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.

Icelandic Saga Database
Sagas of the Icelanders
“The Icelandic Saga Database is an online resource dedicated to the digital publication of the Sagas of the Icelanders — a large body of medieval literature which forms the foundation of the Icelandic literary tradition. The sagas are prose histories describing events that took place amongst the Norse and Celtic inhabitants of Iceland during the period of the Icelandic Commonwealth in the 10th and 11th centuries AD.”

YouTube
Volcano! Surtsey and Haemay
“A fascinating extract from the ITV documentary “Savage Earth” first broadcast in the 1990s. Surtsey was the island born from an underwater volcanic eruption off the south coast of Iceland in 1963. Haemay was the small town on the Westmann islands, south of Iceland, which was awoken one night in 1973 to find its volcano had burst into life. The townsfolk fought the advancing lava with high pressure hoses and managed to turn it away from their harbour.”

YouTube
Peace Tower Event
“A little old, but we saw this video while browsing online. The Imagine Peace Tower is a memorial to John Lennon from his widow, Yoko Ono, located on Viðey Island in Kollafjörður Bay near Reykjavík, Iceland. It consists of a tall “tower of light”, projected from a white stone monument that has the words “Imagine Peace” carved into it in 24 languages. These words, and the name of the tower, are a reference to Lennon’s peace anthem, Imagine.”

Video: Helgasons.com
Halldor winns X Games Big Air with best possible score!
“Icelandic snowboarder comes out top.”

- On the streets of Iceland next year? CREDIT

2012 – New Beginning, announces the arrival of the electric car. Our goal is to implement a system in Iceland, which will enable the Icelandic public to convert their whole fleet, in to electric cars.

IN: How did you come to start the 2012 initiative separate Icelandic New Energy?

Sighvatsson: One and half years ago we decided that it was time to bring the electric car to Iceland. We said “Okay it’s time to do it, so how do we do it?” It’s the chicken and the egg problem. You know, no infrastructure, no cars. Nobody is building the infrastructure because there are no cars. So we set out and said we’ve got to build the infrastructure. The cars will then come. But once we started digging into this we found that it was not going to be so easy. Because we were looking product road maps of all the major manufacturers to see what was going on. See what models were coming out and we soon figured out that it would not happen that way. We went abroad did meetings with many of the major manufacturers.

By the end of 2012 (we want to) have the island covered in charging stations. As a consumer you must be able to drive wherever and be secure about knowing a charging station or a fast charging station is near you so you can continue your journey. As I said we soon found out it was not just building the infrastructure. There’s a great deal of bringing stakeholders together, stakeholder management, talking to the government, the municipalities and everyone that has any control of either the supply of cars to Iceland. Then there is the education of people about the uses of electric cars. So basically we just initiated the 2012 project. We’re still in the preparation phase. When we do the agreements with all the stakeholders and once we have that all in place we will start the roll out of charging stations.

IN: Why do you think Iceland is ready for the electric car?

Sighvatsson:Well, as you probably know Iceland was hit pretty bad the credit crunch and the financial crisis. It might be something related to that. People are really ready for something new. We have great sources of energy here in Iceland. Renewable energy in the form of geothermal and hydrothermal power. Everyone basically feels that it is nonsense that we, being the small volcanic island here in the middle of the Atlantic, are importing energy in the form of oil.

I think the general public has been early adopters of technology and new trends. We are one of the highest users of mobile phones in the world. I think we have the most high speed internet connections in the home. We are just a nation that is very quick to adopt new trends. We intend the electric car to be a new trend here. As the island is small and has renewable energy sources we think it’s a perfect test case or showcase to see or to demonstrate what the future city and community can be like.

IN: When you were making your decision to do this was there a big decision to make between electric cars and hydrogen based cars?

