Who Killed the Norwegian?
Who Killed the Norwegian?
Journalist: Eirik Vistnes
Photographer: Tuva Hebnes
Translator: S. Faseeha F. Gillani
Intro (I) It was a May 17th morning like any other. The family was frying waffles, and serving them with strawberry jam and sugar. Now all that was missing was some blue, and they had all the colors of the flag. The children had already rushed out to the neighboring plot to pick bluegrass they knew was growing in a cluster there. You could just hear the babbling brook in the distance.
But the cheering only lasted until the first scream. It came from the neighboring plot. Soon the whole family was standing with the children and trying to cheer them up. They all stared down at a blood-red puddle, their faces white as the sound of police sirens and blue lights found their way up to the scene.
The police determined that the victim was Norwegian, a North Germanic language that had lived in the area for several hundred years before he was killed. They also quickly concluded that the death could not be attributed to natural causes. Among other things, because of several stab wounds to the victim, which the police believe were inflicted with a cheese grater they found in the stream nearby. They found no fingerprints on the weapon, and barely a bent blade of grass more than that. The murderer had left the scene almost without a trace.
There was a fairly good turnout when Ås Studentmållag hosted a panel discussion about the murder mystery. It has been put away by the police, who currently have their hands full with the Ingebrigtsen case, but despite little tangible evidence in the case, there are still many unsolved threads to pull.
Who was the victim? (II) One who knew the Norwegian well was Mikkel Refsnes. “We go way back,” says Refsnes of his relationship with the victim. “He’s been there since I was born. Even though we’ve had our disagreements over time, we had a happy relationship, the Norwegian and I.” He’s not the only one either. The Norwegian may have died alone, but he didn’t die forgotten. Across the country, he’s remembered as a good and close friend, who was able to put into words what no one else could. Most of them got to know him as young children, and he accompanied many of them all the way to their deaths.
Despite his popular rank, not everyone wished the Norwegian well. In academic circles there were those who wanted him gone. During the investigation, the police came across several death threats, which included promises of “annihalation”, “decimation” and “eradication” of the Norwegian language. These threats led the police to single out the academic as the main suspect in the murder.
But during the interrogation, something was amiss. The academy had never been to the murder scene. It was in the city where the murder probably took place. Besides, there is little reason to believe that the academy felt particularly threatened by the Norwegian. They had many times more power than our victim, so why put their entire reputation on the line for something so unimportant? That was the conclusion the police drew when they finally decided to close the case – that there was not enough evidence there to convict anyone.
Multiple Suspects (III) After the academy, there were no other suspects left. The case was apparently cold, no leads, no new evidence, nothing. But the case was not cold – in the embers we find a new name, a new suspect in the case. It is said that it is those closest to us who hurt us the most – could the Norwegian’s murderer be none other than author Jon Fosse?
Eyewitnesses say that the Westerner was in the area from morning until night. He wandered aimlessly around the area, and when asked what he was doing there, he only said that he expected someone to come and pick him up soon. The story seems unlikely, given that he stayed off the road, and when this was pointed out, he only said that he is someone else, that he is not Jon Fosse but his twin brother Jørn.
There are those who believe that Fosse has tormented the Norwegian for a long time with his difficult words and long, uninterrupted sentences. But one question remains – why? The author has never expressed contempt for the victim, so why commit a murder without further ado? For this reason, there are those who claim that Fosse rather did the job on behalf of others. In 2023, he received a large sum of money into his account from the Swedish Academy. Supporters of the theory of Fosse as a hired killer claim that all this can be traced back to a previous relationship between the Norwegian and the Swede, especially the breakup in 1905. But there is one thing that does not fit into this story, and then we have to go back to the murder weapon itself. Why did Fosse use a cheese grater, when everyone knows that the pen is mightier than the sword itself?
Traveling Backward (IV) To find out more about the mystery, we must travel even further into the past, to the ancestor of Norwegian, Norse. In 793, the Vikings attacked the island of Lindisfarne, forcing much of Britain into an involuntary cohabitation. This cohabitation left clear traces, even after several generations. Therefore, one can ask oneself: Is this a story of revenge?
That is what many believe. They point out that there are English words everywhere, that before he died, Norwegian was losing more and more to English, and that at the scene they found nothing in Swedish, but that many of the words they have managed to trace back to English.
The hypothesis of revenge is widespread, but it also forces us to ask ourselves a difficult question: How did English get here? Neither the British nor the Americans sent ships on a cruise along the Norwegian coast, so how did they get ashore then? Could it be because we invited them in, gave them food and shelter, and slowly but surely gave them more and more and more. Where is the only place on the planet where cheese graters are common? Did we kill the Norwegian?
Conclusion (V) No, wait a minute. The Norwegian was just seen in good condition on a road sign somewhere. It turns out that the blood-red puddle was actually just jam. And the cheese grater is just someone who has lost it. It happens.
