David Toms writes: If the port city of Trondheim in Norway seems remote today it is because we have become so used to travelling over land or by air rather than by waterways. In the age of sail, Trondheim, like other such cities, was deeply connected to all parts of Europe and beyond into the Atlantic world, the rich trade in colonial goods, and the spoils of slavery. It was this connectedness that drew the Allingham family of Ballyshannon, Co Donegal here and it is what drew my wife’s distant relatives here from Kiel, then part of Denmark-Norway, at the end of the eighteenth century.
Living in southern Norway as we do, the sense of Trondheim as remote is real but deceptive. Of course, going overland in Norway even today is treacherous in some places, and the further north you go, the more the seasonal markers familiar to someone who grew up in a temperate climate recede, so that even travelling in summer, as I and my wife did recently, the subarctic landscape suggests something more muted.
The line in my wife’s family back to Trondheim is a short one. As we prepared to make our way northward, Miriam made the decision to donate a photo album which she inherited to the NTNU university library in Trondheim. Her grandfather had been an engineering student there during the second World War, when Norway was under Nazi occupation, and had taken many photographs of his fellow students, lecturers and of life in Trondheim at that time. The university was very glad of this personal collection of photos and during our holidays we drove to bring them to the university.
The first Norwegian Kiel, Dietlev, is mentioned in 1803 in a legal case against a sailor for thievery settled out of court. When and which Kiels made the move to Trondheim is not exactly clear. They are recorded in a census in Kiel in 1803, but clearly they had strong links to Trondheim already by then. Following Dietlev Kiel’s first appearance in Norwegian records at the beginning of the nineteenth century, several branches of Miriam’s family on her Norwegian side made their lives in Trondheim. We hoped on our visit that we might find – in the churchyard around the cathedral, Nidarosdomen – some of their graves.
Within a single generation Dietlev’s son, Bertram, would own property and a distillery in Trondheim, which – the family lore goes – he sold to Jørgen Lysholm for pietistic reasons, not wanting to profit from the miseries of others. Lysholm’s distillery produced aquavit, the Norwegian liquor that is the national drink to this day. Lysholm proved to be a great innovator, sending his sherry-casked liquor twice over and back across the equator as part of its maturation process, creating an entirely unique product. The growth of distilleries in Trondheim at this time followed a relaxation of industry regulation, whatever the religious reservations of men like Bertram Kiel.
It was into this mercantile environment that the Allingham family of Ballyshannon made its own business forays at the same moment, with the Allinghams and timber merchants the Owesens becoming intertwined through the marriage of Otto Owesen and Jane Allingham. Otto Owesen, like the Kiels, was originally Danish-German.
William Allingham Sr first made his way to Norway in 1805 to help Otto Owesen in the running of his business. He was fifteen and a half when he arrived. The Owesens and the Allinghams didn’t share just a desire to excel in business, but each family had literary ambitions as well. For Otto Owesen this found expression in his membership of an amateur theatre group in Trondheim, det forenede dramatiske selskab, of which Miriam’s relative Bertram was also a member. The Allinghams meanwhile, in the shape of Mary Ann, William Sr, and especially through his son, William Jr, would leave behind substantial bodies of writing in the form of poems and diaries.
So, after arriving at our hotel into this grey, stoney, slightly overcast city on water’s edge about the midpoint in the undulating length of Norway, there was no great sense for myself and Miriam that this was summer. The initial prospect of Trondheim from the car was not a prepossessing one: it had a slightly shabby air, that shabby air that only older seaside cities tend to have. A genteel shabbiness that comes from having housed for centuries people coming on and off ships.
After check-in, we made our way towards Nidarosdomen – Trondheim’s great medieval cathedral. A walk to the cathedral is a good way to get your bearings even today in Trondheim. It remains the epicentre of the city. Back at our hotel, Miriam, having done all the driving over the last two days, decided to take a rest while I went out alone with a book to do some exploring of the city centre.
As I walked toward the large open square at the heart of the city, I felt myself curiously at home with the faint whiff of sea-salt on the air, the hungry cry of the seagulls that had amassed themselves in the square. I always have feeling of homecoming in seaside towns. A sense that I have been here before, even when I arrive in these places for the first time. I imagine that for the Allinghams, coming respectively from Ireland’s Northwest and the Kiels, coming from Germany’s northern coast, arrival in Trondheim must have had the same familiar feeling.
