mál draumanna

I think I was in Finland.

There was an old manor house turned museum, the upper hall filled with sleighs that had belonged to the family in past centuries. Each sleigh had name, shown on a plaque in Finnish and English, though the Finnish was not the Finnish of the waking world. A smaller one was Swan (Kalle or Kulle), a larger one Reindeer (a compound involving an element meaning ‘water’). There were more, perhaps even ten, arrayed on the white and black marble floor behind velvet ropes. All were made of bent wood, elaborate curving shapes like filligree or the arms of chandeliers.

Outside (where? I do not remember) there was a smiling young woman, perhaps a guide, with light, curly, cloudlike hair. She addressed me in Flemish (did she think I was Flemish myself?). Which I recognized as such (or as dream-Flemish) and understood enough of, but even in dreams I do not know Flemish well enough to speak it back. She must have sensed this (I hesitated, after all), and she asked, Do you understand Vlams? I wish I remembered the exact syllables well enough to try to spell them here.

I do remember drawing my eyebrows together and making my best effort, in a mix of words she’d just used and some Old Norse with reconstructed pronounciation, doing my best with the uvular R, to say that I would like to learn Vlams. Again, I cannot reproduce the syllables exactly, but they were good enough to be understood, because she brightened at this even beyond her already radiant affect and clapped me on the shoulder. She urged me to stay in touch, to visit her at home, gave me an address in Åbo.