D Kendall

The October 2020 bulletin of the UK Institute of Translation and Interpreting has an interesting article on Romansch, Switzerland’s fourth language by Emma Gledhill, a translator, who lives in a Romansh-speaking village.

She describes how there are at most 60,000 speakers of Romansch in the Graubunden canton of SE Switzerland, amounting to 0.5-0.85 of the Swiss population. It is a Romance language, which has had national language status since 1938. Almost all Romance speakers are bilingual, predominantly with German.

The Swiss geography with communities in valleys separated by mountains has led to there being five dialects of Romansch (Sursilvan, Surmiran, Puter, Vallader and Jauer), some of which have sub-dialects. Some children are taught with Romansch as the medium of instruction.

From Wikipedia, I read that there have been attempts to unify the dialects although use of this unified version has not caught on in speech and has caused conflicts when used as the medium of instruction in schools, some Romansch speakers/areas preferring their own variant of the language to the unified version.

According to Emma Gledhill, Romansch is a Rhaeto-Romance language along with the Ladin language of the Italian Dolomites and Friulian in north-east Italy. According to Wiki, this link is disputed, the academic dispute being known as the Questione ladina (this dispute had political associations as Italian irredentists claimed that the three languages were all dialects of Italian. I haven’t a date for this but it was presumably before the Second World War and could be way back and I don’t know what the latest developments are on Questione ladina or whether it’s a dead issue).

Wikipedia has a very informative article on Romansch, the features of the language and its links back to the Latin spoken in the period after the fall of the Western Roman Empire as well as a long book list for those wishing to delve deeper into the language. It is Romance language but with considerable numbers of imported German words and German has taken over in what used to be Romance-speaking areas.

Active efforts have been made to keep the language alive.

There is a daily paper in Romansch called  La Quotidiana founded in 1997 with support from the Romansh news agency Agentura da Novitads Rumantscha.  

The paper is protected by a paywall but here is a description in Romansch:

La Quotidiana (LQ) è la suletta gasetta dal di rumantscha. Ella cumpara da glindesdi enfin venderdi. La gasetta appartegna a la gruppa da medias Südostschweiz ed è confessiunalmain e politicamain neutrala. En La Quotidiana vegn oravant tut rapportà davart quai che curra e passa en la Svizra rumantscha ed en la politica grischuna. La politica naziunala ha pli pauca paisa e novitads internaziunalas èn plitost raras. Il dumber d’abunents confermà tenor la WEMF munta actualmain a 4341 (l’onn 2003: passa 5000).

If this feels a bit much, one can content oneself with “Bun di” (no prizes for working out what this means).

I was pretty sure that I’d once bought a Romansch dictionary when I was at a course near Berne years ago. But I can’t find a trace of it on my bookshelves so perhaps I only looked at the book (or possibly caressed it) and the intensity of desire to own it has been transformed in my memory into a purchase.

It could be somewhere as my library is getting to the point when I need a catalogue. But I feel that if I start to shelf mark my books, it will effectively take up the bit of my life not occupied by shifting books from place to place ( I haven’t really got into taking shelvies though). I have vague memories of being given some position of trust in the English literature section of my school library and getting carried away with the stamp I was given to put gold shelf mark numbers on books and making raids across subject boundaries, struggling with feelings of mauvais foi as I did so but incapable of controlling myself  (and too sneaky to attract the attention of any external controller). So with this history of shelf mark abuse and bibliomachismo, as well as the time factor, I’d better go easy on classification.

Romansch is anyway interesting (the only possible drawback being that I am collecting languages in the same way as some people acquire cats but I can live with this faiblesse).

I’d heard of Sorbian, a Slavic language spoken by a minority in what was then the GDR, while I was studying for my uncompleted PhD. But I didn’t know much about them nor exactly where they lived.

But now I’ve just been in Cottbus in Lower Lusatia (Niederlausitz), about 130 km south-east of Berlin and seen the dual language street names, which whetted my appetite to learn more.

