Reykjavík Grapevine - 25.09.2009, Qupperneq 38

26
the reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 15 — 2009 More from Eiríkur Norðdahl:
www.norddahl.org/english
poetry | Eiríkur Norðdahl opinion | Media
Books | Review
They say human beings use
language to make sense
of their surroundings. We
frame, categorise and sys-
tematise the objects around us with the
help of nouns and verbs and adjectives.
The sky is blue. The horse gallops swift-
ly. The sentence is a ridiculous rhetori-
cal filler. We do this to understand each
other, to convey information, give or-
ders, ask for favours. To some, thought
is practically unthinkable (!) without
language. If there is no word for moth-
er, then there is no mother—or, at the
very least, no mother to speak of.
And yet when we’ve finally managed
to raise and strengthen these structures
enough to have some sort of conversa-
tion, we start picking them apart. We
join the boy-scouts to sing gibberish
like Ging Gang Goolie; we giggle at
Smurf-books with debates about wheth-
er an object should be called “a smurf-
opener” or a “bottle-smurfer”; we can’t
be bothered with films in (real) lan-
guages we don’t understand, but who
can withstand the charm of a Klingon
conversation?; we play computer games
in simlish; listen to music in hopelan-
dic and scat; devise made-up languages
of our own—pig Latin, rhyme-slang, ar-
py-darpy—to cloak our darkest secrets
from our parents and/or the police.
There are many theories about
divine languages spoken by God, an-
gels, Adam and Eve, languages of pure
universal harmony. Some Pentecostal
Christians speak in tongues —“glosso-
lalia”, as it’s called—which is believed to
be a holy language, perhaps from Eden
and perhaps from Heaven itself. These
people fall into some sort of trance and
start speaking something which resem-
bles a language, and indeed has linguis-
tic structures, although the sounds usu-
ally originate from the speaker’s native
tongue. These divine languages sound
mostly like gibberish—like compli-
cated pig-Latin or simplified Klingon,
like very basic sound-poetry—at least to
the uninitiated. Religious zealots from
the glossolalian’s particular sect would,
of course, be more likely to sense “the
presence of God” than the presence of,
let’s say, hopelandic.
In the 13th century the Holy Roman
Emperor, Frederick II, had his servant
experiment on newborns to see if, un-
disturbed by human languages, the
infants would eventually start speak-
ing in the language of God (presumed
to be Hebrew, Latin, Arabic or Greek).
The infants were completely isolated
from hearing any language. They never
spoke and they died for they could not
live without “the gladness of counte-
nance.”
Jacob Grimm, of the famous Broth-
ers Grimm, theorised that if God
speaks any language involving dental
consonants, He must have teeth, and
since teeth are made for eating and not
for speaking, He must not only be a
talker but also an eater which, as the
Dutch philosopher Frits Staal put it
(according to Wikipedia): "leads to so
many other undesirable assumptions
that we better abandon the idea alto-
gether." We can only assume that Staal
means He might speak with His mouth
full.
Poetry, as everyone knows, is full
of gibberish. Not only are poets often
deliberately labyrinthine as well as
voracious neologists and portman-
teurs—making up new words with
varying degrees of sanity—but some
of them actually attempt to write pure
nonsense, utterly bereft of any sense.
The Russian Futurists wrote poems in
a language they called Zaum, a transra-
tional language to awaken the creative
imagination from its drowsy everyday
existence. The Dada-poets had Hugo
Ball’s Karawane and Dada-Mertz had
Kurt Schwitters’ opus magnum, the
Ur Sonata. Since the beginning of the
twentieth-century sound-poetry has a
non-stop history. But even before the
birth of the so-called avant-garde, there
was nonsensical poetry. In Iceland, Æri-
Tobbi wrote his tercets and quatrains in
the 17th century; in 13th century Cata-
lonia the troubadour Cerverí de Girona
had his own songs of gibberish, and
16th century Italy had Teofilo Folengo.
The history of poetry is blotted high
and low with work of such inspired de-
lirium.
Perhaps, deep down inside, we are
not as impressed by “actual” language
as we sometimes let on. Perhaps we feel
there are other ways of using and abus-
ing our tongue, our language centres
and vocal cords—a thinking beyond
mere meaning. Like screaming. Like
laughing. Grunting. Like giggling. And
then, if I’m allowed to quote “meaning-
ful” poetry to drive my point home, per-
haps Emily Dickinson had something
like gibberish in mind when she wrote
“Much madness is divinest sense / To
the discerning eye; / Much sense the
starkest madness.” And maybe Kurt
Schwitters said it all, when he said:
“Ziiuu ennze ziiuu nnskrrmüüü, / ziuu
ennze ziuu rinnzkrrmüüüü; / rakete
bee bee, rakete bee zee”.
The title and blurb
of this book leads
you to think it’s
about Guðríður
Þ orb ja r n a rdó t -
tir, the wife of
Þorfinnur Karlse-
fni and mother of
Snorri Þorfinns-
son, the first Eu-
ropean child to be
born on the North American continent.
But in fact, The Far Traveler is a very
general book about literature, ships,
North Atlantic settlement, archaeol-
ogy, and Christianization in the Viking
Age. It puts women’s experiences in
the foreground, and it does talk about
Guðríður, but it’s not really about her or
her voyages.