Sighvatsson:There has been some initiatives here in regards of hydrogen for the past nine years. The first public hydrogen station in the world was setup here in Iceland back then. There are some players testing their vehicles here. Daimler and Ford. We feel that, technology wise, the advancement in battery technology is simply now. The density of the batteries are increasing 14-20% every year. It doesn’t matter if it’s Chinese, Japanese, or in America or Europe. Everyone is putting money into batteries and not into hydrogen. For the past ten year or fifteen years there had been a lot of research towards hydrogen. It simply has not succeeded. Hydrogen fuel cells are still outrageously expensive. You will not see any viable cars at reasonable prices. You won’t see hydrogen fuel cells anytime soon. So we think this technology is coming out on top.

There’s also the issue with the energy loss. Hydrogen is simply an energy carrier. If you have about 60% loss of the energy first of all converting electricity into hydrogen and then converting it over again I think it’s just a no brainer.

*For more information on the 2012 Initiative CLICK HERE.

Iceland News spoke to Kara Schuster, co-chair for the 2010 INL convention in Toronto, who gave us her side of what’s to come.

Saunders: How did you get involved with the Icelandic community in Canada?

Schuster: My uncle once sent me the link to the Toronto newsletter and we didn’t really know anything was going on here. And then they had the Snorri program… it’s an exchange program where you go to Iceland for six weeks and meet quite a bit of your family. You work there and go to school… learn the language. I went on that and the Icelandic club here in Toronto helped pay for part of my trip. After they gradually asked me to help out and volunteer for a few things. I was youth program co-coordinator, vice-president, president and now I’m the co-chair for the conference.

Saunders: When did your involvement start with the Snorri program and making those steps up?

Schuster: I went on the Snorri program in 2002… I think it was May 2005 or 2006 as president for the Icelandic-Canadian Club of Toronto.

Saunders: During that time did you have much involvement with the conference on the administrative side?

Schuster: Not so much, I went as a guest and delegate from our club for three years. I started with the Victoria conference, then Winnipeg, then Calgary. I can’t remember exactly.

Saunders: How did you step into the role of planning the yearly conference?

Schuster: I guess my first year in Victoria talking about it. I said “sure”. 2009 was taken, but 2010 wasn’t. Being involved with the initial planning stages it just seemed natural to become co-chair.

Saunders: What kind of experience had you had organizing events like this?

Schuster: Not much, I organized events through my fraternity in university- some basics for planning formals and dinners. Then planning events through the Icelandic club. So it’s kinda flying by the seat of my pants a little bit. Learning as I go.

Saunders: How have you found it so far?

Schuster: It’s been a huge growing experience… it has been challenging though. I still work full time on top of all of this. But there’s a really good support net. And there’s always help when I need it.

Saunders: What are some of the highlights of the conference?

Schuster: We’re changing it up a little bit from the years that have gone past. We’re trying a different format now. We’re trying to gear towards some of the younger people in our club to continue being involved. We now have a film screening segment so there is a film running all day long. We have a guest speaking on the Sunday. Usually in the past we’ve just had the AGM… which people aren’t generally very excited to stay for. They’re usually trying to rush out and catch their planes. That’s the basis for-having the conference (the AGM).

Saunders: Have you met many challenged in the process of putting 2010 together?

Schuster: There were some challenges in finding a hotel because we’re a relatively small group with, unfortunately, not a lot of money… and Toronto being popular for conferences… getting price for what we wanted.

Saunders: How has the current problems in Iceland affected your planning?

Schuster: We need to fund raise a lot more than some clubs have in the past because some of the companies in Iceland are usually major sponsors. And we won’t have that this year. That’s an obstacle we have to deal with.

Saunders: Icelandair had provided some kind of help with flights in the past?

Schuster: Yes, they usually give us flights to raffle off, which I think they’re going to do again this year. But we used to have sponsorship from some of major banks. And some of the other organizations that would bring in Icelandic talents. We’re likely not to be getting this year.

Saunders: Where in Canada is the conference going to attract Icelanders from?

Schuster: There’s a lot in Winnipeg that we hope will come. There’s a lot in Ontario… in London. We’re having people as far as Victoria. A range of people from across the country.

Saunders: Anything else to add?

Schuster: It’s a really valuable weekend for people who don’t have a lot of connections with Icelandic culture.