In the interests of research for a book I'm intending to write and make, (yes, really make - by hand), I've just spent a couple of days at a seminar organised by the Viking Identities Network at Nottingham University entitled Language, Texts and Gender in the Viking Diaspora. It may not sound exciting to you, but I really enjoyed it. Admittedly, there were papers which I could hardly understand let alone benefit from, but one called Text and Textiles summoned up wonderful connections between what was woven and what was spoken. And as for those Viking burials, I had never before recognised the huge amount of work involved: all that food to be assembled, all those horses to be killed and butchered. Indeed, it was being suggested that such occasions were indeed performances, a concept I found totally believable.
The seminar was held at Beaumont Hall at the University of Leciester, situated in the Botanic Gardens. Feeling Vikinged-out at one point, I escaped and made my way to a beacon of natural loveliness - a magnolia in full blossom.
Back in Suffolk I'm embarking on Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter, a trilogy first published in 1930. It's set in 14th century Norway, and though this is well past the Viking era, I reckon that the changes to peasant life in rural fjordland would not be pronounced.
The person who recommended this book to me was not a Viking scholar at the conference, but someone at Norwich University College of the Arts where we are both studying. Not only is Chris a textile artist but she is Norweigan. Over a cup of coffee we discovered that her father and my brother had both worked on a Norweigan whaling ship, the Balaena. My brother Gordon, when newly qualified as a marine zooologist, was the scientific officer, and Chris's father was a flenser - one of the men who slices the blubber off the whales with huge knives on poles, a bit like a scythe. Now this seems appalling, but fifty years ago there was a big market for whale oil.
So, my life feels a bit Norse and Nordic at present, and that pleases me.
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Tinkers ~ Paul Harding
18 hours ago
2 comments:
The Vikings were whalers too so perhaps some of their blood runs in you. Do you feel a kinship in making your book?
I do indeed feel a connection with people of the north. Perhaps I'm a Celt - or at least a bit of one, and the book I'll be making is certainly not a random choice. It's going to be called The Other Vikings, a phrase in which the word "other" means women.
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