Fellowship of the Thing

Apologies for my relative silence on social media. I’m engaged on a lunatic plan to write a pair of novels over the summer, and I’ve made some significant progress. This evening I got north of 20,000 words on one (a mythological fantasy), and the other (a mystery novel) stands at nearly 22,000 words. 42,000 words in 20 days is a pretty good average for me. As a rule I’m not one of these people who can sit down at a computer and expect a couple of thousand words to drop from their fingertips, but there it is. This in spite of setting up my summer course and teaching the first week of it. (I still haven’t done any grading, but I don’t think that’s going to take as much time as the setup did.)

There have been costs, and maybe this pace is not sustainable for the whole summer. For instance, I haven’t been reading as much as I normally do.

Still, I have been doing a little. I’m almost done with Jómsvíkinga saga, and it’s been an odd experience. I really like the book and I hate almost all the characters, to the extent I have any feeling for them.

There’s one weird scene where a bunch of the Jómsvíkings have been captured by Jarl Hakon, who is king (in all but name) of Norway. The captured Vikings are brought out one by one for execution, and each of them gets a moment in the sun to be a badass. Some are noble and brave; some are obscene; some manage to get revenge against their captors even in the hour of their execution. In the end, Hakon and his son are so impressed that the balance of the vikings are spared as long as they make peace with the Norwegians.

But before that happens, there’s this one guy. His name isn’t even given in Blake’s text (the one I’m reading, courtesy of VSNR). The viking asks the executioner to wait “while I save my breeches” (meðan ek bjarga bríkum mínum), which in context means having a slash or taking a dump before he has his head cut off. Apparently lots of people soil themselves in the moment of death or afterwards. (“Even when you’re dead, you’re never really dead,” as one of the undertakers in Six Feet Under says when a post-mortem bowel movement happens in one of the early episodes.)

The executioner agrees, and this guy is allowed to relieve himself. As he’s pulling up his pants afterwards, he turns toward the audience, which includes Jarl Hakon, the de facto King of Norway. The viking says, “Lots of things don’t work out like you planned. For instance, I was planning on having sex with Thora, Jarl Hakon’s wife.” And then he waggles his schlong at the audience. The actual phrase used is “he shook the fellow” (hristi félagann), a great euphemism that should come back into use.

Anyway. You can see I haven’t been just wasting my time. And the next time someone asks you to meet some fellow, make sure of the context.