uppsláttur

Ever and again trying to wean myself from Wikipedia. I have relapses.

Wiki - rapid. These are not so fast, and my shoulder squeaks when I reach to get one off the high shelf. Not even a shelf, but the top of the bookcase -- nothing between these and the ceiling.

Superior knowledge?

vugguvísa

They bear them out of their sleeping places and lay them down in cradles. They lie on their backs with the skin against carefully arranged gray foam. We wake them gently, open them, peer down into their faces and try to read their expressions. Sleepy and generous, they let us turn their pages without complaint.

staðreynd

She keeps her heart between the pages of an etymological dictionary.

þjóðargersimi

Á Kolaportinu:

Já, takk ... ég var að spá í Flateyjarbók hérna, en mér fannst hún svolítið dýr.

Dýr? Nú. Það finnst mér ekki.

Já, sko. Hún er ekki fágæti, þessi útgáfa.

Tja. Hún selst oft fyrir meira. Fyrir 16.000.

En þessi útgáfa hefur ekkert fræðilegt gildi.

Það eru fjögur bindi.

En það ekki ekki hægt að nota hana í neinu fræðilegu samhengi. Ólíkt til dæmis Heimskringlu hér, sem er útgáfa Finns Jónssonar og er notuð ennþá í dag. Og þær eru á sömu verð.

Báðar fyrir 16.000.

Mig vantar nefnilega ekki Heimskringlu.

Það er mjög sanngjörn verð.

Hún fýkur ekki burt úr hillunni heldur. Þessi hefur staðið hér í þrjú ár. Ég kem alltaf að öðru hvoru, og hún er alltaf hér.

Nei, nei. Þessi er ekki sú sama og fyrir þremur árum. Ég er búinn að selja eitt eintak á hverju ári í þrjú ár.

Er það, þá? (Hefði átt að segja: Þá er hún engin fágæti.)

Áttu Njálu?

Já.

Þessi er mjög skemmtileg útgáfa hér.

Já, og eldgömul. Vel þess virði að borga svona mikið fyrir útgáfuna frá um miðja 19. öld, sé maður nógu ríkur. En þessi Flateyjarbók er ekkert gömul.

Hún selst mjög oft fyrir 16.000.

Mm. Hvað með 8.000?

Segjum það, já.


(Sjitt. Hefði átt að bjóða 6.000.)

typical

In Webster's dictionary of 1828, stereotypes are only things used in printing: "a fixed metal type; hence, a plate of fixed or solid metallic types for printing books." Stereotype printing was that "done on fixed metallic plates." The verb meant to make such plates or to compose a book on such plates. The example sentence is: "certain societies have stereotyped the Bible."

By 1913 there is a figurative meaning as well: to fix, to make permanent. The citation is from 1887: "Powerful causes tending to stereotype and aggravate the poverty of old conditions" (Duke of Argyll).

Now the Oxford English tells us that a stereotype is "a preconceived and over-simplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person or thing."

This idea is not so fixed as one might have thought.

bókasafn

Sometimes I dream of my favorite library. You could be lost in the stacks for days, unaware of the passage of days and nights. The only meaningful passage was your own, weaving between the shelves. The darkness might be pitchy. You'd grope for the chain and yank a buzzing bulb awake to illuminate the nearest volumes. The iron shelves extended uninterrupted from the basements under the earth through several storeys to the roof high above. If you put your forehead against the bindings and peered down, you could see them falling away a hundred feet into the darkness below. The floor was not a floor but a walkway suspended between the towering slabs of ordered books. It was made of thick white glass. If you looked up, if there were another questing reader stopped just above you, and if he had tugged the bulb above him a-light, you could see the outlines of his shoes through the glass floor.

