If I were a lonely man, or a despondent man, believing this was a terrifying age of hitherto unparalleled anxiety and danger, or if I were a young man who thought I lacked courage and wanted to train for it, I should read half a dozen of the Icelandic stories, beginning with Grettir the Strong and Burnt Nial.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, June 02, 2024
Recommended Reading
Gilbert Highet (1906-1978), A Clerk of Oxenford (1954; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 24: