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Of interest in W.B. Lockwood’s “The Language and Culture of the Faroes Islands”

– There are a large number of words in Faroese to denote different kinds of waves and currents in the sea

(like the Sami in northern Scandinavia and Finland with their large number of words for snow)

– The orthography of Faroese constructed in the nineteenth century on etymological principles helps those familiar with Old Norse to read Faroese but “is often a nuisance to the Faroese themselves”, making it difficult to teach children to spell properly

– Apples don´t grow in the Faroes and were an exotic fruit until the last century. The potato got to the Faroes first; they took over the Danish word for potato translated literally into English as “earth apple” (jordepli with accents and a letter I can’t reproduce) and then simplified it to “epli”. This made things complicated when apples started to arrive so they are referred to as “surepli” (with accent), sour apples.

– Most Faroese people recognise far more birds than we would. They have no general word for gull but call different birds in the gull family by separate names, thus “gneggjus” for common gull, “rita” for three-toed gull and likka for lesser black-backed gull.

– They mix the words for sun (sol) and moon, Traditionally the moon was thought to exercise a baleful influence and its name became taboo, Thus the sentence “Tarvitrin matti ikki drepast i avtakandi sol” (“The bull had not to be slaughtered in the waning sun”). The sun, of course, doesn’t wane, it’s the moon that does that. However, as mention of the moon is thought to be unlucky, the superstitious replace the word for moon by the word for “sun”, which can be confusing for the uninitiated.

Lockwood also has some interesting information about the persistence of communal customs, how a large amount of essential work such as bird-catching, sheep-tending, fishing, whale and seal-hunting, milking, clearing paths and building houses was done by communal labour. There are still remnants of this, in, for instance, the whale hunt. On some islands, even as late as the last century sheep were owned in common by the whole population and in other places when bird eggs were collected, a portion called a “land part” was distributed freely to the whole population regardless of whether they had participated in collecting the eggs. Deep sea fishing, attracting away the young and vigorous for months at a time in return for individual cash wages has intensified the trend away from communal pursuits.

Source: Saga-Book, 1946-53, Vol 13 (1946-53), pp 249-268 published by Viking Society for Northern Research

My God of sleep, my personal Morpheus,  is on the autism spectrum. He knows what sleep is – he’s seen lots doing it but he doesn’t understand. So up he pops at inappropriate moments – on the bus just before my stop, at friends’ dinner table, but not in bed at 4 am. After a brief struggle to cling on to CET, I surrender to KVT (Kendall Variable Time) and get up.

Stimulated by Messenger, Alexandre Dumas makes his appearance with La Dame aux Camélias.

Only recently familiar, I now know that it was about a lady working as a courtesan, who wore a red camelia when she was menstruating and a white when not. It sounds ingenious and I wonder whether it might solve my problem with restaurant visits at the local pensioners’centre. The food is good and cheap but people might talk to me, when I want to put the world on hold. So perhaps if I wore a red camelia, I could be alone, except that red camelias are a symbol for passion that you give to your beloved. It could be misinterpreted, perhaps if I wrote an explanatory leaflet about myself or maybe it’s just easier to cook in my kitchen’s bookish calm.

From camelias to chameleons, which is (I think) the same in French. Wrestling with whether “Les dames aux chameleons” works in French, planning the day pushes Dumas rather abruptly off stage.

But before I get very far Molly Coddle hoves into view, I know not why but she triggers my etymological alarm response. It means pamper, which is a synonym for coddle. Otherwise, the word is innocent enough with its aura of blankets, hot chocolate and brows caressed by beloveds. But it had a chequered history in its early nineteenth century youth with unpleasant homophobic overtones associating it with effeminate gay men, moll having drifted from a working lady at the other end of the social scale from La Dames aux Camelias to a homophobic term for gay men. Fortunately, the word rapidly lost its youthful louche.

But then began the wild dance of the internet, saviour of the thinking being when the ceiling of the world lowers and starts to crush. A source about the history of moll leads me to Dr Jacob Serenius, who produced a Swedish-English dictionary (among others) in 1762. Born in Färentuna, he was a priest at the Swedish church in London for a number of years and took an active part in eighteenth century intellectual life. I’m not sure I would have approved of his take on religion but interrogation about that can wait.

Hunting for the dictionary on Libris, I seem to have arrived at a bad time as the website is rushing around in the throes of renewal but things are hushly calm at Carolina Rediviva; I learnt that Serenius is far from unknown in the Swedish lexicographical world with a half recent Gothenburg University PhD.

