Soria Moria — the castle past three kingdoms
The shimmering golden castle on the horizon that the hero in countless Norwegian folktales sets out to reach. The pure expression of the country's longing for elsewhere.
Soria Moria is not a creature. It is a place — or rather the idea of a place — and of all the figures in Norwegian folklore it may be the one that says the most about the country that dreamed it.
The castle on the horizon
In the Norwegian folktales collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe in the mid-nineteenth century, a particular kind of story recurs. A young man — often the youngest of three brothers, often the one written off as a fool, the Askeladden, the Ash-Lad — sets out from a poor farm with nothing, and somewhere in the distance, across mountains and through forests and past trolls, there is Soria Moria: a castle, golden, shining, glimpsed far off on the horizon. Reaching it is the whole shape of the journey. The princess is there, and the kingdom, and the end of being poor and overlooked. The hero does not know the way. He goes anyway.
The name itself means nothing in particular — it is not a real place and not quite ordinary Norwegian — and that emptiness is part of its power. Soria Moria is wherever the good life is, seen from wherever you currently are. It is the horizon with a castle on it.
The image Kittelsen fixed
In 1900 Theodor Kittelsen painted it: a boy on a high bare rock in the foreground, small and dark, looking across a vast distance at a far-off castle catching the last gold light. The painting is called Soria Moria slott, and it is one of the most reproduced images in all of Norwegian art. Kittelsen did what the best folklore illustration does — he did not draw the castle so much as draw the looking, the enormous distance, the smallness of the boy and the largeness of the wanting. Most Norwegians carry that painting in their heads whether they have seen it or not.
Why the image keeps coming back
A country built along a thin, hard, mountainous coast — a country that, across the centuries, sent something like a fifth of its own people across an ocean toward a better life they had only heard about — is a country that knows the feeling of Soria Moria in its bones. The shining place that is somewhere else. The journey toward it undertaken without a map. It is no accident that this particular folktale image, of all of them, became a national one.
The proof of how deep it runs is that modern Norway still reaches for the name. When governing coalitions have gathered to write their joint political platform, they have done it at a conference hotel called Soria Moria, and the resulting documents — the Soria Moria Declarations of 2005 and 2009 — carried the name out of the folktale and into the actual running of the country. A nation does not name its government’s founding document after a children’s-story castle by accident. Soria Moria is the Norwegian word for the thing worth walking toward, and the walking is the point — the castle, in the tales as in the painting, is always still in the distance.