Book 43: "From Aberystwyth With Love" by Malcolm Pryce

'The sock is from the Hughesovka Museum Of Our Forefathers' Suffering. I used to be the principal curator. As you know, this museum charts the centuries of tyranny and oppression that caused that great Welsh Moses, John Hughes, to throw off the imperialist yoke and lead his people out of servitude to the promised land.'
'Is there really such a place as Hughesovka?'
'You ask such a thing of me?'
'We learned about it in school; they told us it was the only Welsh-speaking community east of the Greenwich meridian – it always struck me as improbable.'
'In our schools we found tales of Aberystwyth equally hard to credit.

A Welsh Russian named Uncle Vanya asks Louie and Calamity to find out what happened to a young girl called Gethsemane Walters, who disappeared from the town of Abercuawg near Aberystwyth over thirty years before, and pays their fee with one of Yuri Gagarin's socks! The investigation takes Louie and Calamity to the drowned village of Abercuawg which is now reappearing from under the reservoir due to a prolonged drought, and then to Hughesovka disguised as spinning-wheel salesmen, before they work out what happened to Gethsemane and to Uncle Vanya's daughter.

Much to my surprise, I found that Hughesovka (aka Yuzovka, later renamed Stalino and now called Donetsk) is a real place, although John Hughes was from Merthyr Tydfil not Aberystwyth and almost all the Welsh workers returned to Britain after the Russian Revolution.

Although quite sad in parts, this was much more fun than the previous book in the series, "Don't Cry For Me, Aberystwyth".

Book 44: ""The Story Of Gunnlaug The Worm-Tongue And Raven The Skald" by Anonymous

It is told of Gunnlaug that he was quick of growth in his early youth, big, and strong; his hair was light red, and very goodly of fashion; he was dark-eyed, somewhat ugly-nosed, yet of lovesome countenance; thin of flank he was, and broad of shoulder, and the best-wrought of men; his whole mind was very masterful; eager was he from his youth up, and in all wise unsparing and hardy; he was a great skald, but somewhat bitter in his rhyming, and therefore was he called Gunnlaug Worm-tongue.

The story begins with a guest of Thorstein Egilsson having a prophetic dream about his host's unborn daughter Helga the Fair. In his dream she appears as a swan fought over by an eagle and another fowl, and the remainder of the saga tells how her life unfolds as foretold, as the skalds Gunnlaug and Raven fighting over her.

Having read various Icelandic sagas before, I am now finding that the same characters pop up in more than one saga. Helga's father Thorstein Egillsson is the son of Egill Skallagrímsson and appears in Egil's Saga, and Helga spends her early life in the household of her uncle by marriage, Olaf Peacock, who has a much larger role in the Laxdaela Saga.

"Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu" was translated into archaic English by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris in 1875, and I am not impressed by their translation of the poetry in this saga. Most of the skalds' songs are incomprehensible and I had to re-read them a few times before they started to make any sort of sense, which is not something I found when reading Egil's saga, for example.