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timerippleSometimes I unintentionally (or at least subconsciously) have a reading streak on a particular theme. Has this ever happened to you?
Or am I just now noticing that things have more in common than I think they do? (Does that even make sense? Look, I've been sitting here typing for four hours, nothing much makes sense to me any more.)
This year, starting with Code Name Verity, I’ve somehow read a number of books dealing in some way with or at least touching upon World War II:
Code Name Verity (Elizabeth Wein): lady best friends in the British Royal Air Force! ALL THE TEARS. ALL THE AWARDS.
A Brief History of Montmaray and The FitzOsbournes in Exile (Michelle Cooper): The eccentric royal family of a tiny island kingdom off the coast of Spain becomes involved in pre-WWII politics. WHERE IS THE THIRD ONE, I MUST HAVE IT, WHAT DO YOU MEAN NO GALLEYS?!?!?! GAHHHHH. I should write more about how much I love this series.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society (Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows): an authoress suffering from writer’s block befriends a quirky island community as it rebuilds after devastation at the hands of the Nazis.
Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons): Flora Poste, young lady about town, goes to stay with her eccentric and gloomy relations at the eponymous farm, and promptly sets out to reform all their lives. WWII is… a presence. Not much of one.
I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith): An eccentric family living in a crumbling castle meets the wealthy new Americans in town. Chaos ensues. WWII is… a presence. Kind of. It’s on its way.
Gaudy Night (Dorothy L. Sayers): Harriet Vane investigates shenanigans at her old Oxford college. One of the amusing but slightly unpleasant characters is seriously into eugenics. (I should also write about how much I love this book! Some books you magically encounter at exactly the right time, and that makes them five million times better, especially if they’re already amazing. This is one of them.)
So! Many books about, involving, or at least tangentially related to World War II. In a further series of stunning coincidences, we’ll come back to World War II in a bit.
Early in the summer I read North, a Seamus Heaney collection from the 1970s, I believe. I put off finishing it; I did not want it to end. At any rate there is a constant intertwining of Ireland, Vikings, and the body as geography, or geography as a body, and violence and language done to it.
Then last month I picked up a galley of Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths by Nancy Marie Brown (Palgrave Macmillan, October 2012). It was not until the final few chapters that I realized this work was illuminating North for me. (Nonfiction: sometimes you learn things!)
I faced the unmagical
invitations of Iceland,
the pathetic colonies
of Greenland, and suddenly
…
The longship’s swimming tongue
was buoyant with hindsight—
it said Thor’s hammer swung
to geography and trade,
thick-witted couplings and revenges,
the hatreds and behindbacks
of the althing, lies and women,
exhaustions nominated peace,
memory incubating the spilled blood.
(“North”)
The althing, I have learned thanks to Song of the Vikings, was an annual meeting of the chieftains of medieval Iceland. Grievances were addressed, judgments were passed, and lots of other things went on; politicking and bickering and snubbing and going off in a huff. Also lots of bloodshed (they were Vikings after all).
Then a few pages later:
Come back past
philology and kennings
(“Bone Dreams”)
Kennings are the tightly packed references made by Icelandic bards in skaldic poetry—an epithet may have an entire story behind it, and a skaldic line becomes decipherable only if you know the story. For example:
“The noble hater of the fire of the sea defends the woman-friend of the enemy of the wolf; prows are set before the steep brow of the confidante of the friend of Mimir. The noble, all-powerful one knows how to protect the mother of the attacker of the worm; enjoy, enemy of neck-rings, the mother of the troll-wife’s enemy until old age.” (p. 113)
Yeah, apparently they’re all like that. O_O Snorri wrote his Edda to instruct the teenaged Norwegian king in the ways of skaldic poetry: he tells the stories we know of Norse mythology so that King Hakon will get the references. Pretty neat!
Philology apparently has quite an interesting history with respect to the Icelandic sagas.
[Low battery; must relocate to a table with a socket.]
[Stupid battery, recharge would you?]
[There we go. Good battery, nice battery. Hang in there.]
Anyway. Philology. “Logos” means a number of things in Greek, but one of them is “word”--hence “love of words”. Pretty straightforward, yeah? Once philology (as the study of written languages) was applied to studies of Iceland and so forth (during the nineteenth century), studying Iceland got a lot more exciting, according to Brown and her sources. Especially to German scholars, who seem to have really liked philology. The Brothers Grimm retold Icelandic tales, and apparently Jacob got pretty into them, in a scholarly kind of way. People also just liked the stories. You have Wagner and his Ring cycle and his German nationalism back in the 1870s, taking mostly from the Icelandic tales and a little bit from German ones, says Brown. “Like Snorri he took bits and pieces of myth and made of them something magical.” (194)
You know who really liked Wagner sixty years later? NAZIS, THAT’S WHO. (See, I told you WWII would pop up again.)
