There was wind. There was threatening rain. There was a storm on the ocean, a storm strong enough to keep our guest speaker from Seattle, David Johnson, from joining us. Two days in a row, the Clipper catamaran’s run between Seattle and Victoria has been canceled. However, he sent a message encouraging us all to attend the INL weekend of fun and frolic in Seattle this coming spring. I made a short speech encouraging people to attend. I
In 1851, according to Statistics Canada, there were 2,436,297 people in Canada. Of those, only 318,079 lived in an urban environment. 2,118,218 people lived in rural areas. That
There
I have reached an age where there is not much that I need or want. It makes me a difficult father and grandfather at gift giving time. I can just hear my kids saying,
I can’t find a suitable winter picture of my grandparent’s house so high summer will have to do.
There we are, the lot of us. I can
In Black Skies, Arnaldur Indridason
Nancy Marie Brown. Song Of The Vikings. New York: palgrave macmillan, 2012. 239 pages.
There are books I read quickly, racing through the sentences, the paragraphs, the pages. There are books I read slowly, not because the language is clumsy but because nearly every page gives me something to think about, to ponder. The Song of the Vikings by Nancy Marie Brown is one of those books that I have read slowly, that I will read again and, probably, again. I wish it had been written fifty years ago when I was a university student and was taking an evening non-credit course, the sagas in translation, with Haraldur Besseson in Winnipeg.
The sagas are wonderful stories. As Brown tells us in the preface that in the later 1920s, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were debating what the curriculum should be for English majors at Oxford University. C.S.Lewis was all for Shakespeare. Tolkien thought the students should be studying the works of Snorri Sturluson.
It is details like this that engage the reader of Brown
What the Bear Said: Skald Tales of New Iceland
(from The Goose Issue 11 2012 page 98)
by W.D. VALGARDSON
Turnstone, 2011 $19.00
Reviewed by JOHN JOHANSEN
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
I stumbled into university because I had a summer job with a group of guys from a higher social class than me. Their fathers were doctors and lawyers or had good permanent jobs and the families lived in areas like River Heights. When the grades came out, they said to me,
When I was reading and commenting on Wakeful Nights, Vidar Hreinsson
