Christmas Eve

Bið feower and twentig aerra géola!
I do not have anything particular to say about English history or linguistics today. My English studies are over for now. I will go on to study Nordic runes and German this spring. Looking forward to it. For now, I am very happy about getting a holiday.

Merry Christmas!

Röde Orm and The Long Ships

I haven't posted here for a while due to rather extreme demands on my B-level English course. My last exam is coming up tomorrow (English literary history - could turn out great or horribly), and I will then head home for Christmas. 

   And with Christmas coming up and everything, I thought I might mention one of my recent essays which is on the topic of a story that takes place during the Viking Age. My essay focuses on a particular chapter of this story, where the main characters come to celebrate Yule with the viking King Harald Bluetooth. The names of these main characters are Orm and Toke, and the book itself (unless you don't already know) is Röde Orm by Frans G Bengtsson. Bengtsson actually studied English here in Lund and was a successful translator as well as fiction writer. His books have been translated into over 20 languages and highly praised for decades - and no wonder! The story of Orm and Toke is exciting and humorous, and yet strangely mythical and captivating. My essay discusses how the English translation (called The Long Ships, translated by Michael Meyer) differs from the Swedish original in the tone of the story and narrative. Röde Orm is deliberately written in an old-fashioned way with old verb forms and a particular language style which makes it feel more like a heroic epic than a brutal action story. Because let's face it: it's about Vikings. They plunder, pillage and fight. It gets bloody. Yet as a Swedish reader, you still like Orm and Toke and consider them to be the good guys of the story. They attain a heroic status on par with characters like Beowulf or King Arthur. 

Image source: http://www.seriecentrum.com/serietips/serietips.htm

   This, however, I think, is lost in the English translation (and possibly other translations as well, but I have not checked). The translation is in modern English and does not manage to retain the atmosphere of the original. The reader gets closer to the action and brutality, and even some jokes and comical points are lost simply because they do not work in English, or because they might have worked but have been ignored or misunderstood by the translator. Rather than a heroic tale that might have been recorded by a bard or chronicler in the 10th century and retold to us now a thousand years later, the English translation feels like a gritty, brutal action story and the characters are much less likable and laugh at things that suddenly do not seem very funny. Maybe the translator felt that he had to repackage and update the novel so as to make it available for new readers. This might have been very well with a story that was actually written a thousand years ago, but is far from an improvement here. Röde Orm is not in need of an update - its prose is meant to sound old and archaic, and is (I think) necessary in order to distance the reader from the violence and make the story work. The novel still receives much acclaim from English readers, but I would like to show them the Swedish original and what they are missing out on. I highly recommend Röde Orm to anyone who has not read it. It is a thrilling, humorous, swashbuckling (I've never used that word before!) adventure that really fires the imagination.

   I am now off to have supper and drink Yule. I have no ale or mead available, so Swedish julmust will have to do.