It’s obviously the time for overseas
travels. Penny’s blog last week told of her learning French and her use of
children’s books to improve her fluency. I am focussing on Iceland.
I am in Canada, on our annual visit to our
daughter and grandson, Gabriel, and it’s great to be sharing books in person
with him, rather than doing it via Skype. Sharing via Skype is OK but there’s
nothing like the close contact brought by snuggling together on the couch with
a book. He loves books and being read
to. So much so, that now he’s started kindergarten (Canada’s equivalent to Prep)
he says he doesn’t want to learn to read because that will mean people stop
reading to him. Nothing we say is yet making him change his mind; we will
continue to read aloud with him. It’s just the stories will become more complex
and won’t be finished in a sitting. That is a hard concept for a five year old
to grasp. Gabriel’s current obsession is with dinosaurs so those are the books,
both fiction and non-fiction, we have to read and reread. Harry and the Dinosaurs at the Museum by Ian Whybrow is the one
which he wants from all three of his adult readers – 8 to 10 times a day!
Most of my comments this time are about
literature for adults which can be read by younger readers too. We travelled to
Canada via Iceland and I spent some time re-reading English versions of the
Icelandic sagas before we left home. However, they had far more meaning for me once
I had an understanding of the landscape they were set in. I am not a proponent of all young people
having to reading myths and legends because I believe it’s only a certain kind
of reader who will enjoy them. By and large I don’t enjoy them. They are complex and fanciful, often with
hard-to-remember names, though full of positive outcomes for the thoughtful
reader. But I would encourage people to
have a go at the Icelandic sagas because they are such great family stories.
It’s thought that Iceland was settled by
Vikings somewhere around the middle of the 9th century AD. The new
settlers came to a really harsh land with even shorter summers and longer
winters than their original homeland, volcanoes and lava flows and geothermal
activity. The sagas are family histories in prose format, describing events
from the 10th and 11th centuries but written about two
centuries later. They are wonderfully evocative and well-written stories, still
very readable and relevant to our modern eyes. One can imagine that most of the events
happened as families struggled and fought to establish their new lives, with
death and vengeance prominent themes. Unlike the Greek and Roman myths which
can rarely be read literally, the Icelandic sagas show elements of truth and
hardship. And most surprisingly many of the Middle Age manuscripts are still in
existence.
There are many English language versions of
the sagas. There’s a great website (which I used for my reading) devoted to the
digital publication of the sagas: http://sagadb.org
. This contains all the major extant sagas, many of which are translated into
more than one language. The Saganet
website -- http://handrit.is -- includes images of the original
manuscripts. Fascinating!
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/sagas/icelandic/index.html has several of the more famous sagas
available for free download. If you would
prefer to read the sagas in book form, there are many choices, translated over
the past several hundreds of years. One of them, which I saw in Icelandic
bookshops, was The Sagas of Icelanders.
There are also smaller versions containing just one of the sagas, such as the
one about Eric the Red or about Grettir the Strong.
Iceland has a very successful publishing
industry. Have a look at these two articles if you want to know more about it.
Baldur Bjarnason’s (an Icelandic expatriate blogger who
lives in UK) opinion in 2011 can be found at www.thebookseller.com/feature/depth-icelands-book-market.html and a 2013 interview with Alda Sigmundsdottir
( a writer and translator) at http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/investigating-icelandic-book-flood-qa-alda-sigmundsdottir#
Let me know what you think of the sagas.
Maureen Mann
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