öld langt síðan

For auld lang syne, my jo,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne.

And surely you'll be your pint-stowp,
And surely I'll be mi',
And we'll tak a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne!


This song exists also in Icelandic, thanks to Árni Pálsson, as "Hin gömlu kynni gleymist ei", but I love the Scots lyrics. Why mess with a good thing? And why take a good word like stowp that is even more archaic that the modern Icelandic staup for having retained an ancient pronouncation and turn it into bikar, "chalice"?

But today is not for pedantry. Pass the glasses down the table, the cups and stowp and then if we run out, the chalices too, and let the bottle follow.

the bombs bursting in air

Ég nefndi bara í gær tilhneigingu íslendinga til að leyfa sér að hneykslast yfir nöfnum á flugeldum, vörum handa krökkum sem kenndar er við bardaga og brennur. Rætt var um einmitt það í kaffistofunni í morgun. Hneykslun er skiljanleg. Margir Frónsbúar eru ánægðir með það (og jafnvel mjög stoltir af því) að Ísland hefur lengi verið afar friðsamt land á heimsmælikvarða.

Þetta þjóðareinkenni endurspeglast einnig í sýningu Þjóðminjasafnsins nýopnaða. Þar stendur til sýnis togvíraklippur úr þorskastríðunum. Því er lýst sem 'sennilega eina vopnið sem íslendingar hafa fundið upp.'

Það er svo sem rétt. Hvorki hafa íslendingar fundið upp margt hvað varðar hernaðarbúnað né farið oft út í stríð í venjulegu merkingu þess orðs. Ekki að þeir hefðu getið það heldur, en það er annað mál. Nei, í núverandi samhengi ætla ég að benda á eitt atriði sögulegt og síðan segja það gott í bili.

Ég veit ekki hvar þessir flugeldar, kenndir við gamla hermenn og forna bardaga, eru framleiddir, hér á landi eða úti, né hvaðan öll hráefni í þá koma, á þessari hnattvæðingaröld. En með púðurslyktina í nösunum á gamlaárskvöld kemst ég ómögulega hjá því að muna það, að fallbyssur Evrópu hefðu varla eins mannskæðar verið án brennisteins frá Mývatni. Íslendingar fundu ekki upp byssur og byssupúður, en íslenskur brennisteinn varð örugglega banamein mun fleiri víða um heim heldur en dóu í öllum orrustum Sturlungaaldar.

Hvort þetta sé fagnaðartilefni, þetta íslenska hlutverk í styröldum meginlandsins, er önnur spurning, en ég hef ekki heyrt neinn láta eftir sér að minnast á það, hvað þá hneysklast yfir því, í sambandi við þessa, hinni mestu sprengingarhátíð.

the rockets' red glare

Get your gunpowder on.

The town is gearing up for New Year's Eve. Kids are setting off firecrackers and jumping frogs to the great dismay of the basement-apartment-living classes in post code 101. The other night in Grindavík a band of fun-seekers of varying ages and degrees of intoxication was apparently unable to fight down the urge to set things on fire a hair early this year, and it went roving through the downtown in search of flammables. Last night the start of firework sales was marked by the local Björgunarsveit with an early show set off near Perlan, giving me and another late-working scholar (standing with our heads stuck up between the accordian blinds and the window, noses to the glass) a prime view of some of this year's nifty whiz-bang items. The latest innovation seems to be things that go paff and then dissolve into shimmering nebulae of metallic red and green that drift on the wind.

And now the special advertising section has made it into my mail slot. I always like checking out the array of fireworks named after medieval battles and burnings-in: Flóarbardaga, Njálsbrenna, Flúgumýrarbrenna. This naming practice is, to a certain degree, tasteless, a point made annually by one or another columnist. However one feels about battles, there is something a bit off about commemorating brennur, the least honorable way of dispatching your opponents in feud.

