HWAET! FRENZIED DOGS!

When I was still very young, my mother thought it would be a grand idea if I were to read things such as the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, Beowulf, and the Icelandic Sagas in their original form. Surely, she thought, a youngster who can converse fluently in Dutch and make himself understood to Germans has the linguistic dexterity to bend his tongue and mind around the immortal classics? Well, okay. Beowulf wasn't too bad.

Sir Gawain And The Green Knight? Piece of cake, along with some of Chaucer. We had dictionaries from her college years, I could look up what the heck it was all about in some of her textbooks, and Dutch and German are vaguely reminiscent of something that might be distantly related to how pre-mediaeval illiterate Dutch peasants might have grunted.

Actually, for those two years I had very strange dreams and slept badly.
It might have been traumatizing, I don't know.


Remarkably, I never had the urge to play Dungeons and Dragons after I returned to the United States.


There are monsters in the old stuff. Scaly things and beasts that growl.
I was eighteen when I arrived on these shores, and I had left my trusty magic blade with the glowing runes back in the Netherlands. As I understand it, D&D requires fluency in several old languages including Gothic and an ability to cast spells in Church-Latin.
My ability to hack my way through Latin is atrociously poor.

Every. Single. Icelandic. Saga. In a nutshell:
Thorkill "rabid rodents", father of Thurgi Stank-Arse, the son of Hack-spit the Rapist, who is the son of Gargle the Butt-ugly, the son of Greatwart Half-ape, son of Barfsack the Buggerer, whose half-sister was known all the way to Asgard as the most vicious she-thing in the north, famous as herder of pigs and elderly virgin, takes his club, says "Honey, I might be late for dinner, see to it that the fish don't stink too much", then goes to the other end of the island to his neighbour's hut and bashes his brains out. For which some people chastised him.

[Hwaet! Þorkill "freyðandi-nagdýr", faðir Þurga stinkur-rass, sonur Hakks-spýtti nauðgaranum, sem er sonur Gorgla asna ljóta, sonar Stóra vörtu hálfapa, sonar sonur ælu sekks þrjótsins, en hálfsystir hans var þekkt. Alla leið til Ásgarðs þar sem illvígasta kvendýr norðursins, fræg sem svínahirðir og öldruð meyja, tekur kylfuna sína, segir „Elskan, ég gæti verið of sein í matinn, passaðu að fiskurinn finni ekki, svo illa“, fer á hinn endann á eyjunni í kofa nágranna síns og slær út heilann. Fyrir sem sumir refsuðu honum.]

Unsurprisingly, I have always had a fondness for dried fish.

A nagdyr is literally "gnawing animal". Ljota: ugly. Ælu: vomit. Sekks þrjótsins: sack of the rapscallion. Svinahirðir is "swine herder". Passaðu að fiskurinn: beware of fish. Fer á hinn endann á eyjunni: fares to the hinter (other) end of the eyjun (island).
Og slær út heilann: and slaps out (his) brains.

It's a beautiful language.

It took me decades to realize that my mother projected her own fascination with weird Northern European shiznit onto me, and was more than a little bit on the spectrum.


Thanks to my mother and her fascination with horrible medical matters, I knew all about rabies ("lyssavirus"; "hondsdolheid"; "hundaæði") by the time I was eight. She was convinced that it was endemic in the Netherlands, which might have explained some of the natives. More than 95% of human deaths from rabies occur in primitive parts of the world.

Personally, I think it explains Old Norse behaviours.
As illuminated in their sagas.



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