The Norn Hildina Ballad from the Shetland Islands: Scandinavian parallels and attempts at reconstruction/translation
The Shetland Islands, together with the Orkney Islands, were until the nineteenth century a remarkable reservoir of the so-called Norn language, an extinct insular variety of Old Norse closely related to Icelandic and, specially, Faroese. Norn was preserved in these North-Atlantic British islands in...
| Published in: | SELIM. Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature. |
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| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
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Universidad de Oviedo
2020
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| Online Access: | https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/SELIM/article/view/15528 https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.25.2020.61-119 |
| Summary: | The Shetland Islands, together with the Orkney Islands, were until the nineteenth century a remarkable reservoir of the so-called Norn language, an extinct insular variety of Old Norse closely related to Icelandic and, specially, Faroese. Norn was preserved in these North-Atlantic British islands in form of single words, proverbs, or prayers. However, the longest and most complete text in Norn is the Shetlandic Hildina Ballad, collected on the small island of Foula in 1774 by George Low and consisting of thirtyfive stanzas. In this article I intend to offer a comparative approach to this Norn oral text refering to its Scandinavian parallels and the attempts at reconstruction and translation carried out by several scholars such as Marius Hægstad, Sophus Bugge, William G. Collinwood, Norah Kershaw, or Eigil Lehmann. |
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