There’s not a minute goes by within a new tweet about it.

And they keep on flowing.

English language media in the country (The Reykjavik Grapevine, Iceland Weather Report and Iceland Review) have jumped on the volcano bandwagon to varying degrees. While most have provided great coverage (The Iceland Weather Report), I’d argue Reykjavik Grapevine has come out on top. Just watch out for Ice News hawking its volcano stories too, which are no more than promotional trash for its advertisers.

But you know: life goes on in Iceland.

It has just banned all strip clubs in the country.

There’s also a fight over the sale of its natural resources to pay for the financial crisis.

So is there a chance we can talk about something else?

Saunders: How did you come to settle on Icelandic and Old Norse as an area of study?

Crawford: Well, I could tell that in a pretty long story, and I’m not sure how long of a story you want. I’ll try to keep it short. I was a dinosaur kid, interested especially in how dinosaurs evolved. When it came time to decide what language to study in middle school, I picked Latin, because all the dinosaur names were in Latin. Then I learned from studying Latin that languages evolved too. From there I wanted to learn the ancestor of English, so I started teaching myself Old English in high school. And when I got more and more interested in the entire family of Indo-European languages, I started e-mailing experts on the subject and asking them what other languages I might teach myself. A professor at UCLA said that Old Norse would be pretty easy, since I had studied Old English, and I sort of “fell in love” with the language.

Saunders: Does your family history play into your direction at all?

Crawford: No. I don’t know of any Scandinavian family.

Saunders: I’m interested to know what kind of opportunities you’ve had to put your language abilities to use. In terms of visiting Scandinavia and Iceland.

Crawford: I’ve only been to Iceland once, for six weeks in the summer of 2007. I spent two weeks traveling the Ring Road by bus, staying on farms and just talking to farmers, insisting on using Icelandic. Then I took the 4-week Sigurður Nordal Institute Icelandic course at Háskóli Íslands.

Saunders: And how did it feel being out there and being able to communicate in Icelandic?

Crawford: It felt really good. Naturally one gets frustrated sometimes with one’s inability to say something. I also often surprised Icelanders by speaking in Icelandic… I think that sometimes people didn’t know what language I was speaking. I was told by some that they had never heard Icelandic with a foreign accent.

Saunders: Were there any particular highlights from the trip you found memorable?

Crawford: Definitely; the people that I stayed with were all wonderful. Hospitable, patient, and helpful to a fault.

Saunders: So for someone thinking about learning Icelandic, what kind of advice would you give them?

Crawford: That depends on how much time you have. If you have a while, it really helped me to know Old English first. To see that English comes out of a language with a grammar and lexicon very similar to Icelandic, makes the “why” of Icelandic much more understandable.

Saunders: Okay, but if you’re not able to go that route. Top three things?

Crawford: 1. Use self-help materials that include audio, like the online course at http://icelandic.hi.is/ or Hildur Jónsdóttir’s book-and-CD set Teach Yourself Icelandic. 2. Find something that you really want to read in the language, something that will feel like a fun diversion rather than a chore. 3. Practice every day. Large amounts of time spent on it now and then are nowhere near as good as even half an hour every day.

Saunders: With your language study and abilities, what do you see yourself doing career-wise?

Crawford: Ideally I’d like to work in academia. But I know that that may not happen. For me, the PhD is a goal in itself, irrespective of what may come after. I have not had to pay for graduate school (I have taught and had fellowships). Aristotle says that flute-players can’t pay attention to anything else when they hear a flute playing. My flute-playing is Old Norse – so as long as I have an opportunity to let that distract me from other things, I’m going to do it.

That was Jackson Crawford, author of Star Wars as an Icelandic saga, talking to Jim Saunders of Iceland News.

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.