Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, has launched a fellowship to award $100,000 to 24 people who will decide not to attend college for two years and spend that time developing business concepts. This, Roger Kimball writes, “is just the latest sign that the edifice of higher education is looking more and more like the House of Usher.”

I’m off to Elk Horn, Iowa, as is my wont over Memorial Day weekend, for the Tivoli Fest. If you’re in the area (southwest Iowa) and interested in stopping by, it will be hard to miss us. The festival brochure can be downloaded here.

(The following article by Prof. Torgrim Titlestad of the University of Stavanger [pictured above] was published by Saga Bok Publishers on their website here. What follows is my translation, posted here at the request of Saga Bok. lw)

Changes in attitudes toward the sagas

Up until the 1900s, the sagas were regarded as highly reliable, and Norway had several eminent professors in the field, such as Gustav Storm and Alexander Bugge. But in the past century the sagas have been regarded as generally unreliable as historical sources. Instead, they have been described as brilliant romances. Progressive historians like Lauritz Weibull (of Sweden) and Halvdan Koht (of Norway) promoted this view through most of the 20th Century. Nevertheless it appears that, beginning in the 1990s, this trend has begun to change, and Prof. Sverre Bagge of the Univ. of Bergen was the first, in 1995, to publicly point out the damage caused by this “hyper-critical” view of the sagas. “The early middle ages and the Viking Age remain the most neglected fields in medieval history in Norway. This is arguably the result of source difficulties in the wake of the destructive attack on the sagas at the beginning of that century.” Prof. Vidar Sigudsson of the Univ. of Oslo renewed this critique in 2010: “The harsh criticism which was directed against the use of the sagas as sources resulted in that aspect of our past being neglected.”

The Weibullian and Kohtian view that we must reject the sagas was that, by and large, they are not contemporary records, but were written down about 300 years after the events described. This “modernist” view ruled out any appreciation of the sagas as the product of oral culture: That is, that both Norway and Iceland, as mostly illiterate societies (though runes were used for shorter messages) had developed specialized mnemonic techniques in order to preserve historic events. In this context the unusual skaldic poems must be emphasized. Their unique form (“as if carved in stone”) testifies to the historical confidence of the Vikings, and their trust that this technique of oral memorization would permit memories to live on for a long time. (Similar techniques can be found, and continue to be found, in other mostly illiterate cultures.) Continue reading "The Six Pillars of Saga Reliability" →

Sorry for the blog outage yesterday. The ever-conspiring Manx (not Manites–don’t click that link) succeeded in getting around our defenses and taking us down. We will work ever-harder to keep that from happening again. Aside from that, do you have any issues using this blog, any performance issues, I mean? Feel free to use this space to tell us about it.

(BTW, outage is one of those ugly words that looks like contemporary terminology to me, but it’s actually over 100 years old.)

I have something going on tonight, and so will not be able to do a regular blog post.

Except for this. So savor it. Make it last.

Today is May 17, Norwegian Grunnlovsdag (Constitution Day). On this day in 1814, a Norwegian assembly in the town of Eidsvold drafted the nation’s first constitution. Actual independence would have to wait until 1905.

Thomas Sowell asks what getting an education really means. He writes, “We don’t have a backlog of serious students trying to take serious courses. If you look at the fields in which American students specialize in colleges and universities, those fields are heavily weighted toward the soft end of the spectrum.”

It is over 80 degrees outside. 80 degrees. I ought to have the air conditioning on, but blast it, you’re supposed to go through a stage where you can have the windows open a while before full-on summer comes. So I’m holding out.

The “procedure” went fine today. Unfortunately we didn’t learn anything new. So I expect there will be further tests, and eventually I’ll have to see Doctor House, who will torture me and insult my faith until I get better.

For now I’m pleasantly buzzed, and I can eat again. Could be worse.

This is worth passing on. Whitestone Motion Pictures presents Blood On My Name, a short film musical narrative in the style of Americana folklore. This is a good short story. These are also the people who created the short film, The Candy Shop, which focuses on child exploitation. Though Blood On My Name is described as a bit of a horror story (it’s barely that), The Candy Shop portrays pure evil.