While we cursorily explored Trondheim, it was unquestionably the cathedral and its graveyard that was the biggest draw for us both. Outside, the cathedral is most remarkable for the stone façade populated with dozens of figures from the Bible; inside it is most remarkable for its great rose window. Still more interesting inside is the crypt, which houses some of the oldest fragments of graves of the Christian era in Norway.
On our second day, as we wandered about the churchyard, seeking out members of Miriam’s family, we began to see the ways in which the Norwegian bourgeoisie of previous eras marked themselves out with distinction even in death. What one did and what one was were also deeply linked two hundred years ago.
William Allingham’s diary, Trondheim January 23rd, 1807
At 8 o’c. this morning General von Krogh’s Lady was interred behind the Domkirk; she is the first of that family which has been buried outside of the Church – the von Krogh’s Burying Place being inside of the Domkirk but it is no longer permitted in Denmark or Norway to inter inside of Churches – and this is a most excellent law, as many Plagues & Sickness have risen alone from the stench of the dead bodies which were interred inside of Churches. As for my part I admire most the ancient manner of getting rid of their dead relatives by consuming their Bodies by Fire! A ship which lay in the Mouth of the River belonging to Hans Wensich was entirely decorated with flags and colours of different Nations to the number of 33 flags; & she fired 27 shots before the [indecipherable] was interred, & 8 after. The day was just beginning to Break, & the sun had just begun to redden the eastern horizon when the Vessel commenced firing and the reflection of the flash of the Cannon had a fine effect on all the Flags which were kept in constant motion by a gentle Breez!
There is a clear kind of dendrochronology to the churchyard that surrounds Nidarosdomen. The oldest graves are those closest to the cathedral itself, with the newer graves further out: the graves spread out in ripples from its great edificial centre.
As Miriam and I made our laps, fanning out and circling back throughout the churchyard in search of her family members, in wide elliptical movements like hounds on a hunt, eyes flitting over names and occupations and dates, one headstone, a monument really, suddenly jarred me out of the muggy stupor of that humid day.
JOHAN WIDERØE
THONING OWESEN
FØDT 27 MARS 1804
I DUBLIN
DØD 1 MARS 1881
PAA LEEREN I STRINDA
Han Vilde Tende Lys For
De Som Gaar I Mørke
Og Hjelpe Dem Som Er
Vandret Bort Fra
Veien
That DUBLIN jumped straight out at me. It is odd the way that certain words which are so familiar to us appear when we see them in incongruous contexts. Even after years living in Norway, it is as if my eyes, the antennae of my mind, are still drawn to seek out the familiar in the foreign. On that day, as we searched for the graves of the Kiels and their relations, I could hardly think of a more incongruous context for Dublin than to see it on a gravestone in far Trondheim.
Who was this man? Above the inscription on the headstone, set atop three steps as it is, there is bronze image of him, based no doubt on his likeness from the one photograph of this Thoning Owesen (he seems hardly ever to be referred to as the much longer Johan Widerøe Thoning Owesen). He has a pair of fine sideburns and is bald with a set of squinting eyes. He will light a way for those who go in darkness and help those who have wandered from the path.
Thoning Owesen it turns out was not just anyone from Dublin. A cursory search online as we ate lunch in a restaurant in the centre of Trondheim told me that Thoning was son of Otto Owesen and Jane Allingham. Thoning then was a member of an illustrious Irish literary family.
Following the tragic early death of Thoning’s mother, Jane, he was sent to Ballyshannon and then to Foyle College in Derry, where while still a young man, his own father died and Thoning inherited his estates, returning once again to Trondheim in 1822. From Trondheim he would manage a farm along the kind of utopian principles that bring to mind Anna Karenina and he would continue to steward his family fortune until his death in 1881.
Thoning died unmarried and without children, leaving his substantial fortune to be used for the establishment of a home for ‘fallen women’ and for the establishment of Norway’s first dedicated school for the blind.
More than half a year later, long after that trip to Trondheim, and in a bout of listlessness I usually assuage by browsing in bookshops, I found myself one lunchtime standing inside the beautifully appointed Norlis Antikvariat on Universitetsgate in Oslo.
