A girl, ploughing through the classics with a sword

CZ was never, as a child, a huge fan of ancient history. And in our case, Sonlight and Veritas Press didn't help. By the time she was eleven, she announced, "If I have to read one more book about a twelve-year-old orphaned boy lost in the midst of historical events, I'm going to scream."

Nonetheless, we're studying ancient history this year, at CZ's request. I think she thought it was going to be more about Nordic sagas and less about Babylonians and Greeks, but she's holding up her end of the bargain. As a result, CZ recently concluded, "I now know way more than I ever wanted to about how to cleave someone in half with a sword."

She's also learned that the scariest place to be in the ancient world was inside a palace, especially if you were a royal first born son with an ambitious uncle. Christendom, flawed as it is, can't help but look a little better.

But every now and then I give CZ a break and allow her to insert another type of book into her schedule. During Christmas vacation, for instance, she chose Musicophilia. Most recently, she decided to tackle the earliest Icelandic saga. But the earliest sagas take place in the 900s A.D. and are pagan, so they feel like ancient history anyway.

So this week CZ has been curled up on her chair reading about a bunch of people who drink a lot and whose names start with Thor-. Needless to say, there has been bloodshed. But I'm surprised at how often CZ breaks out into a chuckle. On Thursday, there was a chuckle that was a little louder than most, so I asked what it was about. She read aloud:

"One night the king had gone to bed, and so had Thorir and Thorolf, and Thorfinn and Thorvald were still up. Eyvind and Alf came and sat down with them and made merry, drinking from the same horn at first, then in pairs. Eyvind and Thorvald drank together from one horn, and Alf and Thorfinn from the other. As the night wore on they started cheating over the drinking, and a quarrel broke out that ended in abuse. Eyvind leapt to his feet, drew his short-sword and stabbed Thorvald, delivering a wound that was more than enough to kill him. Then the king's men and Thorir's men both leapt to their feet, but none of them was armed because they were in a sacred temple, and people broke up the fighting among those who were the most furious.

Nothing else of note happened that night."

So she's developing a black sense of humor. Perhaps it's good that she waited until she was sixteen to read this sort of thing after all.

Another side benefit of CZ not having liked ancient history as a child is that she is still fairly innocent of many of the plots to the Greek stories (she mostly knows the myths), and she's now reading them for the first time with a fresh eye and in their original forms. One evening two weeks ago, for instance, she was ploughing through Grene's translation of Oedipus the King. She was very quiet for a long time, and then:

"He did what?!"

That was definitely worth the wait.