Fantastic creatures of the sea – and how to research them?

[starfishstar]

So, as I'm gently pondering What to Write Next, there's still this idea in my head about drawing on the mythology of selkies... Possibly for my young-Sherlock-and-Mycroft-mythical-AU idea, or possibly for some original story yet unknown.

Or maybe it won't end up being selkies, maybe I'll try to learn more about Icelandic folklore while I'm there later this summer, and look for inspiration there? Or perhaps something else that I haven't even thought of yet will emerge, as I'm on the lookout for fascinating fantastical creatures?

All I know is that I'm intrigued by the idea of doing something along the lines of the capaill uisce in Maggie Stiefvater's "The Scorpio Races" – drawing on folkloric traditions, but with a modern twist. (Like J. K. Rowling did, too – all those magical beasts, boggarts and hippogriffs and all, she didn't invent those, she drew from existing mythology.) Although, I think I like even more the idea of creatures that are sort-of-human-sort-of-not – like werewolves, or selkies, or even the dragons-that-can-disguise-themselves-as-humans in Rachel Hartman's "Seraphina."

However – as a Rachel Hartman or a Maggie Stiefvater proves – creating a richly imagined and culturally respectful inspired-by-mythology original work doesn't happen overnight. In fact, generally it happens through years of research. (And brainstorming and world-building and trying and failing and trying again...) Which I guess leads me to my question:

Any thoughts about how to go about this sort of research? I don't mean by reading novels, though those could be good too, if they're well and accurately researched. But I'm more thinking nonfiction – actual academic books on the history and traditions and origins of Scandinavian folklore, or maybe Celtic folklore... I would want to get well beyond the superficial read-it-on Wikipedia level – but I'm also not sure how committed I would be to reading dry-as-sandpaper academic texts. Is there nonfiction out there that's engaging? Is there fiction that's so well-researched it could serve as a source to learn from?

What do you do, writer friends??

Comments

[nerakrose]

Well, as someone who is researching for original writing (fantasy trilogy) and have been for about six months (and only now getting to a point where I can tentatively start jotting down loose scenes and character studies), what i do is:

1) Wikipedia first. It's perfectly serviceable as an intro to a subject, and the sources are links to further study. Sometimes the sources are to actual books, in those cases I check if the book is available on Google books.

2) my research is into Scandinavian, Finnish and sápmi folklore, myth, religion, spells, etc. and language (primarily medieval) and there are plenty of sources for that sort of thing in the Finnish department library at uni, five minutes from where I live and where I did much of my studying for my degree in Finnish and medieval Norse languages as well so I know the library like the back of my hand. I don't mind academic texts, but I don't check out books and read them from start to finish, I usually have one thing I want to look up, so I look up that thing and skim the chapters on that subject. Often while looking up that one thing I'll be inspired to look st some other chapters and suddenly I'm making notes on three other things as well, that I hadn't even expected...

3) Evernote. I have a notebook for just the notes on this project - all the notes are unsorted and untagged atm as it's all a bit of a disorganised mess; it's notes with plot outlines and lists of names and photographed pages from library books or copy pasted medieval Finnish spells from the archives of the Finnish literature society. Basically all kinds of world building and plot building and character building notes. I use Evernote because it syncs with two devices for free, so I've got it on both my phone and tablet so I can easily and handily add notes whenever I need to.

As for your question about nonfiction that's engaging and such - it's all a matter of temperament and taste, and how well any given text is written, I suppose. I rarely have problems with academic texts being dry or boring, but that's because I'm kind of insatiably curious and think everything is exciting, so I'm not as deterred by dry writing as I ordinarily would... But also it really helps to not just read cover to cover, just read one chapter at a time. Or skim it until something jumps out at you and read that paragraph.

I also have the advantage that I can read pretty much all the Nordic languages so I'm never wanting for sources in this particular research field, but I can imagine if you don't have that advantage, finding sources is more difficult and when you do, they might be harder to get through. After all, I've spent the last seven years studying this exact type of academic text (and, because the field is somewhat narrow, I've already come to know which academics to avoid and which are credible, which sources won't yield anything but old racists and colonial points of view and which don't, etc.).

