Life, Writing

Draken Harald Harfagre Part 1

2 Comments

The author, wearing a very appropriate shirt to tour the Draken Harald Harfagre. #vikings #vikingship #drakenharaldhårfagre

A photo posted by Linnea Hartsuyker (@linneaharts) on

In September, the replica Viking Ship Draken Harald Harfager came to Manhattan. I went out to meet it when it came in, and later got to walk around the deck. The Draken Harald Harfager is a re-creation of a viking war ship (“draken”), and was the first re-creation made and designed by traditional boat-builders rather than archaeologists.

The crew on board all had interesting things to say about what it was like to crew the ship. Many were from Norway and other Scandinavian countries, but a few were from the US and other countries. I learned that it took all hands to raise the sail and took twenty minutes, for without pulleys, the crew have very little mechanical advantage. The sail, which was silk, plus the yard, weigh over 2 tons.

Here are pictures from my tour of the deck. As soon as I got home I bought the official book about the making of the Draken Harald Harfager, which was fascinating, and which I will review in more detail in my next post later in the week.

Continue Reading

Life

Make a Difference Friday

3 Comments

I am scared and sad. If you don’t understand why, or you think it’s sour grapes, please read this–the author said the why better than I could. And this. We are scared and sad for a reason. We feel as though half the country has voted to take rights away from the other half. And while individual voters have been saying that is not why they voted for Trump, that is what he promised.

Something I’ve decided to do is take a least 2 hours once a week, to engage in some online activism and letter-writing. I’m documenting that in case anyone else wants to do similar things. My work will be organized around a few things:

  • I believe that a lot of the press mainstreamed or ignored Trump’s bigotry and racism, and blew Clinton’s minor mistake with the email server out of all proportion. I want to encourage the press to do a better job.
  • White people especially need to call out racism where we see it, and let people know it’s not okay, that we do not want it done in our name. It proliferates when people think it is okay.
  • We need to protect those who will be most harmed by the policies that have been promised by Trump: disabled people who may lose ACA coverage, LGBT+ people who will face greater discrimination, black people who will face violent policing, Muslims who will be harassed or barred from the US, Latina/os who will be deported. We need to stand up against those policies.

I also plan to do in-person activism in NYC. If you’d like to join me, please request to join this Facebook group.

I’ve started a separate blog to record what I’m doing, so after today this will not be on my main book news/writing blog. If you’d like to use my letters and ideas, please do. Here are my activities today:

  1. Join and donate to ACLU
  2. Subscribe to the Washington Post–support some of the best journalism from this election
  3. Help Foster Cambell in a run-off election in Louisiana for a Senate seat that could flip the Senate to the Democrats.
  4. Electoral college petition and letter
  5. Voice my support for the Right To Know Act that mandates police accountability in civilian interactions.
  6. Sign up for Our100.
  7. Ask president Obama to immediately appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
  8. Put on a safety pin to show solidarity.
  9. Sign an Open Letter from American Jews

…I realize how little this is. I realize I’m doing this to fend off my sense of helplessness and despair. I accept if that is all it is, because even one more day of not giving in to helplessness and despair is some kind of victory.

For all the details and links, please visit my new Making A Difference blog.

 

Continue Reading

Life

Surviving Iceland – Part 2

1 Comment

(Continued from Part 1.)

Iceland has one of those landscapes that pictures can hardly do justice. I found the fjords of Norway to be the same way–nothing but being there can really show you how giant ice fields dominate your vision, how the treeless hills rise so high and steep they feel like they might fall down on you, how the lava fields stretch on, twisted and broken.

Kayaking around glaciers and icebergs. #visiticeland #glaciers #Iceland

A photo posted by Linnea Hartsuyker (@linneaharts) on

Iceland combines harshness with luxury–one of the ways that we stayed warm was visiting hot-springs. We didn’t go to the Blue Lagoon, which the Wanderer says is very crowded and over touristed. Instead we visited the Secret Lagoon, which is surrounded by little geysers.

