Languages - I am privileged

[frualeydis]

I realize that I am privileged when it comes to reconstructing medieval clothing: most of the preserved clothing comes from the nordic countries and thus there's a lot of reports and research written only in the scandinavian languages. Another larger chunk is written in english, which I also read, and some in german, which I can read but which takes longer time. This means that I have access to maybe twice as much scientific research on medieval clothing as someone who only knows english. When it comes to viking clothing it is even more obvious since all research is either published in one of the scandinavian languages or in german - I would be sorry indeed if I wanted to do viking and all I had access to were popular books like Thor Ewing's recent book, I want to see what the sources were and how the scholar's reached their conclusions, which is why I like dissertations best I think.
Why I am writing this? Because a recent discussion made me realize how grateful I am for this. Of course I should learn to read french too, but there are so many things one should do.

Comments

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I know what you mean. I'm so glad that as a Finn, I had to study Swedish in school, and even in university we must take one Swedish course. Due to the compulsory Swedish lessons I can also read Dansih and Norweigian (veeeery slowly but still) and so I have access to wide variety of research material on medieval clothing. I'm going to start studying German next autumn, so hopefully one day I can read also German research.

It's really a shame that so few dissertations and books in general discussing medieval clothing get translated.