Sunday, August 22, 2004

Female, young, new-norwegian and good

Those were the criteria my husband set when he started searching for an author to introduce to his high-school pupils this year. And he found her! Olaug Nilssen, a young woman - young enough that I feel I can get away with calling her a girl - who wrote the book Vi har så korte armar - "we have such short arms". But what I wanted to show particularly the Norwegian readers is that Olaug Nilssen has a blog, Eit eige rom med utsikt, "a private room with a view" on a site called skoddeheimen.no. Skodde = fog, heimen = the home, so something like "the home of fog". Only it sounds much more poetic in Norwegian. So plenty of literary references, national and international.

Reading her blog makes me want to blog in Norwegian. I really should write more in Norwegian. Actually I do. But not here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why "new norwegian"?

Torill said...

New Norwegian as in the language New Norwegian. Norway has two Norwegian languages, Book Norwegian, bokmål, which is the more Danish version used by the people living incities under heavy Danish influence and actually the newer Norwegian, and nynorsk - New-Norwegian which is based on the dialects and so more of an original Norwegian language. So, she has to write in New-Norwegian. And Norwegians love confusing language debates, the more confusing the better.

Jill said...

Am I just Virginia Woolfed this week, or is "eige rom" a reference to "A Room of One's Own"?

I too was happy to find the blog :)

Torill said...

Good one Jill!