Another post in between reviews. I searched for “Icelandic Sagas” on YouTube and came up with this video by Dr. Matthew Roby of the University of Iceland. I’ve posted one of his other videos, about Egil’s Saga, here before. What I like about these videos is that he describes the action on the actual historical sites.
This one is about Njal’s Saga, which may be the greatest of the genre. It certainly deserves the attention it’s gotten.
I’m bemused by the Icelandic pronunciations. I was never aware before that Icelandic words ending in “L” get a “K” sound added. That’s just the sort of thing you’d expect from the Icelanders, who do their best – it seems to me – to make their language as unlearnable as possible.
This situation creates a problem for people like me, who produce what is (laughingly, in my case) known as “popular” literature. I’ve maintained the custom of including a character list in my Erling novels. In that list, I include my suggested pronunciations. These pronunciations, you may have noted, bear no resemblance to how Dr. Roby pronounces them.
It’s essentially an insoluble problem from my point of view. If I went to the trouble of learning how to pronounce Old Norse as Dr. Roby does (something I’m not inclined to do in my limited time), I’d be offering pronunciations that a) nobody would bother with, b) listeners would not understand, and c) are not even precisely what the Vikings used, as scholars admit the language has changed somewhat in the last thousand years.
So I give my suggested pronunciations, based (more or less) on contemporary Norwegian speech. This is mostly the way English-speaking scholars pronounce them in lectures, and they’re more or less comprehensible to other English speakers.
It’s a makeshift.
So much of fiction is a makeshift.
So much of life is a makeshift too, if it comes to that.
Watching this, I wondered if Tolkien’s “Thrain” shoudl be pronounced “throw-in,” with the “throw” rhyming with “now.”
“Throw-in” — I admit I like the sound more than “thrane.”
It’s like with Rider Haggard — there’s the faithful Amahagger woman who loves Leo Vincey in the novel She, whose name is Ustane. When I was a boy, I heard that as: You Stain. But I think Oo-STAH-nee sounds better and may have been closer to what Haggard imagined.
So: what’s your bet on how we should pronounce Thrain? Maybe Tolkien makes that clear somewhere….
I’d be curious to know how Tolkien pronounced Thrain. I have an “inkling” scholars may have not settled on these pronunciations at that time.
“So How Do You Pronounce “Thrain” Anyway? ”.
Cool
Having learnt Old English from William Alfred who was in the tradition of Francis Magoun, I asked Andy Orchard, how does one pronounce Old English, and he answered to the effect of ‘Ah, that’s the question’ – rereading Tolkien’s Letters in the new ‘restored’ edition, I wonder how much Tolkien ‘s Old English pronunciation may have had in common with the Magoun-Alfred one… (nice to know, from John Rateliff’s The History of The Hobbit that Magoun and Tolkien were in friendly contact, even as Lewis and Douglas Bush – whom I met once – were). I wonder if Gordon’s An Introduction to Old Norse gives us ‘the Tolkien pronunciation’ (having not tried Dave Lull’s link, yet)? – alas, I have made less good use of the copy of it (ed. 2) I bought in 1977 than the copy of the Interlinear New Testament I bought at the same time.
Until pretty good evidence against it emerges, It’ll be Throw-in for Thrain, I think.
Haggard said Ayesha’s name is pronounced “Assha,” as I recall. OK, so that’s ash-a? or as-sha? os-sha?
My head hurts.
I always remember how Lewis pronounced Agape “AG-eh-pee,” which makes me think they weren’t always terribly particular.
I was struck by Tolkien telling his son Michael (Letter 306) “I grew up in a two-front state, symbolized by the Oratorian Italian pronunciation of Latin, and the strictly ‘philological’ pronunciation at that time introduced into our Cambridge dominated school.”
I tended to pronounce She’s name as (basically) eye-sha.
I think people think of the throaty sound that led to the name “Gollum” as too articulate. It seems to me it wasn’t really a “word” at all but a loud swallowing sound, and “Gollum” was just a way of turning that sound, characteristic of the creature, into a name. If I were reading The Hobbit and came to one of the early passages in which Gollum is muttering to himself, I’d try for that unpleasant gulping/swallowing sound.
For what it’s worth there’s Tolkien’s reading of the Riddles in the Dark chapter, for one (or more? – I have not yet relistened to all of it) authorial rendering…