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2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
52
Introduction
Intercultural contacts between Scandinavian
and Scottish coastal communities have a long history,
ranging from contemporary economic and
technological links through global oil and fisheries
activities, to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
trading, fishing, and smuggling connections. The
Northern Isles of Scotland were part of a “Nordic
kingdom” until the fifteenth century. The political
transfer of the islands of Orkney and Shetland from
the Norwegian to the Scottish Crown took place in
1468 and 1469, respectively, as part of a marriage
treaty between James III of Scotland and Christian
I of Denmark and Norway, with the Scottish parliament
formally annexing the earldom to the crown
in 1472 (Crawford 1983:47). When the shared cultural
heritage that connects Norway and Scotland
is considered, Shetland and Orkney stand out as
particularly evident areas of intercultural influences.
Archaeological, historical, and cultural evidence
suggest the regional communities were not isolated
by their geographical position, but instead connected
via maritime links across the North Atlantic, the
Nordic world, and beyond.
Both historical texts and material culture provide
opportunities to interpret and illuminate cultural
production from various perspectives. When the history
of material culture of the North Atlantic region
is considered, a general emphasis on the Norse or Viking
Age, together with emerging individual national
historiographies during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, has left us with few comparative
studies of the post-medieval period. The present article
addresses this lack of interdisciplinary comparative
research by comparing everyday objects such
as the bentwood box (Fig. 1) and other traditional
wooden boxes, using a microhistorical approach.
By focusing on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
everyday material culture, shared aspects of cultural
and social history, such as regional uses and
narratives embedded in ethnological and historical
contexts, can be compared and integrated into wider
micro- and macrohistories. The article concludes by
relating the results of research into these specific intercultural
contexts, as embodied in material culture,
to the wider arena of intercultural dialogue (Blasco
2004) and the organization of Northern European
cultural spaces (Jönsson et al. 2007).
Methodology: Microhistory
Microhistorians suggest that traditional methodologies
of the social sciences offer generalizations
“that do not hold up when tested against the concrete
reality of the small-scale life they claim to explain”
(Iggers 1997:108). The Icelandic microhistorian Sigurður
Gylfi Magnússon discusses three main forms
of microhistory (Magnusson 2006a): “history from
Reading Material Culture in the North Atlantic:
Traditional Wooden Boxes as Intercultural Objects
Silke Reeploeg*
Abstract - This article explores intercultural links between the coastal communities of the North Atlantic region by discussing
the cultural and social history of Norwegian objects displayed in regional heritage collections in Orkney and Shetland.
The relationship between Norway and the Northern Isles of Scotland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially
trading links, is considered using the bentwood box as a way of accessing both tangible and intangible knowledge.
Different types of traditional wooden boxes from Shetland, Orkney, Norway, and Iceland are compared using a microhistorical
approach, which enables us to consider Norway and Scotland both as individual “ethno-territories” and as part of
continuously changing networks of social and cultural contact a cross the North Atlantic.
Across the Sólundarhaf: Connections between Scotland and the Nordic World
Selected Papers from the Inaugural St. Magnus Conference 2011
Journal of the North Atlantic
*Centre for Nordic Studies, University of the Highlands and Islands, c/o NAFC Marine Centre, Port Arthur, Scalloway,
Shetland, ZE1 0UN, Scotland, UK; silke.reeploeg@uhi.ac.uk.
2013 Special Volume 4:52–60
Figure 1. Norway Bost. Photo no. SL04852.© Shetland
Museum Collection, CON. 81197. (Shetland Museum and
Archives 2011).
S. Reeploeg
2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
53
below”, practiced in the English-speaking world; its
German counterpart “Alltagsgeschichte” (history of
everyday life); and “microstoria” or microhistory,
originating in Italy. He argues that where macrohistory
fails “to provide any satisfactory account of the
many, varied contradictions that characterize the
lives of all individuals and their struggles with themselves
and their environment” (Magnusson 2006b),
microhistory reduces “the scale of observation”,
opening up opportunities to distinguish elements in
people’s lives and society that might otherwise pass
unnoticed:
One of the most interesting and innovative
approaches to particularly cultural and social
history is microhistory. [...] By reducing the
scale of observation, microhistorians argued
that they are more likely to reveal the complicated
function of individual relationships
within each and every social setting and they
stressed its difference from larger norms
(Magnusson 2006b).
