I always enjoy the opening line in your posts,
davem. Your "So" and "So anyway" reminds me muchly of "hwæt" although I suppose you can ascribe that remembrance to my reading of Seamus Heaney's translation of
Beowulf.
I probably share many of the regrets and hesitations over translations and "modernisations" that
Esty and
davem have. However, I would like to step back just a sec to consider an assumption in the first post here. Is 'political correctness' the only motivator in using 'native' for 'Skræling'?
A starting point is to consider if skræling exists in any English dictionaries. It does not appear in the OED and it is not in the dictionary.com as an English word. It does appear in encyclopedias, but there it appears as Old Norse. So the translator could be legitimately and honestly looking for a specific English word, believing that skræling is not English and would not be understood by the English reader. Another point to consider is that, while skræling might mean barbarian in modern Icelandic, that is not necessarily the meaning it had in the ancient texts.
The orgin of the work is not clearly known, as this
Reference.com entry suggests. It could in fact have been an attempt to reproduce the name of the North American tribe. And certainly 'sickly' could well describe the effect of disease which the Europeans brought to Vinland.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Reference.com
As recounted in the Greenlander (Grœnlendinga) saga, the word skraeling may have been the name of one of the North American tribes encountered during initial contact. A Norseman saved two Skraeling boys from the sea. As was their custom, the Skraeling boys became the Norseman's life-long servants. During this service the Skraeling boys indicated that the word "skraeling" was how their peoples' name was pronounced in Norse.
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A further point to consider is that the original meaning of 'barbarian' was far, far less derogatory than the word became in English usage. In classical Greek and Latin, its first meaning (as I understand, not being a scholar of ancient languages) was simply someone who was not a Hellenic or, latterly, Roman speaker. It was linguistic. It is probably impossible to "go back" to this more neutral meaning of 'barbarian', but it is worthwhile considering if "native" is not in fact closer to this original idea of separating native from non-native speaker. It's a jump I admit, as logically 'non-native' would be closer, but my point is really to ask if, in the original sagas, the word was necessarily as pejorative as our later usages make it.
If that is the case, then the translator has tried to recapture an historically accurate rendition of the relationship between the Vikings, Greenlanders, and the North American tribes. It was, after all, the later Europeans who slaughtered the Boetiuk Indians by putting a bounty on their heads, not the Vikings. It was the later Europeans (aka English) who put the highly derogatory connotations on barbarian. But did the Vikings share this attitude towards others? Christian Europe created the image of the Vikings as brutal, barbarous tribes who went around killing and slaughtering, but modern historical and anthropological research suggests that is not an accurate reflection of the Vikings' attitude towards other tribes.
These are, I think, considerations far more significant than the handy old stand-by of "political correctness." Language changes over time and there is an honest attempt by translators to capture an original meaning which may be lost by the "baggage" which words pick up after the text was originally created.
Of 'boss' and 'master' the issue is quite different, between very different forms of social and economic organisation. Yet can we really say that "master" is an example of the 'high and lofty' tone? Not everything medieval was high and lofty, particularly social relationships. I'm not saying that I prefer 'boss' to 'master', just that power and authority pertains also to medieval terminology.