According to Brown, by 1917 in Britain and the US studying Norse literature, languages, and what have you was considered suspicious because Icelandic literature was now ineluctably identified with Germany and, later, Nazism. Even philology as a study was Not Done.
You know who really resented that? J.R.R. TOLKIEN, THAT’S WHO. See, English literary types also had a long history of interest in Iceland and Snorri’s tales. (Yeah, “literary types.” You know, Sir Walter Scott, William Morris, a bunch of other guys. Literary types.) Tolkien was a genius at languages (so what else is new?) and he taught himself to read Icelandic at sixteen. When he came back from WWI and found out that he couldn’t keep studying philology, it was a German thing, ewww, he was pretty upset.
He eventually formed a club for reading Icelandic with C.S. Lewis and some other Oxford dons (he felt the “Northern spirit” of Norse mythology also belonged to Britain), which down the road led to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Many Icelandic figures appear in Tolkien—trolls, Beorn the bear-man, elves, dwarves, wizards, and so forth.
You know who else is English and also really likes Norse mythology? A.S. BYATT, THAT’S WHO. In another stunning coincidence, I also read Ragnarok earlier this year. Ragnarok is Byatt’s take on the Norse myths and the whole end-of-the-world business… set in a child’s-eye-view World War II frame story.
You know how many of these people Brown and I have been talking about were Irish? NONE. (Although Brown does talk about an Irish queen who settles in Iceland and proceeds to be a seriously badass matron. But none of these other people are Irish, probably because Brown approaches her subject from an initial interest in Tolkien).
Except Seamus Heaney, who in 1970-something writes
Come back past
philology and kennings,
re-enter memory
where the bone’s lair
is a love-nest
in the grass.
(“Bone Dreams”)
Suddenly, to come back past philology seems to me a long way indeed.
Or am I just now noticing that things have more in common than I think they do? (Does that even make sense? Look, I've been sitting here typing for four hours, nothing much makes sense to me any more.)
This year, starting with Code Name Verity, I’ve somehow read a number of books dealing in some way with or at least touching upon World War II:
Code Name Verity (Elizabeth Wein): lady best friends in the British Royal Air Force! ALL THE TEARS. ALL THE AWARDS.
A Brief History of Montmaray and The FitzOsbournes in Exile (Michelle Cooper): The eccentric royal family of a tiny island kingdom off the coast of Spain becomes involved in pre-WWII politics. WHERE IS THE THIRD ONE, I MUST HAVE IT, WHAT DO YOU MEAN NO GALLEYS?!?!?! GAHHHHH. I should write more about how much I love this series.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society (Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows): an authoress suffering from writer’s block befriends a quirky island community as it rebuilds after devastation at the hands of the Nazis.
Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons): Flora Poste, young lady about town, goes to stay with her eccentric and gloomy relations at the eponymous farm, and promptly sets out to reform all their lives. WWII is… a presence. Not much of one.
I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith): An eccentric family living in a crumbling castle meets the wealthy new Americans in town. Chaos ensues. WWII is… a presence. Kind of. It’s on its way.
Gaudy Night (Dorothy L. Sayers): Harriet Vane investigates shenanigans at her old Oxford college. One of the amusing but slightly unpleasant characters is seriously into eugenics. (I should also write about how much I love this book! Some books you magically encounter at exactly the right time, and that makes them five million times better, especially if they’re already amazing. This is one of them.)
So! Many books about, involving, or at least tangentially related to World War II. In a further series of stunning coincidences, we’ll come back to World War II in a bit.
Early in the summer I read North, a Seamus Heaney collection from the 1970s, I believe. I put off finishing it; I did not want it to end. At any rate there is a constant intertwining of Ireland, Vikings, and the body as geography, or geography as a body, and violence and language done to it.
Then last month I picked up a galley of Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths by Nancy Marie Brown (Palgrave Macmillan, October 2012). It was not until the final few chapters that I realized this work was illuminating North for me. (Nonfiction: sometimes you learn things!)
