I see Óskar has posted his opinions to the list; I'll refrain from
reading that until I've got my own out of the way.
It was not an easy thing to do to find this Edda-CD.
First I accessed the University library database
(I think anyone can do that; click on Start; then Run
and write telnet saga.bok.hi.is) and found that the
CD is supposedly ready for listening up on the fourth
floor. Off I went but I failed to find it. I asked
for help and found out that it hadn't been appropriately
filed and was still somewhere down in storage. I had it
fetched for me but then they told me that the music system
was broken... Anyway I eventually got to listen but not
for as long as I would have liked.
Oh well... Obviously the members of Sequentia are musicians
(not linguists) and they will have to be judged for the quality
of their music. I don't know much of anything about music so
you shouldn't take my comments about it very seriously.
I read most of the booklet that went with the disk. It got my
hopes up rather high; seems that those people listened to hundreds
of recordings of Icelandic and Faroese chanting and were taught the
metrics of the old poems by Heimir Pálsson. After listening to the
CD for a while it seemed to me that surprisingly little had come out
of this. ... Perhaps those people are _too_ good; I never got the imagery
of a group of 10th century people chanting holy poems. To me it always
sounded like 20th century professional musicians with huge voices singing
an opera. ... The music itself did not remind me of traditional Icelandic or
Faroese music.
But I was specifically asked about the pronunciation of the language.
I didn't see any indication that this was supposed to be a reconstructed
ON pronunciation. I couldn't find any reference to language in the booklet
and the cover of the CD said something like "... the language of the Norsemen,
still spoken in Iceland today" which kind of suggests that they were trying
for Icelandic pronunciation.
But what it actually sounded like to me was if you took a couple of Germans
threw some ON-texts at them, told them to sing, and didn't give them _any_
directions on how to pronounce them.
They made no noticeable distinction between short and long sounds;
"gúnnarr" and "gunar" would have sounded the same.
They made no distinction between ø and ö.
None that I could hear between ey and ei.
None that I could hear between æ and e.
But the thing that really sounded like a mutilation of the language was
the pronunciation of 'r'. An innocent little word like "er" was often
stretched
to no end "ERRRRRRRRRRRRRR".
I am inclined to believe that the length of vowels and consonants would have
formed an essential part of how the poems were chanted - discarding the
difference
seems like a rather bad idea.
But you never know. I am told that Chinese discards the difference between its
tones when sung. Similarily one could imagine that a language might discard
the difference
between short and long sounds (if the difference is really only in the
quantity) in singing.
Any thoughts on this, Yi-Qing?
I hope no-one takes me too seriously. As for music I am the most ignorant
person in the
world and as for pronunciation of Icelandic I am the most biased person in
the world.