November 2024:
14kg of Thule

“PAKETPOST!”

The postman working in my area has a remarkably loud voice that he uses remarkably well to announce the usually rather unremarkable deliveries he has to haul around every day. This time, however, the slightly careless thud that normally accompanies these deliveries was louder than usual. So was the postman’s cursing. What I found on my doorstep soon after was a rather heavy parcel containing twenty-four bricks carefully wrapped in white tissue paper.

I had been expecting them. A contact named ‘antiquarian bookseller’ on my phone had sent me an ominous message the day before: “Your 14kg of Thule are on their way.”

What did these bricks contain? If you want to believe that the life of a PhD student is more exciting than it actually is, stop reading here.

The answer is quite boring: twenty-four used books. Together, these books form an almost complete set of the Sammlung Thule, a series of German translations of Icelandic sagas and related texts, published between 1911 and 1930.

An interesting series in itself, these particular volumes were even more interesting to me as they once belonged to the Swiss scholar Andreas Heusler (1865–1940). A contributor to the series himself, Heusler didn’t just collect these volumes for the sake of completeness. Rather, he revised his own translations and judged those of others with a sharp pencil; he added little doodles and stored letters as well as reviews and some notes in the volumes. This material allows for a detailed analysis of scholarly paradigms in the making, which is not usually possible from an analysis of published texts alone.

For concrete results and detailed insights into Heusler’s research in the making, however, you have to wait a little longer. In the meantime, you can read more about my project in the link below.