The Far Traveler works best as an
intro to the scholars who have tried to
reconstruct life in the medieval north
through archaeology, genetics, anthro-
pology and literary studies. Indeed,
Brown’s background is as a science
writer and she is skilled at interviewing
scientists. Her interest in Iceland dates
back to studying Old Norse literature in
college.
Some of the better passages in the
book are about Brown’s own experience
volunteering on a dig in Skagafjörður.
The images the book left me with are
archaeological: excavating a farm in
Greenland as it’s being eroded by a
rushing river; Brown’s visit to L’Anse
aux Meadows, the Viking site in New-
foundland; a face-off over whether to
strip turf layers by hand or with a back-
hoe; scraping away ash layers and look-
ing for the old walls of a longhouse in
Skagafjörður.
Brown speaks with a number of
scientists who cast doubt on Jared Dia-
mond’s perhaps faddish theory that the
Greenland colony collapsed because
Icelanders couldn’t adapt their palates
to local resources like fish.
Brown pursues a few special topics.
Chapter 3 muses on the sexual inde-
pendence of women in pre-Christian
Europe as opposed to the Christian
idealization of virginity. Chapter 9 is a
detailed discussion of Viking Age tech-
niques for weaving cloth. Chapter 10
describes how the sagas saw the transi-
tion from paganism to Christianity.
The book meanders. It was difficult
to follow the story of Guðríður. I was
never able to keep her life story straight.
A relationship chart of her immediate
family would have helped. Better maps
and a few inexpensive black-and-white
photographs would also have made the
book more attractive. The book does
provide a nice annotated bibliography
of books on Viking Age Iceland.
By the end of the book, I got the
feeling that at some point the author’s
agent or editor looked at a manuscript
or book proposal about the Viking Age
in general and said “Don’t you think
we could reshape this around a more
saleable theme? This Guðríður, may-
be use her life story to structure the
book with? And definitely beef up the
women’s history angle here. Sprinkle
in some goddess references and yes, do
that weaving chapter.” If the text of the
book never quite caught up with this
idea, that would explain why it’s a bit at
odds with the book’s title.
Brown has written a previous book
about Icelandic horses. She is a com-
panionable and sincere author, with a
genuine interest in the North. Overall,
I’d recommend this book to medieval
Iceland buffs. But the story of Guðríður
never quite comes together and the
book doesn’t quite stand out enough to
urge on general readers.
- IaN WatsoN
VIKINGWORLD
ICELAND
OPEN DAILY FROM 11:00 TO 18:00
WEAPONS OF MASS
DESTRUCTION
VIKINGABRAUT 1 - 260 REYKJANESBÆR - VIKINGAHEIMAR.COM - OPEN EVERY DAY FROM 11:00 - 18:00
With stardust in our eyes and
worthless fluff on our minds
it’s difficult to perceive reality.
The glamorous shine is too
bright, the din too distracting, to even
see the doors behind which deals are
being made that seal the fate of a nation,
potentially for generations to come. We’re
too concerned with celebrity gossip and
the anecdotes of acclaimed hot shots of
the film industry to educate ourselves on
the deals being made by our business
leaders and politicians—and wasn’t that
the same guy that screwed everybody
over just last year? How’s that for juicy
gossip?
We wonder, sometimes to ourselves
and sometimes even aloud, why people
don’t seem to care. Why people don’t
show up to protest anymore when their
country is being sold. Why people don’t
seem bothered with the ongoing involve-
ment of corrupt, immoral and criminal
men and women in Iceland’s economy—
the economy that they murdered but the
re-growth of which they feel entitled to
play a part in and financially benefit from.
Not enough people are paying attention,
not enough people are blowing whistles,
not enough people care to inform
themselves. Or is it that the very people
charged with informing the public have
gone to bed with the corrupt among us?
The media is the watchdog of the
people in a functioning society. It is in a
privileged position that comes with the
responsibility of passing along pertinent
information to the masses, the people
not able or allowed to see what goes on
behind the velvet rope. A society with a
functioning media will not burn out. It will
not tire from constantly feeling bulldozed
by the onslaught of secret deals and
corporate deception unearthed after the
fact. It will be active and educated
and in power—fitting
since democracy is, by
definition, power by the
people.
Walter Lippmann equated
mass society to a bewildered herd,
incapable of thinking for themselves
and incapable of comprehending the
world beyond the pictures in their
heads, the pictures put there by
the powerful and wealthy and
the media (technically also
part of the herd) that bows
to power and wealth, the
media that functions as
a lap dog of corporations
and governments rather than as the
watchdog of the people. At the beckon
call of the ones with money and the
ones with power and the ones who feel
entitled to paint the pictures that will oc-
cupy the heads of the herd, some media
is trained to throw dust in our eyes and
distract us from what is really important
in life.
It will be interesting to see what
pictures Davíð Oddsson will paint at the
helm of Morgunblaðið.
- catharINe fultoN
the far traveler:
Voyages of a Viking Woman
Nancy Marie Brown
Harcourt (2007)
Speaking Like A God The Pictures
In Our Heads