Английский язык. Рассказы. Уровень В2+ - стр. 9

We had buckets of water, and when we found something, a little piece of wood or something like that, we washed it and took a close look to see if there was anything there. Any runes we found were written down, and as it wasn’t in modern Norwegian – the runes were written in mediaeval Norwegian- someone had to get a book out, first of all to find out what letters the runes represented and then to find out what the text meant.

We found a lot of objects that we couldn’t identify. We found a very nice thing one day. Sonja, a Swedish woman who had been digging in the corner, suddenly said, “Whooah, look at this”, and carried this thing towards me. From a distance it looked just like a little piece of wood, but when it was about a yard away, I could see that it was a little king from a chess set. It was really, really exciting. To find the king was nice, not a pawn or a bishop, for example. We were really lucky that it came out in a lump, and we didn’t scrape his head off, as we were cutting sections of earth to examine one section at a time, and Sonja had spotted his head sticking up out of the ground. I think somebody had cut off his nose by mistake, but the rest of him was intact. The find more than made up for my losing my own king so many times!

Lost and Found

1. Where did this story take place?

2. Where did Thomas and his girlfriend use to go sometimes?

3. What did they use to do there?

4. Who would usually win at chess in the evening?

5. What was he doing in Norway?

6. What did Trondheim use to be?

7. Why was it a good place for digging?

8. What did they find there?

9. What finds were especially exciting?

10. What are runes?

11. What were runes used for?

12. Why did the Vikings prefer wood to paper?

13. What are the runic symbols like?

14. What could be the reason for that?

15. What about the content of their finds?

16. How did they explain that some of the texts did not mean anything?

17. What did they need buckets of water for?

18. What language were runes written in?

19. How did they manage to find out what they meant?

20. Who found the most interesting find?

21. What did it look like from a distance?

22. What did it turn out to be?

23. What was lucky about this find?

24. Was it absolutely intact?

25. What did Thomas feel about this find?

Lost and Found

Training 1

Thomas spent some time living in Norway. He and his girlfriend Helga used to go away sometimes to her family house, which was two thousand metres up in the mountains. They used to go up the mountains with a rucksack and skis on their backs, spend the day skiing, and then come back down, sit by the fire, and then Helga’s Dad would beat Thomas at chess: he’d just trap his king and Thomas would lose.