Contemporary microhistory studies communities,
villages, and people belonging to a small area, using
local historical sources, oral history, and surveys.
By focusing on material culture from a small
region, especially on an object that has not been
documented in great detail, the methodology for
this article can be extended to include both tangible
and intangible cultural heritage, as well as the role
of historiography itself. After considering the macrocontext
for the research, this article reduces the
radius of research to a single object, the bentwood
box, using it as a microhistorical prism through
which the intercultural links between communities
and cultures across the North Atlantic region can be
rediscovered. Museum artifacts from collections in
the Northern Isles of Scotland are compared with examples
from Norway and Iceland, and surveyed with
the help of associated historical and literary sources,
as well as analysis of etymologies via dictionary
descriptions and examples from
historical text collections.
The Macro-context: Organizing
the North Atlantic
There are a number of familiar
concepts that have historically
been used to organize the North
Atlantic region, with maritime
transport, trading, and colonization
being some of the main vehicles
by which communities have
interacted. The authors of Organizing
European Space identify
three “networks” (Jönsson et al. 2007) central to the
process of relating various European areas to each
other: physical, institutional, and socio-cultural.
These operate within a “territorial field of tension”
(Jönsson et al. 2007:51), with societies integrating
with each other (for example in a political union or
a governing state), but also transforming integrative
structures into regions or networks that oppose
or transcend the homogenous territories on offer
(Fig. 2). Transportation networks are just one of the
dynamics in what Jönsson et al. (2007:51) define as a
“trialogue” between space, identity, and organization.
On the one hand, historical spaces such as the Norse
cultural region of the eighth to twelfth centuries point
towards an element of shared group identities across
the North Atlantic. On the other hand, socio-political
organizations or organizing networks, such as regional
or national boundaries, organize both space
and identity into an “ethno-territory” (Jönsson et al.
2007:46) that identifies specific cultural identities
bound to specific territories.
During the eighteenth century, in particular,
European perceptions changed from thinking about
medieval regional boundaries or provinces to the
now naturalized concepts of the nation and state (often
merged into one homogenous idea).1 This shift is
evident in cartography and the modern disciplines of
historical and political geography. It is particularly
relevant to the Northern Isles, which, after Scandinavian
settlement, experienced a “Scotto-Norse” period
of governance, which lasted from the fifteenth
century to the beginning of the eighteenth century
(B. Smith 1990, H. Smith 1978). Modern historians
on both sides of the North Sea have argued that the
Northern Isles then experienced a period of rapid
cultural change, with direct links to Scandinavia,
particularly Norway, diminishing. This period is said
to have begun after the islands were transferred to
the Scottish kingdom in 1469 or, due to increased acculturation
or “Scottification” (Marwick 2000:15),
even before then.
Figure 2. The territorial field of tension. Adapted from Jönsson et al. (2007:20).
S. Reeploeg
2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
54
As a consequence, both Scandinavian and British
national histories generally take the view that the
Northern Isles of Scotland, although retaining some
remnants of Nordic culture, were essentially incorporated
into a different cultural “ethno-territory”
(Jönsson et al. 2007:46). This perspective has led
to an insular approach to the study of the Scottish
Northern Isles that delegates them to the peripheries
of Northern Europe:
In the area of cultural contacts, scholars have
too often viewed the Viking Age through the
distorting lens of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury
imperial conquest and colonialism.
[...] in the area of nationhood, scholars have
often reduced locally variable communities
of the North into monolithic ethnic units
(“nations”), dramatically oversimplifying
archaeological evidence and textual evidence
and often extending the national boundaries
of the present day backward problematically
into the realms of the mediaeval era (DuBois
1999:11).
