Patreon Vocabulary This Week: Hafa/Past Participles (Patreon)

The next Old Norse lesson Patreon gets before the rest of my audience is no. 14, which covers verbs of the hafa "have" type, plus past participles ("done, given, taken").

I'd like to remind you also that on my website, there is a list of videos organized into broad groups by playlist/topic (e.g. Norse mythology, Old Norse lessons, etc.). If you look at the list of Old Norse lessons, there's a link next to each one that I've posted so far with "Patreon extras." That link brings you to the post on Patreon where you can navigate to the extra Patreon video about the topic, as well as (for videos that aren't public yet) the private advance Vimeo link for Patreon supporters. I hope that this goes some way to eliminating the chaos that can ensue from Patreon's blog-like setup that makes it hard to find a specific thing you're looking for.

I've never done a good job of informing people that my website and that list exists (maybe I ought to try mentioning it at the beginning of new videos), but be sure to check that if you're looking for more on a given topic. With hundreds of videos (I'm not even sure what the total is), I've covered more than a little ground.

Speaking of which, I've had some complaints on Patreon about the limited number of videos dealing with myth lately. I'm not sure what to say to this except that the longest playlist of all on my channel is still Norse mythology; there have been plenty of months with nothing but videos on myth. If I have to reflect, though, one reason for the lower number lately is just that while I'm actively spending hours a day working on my class for The Great Courses on Norse Mythology, I'm retreading ground that I've already tread (sometimes repeatedly) on the channel--which means I'm not dealing with much material that would be new to you. 

To be frank, I had also been misled by how often viewers requested Old Norse lessons in the past into thinking that the Old Norse lesson series would be more popular than it has been. Since those videos are relatively easy for me to prepare (not always to edit), I've been making a lot of them while so much of my day is taken up with work for The Great Courses and Ubisoft. 

So to some extent there's a cyclical nature to it, and to some extent the videos I make are occasioned by something else I'm working on (remember the detailed readthrough of Hávamál I did while I was finishing The Wanderer's Hávamál?). But mutatis mutandis, I pay a lot of attention to what you request on Patreon, and what questions you ask and what points you raise. Over time, I try to make videos that respond to these, but the turn-around can be pretty slow. For example, the editing work on just my recent Indo-European video took 42 hours--hopefully worthwhile since it's such a central, important topic, and my old video about it never really met my standards. That's on the extreme end, but preparing, filming, and editing these videos is still a one-man show, and with many other obligations I'm almost never able to turn a topic request into a posted video very fast (the exception was the Rök runestone thing during Christmas vacation).

I hope that contributes to giving you some picture of how and why there can seem to be a "glut" of certain topics and a dearth of others during a given month. But of course, some of that can be pretty random as well, and sometimes it's just that I can't make as many videos (or make videos that are as long, or take as much editing) because of something else going on (Covid restrictions have made it harder to film in some areas, for example) or because of other deadlines.

For now, thanking you dearly for your continued support this week, and wishing you all the very best,

Jackson Crawford