A 2nd Conversation with Dr. Natalie Van Deusen! And a video sneak peek. (Patreon)

I'm pleased to announce that Dr. Natalie Van Deusen will be joining us for another live conversation. This time she's planning to talk mostly about some subjects we've barely covered here before, especially the rímur (later medieval Icelandic rhyming poems that often rework material from other stories) and the broader question of how the sagas were transmitted in the later medieval and post-medieval time periods. This is a good follow-up topic to both our earlier conversation with her and to the most recent conversation with Dr. Ármann Jakobsson.

This live conversation for Patreon will begin at 1:00 p.m. U.S. Mountain time on this Sunday, March 13th. The Zoom link is at https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/94349276626 with passcode: rimur

On another subject, while I'm not posting any videos publicly this week, I'm still working hard on all the usual projects (videos, the next book, e-mails I received a month or two ago). One video that I thought I'd give you early access to is a remake and expansion of one of the oldest videos still on the public channel: "How to Use an Old Norse Dictionary." This is a tough topic in a sense, because to me it's virtually second nature, and I have to think about ways in which it's not obvious to someone new to looking at, especially, the Cleasby-Vigfússon dictionary. 

The C-V isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and I was kind of surprised at how much of my own annoyance with it comes across in this video. But it's an irreplaceable tool, because it took an eccentric like Guðbrandur Vigfússon (with help from Konráð Gíslason) to sit down and write all that out and still be cited 150 years later as the most comprehensive dictionary of Old Norse (or Icelandic--unmodified by an adjective like "Old"--as he insisted on calling it). 

Maybe if the University of Copenhagen's Dictionary of Old Norse Prose is completed one day, it will surpass the C-V in some respects, especially in comprehensive documentation of prose. But I have a lot of respect for the weird, and weirdly personal, tome that the C-V is, regardless of how many of those weird particularities drive me up the wall. For all I know, the Wanderer's Hávamál is to someone else what the C-V is to me, though obviously that's a work on a much smaller scale.

So if the huge dictionary exasperates me, it's the exasperation of someone who has used it so much and so long. I hope that comes across in this video, which aims to make the maze of its hundreds of pages a little more accessible to the beginning student. You can get a lot out of this dictionary even at the very beginning of your studies of Old Norse, if you know what to expect from it. Perhaps even Prof. Van Deusen will have some remarks on it; it's hard to get a degree from a graduate program in this field and not have some kind of strong feelings about this dictionary.

As usual, thank you for your continued generosity, support, and kindness, and all the best,

Jackson Crawford

P.S. Patreon messages don't work. I don't get  notifications for them, and there's nothing on my home page to show me   when there is or isn't a  message. I can't even always see them when I   check for them manually,  and you won't see it if I reply! This week  the best ways to get  in touch are just a) to comment on posts like  this, or b) to post in the Community page.