So my advice, I suppose, is find a way to structure your research that works for you AND, most importantly, pick a subject that actually excites and interests you! I got the feeling with the Raven cycle that stiefvater is a gigantic nerd for Welsh kings and lore and stuff, because the love for it shone so clearly through the text. That kind of love makes any and all research lighter and easier and more exciting than if you're just doing it out of a sense of duty. It's how I'm feeling about my own research and novel planning - I love all of it, so I'm just digging into it all greedily when I can. It's how I borrow grammar books about Sápmi languages to read, because from those I can draw inspiration for a fictional language for the fictional nation loosely based on the Sápmi - and because I'm also a huge language nerd and love seeing how this particular fenno-ugric language is constructed and make comparisons to how Finnish is constructed. What's the same, what isn't, what's different, what's similar.

[starfishstar]

Oh, ooh wow, I didn't realize just what an AMAZING resource you would be on this question. Thank you!!

(I know you study Finnish, but I didn't realize you study folklore and medieval(!!) language...I guess I thought you studied "just" the language. (As if there were anything "just" about learning a Finno-Ugric language! Respect!))

Okay, so first of all, you've definitely confirmed what I thought, which is that something like this would be a project of many years' reading and gradual accumulation of influences and thoughts, before some first ideas of my own would even begin to poke out of the soil. Not a project to undertake lightly... (Though maybe I can play around in the world of fic for a while longer, where the stakes aren't as high, and experiment in writing in this direction. I actually haven't written much that would even qualify as fantasy genre, despite the fact that I write in the Harry Potter world!)

Oh, I'm glad you (as a real academic!) find Wikipedia okay as a starting point. I do find it useful when all I need is a general sense about something.

Your research topics sound so fascinating! A bit jealous now. ;-)

Re: Stiefvater and Welsh kings, that's another thing, I would feel weird about being *yet* another American obsessed with and romanticizing British/European mythology... We do have a bit of a tendency to do that... :-P But I guess that's a good sign, if you're saying Stiefvater has done a good job of it? Means it's not totally hopeless for the rest of us goofy Americans...! But oh yes, I would totally, totally pick something that fascinates me so much that I'm just sucked into it and it doesn't feel like work to read up on it.

I don't think I expressed myself well about academic texts – though your response helped me clarify my thoughts, so maybe I wasn't able to express it clearly until now! I'm certainly not denigrating academic writing; maybe it's myself I don't trust to be able to really do proper research? You make a very good point, though, about academic/research reading being more about skimming and picking relevant bits here and there, rather than reading cover to cover. I think I've been out of academia so long that I've forgotten how to do that! I'm definitely the same way, though; if something interests me I can happily follow that thread endlessly and enthusiastically. I guess I just worry that I'm too much of a "dilettante," my eye getting caught by shining bits and bobs here and there, but not enough to sustain serious research.

(It's funny, just today I was nerding out about the similarities between the various Germanic languages – right now I'm in Belgium surrounded by Dutch, while also working on my online Icelandic language course, while also speaking German to German friends here – and my friend said to me, Why don't you study linguistics?? I tried to explain how I don't feel like I'm cut out for an academic's life; I *obsessively love* talking about and thinking about languages and the similarities and differences between them, but I'm not sure I have the long-term stamina to devote years of my life to following one single linguistic research topic. Maybe I'm wrong about that, though.)

But yes, anyway, very good about point about approaching it in skimming way, reading a bit here and there and then following as one topic/resource unexpectedly leads you to another. I have the disadvantage of not being near an academic library right now, but maybe when I'm back home. (My town actually has a huge Icelandic manuscript collection, of all things!)

Anyway, long response, sorry, but your comment got me thinking about all kinds of interesting things! Thank you!

[nerakrose]

Gosh well some of it is a side effect, really - when you study the old Norse and medieval Norse languages, you've got to do it by reading texts written in those languages. And often those texts are folkloric in nature, though tbh most of what I read was law texts, cook books, historical accounts and religious texts. Some sagas too, but "sagas" is a very broad genre and not all of them were mythological, some were historical and the kingly sagas were fiction. And as for the Finnish stuff, I didn't study medieval Finnish very much beyond what was covered in one chapter in one text book, but I've gone back to it when I started researching my novels. Kalevala studies are required only as a by-the-way thing in lit class, but I wrote my masters thesis about a comic which was a retelling of a Kalevala sequence, so did lot of basic research into that, and from there I actually got the inspiration for the novels I want to write! So I continued that research on the side while finishing up my thesis, and am still at it, and have expanded the field to Sápmi stuff. I'm very well versed in the Norse mythology stuff seeing as I've learned that in school since first grade and it's a very pervasive part of my every day culture, both in Iceland and here, but I do fact checking every now and then, and read up on some of the old texts to get a feel for how stories were told then (it's amazing how much you can glean about a culture from the way they tell a story!)

