Notes on Pronunciation of the Augmented Vocality Texts

The question of how to pronounce medieval texts is a complex one, without a single correct answer. Like translating, reading texts aloud is itself an act of interpretation with contingent assumptions the about the nature of the audience and the relationship between the voice of the poet and the performer. This was as true for medieval readers as it is for us today. All of the texts we have worked with in this project come down to us divorced from their original performative context. They are preserved in manuscript compilations from centuries after they were likely composed, often without any detailed acknowledgement of their sources. Sonatorrek and Arinbjarnarkviða, for example, are intensely personal poems, reflecting both the poet’s love for his subjects and the creative process that allows him to express it. They are preserved together with a long prose account of the life of Egill Skalagrímsson originating in the 13th century, over two hundred years after he died around the turn of the millennium. For saga authors, quoting Egill’s voice was a way of bringing the past back to life for their audiences in the present moment. Yet they were also claiming it for their own, integrating each verse they quoted into their account of who Egill was and what his words meant. The surviving manuscript witnesses to Egills saga show a considerable amount of variation, both in the prose narrative and especially in their selection and deployment of verse. These poems, whether or not anyone called Egill originally composed them, have also belonged to the numerous performers who have interpreted them for over a millennium.

That said, philologists can offer some very educated guidance on the historical phonology of the language. Although we cannot consult Egill himself, we can bring a large body of evidence, both contemporary and diachronic, to bear in order to track the development of the Old Norse language through time. Poetic metre in particular provides important clues about how sounds were intended to be pronounced when a text was composed, though this might be obscured as copies were made in subsequent times that gradually updated spellings. It should be stressed that significant phonological changes occurred during the medieval period and some phonemes would have been pronounced differently at, for example, the time Egill was composing and the time a saga author was quoting him. Thus any reconstructed medieval pronunciation already requires a decision about which version of the text is being reconstructed. Every reconstruction also restores a hypothetical standard form of a language about which we have limited information, not the unique, idiosyncratic speech of a real individual.

The purpose of this project is not to reconstruct hypothetical originals. On the contrary, it belongs to a continuous history of exploring the possibilities of expression that they offer. Our choice to adopt modern pronunciation, minimally adapted where necessary, is in keeping with this aim. Icelandic and Irish are living languages and the actors who perform these texts are native speakers of the present-day descendants of the medieval languages used by our texts. This early stage of the language is massively challenging and remote in some ways to modern speakers, but fundamentally familiar and intuitive in others. Performing the texts using current pronunciation as far as possible permitted them to read fluidly and emotively, and allowed them to engage fully with the meaning, pacing and sound effects beyond the individual phonemes.

For those wishing to explore the sounds of the language at this level and to get an impression of change over time, we have also provided recordings of individual phonemes that reflect a reconstructed stage of the language at the height of its medieval literary productivity. Such exercises necessarily oversimplify the realities of the variety of actual human speech. There can be no raising Egill from the grave. We can, however, through each of these approaches access different aspects of his artistry, and that of subsequent medieval readers, writers and performers who preserved and reinterpreted his work. As well as sampling different pronunciations, these sound files allow users to experience two complete interpretations of each text in two different voices: one male, one female. We hope this resource will inspire those seeking to use it creatively by opening up the range of possibilities they offer in performance. For students of the medieval language, it provides a way in to understanding their phonology as well as a reminder of the key importance of the aural and performative aspects of these texts.