Reading in the room - a glimpse from Dublin

 

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Dublin for the first time, and participated in a seminar (for more on which, see previous blogpost). I have been wanting to visit Ireland for a long time, and as - I believe - most Europeans I have grown up with a range of different cultural impulses that have shaped my idea of the country, its history, and its culture. Thanks to these impulses, Ireland is to me synonymous with books, and one of my priorities was to purchase a collection of Irish poetry. However, I also went about this mission with a certain apprehension about the necessity to keep a certain balance between my enthusiasm for Irish literature in general, and the rather appalling tendency to romanticize and exoticize Ireland, its inhabitants, and its cultural heritage. I wanted to avoid falling into generalizing raptures about how Ireland is a land of letters and how ubiquitous poetry is there. Largely I was successful in this, although Dublin itself did its best to sway me, such as when I walked past a farrier in an alley, over whose door was written a quotation from Seamus Heaney's poem 'The Forge'. 

In the end, I did go to Hogges Figges, and quite excitedly sought out their poetry selection. I was not entirely sure what to expect, so I was ecstatic to find an annotated facsimile of the first edition of William Butler Yeats' collection The Tower. Not only is it a beautiful book, but, more importantly, it was a complete volume of verse, something I have struggled to find in the case of Yeats, since his popularity has ensured that there have been printed many selections and incomplete anthologies, while his individual books have been more neglected. Overjoyed by this find, I went to a pub and sat down to have a cup of tea, whiling away the time in a very pleasant way before meeting a friend for lunch. It was a short while, about half an hour, but there was something at once so quintessential and yet unromanticized about the feeling of reading Yeats in a pub which etched the memory into my brain. 

Lectures from the Festival of History - St Olaf: An international Norwegian Saint (Dublin, 2023)

 
This October, I had the tremendous honour of being invited to participate in this year's Viking Seminar, a part of the annual Festival of History in Dublin. The topic for the seminar was the figure of Saint Olaf and the international character of his cult, as it spread widely across Northern Europe shortly after he was proclaimed a saint in 1031. Participating in this seminar was an absolutely marvellous experience, and I was delighted to be part of the line-up, especially because the various presentations connected very well with one another in terms of the topics and the details explored in them, and also because the line-up was comprised of very lovely people. 

As the seminar was a public event, the lectures were also recorded, and they are available on YouTube, thanks to the Dublin City Libraries. Consequently, instead of repeating my words unduly and unnecessarily, I give you the link for the whole seminar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD059xzw3CA. 

Celebrating Nynorsk, celebrating Jon Fosse

 


Today it was announced that the recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature 2023 is the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, and the most likely and anticipated Norwegian candidate to receive the prize. The choice of Jon Fosse was therefore not a surprise, but it was great and very welcome news, and it has made me very happy. My excitement about the prize does not have much to do with Jon Fosse himself. I have so far only read one of his plays - Nokon kjem til å komme (Somebody is going to come) - which is also arguably his best known work, at least in Norway. I appreciate this play more than I can claim to like it, and my satisfaction about having read it stems more from its cultural significance than my personal enjoyment. This is a convoluted way of saying that I do not have a strong personal attachment to Jon Fosse's oeuvre. Nor does my excitement stem from the fact that the recipient is from Norway, as there are numerous Norwegian writers I do not care about - and one that I actively dislike to the point that I would have become genuinely angry if he were to have been chosen by the Nobel committee.

Rather, the excitement I feel today is because Jon Fosse is the first Nobel laureate in literature who writes in Nynorsk, the minority form of the two official forms of written Norwegian. (We have no official spoken form.) Nynorsk is my own primary written language, and one that constitutes a massive part of my own identity as a rural Norwegian, a Western Norwegian, and a speaker of a certain dialect which is most closely aligned with Nynorsk. Moreover, since Nynorsk is a minority form, it is also a form that is constantly struggling against neglect or even overt antagonism from various agents in Norwegian society, such as certain political parties or youth organizations of political parties who wish to remove Nynorsk as a compulsory part of the syllabus in Norwegian schools. Most of the national media in Norway is written in Bokmål rather than Nynorsk - Bokmål being the dominant form and more closely aligned with urban and Eastern Norwegian dialects - and the vast majority of books printed in Norway are in Bokmål. Foreigners coming to Norway have typically been most likely to receive study materials in Bokmål, even if they live in a municipality where Nynorsk is the official form of Norwegian. In short, Nynorsk is under constant pressure. 

Due to the pressure against Nynorsk as a written language and its use within Norwegian society, the choice of a Nynorsk-writing author for the Nobel Prize is to provide a globally accessible recognition of the merits of Nynorsk as a literary language. The choice of Jon Fosse signals to the world, and to us Nynorsk-writing and Nynorsk-promoting Norwegians that we are not alone in acknowledging the value and potential of our language. And while I do not, in my excitement, endorse the Nobel Prize as a cultural phenomenon, or any form of institutionally driven, non-organic type of canon-formation which we see at play in such awards, I very much appreciate how such a prize can provide a much-needed recognition of a language that struggles in the face of an often hostile majority, and how Nynorsk as a language can benefit from the kind of visibility and reference point provided by the Nobel Prize. 

To celebrate today's good news, I bought three bars of 'eventyrsjokolade' (fairy-tale chocolate), a small bar of milk chocolate where the inside of the wrapper contains a short version of a Norwegian fairy tale. One of these was the story of the fox widow, a story to which I feel a personal attachment since I performed in a puppet show version of the fairy tale when I was in kindergarten. While these condensed versions of fairy tales are written in Bokmål rather than Nynorsk, the choice still felt appropriate since it is the only literary sweet we have available. And, as always, they tasted delicious. 

On bluer skies

Since 2012, I have been an active member on Twitter, and in those years I have gained a lot of different experiences, and for the most part these have been immensely positive. Both as a scholar and as a general human being, I have become indebted to a wide range of individuals who have showed me great kindness and helped me improve, both personally and professionally. I hope to be able to continue reaping benefits from Twitter, but the current owner - an emotionally deranged, all-too-powerful, idiotic, destructive man-child with the intellectual capacity of an egg cup - has made the possibility of gaining something good on Twitter increasingly difficult. As things seem to be heading down an even more ludicrous road in the coming weeks, I have created an account on Bluesky just to be able to keep in touch with the friends I have made in the past eleven years, friends without whom I would be infinitely poorer. 

My handle on Bluesky is @hopesteffen.bsky.social. You are all welcome to find me there. 

For the time being, my main activity will remain on Twitter, but I hope that if that particular network does implode in the hands of a faux-genius who has not heard the word 'no' often enough in his life, Bluesky will provide a viable alternative, which can foster the kind of exchanges that have broadened my horizon for eleven years.