A few days later, we visited the Myvatn Nature baths, and soaked for hours.

I wanted to visit Iceland to see what it was like, so I could describe it in a novel or two, but I’m worried I will have to fall back on cliches. It really is alien. It really does seem to exist on an inhuman scale. Humans have carved out small cities and towns that feel like any other country’s, but between them is a landscape that varies between lush, green fields, and black rock that even lichen has hardly domesticated.

Next post: more of Iceland’s history.

Continue Reading

Life

I also went to Iceland – Part 1

1 Comment

I posted two updates about two days in the Faroe Islands, but haven’t updated about Iceland yet, despite that being the much longer part of the trip. Part of that is that I did enjoy the Faroe Islands more. Though they have a population of only 50,000, it felt much more lived in than much of Iceland. Iceland has a population of about 300,000, and in 2016 is projected to have 6 million tourists over the course of the year. In summer, so much of Iceland’s work is given over to tourism, and there are so many tourists, that it feels more like a national park than a country with its own heritage.

I am very glad we went, though. There is no substitute for actually being in a place to write about it. Just like I could never have imagined the steep beauty of Norway’s fjords before visiting it, I could never have imagined the bleakness, the alienness, and the way that Iceland’s landscape feels inhuman and intimidating before visiting. And it is beautiful, in a harsh, severe way.

I have heard it is sometimes warm there, but it never got above 55 degrees F when we were there, and it was below 40 at night. We rented a van with a mattress in the back and camped every night as we drove the ring road.

 

Iceland is known for its stunning waterfalls, and we saw three with very different characters. Gulfoss, in a field of wildflowers:

 

Dettifoss, cutting through Iceland’s nearly lifeless highlands. If there were a waterfall on Miranda, a moon of Uranus, this is what it would feel like:

 

And here is Goðafoss, which was so stunning in the sunlight all it needed was a unicorn leaping through the rainbow.

Stay tuned for more–glaciers, hotsprings, museums in Part 2.

Continue Reading

Life, Writing

Ancestry is a Privilege

No Comments
Harald Harfagr statue
Harald Harfagr statue

When I was in high school, my family started getting into ancestry, and traced our lineage back to Harald Harfagr, the first king of Norway, on my mother’s mother’s side. On my mother’s father’s side, I’m descended from a Sheriff of Nottingham (though likely not the Sheriff of Nottingham of Robin Hood fame, and anyway, Robin Hood is more of an accretion of Green Man myths than an actual historical person). On my father’s father’s side, I’m descended from Pieter de Carpentier, Governer-General of the Dutch East India company in the 16th century. The de Carpentier family is where Carpenter Bay in Australia gets its name.

All this makes me exactly 0% special. All those Northern European genes add up to one very tall pale lady. And the further back you go in history, the more descendants these ancestors have. Harald Harfagr had upwards of a dozen wives, and children by all of them. My mom, a plant geneticist, did a calculation to find out how many genes I would share with Harald Harfagr, and after almost 1200 years, the answer is not many. If you have any Northern European ancestry, chances are good you are descended from Harald Harfagr as well.

Still, that connection to Harald Harfagr was what got me interested in his story, which led writing to The Half-Drowned King and its sequels, for that is the story of the rise of Harald Harfagr as told mostly through the eyes of his right hand man Ragnvald of Maer, and Ragnvald’s sister Svanhild. (Don’t google if you don’t want book spoilers.)

I always feel odd when I tell people about my ancestral connections, though, because an obsession with blood lines seems next door to an obsession with race. Also, the victors in historical struggles are much more likely to be able to trace their lineage than the oppressed. My husband, of Jewish ancestry, only knows the family history back three generations. His name is common, and the Jews of Europe were marginalized and displaced so often that it was hard to hang onto that history. The church records of the Scandinavian countries form an unbroken chain back to the coming of Christianity. Those countries suffered fewer destructive wars than Continental Europe.

