Gripla - 20.12.2016, Page 298

GRIPLA298
translation). I loved all the readings, but it was Njáls saga that bowled me
over. I wrote my term paper on it; looked up “norse Sagas” in encyclo-
pedias; and from libraries got first the Saga of the Laxdalers, then Egil’s
saga, then Saga of the Ere-Dwellers. I also began reading around in Old
and Middle English literature and then in medieval french and German,
though it remained the sagas that interested me most.
So I was “doing” film and sagas from 1959 on – sagas as a quasi-aca-
demic pursuit, film as serious hobby. It never crossed my mind then that
they had anything to do with each other. and they didn’t, or at least not in
the ways that would later come to interest me.
the following year I moved to Berkeley and there re-started my sopho-
more year – not in music, but in Scandinavian and Comparative Literature,
emphasis on the Middle ages. I took my B.a. and continued into graduate
school, at this point as a single mother of two children. My only time in
Iceland was a month in the summer of 1970, with my kids; but that was
more for purposes of meeting the place than for study or research. My
children loved Iceland, for reasons I’ll come back to.
In the autumn of 1971, we moved from Berkeley to Boston, where I had
my first job at Harvard teaching Scandinavian literature – from sagas to
Strindberg. Within weeks of my arrival, I was approached by the head of
the Carpenter Center, Harvard’s art museum and home to its art History
Program. the Center, he said, wanted to start giving courses in cinema and
I had been recommended as a serious film buff; would I be interested in
teaching a course on some aspect of Scandinavian cinema? Sure, I said. (at
that time, film was just emerging as an academic subject, and the few peo-
ple who taught it had little academic training to speak of.) So the Center
ordered some films for me to screen in advance, and on the very small
basis of that plus some reading, in the fall of 1972 I offered my first film
course, on Bergman and Dreyer. In the coming years I added courses in
Scandinavian and German silent cinema. and so on. I mention this partly
to dispel the idea (I can’t tell you how many people have asked me this)
that I started out as a medievalist, then got bored with the Middle ages
and, in mid-career, switched to film instead. the record will show that I
was teaching both pretty much from day one and continued to do so every
year after that. and I’m still working on both.
What did change at some point was the kind of cinema I worked on,