Returning to Sweden, he became a bishop active in Strängnäs where he died.  There is a picture of him at All Saints (Alla Helgons) church in Nyköping, which I have to visit (after I’ve checked that it´s actually on the wall and not languishing in some ecclesiastical basement together with sentimental nineteenth century alabaster statues of the saviour with his feet chopped off).

With no urgent translation work, it feels like a good day for a library visit to Carolina Rediviva. I have an article about the Faroes that I’ve wanted to read for some time and I’d like to learn about how to access digital articles as so many publications are now only available that way.

But I have an hour of Bengali to fit in, an hour of French, an hour of current affairs, an hour of German, a body longing for a walk and a shingles vaccination, and a flat that needs attention if it is not to scream from every dusty corner that an old man lives here. Lucky that KVT has a flexibility worthy of Harry Potter and doesn’t plod along with the austere inevitability of CET.

It’s now 6.45 CET, more or less the same in KVT with 2 hours and fifteen minutes to get through my Japanese tea ceremony-like shift from night mode to day mode before 09.00. So resisting the temptation to relax on my lotus leaf in my dressing gown and drift around on the Internet ocean, I am going to leap up and put all these pesky items pressing in on me in their place.

My six years in a Somerset village (after 12 years in a small coastal settlement in Sussex) laid the basis for my lifelong love of the West Country. I cycled a lot (which would have surprised my physical education teachers frustrated at my apparent physiophobia). Most of my journeys were aimless with no effort to  understand what I was looking at, a blurred fond recollection of wayside ragged robins,  warm sand-coloured buildings in a soft gentle green world. I’ve made up for it since, returning again and again to the area aiming not just to recognise the familiar but to make it unfamiliar by viewing it through historical, geological, architectural filters and more. That at least is my aim although I have dug deeper than intended into the ecclesiastical, developing an eagle eye for vaults and apses but only nibbling at my grand plan.

My move to Sweden a  half century ago disturbed and preserved. Disturbed through distance but preserved through Dorset and Somerset becoming a mirage, a verdant longing in the harsher Scandinavian landscape, where the irritations of everyday life kept their distance. If I moved there, it would probably crumble like an ancient Egyptian artefact exposed to the air.

It’s taken me time to get used to Sweden, its distances, the apparent emptiness, the barren acidity of coniferous forests. But my eye has become accustomed and I’ve learnt to appreciate it, especially since I moved to Uppsala with its dense pattern of Uppland villages. When I cycled a lot before the pandemic, I felt sometimes moved a half century back in time (with the added advantage of having a comfortable cycle rather than drop handlebars which were de rigueur for DK quivering on the edge of  adolescence).

The feeling of emptiness engendered by Sweden’s distance between villages is partly an illusion. The people are there but have been strewn around the landscape after the agricultural reforms of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Scattered strips of land were then combined in the interests of agricultural efficiency (and to favour the larger farmer), the old nucleated villages were broken up and people moved out to where their land was (rather than having a number of farms in the village surrounded by commonly enclosed scattered strips). I would like to know more about the details of that process in Uppland as it seems that more villages have survived here. I wonder about the pattern of land ownership. Feudalism wasn’t highly developed in Sweden but there were aristocratic estates and smaller holdings, which should shed light on the current landscape.

For me, Uppland is more attractive than south of Stockholm, although that may be because the land is more verdant here (Stockholm itself is really some way out in the archipelago).

I’m not contented with my progress with this project this year but I shall try again in summer 2024 and make plans in the meantime. Among other things, I want to find out more about a mediaeval church painter called Albertus Pictus (c1440-c1507), active in these parts. His wall paintings are most restored from layers of Lutheran whitewash disapproving of the distracting image interfering with inward contemplation.  I have a list of village churches to visit but it requires planning transport and making sure that the churches are or can be opened. I need to get back into better shape to be able to cycle, hopefully time spent this winter on the North German coast where the sun always shines will help.

My missing words were bariatric meaning the treatment of obesity from the Greek

“bar” (to do with weight) “iatr” treatment and “ic” pertaining to.  And a “bench trial”, which is a trial without a jury.

