Posted by Ed Kiser on April 27, 2004 at 21:12:20 from 205.188.116.10 user Kisered.
For the first time, I can now say I have finally read through this fascinating story, by W. G. Collingwood.
In a way, this account reminds me of the "Lord of the Rings". Perhaps it is the strange names of the various characters, and the names of places that to me anyway are strange, even though perhaps to those more familiar with the Lake District, some places may have names that are still in use today.
The geography was all very strange. Too bad there was no map to show where the action went, as is done so conveniently in the Ransome stories. One gets used to seeing the maps in Ransome's works, and finds a great void, a lack of that map in stories ike "Thorstein..." At least in LOTR the very needed map was provided.
It was a fascinating story of very old days going back some thousand years. Times were very unsettled back then, with great dangers of those that would come and raid to plunder and kill. The time was of the spreading of the Vikings, and, strangely perhaps, the spreading of Christianity as well, coexisting with the Norse gods of old.
The weapons are very similar to that of the culture of LOTR as well, so that helped in showing that similarity.
There is the concept of the red-haired giants of the land, far up in the highlands, with their courseness. Here again came the reminder of the Picts of very old times. Even the presence of the Dogs' Home in "Picts and Martyrs" reminds me of the rough dwellings of those rustic hill folk.
Then came the ultimate reminder, as Thorstein with his wife, to avoid persecution, set up a crude living quarters on, of all places, Wild Cat Island - which of course was not called by that name. It was almost like seeing an old "friend" again. At last here was a place that I could identify with in the story.
It is a fascinating adventure of the mind to go back in time, yet to a somewhat familiar place, and see how those people adapted to that area and thrived with struggles against the elements and the hazards of rather unpleasant neighbors.
The glimpse of somewhat relatively primitive existance is somewhat given by the D's exile to the Dogs' Home. At least, by their standards, they had to "make do" with less accomodations than they had become accustomed. Even the "Guddling" of fish taught by Jackie reminds us of those early tribes of Viking settlers of that land. Their struggling with the dressing of the rabbit also seemed to take us back to those more primitive times.
The Ransome characters were having "an adventure", playing at a more primitive existance. The "Thorstein..." story helps to give us the picture of what that existance was that our beloved Ransome characters were playing at imitating.
I found the dialect and wordage to be a bit alien, but having read Ransome, his use of some of those words gave me a bit of understanding that without which I would have been even more in the dark with the Viking descriptive words.
There was another similarity I noticed in that when Thorstein was first among the land of the giants, and they were about to be severly violent to him, a young red-haird girl rushed at him and put her arms around him to protect him from the cudgel of her father. This event reminds me of the story of the Indian princess, Pocohontas, who did the same thing to protect Captain John Smith of the Jamestown early colony in what was to be Virginia, in the early colonial days.
We look back at that ancient time of over a thousand years ago, and yet they too look back for another thousand years and marvel at the ancient artifact in the presence of a Roman Road. It struck those people how strange than anyone would actually bother to work that hard to arrange stones on the ground that way, just so they could WALK on them, but they did not mind walking on those old roads themselves when they happened to go in the direction of where they were already heading. As for those old Roman roads, I don't recall any reference to such in the Ransome stories, nor do I remember any visual showing of these in the offerings of the LAKELANDCAM daily display. So I was wondering, are there any Roman roads in evidence in the Lake District today? Perhaps the Roman roads mentioned in "Thorstein..." were not in that local area, but some distance away. Kinda hard to tell, without that map, to say just where they were going.
I am delighted to include "Thorstein on the Mere" to be a part of my collection of "All Things Ransome."
Ed Kiser, South Florida
I sure did miss having a map for "Thorstein..."