Anonymous asked:
How far should we go to preserve old Norse Orthography? Most parallel translations use standardised letters but are we losing anything in not keeping all the quirks of the original?
This is a beautiful question, so thank you for asking it. I find this to be a very interesting aspect of translation to discuss, and it is one that is likely not discussed often enough. My answer became more like a mini-essay, so please bear with me (especially if you are already familiar with some of the concepts discussed):
The ‘Latinization’ of Old Norse:
Before we can actually ponder the question of “how far should we go to preserve Old Norse orthography,” we ought to understand what the orthography in question entails. For this discussion, we will be focusing on the orthography of manuscripts, and not the orthography of runes.(1.) More importantly, though, is that we must relate this writing system for Old Norse to its linguistic context. After all, the scribes who crafted these Old Norse manuscripts to begin with had to be taught from non-native sources. Furthermore, by discussing this linguistic background, we will better understand the relationship that this writing system actually had with the spoken language.
(The examples throughout this ‘essay’ will primarily be that of Icelandic manuscripts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries).
From Speech to Script:
Although writing is inseparable from language, it is most definitely not language itself. Spoken language encodes thought into a physical form, whereas writing is second-handed, encoding spoken language into a preservable form.(2.) There is also the question of the cultural impact that writing can have on a language. After all, the latin alphabet was not originally tailor-fitted to the needs of Old Norse, and thus the system had to be modified. If a writing system is foreign and needs modification, how much, then, does this writing system truly reflect the language being studied?
We begin to see a possible divide between those who spoke and those who wrote.(3.) Even English tends to be written in a form that is different from the spoken form, based primarily on the social definition of ‘proper’ writing. Writing is done through a social and cultural context, and those writing were of a specific strata within society. Furthermore, as we will discuss momentarily, the writing of Old Norse in manuscripts came through the filter of an institution once absent from Old Norse societies.
Reshaping Old Norse:
The tradition of writing in manuscripts is believed to have come to Iceland and Norway from England, although much less insular (English) influence is observed in Iceland.(4.) Yet, insular influence still made its way into Iceland through Norway, but not likely until after the establishment of archbishropic of Niðaróss after 1152 CE.(5.)It was from the Anglo-Saxon tradition that thew letters ‘þ’ and ‘ð’ were added into the ‘Latinized’ Old Norse, which is why the Latin letter for ‘þ’ is called þorn (thorn) instead of þurs (thurs).(6.)
In the middle of the twelfth century, a work was written in Iceland called the First Grammatical Treatise, which aimed to create an alphabet suitable for the Icelandic language.(7.) The tedious rules proposed by this work, however, were not systematically applied in any extant manuscript, nor did many scribes remain consistent themselves. Still, the influence can indeed be observed down into the fourteenth century.(8.)
A Period of Transition, Problems, and Complexities:
If even the Icelanders themselves could not decide on a unified way to represent their language in the Latin alphabet, how are we to understand and apply this? How do we preserve an orthography that seems to have been debatable even by contemporaries? The easiest way would be to use the original orthography of each individual manuscript, but this does come with its own set of complication to consider.
Most manuscripts from Iceland, for example, were not originals but copies; no documents in Old Norse have survived from before 1300.(9.) When taking that into consideration, a saga originally written in the thirteenth century contained as a copy in a manuscript from the fourteenth century would not have necessarily used the same script nor the exact same orthographical practice as the original.(10.)
The point here is that even the manuscripts we have are mostly copies of a lost original, and therefore we do not exactly reap the benefits of a preserved orthography for the original text, because it has been copied and altered to fit the orthography of the later time period. We could, of course, refer to an older manuscript from the period that the original came from, but each scribe was unique in their method of writing, and thus nothing could be determined with comfortable certainty. To complicate things further, not all orthographic patterns were native changes, or even changes of the scribe’s own choosing. In Iceland, the use of an accent to denote a long vowel, for example, declined in the fourteenth century due to Norwegian influence.(11.)
So, just how far should we go?
