Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Apple Basket! We
are having wonderful June weather, sunshine and temperatures soaring to nearly
20 C some days – what more can one expect from a Danish summer?
Apart from hay fever, of course; the pollen season is
hitting late but hard this year after the long, cold spring, and my sinuses are
not too happy. The head cold that snuck up on me a few weeks ago doesn’t really
want to go away, either, so I’m stuck with the sniffles, some scratchiness in
my throat and a touch of conjunctivitis. Darn grass pollen season.
It’s affecting my running a bit, as well: I don’t run
when I’m feeling off, so lately, it’s been only two or three times a week
instead of four. But never mind; I am not in any rush, my tendons are probably
better off for getting a chance to build up their strength slowly – and I am
not signed up for any race that could push me into training more than I am
properly ready for.
I have some great news this week: Victor was accepted
into the Talent Programme at his music school! He auditioned last Monday, and
this Monday he got the reply (after a whole week of waiting!); they had 8 spots
for 18 applicants and only accepted one classical guitarist this year, so yay!
This means he will be having 45 min solo lessons instead of the usual 25 min,
acoustic training, and more collaboration with another guitarist – we’ve been
hearing Renaissance lute music from other Talent Programme guitarists, so that
should be fun.
I am beginning to understand the problem with social networking taking up too much (work) time: I'm on Ravelry, my primary - and first - social site, recently also Goodreads, and just lately, I've set up a profile on LinkedIn (still in progress). So, checking all of those, making new contacts, joining groups and following discussions, and checking email on two accounts can take quite a bite out of a day, if one is not careful. So, I'm working on finding the balance that keeps me satisfied: keeping up sufficiently without making me feel that I'm wasting time. As long as I'm doing something productive, it's not all bad, I think: connecting, advertising myself, learning - that's all good. Falling into the Ravelry hole of reading long, chatty threads or ogling patterns I don't have time to knit - not so good.
The
Knitting
It seems that my recent bout of I-have-too-many-wips
is turning into the baseline rather than the exception: I keep coming up with
things I want to knit, either from lovely, tempting patterns (I am looking at
you, Ravelry!) or stuff I make up unique, original designs. Some of
these projects have deadlines (birth day and birthdays), and some of them I
just want to finish.
Deep breath. I’ll get there, one row at a time. As you
know, having to knit All The Things is not exactly a punishment for me – which
is probably why I have too many wips in the first place.
One example from this week: having the gorgeous skein
of Lotus Mimi mink yarn that I mentioned last week, I was vaguely considering
making a cowl or a scarf with it, something soft to go around my neck – at some
point before next winter. No rush, no need to cast on right now, it can wait.
And then comes the invitation to the third What (else) Would Madame Defarge Knit?
KAL: the pretty, lacy, cabled cowl inspired by Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White. So of course I had
to see if The Lady Is A Ninja could be done in lace weight mink yarn.
Result so far: I went down to a needle size 3 mm (from
the 4 – 4.5 mm called for in the pattern) to get a fabric I liked, made some
calculations, and added two horizontal repeats, giving me 12 repeats instead of
10.
I’ve still only done the garter stitch border, so it
doesn’t look like much yet.
And then I cast on for something new that I can’t tell
you about just yet – it’s looking good, though, after the obligatory three
froggings of the first bit, so watch this space!
Victor’s V neck jumper is coming along nicely; as soon
as I had swatched, measured and crunched the numbers in the stitch and row
counts, it was pretty straightforward. When I reached the bottom of the V and
the armholes, there was more measuring done, trying the shoulder part on the
boy himself, to see if my calculations were good. And they were; so now I’m
working in the round, with no decreases for feminine waist shaping to worry
about.
The remainder of the body will be TV knitting – and even
book knitting: I have Kindle for PC now (with a little help from my tech
savvy kids), and I’m reading Treasure
Island on it. No need for a heavy object to keep the book lying flat,
needing to be moved for every turn of the page.
The
Apple of the Week
This week, we get to the end of the Amled story; we
follow the party to England and see how Amled makes an impression on the king.
And we follow Amled back home, of course, to see how he deals with his uncle.
No spoilers – I’ll just give you the story and a few notes afterwards.
SAXO: The Deeds
of the Danes (Gesta Danorum)
Book 3, chapter 6
17 When
the party arrived in Britain, the delegates approached the king to hand over
the letter which they believed was to be the end of another, but which in
reality pointed themselves towards death. The king, pretending nothing was
amiss, greeted them in a friendly and hospitable manner. What happened now,
tough, was that Amled rejected all the royal dishes served, as if they were low
fare. He displayed a strange abstinence, politely refused all of the sumptuous
servings, and touched neither food nor drink. Everyone was amazed that a young
man from a foreign country could turn up his nose at the choice delicacies and
luxurious dishes offered by the royal tables, as if they were grub for
peasants. So when the king ended the meal and said good night to his friends,
he sent one of them to lurk in the guests’ bedchamber and listen to what they
talked about during the night.
