Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

“I’ll do it for you,” Mari told him. “Of course I’ll get some things wrong, but I don’t think it’ll be too bad.”

“No, I can’t accept that. It would interfere too much with the rest of your work.”

“This is more important.”

“No, I really can’t accept it, Miss Gellers.”

“Please, Doctor Tharlsen.”

(Doctor Tharlsen maintained a formal relationship with his students, and Mari had guessed early on that he would be embarrassed by anything that suggested his friendship with her was other than straightforwardly professional.)

As a compromise he agreed that she might stay on at the university through the summer vacation and make a start on the work to see how it went. He spent the first three weeks at Yale, where the library had recently installed a new fluoroscopic technique, combined with computerised image enhancement, to extract meaningful characters from damaged documents, and were eager to try it out on the Frählig MS. By the time he returned Mari had the legible parts of the Gelfunsaga on disc, including a whole series of extensions of lines revealed by the fluoroscope—on Mari’s suggestion he had asked an assistant at the library to email these to her. By the end of the vacation Doctor Tharlsen was himself online and exchanging email with distant colleagues.

A word about the Gelfunsaga . This is the longest, most exciting, and at the same time most tantalising portion of the whole MS. Like Snorri’s later Prose Edda , it appears to be a prose recension of a much older verse legend, from which it occasionally quotes a few lines. The story it seems to tell is referred to nowhere else in the literature. It would clearly be of interest to the general reader, as well as to scholars. Unfortunately it is the last item in the MS, and so the most extensively damaged, less than half of any line being legible. And its being largely in prose inhibits reconstruction, for two reasons: the alliterative verse line of, for instance, the riddles obeys rules almost as strict as the rhymed and scanned lines of later European poetry, and these usefully limit the possibilities for supplying missing words and phrases; and then the copyist, though he had written the Norse verse sections out to fill every line and had translated them into prose, had marked the line endings on both sheets with a slash, thus relating them clearly to each other. Sometimes one half of the meaning could be read in each language. There was no such guide for the prose of the Gelfunsaga , and the copyist cannot have recognised the brief verse sections as such, and so failed to mark them.

The story, as far as it can be made out, has affinities with the first two episodes of Beowulf. The hero, Gelfun, to rid the neighbourhood from the depredations of a monster (who may or may not be the troll twice referred to in the surviving portions of the text—the Latin uses the word monstrum throughout, but at one point adds the epithet sol timens, presumably the copyist’s attempt at sunfearer ), goes to the underwater lair of the beast, using a hollow reed(?) to breathe through. His weapons are useless to him, since the creature’s limbs are made of rock. (This is one of the passages where the Latin and Norse complement each other enough to make the gist fairly clear.) Gelfun then wrestles with it, apparently inconclusively (the text is once more very obscure), and there is then an exchange of oaths. But he seems to have won the contest, because he takes a treasure of amber from the cave, and then puts the monster onto a ship and dispatches it to sea. The final section is the most seriously damaged part of the manuscript. It seems to have little relation to what went earlier, but apparently deals with Gelfun’s choice of an heir.

Because of its near intractability Doctor Tharlsen had kept the Gelfunsaga till last. At the time Mari came into his life he was about to start serious work on it.

All this occurred in the summer of Mari’s second year at University. For the last fortnight of that long vacation she joined her family at their holiday home on one of the northern fjords. There, disruptingly, she fell in love.

Fell, for once, is the right word. The event was as unforeseen and overwhelming as the collapse of a cliff face, altering the whole landscape of her life. She had, of course, had a few tentative involvements with fellow students during the last two years, trial runs, as much to explore her own emotional responses as the physical sensations, and had found, even when the sensations had been enjoyable enough, that the event had left her dissatisfied. She was, she came to realise, one of those people who need to commit themselves, heart and soul as well as body, to anything of importance they undertake. Before she could love, she must choose, choose with her whole being, for all of her life.

She had expected, or at least hoped, to do so as she did most things, deliberately, to find a man of her own age whom she liked, get to know and admire him, while he did the same with her, and then, as it were, build their lifelong love together step by step, much as she had watched her parents and elder siblings building the house on the fjord together. The last thing she had looked for was a cliff-fall.

Dick Vesey was an Englishman, like her father a hydroelectric engineer. They had met at a conference and liked each other, and since Dick’s main interest outside his work was fishing, Mari’s father had invited him to the fjord for the late salmon run. He was twelve years older than Mari, with her sort of build, slight and active, but his face was different, the skull squarish, and the features moulded in definite angular planes. (One night on their honeymoon, tracing those planes with her fingertips, she wondered aloud whether his parents had conceived him in a bed with a Braque painting on the wall above it. “Far from it,” he answered. “It was on open moorland during a cycling trip in the Cheviots, I believe. They didn’t intend it to happen. She was married to another man, and didn’t want to divorce him.”) The effect was to give him a misleadingly merry look, almost droll. In fact he laughed seldom and spoke little. His humour when he chose to deploy it was dry and understated, but quirky, poised between the gnomic and the surreal. Occasionally he produced a remark that might have come straight out of the riddles. He was an excellent and attentive listener. When Mari told him about her work with Doctor Tharlsen, though he had no knowledge of the languages involved, he not only grasped the difficulties but, as her family never in their heart of hearts had done, accepted the importance of the work. She used her laptop to show him some examples of what she was doing. It was while they were sitting together gazing at a laptop screen filled with fragmentary lines of runes that Mari realised what had happened to her.

Later she came to feel that the occasion had not been random, as it had seemed at the time, but utterly appropriate, almost willed. She had fallen for Dick because something about him spoke to her, just as the Frählig MS had, but even more urgently and insistently. The same, he said later, had happened to him, but since each felt there wasn’t the slightest chance of the other returning feelings so irrational, they had managed to conceal it from each other.

But not, it turned out, from anyone else. As they waved his car away and watched it vanish behind the pines Mari’s father said to her, “Well, when does he propose?” and the rest of the family—ten, including a brother and sister-in-law—bellowed with cheerful northern laughter.

They became engaged by email. She visited him in Scotland over the New Year, staying in a hotel near Dumfries because he had no home of his own but lodged wherever his current work happened to be. Nor was there any family for her to meet. His mother had returned to her husband soon after he was born, the husband making it a condition that she didn’t bring the baby, so his father had brought him up, marrying when he was five, but had had no more children, and had then emigrated to Canada with Dick’s stepmother when Dick was a student. Dick was now between jobs, and the reason he had chosen Dumfries was that it would allow them to look for a house within easy reach of his next one, which involved the installation of a small hydroelectric plant in the hills above the town. They narrowed the field down drastically by telling the agents that the property must have fishing rights attached. They found nothing they liked.