I faced the unmagical
invitations of Iceland,
the pathetic colonies
of Greenland, and suddenly
…
The longship’s swimming tongue
was buoyant with hindsight—
it said Thor’s hammer swung
to geography and trade,
thick-witted couplings and revenges,
the hatreds and behindbacks
of the althing, lies and women,
exhaustions nominated peace,
memory incubating the spilled blood.
(“North”)
The althing, I have learned thanks to Song of the Vikings, was an annual meeting of the chieftains of medieval Iceland. Grievances were addressed, judgments were passed, and lots of other things went on; politicking and bickering and snubbing and going off in a huff. Also lots of bloodshed (they were Vikings after all).
Then a few pages later:
Come back past
philology and kennings
(“Bone Dreams”)
Kennings are the tightly packed references made by Icelandic bards in skaldic poetry—an epithet may have an entire story behind it, and a skaldic line becomes decipherable only if you know the story. For example:
“The noble hater of the fire of the sea defends the woman-friend of the enemy of the wolf; prows are set before the steep brow of the confidante of the friend of Mimir. The noble, all-powerful one knows how to protect the mother of the attacker of the worm; enjoy, enemy of neck-rings, the mother of the troll-wife’s enemy until old age.” (p. 113)
Yeah, apparently they’re all like that. O_O Snorri wrote his Edda to instruct the teenaged Norwegian king in the ways of skaldic poetry: he tells the stories we know of Norse mythology so that King Hakon will get the references. Pretty neat!
Philology apparently has quite an interesting history with respect to the Icelandic sagas.
[Low battery; must relocate to a table with a socket.]
[Stupid battery, recharge would you?]
[There we go. Good battery, nice battery. Hang in there.]
Anyway. Philology. “Logos” means a number of things in Greek, but one of them is “word”--hence “love of words”. Pretty straightforward, yeah? Once philology (as the study of written languages) was applied to studies of Iceland and so forth (during the nineteenth century), studying Iceland got a lot more exciting, according to Brown and her sources. Especially to German scholars, who seem to have really liked philology. The Brothers Grimm retold Icelandic tales, and apparently Jacob got pretty into them, in a scholarly kind of way. People also just liked the stories. You have Wagner and his Ring cycle and his German nationalism back in the 1870s, taking mostly from the Icelandic tales and a little bit from German ones, says Brown. “Like Snorri he took bits and pieces of myth and made of them something magical.” (194)
You know who really liked Wagner sixty years later? NAZIS, THAT’S WHO. (See, I told you WWII would pop up again.)
According to Brown, by 1917 in Britain and the US studying Norse literature, languages, and what have you was considered suspicious because Icelandic literature was now ineluctably identified with Germany and, later, Nazism. Even philology as a study was Not Done.
You know who really resented that? J.R.R. TOLKIEN, THAT’S WHO. See, English literary types also had a long history of interest in Iceland and Snorri’s tales. (Yeah, “literary types.” You know, Sir Walter Scott, William Morris, a bunch of other guys. Literary types.) Tolkien was a genius at languages (so what else is new?) and he taught himself to read Icelandic at sixteen. When he came back from WWI and found out that he couldn’t keep studying philology, it was a German thing, ewww, he was pretty upset.
He eventually formed a club for reading Icelandic with C.S. Lewis and some other Oxford dons (he felt the “Northern spirit” of Norse mythology also belonged to Britain), which down the road led to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Many Icelandic figures appear in Tolkien—trolls, Beorn the bear-man, elves, dwarves, wizards, and so forth.
You know who else is English and also really likes Norse mythology? A.S. BYATT, THAT’S WHO. In another stunning coincidence, I also read Ragnarok earlier this year. Ragnarok is Byatt’s take on the Norse myths and the whole end-of-the-world business… set in a child’s-eye-view World War II frame story.
You know how many of these people Brown and I have been talking about were Irish? NONE. (Although Brown does talk about an Irish queen who settles in Iceland and proceeds to be a seriously badass matron. But none of these other people are Irish, probably because Brown approaches her subject from an initial interest in Tolkien).
Except Seamus Heaney, who in 1970-something writes
Come back past
philology and kennings,
re-enter memory
where the bone’s lair
is a love-nest
in the grass.
(“Bone Dreams”)
Suddenly, to come back past philology seems to me a long way indeed.
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no subject
Date: 2012-08-15 03:48 am (UTC)Oh Code Name Verity is quite possibly the best book I've read this year. Definitely worth it. Keeping the Castle is cute, but I think it lacks the quirky, almost-uncomfortable-but-awesome charm of Owl in Love. Above is my other favorite book so far this year--so very, very brave, and yes, imperfect, but all the more interesting for it.