My sole source so far is a detailed description on Wikipedia, which provides a number of additional sources that I shall investigate (almost all the information below is from that source).

The Sorbian speaking population live in Upper and Lower Lusatia, each region having its distinct Sorbian dialect, the lower Lusatian containing more imported words from German. Practically all, if not all, Sorbs speak German as well and there are now many people of Sorbian origin, especially in Lower Lusatia (the region around Cottbus), who no longer understand Sorbian. Among religious Sorbs, Lutherans predominate in Lower Lusatia and Roman Catholics in Upper Lusatia.

The pressure on the Sorbs to assimilate increased in the nineteenth century, especially after the foundation of the German Empire in 1871, reaching a peak in the Nazi period, which denied the existence of the Sorbs as a distinct Slavic people but regarded them as Sorbian-speaking Germans. According to Wikipedia, this substantially spared them from ethnic cleansing although expressions of Sorbian culture were still sharply discouraged, organisations closed down and individuals persecuted. Checking on another source about the Sorbian writer Mina Witkojc (1893 to 1975), she was prohibited from exercising her profession (berufsverbot) by the Nazis.

In the post-war period under the GDR, the Sorbs were able to re-establish the Domowina, a political and cultural organisation serving as an umbrella organisation for Sorbian associations.  However, there were points of conflict relating to resistance to collectivisation of agriculture and religious practices. Wikipedia mentions an open uprising at Blot but gives no details.

The development of open cast mining of lignite (brown coal) affected the area where the Sorbian speakers lived, leading, among other things, to the abandonment of villages.

The number of Sorbs is given as 145,000 in 1945 and 40,000 today indicating a substantial decline in the past seventy five years (although perhaps the 1945 figure should be treated with caution, given conditions in Germany at that time). I have also seen larger estimates of the number of Sorbs today up to 60,000-80,000 (presumably hard to estimate exactly as the overwhelming majority are German citizens so the numbers are an estimate of cultural and linguistic affiliation).

A long-standing demand of Sorbian organisations is for the Sorbs to be united in one administrative area, for example in one federal state. At present, they are divided between two federal states, Upper Lausatia in Saxony and Lower Lausatia in Brandenburg. This administrative division goes back at least to the Congress of Vienna (1815) when Lausatia was divided between Saxony and Prussia.

These calls have not been heeded by the German government after re-unification, regardless of the Sorbs status as a recognised national minority.

The Sorbs have also been historically known as Lusatians or Wends. I’m not sure of the exact definition of Wends but it does not seem to refer to a specific people but to be a general term referring to people of  Slavic origin living in close proximity to the German-speaking population.

The term Sorb seems to be related to the word Serb, the Serbs apparently being referred to in Sorbian as South Sorbs (I’ve not checked this).

Before the second World War, there was once a much more complicated patchwork of interspersed nationalities in Germany and Eastern Europe. However, despite the activities of the Nazi regime, there are still at least remnants of numerous groups left. I’d like to learn more about these, among others the Sorbs and the Kashubians in Poland.

There is some material available in English. Gerald Stone’s book from 2015 “Slav Outposts in Central European history” looks like a good starting point. Much more is available in German. Works by Mina Witkojc mentioned above, who has been translated from Lower Sorbian to German but also by Jan Skala, who was active in an organisation for national minorities in Germany before it was dissolved by the Nazis. There’s a book about him “Jan Skala – ein Sorbe in Deutschland” by Peter Kroh from 2009.

1 September and this strange summer is drawing to a close. For me the most intensively Swedish summer ever, leaving me better informed about my surroundings and reducing my exile-related feelings of dislocation and not belonging. At the same time, a feeling of being cheated, that the summer with its peculiarities doesn’t quite count, that it wasn’t enough to compensate for the cold and dark to come.  But we have to accept that too and find satisfaction in playing a bad hand well, aware that there is no guarantee that tomorrow will be like today and that the only reasonable expectation is the unexpected.