My degree is in Finnish language and culture (I had one class on history, everything else is literature), so basically 50/50 language studies/literature. We don't have majors/minors, but we have some elective classes we can take from outside the degree, and I chose to take primarily medieval Norse language classes for those (specifically, I took the classes: old Icelandic, modern Icelandic, the Nordic language societies (a socio-linguistic class focused on dialects vs standard language, I wrote a paper about Sápmi languages and their social standing for that class), the Nordic medieval languages (so: old Icelandic, old Norwegian, old Swedish and old Danish) and east Norse (old Swedish and old Danish. this class also included runic Danish and Proto-Norse, which was v cool).

All this boils down to a very specialised skill set in reading a) all the modern and medieval Nordic languages, including Finnish, and a fuckload of specialised knowledge in old customs, mythology and folklore. XD


To get back on topic: yes, Wikipedia is great. It's very well sourced and it's edited by people who know what they write about. Only reason why it gets a bad rap is because you can't use Wikipedia as a source, so if you want to quote Wikipedia in an academic paper, you quote wikipedia's sources - not Wikipedia. But yeah, most academics will tell you that it's good for an introduction. It's very well set up, explains things in a language anyone can understand and has sources for further reading. We all use it if we come across something new we don't know about or need to look up.

I get what you mean about the American/European thing, and I don't think there are any hard cold facts here, or a set of rules. Where stiefvater was concerned I felt like she was projecting her obsession and love for this Welsh stuff into gansey (one of the main characters) and having the location be in Virginia was like...wishful thinking. In a "im now Welsh in Wales so I'll just bring it to me" sort of. I didn't feel it affected the book negatively, and it's entirely possible I was being hyperaware of it because I can get a bit annoyed sometimes when yet another American starts writing about things that doesn't concern them :p but on the other hand, I don't feel like it should be forbidden, you know? One should feel free to write what they like. I think it's just that sometimes, things aren't in the past and free for taking. I'm fortunate enough not to come from a culture that's been historically oppressed or anything (unlike, say, the Sápmi or the native Americans) so people writing about Norse mythology is by definition not cultural appropriation. But it's still a culture that's alive, you know?

Tbc in next comment

[nerakrose]

We might not believe in the Norse gods anymore and practise a religion around them, but we still absolutely talk about them like they're still around ("who pissed Thor off", "there comes freyja") and they are very much a fixture in every day so each and idioms (not to mention that we do tell their stories to our children and perform plays based on the stories and whatnot), we name our children after them (I can mention several family members and friends with mythology names), we believe in elves and ghosts and nixes and so on. So sometimes I can get really rubbed the wrong way and sometimes I don't, depending on my mood that particular day :p so i suppose it's got to do with respect, too - do you respect the source, or is it just a "cool factor" ? Believe me, I can tell the difference :p

It's important to remember though, that it's fiction and it doesn't need to be accurate. You don't need to duplicate the facts of the real world. You can change things about and switch them up and do things differently, so long as you're mindful that you don't offend. It's something I'm very aware of in my Sápmi research, because they are still suffering from colonisation and racism and there are a lot of harmful stereotypes. So before I make a Sápmi character a shaman, for instance, in my novels, I need to make sure that I don't make that character an offensive harmful stereotypical shaman, even if the fictional nation and people I base on this culture are only loosely based on it; it will be recognisable as coming from Sápmi (well, by people able to recognise it, anyhow), and I've got a duty to represent them faithfully, respectfully and, when it comes to sensitive matters, accurately. I want to make one Sápmi character a shapeshifter, but I don't know yet if I can, because I'm still looking for sources - it strikes me as something that could potentially have been a racist twisted stereotype of Sápmi spirituality and shamanism (the way you sometimes see with native Americans), so I haven't settled on anything yet in regards to that character. If it turns out it is problematic, and I'm still going through with the shapeshifting, then I need to be incredibly careful in how i portray that character and their abilities, and be prepared for any backlash I might experience because of it, should I ever get my stuff published.

