ONE OF THE LAST JOBS I HAD BEFORE BECOMING A full-time student was serving behind the counter at Solosy’s two newsagents shops, at the Trafalgar Square end of Charing Cross Road. When things were quiet in the shop I would often take down a book we stocked called Hugo’s Teach Yourself Norwegian in Three Months. Browsing through it I came across words like barn (child), and kirk (church), that I had heard my Scottish grandparents use. I found gate (street), a word I remembered from probably the first song I ever learnt, ‘The Keel Row’, which begins ‘As I came by Sandgate, by Sandgate, by Sandgate...’. These words turned out to be linguistic remnants of the Viking settlements in Britain that began early in the ninth century and continued for some three hundred years. Visitors to York today will find street names like Coppergate, Stonegate and Fossgate, from a time when the city was the centre of the Viking kingdom of York. Even our names for the days of the week derive from the same source and time: Monday (Måne dag – ‘moon day’); Tuesday (Tyrs dag – ‘Tyr’s day’, named for the god Tyr); Wednesday (Odins dag); Thursday (Thors dag); Friday (Freyjas dag). From all of this I quickly realized I had one foot in the door of the language. It was a tremendous encouragement to go ahead and learn it properly, as was the realisation that knowing any one of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish gives good access to the other two.
All Scandinavian languages derive from the varieties of ‘Old Norse’ that were spoken across the Scandinavian peninsula during the Viking Age and beyond. In the case of Norwegian, Swedish and Danish they remain mutually comprehensible, although largely for reasons of national identity and pride novels and textbooks are routinely translated between the languages. Written Icelandic remains closest to Old Norse and has retained the distinctive characters of thorn (Þ) and eth (ð). The former is a voiceless ‘th’ sound as in English ‘think’. Thus, a name such as Þorgeir Þorkelsson is typically anglicized as ‘Thorgeir Thorkelsson’. The voiced version, the eth, is pronounced like ‘th’ as in ‘father’, and is never used at the beginning of a word. It is often anglicized in writing as a ‘d’, so that Austfirðir may be anglicized as ‘Austfirdir’. Both the thorn and eth appear in the pages to follow, for a sense of Iceland’s distinctiveness.
Modern written Norwegian is complicated by the parallel existence of two official forms. Bokmål (‘Book Language’) grew from the Dano-Norwegian that developed during the centuries of Danish dominance over Norway. It is the language of the city, and the spoken and written form favoured by the overwhelming majority of Norwegians today. As in Danish, the alphabet retains æ, ø and å after z. Nynorsk (‘New Norwegian’) is an artificial construction from the mid-nineteenth century that attempted to bring the written language into line with the Norwegian spoken in more rural parts of the country. It is often the preferred language of poets.
The Swedish alphabet adds å, ä and ö after z. On account of the French roots of the House of Bernadotte, which has ruled in Sweden since 1818, Swedish retains a small but distinct French element which is entirely absent from Danish and Norwegian.
These historical complexities make it virtually impossible to translate place and personal names into English with any consistency. In the pages that follow I have preferred a subjective approach, mixing old and new and variant forms of the originals rather than imposing an illusory standardization on their exoticism.