But the stuff of violence is exciting, there is no getting around that. The tools of violence, especially old, romanticized violence, also make good names for fireworks: sverð, exi, spjót, and of course atgeir, the wonderful weapon owned by Gunnar á Hlíðarenda the exact nature of which is still not known. Knobby and pointy it must have been, though.

The kappar, the champions of old, also lend their names: Gunnar himself, Leifur heppni, Ari fróði ("fyrir þá sem vilja ekki of mikið læti"), Auður djúpuðga, Gunnlaugur ormstunga ... It is nice to see the women of saga represented, I suppose. Hallgerður langbrók, for example, is an explosive with a lot of flash and silver. This is only appropriate, for Hallgerður caught the eye of none other than Gunnar á Hlíðarenda with her colored clothes, her yellow hair, her silver bangles and neckrings amassed in the course of two prior marriages. (This blonde bombshell tended to outlive her husbands, and she won her lasting literary fame in large degree by proving the end of Gunnar when his bowstring broke in battle and she would not give him a lock of her yellow hair to replace it.)

This time I noticed the copy for Hallgerður:

Það verður enginn svikinn af þessari.

I'm sure I'm meant to read that as "no-one will be disappointed in this one" (and that one is grammatically feminine because it is a cake explosive, a kaka), en svik er svik; this is Hallgerður langbrók, and I can't help seeing this as a revisionist comment on this most reviled and yet beloved of saga women: "No-one will be betrayed by this woman."

the hen's march

The days are growing longer by wee increments, specifically, goes the folklore, by a hen's tread: um hænufet. Apparently the first tread of this celestial hen is 9 seconds in Reykjavík, the next 27 seconds, and the next 44 seconds.

Bless the University Almanac for putting up a page that shows exactly what the length of a hen's tread is from one short day to the next both in Reykjavík and up in Akureyri. I, for one, would not otherwise have a sense of this measure, being a town-dweller and unused to hens. Most of the local fowl are clustered in the town end of the pond, sqwonking and slurping up quantities of soggy bread, and hens do not number among them. The dominant species is the gray goose. Their steps are clearly visible in the snow and the spacial distance from one to the next easily measurable by anyone with decent boots and a ruler. Or, if the temporal span of a goose-tread were of interest, one could take a stopwatch along and time the interval of their lazy waddle from one pink foot to the other. However, to my knowledge the tread of geese does not correspond to any other particular distance in time or space.

Not unless we count intellectual space, in which the span between the one goose foot and the next is the space of attribution. Quotation marks are goose feet, gæsalappir, and quotations appear within them, innan gæsalappa. As a result, the geese on the snow-covered Tjörn remind me of gray dons and docents, lost in thought, methodically marking on the white page the borders between their own scattered thoughts and those of prior scholars.

ceci n'est pas une raie

This is not a skate.

But in Sweden it is a skata, I have just learned. In Norway skjære, England magpie. In Iceland it isn't anything, because these raucous birds have never found there way there outside of the dictionary, but I am newly given to understand that the name is skjór.

In Iceland skata is a skate and not a magpie at all. So is tindabikkja, an amusing word if ever there were one. But skata seems to be the one of the two that is most used in connection with the nasty-smelling fermented starry ray eaten every December 23 in honor of St. Þorlákur and, really, in honor of Icelanders' historical ability to survive on a diet that would have qualified as a natural disaster anywhere else.

The town today, as on every Þorláksmessa, lies under a choking haze of skötulykt, a noxious ammoniac vapor reminiscent of toilet cleaner fumes or the emissions of an enormous and territorial tomcat. Perhaps the jólaköttur himself.

Imagine if the traditional dish were made of the Swedish skata, a magpie-pie. There would be a nursery rhyme about it, even.

No, wait. Those were blackbirds. Fjárinn.

you must be this tall to ride this ride

Vetrarsólstöður. Just now the blue glow is creeping up from behind the mountains on Reykjanes after the longest night of the year. Candles are flickering in the coffee room.