And the etymology of “bevy” which, according to Etymology on line is early 15c, a collective noun of quails and ladies, from Anglo-French bevée, which is of unknown origin. One supposed definition of the word is “a drinking bout,” but this perhaps is a misprint of bever (see beverage). One source on the net suggests that a bevy of ladies refers to a delightful gathering or group comprised of women, typically characterized by their elegance, grace, and beauty. This collective noun phrase connotes an aura of charm and sophistication, emphasizing the enchanting aspect of the female presence within the group”. That all sounds backward and tiresome, the kind of thing you would expect from a gush of conventional thinkers. “Bevy” is not going to be allowed to join my vocabulary unless I have some quail-intensive experiences, which seems unlikely.

Reading William Darymple’s book on the East India Company makes me aware that I don’t know the difference between a howrah and a palanquin. A palanquin is a covered litter for one passenger consisting of a large box carried on two horizonal poles by four or six bearers, a howdah is a throne-like saddle for an elephant, If discretion, shielding the traveller from the inquisitive eyes of the hoi polloi is the name of the game then a palanquin is the one to go for. If, on the other hand, Curzonian ostentation is what you’re after then it’s a howdah.

The symbol of the strong elephant bearing a load was popular in the late middle ages, I’ve read that it was a symbol for Christ and the redemption but I’m not sure how that hangs together, There’s the Elephant and Castle pub in London, even district now, which Wiki tells us Shakespeare mentions in 12th night but according to London encyclopaedia, this pub was converted from a smithy in the eighteenth century. Perhaps there were lots of elephant and castle pubs or maybe it was the sign for the smithy. There doesn’t seem to be an Indian connection though the motive was popular in heraldry,

My other Indian discovery is the Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, the national poet of Bangla Desh.

 (1899-1976). He wrote a poem called Bidrohi, meaning “the rebel” in Bengali earning him the title of the Bidrohi Kobi (rebel poet), According to Wiki he was an orthodox Sunni muslim but heavily influenced by syncretism and critical of bigotry and the oppression of women. He is celebrated in West Bengal too, at least he has a Kolkata metro station named after him. Not exactly an ideological blood brother to yours truly but it’s an interesting thread to pull to discover more about Bengal East and West.

Another Indian discovery is Powis Castle near Welshpool, home of the Clive family, which apparently has a huge collection of Indian items brought home by Clive. I have too many images from Kolkata  in my mind’s eye for easy enjoyment of  the beauty of India in my home environment. The shanties press in on my attention, another “they are here, because we were there” moment like the precious baubles. I shall probably pop in next time I’m in Welshpool…

Closer to home, I have become interested in Havelok the Dane. I’ve wondered for a long time about the absence of written sources about the period of the Danelaw when half of England (east of Watling St, the Roman road, I think) was ruled by the Danes and even the whole of England had a Danish King Canute for some  years. There’s a great number of place names and words of Scandinavian origin, especially in the dialects and the influence gets stronger the further north you go where the dialects are loaded with words of Scandinavian origin, culminating in Shetland where the dialect is populated by the ghosts of Norn.

But somehow the Scandinavian is scattered, not fully integrated into our story about ourselves, which runs from plucky Alfred burning his cakes, founding the navy and resisting the Danes through William the Conqueror where things get distinctly ambivalent, and finally the resurgence of English with Chaucer and the Tudors, and the well trodden path leading to David Kendall at junior school in the early 1950s struggling with mauvais foi as his red crayon hovered over the outline of the Republic of Ireland and Burma with all the other far flung imperial bits and bobs.  

I’ve discovered the story of Havelok the Dane, which is an old story in several versions, the Middle English being best known. And I realised how important the study of Middle English was to understand how we got from Old English, pretty much a foreign language, to modern English.

I even had several hardly used books on Middle English on my out-of-control bookshelf which is becoming more Narnia-like by the day.

There were also some words. I now know what an epigraph is, a word I recognised but never introduced myself properly to. It’s a written message on a building or a short quotation or saying at the beginning of a book or chapter intended to express its theme, which I found filled a useful gap and will probably be pressed into service in the not too distant. And a commonplace book, which are notebooks people like me use to jot down bits of knowledge, a repository of thoughts.

And fustian which as I thought was coarse clothing but apparently also means a pompous or pretentious speech, And the etymology of famine which was straightforward from the Latin fames hunger, thus related to “famished”.

I’ve also learnt what ceps are, a type of edible fungi, porcino (little pig) in Italian, steinpilz in German and cepe in French. I haven’t budged an inch from my English prejudices about edible fungi despite my half century in Sweden but I like to know the name of things,

There were some other words too but I have mislaid them. My commonplace books are many and swirl around my flat like an asteroid belt.

