'sorðið' is the Modern Icelandic spelling of 'sorðit', the supine
(=neuter past participle) of the verb "serða", which does indeed mean
"to have sex with", just as you said, Patricia. MM and HP translate
it as "intercourse". But Alan has a good point about it being
considered blunt term, to say the least; the little boy is too young
to realise how tactless he's being. There's an interesting article by
Ármann Jakobsson "Troublesome children in the Sagas of the Icelanders"
(Saga-Book XXVII, 2003), which discusses this very scene: "These boys
are a classic example of naive impertenance [...] They are able to
say what other people may well be thinking, but are too cautious or
too polite to put into words." He likens the incident to the fable of
The Emperor's New Clothes, and to other examples of marginal figures
in sagas, beggars, servants, children, who comment on the action a
little too directly for some people's comfort.

Incidentally, I think Zoega's cryptic comment on 'serða' "...(esp. a
male)" refers to the fact that it's often used to mean "sodomise(d)",
and as such was was considered a very insulting word. Both the
Icelandic lawbook Grágás and the Norwegian Gulaþing lawcode have
penalties for accusing a man of having been 'sorðinn'.

This does raise some interesting issues for the translator. If the
word seemed offensive to people at the time, an honest translation
ought to reflect that, but presumably the use of an equivalent crude
word even in fiction was felt to be inadmissable at the time when the
19th and 20th century translations we've looked at were made. That
doesn't necessarily mean that these translations weren't "honest";
they might be excused on the grounds that to break the taboos of their
own readers expectations would create a jarring effect that wasn't
present for the saga's original audience. Unfortunately, no one knows
for sure exactly how the original readers would have felt about this,
or what their expectations would have been. Though the word was
extremely offensive in one context, as the lawcodes show, it may not
have been such a big deal to read it in a story, spoken in character.
The use of the word in other sagas adds to the impression that it
wasn't so shocking to use it in literature.

But mores change, and a translator nowadays probably has more leaway
to recreate the effect of putting a crude word into the mouth of a
character than translators did in the 19th or early 20th century, even
given that academic works might lag behind fiction in general in this
respect (I notice that MM and HP's translation of Njáls saga was
published the year after The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs!). On
the other hand, the 20th c. translators may have wanted to avoid taboo
words, not so much because of their potential to upset people, but to
avoid the danger of using a word or expression that would quickly
become dated. What was mildly offensive in 1960, might seem quaint
and ridiculous to many readers in 2006, but a neutral term is more
likely to stay constant, even if this loses something of the effect of
the original. A translator also has to take care to avoid too much
local colour, e.g. words that an American reader would associate
strongly with Britain.

Another difficulty is the fact that the taboos of one culture rarely
map exactly onto the taboos of another. While English has lots of
words that overlap partly with ON serða, there probably aren't any
that have the exact range of conotations or the exact role in our
culture. Still, it might be possible to achieve the same effect, of
suggesting children at play saying things that embarrass their elders,
even if the English and Old Norse terms don't match up on every point.
I suppose what word you chose depends on taste as well, and who one's
intended readership is.





--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "Patricia" <originalpatricia@...>
wrote:

>
> Saell Alan
> The word used in the Old Norse version was not found in any of my
> dictionaries , so I used the version that had been employed in the

Five

> Volume set of the Sagas of the Icelanders - and that seemed well

enough to

> me -
>
> Finna það til foráttu að þú hafir eigi sorðið hana." there is no

word in

> any of the dictionaries that I use that seems to resemble the one

"sorðið"

> used , how else can I determine what it means but by referring to an
> established translation - which I used - seeing it as accurate enough
> Patricia