First day of class

Discovered today the difficulty of a having obtained a larger camera: I'm decidedly less inclined to take it out and about with me, for fear of seeming even more over-encumbered and touristy than is already obvious. Then, alas, my regret when I run across a tree with a sweater knit completely up its trunk and all its major branches, the metanym of modern Iceland, and me without my camera. Fortunate, I suppose, that a besweatered tree in the middle of downtown Reykjavik is not likely to go anywhere.

First day of class in Old Norse Language, with good Haraldr, who tends to squint and smile a lot and stand and pace in a sort of upright Germanic pose that's both jolly and formal. I will be with the beginners of the class, I'm absolutely sure now, a blow to my unjustifiable pride, but at least I don't have to come to class on Fridays. I am looking forward to the syntax of Old Norse being easier than the Latin-perhaps even in the much-feared skaldic verse, though I have no way of being sure of that yet. But the paradigms are bound to be more difficult and numerous-all the dozens of varying stem-types in nouns and verbs.

With any luck this will make it easier when I get down to learning Old English and reading Beowulf.

There was, all apologies to my kinswomen and creditors, some impulse buying today. Bookshops, there's nothing can be done about them.

If it is any relief to my dear, financially-minded women, the two to the left are both required reading and utterly essentially texts of historical scholarship. And the one of the far right is as necessary a mental medicine as any banjo on boat of shipwrecked sailors.

Speaking of which, David, James, and I visited the folk music shop today. James found a little eight-string harp which has inspired him to collecting we multi-talented scholars into a band and doing something wretched and beautiful and keyless with us. David seemed to play all the odder things in the shop, and did some excellent percussion while I played the Peacock's Feather hornpipes on a little Ashbury pancake mandolin. Then I found a pair of tenor banjos, one of which was in GDAD, and got so excited that I sung a full verse of Tom Dooley before I realized where I was, and subsequently left the shop with all due unexpressed feelings of apology to the shopkeeper.

I further was able to resist impulse-buying cheese when we stumbled upon the first shop we've found with a proper cheese case. But we will be back, and the Italian-Canadian beast with the biblical name will be making some ravioli.

And this is what you get when you ask an English medievalist to look English for the camera, so that you might have at least one proper picture for your blog. Or rather, this is the second attempt. The first one was horrifying, colonialist, and made us both a little uncomfortable.

Come the weekend I should have some shots of some of those famed Icelandic landscapes (Which as a little photobook in the bookstore taught me, are best accented by languidly and artistically posed naked women), and my monstrosity of a camera will be put to its natural purpose.