frualeydis | Languages - I am privileged (Reply)

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.