Idk if that was helpful at all, mostly just my thoughts about problems I'm facing...


Oh and on the topic of linguistics! One of my favourite thing to do is compare German and Icelandic, actually - I speak German (more like, I read it very well and I know my grammar, but my speaking proficiency is only enough to make myself understood in shops and the like, in Germany...) and I find it fascinating to see how they are alike and how they aren't. I have a thing for verbs in particular! Like the German werden verb and the Icelandic verða. Interesting stuff! I could never have gone into linguistics, though, because linguistics as a field is far too broad and unspecific, and I'm more interested in specific languages - which is why I chose Finnish. We sadly didn't have any fenno-ugric classes, so what little I know about that language family is through my own studies in my spare time. I would've loved to have classes in Estonian or Sápmi or Komi or any of the other fenno-ugric languages. :( etymology is another big favourite of mine, I love finding out where words come from, why and how. For instance, did you know that the word for hell actually comes from Finnish? It was loaned into proto-Germanic if I recall correctly, and from there made it onto old Norse and from there it made it into English. (I have a source for this if you want it.)

[starfishstar]

First response: Oh my gosh, yes to everything here! (Second response: So sorry for the delay in answering, I've been traveling and am far behind on everything.)

In more detail, now:

Your degree, and especially those elective courses (all the medieval language stuff, and the comparative language and dialect stuff) sound amazing. I have a tendency to geek out about anything language related, but most especially the historical/comparative aspects. It's part of what most intrigues me about learning Icelandic in fact, how I'm able to draw connections to German, or even Old English. So jealous of your ability to read all Scandinavian languages. :-)

Yes yes yes to everything you said about cultural appropriation, and people writing stories set in cultures not their own. Definitely needs to be approached with SO much sensitivity, and careful research, and willingness to listen, and also willingness to hear and accept it if people from within that culture are telling you no, actually this isn't okay, back off. (i.e., everything J.K. Rowling has NOT done in her ham-handed writing about "Native American" magic for the upcoming Fantastic Beasts movie. I love JKR a lot, she's generally a very sensitive and empathetic advocate on all kinds of important topics, but I'm deeply disappointed in her on this one.)

I think the issue of cultural appropriation/cultural sensitivity applies even if the culture in question is not historically or currently oppressed... I mean, take Iceland for example. As you know, I love Iceland. I find the nature stunning and inspiring, I've met so many people who bowled me over with their kindness, I am endlessly amazed by the music/creative culture, I've made friends and connections that I never expected and which I treasure. The reason I'm doing something as oddball as going off to a remote fjord to take a full-time intensive language course is because I truly do hope Iceland will be a place I keep going back to throughout my life. BUT. I'm not sure I would ever dare to write a story set in Iceland. Maybe I would, if it were something set in Reykjavík or in other places that I know. But certainly I would not try to write anything drawing from any kind of Icelandic folklore without a huge amount of research and checking that what I'm doing is all right. I mean, shoot, I lived in Berlin for 8 years and I still haven't written a single piece of fiction set in the city, because though I know Berlin very well, I haven't lived through its history (only absorbed it secondhand from Berliner friends and acquaintances) and I doubt my ability to represent the city truly, in all its nuances.

Which is all to say, on the one hand I totally want to write a fantasy genre story weaving in some of these things I've been thinking about, especially some of the things Rebecca Solnit mentioned in the book of hers I read most recently, tales of humans who turn out to be part animal, or otherwise mythical, especially these stories from the far north of men who are bears and women who are birds, and so on, what an interesting human trend in storytelling to explore... But on the other hand I think, I don't know the least thing about it, I'd just be another American stomping around on stuff I don't understand, don't even try it. :-(

The answer, I guess, is research, research, research...

I love everything you said about your writing and your work to make sure you're sensitive in your portrayal, even if what you end up writing is a "fantasy" version, not strictly based on a real culture and history. (I was once in a writing workshop with this well-meaning but clueless young white Belgian woman, who was determined to write a cycle of fantasy novels set in a sort of mythical prehistoric "Africa" of her own imagining – it was pretty hair-raising, especially because she didn't understand why others of us in the class had even the least bit of concern about what she was doing, and all the potential for it to accidentally go very wrong...)

(this, also, continues in the next comment...)