18 Now,
then, Amled’s two companions asked him why he at dinner had let all of the food
be as if it were poison, and Amled replied that the bread had been soaked in
blood, that the drink had tasted of iron, and that the meats had been hewn
through with a stench of corpses and completely spoiled by a reek of death and
burial. He added that the king had the eyes of a slave, and that the queen on
three instances had behaved like a bondswoman – so it was not so much the feast
itself as those who had given the feast, whom he targeted with his rudeness.
His companions immediately began chiding him for being still not right in the
head, and laughed maliciously at his thus criticising that which he ought to
praise, and complaining about things that were just fine, when he in this
manner disrespectfully denigrated an outstanding king and a woman presenting
herself most civilly, and heaped on two people who deserved honour and fame,
the most humiliating insults.
19 The
king, hearing this from his servant, declared that the one who had spoken thus
must be either superhumanly gifted or correspondingly mad – and with these few
words he gauged the true depth of what Amled was doing. He then summoned his
groundskeeper and asked him where he had gotten the bread. As he replied that
it had been made by the king’s own baker, the king further asked where the
grain for it had grown, and if there was any reason to believe that someone had
been killed in that spot. The groundskeeper replied that not far away, there
was a field showing clear signs of a large number of deaths at some time in the
past, for it was littered with the ancient bones of the slain men. That he had
had sown in the spring, for he reckoned that it would be more fertile than the
other fields and would yield a rich crop. Thus it was not impossible that these
rotten remains had given a bad taste to the bread. From this reply the king
concluded that Amled had spoken the truth, and he now also wanted to know where
the meat had come from. The groundskeeper explained that his pigs by negligence
had escaped the sty and had eaten the rotten corpse of a robber, and this could
maybe have given the taste of their flesh a hint of rottenness. When the king
understood that Amled had been right about this too, he asked him what the
liquid was from which he had mixed the drinks. He received the answer that
there had been honeycombs and water in the mix, and when the stream had been
pointed out to him whence the water came, and a deep hole had been dug in it,
he found several rusty swords from which one might suspect that the water had
gotten an off taste. Others say that Amled rejected the drink because he was
able to taste from it that the bees had sought food in the belly of a corpse,
and so the problem lay in a taste that originated in the honeycombs.
20
When the king saw that a convincing explanation cold be made for the taste that
Amled had complained about, he realised that Amled’s harsh words about his own
unworthy eyes had to point at something bad in his own heritage, so he secretly
sought out his mother and asked her who his father was. She protested that she
had never lain with anyone but the king, but when he threatened to torture the
truth from her, he was told that he was the son of a slave. So it took coercion
to discover why Amled had spoken badly of his heritage.
The king, of course, was quite embarrassed over his
heritage, but at the same time thrilled at the cleverness of the young man, and
he then asked him why he had exposed the queen with that rude accusation of her
behaving like a slave. It pained him that his guest in his nocturnal talk had
raised doubts about the nobility of his wife – but he was now informed that she
had indeed been born to a bondswoman. For Amled explained that he had noticed
three occasions on which she had acted like a slave: the first was that she
drew her cloak over her head like a serving girl, the second that she hitched
up her skirts when walking, and the third that she picked between her teeth
with a toothpick and ate the bits of food she dug out. He also told him that
her mother had been captured and made a slave – for he was not to believe that
she only behaved like a slave, she was actually born a slave.
21 In
deep admiration of his skills, which he regarded as a sort of divine gift, the
king gave him his daughter in marriage, and everything that he said he took as
a testimonial from heaven. As for his companions, the king followed the orders
from his friend and had them hanged the next day. It was a service done to a
friend, but Amled pretended that it was an offence which he regarded most
severely, and for blood money, the king made him a payment of gold which he
later in secret had melted down and placed inside a pair of hollowed-out wooden
staffs.
22 When
he had remained with the king a year, he asked leave to travel, and he thus
returned to his homeland not carrying anything with him from his rich and royal
equipment but the staffs containing the gold. As soon as he landed in Jutland,
he changed his new appearance back into the old, and the dignified behaviour he
had now become accustomed to, he carefully replaced with his usual foolery.
When he stepped into the hall where they were
celebrating his wake, standing there filthy from head to foot, it came as a
shock to everyone in the hall that the rumours of his death had been false. In
the end, though, the terror turned to mirth, and all the guests began making
fun of each other because the man they were having the wake for as though he
were dead, was standing there in front of them very much alive. When they asked
about his companions, he held out his staffs and said, ‘This is one, and this
is the other.’ And whether that was more truth or joke is impossible to say.