These connections are also important to me, though. I love knowing my family’s history back that far, through the indigent Swedes, Dutch, and Irish who came to the United States at the turn of the century, to the more privileged ancestors, and back into legend, for if the Heimskringla (The Saga of Kings) is to be believed, Harald traces his ancestry back to Odin himself. I love knowing when I visit Norway, Iceland, and Ireland, that I am walking paths, and kayaking fjords, that my ancestors traveled upon a thousand years ago. I feel a greater connection to those places, knowing that my ancestors, suited to the cold weather, braved those hard winters and stormy oceans.

I try to walk the line of valuing my history without setting it above other people’s history. It is my history, the good and the bad. The vikings were pagan raiders who sacked monasteries and killed and tortured monks. They took slaves and sold them (often to Christian countries–not much moral high ground in Early Medieval Europe). They were also farmers and traders and settlers, men and women who had ambitions and loves, loyalties and enmities, like any other people. They were not particularly more violent than others of their age, but neither were they less. I find ancestry to be a useful connection to history because it reminds me that they were just people, that in a different age, I might have been very different, but still a person. It reminds me that who I am now is dependent upon and shaped by all these generations that came before.

Continue Reading

Books, Life, Writing

Whose story is it?

1 Comment

On Friday, I had a bit of a wrestle with the fate of a minor character in The Sea Queen. My plot question was “should s/he live or should s/he die?” and I was trying to figure that out based on my answer to: “what does it mean to my main characters and plot if either happens?”

I could make it work either way, but neither choice felt right for the narrative, and usually when I’m working out plot issues, one choice will simply feel right for the story. The question that shook me loose was: “How can the fate of this character show respect for them as a person rather than a prop?” And then I knew what to do. When I’m writing, I can do anything I want to my characters, but they only come alive when I don’t ask, “What is done to them?” but “What does life ask of them, and how do they answer?”

A couple months ago, I read Man’s Search for Meaning by psychologist Victor Frankl. The most affecting part of the book is his years in Nazi concentration camps, and how that experience illustrated, in the starkest terms, some essential truths. These are:

  1. Doing something that has meaning is a person’s highest calling, not happiness
  2. Even when every freedom has been taken away, people can find meaning and purpose in how they meet their situation

He found that prisoners in the camps who felt that their lives and choices had meaning, who had someone to live for, a memory that sustained them, or a desire to help their fellow sufferers as much as they could, had a better chance of survival than those who did not have that purpose. Those without purpose were more likely to become their worst selves, to steal from one another, and eventually, to give up and die. To Victor Frankl the central question for everyone should be not, “What do I want from life?” but “What does life want from me?” Perhaps the answer to the first one always, for everyone, is “meaning”, and the answer to the second is what creates that meaning.

Story is meaning, and meaning is story. Humans tell themselves stories all the time, at every moment of every day, when we are not listening to others’ stories 1. Even when we sleep, our minds make up stories. One of the symptoms of PTSD is an inability to give meaning to an event, to create a narrative around it. Sufferers of PTSD cannot tell their story, and often relive it instead. And people are more likely to suffer PTSD if they are prevented from sharing their trauma and telling their story 2.

The stories we tell ourselves about our lives become our truths. Do you tell the story where everyone screwed you, and everything went wrong, and therefore you failed? Or do you tell the story where you had a lot of experiences that taught you things, and you had to make adjustments along the way, but every step you took led you to where you are now. For many lives, either story has a grain of truth, but which person do you want to be?

One of my writing teachers always asked “What does this event mean to this character?” because the importance of a plot is not the plot itself but what it means to the characters experiencing it. As Hamlet says, “for there is nothing either good or/bad, but thinking makes it so.” Thinking is storytelling is meaning-making, and every character makes their own meaning. It’s one of the hardest writing questions to get your mind around. It requires knowing a character very well.

Sometimes the hardest thing about writing fiction is choosing the right main character. I got into an argument with a friend early in my MFA program, where I was railing against writers who write about characters exactly like them, usually young writers from Brooklyn. And my friend was saying that every story is worth writing, and that I was being a snob to think otherwise.