Track maintenance but the replacement bus comes, whisking me to Lund unlike my earlier experience in Padborg. A long wait – I couldn’t resist cheapy Snälltåget. But it’s a pleasure to sit quietly in Lund pondering my first year in Sweden. I’ve mostly just flashed through Lund of late. It was a Sunday; I couldn’t go to the cathedral crypt to look at the Danish writing on the tombs. I know no one there now. It’s strangely familiar or familiarly strange. I was in my 20s then, my English life was close at hand. Unlocked doors, tea, toast and marmalade, peaceful courtyards, scuttling across Skåne in orange and yellow diesel cars when I wasn’t madly driving from coast to coast with my Raleigh moped, which no one east of the North Sea knew how to mend. Pretty coloured stamps in my savings book at the post office where you paid your bills and a monthly wage of 1,600 after tax. 25 öre phone calls and rent of 500. And cradle to grave social democracy, the feeling of shame when shopping at ICA and not Domus; though it didn’t really matter as ICA wouldn’t be around much longer.  And all those small Scanian towns with their newspapers.

Kastrup an occasional experience, England far away, not like flipping backward and forth  from Stockholm (London E250) before planes disappeared in the greenery. Clogs and a silly brown fur (ish) hat with ear flaps, promoting my inner image of the hero of Petrograd in 1917 but in fact looking as if my name was Bertil.

And not understanding the language, occasional nowtime flashbacks in Denmark as to how it felt, those first two years when communication was like holding a wine glass with gloves on before I started to massacre Swedish in earnest. At least, I learnt to say Peugeot and Kristianstad like a Skåning to my Stockholmsk mother-in-law’s discomfort.

Back in Uppsala, it’s taken me a while to find my rhythm. I’ve finished Middlemarch, I thought I’d read it but there’s no laborious memory reconstruction, no remembered character trait, no distant resonance. It’s a fine novel. I like books that are great works of literature but integrated with a historical period, in the case of Middlemarch, the great reform bill in 1832 and the class relationships between old and new money. The latter is par for the course for the Victorian novel but George Eliot does it so well.

And I’m getting to grips with my Bengali which I’ve neglected. I’m slowly moving on from the parrot phase.

And started to read William  Darymple’s “The Anarchy” about the East India Company. I didn’t realise  how tenuous the East India Company’s grip  was until quite late in the eighteenth century. Plassey was the turning point but there was later resistance to the English. Darymple describes the horrific process where the East India Company  took advantage of the collapsing Mughal Empire and sucked Bengal dry, taking its wealth to England leaving the Bengalis with famine.  A lot of Clive’s loot ended up at the family’s home Powys Castle, which has a very large collection of Indian artefacts.

The taxi driver was not great at responding to the small road signs to Orkesta church north of Vallentuna in the county of Stockholm. But the signs weren’t good, wrongly angled, which sent us rolling down a dust track to nowhere. He was anyway a  a cheerful accepting man, a solution person not a problem person, only spoiling it at the very end by asking me if I was looking for a particular grave after my having carefully explained the purpose of the trip.

I’m in search of U 344,  not a World War 2 submarine but a rune stone.

It’s near the west door of Orkesta church and remarkable both for the direction of the runes (from right to left) and for it commemorating a Viking who travelled to England and collected tribute. Swedish Vikings generally travelled east and south, while the Danes and Norwegians travelled west to England, among other places.

According to Wikipedia, the message reads “Ulf  collected three tributes in England. Torste collected the first, Torkel the second and Knut the third”. Ulf lived in Borresta in Uppland and was unusual in that he returned home alive from England after every trip. I’m curious about the content of the message, does it mean that Torste, Torkel and Knut handed over their collected tributes to Ulf?

I also wonder how these Vikings got to England – did they sail all around the south of Sweden and then through the Öresund to cross the North Sea? Or did they cross overland to the west coast (I don’t believe Sweden had much of a west coast,  if any, at this time early in the eleventh century). And then perhaps they joined forces with a Norwegian or a Danish raiding party. The prospects for success don’t look bright if they acted as individuals (Hi, I’m Ulf. I’ve come about the tribute…).