The shortest day brought a nasty little thaw and sloppy rain that curdled the snow where it lay and turned it into a sullen mess of cottage cheese that sucked at your feet as you walked about the city. But the shortest day was blessedly short, and with the further fall of night, the temperature dropped again. This made of course for instant treacherous slickness everywhere as meltwater became glassy black ice. The wind came up and drove the last of the fine snow along the streets in long, shifting skeins like wool being carded by the thin spirits of winter.

But that wind settled, and then the swirling hundslappadrífa (snow falling in clots the size of a dog's paw) was lovely against the dark, especially as viewed from below, through glass, with a glass of red wine in hand. Today the town is white again, slowly turning blue. The sun will come up a little ways back, rather than further, on the path it has taken all winter.

That's what vetrarsólstöður is: the stopping place of the rising sun in its progress along the horizon before it marches back again. The Icelandic word has nothing to do with light and dark and all to do with the solar path as viewed from rather high up on the bowed surface of the third planet. We were just yesterday at an outermost point of earth's complicated, annual, carnival trajectory. The little spinning boat is still for an instant and you gape out at the lights of the fair and the illuminated faces of the nearest fair-goers before the gears engage and the arm of the machine jerks you back. And you gasp as the little boat spins again, now suddenly the other way, jamming you against your friend there beside you, and both of you laugh in terror and delight.

the great library

A terse but well-written editorial in the New York Times today voices some of the same concerns I have about the impending Googlization (Googlification? Googlun?) of several major research libraries. I, too, am concerned about copyright and about "the well-being of the books themselves:"

Google has developed a scanning technology that the company claims is not destructive. Clearly, Google will need to work closely with libraries to ensure that no books are damaged. It is an illusion to think that the digital versions of scanned books can replace the books themselves.

A participating library will get a free digital copy of every book scanned in its collection. In other words, each library will essentially get a digital backup of a significant portion of its holdings, but it will be critical to remember that printed books are a stable medium, one that has persisted for
hundreds of years.

Hear hear. I would only have said it more stridently myself. In fact, I will anyway.

There is real danger of damaging books physically during scanning, either through carelessness or because of unforeseen effects of the scanning itself. Goodness knows that even the preservation techniques of earlier ages have sometimes turned out to be destructive. And I for one seem always to be hand-copying something out of a book I am not permitted to photocopy because it is too fragile.

The stability of books as a medium cannot be stressed too much. They are of course vulnerable to fire and water (as are electronic media), but they are remarkably durable. You can, for example, drop them on the floor several times before this abuse has any impact on their legibility.

Furthermore, writing or set type on pages is organized into informational quanta in such a way that damage to part of it does not reduce the readability of the rest. In contrast, many digital, machine-readable formats are so sensitive to corruption that a few 0s or 1s out of place makes the entire document unreadable.

Imagine if books worked this way, if the careless underlining of an interesting word or a single dogeared page were to make it impossible for the next potential reader to even open the book. (Note that we've borrowed the vocabulary of opening and closing books into the language of digital documents, and note that it brings exactly the deficiences of the younger medium versus the older into high relief.) Whole pages and quires have gone missing from books and manuscripts, and though obviously it would be better if we had them, their loss does not equal the loss of the information on the rest of the pages. If this were so, we wouldn't have Beowulf or The Poetic Edda or most anything of any age.

Even if they are accurately scanned (and it would be generations before anyone truly knew whether they had been accurately scanned), the books themselves must not be destroyed. They contain information that will not be captured by any technology of reproduction, never mind one being put into practice by people who cannot possibly be reading all the material they are meant to be copying accurately. And:

Digital technology is only a few years old, and even in that brief time, the digital world has produced dozens of incompatible, and often unreadable, media formats. The Google project will enhance the usefulness of the books it encompasses, but it in no way will render them obsolete.