Today was the equinox. Tonight I imagine fish looking up through the thick, translucent ice at the slow increase of light.

leggja á

Grettir Ásmundarson vs. Glámr. The famous scene in the moonlight, the wrestling match, the grim tug of war in the gap of the door. The black and bloated revenant pulls with his feet braced against the frame. Grettir does the same. Glámr pulls outwards; Grettir pulls inwards. They are equally matched, and Grettir can feel it. He cannot break Glám's grasp and he cannot pull him into the house. So he lets his feet slip, and Glámr tumbles backwards onto the turf with Grettir on top of him.

It is a clever move, and Grettir does defeat Glámr and behead him, but he never gets free of the curse Glámr lays on him during the fight: eternal outlawry, solitude, terror of the dark.

She is photocopying the passage for a class. She hasn't opened this edition in several years. The cardboard cover flaps away from the title page. A bit of paper is stuck to the flyleaf, a note:

I'm going home. Call me after the meeting--!

and a little scribble of a name.

She feels a little tug. Then she lets go of the book and it falls back onto the desk.

hlaðið

My only English-English dictionary is in a box somewhere. The boxes are piling up. Even without consulting it I can say with some security that Icelandic hlaða "to stack up" and English lade "to load" are related. The Icelandic gives you the option of middle voice hlaðast for communicating the sense of helplessness associated with the stacks seeming to pile up on their own. You don't hear lade much anymore outside of bills of lading. I suppose I'll have one of those when it comes time to shift all this.

The boxes full of books are about 45 lbs each, 20-odd kilos. That's weight or mass, of course. I'm not sure how to measure the quantity of knowledge, fræði, in each book or grouping of books. Perhaps it's best done in volume, like a liquid. That would make sense, given the liquid and alcoholic nature of fræði or at least kveðskapur. Indeed, ladle is related to lade and hlaða as well.

It is beginning to make sense to me that several of these boxes come already emblazoned: Budweiser, Corona, Tsingtao, Red Hook, and the very evocative Eye of the Hawk.

þorskur

I am still fascinated by Fiskirannsóknarstovan and its long lists of piscine names. Today, also, I am thinking about cod. Much has already been written about cod, thanks to Mr. Kurlansky. I will add just a few lexigraphical and personal notes.

Fiskirannsóknarstovan informs me that the cod has at least thirty-five names in Faroese. Toskur is a clear relative of the Icelandic þorskur. Grunnafiskur and grunningur are appropriate for a fish that likes to be near the sandy bottom. Miðafiskur is a good name, since one fishes at the miði. Some of the others are more surprising. I do not know why the cod might be called málfiskur, unless it is, unbeknownced to all, the singing fish made famous by Halldór Laxness. Tertlingur is likewise mysterious to me. I note gráur fiskur and hvítur fiskur, remarkable only because in Icelandic the cod is yellow.

I have hauled three cod off the sandy bottom outside Reykjavík harbor. They were indeed very yellow, but perhaps I would have seen things differently in the Faroes.

It is a commonplace that Icelanders will not eat cod, that haddock is the domestic fish of choice, so common that its proper name ýsa is sometimes neglected in favor of fiskur. Nonetheless, I had a Icelandic friend who favored cod over ýsa and maintained that he had grown up among northerners who all favored cod over ýsa. On several occassions I have eaten cod he had prepared. Always the flesh parted before the fork in thick, snowy leaves like the pages of a book, white and tasting of the sea.

eldur og gler

A book tells me that the reflection of the fire in the dark glass of the windows, seen more faintly and as if it were outside, leaping eeriely in time with the fire in the hearth, was once called witch-fire by some. It strikes me as a good name, but I am not fearful of witches. It was probably an unnerving name to those who used it. The book too suggests that people did not like to see it, that they covered the windows against the dark, the cold, and also the illusion of mysterious burning on the snow around the house.

I have no hearth, but I have lit candles. I do not draw the curtains because I do not mind the phantom flames in the window. They are merry enough. They hover, forming new constellations with the usual flock of glittering points, some outside lights on the hill, some reflections of lights of the room.

Ah, now they are guttering.

dragons & ponies

(looking up from book) "What's a dragoon?"