I think we were both right. I do think there is a higher degree of difficulty writing about yourself or someone very like you, because we don’t see ourselves very clearly, and we may not see our own agency.  A character can have lots of bad things happen to them, but they still have a choice in how they react to that. Even being passive is a choice. And with a skilled author, who can tease out the reasons for the passivity, and the consequences of it, that can be an interesting story. But the author needs to understand that while the character may seem to have everything happen to them, and perhaps that’s even the story the character tells himself, the truth is that he has choices, agency, no matter what. Maybe terrible choices, maybe the only choice is in how he faces his situation–what meaning he takes from it–but he has a choice.

(This is not to excuse terrible things, or to say there is something wrong with ‘being a victim’. People do terrible things to one another, and the victims of that have every right to be angry. And they have a choice of what to do with that anger and every other feeling about it. In Victor Frankl’s practice, he found that helping his patients find meaning helped them heal from whatever they had been through.

This is also not to say that everything in life happens for a reason and Frankl is very careful to state that as well. His point, and mine, is that things happen–life asks things of you–and you get to decide how you’re going to answer.)

Readers want to read about characters who do things, who make things happen, who make choices. I’m not the type of author (at this point) who can make a passive character interesting, or the type of person who has enough sympathy for a passive character. My characters do a lot, do everything, do too much. All they do is make choices and try to make things happen, often to a fault–a lot like their creator.

So this is both a post about writing or life. Whose story is it? In life, it’s always your story. You can tell it as other people’s story, as the story of everyone who did you wrong, or as the story of how you overcame that. In fiction, it is your protagonist’s story. They always have choices. And it is also the story of every other person in the book–none of them should feel like props, and all of them should have their own stories, no matter how briefly they intersect with the protagonist. Because we are all protagonists, making choices, searching for meaning, answering what life asks of us.

1 The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall
2 Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character by Jonathan Shay

Continue Reading

Life

Faroe Islands Day 2: Eating Fulmar

2 Comments

Continued from this post.

Faroe Islands

On our second day in the Faroe Islands, the Wanderer’s knee was hurting from the hike the day before, so we took a bus to Klaksvik and walked around. The Faroe Islands are so beautiful that just getting in a bus is a guarantee that you’ll see something lovely, like a million waterfalls cascading down fjord walls. Most of the Faroe Islands are connected by long underground tunnels, hewn out of the rock, and in one of those I saw something very grim: bicyclists.

You see, this tunnel was at least six miles long, with a 15% grade down to the lowest point, and then 15% back up, through the dark, with rough carved walls. Can you even imagine? At a slow pace, this would take probably 30 minutes to bike through, but it’s in darkness, half of it is a steep uphill. That would seem like the longest 30 minutes of your life. Your legs would be burning, and you would be biking through a dark tunnel that seemed infinite. It’s only at the very end that you can see a light. If I did it, I would fear that I had been transported to Hell, or at least Purgatory. If someone made me bike that tunnel, I probably wouldn’t speak to them for a week.

Above ground, in Klasvik, I searched for yarn yet again, but both Faroe Islands and Icelandic wool is extremely scratchy, and I’ve been spoiled by super-soft merino wool yarn made in other places. I didn’t want to buy wool and make something too itchy to wear. We ate lunch at a coffee shop that had huge open face sandwiches and delicious cakes.

We visited Christianskirkjan, a church built in 1963, but in the old style of Viking halls of upright staves. The baptismal font is a 4000-year-old stone-age offering vessel. An old 8-person rowing boat with overlapped strakes, also in the Viking style, is suspended from the ceiling. This is the old boat that the priest used to use to travel between the islands to conduct masses.

One of the funny things we noticed in the Faroe Islands is that the hill peaks always collect a cap of cloud, even on sunny days. In Klaksvik, we saw one of these forming: as cool wet air from the fjord hit one of the hills, it was forced upward and turned into a cloud–we could see clear air become cloud.

