A Sunday of Study

My first day of the Iceland sojourn during which I have decided (possibly in vain) to entirely devote to study. Piles of Peter Sawyer, the lines of Lars Lönnroth, and the epiphanies of Eric Christiansen (I swear I didn't actually spend that much time coming up with those alliterations. I swear). Further along in the day, Old Norse paradigms will be memorized and my new copy of Saxo Grammaticus will be introduced to my Latin dictionary and subsequently deflowered.

Alright, enough of that. I figured a bit of quote dumping might be appropriate in communicating the general feel of this sunny blue Icelandic day, since there are no new photos to dump.

First, Lönnroth's summary on the historical significance of skaldic verse: "But although the sophisticated wordplay of these artful verses is a delight to connoisseurs, the factual information they convey is often disappointingly slight; in most cases we only learn, after having straightened out the inverted syntax and deciphered all the intricate metaphors, that some great ruler, attended by brave warriors, defeated his enemies at such-and-such a place, thus making the life of local corpse-eating wolves and ravens a little happier."

Ah the bitterness of old academics. Comedy and tragedy for the ages. Speaking of bitterness, a quote from one of Tolkien's letters, which have been my pleasure reading for the past week or so. I posted this on Mr. William's Gillis' fb page, as finding heartfelt anarchic rants from old Catholic philologists is certainly a rare and wonderful thing, particularly for Portland's loudest residence Anarchist: "The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hella, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin's bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as 'patriotism', may remain a habit! But it won't do any good, if it is not universal."

That's all for now, lest I start digging around too actively for quotable lines. I will thus continue with the dusty tomes (Referred to as such as often as possible, in the vain hope that I might forget I'm reading most of them on a computer screen) and listening to Portland Taiko, Dick Gaughan, and whatever else can keep me awake and alert.