Greetings!
I've been on the list for only a couple of weeks and thought I should introduce myself. My name is Brandon, I live in Honolulu, and I am tackling Old Norse in the Python-esque spirit of, "...and now for something completely different." I spend a lot of time on medieval poetry in Persian--Hafez, Rumi, Nezami--which ranges from spiritual ecstasy to subtle lyricism to romantic narrative fantasy. After pondering the idea for quite awhile, I resolved to balance the Central Asian poetry with some spare, dramatic Northern prose. You get virtually no help from cognates with Persian (even though it's Indo-European), and the writing system, which doesn't even represent short vowels, is always a bit of a challenge. Also, almost every metaphor is unfamiliar or even disturbing, like eyes bleeding from unrequited love and eyebrows shooting arrows. So, if reading medieval Persian is like visiting a fascinating planet in another solar system, reading Old Norse is like vacationing in a strange place where one at least has some distant relatives.
Old Norse isn't entirely new to me because I took a one-semester course in North Germanic philology in college. Also, while my wife and I were marooned in our camper-van for 40 straight days of rain in central Sweden, 30 years ago, I worked my way through Ibsen, sort of, with a little Norwegian dictionary and the "Teach Yourself" book. So, I may not be starting from square one, just square 1.05 or thereabouts. I've gotten the 3-volume New Introduction to Old Norse, which looks like a great resource, and I'm also enjoying the various websites devoted to the topic.
I don't expect to be posting any messages for a good long time, but I appreciate what you all are doing and try to extract whatever I can from your correspondence.
Regarding Yahoo, I've been on Yahoo groups for a long time, and there is a technical explanation to your mail problems. Not being very technical myself, I will just say that it has to do with Yahoo having too few machines to push the messages through their "pipeline" and to go on re-sending those messages if they don't make it through the first time. Ultimately, most messages get through, but some may be a day or two late for some users. Some never get through. Furthermore, the problem seems to affect some people on a given list, while not affecting others, and it comes and goes. The safest thing to do is to read your messages directly on the website for this group if you seem to be suffering this problem, as some of you already do. I've already noticed, as well, that my Hotmail junk mail filter catches some messages from this list, which I'm attempting to correct.
Aloha,
Brandon
From: "Fred and Grace Hatton" <hatton@...>
Reply-To: norse_course@yahoogroups.com
To: <norse_course@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [norse_course] posts that don't appear
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 07:03:35 -0400
A couple of times recently Alan's translations haven't appeared in the
emailed digest, but I found them at the yahoogroups website. I thought
maybe it was the result of his replying to a post rather than originating a
message.
Grace
Fred and Grace Hatton
Hawley Pa