In order to consider material culture within this historiographical
context, it is therefore necessary to
re-focus our attention on the trans-national nature of
cultural history, but also recognize the influence of
several national and regional historiographies.
A useful collection of essays on modern cross-cultural
contacts between the Nordic world and the
United Kingdom was published as Anglo-Scandinavian
Cross-Currents (Ewbank et al. 1999). It analyses
the cultural connections between nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century literatures and historiographies
from Scandinavia and the United Kingdom. In
the introduction to the volume, Inga-Stina Ewbank
draws attention to the difference in viewpoints that
have perhaps characterized the different national
paradigms and, in both teaching and research, still
continue today:
Viewed from the centre of the British Empire,
boundaries between different Scandinavian
countries often blur or vanish altogether. […]
Viewed the other way—from the margins of
Europe and in relation to English culture—
differences are also sometimes elided, in favour
of a unitary Scandinavianness (Ewbank
1999:12).
The time frame for Anglo-Scandinavian Cross-
Currents is 1850–1914, when the whole concept
of “Northernness” itself took on a more romantic,
but also political, flavor in that it was used to construct
various national narratives in Scandinavia and
Northern Europe. The time frame for the present
article is the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
which for both Norway and Scotland is a complex
historical period characterized by significant internal
and external conflict. Norway was part of the Danish
realm (Kingdom of Denmark–Norway) until 1814,
and from 1814 to 1905 in a union with Sweden,
whereas Scotland became part of an Anglo-Scottish
kingdom from 1707 onwards. This political context
meant that cross-cultural contact often occurred
within a bigger administrative unit. A series of wars
affected all of Europe during that time, starting with
the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and continuing
with the Great Northern War (1700–1721), the
Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the French Revolutionary
Wars (1792–1802), and the Napoleonic Wars
(1803–1815). These conflicts defined economic and
political contact between Northern Europeans, with
existing links between cultures and ways of life both
disrupted and transformed.
Intercultural Objects and Historical Spaces
Hance Smith (1978:25) notes a “relatively high
degree of continuity of material culture […]” between
Shetland and Scandinavia during the modern
period, with wooden goods purchased from several
small ports south of Bergen. He points to the lively
trade in Norwegian-made kit-boats and timber up
until the late nineteenth century, which, in islands
without large woodland resources, showed “requirements
of this material culture for items made
from wood—especially boats—which was the chief
means of maintaining contact with Norway for over
a century and a half after 1710” (H. Smith 1978:25).
An interesting example of this cultural continuity
can be found in the Shetland Museum collection of
wooden farmhouse containers. It is described as a
“Norwa Bøst”, a bentwood container or storage box,
and dated from around the eighteenth century. The
box has been decorated with pokerwork on the sides,
Figure 3. Norwa Bøst. Photo no. 00960, Shetland Museum
Collection, 2003. Description: Imported goods. [container]
Delting, 1740s, donated by Seymour Tait, Scalloway,
CON 65188. (Shetland Museum and Archives 2011).
S. Reeploeg
2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
55
and the initials “RG” have been carved into the lid
(Fig. 3).
With several versions of this type of container
on display at both the Shetland Museum and other
smaller museums around Shetland and Orkney, this
particular example is useful, as ownership and thus
age and associated historical details can be traced.
The box belonged to Robert Gifford, son of the landowner
Thomas Gifford of Busta in the northwestern
part of the Shetland Mainland. Thomas Gifford was
the author of An Historical Description of the Zetland
Islands (1786), describing Shetland in 1733.
His son, Robert, died young in a drowning accident
in 1746. The family forms part of what are locally
referred to as the lairds, landowners “with Scottish
and other non-Scandinavian European links” (H.
Smith 1978:25).
Thomas and Robert Gifford certainly imported
and owned Scandinavian objects and resources.
For example, Mr. Vanderfield, Gifford’s merchant
in Goysound, Norway, was instructed in June 1751
(Gifford 1751) to purchase four- and six-oared boats,
masts, ploughs, twelve hand staves, and wooden
planks. An earlier “account of our Cargo taken in at
Goysound aboard of the ‘Douglas’ for accompt. of
Mr. Thomas Gifford of Busta” (Gifford 1748) from
Capt. Kuhass for cargo transported from “Noraway”
in 1748 lists bark, wood, hazel cuts, and stockfish
amongst the items purchased alongside small boats
for coastal fishing.