[starfishstar]

Oh, and yes, how much you can tell about a culture from the way they tell a story! My layperson's vague understanding is that the Icelandic sagas are really interesting both for their format (the first sagas told in prose rather than rhyme, or something like that?) and for the content (relating real historical events, told through the lens of how people of the era understood natural events, caused by gods and giants, etc.) But I need to read a lot more to actually know anything about it!

And yes, I share your love of etymology. :-) "where words come from, why and how." – I can drink that stuff up forever! I believe you about the word "hell" coming to English from Finnish, though I'm happy to hear sources if you want! But that seems totally plausible to me, especially since the Norse gods – and thus surely to some degree Norse worldview – still have such an influence. (Even being our names of the days of the week for example – I once wrote an essay on that, for a history of English course!)

[nerakrose]

(aahahhaa i'm so late in replying i'm sorry - i've been away and then i've been busy/distracted. whoops. where did the time go?)

ugh, the jkr thing. she really needs to stop. v.v

i'm curious, what is your degree in, if you have one?

i meant to say earlier and forgot: it's really important that you don't get stuck researching for years. worldbuilding and setting is great, but... don't blow all your steam off on that. start writing as soon as you can - you can always fix things and do more research later. we aren't all tolkien. :p my favourite thing to do is worldbuild as i go (and then take notes on what new element i just came up with is so that i won't forget later). for example, in this trilogy thing, what's important for me to know (but not necessarily put into writing) is setting. i have a crazy spatial awareness (never get lost, always know where i am in relation to X or Y, etc), so i need to know where all the major geographical points are and i need to have at least a rough idea of what the city the plot takes place in is like. on a microlevel, i need to know which side of a house faces south (for example), if that house is important in the story. else i can't move my characters around if all the map in my mind has are blank grids, to put it simply. so that's always something i do first. BUT! other stuff i can do as i go along. which brings me back to the point i set out to make. for example, i wrote a scene in which i had a character stopping by to get coffee before a meeting. it's likely not going to be in the novel, it's more of a character study (he's just going to show up to the meeting with his take away cup), but i wanted to know what kind of customer he is, and by extension what kind of person he is. the coffeshop (and this is something i came up with as i wrote, not something i decided beforehand) is a chain called taikahvia, a compound of taika and kahvia, the words for magic and coffee in finnish respectively, and they do charmed coffee. so the barista asked my character if he wanted a good luck charm on his latte, 20% off on to-go-cups, today's special offer. so now i suddenly have a world in which magical coffee is a real thing and people can add on charms like they add on flavoured syrup. (probably the charms wear off after a couple of hours, idk.)

so, you know. research is good, but don't do it for years. the only reason why i said i've been doing it for six months is because i did it alongside my thesis - but i didn't do it every day. all put together, i suppose the research i've done for this thing is maybe 10-12 days, and i don't mean full days, just the amount of days i definitely looked up something specifically for the trilogy and didn't just make a note when i came across something useful when doing thesis research. writing is the important thing. get to know your characters and you'll get to know your plot better and as you get to know those things, the world builds alongside it all.

honestly i'm not an expert on the sagas, but i know they vary in genre and format. i've not read them all. some are translations of european literature (i read an excerpt on something about charlemagne i think, i don't remember).

the guy who discovered the hell thing is adam hyllested. his phd thesis was about language contact and some of the things he found out was that words previously believed to be loaned into finnish/fenno-ugric languages couldn't have been, and he found evidence that it was the other way around. the article about hell is in danish, his phd thesis only briefly mentions it in one single paragraph. :P his thesis is really interesting reading though! it's available online, here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5n0zqfuny4jgt80/Trykklar_PhD_Adam-TO.pdf

[starfishstar]

Oh, no worries! I've also been falling behind on stuff while I'm traveling. (And will probably fall even more behind, once I'm in Iceland and wholly focused on the language course I'm doing there!)

My degree is in linguistics, nominally, but with the focus on translation of literature. So I did a bit of "proper" linguistics stuff here and there, and one really fantastic class on the history of English, but mostly it was about translation theory, and actually doing translations (mainly from German).

I guess the thing for me is, I need to do some research (or at least some more reading) to even know what I want to write in the first place! Right now at least, I'm not at a stage where there are lots of ideas already existing in my head, jostling to get out. It's more about the input I take in, like, I read something interesting and think, ooh, I'd like to explore more of that. That's why I feel like I need to take in a lot more input before I'll at all have something write about.

