In Pursuit of Vikings: Feast on the Yule and Return with the New Year

I meant to post last week, after my Feast on Christmas day, on the hospitality of Barbara and Jaime and Sarah, fine piles of vegetarian cooking and Spanish desserts and good company and good beer. But it has been the way of my mind lately that once it ventures into its hole, its little workspace, its peripheral vision goes a bit dark. So once I got back home, in the days before David and James returned, I mostly just thought about work, and taking breaks from work to eat and watch anime (and read LotR).

And yet though a selfish sin it may have been, it wasn't entirely without productivity. I have made so decent inroads into returning to my old German studies, and improving upon them with an academic vocabulary: I got through the introduction and some of the first chapter of Stephanie Wurth's Der "Antikenroman" in der islandischen Literatur des Mittelalters (There's some missing umlauts there: I don't really have the hang of doing German characters on this keyboard). Likewise I made inroads into reading both Breta sögur and Trójumanna saga. There's a certainly amount of fear in that little project, as neither exists in translation, and I'm not really confident I can read them, or even a sufficient portion of them, as well as the other works I'll likely need to gain some understanding of, in time to write my thesis. The near future does has a certain hazier-than-usual quality about it. But, fortunately, the corpus of nerd literature has lots of good anti-fear quotes and sentiments throughout: between Dune and others I think I have enough philosophical material to continue to work effectively.

New Years was excellent. Again with the hospitality of our Frakkastígur neighbors, and James and David (though no Paul) returned to add Commonwealth class and grace to the festivities. They do love their fireworks in their country, and have very little fear about them. Bahb saw someone light their house on fire, though it was raining, and there were great piles of snow on the ground. And there were plenteous children walking about with great flares and roman candles. Sparks were clattering against the windows and balcony of Hallsgrímskirkja. James was laughing and shouting at anything that gave him the slightest opportunity or provocation.

And for we proud and few who signed up to learn firsthand of seiðr and shamanism and berserkr from Neil Price himself, class begins next week. So the send-off has been had. Back to the tomes.