_Warrior Lore_ (Cumpstey): Seven Reasons to Love It.

Ian Cumpstey, Warrior Lore: Scandinavian Ballads (2014)

1.  The translated lyrics flow smoothly, with a feeling of great simplicity-- which no doubt took lots of skill and effort to cultivate!  Translator Ian Cumpstey spent eight years in Sweden, where he absorbed the language and marveled at the integration of music into daily life.

[If you'd like to hear a sample read aloud, Skadi Press has posted "Widrick Waylandsson's Fight" to Soundcloud-- and I think you'll agree that the reader's charming accent does no harm!  Oh, I'm such an American.]

2.  The lyrics themselves are front and center.  Short intros to each ballad enhanced my appreciation without overburdening me (a casual reader) with scholarly detail: Cumpstey provides a helpful summary, and then lets the ballad speak (or sing?) for itself.

3.  There's something shattering about a tale of great trauma rendered so simply and directly...!  Although as gory as Grimm's tales, many of these medieval songs evoke remarkable compassion in few words.  For example, the ballad "Hilla-Lill" tells the fate of a lady who-- by consenting to an unsuccessful elopement-- furthered the slaughter of her father, lover, and six of her brothers:

"My brother he wanted to have me killed,
My mother she wanted to have me sold.

"And so I was sold for a bell so new,
It hangs in the church of St. Mary now. 

"My mother she heard the chime of the bell,
And broken her heart into pieces fell." 

Along the same lines...

4.  Female suffering is voiced.  These songs don't posit that fairytale women will live happily ever after, Disney style.  Rather, the wives and daughters of legendary knights can-- and do-- lose all that is dear to them in a single battle; and even a lasting marriage can be far from romantic.

"Yes you took my serving girl,
And lay on the pillows of blue,
But me you've pulled me by my hair,
And cursed and beaten too,"

Elin accuses her husband from her deathbed.  She refuses to forgive him-- and who could blame her?  (Well, the Victorians.  Maybe.)

5.  Still, the women of these ballads aren't saintly.  After Cumpstey's introduction described one young lady as "playing hard to get," I had to laugh out loud-- for she'd posted her suitors' severed heads on stakes outside her home!  Yet the gentlemen callers kept right on coming.

6.  Oh yes--and there's humor, too.  Really!  For example, a crossdressing Thor nearly gives away his game by revealing a less than delicate appetite.  (I enjoyed this version of Thor's famous search for his lost hammer-- the only tale remotely familiar to me, by the way!  All else was new.)

7.  Homeschool potential.  I could imagine high school students using this work to ease into early literature, or to sample from a different cultural context.  Each ballad and its introduction read easily in one brief sitting, yet offer plenty of material for thought and discussion.

Happy Friday! Thank you for visiting, and please drop by This Ain't the Lyceum for more Quick Takes.

Disclosure:  The author/translator gifted me a Kindle copy of this work in exchange for my honest review.

Edelweiss, secret journals, and more Quindlen brilliance~ Quick Takes, September 26

1. Two sick kids. One with a possible UTI (and candy-pink antibiotics), the other with some oddball bug that mimics strep throat but would scorn to be so obvious.  It's there in her bloodstream, laughing at us... So if I seem a bit loopy, blame sleep deprivation! No, they're not sleeping. You've all been there, right?

Conversion Diary

2. As the children and I feel utterly drained, we've leaned on video for the past two days... I know, I know, it's so unhealthy. But for now let's overlook that point and smile, because-- their new video obsession is The Sound of Music! These two and three-year-olds would love to have "The Lonely Goatherd," "Edelweiss," and "So Long, Farewell" on continuous replay... Frankly, I can't think of a more comforting movie for cranky, lethargic moods (including my own here)! Perhaps my girls have noticed that this one makes mama happy-- and therefore indulgent?

3. Despite illness, my feisty three-year-old found the energy to upbraid Rolf (of "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" and subsequent scenes). "If you don't stop being a Nazi RIGHT NOW," she threatened, role-playing Liesl, "I'm going to run up that mountain into SWITZERLAND and you'll never ever ever see me again!"

We really don't have to worry about her (much), do we?

Image: Open Library

4. My daughters' interest in The Sound of Music moved me to place a hold on Maria von Trapp's The Story of the Trapp Family Singers.

5.  Also, I received a review copy for the first time... Ok, ok, it's from Crown's Blogging for Books program, which just about any blogger can join-- but still, there's an ego boost in it.  (Yay, my opinion has value in a barter economy!)

And so, I look forward to reading The Secret Journal of Ichabod Crane (Sleepy Hollow), which apparently is connected with a TV series?  Never seen it.  Have you?