I still fear greatly that large-scale digitalization of the great libraries will make it more difficult for those of us who know this to convince cash-strapped bureaucrats to continue buying, housing, and preserving physical books. I know that this is already a problem in the American legal profession as well as in the matter of newspapers, and it would be an enormous tragedy if it became a bigger problem than it already is in the Academy in general.

I could go on at huge length on this matter, and on the whole concept of searchable text, and I probably will. I leave you will this comparison of the durability of technological versus human methods for decoding information preserved in outdated formats.

The format in question in this first example is magnetic wire, a precursor of magnetic tape. I know of a sizeable collection of recordings preserved on magnetic wire, made in the second decade of the twentieth century when this was the cutting edge of technology for recording sound. There are, to my knowledge, now only two machines in the United States that can play magnetic wire spools. I once met on a plane the one fellow who knows how to repair them when they break down, which they do, apparently, often.

The other format is medieval Icelandic, an admittedly obscure language, one fairly obscure even in the context of 13th-century Europe. Even discounting Icelanders, there are today more people in the United States who can decode this antiquated storage format than there are machines than can play magnetic wire, more by an easy factor of 100. And they can teach others to decode it too.

More ranting on this subject to come, but now I really must trot across the street and look at that manuscript from 1827. I expect the handwriting to be perfectly awful, but at least I will not have to endure the antics of Microsoft Word perpetually crashing and freezing my machine.

klaka?

Ice is neat. Likewise snow.

I am always heartened to see Icelandic kids happily engaged in the time-honored practice of scooting one's feet back and forth on packed snow or an icy patch while, say, waiting for the bus, totally absorbed in the experience of near-frictionless movement for its own sake. Or shuffling through powder. Or poking the rimey edge with a stick as the ice crust forms over standing water. These activities have eternal charm, it would seem, international appeal extending even to the oh-so-slick teens and pre-teens of this subarctic hotspot. They may be too cool for school, but they are not too cool for ice.

The water in the Tjörn froze a forbidding black a few days ago, and then the sky went blue-gray and dumped several centimeters of fluffy white on top of it. It's been fairly still, and so the snow has lain quietly, tracked through here and there by awkward geese and red-clad children. Sunday evening, crossing over onto Lækjargata, I saw a lone small figure, well-insulated in parka and boots, trudging with an air of great concentration in that snow. Passing by, I could see that it was a boy of maybe nine. He was pushing the glittering snow from the dark ice with his feet so as to form two-meter-tall letters, presumably visible from the air, spelling (in English): HELP.

föstudagskvöld

Last night I saw Sigurður Fáfnisbani on line at Bæjarins beztu.

Or perhaps it was a descendant (though not, obviously, through the patriline), an afkomandi Völsunga. He had an avian friend on his shoulder, a green páfagaukur, and they seemed to chat amiably back and forth as the line crept forward, though of course I only caught half the conversation. I was tempted to alter my usual order:

Eina með öllu nema remúlaði, og aukinn skammt af steiktu Fáfnishjarta, takk!

But at the last minute I thought better of it (and opted against the raw onions as well).

Later, in a bar, with a glass of whisky in hand, I encountered a nykur, a water horse, or in this case, a beer horse.

Sei sei, mikil ósköp. Bærinn allt morandi í sagnadýrum.

-3° C & 66° N

Nippy, with a good wind. The pond may yet freeze.

A gray goose flew by me yesterday, less under its own power than being hurled along by the gale. During the night, offshore winds were clocked at fifty meters per second, well into the duodecimal top bracket of the Beaufort Scale, but seas were apparently small. As one paper put it, the waves are blown down by that kind of wind before they can heap up. Today I saw ravens windsurfing merrily, hopping lightly up from the corner of a rooftop into the blast, hanging for minutes at a time, wingtips twitching, then letting themselves drop back onto the roof corner before trying it again. The dry, castor-sugar snow that had been making everything look like an overzealously-sweetened county fair funnel cake is being scoured off the streets and whipped out to sea.

upp á stól stendur mín kanna

I am soðgreifi today, and the making of coffee falls thus to me, and I fall into the familiar motions automatically. I recognize the weight of the full kanna and the smell of the black coffee, the unsecure-feeling twist-lid of the metal can housing the coffee grounds, the sound of the water kettle for the tea just before it clicks done. The coffee makes itself while my mind is out in the hallway.