A few years ago I bought Gunnar Eriksson’s biography of Rudbeck from Ekerö library, where it was being sold (in mint condition and horrendously cheap). It remained in mint condition in my library for some time but I’m glad to have it now that I live in Uppsala, where it’s hard to move a metre without stumbling over Rudbeck. I’ve now have my Rudbecks sorted out and know that I am reading the bio of Rudbeck the elder (1630 to 1702).

He was involved in so much – discovering the lympathic system (I was too squeamish to cope with this chapter) and later having an anatomical theatre built. And other matters, far removed from his professorship in medicine, in the manner of the intellectuals of his period; also his ongoing efforts to reform the university, presented by Eriksson as a battle to overcome the scholastic and Aristotelian remnants of the middle ages and to usher in a more empirical approach.  There is a wonderful episode which I must find out more about where Rudbeck announced a presentation on what was known about nothing, which was perceived (probably correctly) as a provocation (it might be a reasonable question today…). He was also involved in organising a water supply from the castle and housing. And then his magnum opus, Atlantica, where he combines sharp insights and methods anticipating the future with statements about Sweden as the lost continent of Atlantis and Swedish being the root tongue of all languages, which may have served well as an ideology supporting Sweden’s great power ambitions but which were otherwise an oddity. And the last tragic chapter when many of Rudbeck’s manuscripts, including the last part of Atlantica and a substantial part of his library were destroyed in the town fire. He lived long enough to work on plans for Uppsala’s reconstruction but died not long after

My intention was for the Rudbeck bio to be my bedtime reading but it proved far too weighty a work for this purpose. I need to read it carefully and to take notes. I’d like to work my way through the quotes from Rudbeck in seventeenth century Swedish, which, poised on the threshold of hopeful sleep, I skipped. And to know more about the history and organisation of the university and Rudbeck’s academic conflicts. The seventeenth century feels rather late for scholasticism (counting angels on pinheads and all that) and I’d like to know more about Gunnar Eriksson’s reasoning and also about Rudbeck’s relationship to Cartesianism. It’s going to be a laborious plod but I think worthwhile from the point of view of feeling at home in Uppsala.

While checking some facts, I came across a picture of the very fine door to the house where Descartes lived in the Old Town in Stockholm (it’s still there, I have to take a pic) on his tragic visit to Sweden. I’m very suspicious about French people, who move to Sweden. It seems so existentially irresponsible and careless (not to deny this northern country’s many redeeming features but France undoubtedly has some charms that Sweden lacks). And in Descartes case, it was fatal, as he came in October, didn’t get on well with Queen Kristina, who had invited him, and subsequently died of pneumonia so the whole thing was rather a disaster, “I went to Sweden, therefore I am not” as he mumbled to St Peter surprised to find him knocking on the gate of heaven at such an early time. So my bio has generated a visit to Gamla Stan in Stockholm as well as to Rudbeck’s tomb in Uppsala cathedral.

Circadian anarchy strikes again and I am keeping Stalinist hours, being awake far into the small hours and then sleeping until noon, although without having the place cluttered up by booze-sodden “chums” (an interesting word, said to originate from “chamberfellow” unlike “bloke”, which comes from Shelta,  according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, with a startling absence of PC, perhaps explained by mine being the 2004 edition, “a secret language used by Irish and Welsh tinkers and Gypsies “), although “crony” coming from the Greek khronios (long-lasting) might have been a better word, keeping up the association with time, or, on second thoughts, maybe not  bearing in mind that friendship with Stalin was not exactly durable and, in any case, I don’t like megaphone words shrieking “look out, bad guys”, preferring to think for myself rather than being shoved here and there by signpost words. In any case, I much prefer the company of Marika Stjernstedt to Malenkov, Iron Lazar and Kobe.

