Hrolf Kraki's Saga by Poul Anderson
War Of The Gods by Poul Anderson
The Saga Of Asgard by Roger Lancelyn Green
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
"Then I heard a voice in the world: 'O woe for the broken troth,
"And the heavy Need of the Niblungs, and the Sorrow of Odin the Goth!"
-William Morris, Sigurd the Volsung, quoted in Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 333-465 AT p. 333.
An author can either retell the myths or write a new narrative incorporating them. Poul Anderson does both and imaginatively creates earlier versions of myths in:
"Star of the Sea" IN Time Patrol, pp. 467-640.
This is our new blog topic.
15 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I'm glad to say I too have a copy of HROLF KRAKI'S SAGA, WAR OF THE GODS, and the Time Patrol stories "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" and "Star of the Sea." Unfortunately, I've not read Morris' SIGURD THE VOLSUNG.
One thing that interested me about Anderson's WAR OF THE GODS was how, after the first time I read it, I thought it was weaker than most of his novels, too obviously derived from Scandinavian mythology. However, after I read it a second time, I came to have a much higher opinion of the book. Yes, it was a retelling of Scandinavian myths, but it was imaginatively well done in original ways easy to miss on a first reading.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: I always liked it. It has a good -feel- of antiquity to it.
Paul: yes, the STAR OF THE SEA take on Scandinavian myth is a good imaginative reconstruction of much earlier versions of the myths we mostly know from medieval redactions in Iceland.
Closer to the sources in Indo-European myth.
Note that at the time STAR is set, the Germanic languages were actually still united -- just regional dialects of one speech. Poul missed this in some earlier works (that one about a 1st-century Roman and his freedman in Jutland, frex), but it comes out well in STAR.
Recent linguistics has determined that the first Germanic sound-shift occurred no earlier than and possibly later than 500 BCE. Prior to that, the area of northern Europe where it arose was speaking "pre-Proto-Germanic", basically a simplified form of later Proto-Indo-European.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, re the "antique feeling" of WAR OF THE GODS.
And I was reminded of how, as late as the 1060's in Anderson's THE SIGN OF THE RAVEN, we see King Harold Godwinson's rebellious brother Earl Tostig sending an emissary to Harald Hardrede of Norway who was able to speak to the Norwegians using basically the same language. Apparently Old English and Old Norse were still mutually comprehensible to speakers of those languages.
That makes sense, that pre-proto-Germanic was still close to proto-Indo-European.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: they were still mutually comprehensible when the Vikings first hit England, in the 800's AD -- but only just.
For example, the Englishman would say:
"I'll sell you that horse that pulls/drags my wagon".
That would be, in Old English:
“Ic selle the that hors the draegeth minne waegn.”
In Old Norse, it would be:
“Ek mun selja ther hrossit er dregr vagn mine.”
By 1066 the Standard form of Old English -- the Wessex dialect, based on that spoken around Winchester -- would probably not have been mutually comprehensible with Old Norse as spoken in Norway by that date. Not unless you kept the conversation very simple -- things like "give me bread" and spoke very slowly.
OTOH, by that date there had been Old Norse speakers in England for more than 200 years, and their language was not extinct (it hung on until about 1200) and it had profoundly influenced the east/central/northern varieties of English.
So someone from the old "Danelaw" would be quite likely to have spoken something understandable to a Norseman, and vice versa.
Incidentally, modern Standard English is descended from an East Midland dialect heavily influenced by Old Norse -- over 800 loanwords, and it was contact with Old Norse that started the stripping-down and simplification into a positional system of English syntax. (English is sort of 'nearly' a contact-creole language.)
The West Saxon dialect was much more conservative and had little Old Norse influence. It was much more like Dutch, Frisian and Low German.
As late as the 1600's, people in Wiltshire and Shropshire were still saying "geboren" for "was born" and calling the sky "lyft" -- corresponding to German "Luft".