Ooh, so your trilogy is set in a present-day world, but with magic? I really like stories like those, that blend magic/fantasy with recognizable modern/real-world elements. (It's part of what I liked so much about the one Stiefvater book I've read so far.)

And yes, I completely agree about writing extra scenes, for background or character development, that don't necessarily belong in the final story – they're just there for you, the writer, to get a full enough sense of the character to then be able to write them in a fully rounded way when they do appear in the story. That was something I had to learn early on as a writer, that the first scene I write, even if at the time I *think* I'm writing the opening scene of the story, is very likely not actually where the story needs to start in its final version. Often a whole bunch of the beginning is just me getting to know the character/figuring out the scenario, but the real "story" starts somewhat later on. (Or, perhaps, earlier.)

That stuff about Finno-Ugric loan words into Indo-European languages (and how it had been assumed by default to always work the other way around) is really interesting!

[nerakrose]

Ohh, translations! Do you do a lot of those? I've been looking into going into that business but it just doesn't pay well enough that I can make ends meet if I go that route :/

I can totally understand that. :) good luck figuring it out!

Yeah, more or less. It's a fictional planet and all, but yeah - I'm tired of the "European medieval age" type of fantasy. There are some really good books out there, but the ones I like best have been primarily Russian inspired (Leigh Bardugo - the Grisha Trilogy + Six of Crows which takes place in the same universe) and Polish inspired (Naomi Novik - Uprooted), which is so refreshing. So tired of things being located in medieval "France". So I'm going for a modern (solarpunk!) inspired world with most of our modern technology, but with magic. And the influences will be primarily Finnish (with a side of Norse culture). It could be interpreted as "what if the industrial revolution just never happened and people went straight from the Renaissance to solarpunk?" I suppose...idk, I'm still working it out.

[starfishstar]

Oh goodness, yes, I was a translator by profession for about 7 years. (One of the few people I know to actually put my undergrad degree directly to use!) I left that life when I left Berlin last year, and I don't at all miss the stress of the freelancing life, but I do miss the fun of translation.

Yeah, your world for your trilogy sounds awesome! I, too, am so ready for fantasy stories that are not set in pseudo-medieval-western-Europe. I mean, I'll still read the occasional high fantasy story of that type if it's a really good one. (For example, I guess "Seraphina" by Rachel Hartman technically falls into that category, but it's brilliant. And the world-building is so great and original.) But, yeah, more stories that break out of that mold, please! I've heard N. K. Jemison praised as someone who writes fantasy that's not medieval-Europe-based. I recently checked out a couple of her short stories and they were great; she's high on my list of books to read next. She's apparently good on POC-representation, too. Have you read her?

And since you mentioned "Six of Crows" – that's a title I've been seeing EVERYwhere since I started working in a library, but I still don't really know anything about it. Do you recommend it?? If so, I'm going to add it to my to-read list.

[nerakrose]

Fancy! I totally get you. I'm thinking of doing translations on the side once I get something steady going, but we'll see. I can't do any freelance work so long as I'm on unemployment benefits, because if I do I'll be ineligible for them and I need them to pay bills and eat :/

I have Rachel Hartmann (seraphina + shadow scale) and n.k. Jemisin (the inheritance trilogy) in my shelf just waiting for me :) I'm especially excited about n.k. Jemisin because a good friend of mine recced her to me for not only good poc representation but also good lgbtqa rep and amazing non-Eurocentric fantasy stuffs :D I was planning on making it my summer reading, but here I am on the last day of July and haven't yet finished reading the ballad of sir Benfro (a four book series, I'm a little over halfway through with the fourth book). I haven't decided what to read next really, I have so many options and August is a blank ! I mean, in September the fourth book in the gentleman bastard sequence comes out (I've preordered it) and I want to reread the first three in anticipation, but until then... I don't know. It's like I forgot August existed, haha. And I have a pile of unread books in my shelves...

