As you saw, if you read yesterday's blog, I got wiped out. I plugged in the commuter and went to bed. I spent this morning, all morning, at the dentist's and I'm cooking dinner for a friend who is coming at 6. So I have time to fill in a few blanks, still on about Icelandic literature. The tone of the sagas is what impresses me most. It is so laid back, so factual, so seemingly unemotional even when it describes the most harrowing events. The narrative never goes inside a person's head. We are told and we see what they are doing; we see but we don't hear their thoughts. It's sort of like play-writing, which is probably why I I lke it so much. With plays you don't have the many and various means available to a novelist to tell a story. With plays you have what a person says, what he does, and what other people say about him, keeping in mind that people are unreliable and not always truthful (a good trick). So there's no stream-of-consciousness. If you're lucky, you get a monologue such as Shakespeare wrote. Contemporary playwrights use the monologue a lot but they aren't Shakespeare. I digress. Where was I? Ah yes, the sagas.

Well, Snorri Sturluson wrote them down and for that we are grateful. Icelanders, like most early people, before reading, loved to be told stories, loved to hear the tales told around a fire in the dark, Icelanders more so, maybe, because the darkness lasted so long.

Oh dear, I wrote a lot more and I pushed the wrong button (again) and it's gone. It's too late now write it again. I'll try again tomorrow.

Sigh

You probably know that the Icelanders are the most literate people in the world. It's in my DNA: books, words, reading, thoughts, ideas. Yesterday I enjoyed an afternoon of talking about Icelandic books and literature, beginning with the sagas. We were lucky that the earliest stories were written down in Norse, not Latin, so that the material was available to common people when they learned to read the language they spoke. And Icelanders have remained purist in their attitudes to their spoken language today. (It is one of the most difficult modern languages to learn, I'll tell you, because it still declines and conjugates and presents masculine, feminine and neuter nouns with attached articles, too, all of which have to match. I've been working at it for a few years and I'm not fluent. It would help if I did more homework, i.e. studied.) So pure is the present-day language, in fact, that I am told a modern Icelander can pick up a saga in Old Norse and read it without a crib or dictionary.

Even though almost everyone in Iceland speaks English (and several other European languages) they had an argument with Microsoft several years ago when Bill Gates wanted to stay with English in his programming because everyone in Iceland would understand it. But that would have meant that students and younger people coming on would not be as attached to their native language as they should be. I don't know who was arguing, the government or sales force or social media, but Iceland won and got their computer programs in Icelandic. BTW I have an Icelandic keyboard I can switch to for my Icelandic work.

I started this too late and he battermy power is about to give out. Mi