Common throughout Europe during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, bentwood containers
date back to the traditional wooden farm
objects and tools of the Middle Ages. Depending
on size, the boxes were used to store food, tools, or
fishing tackle. The “Norwa Bøst” has a distinctive
lid, and is made with a technique known in Scandinavia
as svep, which is when wood is bent around
an oval shape, and then fastened on one side by
stitching the two overlapping sides together. An
almost identical box can be seen in the collections
of farmhouse containers in the West Norwegian
Folk Museum of Sogn (Fig. 4) and other regional
Scandinavian museums, where they are referred to
as tiner or svepasker.
There are different locking mechanisms, which
attach the lid to the box. One is based on the one
side-handle being rounded and fastened in two loops
to make it possible to turn to hold or to loosen the
lid on that side (Figs. 4, 5, and 6). Another opens the
container by pulling the two wooden side-handles
apart (which is possible, as the box is flexible)
(Figs. 3, 7, and 8). This design means the lid stays
tightly attached, making the box watertight, or even
airtight, which, together with its comparatively light
weight, makes it a useful container to carry on an
open boat or for travelling overland.
The Dictionary of the Scots Language lists the
use of the term “bøst” for bentwood box in Shetland
as first documented in the nineteenth century in
Edmonston and Saxby’s The Home of a Naturalist
(1888:39), which describes the “Büest” as “an oval
box, prettily carved and stitched (as it were) together
by withes. ... In it our mother kept her baby-gear”
(DSL 2005). The use of the Scots word “Buist”
(modern Scots) or “Boist” (Older Scottish Tongue,
which developed from the twelfth to seventeenth
century) is said to have originated from the Old
Figure 4. Tine, Sogn Folkemuseum, West Norway. Available
online at www.digitalarchiv.se. Accessed July 2011.
Figure 5. Author with Ditty Box, Corrigal Farm Museum,
Orkney. Photograph © S. Reeploeg.
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2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
56
French boiste, which refers to a small container or
box. There are various entries for the word “Buist”
or “Büest” with “bøst”, a term from Insular Scots,
referring to:
“A box or chest” (Sc. 1808 Jam.); “a small
box” (Ork. 1845 Stat. Acc.2 XV. 95; Ork.,
Sh. 1866 Edm. Gl.: Abd.2, Ags.1 1937, obs.)
(DSL 2005).
Within mainland Scotland, the “buist” is “an open
box containing a very varied collection of tools”
(DSL 2005). The word itself thus documents some of
the changing aspects of the language contact of the
Northern Isles, as part of Scotland, both before and
after the eighteenth century. Interestingly the DSL
lists a whole host of ”bosts”, “buists”, and “boiste”,
most certainly not all referring to this particular
make of box. A poem of 1819 by Richard Gall from
Dunbar, for example, mentions the material that a
traditional type of “buist” box would be made of
in Scotland, a “willow buist” (DSL 2005), which
Figure 6. Norway boxes, Unst Boat Haven, Shetland. Photograph © S. Reeploeg.
Figure 7. Tine, Sunnfjord Museum, Norway. Available
online at www.digitalarchiv.se. Accessed 15 September
2011.
Figure 8. Askja, National Museum of Iceland. Photograph
© Colin MacConnachie.
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2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
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Most examples of these boxes are associated with
fishing, with one box from the Old Haa Museum in
Yell (Fig. 9) described as “used for carrying food
by Faroe fishermen”2 (MS description on label) and
another, from the island of Unst (Fig. 6) simply as
“boxes from Norway” (printed description above
the box).
Cultural History and Ethnological Context:
Scandinavia
Due to the revival of traditional folk customs
and traditions associated with the establishment
of a national narrative for Norway during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bentwood
boxes, known as tiner, are nowadays treasured family
heirlooms, which are often decorated with traditional
flower motives (rosemaling) (Fig. 7).
