If you'd like a good read for free, here's The Saga of Hrolf Kraki

[JVS]

It's an enjoyable book.

http://www.northvegr.org/lore/oldheathen/034.php

[Jackpine Radical]

1. It's been years since I've read that stuff.

I think I still have copies of most of the sagas & of course the elder edda. I expect to have the time beginning next year to read the old stuff again. I love it. It takes you into a mindset so incredibly different from the mechanistic mindset of modernity...

(For some reason I seem to have been alliterating all night)

[JVS]

2. I gotta get off DU soon. I have 5000 lines of "Erec" to read by monday.

I read Hrolf Kraki today, it was especially fun when I got to the part that I had translated from Old Norse last semester. Last week was the Volsung saga. I'm thinking of writing about the concept of Incest and Noble Blood for this semester, because it seems that when the family tree collapse in these stories, the offspring is very powerful, quite opposite of the modern view on inbreeding.

[Jackpine Radical]

3. I have struggled through the ON, but only with a modern-language

translation at hand. Preferably English, but I can make do with one of the modern Scand. languages if I have to.

Just as an item of curiosity, you might want to humor me by having a look at a book I wrote years ago:

www.amazon.com/gp/product/0850307651/102-0204730-6237778?v=glance&n=283155

[JVS]

5. My Norse Prof. knew the guy who wrote "Rune Might" under...

another name. His true identity was discovered and it ruined his academic career.

[Jackpine Radical]

6. Ak, ja. Thorsson, a pen name for Flowers.

Actually, I don't think all that much of Flowers/Thorsson's work, Too much influenced by that late 19th-cent. German occult romanticism, IMHO.

I didn't know about Flowers' academic career. I did know he was a PhD. Too bad, really. Unfortunately, Scandinavian academics are a rather humorless lot, and they almost seem to want to hide the pagan past out of shame. My little book is on a Norwegian academic blacklist created to warn people off from the writing of people like me--a fact I find pretty funny, all-in-all.

[Jackpine Radical]

4. I think Poul Anderson wrote a novel based on Hrolf Kraki's Saga.