I HIGHLY recommend six of crows! You don't need to have read the grisha trilogy to read six of crows, but it does take place in the same world not long after the events of the grisha trilogy, so there will be spoilery things re: events of the grisha trilogy. None of the characters from the trilogy show up in six of crows though (btw there's a sequel to six of crows coming out this fall, it's called crooked kingdom and I've preordered it). Also I'm not sure I'd have enjoyed six of crows as much as I did if I hadn't read the grisha trilogy first - it's pretty awesome in its own right even if book one has some First Book problems + internalised misogyny, that stuff all went away in book two and book three was all around just wonderful and I spent the last hundred pages or so of it in tears. Also in book three there's a lesbian couple. Six of crows is better in poc rep and disability rep, it also has lgbtqa rep though slightly more understated than book three of grisha (I'm fully expecting the gay ship to become 100% canon in the next book, in soc there is flirting and some admitting of intent/feeling, but neither has acted on it yet). Also it's about thieves and I love heist stories :D (it's also about murderous children, heh. Everyone is like 17 and the head of the group (Kaz, the one with the disability (he is also ace, I believe)) will do absolutely anything. He has zero scruples. it's very interesting to have a protagonist like that I have to say.

To further entice you towards six of crows, Kevin wada, one of my favourite comic book artists (he does mostly covers, but also commissions, fanart and other stuff, also happens to be Asian and gay) made official art for soc. This is the most recent, a set of posters: http://lbardugo.tumblr.com/post/147818773540/lbardugo-all-of-the-character-art (that last one with the two faces in one poster? You'll understand once you've read the book. Don't ask me about it, it's spoilery :p) ETA: I managed to find the first official art he did, here: http://kevinwada.tumblr.com/post/123470543176/lbardugo-well-be-giving-away-this-limited this is what originally convinced me to pick up the book tbh (and the trilogy while I was at it, and then I decided to read the trilogy first because I'd heard soc was in the same verse, so figured I'd best read what came first, first...)

[starfishstar]

Ooh, you have Rachel Hartman's books already! I hope you enjoy them. :-) And if you read N.K. Jemison, I'd love to hear what you think. I won't get a chance to check out her books until this autumn at the earliest, when I'm done traveling. Exactly the same – I've heard her recommended for great diversity/representation AND non-Eurocentric-ness. Yay!

Okay, so if I want just one recommendation of a book to start with, would I read Six of Crows, or the first book of the Grisha trilogy? I don't have a huge amount of patience for series right at the moment, just because there are SO many other books I want to read so it's hard to commit time to a whole series. And if the first book is weaker than the others, it might not draw me in enough to read the whole series... So should I read Six of Crows even though it's a bit spoiler-y for the other books (given that I may or may not even find the time to read the other books)?

Re: translating, which language pairs would you work with? One of the others in my language course right now is a translator (not of Scandinavian languages, though) and she's learning Icelandic partly with the idea of maybe eventually being able to translate from it. She seems to think there's a well-paid market for that, right now. So given that you speak Icelandic AND so many other Scandinavian languages AND English, it seems like you could be quite well set up to work as a translator in that area.

[nerakrose]

i finished the first book in the inheritance trilogy the other day, and i loved it. :D it's really good. the world building is amazing and the premise is pretty interesting.

hmm, if you want just one to start with, go with six of crows. it's not THAT spoilery in regards to the grisha trilogy (as i said, none of the characters from that make an appearance) and it takes place in completely different locations. the spoilery things it refers will likely make little sense out of context and you'll just forget about it, or it might be just the thing that when you get to the grisha trilogy will make you confused as you can't work the information into the story (until much, much later, when it actually happens). it works as a stand alone story in away that the first book of the grisha trilogy doesn't. that being said, the grisha trilogy is a light and fast read and i read it in the span of about five or six evenings. (the first book isn't that weak either, did i make it sound like it's awful? it isn't, or i wouldn't have finished it, much less continued reading the rest of the series...)
they're also completely different stories, in that six of crows is about murderous teenage thieves pulling a massive heist, and the grisha trilogy is more akin to your standard "girl discovers she has powers and chosen to save the world" narrative. the magic system is really interesting, with magic being something inherent (there are genetic explanations) and then there being different "versions" (or as some see it, castes) of magic. one of the characters in six of crows is a heartrender (means she can kill you with the power of her mind pretty much. there are two types, heartrenders and healers.) who was part of the war/resistance that took place in the grisha trilogy.

