|
Studenthuset 19 B
When offered the possibility to buy a small property somewhere , I first stubbornly refused. How could I, not even for a day, go away from my ARRETIUM and the Roman vita dulcis, my hypocaustum central heating, my luxuriant vineyard under the Tuscan sun? But allured by the publicity... Quite incredible, how in those days ( early 2nd century A.D.)our famous scriptor TACITUS went about praising the fierce blue eyes and the marvellously uncorrupted virtus of the tribes in the North- the GERMANI. So I made up my mind, but...
Well, to say the least, I certainly gave my estate agent a tough nut tu crack. For days he kept running the fabulous AW TIME MACHINE, trying to find for me a decent place and a decent period, but to no avail, until he in mere desperation happened to hit the button "Southern Scandinavia 21st century"..... 
Visitors to this Kot
Wow! Amenities unheared-of and what a bargain! For 500 strti a very cosy little flat, situated moreover here in LUND- a modern metropolis of knowledge with a history going back a thousand years. Its prestigous UNIVERSITY
Its SPECIAL ATMOSPHERE.
Lund has about 35 000 students and compared with the total population of approximately 100 000 inhabitants, you can easily understand
who rule the city.In the immediate surroundings of the Cathedral and the University building, you will find an enchanting milieu, a series of narrow cobblestone streets,
small shops, restaurants and pubs. At the various "Student Nations"(what is that?)
and elsewhere you' ll also find tons of cool activities. Yes, LUND is really a great city to spend your study-abroad time, though there
certainly are a few things I haven't quite understood.. All that beerdrinking, just as TACITUS wrote: "Diem noctemque continuare potando nulli probrum."
Due to the city's convenient geographical location you can easily make many interesting excursions.
How tempting! In less than three hours the SAS plane would carry me back to the Tuscan sun....
" A YOUNG CITY WITH AN OLD HISTORY ". Another one of those catchy slogans. Well, old history certainly is a relative conception.Seing things from my Roman or Etruscan perspective ...! In 1990 the city of LUND celebrated its 1000-Year Anniversary, just twenty years after celebrating the 950-Year Anniversary in 1970.Remarkable! The age of the city has in fact been debated for a long time and according to recent archaeological diggings, it is now supposed to have been founded around 990.
The foundation of Lund remains unclear. Until recently, the town was thought to have been founded by King Canute the Great around 1020,
however, recent archeological discoveries suggest that the first settlement was founded around 990, when the village of Uppåkra was moved to
Lund's location, by King Sweyn I Forkbeard. The distance is only some five kilometres, but Lund is located on a hill, and on the other side of
a rivulet-ford, giving the new site considerable defence advantages compared to Uppåkra, that is situated on the highest point of a rather
large plain. Beside new techniques of warfare, the relocation is believed to signify the process of unification of Denmark. Try to remember the name of that village-- UPPÅKRA. You are likely to hear a lot more about it in the future. Excavations going
on more or less for about ten years have in fact revealed a settlement considered to have been the richest and largest Iron Age-Viking Age town of the
Scandinavian Peninsula. Sensational news, which also have given rise to a great deal of animated debate. The Swedish gouvernment has been accused of trying to diminish or ignore
the importance of the site, eager to keep up the image of Birka and Mälardalen as the centre of Scandinavia.
Let's instead for a moment turn back for a stroll in those enchanting irregular small streets which occasionally even by means of their names recall the glorious Catholic past. The 12th and the 13th centuries were, as we saw, something of a golden era for the city. It had become the Christian centre of Northern Europe with an archbishop and with an imposing Romanesque Cathedral, still there almost perfectly preserved. At most there were as many as 27 churches, eight of them connected with a monastery or a convent, and all this within a fairly small urban area. In the Middle Ages religion clearly played the dominating role. Everything was controlled by the Church and participating in its rituals was a vital part of everyday life. The year revolved around the Christian calender with its numerous feasts, the framework of the monastic day was the specific cycle of devotions from matins to vespers, the lives of ordinary people were totally dictated by the Sacraments.
