Hi Jed!
 
Good to hear a little about your background and to see where your interest on ON stems from.  I daresay your retirement is busier and more fulfilling than your working life was!  I hope I'm in that boat when I retire too!
 
Glad you enjoyed this as much as I did!  It's funny how going over other people's translations really reinforced my understanding of the grammar we had learnt at college. 
 
I was half hoping that some people would want to carry on doing translations because, as Teja once rightly said, that's where my interest lies!  I contacted my ON lecturer for his advice on what to look at next and he suggested either
I don't mind which we do, but I should warn you that this time we'll all be in the same boat together because I won't have lecture notes to rely on!!  But I'm sure if we get stuck on a particular bit, someone else from the group will put us right.
 
I'm happy to post a passage up each week and co-ordinate the responses and we can all chip in and discuss how best to unravel the grammar! So it's really over to you, Jed, Simon, Laurel, Grace, Thomas, Daniel and anyone else who has or would like to join in.  I'll go along with what the majority want.
 
Kveðja,
Sarah.
----- Original Message -----
From: Gerald Mcharg
To: norse_course@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, July 06, 2003 11:49 PM
Subject: [norse_course] From Jed to Sarah - Are we translating anything else?

Sarah
Your comments and explanations were much appreciated, especially in the clause where 'óvænligr' refers back to Hott. I sweated unsuccessfully on that one, but now it seems so simple, thanks to you.
Is there any chance of trying something else, once others have also done the final translation of 'Bothvar'?  I have the luxury of early retirement and so more time available than most, so I can sympathise with those of you who have to make a living. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed the 'company' of you, Daniel, Xigung, Simon, Laurel, etc., who shared difficulties and offered helpful suggestions.
A little more about myself: when I retired from teaching, I did an MA at Leicester University in English Local History. I applied the disciplines and methods of that course in studying my local area of West Cumberland which was settled by Scandinavians who were ultimately of Norwegian (not Danish) origin. Of course they had to fit in with the British, Scots (from Ireland and Scotland), English, and later, the Normans and Flemings who put in a delayed appearance 26 years after the battle of Hastings.  What a wonderful polyglot, multi-ethnic set of mongrels we were up here! It's a shame we couldn't fit the Picts in. I had already studied Old English and Classical Greek, and had acquired enough Latin to read the local charters and other records in that language.
Armed with all this, I did my own place-name study of the St Bees valley - I live in Whitehaven at its northern end. It was the Norse elements in place-names and our dialect words that led me to study Old Norse. For example, I was ten or eleven before I heard the word 'winkles'. We called them 'cuvvins' which comes from ON 'kúfungr' - 'sea snail'.
Anyhow, the time spent on Old Norse has put my history and place-names studies in abeyance for a while, but if we can't carry on with our translations, I'll go back to them.
Could we have a consensus of opinion on this?
Cheers,
Jed.
 


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