For even though most of them took his remark to be pure nonsense, he kept
closely to the truth inasmuch as he, instead of speaking of the dead men
themselves, spoke of the blood money he had been paid for them.
23 He
now joined the cupbearers and began heartily toasting the guests to liven up
the party even more. And to keep his loose shirt from getting in his way when
he went about, he strapped his sword belt around his waist, after which he
repeatedly drew the sword from its scabbard and on purpose pricked his own
fingers on the point. In the end, the men around him had an iron bolt run
through both sword and scabbard.
To further his own devious plans, he kept on serving
wine for the noble lords: he handed them cup after cup and poured so much wine
into them that they were unable to stand on their feet from inebriation, but
fell asleep in the hall itself and used the dining hall as a bedchamber.
24 When
he now saw that they were easy to set upon, he made up his mind that now was
the time to carry out his plan. He got out the sticks he had readied a long
time ago, from their hiding place, and went into the hall where the noble lords
lay all over the floor, puking and senseless from drink. In here, the walls
were covered by the blanket his mother had made, and he now cut the straps to
let it fall down. This blanket he laid over the snoring men, and with the
hooked sticks he gathered the knots into a tangle so inextricable that none of
those who lay under it were able to get up, no matter how hard they tried.
Then, he set the house on fire, and while the flames rose and the fire spread
soon to envelop the building and devour all of the king’s hall, they all were
caught in it, whether they slept soundly or tried in vain to get to their feet.
25 After
this, Amled went to Fenge’s bedchamber (for Fenge had been led to his quarters
earlier by all of his retinue). His sword happened to hang by the bed, and
Amled snatched it and hung up his own instead. Then he woke his uncle and told
him that his nobles were burning to death: now Amled was here, armed with his
old hooks and burning with desire to have his well-deserved revenge for the
murder of his father. At these words, Fenge jumped out of bed, but could not
find his own sword, and while he tried in vain to pull the strange one out of
its scabbard, he was killed.
Here we see a brave man! A man who deserved to win
eternal renown! He cleverly armed himself with false simplicity and kept his
true wits that outshone ordinary human capabilities, well hidden behind an
amazing display of madness. And so he succeeded in not only saving his own life
with a ruse, but also, using the same ruse, in the end achieving revenge for
the murder of his father. So cunningly he looked out for himself, so bravely he
avenged his father, that we have difficulty in deciding which was the largest,
his courage or his cleverness.
...
§19: So, are Amled’s oblique comments the result of uncanny
perspicacity or just lucky guesses? Well, given the mortality rate and the
level of physical brutality displayed in the day (we really live in an age of
unprecedented physical safety), it would perhaps not be too much of a stretch to
assume some interference with death and the dead at one or more stages in the
production of the foodstuffs. Grain grows on soil into which blood may well
have seeped at some point; pigs are well-known to eat anything, including
corpses; and water runs over and through just about everything. Amled is clever
enough to know this and to choose sufficiently vague modes of expressing
himself to let the king find his words confirmed.
§20: As for the heritage of the king himself and his
queen ... Amled obviously has knowledge of her birth to a bondswoman, maybe
obtained only after the fact, so to speak: he studied her body language and
habits during the initial feast and then sought out confirmation of his
suspicions. And should it have turned out that she was not born a slave, then at least he had from the beginning only said
that she behaved like one.
Likewise concerning the king: Amled’s first claim was
that he had the eyes of a slave, which can be construed to mean a variety of
things – maybe Amled got lucky on this one, that the father of the king
actually was a slave (or could be, at least).
§24: Were you shocked by the brutality in this? The
calm arson and burning alive, not of Fenge himself, but of his courtiers, may
seem excessive – but Amled is establishing himself as the new king and thus
needs a secure power base. He has to get rid of those who would have remained
loyal to Fenge: just as well kill them now instead of later, when they pose a
direct threat.
This is obviously not the end of Amled: Saxo goes on
to tell of his conquests and exploits, his new marriage (the daughter of the
English king, mentioned in §21, dies), and finally, his death in battle years
later. As this is a history book and not a tragedy, the characters live out
their lives and do not all die at once in a huge, dramatic scene.
Shakespeare is compelled by his genre to kill Hamlet
off – along with quite a few others – at the end of the single story, the
revenge story; and he is, of course, perfectly entitled to meddle with the
story to suit his own needs.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief foray into the world
of Amled before Shakespeare, before Denmark as a whole, and almost before the
Vikings.
That is it for this week – I hope you have a great
week, and I will be back soon.
Keep happy, keep healthy, keep crafting!
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