Letter from Iceland #25
The "wait, are you done?" edition, plus an announcement!
Komið þið öll blessuð og sæl!
Today I have a special announcement to make, but first this …
Our volcano has stopped erupting!
Seriously, this must be the quickest volcanic eruption in the history of the world. It started with A BANG on Monday, dwindled by three-quarters in the first 24 hours, and now there is no visible activity.
Talk about getting things done quickly and efficiently in time for Christmas!
But to my big announcement …
I meant to bring this up last time, but that goshdarned volcano kept getting in the way. (Can you tell I’m watching Ted Lasso these days? I’m so impressionable.)
I have an idea for something new.
I want to try posting an entire book in this newsletter/blog/Substack thingy, in installments, and with each installment to post an audio clip of me reading it.
I am speaking not just of any book, but this book:
I have already published a few of my books as audiobooks, but not this one. The reason is simple: the way it is set up does not lend itself very well to audio, unless you have the printed book in front of you so you can understand how I am reading it.
For example, this does not work very well in audio without the printed counterpart:
Idiom: Sjaldan er ein báran stök
Translation: Rarely is there only one wave
Meaning: Bad luck comes in twos (or more)Waves on the sea rarely come as single entities. There is usually a small one followed by increasingly larger ones, culminating in a big one. The fishermen of old knew this and counted the waves, knowing exactly when to land their boats. If they failed to land properly they would be hit with a larger and even more powerful wave, possibly crashing their boat into the shoreline and thus destroying it, or becoming sucked back out to sea. Today when the Icelanders want to say something like “when it rains it pours”, meaning they’re being hit with more than a single bout of bad luck, they say this: “Rarely is there only one wave.”
(An excerpt from LB of Icelandic)
As you can imagine, the Little Book of Icelandic is riddled with Icelandic words. And a number of people who have the print or ebook versions have asked if there was a way to find out how all the Icelandic words in the book are pronounced. I tried to accommodate their wishes by having audio files on my website, but that’s not a great solution, since the words are then fully out of context.
BUT with Substack’s super-duper feature that allows audio to be embedded into posts, this problem is solved! I can record the book in installments, and have the printed words and setup to accompany it. That way readers can read the book and hear the Icelandic words, sentences, idioms etc. spoken out loud.
A few words about the book
I love the Icelandic language. To me, it is such a pure and perfect reflection of the soul of the Icelandic nation. For example, the Icelandic people are filled with paradoxes (I write a lot about that in this book) and at the heart of the language is also a paradox: it has an impossibly complicated grammar, yet a way of cobbling together vocabulary that is incredibly simplistic, almost naive.
I love the way the Icelandic Language Committee comes up with new words, for example. Every time a new term enters the language that there is not yet a word for in Icelandic, the Language Committee has to make up a new word, rather than just Icelandicizing foreign words. In the book I have a section on how they do that.
I should state that the Little Book of Icelandic is not a language learning book per se—rather it is about the language itself, and the Icelanders’ relationship to it. I know that many people who are learning Icelandic have found it a useful accompaniment to their other studies, however. It is a popular book, and has a 4.7 star rating on Amazon (out of 262).
Anyway, I am really looking forward to sharing the book with you in this way, as it is one of my favourites. That said, this part of the newsletter will be for paid subscribers only. I may offer the occasional free sneak peek, but only paid subscribers will get full access to the entire book, and its archives as we move through it.
I will post the first installment tomorrow, and that will be free and open to all—that way you can check it out and see if this is something you might enjoy following along on. And who knows how this might unfold … perhaps we could have discussion threads and suchlike to accompany it.
SO. If you would like to upgrade your subscription to paid, you can use the link above this section. Or if you would like to give someone a subscription to the paid section of this newsletter as a gift, you can use the link below.
This part of the newsletter will have its own separate section, and you can choose to receive notifications only for that sections, or the others, as you wish. More about setting those preferences here.
And finally …
Happy winter solstice!
I know I, for one, am happy to know that our journey into darkness is over for another year, and we will now be moving steadily into the light. 😌🙏
If you are not keen to become a paid subscriber to this newsletter but would like to check out the LB of Icelandic nonetheless, you can hit the button below.
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Hæ Alda,
this is such a lovely idea! Thank you very much. So i can read and listen. This will help.
I try to learn Icelandic and yes, Grammar is killing me. 😊
Bless
Claudia