It’s completely silent up here.
When you hear the word mountains, what comes to mind? I’m from a flattish place, and I’d always thought of the Alps or the Himalayas until I moved to Norway. Here is a different kind of mountain range, like the highlands of Scotland only bigger. Last week we went to the Rondane mountains north of Lillehammer for a couple of days. It is bleak and very wild, quite extraordinary. Many families have a cabin here that they go to at Easter to ski, and in the autumn to pick multebær, and a few other times every year. All the cabins are exactly the same, almost; the same shallow pitch to the gable roof and the same dark-stained boards anyway. They are scattered about the land, not specially pretty but not bothersome either. Some have grass roofs.
The next time we go I’ll take a picture on the way up from the river valley; it’s a bit like parts of the Rhine, this sort of thing:
with old farms and you expect to see vineyards on the hillsides, which makes the plateau at the top quite a contrast:
There is flat marshland and heather. And quickly changing weather:
Lots of small streams and waterfalls in the summer:
Some animals: sheep, lynx, elk, reindeer. And birds: I don’t know all the birds, only grouse.
A forest of tiny old moss-covered birch trees surrounds our cabin:
I’ve never got any further North than this bit right here:
We always say one day we’ll drive all the way to the old copper-mining town of Røros, but it’s a long way and it’s difficult to make the effort.
A Bad Guide 
Any bears? Or wild goats? Any blaeberries?
No, no and yes. But we’re going to take the goats up there next year for a month. We thought they could clear some of the trees.
Indeed, there’s something of the Pentland Hills in some of these photos. Or something that looks like the mountains you can see from the train window between Perth and Inverness.
I think it’s a place I could like easily, going out for long walks, barely seeing a soul.
Any idea how much it might cost for a ticket between Mars and that lonely but lovely planet?
Look at that sky! It’s quite beautiful in a harsh way. I think it must be glorious in the late spring. But I admire your fortitude, SK. I’m not sure I’d like to set out on a walk by myself there. It’s daunting.
If you know the price to Paris, you have to add about 10,000 Mauritius rupees (roundtrip) from Charles De Gaulle to Oslo. But unless you come in the next couple of weeks I’d wait until the snow’s over next… Mayish. (You’re always welcome, of course.)
The planet isn’t as lonely as you think. Especially in school holidays there’s much people around.
Air France takes around 6-700 € per way for the cheapest seats — if you find one. I couldn’t twist the SAS website to tell me anything. Maybe they don’t fly there anymore. I think most of the seats are taken by travel operators, e.g, Star Tour, who also hire charter planes, and you may be lucky and get a cheap seat through them, but the Star Tour site is impenetrable. I would be surprised if this isn’t much easier to solve from the Martian side.
The best time for hiking in the Norwegian mountains is late summer or early autumn. In Rondane and other eastern areas one can start earlier, since most of the snow is gone by the end of May. But high summer (July-early August) tend to be either too wet or too hot or too full of insects (although perhaps not for a Martian). September is often nice. October is wetter and colder and the days are getting shorter.
Skiing is best in late winter or early spring — March and early April — because it’s milder and the days are longer.
“The planet isn’t as lonely as you think.” Try living near the top of it, where civilisation is at least nine hours away by plane even Australia is 3 hours away.
Stuart, doesn’t NZ look a bit like this in places? (I’ve never been).
Well, I’ll take your word on the non-loneliness. It’s quite an alien landscape for me, but reminds me — oddly — of New Mexico. The high desert there was also quite strange to me, but after an hour or two I began to find it beautiful and wanted to be out there under that huge low sky. Still, I think I’m more of a woods and fields kind of gal. Rivers, lakes. Lush trees. Hills.
BTW, great photos, Mr Crown.
Thanks. The best one, the cloud picture, was taken by my wife.
Trond: Especially in school holidays there’s much people around.
I’d say only in the school holidays. It’s very easy to avoid seeing a soul, though.
“Stuart, doesn’t NZ look a bit like this in places? ”
Very, very much. I was especially struck by this with the 2nd photo, of the lake. The blasted heath also looks very zildish.
Stuart: Nine hours – that would place civilization in Singapore, Hong Kong, thereabouts ? I gather Sydney doesn’t count !
