Monthly Archives August 2020

In this, the final book in the Icelandic Folktales series, we leave behind the ghosts, ghouls, and goblins of the previous books. As the title might suggest, the stories are generally longer than in the first two books, and humans are the only characters.

Magic still plays a role at times. In one story, the poor friend of two princes follows them as they seek fame and fortune. At each royal house where they winter-over, the poor boy makes himself useful to the royal family, and earns a magical boon as his reward, while the princes do nothing, but have to pay handsomely for their room and board. Finally, the three adventurers arrive at the castle of a harridan virgin queen. She allows only eunuchs in her court, and any man who refuses is banished to a desert island...

This is book two of the Icelandic Folktales series.

The island of Iceland sits at the north end of the Atlantic Ocean, just south of the Arctic Circle. While the Gulf Stream, which passes by on the south side moderates temperatures some, Icelandic weather is highly changeable, and winter nights are very long. No surprise, then, that long, dark, nights, howling winds, blizzards, and oh by the way, volcanoes, can take the imaginations of isolated farmers and travelers in dark directions.

In these stories, trolls and especially trollwives are the bane of the traveler and the shepherd watching over his flock in isolated summer pastures, often luring them to their death, slavery, or even transformation into trolls themselves.

Icelandic elves bear no resemblance to, say, J.R.R...

This is the first book in the Icelandic Folktales series. The stories were originally collected by Jón Árnason and Magnús Grímsson in the 1800s, and were translated by Alan Boucher in the 1970s. This volume features stories of ghosts, witches, and the Devil himself.

Iceland is a beautiful but rugged country with ferocious and highly changeable weather. Early farmers lived far apart on isolated farmsteads. Life was hard, so it’s no surprise that the supernatural world was real and near to them. Ghosts and other spirits walked among them, often with malicious intent. The Devil was around too, but not as the nearly all-powerful being imagined in Continental Europe and the Americas. Here, he could not only be bargained with, he could be beaten or fooled, and often was...

Scott Kelly’s early life as a kid from West Orange, New Jersey, just west of New York City, gave no hint of what he and his twin brother Mark would become. Scott in particular was a mediocre student at best, drifting through school, even junior college, just getting by. Until he read Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, the story of the seven original US astronauts.

That book sparked the passion in him that led him to become a Navy F-14 pilot, a test pilot, and ultimately an astronaut who would fly both the Space Shuttle and on the International Space Station. His final mission aboard the ISS lasted nearly a year. That year would prove to be a true test of endurance—mental and emotional more than physical—for not only him, but his ex-wife, their two daughters, and his girlfriend...