Soð- is a boiling word. The verb to boil, sjóða, is cognate to English seethe. (Etymologically speaking, sheep, sauðir or sauðkindur, are animals for boiling, but thankfully this does not prevent one from roasting them quite crisp in practice.) Greifi corresponds to German graf, Danish greve; it's unclear when it got borrowed in. I'm used to thinking of the soðgreifi as the Count of Boiling, but it occurs to me now that the title is better cast as Seethe Reeve. Somewhere along the way, the ge- of Old English gerefa got lost, freeing up refa to become reeve and shire-reeve, later sheriff. The gerefa and refa must have been leaders of men, liners-up of those men into a secgróf (OE), orderly like letters in the alphabet, staves in the stafróf (Icel.).

The cups clink together, held by the loops, on the way from the cabinet to the tables. Then they are set out in rows, two abreast, eight to a table. Then the bell is rung.

vetrarfuglar

duggendur
stokkendur
álftir
fýlar
grágæsir
dúfar (greyin litlu)

walking tour

It takes a few steps to get back into it, the weird and careful shifting of weight that allows one to walk comfortably on the winter slickness of Reykjavík's residential streets in civilian shoes. It can be done. The natives do it. Some foreigners, apparently, never get it down, having grown up in, oh, San Jose or something. Even in hiking boots (hnuss - klæddir eins og túrístar) they are unable to accustom themselves to not being able to fling, recklessly, each foot forward in turn, secure in their friction-based grip on the ground, and they tend to wipe out both spectacularly and often.

Mind you, the natives do also wipe out sometimes, spectacularly, even. Some tens of them went down with bone-jarring thumps over the past few weeks of fierce weather, landing first on the pavement and then in the emergency room. But I have never seen for sale here the little elasticized slip-on cleats that I have seen in Norway. Mostly, the good folk of Reykjavík are really very deft, moving from icy patch to dry pavement and back like seasoned travellers stepping on and off an airport's moving sidewalks.

But the truly dreadful conditions of earliest spring are yet to come: a hand's breadth layer of slick ice under a hand's breadth of icy water and above it all, speeding you along to your inevitable wet fate, a Beaufort 8 wind that catches you like a glímukappi and throws you down.

samdægursþjónusta

Íslandspóstur klikkar ekki.

jólahjól

This evening before sitting down to dinner, I flipped on the radio and spun the little volume dial. I was rewarded with a charming and informative program on the history of that excellent Christmas song made famous by Sniglabandið: Jólahjól, a pop tune capturing the excitement of the kid who desperately wants a bicycle (hjól, lit. "wheel") for Christmas (jól) and suspects that his smirking parents have indeed gotten him one, but he cannot be 100% certain and is trying not to let his hopes get the better of him.

This was pleasing supper entertainment, skemmtileg og fróðleg og umfram allt jólaleg. I found myself turning over in my head Jan de Vries's speculative etymology of the word Jól, clearly related to English Yule, Old English geol or geola and plenty of other Germanic words for the season around the turn of the year. De Vries grants that the pre-Germanic connections of this word are unsicher, but he offers, citing Feist, that it may well attach to an Indo-European root having to do with turning, axles, and wheels. In other words, jól and hjól may have the same origins; the jólahjól may by dumb coincidence echo a very ancient understanding of time and winter.

cinema roundup

I have been exposed to a great number of movie trailers of late, viewed whilst surrounded by Danes munching licorice and gummy candies named after things you would never willingly put in your mouth, never mind swallow. Here are a few observations.