Ulf of Borresta is described in one history book as coming back from England to live in Uppland as a magnate, a rich man. His tribute was presumably in the form of money or gold and silver. I wonder about the position of money in England and rural Sweden at this time. We read about the feudal system in England breaking down and the emergence of paid labour and money relationships. The Scandinavian demand for tribute must have increased the demand for money in England and the availability of money in Sweden but this is at least three hundred years before feudalism started to break down in earnest. What could Ulf have found to spend money on and where?

I’m ignorant about the presence (or absence) of feudalism in Sweden and need to read more about Swedish history and the place of money in the economy.

As far as I could see, the rune stone was artistically ornamented but without Christian symbols. At the time of its erection, in the early eleventh century, Christianity was only slowly breaking through in Sweden and Orkesta was not far from the core of paganism at Uppsala.

No name is given for the rune maker but it is thought from the style to be the famous rune master Åsmund Kåresson.

The stone was discovered by Richard Dybeck of Yttergärd who Wiki describes as a Swedish jurist, antiquarian and lyricist (1811-1877). He is, among other things, known as being the author of  the lyrics to the Swedish national anthem, Du gamla, du fria. He was also the maternal uncle of  Amanda Kerfstedt (1835-1920), author, dramatist and translator. Like George Eliot, she started writing used a pseudonym but later used her own name. She was active in the women’s movement (among other activities). Her novel Reflexer (Reflexes or perhaps Reflections) was the first novel in Sweden where the main character was a transvestite. It tells the story of Walter, a respected family father, who furnishes a room in his  house where no one else is allowed entry. He locks himself into the room at 1 pm each day in order to be a woman. His behaviour is explained by tragic circumstances in his youth where his twin sisters (I believe they were twins) drown. He was detected by his wife, who divorced him but creditably (from a description on the net), he seems to have stood his ground. This was a decade before the term transvestite was introduced and it seems the novel was greeted more with puzzlement about what was considered an odd choice of topic rather than moral outrage (at least initially). After a long period out of print, it was republished earlier this century. I must try and find it.

Not wanting the taxi meter to tick into the stratosphere and unwilling to send the taxi away leaving me to an uncertain fate in the back of beyond with only the distant Roslagsbanan railway as a thin thread leading to the world as we know it, I didn’t look at the interior of the church. Had I done so, I would have seen the reconstruction work paid for by C.W. Cederhielm, a founding member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences and translator of Voltaire’s Brutus, a man of the enlightenment deep in the bucol.

It’s amusing to think of the people connected in some way with this simple Uppland church gathering there in the small misty hours, Ulf, Torste, Torkel, Knut and Åsmund Koresson, C.W. Cederhielm, Richard Dybeck and Amanda Kerfstedt (and why not co-opt Walter too) to discuss the fate of the world, like some TV breakfast show but in the wilds.

.

Giving up the struggle to make the room into last week’s various resting places, it’s four in the morning not half past six and the lit doorway leads nowhere more magical than my own bathroom.

My head is Faroe full; only four non-travel days but the intensity of memory stacked on memory makes it longer, the initially exotic rapidly becoming familiar.

Unwished images of the pilot whale hunt intrude – the blood red sea, the panic of the pod when pressed into the shallows, the flashing of the knives of the multitude, bureaucratic procedure as the haul is recorded, dissected and distributed. I don’t remember where the memory comes from. I’ve read the Faroese author Hedin Bru’s bloodstained description of “grindjakt” but it’s very visual, from you tube perhaps. I find it distasteful, I wouldn’t want to be there or to eat the meat or blubber. But I can’t protest – this is a country where little grows, perhaps potatoes not much else; five per cent of the land is cultivable, if that. They have to live, we have to prioritise our own species and the slaughterhouse of commodified death is hardly better, although concealed from the casual eye. But I do have a right to my way of being although I know I wouldn’t be viable there. I wouldn’t do the right things to put people at their ease and their hearts would harden against the refusal to integrate.

I felt this when we visited the island’s even smaller second “city” Klaksvik, with much more of a “frontier feel” than Torshavn, which was remarkably city-like for a settlement of 20,000. But Klaksvik was the odd mix of the suburban and the frontier, which I recognise from my sojourn in northern Sweden, where many practical folk gathered to discuss and arrange practical doings and I would be an unviable form of human life.

Other memories beside the carnage, the towering hills everywhere, even closely around settlements; an underwater mountain range, the peaks being the visible Faroes. And vigorous in my youthful West England life, I remember very occasional climbs, how you could go up and up with increasing difficulty and suddenly discover that you were no longer on a steep slope but hanging perilously above a long drop, and edging back to safety in the days before squeamishness kept me away from cliffs, domes and towers.

