The Bell In The Lake

 The Bell In The Lake is a novel set in a remote village in Norway in 1880. Lars Mytting wrote this tale about Astrid Hekne. Astrid's ancestors had, centuries before her, given birth to a pair of cojoined twin girls. The mother of the twins, also called Astrid, died giving birth. The girls grew up sharing a body from the waist down. Their talent was weaving on a large loom. The twins could weave wonderful tapestries with intricate designs that told a story. When the twins died their father chose to honor them by commissioning two large church bells to be installed in the local church. The bells made beautiful sound and were known to ring as if by magic before calamities such as floods occurred. Astrid goes to this church with her family. During a Sunday service on a cold New Year's Day, a woman sitting next to Astrid, dies of exposure. The priest decides a new church is in order. He decides to sell the town's stave church to a University in Germany in exchange for money to build a new one. This has been a very cold winter. The ground is too frozen to bury the dead. The cows are beginning to starve. Desperate to keep the cows alive, the villagers feed the cows horse manure because they know the horses don't digest all the grain they eat. Astrid goes to a sunny side of a local slope to pick tree branches and twigs for the cows to eat to tide them over until spring. Astrid doesn't think it is right that the church is being replaced. She especially doesn't like the fact that the bells are leaving for Dresden because they were a gift to the town church from her family. The story of Astrid and how one of the bells ended up in the lake is a mixture of Norwegian folklore, religion, superstition, and duty. I loved it.