious few, it is called nothing. For the age of exploration is long over, and if Spitsbergen still dwells in the popular imagination, it exists only as a faint echo, a half-remembered word.

People might wonder, I suppose—or do I only fancy that they wonder?—how I kept myself busy those many solitary decades. Perhaps they think a life is made up of milestones, great monoliths rising above an endless roving sea that both washes and abrades them. I think that is rubbish. Few memoirs are written and fewer still are read, so in most cases we must rely upon only two or three markers, often dubious, when peering through the grimy glass into someone else’s existence. A life is substantially more curious, and mundane, than the reports would have it. And in truth, though I am known— within the tiny dewdrop circles of the unlikely few who know of me— as a solitary, unmatched Arctic hunter, I am no such thing, and I was seldom alone.

This is my story.