As the Campus Book Fest rolls into University for the third time, Jo Caruana chats to this year’s special guest, Icelandic author and poet Gerður Kristný.
Gerður KristnýBooks and universities go together likes horses and carriages. And yet, since technology took over our lives, libraries have definitely lost out a little. In fact, I will ask you this: when was the last time that you visited a library? (Regretfully, mine was in 2008).
Well, to combat that, a number of book lovers joined forces three years ago to create Campus Book Fest – a three-day university festival that celebrates books and reading, and which combines various activities that highlight why books should never lose their special place in our hearts.
This will be the third edition of the festival to be held from Tuesday to Thursday from 9am to 2pm and 4 till late. There will be a variety of events, including workshops, readings, films and discussions, as well as tours to lesser-known parts of the university library.
In addition, the festival’s special guest, author and poet Gerður Kristný, will also be hosting a number of events, including a workshop on Wednesday related to the re-writing of Norse Mythology and a reading and Q&A session to close the festival on Thursday.
Renowned in her homeland of Iceland, Kristný’s first book was published in 1994 when she was 24. Since then she’s written 25 books, including novels, short stories, poetry collections, a biography, plays and books for children. “My first three books of poetry each centred around similar motives, where the use of wintery imagery highlighted the need for emotional connectedness and where historical themes created a space to reflect the role of women in different societies,” she says.
Her interest in exploring feminist themes through poetry took a great leap forward with her forth book of poetry, Bloodhoof, for which she received various awards. The book has also been translated into various languages, including English, and it will be this book that she reads from at the Fest.
“In Bloodhoof I manage to combine an epic tale with my sparse imagery, and tell a story about the fate of migrant women of all ages,” she says. “Since then, I have continued to experiment with the possibilities of the cycle-form and, through the combination of narrative structure and poetic language, explored the fate of women faced with brutality and oppression.”
Bloodhoof is Kristný’s reinterpretation of a medieval mythological poem. She hasn’t transported the story into the modern age, but, has, instead, recreated the poem as a new version of the original story.
“My aim was, partly, to write a poem that could be re-inscribed into the original medieval codex from which the story derived,” she says. “We know that the narrative core of the poem in question was orally transmitted throughout the Nordic and the Germanic worlds from the early medieval period and well into the 13th and 14th centuries. It was only then that it was written down in Iceland by Christian scholars with the aim of collecting classical Nordic myths for the understanding of the imagery of the Nordic medieval poetry.
Contrasted with our present problems in Europe, the stories of the migrant peoples that roamed through Europe in search of new homelands in the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries have become immensely fascinating
“The Christian scholars wanted to understand the world of their ancestors and to retain the keys to their poetry but had no intention of discarding the knowledge of the heathen past. The open-mindedness towards the old culture, which already had been more-or-less uprooted from Scandinavia and Northern Europe in the 13th century, saved the Nordic nations’ cultural roots, and is the prime reason that we understand the religious and mythological context of figures that are found in archaeological excavations and inscriptions on rune stones.”
The author explains that, as Icelandic has not undergone any major changes since medieval times, it was relatively easy for her to read the poems. Meanwhile, her fascination with the subject rests on the fact that she can also read about the great upheavals in Europe during the Migration Period.
“It feels as though I am reading the morning paper! Contrasted with our present problems in Europe, the stories of the migrant peoples that roamed through Europe in search of new homelands in the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries have become immensely fascinating,” she says.
The poem in question, which Bloodhoof is based on, is called Skírnismál or ‘Skírnir‘s Journey’ in English. It tells the story of the Nordic fertility god Freyr, who sends his servant Skírnir to the land of the giants to fetch Gerður, who is of the giant tribe.
The fertility god had managed, through witchcraft, to see into all the habited worlds – both of men, gods and other creatures – and Gerður is by far the most beautiful woman he has seen. He then pays Skírnir for his services with a sword and a horse called Bloodhoof. Gerður refuses to come with him but Skírnir uses magic to subordinate her.
“Many academics of German studies have interpreted the story as romantic, but I wrote it from a feminist view; from the perspective of a woman that is tricked into leaving her homeland to marry a man in a strange place far away,” Kristný details, adding that she is looking forward to reading her interpretation on Thursday.
“It was at the Iceland Writers’ Retreat last year that I met the talented Leanne Ellul from the Campus Book Fest, who had already read Bloodhoof. I had always dreamt of visiting Malta, so I was thrilled when she invited me to the festival. Now she’s gone a step further and is even having my work translated into Maltese, which I am really pleased about.”
Kristný is eagerly looking forward to sharing her story at the festival. “Travelling has taught me that people all over the world love storytelling, and the mythologies that the mankind has told one generation to another through the ages can be quite similar. I expect the people of Malta to be as interested in literature as anywhere else that I have read from my works. I’m looking forward to finding out what we have in common!”