I love the wildness of Norway compared with the cultivated look of a lot of southern Europev – I like northern Scotland for that. Would love to try Rondane. I’ve stayed in the Hallingdal and done the Oslo-Bergen train in the distant past. Magic.
I second the enthusiasm for the pictures. Wonderful stuff.
I was wondering about the name; Wikipedia tells me “Rondane is the finite plural of the word rond,” and the latter is apparently a variant of rand.
Question: is the -d- pronounced or not?
The d is pronounced as in porridge.
Yes, the D is pronounced, as dearie says. There’s equal emphasis on both syllables of the word.
We (well okay, my wife) don’t know of any word ‘rond’ or ‘rand’. I expect that’s right that the -ane is a version of the usual -ene finite pl.
Yesterday I was curious about the pronunciation of Norge, Va, and came across this discussion of it. I’m not sure anyone knows, quite.
the cloud picture, was taken by my wife
Do you think she would mind her husband sending a higher resolution of the overcast photograph to any Martian on this planet?
looks like my country, the road, the hills
just instead of the cabins there are yurts
New Zealand, Mongolia, Norway, New Mexico, Scotland: if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, I say.
It gets pretty cold here in the winter, how warm is a yurt?
pretty warm, hot even if to use charcoal in the hearth, but in the morning it could get cold if the outside temperatures are -30 around
Yes that’s about as cold as it gets here, I think (℃).
Einar Haugen (the only dictionary I have — it’s very good but over 40 years old) has:
rond -a, pl render cf rand
rand -a/+-en, pl render 1 boundary, edge (of cliff, horizon), outline, rim. 2 fig. brink. 3 stripe (in material, of pattern); brim (of bottle, pail); groove (of ski); welt (of shoe).
Both rond and rand have a dot under the -d, indicating it’s not pronounced (hence my question); the + indicates Bokmål.
Incidentally, I just read that Norwegians say “Det regner trollkjerringer” (translated as “It’s raining she-trolls”) for “It’s raining cats and dogs.” Is this true?
New Zealand, Mongolia, Norway, New Mexico, Scotland: if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, I say.
I’m afraid we have nothing like that on Mars.
New Zealand, Mongolia, Norway, New Mexico, Scotland: if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, I say.
Excellent – that saves me having to plan a trip to see New Mexico’s fjords, geysers and glaciers.
Hat:
Einar Haugen (the only dictionary I have — it’s very good but over 40 years old) has:
rond -a, pl render cf rand
rand -a/+-en, pl render 1 boundary, edge (of cliff, horizon), outline, rim. 2 fig. brink. 3 stripe (in material, of pattern); brim (of bottle, pail); groove (of ski); welt (of shoe).
An apparent problem is that the toponym does not have the (ordinary feminine) plural -er, -ene that is listed in your dictionary entry. Instead it has the (generally) masculine -ane. Rand isn’t listed with that class of feminines anywhere I find it.
However, I note now that many of the feminines that take a masculine plural are frequently used in toponyms. Hence (picking from the list in Ivar Aasen’s Norsk Grammatik (pp. 146-7)) hei, myr, øyr, sætr, lein, kleiv, elv, vik, øy, fit, fles, skjel, egg, eng. I could venture to guess that this development is partly a result of a false identification with the masculine gender stemming from the frequent use of the dative in toponyms, the dative plurals in -om being common to all genders. Thus Rondinn ~ i Rondom -> Rondane.
Also the derivation of names for such massive mountains from a word meaning “line, rim” is a little stretchy. I’d suggest “horizon” (modern synsrand) -> “purple mountain”. In this specialized sense a masculine may even have beena zero derivation (or a secondary masculine have been percieved as one) . But this is all speculations.
Both rond and rand have a dot under the -d, indicating it’s not pronounced (hence my question); the + indicates Bokmål.
It’s silent in the word ‘rand’ /’rond’ but pronounced in the name of the mountain massif. The latter might be a reading pronounciation invented by us non-locals. I haven’t been able to find any source for the local pronunciation of the name. In Gudbrandsdalen (the valley running west of Rondane) I believe the possible forms are Ronn(d)æinn (mpl.), Ronn(d)inn (fpl.) and Ronn(d)om (datpl.).