My Roman idiom accompanied the Christian from the cradle to the grave. The child was saluted into this world by the baptism, the old man was provided with the viaticum on his journey to the other world, the Mass, the sacramentum sacramentorum, was repeated every day in every church in a language that few common believers understood, the Bible was not available for ordinary people in their own tongue and it was the clergy that held the keys to Salvation... When we try to conjure up the heyday of LUND, I think it would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the Latin language and not only in the stricly religious field. It was the regular means of written communication in most intellectual activities (for those who could read and write), administration, law, literature, scholarship etc. And in international contexts it also served as a living SPOKEN language! Thanks to this extraordinary lingua franca Scandinavia had become an integrated part of Western Christian culture and not remained an isolated backward region in the North. One Latin-educated Dane who definitely contributed to putting Gaetland on the European map was the famous chronicler, known as Saxo Grammaticus. His monumental work Gesta Romanorum (with the earliest known account of the Hamlet story!) may have been conceived and written here in LUND , late 12th-early 13th century. Little is known about his life, but he is assumed to have been in the service of the mighty Archbishop Absalon.
Now we have come full circle back to its prestigious UNIVERSITY , which, as hinted at above, was founded in 1666, chiefly in order to get a better grip of the new province, but what a lucky stroke in view of later development! Sweden was now one of the Great Powers in Europe and the king needed a loyal staff of administrating civil servants, judges, diplomats etc.,well-educated and with a good knowledge of LATIN !!! The liberation from the omnipotent Roman Church and the new strong emphasis on the use of the vernacular , no doubt strengthened the position of the national states but meant as well cultural isolation and inefficiency in many sections of society. The "global" Latin language soon turned out to be indispensable and , paradoxically, even more so in smaller countries on the periphery of Europe, such as Denmark and Sweden, which didn't have a prestigious native idiom of its own as, for instance, la France. It must be admitted that Sweden during "the Great Power Era" (1611-1718) tried really hard to gain prestige. An endless flow of propaganda pamphlets (in Latin, of course!)were spread in Europe. In their international contacts Swedish diplomats were strictly forbidden to use any other language than Latin - or Swedish! If for example an ambassador from Louis XIV was impudent enough to present in Stockholm a petition in French, he should be treated rather like a Man from Mars...
The patriotic megalomania reached its apex in the monumental four-volume work ATLANTICA, written (bw 1679-1702) by Olaus Rudbeck, professor of medicine at the University of UPPSALA. (Another HOOD!) The man was a strange mixture of brilliant pioneer in many fields and propagator of (today) "crackpot" theories.
In short, he advanced not only the idea (not new!) that Sweden had been the homeland of the brave Goths, he went one step further, trying to prove that the country had downright been the cradle of all races and all civilization. The work was published bilingual with parallel columns of Swedish and Latin, and it was of course due to the latter that it gained international reputation and was read, as we know, by men such as Newton, Leibnitz, Montesquieu,
Chateaubriand.
LUND had almost from the beginning been a centre of learning. A Cathedral School for the education of priests (today a prestigious Upper Secondary School) had ,in fact, been established as early as 1085 and a studium generale, a rudimentary university, also existed for a period, long before the "real" one was founded by the Swedes. As could be expected in a similar environment of young people, all Latin that was produced here over the centuries, did not serve as a vehicle of deep and serious thoughts...
One must not forget that in the Middles Ages and up till approximately the end of "the Great Power Era", Latin was very much a living language and used for teaching at all levels except the very first classes. Students were also often forbidden , on pain of punishment, to switch to their mother tongue outside the classroom. Many a method that in 20th-century Latinteach discussion has been hailed as new and revolutionary , was practised here automatically and, to be sure, with far more success: Oral approach. Total-immersion-Latin-learning.Communicative competence. Drama in the classroom.. The performance of Latin plays, especially Plautus and Terence, in original version or adapted, was in fact for centuries a well established custom both in the schools and at the University. From the staging of existing works it was but a short step to the creation of new hilarious imitations and paraphrases. This is supposed to be the origin of the very special kind of farcical musical shows, centered around historical or mythological events, known as SPEX (take a look in Wiki!) and which seem never to lose their enormous popularity among students. New ones are constantly produced , no longer , however, sprinkled with Latin quotes and sentences, as earlier plays often were ( in the script or added by the actors on the spur of the moment).
"O Alte Burschenherrlichkeit!", the old German Studentenlied on those glorious student days, is still often heard in LUND, popular at celebrations and parties.
( Du gamla klang-och jubeltid ... )
Yes, great changes have indeed taken place... Only a tiny minority of magistri and scholares now understand a word of my Roman idiom, but what is really amazing is ,on the contrary, that our Latin language held sway here for almost ONE THOUSAND YEARS!! Amazing, too, of course, is the fact that everybody is wearing jeans so everybody could be anybody, for instance a time traveller from ETRURIA....
The Articles of Studenthuset 19 B:
Sort by: Featured Date | |
|
