chaotopia

Storl’s memoir is of a highly resourceful wanderer, and covers the period usually referred to as ‘the 60s’... Storl’s memoir gives some childhood background but mainly covers the years from the mid-1960s to 1970s, the period usually referred to as ‘the 60s’. It’s the tale of a highly resourceful wanderer. He’s a man who is good at surviving with no money, has great social skills and loves the natural world to the extent he’d rather sleep in a tree than in a student dormitory.    Storl’s love of the living world is one of his main themes. He takes the cutting down of trees personally, and as a paper boy he shoots out streetlights with an airgun because of the insects dying on them. His account of the horror of having to kill and dissect frogs reminds me of my own days as a biology student, cutting the tongues out of limpets to look at a distribution on a beach, partaking in the destruction of life just to learn a minor survey technique.    His love of the world goes e...

This is not a review but a plug, because I have two poems in this volume. The book is in two sections - ‘The Older Rune Poems’ and ‘The Reawakened Tradition’. Most of our knowledge of the meanings of the runes comes from the mediaeval rune-poems, Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic and Norwegian. The first section has original language versions and new translations of all of those, of the very brief Abecedarium Nordmannicum and of a previously little-known Early Modern Swedish rune poem.  This section starts with an essay by P. D. Brown, in which he presents the rune-poem tradition from the viewpoint of a poet. He tells us that the poems were tools “to make the mind more generally agile, more adept at making connections, thinking ‘laterally’ and more imaginatively” about what the runes in are. The old rune-poems themselves are given with learned notes about the language and meanings.  The second part contains an introduction by P. D. Brown. He writes: ‘A rune poem mingles and blends the fr...