Note, though, that the 19th century poet and Nynorsk pioneer Aasmund Olavsson Vinje used Rundarne in his famous poem (and song thanks to a melody by Edvard Grieg), likely believing the name to be derived from rund “round”.
Gosh, he’s really good, isn’t he?
My wife’s from Gudbrandsdal and she pronounces the D.
‘Det regner trollkjerringer’? My wife & daughter both thought that was a good one, but nobody’s heard it before. As I’m sure you know Language, a kjerring is an old hag (or old bat, bitch etc.), and ‘it’s raining old hag trolls’ would be a good entry for the next edition of your book. There’s a lovely place in northern Norway called Kjerringøy — Crone Island — that is associated with Knut Hamsun.
Thanks, Trond, I knew you’d come through!
Crown: So it’s a family place, then? A seter? Does she make her own goat cheese?
Crown and Hat: I’m not as good as you think. I’m an interested layman with some, but not enough, books, and I’m frequently wrong. There’s always something I didn’t know or think about.
Crown again: If your wife is from the southern half of the valley, and from your pictures I believe she is, her native dialect is closer to Central Eastern Norwegian than if she’s from the upper half. And, anyway, I think your wife is too young for me. Does she remember what her grandparents, or other old people in the parish, used to say?
My wife’s family are from elsewhere. It was built by he late father sixty years ago while he was stationed in the army in Ringebu, lower down the valley (as you rightly guessed, though the small picture is one of the Rhine). In those days they would walk up there (a very long walk). It’s simply a hytte, or cabin, with some land, rather than a seter, which is a summer mountain pasture for the grazing animals of a farm lower down in a valley.
Trond, do you know of an English-Norsk dictionary that has Norsk genders (or at least noun endings) in it? Language seems to have an old one like that, by Einar Haugen, but it’s only Norsk-English (I’ve ordered it anyway because it seems really good).
Trond-
On the slight chance this might add more information about rond/rand, this is from the 1910 edition of A. Larsen’s Dansk-Norsk–Engelisk Ordbog, which I understand is Bokmål.
The font is very hard to read, so I just photographed it.
Did everyone see empty’s new blog?
http://voidplay.blogspot.com/
Welcome to the blogosphere, nøwhere man, nice calling card.
I tried to post a comment, but ‘nothing’ happened. (I would have thought it was deliberate, but I see you posted one Nij.)
i always wanted to do something the same, not as a blogpost , but in the comments, during the heated debate for example
so very definite
if void, then the next post i’d like to suggest to be zero or it could be the indefinite mark, two zeros, but then it would include everything :)
Yeah, why did I create that blog?
To have an url to use instead of my (professional) email address when commenting at blogs.
To have my own little preview function for use when I want to make sure I typed all the carets/chevrons etc correctly before posting at other blogs that lack such a feature. But at least some of the time I have found that I couldn’t use it that way; the cutting and pasting failed.
To toy with the idea of actually blogging. Yeah, maybe.
To see what comments turn up, anyway.
I don’t know why AJP couldn’t comment.
I have to work now.
So it’s “Vide” now…
…no more “empty”, “ø”, or “nøwhere man”….
Yes, I did post a comment at Vide’s nothing blog. Veni, vidi, vici. And it took me a good 20 minutes to do so, too, even though I already have some sort of (old) blogger account already set up for my original camelsnose blog (see my URL).
I have no idea why Kron can’t leave a comment. That’s why I changed to WordPress:
http://wordpress.com/
It has its quirks, but it’s more intuitive.
Read with a blog? I would LOVE to see that. I wonder if they can get WordPress in Mongolia–it’s still blocked in some places, like China and Turkey. Maybe she would have to use Blogger.
it’s “Vide” now…
Not really. I have been “vide” on Mauritius, and through some virtual spillway that name ended up here.
Maybe I should look up the Norwegian word for “empty”. What?! It’s “tom”. But that’s an actual name. Wait! It’s my name!
Tom: I swear, on my way home from work just now I thought: – Tom! When I get home I’ll call him Tom!