"Eh, a kind of cavalry. Medium, I think."

"Sounds like dragon."

"Yeah, it does. I have no idea what the etymology is. Hang on. (typing) Here we go, it does come from dragon, in French. Dragoons were mounted musketeers, and the muskets belched smoke and flames and so were called dragons by the French. At least by one account."

"Interesting."

"Oh, and it's also a verb. 'To subjugate by force,' as by sending a bunch of dragoons in, or simply 'to compel.' And in 1828 there was another sense: 'to persecute by abandoning to the rage of soldiers.' Clearly a case of verbing going on there."

"Verbing also being a case of verbing."

"Indeed. Wait, this is weird. Dragoon also appears in another 1828 definition, that of bidet."

(laughs)

"I learn that in 1828 a bidet was a small horse issued a dragoon to carry his baggage."

"Carry it to the latrine?"

"Ah, it makes perfect sense. Bidet is French for pony, from Old French bider, 'to trot', and the older type of bidet was meant to be straddled, rather like one would straddle a horse."

"Fascinating."

"Yeah, language is a funny thing."

"Sheds a whole new light on 'the trots.'"

(makes strangled noise)

út í bláinn

Idle trolling of the veraldarvefur reveals that Traaie Coon means narrow shore, in Manx. Or at least someone claims it does.

Also that Luke 12:47-48 (in what edition, I have no idea) describes hell thusly:

That was the only light anyone ever saw in that place. The shore will be nearly gone, as the lake becomes full of the bodies of fallen angels and men, lapping close to the edge of the Bottomless Pit. If there are degrees of punishment as there are degrees of reward, then some will be cast on that narrow shore.

Not much better is Tacitus's description of the bank of the Sea of Judea, as translated by Thomas Gordon in 1737. It concludes with this note:

Moreover, into the sea of Judæa the river Belus discharges itself: The sands gathered at its mouth are, with a mixture of nitre, melted into glass. This is but a narrow shore, yet by such as are daily draining it of its sands, found to be inexhaustible.

Vergil's Æneid, book 4 (in translation by John Dryden), speaks of another land:

This little spot of land, which Heav’n bestows,
On ev’ry side is hemm’d with warlike foes;
Gætulian cities here are spread around,
And fierce Numidians there your frontiers bound;
Here lies a barren waste of thirsty land,
And there the Syrtes raise the moving sand;
Barcæan troops besiege the narrow shore,
And from the sea Pygmalion threatens more.
Propitious Heav’n, and gracious Juno, lead
This wand’ring navy to your needful aid:
How will your empire spread, your city rise,
From such a union, and with such allies?

Robert Louis Stevenson's "To all that love the far and blue" is cheerier, addressed to those who pursue the fleeing corners on foot---

Or, bolder, from the narrow shore
Put forth, that cedar ark to steer,
Among the seabirds and the roar
Of the great sea, profound and clear --

dagbækur

So, do you take the 200-page journal with only 40 pages left in it, in the hope of finally finishing it on this trip, or the new, whippy, luxuriously leather-covered moleskine with the snappy elastic and the creamy paper, in the hope of starting a new chapter, a new volume, even? This is still unclear. But you will bring the swim goggles along.

lost & found

On the street, nay, worse! atop the rubbish bins I see a stray book. Aside from having being abandoned, it does not seem to have been ill-treated in whatever home it had been in last. It is fat and sleek, not very old, either, though not very young. It is a dictionary. I ruffle its pages. It purrs contentedly under my fingers. It seems really in very good condition (who would have orphaned it here? what heartless owner? someone moving away, no doubt, someone who didn't feel he had room for it in the new place), and it is fairly clean for something found nosing about near the bins. There are no marks on it, just two paper tags, one next to the definition of thesis and the other on the page including feral, feracious, ferine, ferly (noh! ferlig?), Fergus, Fenian, and Fenris.

I snap it shut and heft it again (it is hefty), pretending to weigh my options, but I'm fooling myself.

