Timber circles

Timber circles are platforms resting on thick posts, associated with sun worship and offerings of stone and animal bone. In the novel, they link Frank Brennan’s presence on Bornholm in 1997 to the sunrise practices led by Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi, while a newly built circle becomes part of Pirjo’s anxious effort to keep Shirley’s confinement undiscovered. The structures therefore connect an investigative clue, a communal ritual, and the practical geography of concealment.

Structure and Earlier Use

Carl Mørck describes timber circles as platforms supported by thick posts, designed for sun worship and offerings of stone and animal bone. His account arises while he is publicly seeking information about Frank Brennan, whom the investigation connects with an accident on Bornholm. Carl says that Frank stayed on the island in 1997 and took part in excavations of timber circles. The structures thus enter the investigation not as a decorative detail but as a specific link between Frank’s past and the investigators’ search for his whereabouts.

The distinction between excavation and construction matters. Frank’s connection is to excavations in 1997; elsewhere, men are building a new timber circle. The text does not establish that the newly built platforms are the same structures Frank helped excavate, or that the new work reproduces any particular ancient design. Instead, the shared name places two activities—investigation of earlier circles and construction of a present-day one—within the same recurring material form. The circle can be examined as evidence and used as a place of practice.

At the press conference, Carl specifies that Frank’s light-blue VW Kombi had a wide fender and a peace sign painted on its roof, then connects Frank’s stay on Bornholm with the excavations. He presents Frank as a known sun worshipper who may still practise, and directs people with information to Q Department. Bjørn attempts to stop Carl from pursuing the appeal, insisting that the case should wait until there is more to go on. Carl nevertheless points to the contact information beneath the photograph and appeals directly to the camera. The timber circles help make the appeal concrete: they supply a distinctive activity and place to associate with the man investigators are trying to identify.

Ritual and Daily Routine

In the circle used for the sunrise gathering, Atu waits on a platform seven meters above the ground, facing the sunrise over the sea. His position makes the platform the ritual’s visual focus: the gathered people look toward him, and the scene falls quiet when he turns to them. He instructs the assembly, “Let us greet the sun with upward-stretched arms,” and thirty-five pairs of arms rise toward the sea. They remain extended until Atu tells the group to take twelve deep breaths, after which their hands pass down over their bodies to awaken the night’s dormant energy.

The circle is part of a larger daily sequence rather than an isolated setting. Newly arrived course members are woken, washed in the central courtyard, and dried on the porch while watching the sun rise. They then return to their cabins for a brief, silent chant to the Celestial Sphere. Meanwhile, permanent residents and temporary assistants prepare in their assigned quarters. Pirjo goes from house to house to check that everyone is ready, because late arrivals could disturb the hour of awakening. Her route normally takes her toward the timber circle by the time the gathering is due to begin. These details show how the circle’s ritual use depends on coordinated movement and preparation across the community, not simply on the platform itself.

Construction, Surveillance, and Narrative Function

A different timber circle is under construction to the north. One of the older disciples helps build it, while another tends the crops in the greenhouses. Pirjo encounters the men as they move slowly through a hallway before the assembly. On another occasion, she stands in front of the new circle watching the workmen, alert to what is happening around her. The text gives the platform a continuing physical life: it is not only an object from the past or the finished setting for a ceremony, but also a current building project requiring labor.

That worksite lies several hundred meters from the house where Shirley has been locked up for a second day. Pirjo judges the distance and the walls sufficient to keep Shirley’s cries from reaching the workers, but becomes uneasy when one man heads toward the house to relieve himself. If he does so, she fears, another might follow and hear Shirley calling for help. Her calculations make the circle’s surroundings consequential: the location of the workers and the route between the worksite and the house shape the risk of exposure. Pirjo estimates that Shirley may remain capable of shouting for four or five more days and might not die for at least twenty. The interval makes concealment an ongoing problem, not a danger that will resolve immediately.

Pirjo claps her hands, and the workmen relax their flexed muscles and look at her. The gesture interrupts the building work at the moment she is assessing the possibility that someone might approach the house. The passage does not state what she tells them to do next, but it makes clear that the circle and its workmen form part of the environment she is trying to control. Across the novel, the structures hold contrasting functions together: they are the subject of Frank’s earlier excavations, the elevated focus of Atu’s sunrise ritual, and a present construction site whose proximity to Shirley’s hiding place threatens to expose violence concealed behind the community’s ordered routines.