Scenes from Klaksvik. #faroes #nofilter #klaksvik

A photo posted by Linnea Hartsuyker (@linneaharts) on

We returned to Torshavn on an afternoon class and went to Crossfit Tvormegi in Torshavn, where the coach kindly gave all of his instructions in English for us and I push-pressed 15kg more than any other woman there. *bicep emoji*

The star of that day was dinner, a 9 course tasting menu at Koks, considered one of the best restaurants in Europe. The chef has set himself the challenge of making the meal almost entirely from local Faroese ingredients.

I can’t identify all of the dishes here, but the dishes I do remember were:

  • Some snacks, including: deep-fried lichen, deep-fried cereal grain porridge
  • Cod tartare with watercress on crostini–this may have been my favorite dish
  • An uni and cheese spread
  • Grilled langoustine with smoked pine
  • Shaved horse mussels
  • Halibut, cooked perfectly, and served with lovage pesto, which was a very herbal flavor, a little much on its own, but perfect with the fish
  • Aged lamb prosciutto
  • Diced fulmar and beets, which was by far my least favorite, but instructive to eat. Fulmar is a seabird, similar in appearance to a seagull, and the meat had a consistency like rubbery duck and tasted of seaweed and old fish. I would not willingly eat it again, but it would have been an important protein source to early medieval Faroese, and it’s good to know what their food would have tasted like.
  • Dessert No. 1: Sorrel Sorbet and Grass Granita–the grass granita tasted exactly like a meadow of the sweetest grass that has just been mowed
  • Dessert No. 2: Dulse and blueberry with dehydrated chocolate for a nice crunch
  • And finally they gave us some pizelles, chocolate, and candied Angelica as an anniversary treat

Next:Iceland! I won’t be recapping the Iceland side of the trip in quite as much detail, but will definitely hit the highlights. Coming soon!

Continue Reading

Life, Writing

Another Day In the Life

1 Comment
Writing
Photo by Morgan Schmorgan

Last week my sister asked me what my days are like now that I’m a full time writer, a question that is a little panic-inducing. I just came back from a long trip, and before that, I only had one week of the full time writer life.

Right now, I’m working on turning the 70% rough draft of The Sea Queen into the 100% first draft. I use a pomodoro timer on my phone to manage my time. For a while I tried working for 25 minute blocks (pomodoros), with 5 minute breaks, and every 4 pomodoros, a 15 minute break. Now I’m trying 15 minute blocks with 3 minute breaks and I think it’s working better.

I’m working mostly at home right now, where I have a nice big monitor on a table in the living room so I can see two chapters side by side on the monitor and the outline on my laptop screen. I listen to various writing mixes I’ve made on Spotify. I keep on considering whether to try to work in the NYU library, where I have purchased an alumni pass, but I like my big monitor, and I like being able to make lunch at home.

I do something athletic most days, and I try to involve other people in that when possible, since being at home all the time, especially with my husband out of town, is rather lonely.

I’ve been cooking a lot, but I know that, before he comes home, I will get tired of cooking for one.

In the evenings, when I used to do my writing, now I read and knit and watch TV and movies, which hopefully feed the creativity I will pour back into my writing.

I had always planned to try to get an adjunct teaching position, but this draft of The Sea Queen feels so all-consuming that I am concerned about adding something else to my life. Which might be silly, since I used to write with a full time, 40 hour a week job.

I was also going to start taking Spanish Classes.

But now I have deadlines. I am trying to write two 500-page novels in two years, while, over the course of three years, doing everything it takes to publish and promote three books. That is a lot. The Sea Queen is due to my editor in July 2017, which seems like a long way off, but I want to do at least one more draft on my own, and then have my agent and some other readers look at it, and then make the changes they recommend, before doing a few passes with my editor, so the months will pass fairly quickly. And then as soon as I complete it, I need to start on the final book in the trilogy, The Golden Wolf. And soon, by the beginning of August this year, I will start doing copy edits on The Half-Drowned King.

