Saunders: Can you tell me a little bit more about how you came to write the post?

Crawford: It actually started with a really brief Facebook exchange with a colleague, Ben Frey. When I first joined Facebook 2 or so years ago, I wasn’t really sure what to do with my status updates, so I just started quoting Star Wars, using a different quote every week. Finally on 22 February, Ben commented on one of these status updates by writing, “What is it with Germanic linguists and the holy trilogy? Is it the magic swords? Perhaps the ill-fated battles between the old and the young? No…it can’t be the latter, ’cause then Vader would have won.” Well, the past few weeks I had been reading a lot of sagas and a lot of the long introductions to them in the Íslenzk Fornrit series. So as a joke I responded, “And Ben, as far as I’m concerned, the trilogy as presented in Lucas’s films represents only one manuscript tradition, and a rather late and corrupt one at that. I believe that there is a palimpsest to a Latin choral that contains fragments of a version where Vader survives to old age after slaying Luke out of loyalty to the emperor, but is naturally still conflicted about it when Leia’s son avenges the killing on him.”

But I had drunk a lot of coffee that day… and the idea kept getting bigger in my head… finally after a couple hours of playing with it in my head while doing other jobs around campus, I just sat down and typed out “Tattúínárdœla saga – If Star Star Wars Were an Icelandic Saga.” I posted it as a Facebook note and tagged some colleagues.

Saunders: I see, and then it started getting passed around?

Crawford: Yeah. And it was being passed around so much that I decided to put it on a blog and make it easier for other people to find it. It’s also an extremely busy semester (I have my PhD prelim’s in May) and I was looking for a fun way to practice my most needed skill: Old Norse. And I decided that actually writing out this saga was a perfect opportunity.

Saunders: Where did you write it? How long did it take?

Crawford: I wrote in my room… it took 45 minutes. If you’re talking about that original post. Subsequent posts, written in Old Norse, have taken maybe an hour and a half each.

Saunders:Okay, so it’s up on the blog. From what I saw in the comments section, you’re away for a few days, come back, and it’s being viewed more and more.

Crawford: Yes. I typically don’t get online on the weekends. Someone put it on Fark (I still don’t know who), and from there it just spread all over the Internet.

Saunders: I’ve seen some of the feedback in the comments section, but what feedback have you been particularly pleased about?

Crawford: I’m particularly glad to see remarks of the “This guy knows his stuff” variety – they give me a little bit of encouragement that maybe I really will “know my stuff” when I take my prelim’s in May!

Saunders: It’s being passed around in Iceland too. How does that feel?

Crawford: That has been one of the biggest surprises to me. I approach Icelanders with some humility – after all, I’m trying to make an academic career that’s built largely around their language. Not every Icelandic comment has been favorable. But for the most part the Icelandic comments that I have seen have been encouraging.

In part two we’ll move away from Star Wars to find out more about Crawford himself.

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