Upstairs to the right in this bookshop there is a room that is dedicated largely to books they have acquired in the English language. As I ran my eyes over the spines with the same kind of hungry hunting for serendipity that I roamed the churchyard of the cathedral in Trondheim, I spotted a book with a strong spine titled The Ballad Book. As a longtime obsessive of the ballad tradition in Ireland and Britain, I gravitated towards the book, sliding it off the shelf on which it was tightly packed with a miscellany of other English language titles. Like all people who are suckers for a nice second-hand find, this book had an appealing air to it. The book itself was a fading maroon, a gold border on the front cover in the centre of which there was a figure playing a harp. A nicely produced little volume. The burgeoning bibliophile in me thrilled slightly at the sight of a personalised ex libris card still on the inside cover, an embossed stamp on the cover page from the bookseller made me yet more giddy – FROM W.B. KELLY, Importer Of Foreign And English Books, New And Old, In All Branches of Literature, 8 Grafton St., DUBLIN. There was the mark of several owners, all from a later family, the Schaanings, but on the flyleaf there was written an inscription that I read several times over:
From William Allingham
To Thoning Owesen
Leeren, Tronthiem
Norway
29th September 1864
Leeren – today spelled Lieren –was the farm Owesen ran. I bought the book immediately, with that furtive look and rushed air of one who feels they’ve cheated a bookshop out of something they should have valued more highly.
How odd, I thought, to find this book. Not odd at all perhaps, merely the inevitable result of being someone who spends an inordinate amount of time in bookshops and who has perhaps subconsciously sought out these connections after first encountering Thoning Owesen’s gravestone in Trondheim. Still, I felt that I was meant to find this book. That it was meant for me. This is the illness of all inveterate book buyers, I suppose. It’s a kind of addiction with all the usual rationalisations.
The time spent by William Sr in Trondheim was intended to help him learn more about the timber trade as well to help him improve his language skills so he might continue the family’s business interests in Norway. For William himself, it seemed like a chance to learn much about a new country and new culture. William – accompanied by his brother Edward – would be in Trondheim for his sister Jane’s death, a topic he writes about with great feeling in the diary still to be found among papers connected to the Allinghams and Thoning Owesen at the Gunnerus Library in NTNU, where Miriam had deposited her grandfather’s pictures during our summer trip.
William Sr’s diary is a fascinating record of a young man’s impressions of a decidedly alien landscape even if the mores of a certain bourgeois European culture was a common reference point he shared with those he socialised with. William’s surviving diary runs from January to May 1807, during the worsening of his sister Jane’s condition and her eventual death on March 4th, 1807, a few weeks before Easter, until he finally takes leaves of the city in vastly different circumstances.
With each entry, William assiduously records the length of the days and the temperatures. He is clearly fascinated by the sheer shortness of the winter days, and the depth of cold he experiences in Norway. Even for a man from Ballyshannon, Trondheim must have represented a reorientation of his conception of north. He notes the days when there is good sledding and the effects of the cold and frost, as in this passage from early February 1807:
No Landscape Painter could imitate the beauty and pleasing scenery of what I saw on getting out of my bed this morning at 8 O’Clock – the air being very cold and altho I had fire in my stove all yesterday evening, this morning the windows were covered with Frost and it was namely in this I saw the fine touches of Chance, or rather of Nature – on some of the pains of Glass there were formed by the Frost the most exact and beautiful shaped Trees and Shrubs, an Alien wild Forest, and really the National tree Gran or Fir was evident on some together with the Poplar etc., which formed a neat Garden!
The Room then getting warm, in less than ½ an hour these Natural Landscapes vanished, ‘and like the baseless fabric of a Vision left not a Wrack behind’, nothing except a small portion of Water caused by the Frost’s desolving!
The change and the charge of the period is in the air, in the very ink of William’s diary. The feelings of national romanticism are nascent: William is fascinated by the bondekultur of Norway: the culture of local farmers and their folklore and customs. This is the same culture that would provide so much inspiration in the decades to come in the building of the national image in Norway through paintings and poems. William is equally attuned to this zeitgeist. Indeed within a few short years, Norway would dissolve its union with Denmark in 1814, ending over four hundred years of Danish rule. Through the diaries we learn of the translation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women into Danish, as well as the news of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. He marks St. Patrick’s Day by writing that ‘Many a nagen of wisky will be drank in old Ireland this morning. St. Patrick’s Day is not observed here. They don’t know such an Irish saint has existed!’
It was a fortnight before this, while on a short trip to Levanger, some 70 kilometres north of Trondheim, that Jane died on March 4th, 1807, a little under two weeks before her son Thoning’s third birthday.
