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Medieval Icelandic law contains no provisions about copyright. Authors used without hesitation narrative texts by others, but poets were paid for composing laudatory poems about kings and narrators for telling stories at their courts. The art of storytelling became a speciality of Icelanders, who were also hired to write biographies of Norwegian kings. It was considered reprehensible to use the poetry of others as one's own work. Two Norwegian poets may have got the cognomens skáldaspillir (Destroyer of poets?) and illskælda (Bad or Evil poet?) for plagiarism. An Icelandic poet composed a laudatory poem about a woman but changed it to fit another one, receiving a bitter revenge. In Icelandic sagas stanzas occur frequently and, unlike borrowings in prose, their authors are usually named. In the medieval law of Iceland it is forbidden to compose about people not only derogatory but also laudatory poetry. Conceivably it has been considered to give the author some kind of power over the person who was the subject of the poetry. Proper copyright, though, does not occur in Icelandic law until the beginning of the twentieth century.

The article initially addresses the novel Kata by Steinar Bragi in the context of genre and asks to what extent it aligns itself with the crime novel, in particular the more recent brand of the crime novel wherein social issues are placed at the forefront. The point is made that Kata diverges in some important respects from even the most radical of critiques found within the parameters of the crime genre, in that it suspends the very concepts that usually ground such narratives (justice, right, and crime) and comes to the conclusion that the widespread social acceptance of violence against women delegitimizes the entire edifice of Western thinking on social justice. It is here that the article looks towards Louis Althusser's theorization 149of ideological and oppressive state apparatuses, while shifting their object from the class struggle to gender relations. Althusser's concepts are employed to shed light on the ideology that supports and enables violence against women in contemporary societies, and how the reverse of the oppressive function of the state, that is, state leniency and disinterest in prosecuting sex crimes, or creating the environment in which they are unlikely to be reported, are taken up in the novel, thematized, and in turn, fuel the rage of the protagonist. Finally, a question is raised as to the signific-ance of the fact that a novel about female rage and disempowerment is written by a male author.

This article discusses the "Critical period" in language acquisition – based on the theory that children are born with the natural ability to learn language; an ability that gradually fades or disappears. According to this theory, children who are not privy to normal language stimulation during childhood miss their chance to acquire a language "perfectly".Critical periods do not only exist in language, e.g. children and other young animals need to receive visual stimulation for their vision to develop. The beginning of this article considers difference in opportunities for research, and thereby the state of knowledge concerning the critical period in vision, compared to language acquisition. The difference is based mainly on two factors: on the one hand, animals have been studied to elucidate the critical period in vision – an option that linguists do not have – and, on the other, it is quite common for children to lack visual stimulation, i.e. due to cataracts. It is less common for children to grow up without language stimulation, although stories exist of children that, for one reason or another, were deprived of human interaction during childhood. The author uses this opportunity to provide an account of two such stories, in a more detailed fashion than would be necessary to define the critical period in language acquisition. These are also stories of violence and questionable work methods for the sake of science. This is followed by a discussion of deaf children as, in the past – as well as the present day – it was common for them not to receive appropriate language stimulation from the beginning, i.e. via the use of sign language. The examples are so many that late language acquisition by deaf children can shed light on the critical period in language acquisition.Many have discussed the critical period in language acquisition but emphasis is often placed on that which has remained unlearned. This article asks rather what can be learned and whether language structure can be established despite a late start for the language acquisition process.