Swinging it up onto my shoulder, I set off again homeward, already picturing how I will rub it down with a damp rag and how well it will get on with my other books.

afsakið hlé

Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are leaning in various attitudes of idleness against the wainscotting. They are waiting. Aramis looks serene. He holds a small book of psalms open in one hand, and he is studying a loose scrap of paper between the pages, doubtless some notes he has made on a theological matter. Athos is cultivating an air of bemused boredom. He may be slightly drunk, or else he may only be faking. Only Porthos makes no attempt to assume an appearance other than that of impatience.

bastille

I do not remember the name of the café, but I remember being at the Place and drinking coffee or perhaps wine and seeing the gold in the pavement outlining where the prison had been. That was several years ago now and in winter. These days I think of that prison more than I usually do, but my mind is on the other side of that history in the company of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis in nightly readings of The Three Musketeers. There, too, a fair amount of wine is consumed.

bækur á flugi

I descend into the library, stepping past the glum young guard, stack card in hand, list of Dewey decimals in pocket, heading for the broad staircase the winds downward about the atrium towards the subterranean shelves. There, at the first landing, I am confronted with Art in the form of maybe sixty books pierced by steel wires and suspended in various attitudes. So pinioned, they resemble birds in flight, tumbling on air currents, only caught mid-tumble and frozen. I walk to the edge and peer downward. The books (open, shut, hanging, held) fill the several-storey shaft, the wires criss-cross in a metal web.

How arresting. I have the same disconcerting feeling I have had upon happening across taxidermy at a zoological park or a natural history museum and thinking what beautiful animals and then oh, they are real, they are dead. I recall hearing a docent at one such museum address just this reaction in her tour group by saying with audible regret that, yes, animals used to be "collected" from the wild for display purposes, but that the museum no longer sponsors such expeditions, and today only animals from zoos and sanctuaries, dead of natural causes, are used.

And I suppose the books have similiarly been culled from captive populations in bibliographic parks, and only after long and productive lives. I suppose none of them represents anything like an endangered species of printed matter. Nonetheless, the installation seems faintly inappropriate, and I leave feeling unsettled.

kór

Baroque horns and singing from over the hill, many voices, and in the summer-seeming air, you think of the Sunday bells of Háteigskirkja. Now the voices sing hallelujah, hallelujah with a plaintive fall of notes, a minor key, a rising quaver. Háteigskirkja vanishes from the mind's eye, replaced with the thought of haugfólk at worship. They use the same book, after all. Well, the first part, anyway.

out of joint

I get in late, tired, and pour myself some port. A long day. Speeches, remembrance, too much finger food and white wine. Story in plenty, a surfeit of tales. One friend telling how a mysterious fever had come upon him and held him in its pinching grip for days, only to break suddenly as he entered the hall, leaving him soaked with sweat but able to speak. I looked at him with a wild eye, ready to see blood spout from his ears, to watch him burst his white shirt with grief. He looked wry and reached for the wine.

Back at my desk, I seem to have left a book open, the last page read held open with a bottle of painkillers resting lightly in the spine. Seven of my ten roses have been lop-headed for days already. The white one is still in glorious bloom, shining in sympathy with the moon outside.

fleira

An alliterative week, this. Here are some words with F:


fylskni

Concealedness. Saw this in Snorri's Óláfs saga helga, ch. 83. A pleasing substantive. It has the solidity of a nice piece of origami, as if the papery verb fela, "to hide," had been folded and crimped into a small box of surprising soundness.


fnugg

A mote, as of dust, sometimes a flake, as of snow. I renewed my acquaintance with this word in a huge book of Norwegian poetry that, honestly, no one reads. Me included. It is exactly the right name for light things of that nature, things that might land on your face and tickle, provoke a smile or a sneeze.


finch

An old word in English, one older than the convention of spelling that last chuffing sound with a ch. Etymology unclear, I see, "perhaps imitative (?)" Who knows. There have been purple ones raucous at the window in the mornings.