"Sky" is an Old Norse loan, as are "ship" and "skirt" and "bread" (the Old English word for bread in general was "loaf" -- the word "lord" comes from "bread-giver".)
This is a partial list of Old Norse loanwords in modern English. Note how ordinary most of them are; they replaced Old English words which expressed the same concept, or as with shirt/skirt, divided the meaning. That's a sign of prolonged bilingualism on an everyday level.
anger
bait
bask
berserk
blunder
bulk
crawl
dirt
gang
gawk
gift
haggle
hap, happy
lake
litmus
muck
muggy
rive
scathe
seem
skill
sleuth
snub
sprint
stain
stammer
steak
thrift
thwart
window
All I can say to that is "Wow!"
CS Lewis invented this verse in THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH:
"In Bragdon bricht this ende dai
"Herde Ich Merlin there he lai
"Singende woo and welawai."
Interestingly, the East Midland dialect became the basis of modern English because there was a substantial migration from there to London after the Black Death.
That was about the time that the royal court abandoned French as their first language -- the rest of the aristocracy had done so earlier, starting with the minor landed gentry and working up the scale.
(Because the very highest levels of the aristocracy often traveled to France, intermarried with their French equivalents, or owned estates there.)
Note that Chaucer started out writing in French, then switched to English. And in the Canterbury Tales, there's an amusing aside about the Prioress, that pillar of gentility, who speaks French... but after the style of Stratford-atta-Bowe, not Paris!
The English upper classes kept learning French as a second language for some time after they abandoned speaking as a hearth-tongue. Hence schools teaching it.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
To quote Paul: "Wow!"
Yes, I can see, from your explanation, how the Standard Old English spoken at the court and cities like Winchester and London would hardly be comprehensible to speakers of Old Norse. We have to imagine Earl Tostig's emissary to Harald Hardrede to be from the Danelaw, from those English familiar with Norse.
And you beat me to mentioning how the English we have today descended from the East Midlands dialect, from the migrants who settled in London after the Black Death pretty much exterminated the older stock of Londoners.
And many people in the English upper classes kept right on learning French as a second language into the 20th century. I'm reminded of how the first Hanoverian king, George I, who apparently knew little or no English, would converse with his ministers and courtiers using French.
Ad astra! Sean
I have read that George I meant to say, "I have come for the good of you all," but said, "I have come for all your goods."
Kaor, Paul!
Ha! An amusing malapropism. It would be no surprised if George I preferred to speak French, to avoid such embarassments!
Ad astra! Sean
French was the international language well into the 19th century, and aristocrats learned it as a matter of course all across Europe -- one reason French noble culture was so influential.
The Russian aristocracy often used it "at home", so they couldn't be understood by the servants, and were effectively bilingual from an early age.
In the BLACK CHAMBER book I'm working on now, Luz takes a Russian prisoner. She can't speak Russian, so he makes a casual, bloodthirsty threat about him in French to one of her party.
The Russian can't help a flicker of reaction when he hears it, which confirms her suspicion that he'd be able to speak it, as she'd pegged him as someone who'd been a man of rank in Russia before 1914, which meant he probably could.
Sean: probably anyone Tostig sent could. He'd been Earl of York, and York had been a Norse kingdom for a long time and Yorkshire was heavily Scandinavian-settled.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Indeed, and French was the international language until the first decades of the 20th century as well.
What you said about many Russians using French as a second language reminded me of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and his wife Alexandra Feodorovna. They used ENGLISH as a means of keeping their correspondence with each other private. Which was mentioned in Solzhenitsyn's MARCH 1917.
I agree with what you said about Tostig. And not everybody in northern England was totally reconciled to being ruled from London. Which was why Tostig got so much support there.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: IIRC, Winchester was the capital then. Otherwise, yea; York had been a separate kingdom within living memory. The south, west midland and western parts of England were the original core that Alfred put together -- the Danelaw was reclaimed bit by bit.
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