Fat Birds Are Flocking Outside

 A rather large bird, forget what it´s called, against the sun.

As potentially impractical as taking pictures directly into

the sun might be, it creates some lovely colors.

 Some of that good ol' Icelandic midnight sun

A returned James, three hundred kilos heavier,

his face darkened by Canadian vices,

and his beard castrated.

Just got my third (and final) residence permit (the one

on the bottom), good until February. Both beard and smile

seem to have gotten bigger, but my eyes have sort of sunk in

and darkened. Hello, approaching middle age.

These pictures are bit old, admittedly, but work and the usual excuses. It was intended to be a whale-watching trip, but lacking whales we at least got to see a lot of birds, and fat puffins bobbing around their little isle. And a free ticket to go again, because Icelandic whale-watching boats seem to be far more concerned with customer service than anything else on the island. Or maybe they're all just in a better mood. Or maybe our guide was just very German.

Breta sögur translation completed (at least a first draft), and I'm 30 verses out of 171 in the accompanying Merlinuspá, the Old Norse translation of The Prophecies of Merlin. A rather esoteric and ridiculously frustrating introduction into translating eddic poetry, though I did get those 20 verses of Voluspá in class, that seems so long ago. The translator seems to have just as much trouble remembering place names (or they're bad for his meter) as I do; just in verse 30, he tossed out Neustria and gives it the nice general title 'The South'. I've got an outline going for the thesis itself, and just read a very comprehensive article from 1936 that showed me a lot of things I was missing, but also potentially gave me a lot of dated conclusions I can argue against. My rustiness in Latin is going to start hurting me soon, though, when I have to start quoting and carefully interpreting Geoffrey's original text. And going down this route of scholarship, I definitely need to learn French, for all the work on their vernacular Bruts, and there's at least one very short article in Norwegian. Though Paul and google translation might suffice me for that. But it's progressing, if ever slowly, and starting to take shape.

Going to be heading out to the Faroes for a little bumming around with Barbara next week. I will have a proper body of pictures then, hopefully, if something catastrophic doesn't happen to my camera, and hopefully a story or two to tell.

The last day of weight-lifting is tomorrow, before the gym closes until August 13th. Gets me a little teary eyed, thinking about it; I will miss the muscle-weight I've put on since I got here. It'll give me an opportunity to get better acquainted with my yoga mat, though, and I figure taking a month or so away from the bench every year will probably do some good. I have been doing this, on and off, for ten years (which remains a disturbing thought), and I'm not exactly the Dragon Ball Z protagonist I was shooting for at 15, so not much use worrying about it.

On a lighter note (bam), I have grown increasingly existentially frustrated with how little novel-reading I do anymore, and how little of the great works of English I've ever read. So I started reading Moby Dick last night (Sorry Bahb, I know I was supposed to finish more of his short stories first, but I got impatient), and damn, it's funnier than I was expecting. The whole sleeping with the cannibal episode is the best piece of racist humor I've heard in quite awhile. And it's full of one-liners, alas that I'll never memorize them all (or any, in all probability). I'm waiting with anticipation for Patrick Stewart (I will never be able to think of Ahab as anything but Patrick Stewart) to show up and start spouting the fire and brimstone.

Two months and a week until Thesis is due. Tick-tock.

His Son, Who Was Called Lear. . .Was Not Called a Wise Man

Dust cloud and 23:00 sun in Reykjavik

It's delightful how often the most classic of stories are the easiest to summarize.

Page 50 out of 121 of Breta sögur, plus about six pages I jumped ahead to translate for Bahb´s thesis, concerning Merlin and his revealing of two dragons beneath the foundations of the fortress king Vortigern was attempting to build. We managed to discover that the dragons, in the Norse translation, were made to breathe poison, rather than fire, and fly, rather than just sort of move about in an indeterminate manner; mighty scholarship! Meanwhile, the translator seems very fond of King Lear, or at least fond of pitying him, as he abbreviates his story very little, and adds some extra dialogue. Little details make all the work worth the effort, or at least entertaining: the completely failure to grasp British geography, but the addition of extra Norwegian geographical details, the addition of little Norse turns of phrase, like ' bearing the helm of terror' for conquering or ruling over, the addition of kings having to discuss things with their þingmen, and the author having to explain that, among the British of those days, it was normal for the eldest to always inherit (silly barbarians). And I have no doubt that the King of Iceland who appears during Arthur´s days in Geoffrey´s Historia will nicely disappear, or Haukr will have some time explaining him to an Icelandic audience.

The thesis itself grows no closer to solidity, but our last little seminar on French sociology with Kevin Wanner is completed, so now there is naught left to distract me, but the vicissitudes of life. Getting increasingly lonely hereabouts; not that I was socializing a whole lot beforehand, but many of the folk are gone, or leaving soon. Thankfully James and Magda will be back soon (and Paul already is), but there will be repercussions. The Ölsmiðjan Session might not last for much longer. The Nerd Monastery is soon to dissolve, when Bahb goes back home to Kentucky to mourn Dixieland summers.

 

Just a summer of translation and thesis-composition, and then there is a good possibility of spending the autumn in transcription (and maybe even learning a little modern Icelandic, like the rest of those fools who think there´s some good reason to actually learn to speak a language), should my luck hold out. Need to sign up for the GRE soon; the price of a good American PhD is having to deal with the mind-fuck of conceptualizing and then participating in a standardized test for graduate school.

 

Met Matthew Driscoll today, the head of the Danish half of the Arni Magnusson Institute; years ago, I don´t think I ever could have imagined I´d find a rant about a rather kooky transcriber of manuscripts in mid 19th century Iceland so entertaining, but there you go. It was awesome. He also shared the insight that the people who sign up in droves every summer to study manuscripts in Copenhagen are a rather strange bunch of folk, wink wink sigh; I think there might have been an implied stab at American nerds, there (and Germans).

 

If anyone still reads this, I apologize for not updating very often. It has grown nearly impossible to decide what, if anything, is worth writing up here; hopefully I haven´t been too far off the mark.