New Store at Redbubble and Sale at DeviantArt!!!

OK, yes, I’m going to buy into the crass commercialism of the season and note that, not only do I have a store up at Redbubble now, where you can buy tshirt, sweaters, prints, cards, ipad covers and phone covers, but DeviantArt has a 25% off sale at the Prints Shop this weekend! I’m slowly trying to pull my online store(s) together into a more professional online presence (looking into advertising at the moment… we’ll see if I take the leap), but I thought I would at least let you all know. My prices at Redbubble are mostly on the low side right now, meaning I am only getting 10 or 15% of the price on a few of the pieces–I may have to raise them eventually, but if things go well I will try to find some other venue which will let me get a higher % and sell at lower prices. And don’t forget my store here on the blog, with links to all these places.

So, summary of what is new:

Redbubble store

Tumblr sketch blog

Sale at DeviantArt (this weekend only)

At the moment I am most excited about this piece, hopefully the first of a series of black-dress tuff-grrl Valkyries–so be sure to get your copy! Clothes, i-stuff accessories, cards, posters, whatever!

Oh, and happy Thxgiving…

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Have a very Viking Thanksgiving

Then they showed them how to bury lutfisk when you plant your crops, and this is why we give thanks even today to Odin and Thor that we finally have a practical use for cod soaked in lye.

OK, so Vinland is probably not in Massachusetts, and no, the Vikings did not stay long-term in North America. Sure, they were in Greenland for half a millennium, but that was about the limit of a sustainable, fully-Norse-culture settlement, even if it looks like they did travel regularly to N America from Greenland (long after the trips in the Vinland sagas) to get lumber (but no, they did not travel to MN and set up runestones, sorry). Anyway, sorry the native american and the pilgrim in this picture are not in especially well researched authentic clothing–only time for a quick sketch right now, and I just wanted to hit on the funny point, meaning, the exaggeration of the typical Scandinavian-American tendency to celebrate the fact that the Vikings were in North America 500 years before anyone else… um, wait, before any other European (although I am told that Basque fishermen had been fishing of the coast of North America long before). And of course, we have our representative of the first nations (sorry again for the caricature…) looking on wondering what the fuss is all about…

Pic is also up on tumblr and on my deviantart account.

And of course, don’t forget my previous Vikings-In-America cartoon, available in a few formats from DeviantArt, and also as a postcard from Redbubble. [Edit–sorry, doesn’t seem to be a big enough file to sell on Redbubble–that’s what I get for drawing it on my iPad I guess. You can view it there anyway.]

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Happy bday Árni

Happy 350th Árni Magnússon! (You can supplement the wikipedia link w/ this more official bio). Thanks to Árni, I have a profession. We owe a lot to this guy who gathered the bulk of the Old Norse-Icelandic manuscripts that we have today. The institute where I did my dissertation research, and where I took a seminar in Old Norse paleography, is named after him: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum (The Arnamagnaean Institute for the Study of Icelandic Studies). Árni’s collection was severely damaged in the Copenhagen fire of 1728. He died a bit over a year later. 😦  The collection was divided in the 20th century between Árna Stofnun in Reykjavík (Iceland) and Árna Stofnun in Copenhagen (Denmark–in fact, the Queen of Denmark is visiting Iceland right now to commemorate Árni’s b-day).

Snæfell

Árni has inspired a few fictional variants (which you can find listed on the wikipedia page)–my favorite is Arne Saknussem in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, with his ridiculous and clearly non-Scandinavian name (in his attempt [or in spite of it] to mimic the sound of an Icelandic name, Verne ended up completely losing the patronymic -son). I read Journey right as I was leaving for my own studies in Iceland (and I enjoyed checking out Snaefell, the mountain through which the adventurers supposedly clamber down into the earth. Fun book, and a neat example of how “exotic” Iceland was to the rest of Europe at the time.

In honor of his birthday, I did a quick sketch of Árni as a Viking, posted below for your enjoyment (as well as on my tumblr and on deviantart). If folks like it, I will put together a cleaned-up version of the picture to sell as a tshirt or print on my new Redbubble store. And as always, check out my post on the term “Viking” in Medieval Iceland if you want more info about just what the word means. Sorry for such a quick post today, but things are finally getting rolling on this translation job (a book on the theology of the body), plus my cousin and his family are in town, so no time for anything thorough…

Árni as a Viking.

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