I don’t miss going into an office and working, but I miss some of the rhythm of it, the leaving and coming back. The having a frustrating day and commiserating with my husband about it. The relief when the day is over, though that usually only lasted the two hours when I came home, had a drink, and fixed dinner, before I launched into writing again.

I don’t know what it will look like in a month, or six months, or a year. It feels too good to be true now, but also a little lonely, and I am worried that this novel I’ve been crafting alone, composed of words that no other person has read yet, will not be as good as the previous one, or will take too long to get the stage of the previous one, or a million other things that could go wrong. Writer worries.

So to answer to the question of what my day to day life looks like is: lots of writing, and some of what feels suspiciously like leisure activity. It’s not bad at all.

Continue Reading

Books, Life

The Faroe Islands Part 1

4 Comments

I’ve been dragging my feet writing posts about my travel, because I often find travel narratives, especially by non-travel writers like myself to be very dull: I went here, saw this. I went there, saw that. (Of course, I love this travel writing.)

The travel books I like tend to either be about cold places, like The Magnetic North by Sarah Wheeler, or books about very entertaining people traveling, like In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson, or the best of both worlds, Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier. Well, the Faroes are in the far north, but while I hope to be an entertaining writer, I’m not sure I am entertaining as a person.

But I shall try. I wanted to go to the Faroe Islands because I have some action in The Sea Queen set there, and it’s always better to see a place in person.

The Faroe Islands are north of the United Kingdom. If you sailed in, for instance, a viking ship, from Bergen, Norway, to Iceland, you would run smack into the Faroe Islands. Today they are an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark. Like the Scottish Isles and Iceland, Irish monks were some of their earliest settlers before more settlers came from Norway during the Viking Age. There is also some evidence of settlement beyond the Irish monks from 400-600 AD. The Faroese language is similar to other Scandinavian languages, but it contains many more words borrowed from Gaelic, and its pronunciation rules are very different.

Side note: When I was in the National Museum in Iceland, I overheard some academics, historians of Icelandic Sagas, and a computational linguist, sort of smirking about how one of their friends had to have “viking” put in the title of his book, even though it’s actually about early medieval Scandinavians. To which I say Thhhhhbbbbpppttt. (It’s a technical term.) The Viking Age is defined as the years between 794, when vikings attacked the monastery at Lindesfarne, and 1066 at the Battle of Hastings. During that time, Scandinavian sailors, as well as sailors from the Baltic, expanded out from their homelands. Many were farmers. Some were chieftains or kings. They traded or raided, depending on what seemed more profitable. They started to wage longer wars and settle in some places. These people are known to us as vikings. There is no sharp delineation between who was a viking and who wasn’t–in fact, aside from knowing that “vik” means “bay” or creek, the etymology of the word viking is a bit hazy. There’s really no problem with calling early medieval Scandinavians vikings as a shorthand, as far as I’m concerned. Especially if you want your book to sell outside of academic circles.

ANYHOO.

We arrived in the Faroe Islands just a few days after midsummer, and they are far enough North that it never gets dark. The sun doesn’t even dip below the horizon until just before midnight, and it’s up and shining again by 3am. Even when it’s down, the sky stays blue and orange.

We used AirBnB to stay in an 19th century house in historical Torshavn with a lovely hostess. On our first full day, we took a helicopter ride to Suderoy, the southernmost island, flying over and landing on other islands on the way. The smallest, Litlá Dímun, is uninhabited, and the second-smallest, Stóra Dímun, only has one family living on it. The weather patterns mean that it rains almost every day. The islands gather clouds to them that sit on the crests like a grey felt cap. Deep fjords cut through the islands, and down the fjord walls cascade more waterfalls than I’ve ever seen in one place before.

As we were flying over the islands, we saw a lake sitting on top of a cliff, like this one. (I did not take this picture.)

On Suderoy, we went for a 6 mile hike through some fields full of sheep to a hidden lake. I have never seen more sheep in one place than in the Faroe Islands, and I have been to Ireland, Iceland, and New Zealand. Also, wonderfully, at least half of them were black or brown sheep. None of them wanted us in their fields, and complained bitterly, in a hilariously passive aggressive tone. (Or maybe I’m projecting.)

