Through the glass ceiling again

I have mentioned before how difficult we have been finding it to score more than 550 in one of our near daily games of Scrabble, but today we made it, with the record being on the left in the snap above. Also a good thing in that BH had won the two previous games, so it was time for me to do better. On this occasion, I was off to a slow start, but things got better as the game went on, with several scores of thirty or more and one of forty, with BH's play being the other way around, with my ending up by winning by a comfortable margin. A few marginal two letter words, requiring careful reading of OED, but otherwise nothing untoward.

Record - four games to the card, as would have been favoured by FIL - snapped on top of a copy of the Finnish Kalevala epic, in Finnish. Rather nicely printed inside, with decent paper, typeface and so on - but looking to have been a print on demand book from Amazon. Print on demand is clearly coming on.

Kalevala was first mentioned in these posts back in 2017, at reference 1, but I have been paying more attention since the epic cropped up in the Langer book last noticed at reference 2, winding up with one copy in Finnish and one, an Oxford Classic, in a modern translation by one Keith Bosley. I find that one can, sometimes, work out the Finnish from the English, despite Finnish being a very foreign language to us Anglophones. But not yet got very far into the 650 or so pages.

The book itself is the founding epic of Finland, assembled from folk sources in the middle of the nineteenth century. So, as far as age goes, not in the same league as the Iliad, the Bible or the Mahabharata at all. But illustrated above, rather in the fashion of certain academy painters in this country at about the same time, that is to say the second half of the nineteenth century, with the young lady being the wife of the artist. I associated to Alma Tadema (of reference 5), but inspection suggests that the rather earlier William Etty might be nearer the mark.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/12/finland.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/09/missing.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalevala.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aino_(mythology). The source of the painting.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/11/a-contribution-from-google.html.