Skip to main content

The oldest book I own

When I was about 12 years old I read, for the first time, a classic Icelandic novel titled Sagan af Heljarslóðarorrustu (the title translates as The Battle of Hell's Domain) by Benedikt Sveinbjarnarson Gröndal (1826-1907). It is one of the earliest modern-style novels written in Icelandic, and possibly the first humorous Icelandic novel, written in a deliberately grandiloquent satirical style and telling the story of the Battle of Solferino as if it were an Icelandic Saga.

My grandmother owned a copy of the book and promised to give it to me when I was older. Much later, having forgotten her promise, she gave a copy to someone else, but I knew she had another one because the one I read didn't have illustrations like the one she gave away, so I knew all hope was not lost. Then, recently, she decided to get rid of most of her book collection and gave the family the go-ahead to take whatever books we wanted.

Lo and behold! This book came out of the first box we opened. It wasn't the edition I had read - I remember that as being bound in buckram - but an old, tattered second edition of the book inside a battered leather cover. When I showed the book to granny, she told me it had belonged to a good friend of hers, a man who was very good to me when I was a child and who was like a second grandfather to me. He died when I was a teenager. This of course makes it even more precious to me, but it's not a reading copy. This one is fragile and liable to fall apart in my hands if I try to read it, and there are a couple of pages missing. I might rebind it, but I think it looks quite charming in its current well-thumbed condition, so I may just end up making a clam-shell box to store it in.

Shortly afterward I acquired a reading copy, a  library discard of the most recent re-issue with wonderful illustrations by Icelandic artist Halldór Pétursson (the artist whose illustrations of the 1972 Fischer-Spassky world chess championships were reprinted in newspapers all over the world) that perfectly compliment the story. Due to copyright reasons I can't post any of his drawings, and in any case I didn't find any online for this particular book. You can click here to get a general idea of his style.

Comments

Unknown said…
Wow! What a beautiful old book, and even more special because of the personal connection with it
Bibliophile said…
Yes, it is quite special.
Anonymous said…
How lucky you are! And I would also appreciate it so much more if I had known the former owner.

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme