The Vikings

Sack Pittsburgh

Late afternoon has always been my favorite time of day. Buildings, trees, flowers turn golden in the slanting sunlight. In the fall, bulrushes are backlit by the sun low on the horizon, and in the stratosphere the contrails of jets suddenly criss-cross the blue sky, like secret writing revealing itself under ultraviolet light. When I was a schoolboy it was also the time when I arrived home, changed into my comfortable clothes and could set aside my dull, leaden textbooks and read any book I wanted.

One book I reached for was Einar Haugen’s Beginning Norwegian. I loved the strange new letters — ø, æ, å, and the examples of how they were handwritten — the printed ø became an o with a little hurdle on top. It was a joy to see the Norwegian words in the vocabulary printed in bold type with their English equivalents next to them. A great many of them were cognates with English — snø (snow), små (small), by (town, as in by-law), dal (dale), kvinne  (queen), mjølk (milk). The little frisson of recognition that I experienced every time I saw the connection between these cognates is one of the reasons I decided to study historical linguistics.

One of the early reading exercises was about a boy my age — fourteen or so —who would come home from school in the late afternoon. We lived each other’s lives: he put away his schoolbooks and began writing a letter to his grandparents — just as I did to my grandparents wintering in Florida. He smelled dinner being prepared and felt the warmth of the steam emanating from the kitchen. A cat nonchalantly walked across his letter, and his younger sister was busy dressing a doll. I felt, as he did, his mother’s unseen presence in the kitchen, like the spirit in a stone. When snow fell he watched people trudging through the drifts and sensed the hush of the blanketed world.

            My passion for Norwegian grew out of an even earlier love for Norse mythology and the world of the Vikings. About two years before I had discovered a book of Norse myths, a retelling, although I did not know this at the time, of the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, a thirteenth-century Icelandic poet and historian. The book was illustrated with drawings that captured dramatic moments in these ancient myths — Óðinn about to pluck out his eye in exchange for wisdom at Mímir’s well; the blameless god Baldr dying from a mistletoe dart while the evil Loki looked on in the shape of an old hag; Thórr in a boat raising his lightning-hammer to smite the Miðgarðr Serpent. Other books recounted the adventures of the Vikings — the settlement of Iceland, the discovery of Greenland, and the ill-fated colony in Vínland.

            The mood of the myths was disturbing and at the same time fascinating. The gods were limited in strength and magical knowledge, and were sometimes duped or the victims of treachery. Evil and death besieged them in Ásgarðr, their walled city, which on the cosmological maps looked like an island floating in the air, a kind of treehouse spindled on Yggdrasill, the World Ash, the axis mundi. Malign rodents insatiably gnawed away at Yggdrasill’s roots as fast as the

roots could grow. Ravening wolves were only a few paces behind the Sun and the Moon, and in Hel was moored Naglfar, a boat made from the nails of dead men.

            Doom hung over this world moving inevitably toward a final battle, in which the gods and the forces of death and sterility would annihilate each other — Thórr would finally bring down his hammer on the skull of the Miðgarðr Serpent, but would himself die in venom spewing from the crushed head.

            Presiding over these Viking gods was the portentous Óðinn, utterly mysterious, his motives hidden, his nature restless and shamanic.  How shocked I was when I read about how he hanged himself from a tree — he was the god of the hanged — sacrificing himself to himself:

Óðinn sent his valkyries (“corpse choosers”) to cull from the battlefields of the world the bodies of the bravest heroes and carry them back to Valhalla (“Hall of the Slain”), where he used his magic spells to reanimate these corpses, not once, but repeatedly, as they died in practice battles that were to prepare them for the final battle at the end of the world.

            I felt at home in this world, even if it did frighten me. About this time, in 1957 when I was thirteen, I saw, alone, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, which vividly portrayed the violent world of vengeance and laconic heroes that I had been immersing myself in. In that darkened theater, with only a handful of other patrons, I thrilled to the musical sound of Swedish, Norwegian’s close relative.

            From some quirk of fate our local public library had a rather comprehensive Germanic section. On the shelf was Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader, where I learned about alliteration and the caesura. I remember marveling over the new letters þ and ð. In the font used in Sweet’s book the bar of the ð had an ascending serif on the left side and a descending one on the right side.

            The German section was quite extensive, including not only grammars and readers, but also novels and poetry. One German book was especially fascinating. It was richly illustrated with full-page Romantic engravings of scenes set in dense, mountain forests. One engraving I never tired of examining was of a waterfall gushing down a mountainside. This engraving was a portal to the paradisiacal world of Novalis and the other German Romantics. I was always filled with a vague, unnamable yearning when I looked at this picture, as if I were experiencing a vision, vivid yet intangible.

            The German books dated from the 1890s to the 1930s and consequently were printed in Fraktur, the German “Gothic” font. At first it was not easy to distinguish f from s, and then there was the new letter, Schluss-s, the last letter in the chart below:

          The oddest book — and I cannot imagine how this book wound up in a small public library in Pennsylvania (Manitoba, possibly, but not Pennsylvania) —

was Snæbjörn Jónsson’s A Primer of Modern Icelandic, Oxford University Press (1940). I monopolized that book, but then who else would have wanted to borrow it? I used to study it in the early mornings before heading off to high school. I was lost in the intricacies of how the letters where pronounced depending on where they occurred in a word, until I heard the loud clack that signaled my streetcar had thrown the switch and was making the long, noisy curve up the hill toward my house. The grammar was similar to that of Latin, which I had taken in the previous year; in fact it is a bit simpler, having fewer cases. But unlike Latin, Icelandic has a postponed definite article, which is itself inflected to match that of the noun:

          As far as grammar is concerned, Modern Icelandic has mostly preserved the complex system of declensions and conjugations of Old Icelandic of a thousand years ago. This is why I wanted to master it: Modern Icelandic is close to the language of the Vikings.

            My grandfather is the person who inspired me to take up German, and by extension, Germanic languages. His mother had been born and raised in Germany, presumably in the south, since she was a Catholic. She insisted that her son attend a German school in the mornings. His father was Welsh-speaking and my grandfather could still say some phrases in Welsh, but we are probably inclined to learn the language of our mother (hence Wyclif’s coinage, mother tongue). My grandfather suffered under the harsh tutelage of Prussian nuns, whose sadism drove them to torment and beat the students. If my grandfather were late for Mass in the mornings, the nuns forced him to kneel the whole hour on the sharp wire mesh that had been placed in the aisle to absorb the snow. His knees were lacerated.

            His Germany was the German Empire with its highly drilled armies of soldiers in pointed helmets. It was the Germany of scientific invention and rapid industrialization. He told me I should learn German because it was the language of science. He explained many German words and expressions to me ever since I could remember. By the time I took German in high school I found the textbooks and reading selections easy. My German teacher, Mr. Einloft (Iggy to us schoolboys) was always trying to give me German books to read. I usually refused, but I am not sure why. Probably some silly worry about seeming the teacher’s pet, or about being singled out for attention in some way. How I sympathize with him now whenever I find that rare student who is gifted in a subject, yet indifferent.

            Although this boyhood in a fantasy world is very clear in my memory, I feel as if I am viewing that youngster from the wrong end of a telescope, for the world and I have changed so essentially in the interim, and life’s exigencies have imposed themselves on the adult me with the relentless pressure of time. Now I feel the wolf nipping at my heels; it’s no longer just a story. It seems that the very things I am interested in, like the languages and literature of ancient Scandinavia, and the things for which I may have a talent, such as letter writing, are precisely the endeavors that are not important, or are no longer important. Somehow, despite the enormous wealth of America, there was no room for those of us who dedicated ourselves to ancient languages and vanished civilizations. Also, the values of the culture have changed radically: Ezra Pound mentions how in the early 1900s one could buy in a bookshop a primer of Old Provençal. There was in those days a market for such a book, because a sufficient number of people were interested in troubadour poetry and were familiar with dead languages like Latin and Classical Greek. I suppose when I was entering my teens that world was teetering on extinction, and somehow I was totally unaware of the practicalities of life and the way the world was unfolding. But from this distance I realize that we have but one life, which even at a century would be short. Before we pass into the oblivion that I imagine is like the oblivion before we were born, we might as well live our lives as our genes and circumstances ordained we should, lest we be even more miserable during our hour upon the stage.

© Robert L. Fisher 2009