I’m up against it tonight. A meeting to attend tonight, a meeting to attend tomorrow, and a fairly large translation job to do whenever I can squeeze it in.
Above, the divine Sissel, doing “Solveig’s Song” by Edvard Grieg, from his music for Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt.”
She’s wearing the Bergen folk costume.
What shall we say about the year that is passing? If you’re reading this, you and I are survivors. Our Lord bids us live in hope. Sufficient unto the year is the evil thereof.
Blessings to you and your family, from the highly trained professionals at Brandywine Books.
It’s a Christmas miracle... sort of. You know how the movie “White Christmas” goes, when they’re all in the ski lodge, hoping/praying for snow so they can save the business, and they get a big snowfall on Christmas Eve? That happened here, in the magic wonderland of Minnesota. We’d gotten some snow early this winter, but a long stretch of warm temperatures and dry weather left all nature naked and ashamed. But last night the blizzard came in pure Hollywood style, depositing 8 or 9 inches, I guess. Today you could film a Hallmark special here. Something for the kids, anyway. If they have to remember a premature year without the grandparents, they’ll at least have memories of sliding and snowballs. And, of course, of delayed presents because the Post Office is backed up like the Donner Party.
As you no doubt deduced, the video above is the one and only Sissel, singing “Glade Jul,” which is the Norwegian version of Silent Night. Pretty much the same idea in the lyrics, except that we replaced the words for “Silent Night” with ones for “Happy Christmas.” Because we could.
And Glade Jul to you, too.
I’m pretty sure I’ve posted this number by Sissel here before (though not this performance, which conveniently includes subtitles). But it’s high on my list of Norwegian Christmas songs that deserve to be known outside the neighborhood.
According to this Norwegian account, the lyrics come from a poem by Jakob Sande. It was first published in 1931, but the author didn’t think much of it. When Lars Soraas, who was putting a Christmas songbook together in 1948, asked him for permission to use it, Sande had forgotten about it completely. Since then it’s become his best-known work.
Wrote a sizeable chunk of text for the next Erling book last night, and today I’ve been working on what I think might be a clever piece for The American Spectator Online. Which left me little mental capacity for fresh ideas for posts. You know me well enough to guess what that means, especially during Advent: Sissel with a Christmas song:
This is one of Sissel’s most popular Christmas numbers, original a Danish song, done here in a concert in Iceland. The title means, “My heart always lingers,” and if you’re interested in an English translation, a kind soul in Norway has provided us with one here.
I note that the translator, judging by the coat of arms on his profile, seems to come from the island of Karmoy, my ancestral home.
I’m going to have to give you a little bit of Sissel tonight, and then I’ll be gone for a couple days. I have to go out of town tomorrow to do a lecture, and today I got a (relatively) big translating job I have to finish before I leave. So I must post and run.
The song is a Norwegian classic. The tune is by the violinist Ole Bull, a world celebrity in his time. The words are by Jorgen Moe. The title is “The Seter Girl’s Sunday.” A seter was a mountain pasture, where livestock were kept over the summer, so they could graze there and take pressure off the home meadows. Servant girls would be sent up with the animals, and would commonly spend long periods of time up there, sometimes in relative solitude.
The girl in the song is watching the sun, knowing that when it reaches a certain point above the mountains, the folks at home will be hearing the church bells and heading to church. It’s an important social time in a country community, and she is lonely.
Kind of like someone under lockdown.
The title means something like “Time Runs On (like a river).” It’s a beloved hymn of the Faeroe Islands, sung here by the world’s greatest singer, Norway’s Sissel Kyrkjebo. She’s singing in Faeroese, which I understand only a little better than you do. It’s an ancient dialect of Old Norse, and the Faeroese claim that it’s closer to what the Vikings actually spoke than modern Icelandic is. But the gist of the thing is that time runs on like a river, and I am in a little boat. Who will bring me safely home? Only Jesus can do that.
Appropriate thoughts for my birthday. I had a nice day. Went out to lunch with a friend, and reveled in the pleasure of having paying work, and the promise of more to come. Thank you for your friendship here.
The nice thing about December is that if I can’t think of anything to blog, I can post a Christmas music video. In my case, that usually means something from Sissel.
“In the Bleak Midwinter” is in keeping with the weather, in my neighborhood. Poem by Christina Rossetti, music by Gustav Holst. Orchestration by a bunch of heretics in Salt Lake City.
I was surprised to find this hymn on YouTube. It’s a classic hymn for the Haugeans (the Lutheran “sect” I grew up in. Though we never actually sang this one much in my church), and it’s sung my none other than the divine Sissel Kyrkjebo. I didn’t even know she’d done it.
The two verses she sings are translated thus:
1 Jesus, I long for Thy blessed communion,
Yearning for Thee fills my heart and my mind;
Draw me from all that would hinder our union,
May I to Thee, my beginning, be joined;
Show me more clearly my hopeless condition;
Show me the depth of corruption in me,
So that my nature may die in contrition,
And that my spirit may live unto Thee!7 Merciful Jesus, now hear how I bind Thee
To the sure pledge of Thy covenant word:
“Ask, and receive: when ye seek, ye shall find me;”
Thus have Thy lips, ever faithful, averred.
I with the woman of Canaan unresting,
Cry after Thee till my longing is stilled,
Till Thou shalt add, my petitions attesting,
“Amen, yea, amen: it be as thou wilt!”
Hans Nielsen Hauge, the Norwegian lay revivalist I’ve written about here before, was singing this song as he plowed his father’s field on a day in 1796. Suddenly, he said, he was overwhelmed with the glory of God, and felt himself filled with love for God and all his neighbors, and called to serve them with his whole life. After that he started preaching to small groups — which was illegal. Eventually he would spend ten years in prison for this activity. But by the time he died, he was a national hero, respected by nearly everyone, high and low.
I attended a meeting yesterday where we heard a lecture from a Norwegian scholar, a woman, who’s been studying Hauge’s life and work for years. Her subject was the effect of Hauge’s ministry on public literacy in Norway — because that was one of his many achievements — getting the common people reading (and even writing).
In the midst of this, I came to a new realization about the “liberal” origins of evangelicalism — a subject that fascinates me. As people are no doubt weary of me telling them, early liberalism (late 18th and early 19th Century liberalism) had nothing to do with socialism, or sexual identity, or the size of government. It was simply about whether the common people would be allowed to participate in governing themselves.
I’ll be writing more about this — but probably for the American Spectator Online. Because they pay me, after all.
In case you’re in the vicinity of Cambridge, Minnesota, I’ll be playing Viking at the Isanti County Fair there tomorrow. The event goes on until Midnight, I guess, but I don’t think I’ll be there that long. I’ll have books to sell and sign.
Unless my car breaks down. Or I have a heart attack. Or fall down a well, or something. You never know.
For your Friday treat, here’s something delightful I think I haven’t posted here before — though what do I know? It’s Sissel singing “Sukiyaki.” A bizarre fusion of cultures here — a Norwegian girl in a folk costume singing a Japanese song in Norwegian. But you can’t deny it works. She was born to sing this song.
I suppose this counts as cultural appropriation, and is therefore evil. But if she sang it in Japanese, that would be cultural appropriation too. In fact, how can you avoid the conclusion that learning any foreign language at all is cultural appropriation? Hey you, liberal, trying to be multicultural by learning Spanish! Who gave you permission to plunder somebody else’s language?