Sinikka Langeland – Har du lyttet til elvene om natta? – Sinikka Langeland

A certainty that something important is being handed down

Sinikka Langeland has Finnskogen – The Finnish Forest of Norway – as the source of her songs and her musik. The culture of Finnskogen has its roots in the age-old Finnish mythology that the Finns brought with them when they came to the borderlands northeast of Oslo in the 17th century. She discovered Hans Børli’s poetry one December evening in 1978. The embers were warm in the black stove, and her music crept close to his poems. The feeling of being near something great became even stronger when Sinikka sang the words – in certainty that something important was being handed down.

Hans Børli’s poems are frequently cutting and critical of the society, often with the woodcutter’s drudgery and loneliness as their point of departure. He has also taken his themes from other areas of experience, although most of them are linked with motifs from Norwegian nature. Hans Børli asks existential questions, and in many of the poems on the recording they share his thought about man being mirrored in nature and ascribing human qualities to it.