i can translate from pretty much anything into danish, and even though english isn't my native language by far, i can translate into english too but ofc nobody would hire me to do that :P although if there's a serious lack of icelandic -> english translators i might look into that...
anyway, i'm basically looking at: icelandic, finnish, english, swedish & norwegian -> danish. what i should be focusing on is finnish -> danish because...well, that's my degree. but finnish is Hard and time consuming, whereas the other languages i don't have to first suss out what the sentence means before i translate it, i just have to translate it. i can also do german -> danish, but i would prefer not to as german tends to give me headaches. (i can't deal with the capitalised nouns and the verb-comes-last sentence structures, it's like trying to find a needle in a rainbow coloured haystack. the grammar and vocabulary on the other hand, not an issue. no wait, that's a lie. i hate the german conjunctive with a passion and it's 110% related to the fact that i never managed to master it in use because it's too damn complicated. is it called conjunctive in english? i mean stuff like "sie habe", like...like if you're in a court room and rattling off a list of things a person allegedly did, you'd use "sie habe" about a woman allegedly doing things. if i recall correctly, anyway...)

[starfishstar]

Okay, I'm bumping NK Jemison higher on my to-read list, and I'm adding Six of Crows. :-) Definitely like reading different authors' imaginings of how magic works!

Unfortunately, I have no idea how market demand for Icelandic-->Danish is. Or any of the other languages to Icelandic, for that matter... Icelandic-->English I would guess would be mostly in the realm of literature? And maybe the geothermal/energy industry? My translator friend who's feeling out the possibility of learning Icelandic well enough to translate from it (!!) translates into French, and my only real expertise is German-English, so I'm pretty uninformed about translation between Scandinavian languages – I do know one guy who translates from German and Danish to English. But then, there's always more demand into English, right? :-P

Ha, yes, the German "Konjunktiv I"! Luckily, you're pretty much okay as long as you can passively understand it in writing; you rarely really have to say it, when just going about your colloquial, spoken life unless you want to be perfectly correct.

Man, though, I'm glad I learned German in school, when I was still reasonably young. If I were trying to tackle Icelandic grammar now, as an adult with a less flexible brain and without the German background already firmly rooted, yikes!

[nerakrose]

the translation market is so weird, i don't know if it's even possible to aim for something specific! atm i'm more interested in technical translations (as opposed to literary) as they pay more and also because literary translations do my head in :P but we'll see.

i'm also really glad that i learned german in school when i was younger, i don't think i'd have learned it otherwise. knowing icelandic didn't really help actually :P it might be in part because i hadn't learned much grammar before i left iceland, i hadn't quite reached that stage of schooling. but nothing is impossible! i didn't start studying finnish till my twenties and it's been going well. :)

[starfishstar]

Fwiw, all the professional translators I know specialize to some degree, because it's better to be an expert at one or two things than to be sort of passable in a bunch of topic areas. (e.g. one is a medical translator, some do journalism, one only translates novels...) since being able to write accurately on whatever topic you're translating about in the target language is at least as important as being able to understand the source language! Technical translation seems like a smart thing to aim for, since there's always demand, and it should be reasonably well-paid. But again, I'm no expert on the specifics, because I fell almost immediately into a working relationship with one primary client, so I never had to look that hard for others. My translator life was atypical. ;-)

[nerakrose]

oh, that makes a lot of sense. :D i'll just have to see what's out there - i have topics i can do better than others, definitely. :) thanks!

[shimotsuki.livejournal.com]

Hmm -- I don't know anything about researching folklore per se, but I wouldn't think academic papers on this topic would be dry...when I was an undergrad I used to read papers on things like religious studies, and (compared to the technical papers I was reading for linguistics) I always found them really accessible. Have you tried any Google Scholar searches on things like 'origin Scandinavian folklore' to see what kinds of journal articles pop up? Then maybe through your library position you can link through to the journals and check them out?

And I could be totally wrong, and papers on these topics could be totally dry, lol. But it might be worth a look?

[starfishstar]

You know, further conversation with nerak_rose above clarified my thinking, and now I'm pretty sure it's not that I don't trust academic literature to be interesting...it's that I don't trust myself to have the follow-through to actually do proper research. :-P

I'm probably selling myself short (most likely), but I think of myself as being quite dilettante-ish – if something catches my eye (often something about the history of a word, or some comparative linguistics tidbit...) I can follow that trail avidly, even obsessively, but I don't have much history of doing "real" research, in a properly focused and orderly way. Probably something I should learn, though!

Thanks for the Google Scholar tip! I'll try that out.