Quote:
Originally Posted by davem
I take your point re Skraelings - though it has been kept in all translations I've read so far. And that perhaps is also PC - because apparently the closest literal translation is 'wretches'.
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The early Norwegian
settlers in Greenland sought to control their natural environment in the same way that they did
in their native Norway. By not recognizing the fundamental differences between their former
environment and their new one their society eventually collapsed. Had the Norse
Greenlanders interacted with the indigenous people rather than seeing them to be mere
“skraelings” (“wretches”), they might have learned how to cope and survive in Greenland’s
extreme environment. Similarly, in Vineland, had the Norse Greenlanders interacted with the
Labrador and Newfoundland Beothuks on arrival rather than killing them on sight, they may
well have colonized North America (http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache...ient=firefox-a)
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That said apparently the Icelanders used the name to refer to the inhabitants of Greenland too. |
I don't know which I should do first--applaud your ingenuity in finding such an article or laugh hysterically at an earnest engineer doing anthropological or archeological lectures! That said, the esteemed Professor Ircha does not footnote his source for the interpretation of 'wretches' and that I would like to see simply because the linguistic sources say the word's etymology is unclear. It's a tangled web when a pragmatic researcher takes on cultural studies and treats hypotheses like literal fact. His source for those claims about the Norse (Diamond's book
Collapse) has been contested and his off hand remark about relations with the Inuit does not really reflect the general consensus about the relationship of the two cultures.
To go back to the switch from Skrćling to native, I can't help but wonder if it reflects a change in assumption about the readership of the sagas--the great loss of cultural knowledge which makes familarity with a Norse word no longer a given, just as familiarity with the social organisation reflected in 'master' can no longer be assumed either. Kids these days--all they know is pop culture.
Pullman uses Skrćling in a fantasy world, though, doesn't he? I mean, are readers to take either of his Oxfords as the actual historical one we live in or can visit? So he can take a word and tilt it a bit without being literally or pedantically referring to the actual historical usage of the word. He's calling up something different than a translator of an historical text would be doing.