Today the whole world is discussing the fall of Assad in Syria, the arrest of the Brian Thompson killer, and the verdict in the Daniel Penny trial.
It is a busy news day.
Which is rather sad from my point of view, because otherwise I’m confident everybody would be talking about the release, this weekend, of The Year of the Warrior in paperback on Amazon.
You realize what that means, don’t you?
It means that you can now own the whole series of Erling Skjalgsson books, all the same size, lined up on your favorite bookshelf, to the envy and amazement of all your most most sophisticated and insufferable friends.
Just make sure to leave a space for The Baldur Game (coming soon).
I started this business of formatting books for Amazon (if I remember correctly, though I have an idea I may be mistaken on some points) while setting up The Baldur Game. I watched how-to videos on YouTube that took me through the process of making a Microsoft Word document into something you could humbly submit to the gatekeepers of the great publishing leviathan.
I was terrified to do it, frankly. I am an old man, what they call a “digital immigrant,” someone who’ll never be quite at ease with all the ones and zeros. And yet I worked at it to the point where I’m actually relatively at ease uploading books now.
So I figured I might as well go ahead and make all my Erling books manifest. One after the other, I worked my magic, and behold, they did appear, and I held them in my hand, like the treasures of far Cathay.
And I cannot lie – there’s a thrill to holding your book that just doesn’t happen seeing it appear on a Kindle. Like holding your baby rather than looking at his picture. (But with less diaper changing and mineral oil.)
I even think I’ve developed a minor flare for design. I think the paper books I’ve created possess a sort of simple elegance. They look good to me. I am not ashamed of them.
Hurray – and congratulations!
I am much happier with printed books than with ‘kindle’ (etc.), but I know people who delight in having copies in both forms, and suspect they are numerous!
I am now gratefully enjoying Hailstone Mountain – and (to be tantalizing rather than guilty of spoilers – also I don’t yet know ‘the rest of the story’, myself!) just ran into some commentary on Baruch 6:21 by the Latin scholar who blogs as Suburbanbanshee: “The Book of Baruch has the fun bit where Jeremiah points out that animals aren’t afraid of pagan idols, as you would expect them to be if pagan gods actually lived in them. He specifically mentions an animal that likes to sit on idols’ heads: which is translated today as a ‘bat,’ but which was translated in the Septuagint and in the Vulgate as a ‘cat.'”
Would you care to venture to reveal if you were consciously playing with this, in Hailstone Mountain?
I assume you’re thinking of the brown cat. No, I am not at all familiar with the commentary, and I’ve never even read Baruch. You’ll just have to mark it down great minds, and what they’re rumored to do. And thanks.
I love it that these books are all BOOKS now.
Uh oh, having now very enjoyably finished Hailstone Mountain, here I come with another pick-the-author’s-brains question!
In chapter 29, Sigrid says of Ulla, “I’ll find her a husband, and he’ll be as pleased with her as if he’d gotten a good ship.” Is this a common Old Norse – or long-standing traditional – expression or way of thinking?
It leapt out at me, because I recently encountered a Dutch translation of the Advent song, “Es kommt ein Schiff, geladen” – a song new to me, but (I discovered) quite familiar to my wife, and quite famous in German, if YouTube is anything to go by. From its English Wikipedia article, I learnt it was first published “in bilingual text under the title ‘Vns kompt ein Schiff gefahren’ as well as the Latin ‘En nauis institoris’.” To this, its German article added the suggestion that we ought to compare the Vulgate text of Proverbs 31:14: “Facta et quasi navis institoris, de longe portans panem suum”, which the Challoner Douay-Rheims translates “She is like the merchant’s ship, she bringeth her bread from afar.”
Did that “a valiant woman [verse 10…] is like the merchant’s ship” take off early and long among Norwegian Christians, by any chance?
Honestly, it’s just a simile that occurred to me and seemed appropriate to the time and place.
Thanks! Fun! – it is striking, but I think it would have felt like it might be traditional, even if I had not recently encountered the song attributed to Johannes Tauler! (I see via the Hymnary website that there are translations of other things attributed to him in the Salmebog for Lutherske Kristne in Amerika, ed. M.B. Landstad and Johannes Nilssøn Skaar ( Minneapolis: Der Forenede Kirkes Forlag, 1919) but apparently not the ‘ship’ one.)