Nijma: Thanks, but it didn’t say more than I knew. The language is Danish and/or very danified Norwegian, from before the reform movement had brought Riksmål closer to the spoken language and renamed it Bokmål. The script is Gothic, from the days when Europeans like Indians believed that there’s only one correct font for a language. Scandinavian and German used Gothic. In Norway that ended in the first decade of the 20th century, I think. My old Latin dictionary uses Roman for the Latin headwords and Gothic for the Norwegian explanations and for the preface to the first edition, which came in 1887. But the preface to the second edition in 1921 is typeset in Roman. So I suppose it wasn’t typeset again for the new edition.
Many of our newspapers are older and have gothic headers — and corresponding eternal nicknames: Oslo’s Aftenposten is called Aftenpoften, Trondheim’s Adresseavisen becomes Udresfeabifen.
Trond, I suspect the dictionary is some sort of Norwegian, in spite of the Dansk-Norsk–Engelisk label. The book came from the estate of my Norwegian-American friend’s father, and was part of a collection of Lutheran religious books that probably belonged to his grandfather, who had been a Lutheran pastor and a professor at Luther College in Decorah Iowa, a very, very Norwegian community. (They have lefse and lutefisk at their festivals.) I was offered whatever of the books I wanted, and besides the dictionary, took a New Testament in what I think is the same sort of Norwegian and English, the two languages side by side on a page. Here is the first page with a list of NT books and the first page of Matthew:
The publication date is 1867 and it has the same Gothic script as the later Dansk-Norsk–Engelisk dictionary and your Latin dictionary. The kicker for me is a card printed on heavy stock with a schedule printed for “Ev. Luth Trinity Church” with “Norwegian and English services alternately every Sunday at 10:30 a. m.” and “English and Norwegian Services alternately every Sunday at 7:30 p. m.” also “Sunday School, Norwegian and English, at 12 m.”
I don’t suppose either book is terribly useful, but they’re bound in signatures with leather and marbleized paper and are very pleasurable to handle.
o hai, N! it’s flattering that you are interested in my blog, yes i have a blogger account, but the blog is not outwardly oriented, sorry, and it’s in my language anyway
i don’t know that wordpress is blocked in my country, maybe not, i’m not sure
regarding editing the links and writing html, i use the from where i got banned site’s comments’ window, that one is pretty convenient one and i like to play a ghost
the other two sites were, the first one, two young literary girls were insisting on knowing my identity and i was insisting to keep writing anon, if it’s not any abusive, why not like, but the next time i tried to comment – you are not allowed to comment, shock..
it was a pity, coz their books reviews were pretty similar to my thoughts, i thought, could have chosen a suitable name in some time i guess
the other one was a pretty famous writer’s, i like his works, he was just not used to someone from ‘Outer’ Mongolia to comment on his blog i guess
he lifted the ban after that but something was gone for me and i left, nda, memories
something was gone for me
Yes, I know what you mean. I wonder if anyone is studying the psychology of blogging; I’d like to know why talking to imaginary people is different from talking to people you have met.
Nij, read is in the USA, you know.
“at 12 m”: I’ve never seen that before – how brilliantly sensible. Except for the loony who assumes “m” means “midnight” and wants “n” for “noon”. Let him pitch up in the dark, say I. Or indeed in the wrong light, if in the Norwegian summer.
““at 12 m”: I’ve never seen that before” Really? I find that quite remarkable, perhaps because I’ve been using that for longer than I can remember and just assumed that others must also. Even as a child I just assumed that it had to be 12m since it was neither ante nor post.
I’ve never seen it before and I still can’t see it.
““Sunday School, Norwegian and English, at 12 m.”
Thanks Stuart & dearie, & Nij for quoting it in the first place.
Actually Stuart, shouldn’t you be in bed by now? I’m delighted you aren’t, just inquisitive. I suppose it’s not that late really.
It’s 23:15 and I’m waiting to watch our PM read a “Top 10” list on David Letterman. I suspect it makes our last PM glad that she’s now running the UNDP instead.
Kron: I’ve seen your request for a dictionary, but I’ve been working around the clock and haven’t had much time to dive into it.