I’d never heard of Marika Stjernstedt until I found her “Riksäpplet” (1941) at the library with its snippets about Uppsala, written in an older Swedish style, which I’m very taken with. And became more enthusiastic when I read about her life (admittedly a life-long Catholic but she had an abundance of redeeming features, anti-fascist among them). I’ve now moved on to her “Fröken Liwin” (1925) about the travails of an unmarried mother and mother-daughter relationships. My copy retrieved from the library cellar has a wonderful redolent black binding predating the standard library bindings of my youth. It’s stamped IOGT on the front underlying the teetotal salubriousness of my nocturnal activities and has an ancient sticker “Regler för boklån från Logen-Erentuna-Lyckas studiecirkelbibliotek” informing that “person som lånat en bok kan ej låna en annan utan att först hava återlämnat den förra”. When I’ve finished Fröken Liwin, I shall go on with her autobiographical “Kring ett äktenskap”, which I assume is about her second marriage to Ludvig Nordström, most remembered otherwise for “Lort Sverige”.

Whether Marika S will help me sleep is another matter. She is at least suffused with a light red light rather than blue light, which will perhaps help.

The brief taste of almost normal life during our cycle trip has made it hard for me not to think of covid-19-related restrictions now that I’m back in my flat. I’m eager to travel, to Germany and the UK, but realise that, if I’m going to be pent up somewhere, then my flat is the most practical place to be. I am, however, finding it hard to concentrate; I’m making good progress with Guy Shrubsole’s “Who owns England?” with its fascinating exposé of land ownership in England. But my other books are less satisfactory. I’m working my way through Richard Robert’s book on the City, a few years old now but still very informative. I would like to grasp its contents but all the various institutions and organisations are whirling around in my head and I need to read it several times, once quickly and then a careful plod. And I’ve also got into David Harvey’s book on “Marx, capital and the madness of economic reason”. It looks like just the book to read if one wants an overview of Marx’s Capital as part of an attempt to understand finance capital without immediately tackling all three volumes and the two or three additional works on surplus value. But I find myself losing the thread and again realise I have to read it quickly to get an overview and then start again.

At least I am making progress with Bengali. It’s still going very slowly but I try and do a bit everyday and am recognising more and more of the letters.

To reduce the feeling of being jaded, I need to be physically active. This morning was satisfactory on that front as I got started early (woken by workfolk doing preparatory work on urbanising a strip of parkland that my flat overlooks, giving me ample opportunity for exercises in self-discipline to keep Nimby at bay).  I cycled to the old church at Vaksala, on my list for a long time with one failed visit when a funeral was taking place. This time I went early and got in (before the rush hours). It’s a fine old church, mostly Gothic but with the remains of an old window in the south wall indicating its Romanesque origins.

There are very few monuments but the interior is livened by the mediaeval wall paintings of the Arentuna school, which are now on view after being covered up. The major sight is the fifteenth century altarpiece made in Antwerp (a bit before the Walloons started to come). I couldn’t find much information in the church about how the altar piece came to Sweden but there is an excellent guide to the altarpiece itself (see my facebook page for pics). There is supposed to be a severed hand, a symbol of Antwerp, in a number of places, but I couldn’t find it, neither standing in front of the altarpiece nor at home looking at a pic with a magnifying class. There were, however, plenty of other grisly details as the centre of the altarpiece showed the crucifixion and the side panels a collection of religious figures, saints, bishops and martyrs, often with an attribute indicating the way they died (a cauldron for a saint boiled to death and various unpleasant sharp objects). The freestanding figures are exquisitely carved and there’s a lot to learn from all the associations; I was grateful for the brochure’s literature list, including a reference to a licentiate thesis from 1958 on the altarpiece, which I shall try to get hold of (covid volente…).

