Christmas Eve

Bið feower and twentig aerra géola!
I do not have anything particular to say about English history or linguistics today. My English studies are over for now. I will go on to study Nordic runes and German this spring. Looking forward to it. For now, I am very happy about getting a holiday.

Merry Christmas!

Röde Orm and The Long Ships

I haven't posted here for a while due to rather extreme demands on my B-level English course. My last exam is coming up tomorrow (English literary history - could turn out great or horribly), and I will then head home for Christmas. 

   And with Christmas coming up and everything, I thought I might mention one of my recent essays which is on the topic of a story that takes place during the Viking Age. My essay focuses on a particular chapter of this story, where the main characters come to celebrate Yule with the viking King Harald Bluetooth. The names of these main characters are Orm and Toke, and the book itself (unless you don't already know) is Röde Orm by Frans G Bengtsson. Bengtsson actually studied English here in Lund and was a successful translator as well as fiction writer. His books have been translated into over 20 languages and highly praised for decades - and no wonder! The story of Orm and Toke is exciting and humorous, and yet strangely mythical and captivating. My essay discusses how the English translation (called The Long Ships, translated by Michael Meyer) differs from the Swedish original in the tone of the story and narrative. Röde Orm is deliberately written in an old-fashioned way with old verb forms and a particular language style which makes it feel more like a heroic epic than a brutal action story. Because let's face it: it's about Vikings. They plunder, pillage and fight. It gets bloody. Yet as a Swedish reader, you still like Orm and Toke and consider them to be the good guys of the story. They attain a heroic status on par with characters like Beowulf or King Arthur. 

Image source: http://www.seriecentrum.com/serietips/serietips.htm

   This, however, I think, is lost in the English translation (and possibly other translations as well, but I have not checked). The translation is in modern English and does not manage to retain the atmosphere of the original. The reader gets closer to the action and brutality, and even some jokes and comical points are lost simply because they do not work in English, or because they might have worked but have been ignored or misunderstood by the translator. Rather than a heroic tale that might have been recorded by a bard or chronicler in the 10th century and retold to us now a thousand years later, the English translation feels like a gritty, brutal action story and the characters are much less likable and laugh at things that suddenly do not seem very funny. Maybe the translator felt that he had to repackage and update the novel so as to make it available for new readers. This might have been very well with a story that was actually written a thousand years ago, but is far from an improvement here. Röde Orm is not in need of an update - its prose is meant to sound old and archaic, and is (I think) necessary in order to distance the reader from the violence and make the story work. The novel still receives much acclaim from English readers, but I would like to show them the Swedish original and what they are missing out on. I highly recommend Röde Orm to anyone who has not read it. It is a thrilling, humorous, swashbuckling (I've never used that word before!) adventure that really fires the imagination.

   I am now off to have supper and drink Yule. I have no ale or mead available, so Swedish julmust will have to do.

In memoriam

I wasn't planning to post anything today, but then I realised what day it is. Yes, you're quite right: it is the 22nd November. Winter is getting closer and this university term is coming to an end, and I'm looking forward to studying German in the spring - but for the moment, I would like to look back rather than ahead. This day marks the 50th anniversary of the death of a very interesting man. I am sure many first and foremost think of John F Kennedy, who was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on the 22nd November 1963 - and no wonder. His death made the headlines and was talked about for a long time, and the news of the death of another man the same day received much less attention. Who am I speaking of? 

Image source: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0BY-0Lh4wE-oT7x8aDIhVAhbjKEiGKAvhQSYj_FhAgWBz9iKdlbLedp-fwis4CgrDRGslyoCakOhevRhonKLXLMAMrOl_bvDHqpn9shcwpeeUUZqwlYQ3sFKerWnBxVVEFojOdnMpTNg/s400/cslewis.jpg

To his friends he was known as Jack, but his real name was Clive Staples Lewis. CS Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898, and attended several different schools in Northern Ireland and England. As a boy he loved the stories of Beatrix Potter (they are truly great; read them if you haven't!), and was later on interested in languages and mythology and Scandinavian and Icelandic stories. He was awarded a scholarship at Oxford in 1916. After his service in the First World War, he returned to Oxford and became a tutor in Philosophy as well as in English Language and Literature. He held the latter position until 1954. He called himself an atheist throughout his teenage years and early adulthood, but seems later to have re-embraced Christianity - perhaps in part thanks to his friend and Oxford colleague J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a devout Catholic. In 1956 he married American writer Joy Davidman Gresham, but Joy died of cancer four years later. Jack began to experience various medical problems in the early 60s. On the 22nd November 1963, he died at his home in Oxford.

To people of my generation, CS Lewis is probably most known for writing The Chronicles of Narnia (which were written during Lewis' final years at Oxford and deal heavily with Christian themes). He was also a member of The Inklings, an Oxford-based writing club that also included his brother Warren, Nevill Coghill, Tolkien, Owen Barfield and several others. I would have loved to attend the Inklings' meetings in the 1930s - even though Tolkien, sometimes called "Tolk" or "Toller" by his friends, was renowned for his sometimes harsh criticism and would probably rewrite most of my story ideas.

I could go on forever, or even write a whole book about Lewis' life - but there are already a number of interesting biographies floating around. When I visited Westminster Abbey last summer, I was disappointed by neither Lewis nor Tolkien having a memorial tablet in Poets' Corner. As I have been informed, this has now been fixed on Lewis' part. (If 50 years is what it takes, I'm really hoping for a Tolkien plaque in 2023.) For now, I am happy for Jack's sake - to me, he definitely belongs up there with Dickens, Keats and the Brontës.