Where shadows lie

Since I’m not a big fan of Halloween (both on the condoning-the-occult front and on the candy front), I’ve spent the evening reading instead of trick-or-treating. A few chapters of Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings (one of my favorite books, by the way) got me in a language mood, so I read the last 70 lines of “The Owl and the Nightingale” in Middle English for my class, then read Revelation 1 in both Greek and Latin. The Latin was a piece of cake, and to my surprise I remembered more of the grammar than I ought to, considering that I haven’t really studied it in over four years. Even the Greek wasn’t completely unfamiliar, which caught me off guard because I only took one semester (Greek 101) and that was two years ago, and it was koine instead of Attic to boot. But I guess I did get an A in the class, which probably means something, somehow. Or not. :) To wrap things up I read a couple of pages from a Thai translation of H. Rider Haggard’s story “Long Odds.”

With all my other projects going on lately, I’ve let my language study die out, other than the Middle English translations for my class. But I think I’ve found the catalyst to get me studying again: reading about Tolkien. :) It works almost every time. Right now I’m dying to start studying Old Norse (I have E.V. Gordon’s book) and Sanskrit (I have a few grammars which I bought years ago and haven’t yet gotten into) and to review Coptic so I can start reading texts again.

You know, there’s nothing quite like reading a text in a foreign language and finding to your delight that you actually understand it. :)

I understand your position on the candy front, but are you really going to tell me you think halloween promotes the occult? Sure, it’s the historical significance of it, but I think it has no more relevance today than the fact that Christmas trees were originally a pagan symbol.

Nah. I think Halloween is good all around.

Old Norse is offered next semester.

Liz and sixline: I don’t really think that Halloween promotes the occult — polarized statements are just a good way to get comments. :) No, really, I don’t consider trick-or-treaters to be Satan worshippers or anything like that. But I do find it somewhat disturbing that Halloween is, in effect, a unholiday (unholy day), one that celebrates darkness and death and stuff. Not everyone does, but just look at most of the costumes — witches, skeletons, corpses, mummies, devils, Freddy Kruegers, etc. Not exactly uplifting. While others are free to celebrate Halloween howe’er they wish, I choose not to. Hurray for Latin and Greek instead. :)

Anna: Do you realize that you may have just pushed my graduation back a term? :P Egads. This is something I can’t really pass up, and yet every single class for winter semester (all 17 credits) are required to graduate. But one of them (TMA 101, Intro to Theatre) is a GE, which means I could easily take another class fulfilling that GE credit during spring term. Hmm… Old Norse… ~wistful sigh~ We’ll see.