These endings are purest in Nynorsk, so I think what you’re asking for is an English Nynorsk dictionary. Still, even my Engelsk-Nynorsk Blå Ordbok doesn’t show genders. The problem is that Norwegian translation dictionaries are designed for native speakers of Norwegian who are supposed to know the gender or class of each word, so I think we’ll have to look for one designed for English speakers. Haugen’s dictionary, the one Hat used, would be an example of that. I don’t know if there are any newer around, but since endings and paradigms are gradually worn down it’s often more informative with an older book anyway.
Alternatively, you could use a regular dictionary as the one I mentioned above to get the Norwegian word, and then check it in the online dictionaries:
Bokmåls- og nynorskordboka i felles søkevindu
And then, for those with special needs:
Grunnmanuskriptet, a Nynorsk dictionary based on field work in the early 20th century (the book was never published, maybe because of the great depression, maybe because of a political backlash, I don’t really know), but intended to finally be printed on paper for the national jubilee in 2014.
The transition isn’t all cut and paste, though, since the spelling is more archaic than in the modern one. Which of course was the whole point.
Is this a new trend? I saw the last one on tv yesterday. Maybe NZ & Norway could club together and start their own Aljezeera-type very good news channel.
“NZ & Norway could club together and start their own Aljezeera-type very good news channel”
Yep – NewNorsk.
Trond, that’s exactly what I needed. Thank you. I’ll put it in my menu.
Or NyZeeland.
Maybe I should look up the Norwegian word for “empty”. What?! It’s “tom”. But that’s an actual name. Wait! It’s my name!
That absolutely made my day.
“tom ” is “emrty”? Is that as in “toom tabard”?
It is indeed; Carlyle translates Toom Tabard as “Empty Gown.” (The Germanic root *tōm- is of unknown origin; it has a verbal form that shows up in English teem ‘to pour, to empty’ (unrelated to teem ‘become filled, abound’).
I have been “vide” on Mauritius
It never occurred to me this was French or that “vide” was “ø”. Then I noticed somewhere that this was a musical designation for an open string. Odd that, since it doesn’t seem to be Italian.
Al-jezeera scares me a whole lot, in spite of their shiny new non-terrorist “neutral” label. I’ll have to pay Canahan a visit.
Read–she’s in America? Really?
Of course I want to see read’s blog, especially if it’s in Mongolian (and all the other languages she speaks). I think this also helps with communication on the internet–when someone does not speak English like a native or there is a misunderstanding, you can go to their blog and quickly see they are very educated in something else.
I have a private blog too, that I don’t show anyone. I use it for pasting things from the internet I want to remember, like titles of books I want to order.
two young literary girls were insisting on knowing my identity and i was insisting to keep writing anon
Not good. Anonymity is very important to free speech:
source:
http://www.eff.org/issues/anonymity
I am always anonymous on the web. I work at a place where political expression is not allowed, as it could be interpreted as the position of the institution. But as an individual I have the right to political activity. As “Nijma” I can make political comments without my job being involved.
“Sunday School, Norwegian and English, at 12 m.”
I suppose I can post a photo of it:
In hospital notation, where they use the 12 hour clock, 12M means midnight and 12N means noon.
I can’t imagine a noon Sunday School preempting mom’s Sunday Dinner and having any attendees, but then again I can’t imagine a midnight class in an Iowa community where they would have to get up at dawn to milk the cows.
Oops, photo markup, again:
“In hospital notation, where they use the 12 hour clock, 12M means midnight and 12N means noon.”
And to think that I’d predicted that some loony would want that.
oh i have to prove my educatedness
http://blogmn.net/index2.php
you can try here, many of them are hundreds times are funnier and thoughtful than i am
not to prove our educatedness, but you can try perhaps here http://blogmn.net/index2.php
two of the funniest blogs i enjoy to read are there
[…] Carlyle translates Toom Tabard as “Empty Gown.” (The Germanic root *tōm- is of unknown origin; it has a verbal form that shows up in English teem ‘to pour, to empty’ (unrelated to teem ‘become filled, abound’)
My one true source of wisdom is Harald Bjorvand, Fredrik Otto Lindeman: Våre arveord (Novus forlag, Oslo, 2007). (I had the first edition, too, from 2000, but I read it to pieces.) They say that this word had a wider sense in the early recorded languages. ON tómr may also mean “idle, disengaged, in vain”. The nouning tóm n. means “leasure time, opportunity”. The derived verb Gmc. *tōmijan- (No. tømme “empty”) shows a similar wide sense with Old Saxon tōmian “(set) free”. They suggest, with an admitted semantic longshot, to see *tōm- as an original long grade with -ō- of the same root as Eng. tame < Gmc. *tama-. That would mean that the new derivation tame replaced toom in its original sense when the meaning drifted away. Anyway, they suggest a semantic path somewhat like this:
“tame” -> “calm” -> “slow” -> “idle” -> “idly” -> “empty”
I think this is an easier description:
“tame” -> “inactive” -> “idle” -> “empty”
I know nothing of the other toom, the verb with the opposite sense. When I first saw it, before LH gave the explanation above, it had my semantic module working on overdrive.
