Only every few years, as I understand it, UConn offers an English Seminar in Viking Age literature, this time taught by the very reliably well-humored Prof. T. Kohanski.  Though few sources have survived the last thousand years of Icelandic, well, ice, most preserve similar bits of traditional history, and so there are really only about a half-dozen major works to read through, most from the 13th or 14th century.

I’ll pause there, and put to rest any worries there might be about the abundance of content.  He who is the son of Gunnar of Hlíðarendi is the grandson of Hamund and Rannveig, whose father Sigfus was son to Sighvat the Red, who, through Mord Gigja, Unn, and Valgard the Grey is related to Jorund the Godi, son of Hrafn the Foolish, son of Valgard, son of Aevar, son of Vemund the Eloquent, son of Thorolf Pus-Nose, son of Thrand the Old, and finally, to Hraerek the Ring-Scatterer, father to Harald War-Tooth and grandfather to Thrand the Old.  If you’ve managed to remember what that was a description of before you look up a few lines to check, I applaud you sincerely.  If you haven’t, don’t worry.  I used the chart in the back of the Penguin translation of Njal’s Saga.

So, in the course of studying such uniquely specialized histories, we find that there is historical corroboration for the events and locations mentioned in the sagas.  The Anglo-Saxon chronicle and other regional histories confirm battle dates and the locations of democratic meetings called “things.”  I’ve been in the habit lately of curiously investigating as many photographs of legendary locations as I can find, and they’ve turned out to be dazzlingly beautiful.

Connecticut tends to have such dense and wide-spread foliage coverage that you can’t see more than a few dozen yards in any direction.  But Iceland has no such trouble.  They haven’t really ever had that many spare trees.  (We know from the complaints of the fresh immigrants, who were reduced to importing lumber from Norway.)

Anyway, my recommendations are as such:

1.) Find the church at Hlíðarendi, Iceland, the property once owned by Gunnar Hamundarson, of Njal’s Saga.

Hlíðarendi

2.) Find the Law Rock in Þingvellir, Iceland.

Þingvellir

3.) And for a modern addition, see the Sverde i Fjell monument in Hafrsfjord, Norway.

Sverde i Fjell

4.) Let the sensation of overwhelming beauty inspire you to help another living unit.  Writing them a nice poem counts.

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When was the Western idea of the poetry reading invented?

I imagine the first “poetry readings” were done around fires and at night (naturally, as was everything in my over-idealized notion of what it was to be a neanderthal). Was the poetry done to music, was it a precursor to music, was it music to begin with? I don’t know, because I wasn’t alive then. I should mention now, to make it pretty clear, that this entire blog is speculative.

I’ll guess I’ll just jump thousands of years into the future and end up somewhere like 1000 BC with Homer. Poetry readings must have been more or less big public events, where bards, fashioned like the criminally insane (and probably very, very drunk) just kind of went off of crowd reaction and spun wild narratives. Yes, believe it or not, this woman turned all of the men into pigs–and then there was a cyclops . . .

Jesus Christ himself was a poet and gave readings all the time, but they were very short and people found him too “radical” or whatever.

Things continued in this manner, with Vikings and Medieval dudes (what a crude sense of history I have). When good old Gutenberg came along, things would change forever. Memorization? Psshaw! Now you can just read right off the page! Shakespearean plays could be considered poetry readings, but not very “modern” ones, considering all that worthless memorization. At least those readings had dirty jokes strewn throughout them (oh Shakespeare, you dog!).

What next? Milton must have given some version of a reading  to whoever the hell wrote down Paradise Lost. What’s cool about Milton is he was “old-school” where Shakespeare was just outdated. Milton would yarn-spin just like those old Greek bards, and he was blind. Maybe he was Homer, disguised as a Puritan.

I’m just going to skip the Romantics. But telling from Wordsworth’s Prelude when he gets drunk with some boarders and they all sing and dance around a table, as well as some things mentioned in Keats’s letters, they seemed a rowdy bunch and their poetry readings were probably pretty fun. Who wouldn’t party with Lord Byron, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”?

I imagine it wasn’t until the 20th century that poetry readings became unutterably dull. I’m going to blame T.S. Eliot, simply for the sake of it (I know no reason for doing this).

Jump ahead a few more years: The Beats tried to make poetry “hip” again, but just being in a room with Jack Kerouac made too many people uncomfortable. I’m pretty sure Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder went on to do silly festival readings, where each would dress up like members of the Grateful Dead.

