A long time ago, in a North Atlantic far far away . . . Earlier this week I was drawn into an enlightening discussion with my colleague Ben Frey about the complicated textual tradition that lies behind George Lucas's "Star Wars," which few outside the scholarly community realize is a modern rendition of an old Germanic legend of a fatal conflict between a father and his treacherous son. Below I present some remarks on the Old Icelandic version of the legend, with some spare comparative notes on the cognate traditions in other old Germanic languages.
Earlier this week I was drawn into an enlightening discussion with my colleague Ben Frey about the complicated textual tradition that lies behind George Lucas's "Star Wars," which few outside the scholarly community realize is a modern rendition of an old Germanic legend of a fatal conflict between a father and his treacherous son. Below I present some remarks on the Old Icelandic version of the legend, with some spare comparative notes on the cognate traditions in other old Germanic languages.
Jackson Crawford has written one beautiful piece of Tolkienesque pseudo-scholarship. If you enjoyed the Appendix in LoTR this is a worth a read.
The Old Norse lyrics are taken from a passage in Egil Skallgrimssons Saga. A farmer's daughter is lying sick and the family doesn't know why. Egil discovers a boy who is in love with her has written runes on a piece of bone and secreted in her bed. Egil scrapes those runes off, rewrites them properly, and places the bone back in her bed. After a night the daughter says she is feeling well. "Those who do not know the runes," remarks Egil "should not write them."
