The Natives Eat Eyeballs

A co-worker once asked me, “Is America really so different from Norway?” We were having lunch and I looked down at my plate to compose a suitable response. I felt offended by his lack of understanding, his indifference to the predicament of the immigrant.

“I’ll have you know,” I wanted to say, “that in America we don’t eat dinner at 4 p.m. We don’t eat sour herrings for breakfast. Or brown goat’s cheese. Or squirt shrimp cheese out of a tube that looks like it might hold toothpaste. We eat hot lunches. It doesn’t typically rain two inches a day where I’m from, and we don’t have stores that sell only rain coats and we don’t have vending machines that sell umbrellas. In winter it’s not dark for 20 hours a day. Our coats, bags and dogs don’t have reflectors swinging from them. In America you would be considered a bad parent if you shoved your children out the door in the pouring rain and left them there alone for two hours. Saturday isn’t candy day.  Milk and sugar is always offered with coffee. We don’t have to pay for our grocery bags. Or a TV license. We can buy things whenever we want them – just on a whim I can buy underwear, Pringles, a bottle of Beaujolais, a carton of fresh strawberries, a picture frame, a grill, a paper-shredder and a baby stroller. All at the same store! At 3 a.m.! Where I’m from we don’t have inside and outside shoes – although it’s a good idea – or floor heaters. We don’t call each other “You!” (“Du!”) and we line up at bus stops and bars. We only have one flusher on our toilets, not a special lever for … well, bigger jobs. Taxi drivers aren’t women, and men with beards and leather jackets don’t have lunch at artsy cafes with their babies in strollers. Really, I think it all boils down to the fact that every day in America my mail comes in English. And if the phone rings someone will be speaking English. And when I need to explain to the impatient man at the Elkjøp service counter how I accidentally melted the hose of my vacuum cleaner to the fireplace I don’t need to write my sentences out beforehand with a dictionary. So, yes! America IS REALLY DIFFERENT from Norway!”

I looked up from my salad and said, as flatly as possible to mask the exclamation marks shooting through my brain, “Yes, America is really different.”

The list kept building in my head as the day went on: bigger differences, fundamental differences, differences that signalled an entirely different worldview and not just my queasiness about squirting fish out of tubes . . . how, for example, a preschool wouldn’t ever give its four-year-olds real knives to help cut the vegetables for lunch. Or how a church choir in America would never hope to earn money from its members buying weekly lottery tickets.

And then there’s the whole eating eyeballs thing. The ones found in lambs’ heads, I mean. Around Christmas. Even if not all Norwegians would eat the eyeballs out of a lamb’s head that has had all the fluffy woolly bits burnt off, this is something no Americans do. Not even the ones who live in Minnesota.

I remember a conversation with one of my tutors at grad school who, sitting back into the corner of his high, stiff chair with legs crossed, would always pretend to ask what I thought of something when he was really ensuring that I met his requirements for intelligence.

“When we meet someone for the first time what do we notice about them?”

“How they are different from us?” I guessed.

“Noooo….” he intoned. “We notice how they are similar to us, don’t we?”

Well, clearly we did, so I laughed and said, “Oh, yes! Right!”

That conversation has stuck with me to this day because I do notice differences everywhere. In my defence, I think the differences tend to stand out just a little bit more than the similarities. But why do they mean so much?

As I trudge through the puddles in my knee-high rain boots, swinging a grocery bag full of foods I would never eat in America in one hand, and sipping bitter, black coffee from a cup in the other, I think of this penchant for dividing the world into “Norway” and “America” and think: How else would I know that I am still me?

 

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When I contacted Ivar Løne — the “King” of smalahove (“sheep’s head”) producers — for permission to use some of the photos from his website for this post, he not only sent me extra photos but kindly invited me to his family-run business in Voss to see the process of making smalahove from beginning end. Last year Ivar sold a record 80,000 smalahove, enough for 160,000 dinners! I have happily accepted his invitation to learn more about this unique tradition and promise a full report!

Smalahove dinner, served to guests in Ivar Løne's 18th c. "Stabburet" (wooden granary). (Photo by Brit Løne; used with permission.)

 

Ivar Løne with his five grandchildren, roasting lambs' heads in the traditional way over an open fire. (Photo by Brit Løne, used with permission.)