Some of the first recorded examples of these
Scandinavian types of wooden containers can be
found in the collection of wooden objects from the
Oseberg ship burial dating from the eighth century,
and now displayed at the Viking Ship Museum in
Oslo. With staves of vertical pieces of wood bent
into a round shape, two of the boxes have the same
locking mechanism whereby the two longest staves
on the sides keep the lid in place (Fig. 10). While
the two larger staved containers clearly form the
basis for later coopering techniques, the smallest
container in the photograph shows a very thin piece
of wood, possibly bark, bent into a cup-shape. This
technique of bending bark or thin wood into baskets
or boxes forms the basis of the bentwood or svep
technique.
Based on the work of John Granlund (1940),
Helena Åberg (2008) provides a short historical
survey of the bentwood or svepteknik box tradition
indicates wickerwork, rather than bentwood. Nevertheless,
the use of “boist” suggests the owners were
speaking an older variant of Scots.
The Corrigal Farm Museum collection just outside
Kirkwall contains a similar wooden bentwood
box to the “Norwa bøst”, although described as a
“ditty box”, a naval term for a box or sea chest carried
by sailors to keep valuables (Fig. 5). As noted
above, the DSL (2005) still has an entry for Orkney
Insular Scots in 1845 for the word “bøst”, referring
to a “small box”. This record points to interesting socio-
linguistic differences between the island groups
in terms of dialect contact (McColl-Millar 2008).
In Shetland, the term still appears in several dictionaries
of recognized Shetland dialect words:
Büst, “A wooden box of peculiar make” (Angus
1914:30).
Böst, “a small, oval, wooden carrying-box.”
or “a small box used for containing ointment,
spices, etc.” (Graham 1999:7).
Böst, “a small, oval, wooden carrying-box.”
(Christie 2010:8).
Figure 9. Box used for carrying food by Faroe Fishermen,
The Old Haa Heritage Centre, Yell, Shetland. Photograph
© S. Reeploeg.
Figure 10. Cf24828, Kitchen
utensils from Oseberg, Jarlsberg
Hovedgård, Tønsberg,
Vestfold, Norway. Period: Viking
Age. Photograph © Eirik
Irgens Johnsen. Museum of
Cultural History, University of
Oslo (2011).
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2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
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As in other areas of Scandinavia, remnants of both
bark- and stave-built wooden containers were found
during excavations in Shetland of a late-Norse farm
at Biggins, Papa Stour (B.B. Smith 1999:193). Bentwood
boxes thus provide interesting examples of intercultural
contact through material culture, as each
develops regional aspects. Similar boxes are present
in Iceland, where they are known as askja (öskju,
öskjur), meaning box or case (Fig. 8) (Hólmarsson
1989). A variant of the bentwood box is used to store
linen or the traditional headgear of Icelandic women
(Fig. 11) and is known as a:
traf·askja. KVK.trafa·öskjur KVK FT. traf·eskjur
KVK FT [trafa (plural) referring to the
fringes of the material (Árnason 2002)].
The historical script collection at the University of
Iceland (Ritmálssafn Orðabókar Háskólans n.d.)
contains the following examples, indicating the kind
of uses and appearance that traföskjur boxes would
have had in the past:
lætur hún gullið í traföskjur sínar og setur á
hillu yfir rúmi sínu
[“she put the gold in her box and put it on a
shelf above her bed”, my translation).
Undir borðinu stóðu traföskjur, útskornar
með fögrum rósum
[“Under the table stood the trafaaskja box,
carved with beautiful roses”, my translation).
Traföskjur vary in size and make, with one example,
dating from 1677 and containing pieces of an altar
in Scandinavia and Central Europe. Small bentwood
boxes were found in Bronze Age Austria, ninth-century
England and Germany, and fifteenth-century
Italy. She divides bentwood boxes into five types:
the lockless svepask; lid-locked svepäskor; larger
svepskrin chests that contain a metal lock; lighter,
open svepkorg baskets with a handle across; and
svepta målkärl, which have a handle on each side.