Just back in Uppsala from our trip to the Walloon iron-making area, full of images of elegant country houses with water features and gardens within a few hundred metres of locations for hard dirty manual labour and pokey rooms, “labbies” where the work force slept during the working week. Were the country houses a later addition? I must try and check this.

I was also struck by the time scale. Iron-working facilities from the mid-seventeenth century, with well-resourced foreign entrepreneurs, swiftly naturalised, who imported skilled labour for rapid technical progress, recruited on the basis of contracts with paid travel and compensation fixed in money terms. This was at least two hundred years before Sweden industrialised in earnest.

It would be interesting to know what these early entrepreneurs did with their accumulated resources.

Part of the key to understanding this is that, although private entrepreneurs were used, the process was driven by the Crown (State) with the aim of providing funds and weaponry for Sweden’s ambitions to be a great European power. The main emphasis in other words is on obtaining articles of use rather than on the circulation of capital in search of continual expansion. It looks like full-blown capitalism with an industrial proletariat, technical advances, large sums invested but it isn’t.

It’s not clear from my sources the extent to which the De Geers had a monopoly of iron working in the areas where they were active. According to Kilbom’s “Vallonerna”, there seem to have been competitors and the poaching of imported labour was a problem. The Walloons were better compensated than the surrounding rural workers (unclear to what extent money was used for the latter or whether they rented farms partly in return for days of labour). The introduction by the De Geers of a certificate of good conduct as a prerequisite for employment gives an indication that the Walloon labour force may have engaged in collective activities not to their employer’s taste.

It took a long time before the Walloons were integrated into Swedish society. I’d like to know more about the social relations in the countryside. Local labour was needed by the Walloon enterprises for transport and preparing charcoal stacks, among other things. Who provided this labour and on what conditions and how was it compensated (tenant farmers with an obligation to provide labour?). I’ve read that Sweden didn’t experience a fully-developed feudal mode of production but I’d like to know more about what this description is based on and what it meant.

I found much of interest in Karl Kilbom’s “Vallonerna”, which, although it has considerable limitations (no footnotes), does take up interesting questions.

I couldn’t place him to start with but later realised that Kilbom was one of the founders of the Swedish Communist Party (before falling out of favour with the stalinists in the 1930s and eventually moving back to social democracy). He was of Walloon descent himself and this book was written late in life.

Kilbom writes a lot about the reasons for the Walloons coming to Sweden, and how this at one time was integrated into an anti-catholic dialogue, the Walloons being persecuted protestants finding a safe haven in protestant Sweden. I think he’s right to be critical of this perspective (the emphasis given to the religious aspects) although it would have been easier to convince me if he had not been so eager to prove the primacy of economic factors.

He also describes the changing attitudes of the Swedish church on how to deal with Calvinism among the immigrants and how the church was restrained from imposing orthodoxy if it led to discontent and turbulence among imported labour (at least until Queen Kristina’s flight to Rome, when there was a general tightening up of religious orthodoxy).

I found a closed museum of metallurgy but no museum which took up the history of the Walloon immigrants, their impact on the Swedish economy with a critical approach to the issues involved. Perhaps there is one – it was hard to judge as much was currently not open. But my general impression was that much more could be made of an area that is of great pedagogic, social and aesthetic interest, which at present has rather weak transport links and where it requires effort to extract information.

It’s anyway a good sign to return from a trip with more questions than when starting. And I feel in pleasantly good form after a week with a high level of physical activity (cycling and walking).

I’m preparing for a holiday to northern Uppland, the “Walloon” iron-making area.

Some of the questions going through my mind:

How many French-speaking Walloons came to Sweden in the seventeenth century?

What parts of present-day Belgium and France did they come from) (Liege and Sedan or elsewhere). Were they all protestants?  How many brought their families with them and how many stayed in Sweden? What exactly were their skills?

What made them come? What role did religion play? What role did economic factors play? State of evidence on these topics. Structure of academic work on the Walloon immigrants and issues in dispute.

