Posted on 02/25/2006 10:44:53 AM PST by blam
I thought these were where the faires & goblins lived....
I suppose that is to be expected in and around a port city. The town, Theodore, is named for the middle name of a Greek guy who was in the early timber business around here.
Make mine a Murphy's. And I'll wash it down with a Smithwick's.
For great works of fiction about life amongst the Norse people in the 13th and 14th century, I would recommend the books of Sigrid Undset. They are meticulously detailed, and give a very accurate picture of life in those days.
And they are as scholarly as the books of any historian.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/undset.htm
Among Undset's masterworks in the 1920s was the trilogy KRISTIN LAVRANSDOTTER (1920-22). It re-created a woman's life in the devout Catholic Norway of the 13th and 14th centuries.
In the first volume, The Bridal Wreath, Undset depicted Kristin's, passage to adulthood. Kristin is the proud and beautiful daughter of a prosperous landowner, who marries a basically unworthy man, Erlend. "She understood not herself why she was not glad - it was as though she had lain and wept beneath a warm covering, and now must get up in the cold. A month went by - then two, now she was sure that she had been spared this ill-hap - and, empty and chill of soul, she felt yet unhappier than before. In her heart there dawned a little bitterness toward Erlend. Advent drew near, and she had heard neither from or of him; she knew not where he was."
The Mistress of Husaby and The Cross dealt with Kristin's marriage, the love and hate relationship with her husband, and her final reckoning with God and succumbing to the Black Death.
The novel was followed by tetralogy known as The Master of Hestviken (1924-27), also a medieval tale, in which the protagonist, proud and unyielding Olav, has committed murder - he kills the lover of his fiancée - which he chooses not to confess and accept church's demands of humility. In both works novel series "the first sin" shadows the protagonists life.
Pinging me Irish list.
Thanks for the ping - I've been to Newgrange so many times I could give the tour meself!
I have to visit Newgrange yet!! I'm more a man for mountains!
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