On Nordisk film and the white bear:

Nordisk film, the Danish cinematic concern, uses a polar bear perched on a Mercator globe as its logo. I am fascinated by this reminder that around the time that film was becoming a popular entertainment, spectacle in Denmark must still have consisted in large degree of the viewing of items from the exotic reaches of the colonies: Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, parts of Africa.

In fact the white bear has been the object of Danish viewing pleasure for much longer than that, even, if we may judge by the 13th-century tale of Auðun vestfirzka. Probably fictional but none the less instructive, the Icelander Auðun travels from his native Eastfjords to Greenland and acquires a white bear cub which he then transports, with many a mishap, to the King of Denmark. I do not do the tale justice. It is a brilliant little narrative and well worth the hassle of learning Icelandic to read it in the original. But my point is the bear, the object of visual fascination then and later. Now, it seems, it is the very symbol of spectacle, flashed up on screens across Copenhagen before the main feature, the signal that something worth seeing is about to appear.


On "Alexander":

I wonder whether I should be heartened or disturbed that I am distracted less by the welter of Irish and Scottish accents among the Macedonians than by Alexander's horse Bucephalos being played by a Frisian. A noble beast looking much out of place.



On "National Treasure":

The whole idea that there is a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence is irritating. A moment's thought should be enough for anyone to realize that the treasure map is on the front.

að spjallast við á Hviids

Praised be the forbearance of my Danish friend, who listens patiently while I alternate between murdering his language, largely in the form of names poorly pronounced, and rambling about things linguistic in general. Over a couple of glasses of red wine imbibed at the fabled Hviids Vinstue, and after producing several novel variations of the pronounciation of "Hviids," I proceded to test my companion's endurance with a lengthy speech on the present progressive in Scandinavian and Icelandic. I keep meaning to chase down the story of what, in fact, is going on here.

A Norwegian attempting to say that he is speaking would write.

Jeg sitter og snakker.

Literally, this means "I sit and talk," but the construction is used to express an ongoing activity in the present. Certain verbs are valid, officially, for forming this present progressive, according to whether the speaker is sitting, walking, lying, or simply busying himself, respectively:

Jeg sitter og snakker.
Jeg går og snakker.
Jeg ligger og snakker.
Jeg driver og snakker.

Other verbs are not valid. However, I have seen in informal writing (specifically, a note scrawled and tacked onto a dormitory door) a parallel construction with the verb to be, være:

Jeg er og spiller piano.

Clearly also a present progressive ("I am playing piano," lit. I am and play piano) and a thought-provoking one, since modern Icelandic does use vera (to be) in its own present progressive:

Ég er að spila piano.

But this would be parallel to and even less standard Norwegian sentence than the one above, namely:

Jeg er å spille piano.

Now, spoken Norwegian does not distinguist between og (and) and å (the infinitive particle), and on top of that, the final -r of the present conjugation is indistinct or absent in many dialects, and thus a common native error in writing is of exactly the form of the sentence above, though with one of the approved verbs in the auxilliary position. Thus:

Jeg sitter å snakke.

When foreigners are taught Norwegian, a great fuss is made about not making this error, and honestly, I have never seen a foreigner be tempted. It's a native thing, I think, like þágufallssýki in Iceland.

But how interesting that the native temptation is there. Að is the relative of the particle å in Norwegian (Danish at, Swedish att, Old Norse at), and it brings to mind yet another present progressive construction, this time from slightly antiquated English:

I am a-playing piano.

Or more familiarly, from many a ballad (mang en ballade):

When I was a-walkin' one morning in May
I met a pretty fair maid and unto her did say ....

That outdated English particle a that looks suspiciously like að, å, and the rest has left the language, it would seem, but the whole thing makes me wonder if there is not some historical present progressive underlying this all, one which was standardized according to one analysis in Icelandic (to be + að + infinitive) and another in for example Norwegian (to sit, walk, lie, busy oneself + og + simple present).

I keep telling myself that I really must track this down sometime.