William’s trip to Levanger was to conduct business with a local man whom his brother-in-law, Otto Owesen, ordinarily did deals with on the first Tuesday in March every year. William records in his diary on March 1st however that ‘as Jane is so ill that he does not like to leave her, I am to set out tomorrow in his Place’ and so William makes the long two-day journey by sled to Levanger, where he stays at the large farm of the Muller family, with a view of the church, and the ferry across the sound. At the Mullers’ farm, William is especially taken with their servant girl, Cathrine. On the evening of the March 5th he writes:
At 4 ½ this evening there came an Express from Trondheim with a letter to me from Mr. O. I immediately knew the melancholy contents – my dearest Jane left this miserable, wretched world yesterday morning the 4 Marty 7 ½ O’clock without a Groan. When I took leave of her Monday last and gave her a kiss I was almost afraid it would be the last; which is now alas to certain. She was too good to live! I shall never forget Madam Mullers sympathy in my Grief; she, her two daughters and Cathrine cried almost the whole evening, only because they saw me shed bitter tears. They knew not Jane!
In a state of astonished grief, William made the more than 70-kilometre journey back to Trondheim for Levanger, setting out at 7 a.m. the next morning. Jane Allingham was buried on March 10th, 1807, a Tuesday. William Allingham’s diary records the occasion as follows:
Good God, it is impossible for anyone to imagine my feelings & affliction (except he has experienced it on a similar melancholy occasion) when I proceeded to Church this morning following the Remains of poor Jane to her Grave. Mr. O, Mr. Johannessen and I were in the carriage after the Herse and there were 18 or 20 carriages after us; we alighted at the Fruens Kirk when the Corps was borne through the Church & layed in a grave beside Magdalena Johannesen’s. I thought I should sink into the Earth when I saw the coffin sinking into the cruel Earth and it was with the greatest difficulty I supported myself through the Church into the Carriage again – where I gave vent to my feelings!
William’s diary, as well as giving us a daily account of what life was like in early nineteenth century Trondheim among its merchant classes, is very affecting. He is remarkably young himself, being about eighteen at the time of his sister’s death. It makes the diaries all the more fascinating. Here we have a young man from Ballyshannon, a member of the Irish elite, in a strange country, observing its similarities and differences; all the while his sister’s health worsens. Thoning’s birthday that year fell on Good Friday. William wrote the following:
Little Thoning is 3 years of age this day! I with a great deal of Difficulty, at last this day wrote to my poor Father. I told him I expected to go home in July or beginning of August. All my happiness amongst the Norwegian mountains is fled with poor Jane!
Following his mother’s death, Thoning was taken back to Ireland to live under the guardianship first of his grandfather and then his uncle Edward. Thoning would remain in Ireland until 1822 and attended school at Foyle in Derry without any return to Norway in that time. This was in part down to the fact that the Napoleonic wars severely curtailed shipping traffic between Norway and Ireland. During his time in Ballyshannon he became especially friendly with his cousin Mary Ann Allingham, whose own literary output was the subject of a doctoral study a number of years ago.
After completing his education in Ireland in 1819 – his father Otto died in 1812 – Thoning returned to Trondheim in 1822 and settled into a life of great industriousness and piety. Remarkably, despite the close relationship evinced especially by his cousin Mary Ann’s writings, he would never set foot in Ireland again. Despite this, he maintained a relationship with his Irish family, including with his younger cousin, William Jr as well as Mary Ann.
Letters survive in the Owesen and Allingham papers at Gunnerus library, detailing some of the back and forth in relation to his family’s estate, often with years between letters. A disagreement with his uncle and guardian Edward’s stewardship of his inheritance meant that Thoning probably never returned to Ballyshannon once he went back to Trondheim in 1822, but his correspondences with Edward and the exchange of a book from his cousin William Jr. certainly suggest that family bonds remained strong, even half a century later. This is suggested too by the fact that, through all the years of his life, Thoning kept the writings of his aunt Mary Ann, for them to be rediscovered again in this century, more than two hundred years since the Allinghams first made their mark on Trondheim and Trondheim made its mark on them.
Just two years after William Allingham Jr inscribed a copy of The Ballad Book for Thoning, their uncle Edward died, and Edward’s daughter Florinda Scott wrote to Thoning to inform him. Perhaps it was these strained family relations that made Owesen, as well as his own orphaning as a young child, that made him so particularly concerned for the women and children who found themselves in difficulty in Trondheim as well as those he supported through his school for the blind. Perhaps, above all, this is why, despite the difficulties he experienced with his uncle and the administering of the family estate, that bold DUBLIN stands on his headstone, and caught my eye one summer day.
13/7/2025