The ideal way to solve this problem would be to use the orthography of each individual text being studied or translated. Yet, how much does this truly help us in terms of translation? I would say that answer depends on the situation. After all, just because a word is written with a letter that looks like a ‘v’, for example, doesn’t mean it actually represented a ‘v’. Here is an example of how a letter could represent multiple letters:
Both ‘u’ and ‘v’ represented the sounds u, ú, and v. In other words a ‘u’ could actually represent a ‘v’, despite looking otherwise. A ‘w’ was hardly used until the second half of the fourteenth century, and even then it was commonly used in the initial to represent ‘v’ and not an actual ‘w’. Later in the fourteenth century it also came to represent ‘u’, and even ‘ú’ in all positions. Still, by the fourteenth century, general practice was to use a ‘v’ in the initial position, and a ‘u’ in the medial/final position.(12.)
That is just one complication, but it still shows that even when direct spelling varied, it sometimes was done for the sake of writing itself and still represented the ‘standard’ letter. I think what I am trying to say is that the writing system didn’t always represent the language itself, but rather the process of writing. Scribes took shortcuts and did what felt right or convenient to them. Of course, not every change they made was for such reasons, but many of them were.
My suggestion for how much we should preserve Old Norse orthography is to carefully consider the text of the actual manuscript, but still make use of the accepted standards for Old Norse, which is the ‘averaged’ form of the language. Yet, it may be beneficial for us to include footnotes within the Old Norse text, giving mention to the form of a word or phrase in the manuscript itself. I would only advise that, though, if the person who transcribed the text into standard Old Norse noticed an ambiguity in that word or phrase. If anything, the manuscript from which the Old Norse ‘originates’ ought to be indicated to the reader in some way, though not all are able to access these manuscripts (and that goes for scholars as well).
As for the impact on the translation itself, I would argue that more change comes from the translation of Old Norse into another language, like English, than it does altering an older orthography into a standard rendition. Yet, there is indeed something that is lost when the actual text of a manuscript is not taken into consideration. Standardizing a text that was not actually written in such a way does indeed cause it to go through a sort of filter as well, even if it may be a less dramatic change. Yet, I think we have to settle for a middle ground in this scenario, because there are equally valid reasons to favor a standardized approach as well.
Concluding Remarks:
I am not sure if my answer is very satisfying, but I find that the ‘correct’ approach is usually a combination of all of the other methods. I must also say that I still have a long journey full of learning to travel before I can truly delve into such a complicated subject. I have only just begun to discover the intricacies involved in the composition of these stunning medieval works, let alone the fact that my knowledge of Old Norse is still in a fairly early stage. Regardless, I do hope that I have at least contributed to this debate in a positive way. I have, at the very least, learned a great deal just from attempting to answer this.
I must add that it is important that we not forget the manuscripts, even when it may be easier and more convenient to use the standard editions, such as the Íslenzk fornrit. It is, after all, when we begin to feel the most comfortable that we should check our habits all the more rigorously. For if we ignore the very source that granted us our text, we will blind ourselves to other possibilities.
Again, I wish I could have answered this in a better way, but I have already rewritten my response three times, let alone the fact that this answer is already dreadfully long. I am simply too new to this subject to give you anything but the streaming thoughts of my own discoveries, questions, and curiosities.
FOOTNOTES:
1. Because it is a different system of writing that what you seem to be referring to. Yet, I also omit runes from this discussion because I am not familiar enough with the intricacies of runes to sufficiently discuss the involved linguistic details.
2. Vedrana Mihalicek and Christin Wilson ed., Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics, 11th ed., (The Ohio State University, 2001), 592.
3. This may not be an issue if one wishes to study the people writing these manuscripts. Many of them are anonymous, but we can still learn something about the ‘type’ of person in Icelandic society acting as an author and/or scribe. If one wishes to learn more about the language itself during the medieval period, though, the view on Old Norse would be restricted to a single social group.
4. Guðvarður Már Gunnlaugsson, “Manuscripts and Paleography,” in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, edited by Rory McTurk, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007), 255.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., 256.
7. Ibid., 257.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 249.
10. Ibid., 250. This claim is supported by the quote provided below, which discusses the dating of manuscripts based on comparing similar script hands that are seen in works containing a date:
“A problem with this method consists in the fact that the script used in documents in the fourteenth century was different than that used by the same scribes when copying other manuscripts…”
11. Ibid., 258.
12. Ibid., 258-9.
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