The country is more populated than the mute emptiness of the Scottish Highlands, although sheep density seems similar. Here I have found no trace of pleasure-seeking deerstalkers seeking to clear the land. I don’t know either how the wool industry is organised, certainly commercial rather than subsistence but I know very little about scale or ownership. The transition from subsistence agriculture and fishing to commercial fishing seems to have travelled a different path than in the Outer Hebrides, although perhaps Shetland, unknown to me, would be a better place of comparison.

I eventually found a bibliography of literature in English about the Faroes in a book from the 1990s in the University of Faroe Islands library. I hope it will help me find material that can answer my questions. I suspect much can be found in my local academic library in Uppsala, Carolina Rediviva, although I need the magic “signa” before the doors to the treasure chamber will open.

The small population makes its presence or non-presence felt; there is a good local bookshop/cultural centre in Torshavn but no Faroese-English dictionary on sale (just Faroese-Danish). (Bumping against the frontiers of my knowledge, I wonder whether the Latin plural of “signum”, signa is used in Sweden or whether “signums” is used. Here’s material for me to earn a few eccentric old man points next time I’m at the library. I have a feeling too that, while signum exists that it’s not used as a synonym for shelf mark in the Anglo world and that needs to be sorted out before that area feels harmonious and at peace with itself…..).

I’d hardly thought about Faroese before going there; it was fascinating to discover a new Nordic language, especially one that had its roots in the West Nordic family with Shetland’s lost Norn and Icelandic. The loss of Norn was important for the developing Faroese nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I discovered Jakob Jakobsen, the first person from the Faroes to obtain a Ph.D. He dedicated much of his life to studying the many traces of Norn in the Shetlands, in place names, dialect words etc. Without his contribution, we would know far less about this dead Nordic language whose last speaker was probably born around 1700. The loss of Norn was a cautionary tale for Faroese nationalists, who initially struggled in a country, first a colony and then a county of Denmark where the educational system, legal matters, the state church all pursued their activities in Danish and Faroese was a lower status spoken language of the unestablished people, referred to various non-conformist groups, including the Plymouth Brethren to worship in their own language.

I found the revival of Faroese remarkable (revival in inverted commas, as inward Danish migration to the Faroes was apparently low (unlike the situation with Scots in Shetland) and Faroese remained strong as a spoken language).

Faroese remained a spoken language until the nineteenth century when Hammershaimb, among other others worked hard and successfully on its orthography. Perhaps unfortunately, he worked on etymological principles and gave Faroese letters from Icelandic, which (as I understand it) have little bearing on how Faroese is pronounced. Jakobsen worked hard to try to reform Faroese spelling but his efforts as a solitary intellectual were in vain against the strong tide of nationalist opinion, which wanted not just to preserve and develop Faroese but hoped to restore lost sounds to bring the language closer to its roots (their success in other respects doesn’t seem to have been replicated in this latter area).

A strange experience for me, where I understand large chunks of the language from Swedish and my familiarity with Northern modes of expression. But interspersed with the unknown or dimly grasped. I would like to learn more although I’m aware that I’m seriously promiscuous when it comes to language, becoming infatuated, even when the prospect of a long-term relationship is utterly remote.

It’s now really half past six, time for porridge and to make my usual optimistic list for conquests of the day, July’s accounts and soon future travel being high on my list. Writing my blog will hopefully lull the storm of Faroese associations sufficiently long for me to chip a little at my hoped-for daily doings.

Flashing past the Wiltshire village of Fyfield on the old A4 just west of Marlborough, I knew not that  Fyfield down has “the best assemblage of sarsen stones in England, known as the Grey Wethers” (Wiki). Now I know that a sarsen stone is a silicified sandstone block, naturally occurring, favoured by the ancients for the monumental, and called “ sarsen” in Wiltshire dialect from “saracen”, used in Europe to denote folk of the Islamic faith who opposed the crusades. According to the shorter Oxford, the word came to denote any pagan and hence its application to the stones used by the ancient Britons, dimly illuminated and exotic.

It’s given though as sixteenth century, which seems very late to stimulate dialectal usage linked to the crusades, but it can, of course, have kept its head down, crept through the undergrowth of communication, without attracting attention. Knowledge I’m glad to have, gazing soulfully at the downs on my way to take the waters at Bath for my gout.