The organisation of Walloon labour. Were there conflicts with the employers and how were these resolved? Or were they like Sheffield’s little meisters or “labour aristocrats”. The relationship between the Walloon immigrants and the existing rural population. Their subsequent integration.

Why did the Swedish kings want them to come: What were the technical improvements in iron making in the area around Liege, which were desirable?

Sweden’s need for metal in this period when Sweden was developing into a major power.

The background and motives of the investors/entrepreneurs who came, in particular the originally Dutch/Flemish (?). The relationship between De Geer and the Swedish establishment.

De Geer’s rapid naturalisation and becoming a Swedish aristocrat. Subsequent history of the De Geer family.

Early development of capitalism in the Netherlands. Reasons for investing in Sweden.

Relationship between this early industrialisation and its finance and the subsequent development of capitalism in Sweden and its late industrialisation.

Technical terms on mining and the iron industry in Swedish and English.

Exploring the environments around Dannemora and Lövsta and elsewhere.

My reading about the Walloons has been interspersed with a very interesting book about how the German city of Breslau became Polish Wroclaw, “Uprooted. How Breslau became Wroclaw during the century of expulsions” by Gregor Thum.

I have been fascinated by a long time by cities that have changed nationality, for example, Breslau, Stettin and Königsberg. Unlike Danzig where there was very much both a German and a Polish presence in the pre-war period, the Polish presence in Breslau was thin (it had been a Polish city but many centuries ago). According to Thum, it was not a city that Poland would have expected to receive in the post-war adjustments to the German-Polish border until it was transferred as compensation for Poland’s losses to the Soviet Union in the east (Lwow/Lvov etc). The expulsion of the German population and their replacement by people coming not just from Poland’s lost territory in the east but from many parts of Poland in the immediate post-war years meant that the city was repopulated by people with no relationship to the city nor in many cases to other incoming Poles. Some people of mixed parentage who were Polish and German speaking were allowed to remain but that was a rather thin layer of “heritage folk”.

What made matters worse was uncertainty about the durability of the arrangements agreed at Potsdam, whether the border would remain at the Oder-Neisse line in a world where there was great hostility between the Soviet Union and the western powers.

Thom describes the impressive reconstruction of the badly battered city at the same time as the “communist” Polish government made great efforts to stress that the transfer of Breslau to Poland was a justified restoration of a city that was fundamentally Polish and attempt to remove all vestiges of the German city; this led to there being an uneasy relationship with the history of the city, a tiptoeing around an absence not talked about, only alleviated once the German government stated its acceptance of the post-war borders and the collapse of the PCP and its need to stress the importance of the Soviet Union as the guarantor of the post-war arrangement.

The description of the process whereby it was decided to restore many historical buildings rather the prevailing idea at the time (as per Coventry Cathedral) which was not to do so as the result would be false. And, of course, in some ways it is false as the restored old facades are often just facades with a modern structure behind with internal arrangements quite unlike the historic. But it is not just aesthetics and architectural purity which is at stake but the responses of a population that had been subjected to an attempt to obliterate its culture and historical references. When wandering through the restored central streets of Gdansk, I found it pleasant and acceptable and wasn’t overpowered by a Disneyland feeling of artificiality (which I have felt in the Nikolaiviertel in Berlin and at Prince Charles’ extravaganza at Poundbury).

There are some fascinating quotes translated from Polish sources about what it felt like to move into a flat filled with the possessions of the previous German owners who had fled, like guests in someone else’s life.

It’s hard to conceive of the disappearance of a geographical area, not just its people but the knowledge handed down the generations of its culture, history, linguistic features etc. etc. And in the immediate post-war period and for a long time after, there wasn’t much sympathy for the German refugees from the East outside Germany after the horrors inflicted on Eastern Europe by the German army and state.