The lid-locked svepäskor are the most similar to
the Norwegian tiner. This broad-based collection of
bentwood boxes indicates a shared cultural heritage,
although regional cultural difference means that
each geographical area has distinctive ways of both
assembling and decorating the box (Åberg 2008:29).
Åberg notes that both Swedish and Norwegian bentwood
boxes are often engraved, with boxes made
before 1700 decorated with plant and nature motives
using pokerwork, and most common in the areas of
Norrbotten, Lapland, and Finland.
Thomas Bankes (1788:604), in a section on “Persons,
Dispositions, Longevity […] Language, &c.
of the Natives of Lapland” also mentions one of the
Sami techniques of making wooden boxes:
[They] make boxes of their birch planks,
which they neatly inlay with the horns of rein
deer; and they are very dextrous at making
baskets of the roots of trees, slit in long thin
pieces, and twisted together. Some of these
are made so neat that they will hold water;
and they are particularly admired by the
Swedes.
Figure 11. Trafaskja, Museum of East Iceland. Photograph © Elfa Hlín Pétursdóttir .
S. Reeploeg
2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
59
and a bible, being auctioned by Galleri Fold in Reykjavik
in 2005 (Greinsafn 2005).
Conclusion
What seems at first simply an imported piece
of material culture is clearly part of a collection
of cross-cultural objects and practices of historical
and social significance. The traditional wooden
boxes examined in this article provide an opportunity
for intercultural interpretation that rediscovers
links between communities and cultures across
the North Atlantic region and Northern Europe.
The objects tell us about the flows of objects and
people, but also about linguistic and cultural contacts,
and social and cultural practices within the
different social and historical contexts of Scotland
and the Nordic world. Material culture thus embodies
an everyday intercultural context; it links
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fishermen and
landowners with craftsmen and traders across the
sea, although taking on a very specific role within
modern Norwegian and Icelandic regional and
national traditions. Further research may establish
the regional uses, customs, and possible traditions
connected with the “buist” during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries in the Northern Isles and
mainland Scotland, and whether the “Norwa bost”
was simply an imported storage box or if locally
made adaptations exist. Some later examples were
most certainly presents brought from Norway, both
by islanders themselves and visitors (hence the descriptive
term “Norway box”).
In terms of using material culture to consider
the European “trialogue” (Jönsson et al. 2007) between
space, identity, and organization, the above
microhistorical case study points to the necessity of
considering the intercultural aspects of both Nordic
and Scottish cultural regions. By recognizing that
some areas, such as the Northern Isles, have a strong
connection between people and territory that might
be cross-national and cross-cultural rather than insular
or peripheral, it becomes possible to make an
intercultural interpretation of material cultures and
histories previously studied exclusively from a national
point of view. The combination of an interdisciplinary
perspective with both macro- and microhistorical
approaches thus enriches our knowledge
and understanding of shared and divergent cultural
histories. It presents an opportunity to widen our
understanding of regional complexity in the North
Atlantic region, and to integrate it into our own
national and regional historiographies and cultural
histories.
Acknowledgments
In writing this article, I would like to thank staff and
volunteers at the following museums and heritage centers
for their help: Shetland Museum and Archives, Lerwick;
Old Haa Museum, Yell; Unst Boat Haven; East Iceland
Heritage Museum; National Museum of Iceland; Sogn
Folkemuseum; Norsk Folkemuseum; and Museum for
Cultural History, University of Oslo. I am especially grateful
to Michael Jones and Venke Åsheim Olsen for pointing
out the Norwegian context to me, and to Bobby Gear, John
Goodlad, and Simon Clarke, University of the Highlands
and Islands, for commenting on earlier drafts. I would also
like to thank the guest editor and anonymous reviewers for
their extremely helpful comments and suggestions.
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Endnotes
1Post-reformation European movements such as the Enlightenment
firmly established the idea of a nation based
on reason and ethno-territories, rather than religion or
rule by a sole sovereign.
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