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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 1997-04 > 0859969657


From: Stewart Baldwin <>
Subject: Re: Adam of Bremen's kings of Norway
Date: Wed, 2 Apr 1997 08:27:37 GMT


Anders Berg <> wrote:

>Your point is definitely a good one, as the Irish example show, but even
>though I'm not at all a linguist I'll stick out my neck and say that Old
>Norse did not change in any higher degree between the composition of the
>poems in the 900's and 1000's and the saga compilations of the 13th
>century. In fact, modern Icelandic is even today very close to Old Norse!
>The translation problems that Snorri encountered must have been
>neglectable, IMHO.
>Then again, I'd certainly welcome a linguist's view on this!!

That would help. I think it is true that the Icelandic of today is
very close to early written Icelandic, but the earliest surviving
written Icelandic (as far as I know) is from the twelfth century, and
the slow change of the language from then until now does not
necessarily mean that the change was slow during the preceding
centuries. (The presence of an active written vernacular literature,
which existed in Iceland from the twelfth century, tends to slow down
the change in a language.) For example, English has not changed much
in the last four centuries, but changed quite a bit in the two
centuries before that, as a comparison of Chaucer with Shakespeare
will show.

Of course, one of the problems with the early Norse poems is that even
the genuinely old ones often have very difficult interpretations,
which adds to the problem of trying to get history from poetry. For
example, I see no indication from Ynglingatal that the subject of each
stanza was intended to be the son of the one in the previous stanza,
and wonder if it wasn't originally just a list of names that was
turned into a genealogy at a much later date (by Ari?).

On a related subject, I don't know if this has been pointed out in
this newsgroup before, but an English translation of Heimskringla can
be downloaded from:

ftp://UKANAIX.CC.UKANS.EDU/pub/history/Europe/Medieval/translations/

There are two ways it can be downloaded. The file heims-01.zip gives
the whole work as one long text file, while heims-17.zip unzips to 17
text files, one for each chapter.

Stewart Baldwin

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