It felt good to go into a research library again though there were very few people around at Carolina Rediviva. I returned a book of Romain Rolland’s letters to Elsa Wolff, which I have had since those distant days before Covid-19 (a flashier person than me would have used the word “prelapsarian” here). I didn’t manage to establish whether it’s her signature on a signed book I have but I now know that she had sufficient knowledge of English to be able to read this book. And that it was probably not a present to her from Romain Rolland as the dates aren’t quite right. I’ll have to try to check her signature and see what other Elsa Wolffs I can find in the early twentieth century.

The weather is touch and go just now, unreliable; I decided to risk a soaking as a customer was late with a manuscript and I unexpectedly had time on my hands and badly needed exercise. So off I went on my bike through Luthagen, which is fast becoming part of “my” Uppsala, and past the cemetery, keeping my taphophilia in check (I still have a few calls to make). On my way back, I give into the temptation to buy an ice cream and sit by the river for a while (in principle, I don’t eat when I’m out). It’s a pleasant stretch by the kiosk where there used to be an old toll gate and where the “svart bäck”, the blackspring) tributary flows into the Fyris. Then to my post box where I was pleased to receive Gregor Thun’s “Uprooted. How Breslau became Wroclaw”. I’m fascinated by cities like Königsberg (Kaliningrad), Stettin (Szczecin) and Breslau (Wroclaw) which changed nationality and have wanted to read about the process of changeover. It’s hard for me to imagine what it would be like if Salisbury or Dorchester, for instance, became French.

I’ve spent some weeks reading the Cambridge Companion to the Bible. Not for religious reasons but because I’ve wanted to be able to find my way around the Bible better so that I know what I’m looking at when examining church art (for example, stained glass windows) and can better understand the way of thinking of those choosing the motives. I’ve been dissatisfied for a long time with the rag bag of odd bits and pieces of knowledge that my formal education equipped me with, the spectacular stories Adam and Eve, the Ark, Moses etc., without telling me much about the overall structure and intention of the work. I didn’t read much of the Bible itself – more about the interpretations by, above all German scholars about the age of the various parts, the relationship between history and myth, and the possible intentions and identities of the various editors. It’s an interesting book and the more I know about Christianity, the curiouser I find it. The two testaments seem an odd combination and the Trinity an uneasy device that creates endless problems. I felt I made some progress but by the time I got half way through the prophets I was losing momentum and felt an urge to return to the world of now so I went over to Piketty’s first book (which I thought I’d better read before buying his new book).

I was rather disappointed by Piketty. It’s undoubtedly a serious work with a lot of useful and interesting statistics, especially on the distribution of income, and, unlike much of modern economics, does tackle some important issues and offer a basis for discussion. But I found his analysis of capital fuzzy and he was closer to conventional economics in his values and way of thinking than I’d expected. He’s certainly not the 21^st century’s answer (or equivalent) to Marx. It says much about the barrenness of conventional economics that even a modest attempt at a serious discussion in a broader framework than conventional macro confers star status.

I stopped before I got to Piketty’s suggested solutions and contented myself with reading a couple of reviews, which confirmed my thoughts (and, of course, attracted my approval for their stringency…..).

Otherwise, I am reading about northern Uppland, the Walloons and the iron industry in preparation for a trip in that direction later in the summer. Discussions about pig iron and blast furnaces have left me rather cold in the past but I want to get a better idea of what went on and how the mining and refining of iron ore and other activities were connected (and master some of the terms used in the field). It seems an interesting part of Sweden which I’ve hardly looked at (other than what I have seen from the E4 or the railway). I realised the other day that the old spelling of Lövsta, Leufsta, could well be inherited from the Walloons as this would be the Walloon pronunciation.

It feels good to relax my isolation now even though I am continuing to be very careful. I noticed being by myself and focusing on my own planned projects that I tend to float away into my own time zone. I read for too many hours at a stretch, then get tired and sleep too much in the day. The other day I woke up refreshed and ready for my breakfast and the start of the day. After a while, I thought it was a bit dark and realised that it was 00.30 in the morning. And now it starts to feel not so much of a problem that I have to address but as an irritating intrusion, an unwanted intrusion of conventional attitudes into my time plan.