Nijma: Thank you for the look. The Bible is pure Danish of the 19th century. It’s a treasure, especially because of the double text. I use Bible websites all the time to compare languages.
Trond, thank you for the identification. The bilingual Bible was published in New York by the American Bible Society; the dictionary in “Kjøbenhavn & Kristiania” by “Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag”. Of course I value it most because of who gave it to me.
It reminds me of a Lutheran church I once toured as a part of the city’s architecture tours. At first the church service was in Swedish, but as the Swedish speaking membership dwindled they added a service in English. Finally they combined with a German speaking church. Now they are all in English.
Some of my Mexican students tell me they are studying English so they can understand their grandchildren who don’t speak Spanish.
Gyldendal is both Denmark’s and Norway’s biggest publishers (two separately-owned companies now).
I’ve been thinking about getting one of those ipod/mp3 player thingies and ran across this while I was looking for information on audiobook sources:
http://librivox.org/2009/09/01/whither-norway/
Apparently downloading an audiobook costs about fifteen dollars on a paid service. LibriVox uses volunteers to record books for free. But apparently no Arabic either. :~(
Testing.
Is this turned off while the goats are sleeping?
It didn’t like my comment. I wonder if I typed a swearword in Norwegian by mistake.
it’s really completely silent up here :)
i’ve tried to comment last friday? forgot, but from work i couldn’t, thought something is wrong with the browser setting
and it was for the better cz that could be a snappy comment on proving my educatedness something
and now i see, those were posted, hm, if not the link, i’d ask AJPC to delete them if you could, please?
i’ll post the link again then maybe
It must be siesta time in Rondane. (A dusty sun-baked village in the south of New Mexico?) Do they sell good sombreros there?
I think maybe AJP disabled the links.
Links? The freedictionary.com has this to say about links:
Noun 1. links – a golf course that is built on sandy ground near a shore.
I didn’t know that Crown used to play golf and that he could therefore close the links. Petit cachottier va !
Bah, they’re wrong about links. The links are the sandy ground by the shore; the golf course put there is the golf links. It is a links course. But if you repeat an error often enough it becomes a new truth, the linguists say. They assume dictatorial powers on these matters.
“But if you repeat an error often enough it becomes a new truth, the linguists say” Surely to suggest otherwsie is just being nice.
Let’s not overlook the links that AJP provided at the start of this thread.
I am afraid that in the USA, for some time now, “links” has been simply a synonym for “golf course”. You may well say “bah!”, but sands and words will shift.
“But if you repeat an error often enough it becomes a new truth, the linguists say”
That is not what the linguists say: they are not contrasting “error” with “truth” (of fact or belief), but “non-standard” or “off-norm” (something considered unacceptable with respect to perceived rules of language, usually meaning that it differs from the norm obtaining in “polite society”) with “new or emerging norm” (something now so widespread that it is no longer considered off-norm). Errors of fact can be corrected by confrontation with established facts. Language “errors” could be due to imperfect knowledge of a (second, third, etc) language, but usually “grammatical errors” within one’s own language refer either to dialectal forms or to very widespread usages which are condemned mostly because they have been condemned in the past. A well-known instance is “splitting infinitives” which the vast majority of English speakers do, at least in speaking, and which is also found in the literary usage of “the best authors” (such as for instance Jane Austen) but which some self-proclaimed authorities (such as Jonathan Swift) condemned in the past, because their model of grammar was the Latin language and they thought that English was very imperfect because it was so different from Latin.
