I'm reading a book that a friend got me from a library sale (which is as you might expect, they're purging books that people aren't reading to make room for new ones that people will), and though it's fiction, it was evidently written as some sort of supportive material for school history. The story has frequent footnotes explaining what some words or prhases mean - words like "enlist", "tavern", "runt", or what "crossing oneself" or "confession" mean in a religious sense. Very common vocabulary that an adult who reads books would know, but which a second-grader probably wouldn't have heard.
So naturally the writing style is very clear and simple, and I don't mind it, every once in a while it's nice and relaxing to read something that doesn't specifically intend to drown a reader in confusing nuance and a constant barrage of overwhelming detail. It's a simple, straightforward story, set in the year 1615, about a 14-year-old basque boy who gets hired onto a whaling ship, and the whole story is told from his perspective.
I'm halfway through it now, and at this point of the story the whaling ship of the story has reached Iceland, and the sailors are weirded out by the local turf houses. Someone voices disbelief that these people would really live underground, like some kind of gnomes, and asks whether these folk are even christian. Someone else, who has actually been this far north before, affirms that they are - of a sort, at least. They are some sort of lutherans. And underground-dwelling heretics or not, they're pretty reliable people to work with.
Considering that the book is written in finnish, for finnish children, who are also lutheran by vast majority, the deeply catholic basque sailors' views of Icelanders are obviously not intended or illustrated as the objective truth. People who are otherwise good, intelligent and well-meaning can be completely ignorant about people whose like they have never met or even heard of before.
This is the level of media literacy that they can confidently expect from children who aren't trusted to know what big words like "apostle" mean.
i read this post out to my parents, both of whom being lutheran ministers, and my dad went “well we don’t live underground”
and i said “for the most part. we do have a basement.” i got an eye crinkle laugh out of that!
but this makes me wonder how many books i’ve read for school have had important messages behind them that i’d never thought about because i was seven years old
I was babtised and nominally raised lutheran also. I don't think the turf houses are a religious thing, and more to do with living in Iceland.
