Quote:
Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin
Well, the collection was certainly made with Tolkien's (and EV Gordon's) permission, since they made it! But the printed booklet certainly was done without, a decade after Tolkien left Leeds.
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Ha, good catch. The fact that they were typed up for students is really interesting, because it might make sense of that caption on the cover:
Mál-rúnar skaltu kunna
Google Translate identifies this as Icelandic, and translates it as
Know the Runes, but the actual translation looks a bit more... well, snarky. Still entirely by Google:
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Mál-rúnar, by itself, translates as 'speech-runes'.
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kunna is a form of 'be able to', 'can' (or maybe 'have').
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skaltu is translated as 'please', but alternate translations are 'do' or 'you should' - it's an imperative.
Which means, I think, that the entire thing comes out not as 'know the runes', but as:
Please learn the words!
hS