I am a new subscriber to this group and would like to introduce
myself. I am an American of Norwegian-American ancestry. After 38
years in parish ministry in Canada and the U.S., I have since 1999 have been serving on the faculty of Evangelical Theology
at the University of Klaipeda, Klaipeda, Lithuania, on the Baltic
coast. I teach Hebrew and Historical and Systematic Theology. My theological training included work in Latin, Greek, German, and
Syriac, and some reading in Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian - in addition to a bit of secondary school French.
I first began interested in Old Norse over twenty years ago when, while visiting one of my sons at
Indiana University, I picked up E. V. Gordon's 'An Introduction to Old
Norse' at the I. U. Union Book Sotre. I found it a little difficult to
work with, but the selections included were not altogether impossible
to translate.
Now, a long way from home and with some hours to spare between
lectures, I have found the Þorgeirsson - Guðlaugsson course a good
review and almost painless way to get back into this fasinatng
language which has significance also for this side of the Baltic. Of
course, the Baltic languages, Lithuanian and Latvian, are at best only
distance cousins of the Scandinavian tongues. They are much more
closely related to the Slavic languages. Learning Lithuanian is hard
work, but becoming reacquainted with Old Norse seems almost recreational.
I've not much to contribute at this point. But in the few days since
joining this interest group I've found the questions and answers and
interchange both intersting and informative.