(For much more on this type of “error” found in normal English, see for instance blog posts by Geoff Pullum on Language Log.)
sheesh, subtlety really is wasted on this crowd! :)
stuart, mention the word “linguist” and don’t be surprised if I switch to my “linguist mode”.
marie-lucie, my comment was not aimed solely at you, although as a linguist I would have expected the point I was making to have been fairly clear to you.
Hello.
On Saturday we went for a walk around the hill behind our house. It took five and a half hours and it was like an Irish novel. First we climbed through the woods to a plateau of sunny farmland. All the characters we met there were really friendly and the scenery was beautiful,but they were all leprechauns (or Norwegian nisser, actually). They gave us wrong directions and we walked on and on but never got any further. I’m not going back there again. It’s very tempting, but I feel I’d never get out again. Fifteen years I’ve lived here and I never knew it was there. There are only two ways into this place: through the forest, or down a very small path off the main road.
Very interesting about links, Dearie.
Should I erase all your comments then, read? It seems such a shame, I like your comments.
“oh i have to prove my educatedness” Why, read? When I learned that the late William Safire was proud of having been a college dropout, it made me smile, since I never dropped in in the first place.
“On Saturday we went for a walk around the hill behind our house. It took five and a half hours and it was like an Irish novel.”
When I think “Irish novel” I think Ulysses and that’s one I have no desire to read. Your “Irish novel” on the other hand sounds like a delight to read.
I was thinking more of Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman, which I found from reading The New Policeman, by Kate Thompson, with my daughter a few years ago (a children’s book, but a good one for adults too).
Why, read?
I don’t think she meant it. I think she’s in medical school, though.
(I may be asked to delete that.)
NOTE TO VOID-OID:
I would gladly contribute a No Comment to your blog, but I can’t get it to accept my comments. It says I have an illegal URL, no matter what I write for it.
I know nothing about these things. Maybe someone has an idea?
That place where you went walking sounds like Brigadoon. Maybe it also only appears once every hundred years?
sorry, that was me being a little touchy, my comments sometimes don’t go through, forget to put e-mail
hope the links work though,for me they work okay
I can’t get it to accept my comments.
Well, yes, there was a reason: I had not bothered to set my settings to allow one and all to comment. I have now done so, with any luck. Do drop in.
I have heard the nisse always move when they hear church bells as it hurts their ears. Maybe this is where they moved to.
In all fairness, though, I have met the same trollishly helpful types all over the world. They can turn a perfectly innocent outing into The Twilight Zone. The only remedy is to have your own map–or failing that, to make one by trial and error. Have you checked to see if Lonely Planet, or maybe the Rough Guide have already scouted this area?
This reminds me of the upper pastures, the seter, that you find in the Sigrid Undset series and elsewhere.
I’m impressed that you’ve read Sigrid Undset, Nij. It’s more than I have. Did you read Kristin Lavransdatter? Did you like them?
VWE: I still get ‘Your request could not be processed. Please try again’. It just doesn’t like me no matter who I say I am. At least it doesn’t still seem to think I’m doing something illegal.
Kristin Lavransdatter I liked quite a bit, the one about the boy, The Master of Hestviken, not as much, although I read all four. She could have had a happier ending (and been more virtuous), but since I like history, the medieval setting made up for it.
If this isn’t a spoiler, at one point she quarrels with her husband. The seter is the one thing she owns outright in her own name and not jointly with her husband. Her title to it is not vulnerable to her husband’s political enemies, it being a part of a non-transferable family inheritance, maybe from her mother?–I don’t remember why–and she returns there to mull things over.
“VWE: I still get ‘Your request could not be processed. Please try again’. ”
That’s what it said to me in preview, but I hit post anyway, and my comment was published.
she returns there to mull things over.
During the summer, I expect.
Kristin Lavransdatter’s childhood and youth is set in Gudbrandsdalen. Undset’s Jørundgård is modeled after Romundgard in Sel.
I didn’t remember that seter part, but then I got bored towards the end of the trilogy and hardly remember anything. I would think that the seter belonged to a homestead, a farm, that stayed in the family as Kristin’s odel. I don’t know what could make the difference between inheritance from her father’s and mother’s sides. I think the law was such that the husband and wife would have kept each their assets in marriage. Did she get her father to go into a surety bond when Erlend lost his, or did Kristin’ mother live so long that Kristin hadn’t inherited her when it happened?