6.  Currently, I'm reading Anna Quindlen's Black and Blue-- a story of an abused wife who, having fled her husband (a big-city police detective), is now hiding out with her 10-year-old son under an assumed name.  While piecing together a new life for herself and her emotionally-damaged child, she also waits in terror for her husband's reappearance...  No flimsy Lifetime movie, this novel is slow, tense, character-driven, and filled with astounding turns of phrase that I itch to underline (but can't, since it's from the library).

Image: Open Library

7.  As example of the above, take this description of a supermarket:

"Jets of water sprayed the peppers and plums so that they seemed irresistible, more like art objects than produce.  In one corner was a pharmacy, in another a bank, in the third a bakery section that gave off the smell of cinnamon unexpectedly as you came upon it, like one of those perfume inserts in a magazine."(p.91)

Like one of those perfume inserts in a magazine.   How I wish that I could write like Anna Quindlen!


Happy Friday!  Thanks for stopping by.

Seven Books I Want to Read (or Read Again)

For this week's Quick Takes (hosted by Conversion Diary) I'm selecting seven titles from my "To Read Soon" list.  Here goes:

1. My mom recommends A Discovery of Witches (Harkness)... And so be it!

(Sorry, bad joke.  I really am looking forward to this one!!  Mom's engrossed, and our tastes tend to coincide... The book is on my Kindle as I type.)

2.  Embers (Marai)....I read this novel once before, and found it achingly beautiful!  It's the story of unlikely childhood friends whose social and psychological differences separate them painfully in adulthood.  All of this is an allegory for the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire-- but the tale is so simply yet richly told that its political dimension never thwarted my enjoyment.  In other words, while I'm not invested in the fate of Austria-Hungary, I do care about these characters.

3.  The Doctor's Wife (Braddon)... Immersed in romance novels, the title character is bored with her marriage to a nice-guy doctor.  A British Madame Bovary?  I'm intrigued.

4.  Black and Blue (Quindlen).... Because I loved Still Life with Breadcrumbs.

5. Popular: Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Geek (van Wagenen)... Written by a fifteen-year-old (!), this memoir describes the author's application of a '50s-era popularity guide to the middle-school social scene.  My friend Shannan recommends it, so I'm game!

6. I Capture the Castle (Smith).... Years ago, I saw a film version of this coming-of-age tale set in 1930s' Britain.  I never forgot it and always meant to read the book someday, er, now.

7.  The End (Scibona)  ...A re-read, because-- while the author's use of language is astoundingly brilliant (something to savor on every page)-- in the end  I'm not quite sure that I "got it."  Time to try again!  This novel was a finalist for the National Book Award.


Thanks for dropping in.  Happy Friday, everyone!

Still Life with Bread Crumbs (Quindlen), first impressions

Anna Quindlen, Still Life with Bread Crumbs: A Novel(New York: Random House, 2014).

While I'm no more than a third of the way into Anna Quindlen's Still Life with Bread Crumbs, I must say that it had me at  "the Walmart squatting aggressively just off the highway" (p.4), because-- yes, there is something in-your-face about a rural Walmart, isn't there?

So far, this is the story of a once-celebrated photographer whose fame (and royalties) have dwindled away, leading her to relocate from NYC to a mildewy small-town cottage in the hope of saving money and rekindling inspiration.  And so far, also, what I'm loving about it is Quindlen's ability to indict phoniness-- in this case, urbane intellectual posing-- without sounding like a teenager.

Refreshingly, the photographer, Rebecca Winter, doesn't overthink her own art.  "She mainly found her good work to be accidental, and immediate.  She shot Ben's toy truck, the garlic press and the cutting board. . . . And somehow, sometimes, it worked."  A moment later:  "She had not labored over them [photographs], or transformed them with the gift of her eye, at least not so she could tell.  She just felt them." (pp. 78-79)

I have the sense that Rebecca had used to feel inferior to the academic crowd; and that now, in her 60s, she has matured beyond that need to impress.

Another bit that I especially liked, on climbing trees:  "It was harder than warrior pose in yoga, than teaser in Pilates, than the elliptical or the Reformer.  Rebecca thought that if no one had thought of it yet, soon enough someone in the city would spearhead a craze for tree climbing in Central and Prospect Parks, and it would become the talk of every cocktail party: have you tried that large oak by the Sheep Meadow?  Oh, it completely changed my body."  (p.82)

And this made me chuckle:  "It was one of those statements that sounded sensible until you compared it against actual human psychology."  (p. 101)

The book's pace reminds me of cool, flowing water.  I'm enjoying it.