Recent reading
Apr. 6th, 2022 10:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaSimon by Rosemary Sutcliff (1953)
Time for another Sutcliff, and it's a good one! This one is set during the English Civil War, like The Rider on the White Horse, and while Sir Thomas Fairfax is a character in it, he's only a minor one: the main character is a teenage boy named Simon. Simon and his best friend Amias unfortunately belong to families with different political sympathies, and they fall out over it when the war begins. He joins the New Model Army as a cornet (and how weird is it that a 16-year-old boy with no military experience is put in charge of adult experienced soldiers?), and Amias joins the royalist army. They inevitably meet again, under circumstances which D K Broster could not better. Very satisfying!
There is also a rather tragic subplot involving Simon’s Puritan corporal Zeal-for-the-Lord Relf. And of course the whole book has Sutcliff’s lovely prose and setting. About the only thing I could complain about is the tragic lack of Levellers, which the New Model Army had a lot of in actual history. It would have made more sense of the political conflict, which is portrayed in a rather vague way. Also, it's quite a different book from Bonnie Dundee, despite also being about a boy taking service in a war in the 17th century.
Carl Linnaeus Lapplandsresa år 1732, edited by Magnus von Platen and Carl-Otto von Sydow (1975)
I read something in Swedish! But it's from the 18th century, ha ha. This is Linnaeus' journal from his travels in northern Sweden and then down through Finland, in 1732. It's very interesting to read his description of places I've been, and how different they were back then. It's also stuffed full of notes about plants, insects, possible mineral ores, how people were dressed, how they ate, which diseases they had, etc etc. Some notes are incredibly weird, such as the one claiming out of the blue that heavy women have small vaginas, and thin women large ones. WTF Linnaeus.
The language is studded with Latin and is in old fashioned Swedish, so the book has tons of notes. Luckily I mostly understand the Latin names of plants, except that many of those were of course different from their names today. I was fascinated to see that 18th century Swedish has a lot of words in common with 18th century English, which are common in neither language today!
Some examples:
hazard/hasardera (that is, the verb meaning 'to risk')
gallant/galant
esteem/estimera
prospect/prospekt (meaning 'a view')
Then there is 'brav', which shows the relation of the current Swedish word 'bra' (meaning 'good') to the English 'brave'! Very cool. But it's used in the same way as 'bra' today. There's also 'crudel', obviously related to English 'cruel' and used in the same way. Not a word we have in Swedish today. But my coolest find was 'fäj', which according to the notes meant 'fated to die', that is, obviously the same as English/Scottish 'fey'! I'd never seen this Swedish word before, and I can't find it even in the most comprehensive Swedish dictionary. But the OED says that 'fey' is a Germanic/Norse word, so it makes sense.
Time for another Sutcliff, and it's a good one! This one is set during the English Civil War, like The Rider on the White Horse, and while Sir Thomas Fairfax is a character in it, he's only a minor one: the main character is a teenage boy named Simon. Simon and his best friend Amias unfortunately belong to families with different political sympathies, and they fall out over it when the war begins. He joins the New Model Army as a cornet (and how weird is it that a 16-year-old boy with no military experience is put in charge of adult experienced soldiers?), and Amias joins the royalist army. They inevitably meet again, under circumstances which D K Broster could not better. Very satisfying!
There is also a rather tragic subplot involving Simon’s Puritan corporal Zeal-for-the-Lord Relf. And of course the whole book has Sutcliff’s lovely prose and setting. About the only thing I could complain about is the tragic lack of Levellers, which the New Model Army had a lot of in actual history. It would have made more sense of the political conflict, which is portrayed in a rather vague way. Also, it's quite a different book from Bonnie Dundee, despite also being about a boy taking service in a war in the 17th century.
Carl Linnaeus Lapplandsresa år 1732, edited by Magnus von Platen and Carl-Otto von Sydow (1975)
I read something in Swedish! But it's from the 18th century, ha ha. This is Linnaeus' journal from his travels in northern Sweden and then down through Finland, in 1732. It's very interesting to read his description of places I've been, and how different they were back then. It's also stuffed full of notes about plants, insects, possible mineral ores, how people were dressed, how they ate, which diseases they had, etc etc. Some notes are incredibly weird, such as the one claiming out of the blue that heavy women have small vaginas, and thin women large ones. WTF Linnaeus.
The language is studded with Latin and is in old fashioned Swedish, so the book has tons of notes. Luckily I mostly understand the Latin names of plants, except that many of those were of course different from their names today. I was fascinated to see that 18th century Swedish has a lot of words in common with 18th century English, which are common in neither language today!
Some examples:
hazard/hasardera (that is, the verb meaning 'to risk')
gallant/galant
esteem/estimera
prospect/prospekt (meaning 'a view')
Then there is 'brav', which shows the relation of the current Swedish word 'bra' (meaning 'good') to the English 'brave'! Very cool. But it's used in the same way as 'bra' today. There's also 'crudel', obviously related to English 'cruel' and used in the same way. Not a word we have in Swedish today. But my coolest find was 'fäj', which according to the notes meant 'fated to die', that is, obviously the same as English/Scottish 'fey'! I'd never seen this Swedish word before, and I can't find it even in the most comprehensive Swedish dictionary. But the OED says that 'fey' is a Germanic/Norse word, so it makes sense.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-04-09 12:09 pm (UTC)He was a Mass-Observer! I love it the way people interested in seeing, and writing down, things like these appear in all kinds of times and places.
I was fascinated to see that 18th century Swedish has a lot of words in common with 18th century English, which are common in neither language today!
These are neat! Do you know if they were in common use outside of the writings of Linnaeus-type people, I mean in everyday speech, or what?
(no subject)
Date: 2022-04-09 01:22 pm (UTC)Do you know if they were in common use outside of the writings of Linnaeus-type people, I mean in everyday speech, or what?
I don't know, given that I haven't read anything about how common people actually spoke. My sense is that at least some of these words are part of a common elite culture in much of Europe during the 18th century. The word 'gallant', for example, exists in a lot of European languages (English, French, German, Swedish, Spanish, Russian…). I asked my Spanish flatmate, and he said it had very much the same connotations in Spanish as in English.