The Faroese notion of “an obvious path” is somewhat different from mine, even having grown up in the middle of the woods, following deer trails from a young age. So we lost the path a bit, but luckily we had a pretty good description of the path, and knew generally where we were going. And since the Faroe Islands have no trees, it’s hard to get lost. At all the points when we didn’t know where we were going, we could look back and see the town we needed to get back to at the end of the hike.

When we were finished with the hike, we took the 2 hour ferry back to Torshavn, and watched the cloud-capped islands go by, as the ferry went through water black as ink.

And I guess I’ll save the rest of the Faroe Islands for following post. Next: I find out what seagull tastes like.

Continue Reading

Books, Life

I went to Ireland!

No Comments

The last time I was in Ireland was 11 years ago. In Ireland, my now-husband (hereafter known as the Wanderer) proposed to me, as we were walking back over the Rock of Cashel to get lunch at a pub. This was after I had made innumerable “Welcome to The Rock” jokes in a bad Sean Connery accent, because I am a KEEPER, y’all.

Now that I am setting my own schedule, when I found out the Wanderer planned to attend a conference in Ireland, I thought I’d tag along and get some research done. THE SEA QUEEN, the sequel I am currently writing, has some scenes set in Viking-Age Dublin, and there’s no substitute for seeing a place in person, even after 1200 years have passed.

I also wanted to see The Book of Kells at Trinity College, which historians think was probably created in Iona, a Scottish island, at a monastery founded by an Irish saint, and then moved to Kells to protect it from Vikings.

I had one full day in Dublin, so I went to see The Book of Kells first, and also got to experience the wonder of the “Long Room”, the Ur-Library, the library of which all others are poor copies.

Ireland

Next I visited the Museum of Archaeology and History, which is full of Irish treasures from the Neolithic Age through to the Medieval period. The Bronze Age material impressed me most. Ireland was one of the wealthiest areas in Europe at that time, and the weapons and decorative arts reflect that. The museum also contains several of the famous bog bodies, Bronze and Iron Age corpses discovered in Irish bogs in the 19th and 20th centuries, preserved by the bogs so that archaeologists can learn about what food the people ate, and what injuries they suffered before they died.  The Bronze Age Irish practiced human sacrifice, especially of their kings. One body had its nipples mutilated, which was done, apparently, to disqualify the man from kingship. Because suckling at a Bronze Age king’s nipples was a common way for his subjects to show submission. Such a weird and fascinating detail! Almost too weird to put in a novel, if I ever write something set in Bronze Age Ireland. But too interesting to forget.

Ireland

After a mediocre lunch (don’t order a burger in the British Isles unless you like them burnt), I went to Dublinia, a somewhat kitchy but still worthwhile tour through Dublin history from the Viking Age through the Norman invasion. Dublinia contains computer simulations of the layout of Viking-Age Dublin which will be very helpful for writing about it. Also recreations of the inside of Dublin Viking houses, which were probably smaller than the high-born houses I am familiar with in Norway and Denmark.

After that I relaxed on the grounds of a church and listened to the bells while reading In Search of Ancient Ireland: The Origins of the Irish from Neolithic Times to the Coming of the English by Carmel McCaffrey. All of this makes me want to re-read Morgan Llywelyn’s retellings of Irish myths, which I haven’t read since high school–she does a nice job of bringing reality to the magical tales of Cuchulain and Finn Mac Cool.

The next day we took a bus to Cork and spent a few days there in the slightly more modern world, including visiting the Cork Butter Museum, which, sadly, contains no butter sculptures. I really wanted to quote this exchange from The West Wing. (I did anyway.)

It’s fun to travel with a research agenda–it gives focus to my touring, the same way reading with a research agenda gives me (some!) focus in a book store or library. Later in the summer, the Wanderer and I are going to Iceland and the Faroe Islands for more research

Continue Reading