The ancient also made its presence felt with “polissoir”, a polishing stone or whetstone, dismissed by my inexperienced eye as old stone but in fact not just stone but an artefact with a polished indent where the ancients have sharpened their tools. One such 5,000 year old polissoir has recently been discovered in Dorset. Why the French name I don’t know, presumably some French academic grappling with the grooves in the dawn of science.

And another link with Islam, a reference to Ishmael and learning that he was Abraham’s first son and an important prophet in Islam. Abraham’s other children were Nebaioth, Basemath, Kedar, Mishma, Adbeel, Mibsam, Jetur, Kedemah, Naphish, Tema, Dumah, Hadad and Massa. A fine collection of names. I should like to go through the Dorset church registers and make a note of all the more unusual biblical names used for naming children, although I can’t recall having seen the above.

Dim light at Carolina Rediviva, friendly for the ancient hieroglyphs, not so for my  less ancient eyes. But I’ve purchased and read the exhibition catalogue “Champollion and Hieroglyphics – 200 years of Egyptology” and know what’s there. Champollion’s (among others perhaps) key discovery was that hieroglyphics could be both a pictorial writing system and phonetic symbols and that most “words” were a combination. As long as researchers thought that they were solely pictorial, they wallowed in the weird and not so wonderful and were  distracted from the meaning by speculative interpretation.  This lonely genius makes good story triggers alarm  bells that history is being prettified (According to the catalogue “The legend says that Champollion, after struggling with different copies of inscriptions, rushed into his brother’s study in Paris – supposedly on 14 September 1822 – and blurted out “I’ve got it”, upon which he fell into a coma”). However, even if the denouement was less dramatic, it’s a good example of how what you know or think you know can block new learning.

Resuming exploration of my new home county after the dead  hand of Covid. It’s taken time to get started again, partly because of my orbiting around Sweden rather than actually living here and then it was too cold and dark and now it’s too hot. But at least I’ve been down to where the river (Fyris) meets Lake Mälaren and to see Champollion and am planning to take the boat in the same direction and further to historic Skokloster.

I’m continuing my exploration of Faroese literature and am now reading another of William Heinesen’s novels “De förlorade musikanterna” (The lost musicians). Not  a great fan of historical novels but I couldn’t resist it after reading Leif Zern’s intro describing Heinesen’s universe as a struggle between affirmation of life and the destructive force represented by the manager of the savings bank Andersen and the temperance association, who does what he can to dampen the friends’ exuberance at liquid gatherings.

I have Heinesen’s unread “Det goda hoppet” (The good hope, inadequate translation) from 1964.

Printed in my first year at university in the UK and pages uncut since then. No library stamp or ex libris, I wonder what the book has been doing since then (all books should have a libro-bio page, recording their fate). It seems somehow disrespectful to cut the pages just like that. There has to be some kind of ceremony; I want to take it to the Faroes with me and make it readable in some spiritual and sombre place in the early morning (the Faroes police are trying to intrude into my fantasy by carting me off to explain why I’m running around Torshavn with a knife in the wee hours. Should I depart from my life principle of never explaining my actions or is that, unusually, the road to perdition?)  And also another author Hedin Bru’s ”Berättelsen om Högni” (A tale about Högni). Finely bound and published by Gleerups in Lund in 1939, borrowed on 28 March 1957 as Mr Green explained the mysteries of multiplying decimals to me quivering on the brink of leaving junior school. But I can read this book, delicately with well washed hands, it doesn’t make me tamper with history with a paper cutter.

At any rate, good as far as pushing back the frontier of unknowing. I now know what  a “skälmroman” is in Swedish (like picaresque). And Herr Andersen’s temperance association is oddly called after Idun. Idun seems a friendly goddess, providing apples to keep the other gods and goddess immortal (they start to go grey when Idun is kidnapped). Between my home and Old Uppsala, all the roads are named after Gods and Goddesses. Idunvägen is just around the corner and amusingly many houses have apple trees in their gardens. I walk past them sometimes to get home when I’ve been reading on the bus and get swept past my stop. I’ve yet to clamber over the fence to taste one of the apples and see whether my bald patch (or rather bald sahara) shrinks. I’m not sure about immortality – it’s a heavy responsibility to steer David Kendall around the world and he might begin to pall on me after a century or so. Immorality is probably more fun…

More words, sarsen and polissoir, Ishmael and Fyfield Down, but I’ll save them for another time…..