Sel has also given the Norwegian name selsnepe “Sel turnip” to the cowbane (thoroughly discussed in an earlier thread). It used to be ubiquitous in the (former) marshland along the river Lågen.
The plot does pick up again during the black death. The seter episode takes place just before her last child is born. My copy of the book is I think in storage, maybe I’ll look for it when I go over there to mow the lawn.
There aren’t many people who mow the lawn in their storage, Nij.
AJP, maybe they mow it a first time while it is still attached to the ground, then they bring it in the storage where they mow it once again. Mau-Maus might like reduplication after all — linguistically it is very African and you find this particularity in Creole too.
Maybe Nijma has taken a photo of all that, even made a video clip out of it, who knows.
Call me crazy but the last couple of winters I’ve just left my lawn laying outside on the ground.
Oh, all right
Pix in my URL.
Very nice library, but I’m amazed you can get anything to grow in there; it’s so dark.
Was that the trailer for “The Library Thing”, scheduled for premiere the night before Halloween? I bet the soundtrack is really creepy, too.
Where’s empty? I can’t post on his blog because something’s wrong with my scroll function and I can’t get the drop-down menu to work.
Empty, how’s your German? Can you make anything of the German in Canahan’s Philistine picture? I’m tempted to try it myself, even if it ends up in disaster. I can read something like “halt”. Doesn’t that mean stop? It all looks like that awful Bible font. Didn’t AJP use to live in Germany?
http://canehan.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/philistine/
AJP, that’s not my real library, it’s just for the books I don’t want to read right now, also tires and battery chargers. It does have a lot of atmosphere. It’s probably a good sequel to my (mostly unpublished) meth lab series, but I hadn’t given any thought to the music for it. I have sent off for my first mp3 player, which should arrive any day now, so all of that could change very quickly.
Nij, I can’t read it all and half of it seems to be upside down. It certainly doesn’t say anything about the Samson & the Philistines sermon referred to. In fact it doesn’t seem to say anything terribly enlightening; it’s all stuff like “wie geht’s zu hause”, which is “How’s it going at home” and there’s something at the bottom about a Schwester, or nurse/nun. But who you really need is Grumbly if you want a proper translation.
Undecipherable script is always tantalizing. It’s a little like watching commercials with the sound off: the actors’ expressions are always so vivid, as if they are saying something really interesting, but if you turn the sound back on it’s the same old boring stuff. (Or if you sit on the bus with people speaking in a language you don’t know).
Well, I played with the image a little more. Here is the left side:
Not sure how many links I can put in before the comment gets sent to moderation…
…and here’s the right side with the script turned right side up:
Maybe I’m seeing things, but does the last line say “der Juden”? That would really make them Philistines, who iirc were originally from Crete, in antiquity lived in the Gaza area, and were known for once having captured the
Ark of the Covenant in battle.
Nijma, thank you, I don’t understand very much but it seems that the returning students are making comments and asking questions about people they know who are living in the city. Where is Grumbly when we need him?
I can decipher only some of the text. What is the context?
Here.
I meant the context of the picture.
Lieb (?) hätt’ wie … Vater u. Mutter
Wie … mit seiner … rathe (?) !
ich glaub die ken … …
er … noch (nach ?) …
pfui Leute ihr garstigen Böcke
Sie müssen zu den Juden geschickt …
It simply says
But it’s used to illustrate this paragraph:
However, it seems the incidents (the Freshmen & the sermon) are roughly 100 yrs apart and there’s nothing to tie them together.
Looks gorgeous and reminds me a bit of Iceland! thanks for sharing!
I’ve never been there (except the airport), but I’ll add Iceland to the list.
The Reykjavik airport can actually be a somewhat fun. When I flew Iceland Air, they woke us up and made us get off the plane for 45 minutes (at 2 AM). I wished I could stay a couple days in Iceland and then continue home, but I also wished I still had money left from my trip. After wandering around all the shops and looking at all the sweaters, I settled on a chair near the bar and tried to eavesdrop on some Icelanders who were drinking beer so I could hear what I imagined the Vikings must have spoken.