Erling Sandmo 1963–2020

The year 2020 will for everyone around the world be remembered as the year of coronavirus, of lockdowns, quarantines, and the scare of containment. However, for us at the National Library of Norway, the tragedy of 2020 started before the pandemic hit us. This was due to the loss of a navigator.

Erling Sandmo (Photo: Communications Office, University of Oslo, March 2016)

In February, our esteemed colleague and friend, Professor Erling Sandmo, left us with no forewarning. Erling had just resigned from his job at the University of Oslo to devote himself fully to heading the Map Centre at the National Library of Norway. For three years he had been working with us on creating both this space in the Library and acquiring the Ginsberg Collection that is the core of the Map Centre. He had decided that the National Library and the Map Centre would become his permanent home for the rest of his working life. Erling was energetic and enthusiastic about this prospect, and when he died he was taking a short vacation with his family in the snowy Norwegian mountains. There, he started a skiing trip that he was never to finish. Just a few hundred metres outside his cabin, Erling was struck down by a massive cardiac arrest. Suddenly and unexpectedly, we at the National Library were left without him.

Erling Sandmo was a leading historian of his generation. He had the rare quality of being able to both write and talk about history to almost any audience. He could engage and provoke university scholars with his insistence on a historiography that amongst all the facts and sources opened up for the imagination. He could debate with theoretical bravura and excellence, but just as often he could give lectures or write articles that opened up the past for non-historians, for schoolchildren, radio listeners, or even passers-by. His research speciality was violence in 17th century Norway, the subject of his groundbreaking and much debated doctoral thesis in 1998, which was republished in revised form in the following year (Sandmo 1999). However, his interests were so much wider.

Erling was a true historian, although not a traditional one. He had a never-ending curiosity about the past – about the people that lived before us, and about their lives, their thoughts, their ideas, and their art. It was never the deeds of kings or dates of wars that made Erling’s heart beat; it was the times of the kings and the wars, and above all ordinary people that interested him.

As a radio host, Erling opened the world of classical music for thousands of Norwegians, his sonorous Bergen accent entering not only our quarters wherever we listened but also stimulated our imagination concerning the period of the music that was being played: when and how the music was composed, for whom it was composed, where it was played, and always what was contemporary with the music. Erling would first inform us about a particular piece of music, and this opening made us want to listen to it. So many people have listened to music that they never thought would interest them, thanks to Erling’s voice, his storytelling, and his knowledge of music.

However, maps became Erling’s main topic in recent years. It was Erling who first draw my and thus the National Library of Norway’s attention to the Ginsberg Collection. This is an exquisite collection of historical maps of Norway, Scandinavia and the Polar North, assembled by an American, William Ginsberg, over three decades. Erling called me and, in his humble, polite and suggestive way, he described the uniqueness of the collection. We both realised that its value was far beyond anything the National Library could afford, but Erling’s interest and pitch sowed a seed that by the autumn of 2019 had grown and become the Map Centre. Erling was the proud host at its widely praised international opening week in September that year. Later in the autumn, he hosted a highly successful visit to the Map Centre organized by the Norwegian Geographical Society for its members.

The opening week of the Map Centre was representative of Erling’s approach to the maps, as there were few or no cartographers present and Erling himself was not skilled in the making or use of maps. To be honest, I am not sure if given a map and a compass he would have been able to navigate either roads or mountains. He used the maps for quite another kind of navigation. For Erling, the maps were entry points into the past. He read them as a historian would read old documents or even as a professor of literature would read a novel. When Erling interpreted a map, the longitude and latitude were the last things he looked at. He was always looking for the stories hidden between the lines made by the cartographers.

Erling’s first love was the monsters – the sea monsters drawn on Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina of 1539 and other masterpieces of mapmaking. The book he wrote about these sea monsters was the National Library’s first bestseller. It was translated from Norwegian into both German and English, and then presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2019 (Sandmo 2017; 2018b; 2019a). In a book that he co-edited on the historical circulation of knowledge, he wrote a chapter exploring the characteristics of sea monsters as objects of knowledge in the 16th century (Sandmo 2018a).

However, the monsters were the mere beginning. All of the figures, images and presentations of the world present on the maps were sources, traces or keys that he could use to open up the past for research. The types of questions he was interested in were: What did those maps and atlases say about the people who made them, and about the world in which they were made? Why were borders drawn as they were? Why was the cartouche placed in a particular spot? What could one learn if one had the time to examine all of the variations in the different editions of Ortelius’s atlases in the collections? He sometimes came to my office happily and enthusiastically describing a new research project, asking: ‘Why, Aslak? Why didn’t Barents know anything about polar bears when he made his first expedition? We must find out.’ Moreover, he was about to. This was one of the many projects and undertakings awaiting Erling’s research in the coming years, as was his unfinished book about Olaus Magnus. A foretaste of the book that the world will miss without knowing is his article in his co-edited book on different conceptualizations of the world (Sandmo 2019b).

We will miss Erling piloting us through the past by using historical maps to navigate a landscape. By this I mean not just we who had the pleasure and joy of hearing him talk and lecture already but also the upcoming generations of Norwegians will miss him. Our idea of the Map Centre was not simply to create a last resting place for ancient pieces of paper or to preserve these treasures for researchers of the present and future. Our idea was also to use the maps as points of departure for creating an interest in the past and transforming that interest into interest in history. This was the original motivation for acquiring the Ginsberg Collection for the Map Centre. It is the principle upon which the National Library’s Map Centre is built: to provide a safe place for the original maps, an international centre for research, and an exhibition and public venue where schoolchildren, youths, students, and the general public can see the magic of the early modern world as it presented itself visually – all of this with the memory of Erling’s voice inspiring, navigating and challenging us.

The loss of Erling is a great professional loss for the National Library. It is also a great personal loss for many of us. Erling was a man who made friends easily. He could talk to someone and make them feel seen, included and close. As an internationally celebrated academic, he came to the National Library without any expectancy of being a prima donna. Erling befriended everyone, from the security guards and cleaners to the researchers and leaders. He was eager to learn about all the different aspects of library life. To have Erling in the institutions was an example for all of us, and this made us smile.

For me personally, the loss of Erling is more than anything the loss of a friend. He was someone I was looking forward to spending time with in the coming years and who would help to discover new possibilities for what a national library can be. For all of us, the loss of Erling is the loss of a pilot, a navigator who used the maps to navigate the past and open our imagination to understand better the people that trod the earth before us. Understanding the past will at the same time always be about trying to understand the present and ourselves. We are living in times where this is needed more than ever. May Erling continue to inspire us.