I should probably not be too creative with the circadian rhythm for reasons of mental hygiene; this “problem” will probably right itself once I have greater interaction with other people. I rate the chances of a sympathetic response to my operating on KSNLST (Kendall Standard Non-Linear Subjective Time) as poor….

Wednesday, 24 June

I’m going to “soften” my social isolation now and Day 100 seems like a good point to do it.

It’s not entirely rational as the threat from covid-19 is by no means over but maintaining isolation until (if?) a vaccine is available seems a tough prospect. It will, however, be softening with a small s as I am still going to be very careful, avoiding crowds, generally keeping my distance and wearing my last stand of the Zombies mask but I will at least meet my grandchildren outdoors.

The translation market has shown faint signs of life so I’ve had a bit to do. Otherwise as a major spare time activity, I’ve been reading the Cambridge Companion to the Bible. This not because my rugged materialist philosophy of life is crumbling from fear of the approaching reaper but because an ability to find one’s way around the Bible would be useful when looking at church art, to know better what I was looking at. Growing up in the 50s and 60s, you couldn’t help picking up some information about the book, but it was often of poor quality, disjointed presentations of more spectacular episodes (Samson, Jonas and the whale, Moses in the bullrushes, Noah’s ark and Adam and Eve), which didn’t give much of an idea of the structure of the Bible or any ideas about how the texts had been selected and edited.

The Cambridge Companion is more intended to be dipped into although I read it as a continuous text until I got half way through the various prophets when I got tired. I’ll do the same at a later date for the New Testament but I feel a need now to get back to current reality so I’m tackling Picketty’s Capital in the twenty-first century, which has been sitting on my must-read shelf for a good while.

I’m not discontented with my reading about the Bible, however – it’s given me a slightly better framework for my intended use and the ragbag of associations in my brain is better ordered.

The Bible is a curious book or rather a curious combination of books resulting from Christianity’s only partially successful takeover of the Jewish religion. It’s amusing to think of what could have been the result if Christianity had developed a similar relationship with the old Asa religion instead of supplanting it. Editing the Nordic sagas and combining them with a New Testament to form the basis of a religion would be a challenging occupation (the occasional brutality wouldn’t be too much of a problem as there are some pretty wild episodes in the Old Testament capable of getting God hauled up before the International Criminal Court in the Hague, which Christianity takes in its stride). I shall make a note of this as a rainy Sunday activity.

The Bible is also interesting from the point of view of translation as it made its way from Hebrew to Greek and Latin. I was attracted by the word “prophet”, ultimately from the Greek prophetes, an interpreter/spokesman. According to the Online etymology dictionary www.etymonline.com “The Greek word [prophetes] was used in Septuagint [the translation of the Bible from Hebrew into Greek] for Hebrew nabj, “soothsayer”. Early Latin writers translated Greek prophetes with Latin vates, but the Latinized form propheta predominated in post-Classical times, chiefly due to Christian writers probably because of pagan associations of vates…The Latin word is glossed in Old English by witga”.

All of these “vit” words go back to Sanskrit (wit, witness, “vidja” (knowledge) in Sanskrit.

Other words I’ve learnt in the past week or so are “tetragram” (four-letter word), “plangent” (loud and resonant noise with a mournful tone) and “prequel” (as the opposite to “sequel”), which makes me feel that I should have known it before but in fact didn’t.

I also have a somewhat clearer idea of the distinction between the figures of speech synedoche (“all hands on deck” where a part represents the whole) and metonymy (“Crown lands” where an associated word is used).  It’s probably not difficult to find examples where the distinction is difficult.

As I am now changing my social isolation, this will be my last Corona Diary blog post but I shall continue my blog “unnumbered”.