It seems as though the poetry reading may be dead (isn’t it fun making vague generalizations?). The days of the Romantic poetry party are long gone, and now we are stuck with the “academic” reading, in which every member of the audience politely shrugs or “hmmms” after every poem. Cocked eyebrows are a necessity and if you even think of shouting out of exuberance (this does not ever really happen, but it could, I guess) you will be considered to be “trying too hard.” You will listen very intently to the first four lines, trying to picture everything in front of you, but then start thinking about how amazing it was that dinosaurs existed on earth for as long as they did. The poet will usually say something completely useless between each of his or her poems: “This is about a toilet I met” or “You had to be there.” Many will attempt jokes: one out of every twenty poets is also a comedian. God bless the musician-poet, who likes to strum a little ditty on their zither between poems (a move introduced by Yeats).

Obviously, this is written very tongue in cheek, and grossly exaggerated–I recently went to a reading I very much enjoyed (but I still did not shout, though I wanted to). But why don’t I have fun at readings?

And I mean real, genuine, fun. Where’s the crazy Homers who just say things magically strung together by loose narrative and a music that cannot be touched (even if only for its spontaneity?) Maybe slam poetry? I still feel like I have to be pretty proper at slam poetry readings too, but I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a good one. Maybe I’ve never really been to a good poetry reading in general. But still, where is the Romantic poetry party? Where’s the fire and the night?

Maybe I made it all up . . .

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I’ve been thinking about the way I have been recently reading. For school assignments, I have to designate times of day to read novels and figure out how long it takes me to read a certain amount of pages. Although reading should be a leisurely task, when assigned, I find it more of a chore than a pleasure.

When I read a book for fun, page numbers don’t matter and I get lost in the story. When I was an early teen, I picked up the Lord of the Rings trilogy and finished it within six months. On that turning point for me, I went to my mother to tell her of my accomplishment, and she immediately instructed me to begin Gone With the Wind. Incredulous, and taken aback (because she didn’t congratulate me on my feat), she assigned me fifty pages a day of the Margaret Mitchell novel, and since it was summer time, I had no excuse not to spend each day immersed in a book.

Because I was instructed to read, I automatically hated the book. It wasn’t until several months later that I eventually got the gist of the story and fell in love with the characters and the Old South. Here is the question: should we force ourselves to read, even though we would rather be doing something else? Will we eventually learn to love the story, even if we have to turn off our computers and cellphones for three hours? For some, it is a mindless decision: of course I want to read! There are some who have never had a problem with reading anything they are given, but there are others for whom it is a laborious task, especially for school assignments.

I’ve often had to read endless pages of women’s studies work, classical reading and hand-outs on boring topics, and those are the times in which I glance at the clock and find my eyes continuously falling to the bottom of the page to see how far I have come. Other readings, such as short stories or Harry Potter will be finished in a flash and leave me pining for more.

Maybe it depends on the actual work, but as much as I love to engage myself in a fantasy, I know once I graduate from college and have distractions throughout my day, I will notice the books collecting dust on the bookshelf. I will always want to read, and maybe I will have to put myself on a schedule to actually get it done. Some of us can read without looking at it as a chore, but others may need a fire lit under our asses to get the brain churning and the mind to open up.

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            This week is the week of celebration for the Iranian New Year: “Norouz”. I am 100 percent Iranian but born and raised here in the US therefore, I decided to check one of these events out. Last night I saw the movie “Warring Factions”, which was a documentary film about an Iranian-American Break Dancer who travels to Iran to battle an Iranian Break Dancer. Before seeing the movie, I read a small summary of the film and was wondering why they would choose this of all movies.  Why would they choose a break-dancing documentary to bring awareness of Iran’s culture?
            This is why one should never judge a movie by its cover. This film only gave a taste of Break-Dancing and a full serving of many other aspects of Iran and America. I felt a large connection with this film. It showed the points of views the American Republicans and Iranians had on each other. Most of the American Republicans interviewed felt it was necessary to start a war to defend America before Iran attacked them. While some of the Iranians they interviewed believed that America uses excuses such as “helping Iran’s government” to in reality, help out their own country. This, along with many other viewpoints, was displayed throughout the film. The film also showed the reality of Homeland Security. That was what helped me connect the most. My father lives in Iran and when he comes to visit us, he goes through a very similar interrogation as the man in the film did as well. Homeland Security has been brutal to my father, treating him like a terrorist, or any other type of criminal. It always angers me to hear what he goes through, and I am glad that this was finally displayed to others.
            It was nice to see that a lot of people showed up to this film and could see not only people’s view points, but can finally create somewhat of their own. This film showed the culture of Iran and gave the audience a nice taste of it.  It showed that Iran is a country like anywhere else and making people realize that there are good and bad people in any culture and country. I am always glad to see that minds can be opened through films like these and I do hope that it did make that impact on audiences. This documentary contained humor, entertainment, and a lot of knowledge- I would fully recommend it to anyone who likes to learn more about different cultures. I think that a book could not truly capture those aspects of Iran’s culture and the impact of 9/11 on certain people’s minds and lives, like the way this documentary did.

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