Brennu-Njáls Saga

Brennu-Njáls Saga : Easy Routes into an Old Icelandic Classic

Brennu-Njáls Saga, or the saga of Burnt Njál, regularly ranks as one of the most popular and loved of the Icelandic family sagas. Thanks to its lively, twisting-and-turning and regularly bloody plot, it’s also one of the best-known, in Iceland and beyond.

It makes for fun subject matter, then, on all sorts of academic programmes at all sorts of levels. Needless to say, I was more than chuffed to get the chance to work with it towards my MSc this year. Who doesn’t like a bit of high drama for credit?

That said, as a relative newbie to the tale, it took a bit of prep to enjoy fully the immersion within Njál’s world. It consists of over 150 chapters, with multiple characters – both headliners and a plethora of bit-parts – and as such, it can be dizzying to follow closely. Especially if you are getting to grips with it in the original language.

Thankfully, there are some excellent resources to help out, whether that’s in Old Norse, Modern Icelandic, or English. Here are some of the best routes I’ve found into this exciting, distant world.

Brennu-Njáls Saga for Free

Dipping your toe in the water is the first step. And you can get to know the sagas for absolutely no outlay. Totally free. If that’s not an invitation to give them a try, I don’t know what is!

The Icelandic Saga Database project makes available the entire collection of family sagas in existence, both in the original (with modernised spelling), as well as numerous translations. Brennu-Njáls Saga, with its wildly popular status, is available in six languages. You can read online, or save to read offline as EPUB or PDF files, amongst others.

Brennu-Njáls Saga : The Cook Translation

As fantastic as free is, some of those translations are rather old. For instance, the English translation of Brennu Njáls on the Icelandic Saga project site is the 19th Century version by George W. DaSent.

However, some scholars prefer to set the more modern translation by Robert Cook – this is the edition set on my own university course:

Besides, if I’m getting to grips with a text intimately, I like both an electronic and hard copy; the Cook translation was a no-brainer despite the absolutely adequate older translation in PDF form.

The Perfect Spoken Companion

I find the ready availability of audiobooks also a great support when diving deep into long texts, too. Audible by Amazon have a superb English version available, narrated expertly by a speaker with native Icelandic. I cannot tell you how beautifully he pronounces the many, many personal names:

However, before you buy that, there’s a trick to get it much more cheaply than the standalone list price (nearly £20 at the time of writing). If you purchase the extremely cheap Kindle version (72p, right now!), you have the chance to add WhisperSync narration for £2.99. Oddly, that Kindle version is not the Cook version, as listed – it’s actually the older DaSent translation. However, the narration is the Cook work. Look beyond that minor confusion, and for just a few quid you can listen to the recommended modern translation.

Cowboy Crib Notes

Now, if you have a passing interest in Old Norse or the sagas, you may well have come across Jackson Crawford already. He’s the stetson-wearing academic who shares his nordic knowledge before stunning Colorado backdrops. His video catalogue is prolific and very current – he posts regularly on all sorts of aspects of Old Norse.

Crawford has helpfully published a whole series of recap videos for Brennu-Njáls Saga. They’re straightforward and clear – music to the ears of students trying to get their heads around the dramatic twists and turns. The first part is here:

Easy Access

Finally, if the original Old Icelandic is proving tough, but you still want a taste of the language, there are some wonderful free modern Icelandic resources available via Iceland’s education department Menntamálastofnun (a goldmine I’ve tapped many a time). They are retellings, rather than phrase-for-phrase translations, but offer an easy way in if you want to support your modern language studies too.

The Menntamálastofnun version splits the tale into two parts, available as e-books, the first part here, and the second here.

Takk fyrir, Ísland!

Góða skemmtun!

Whether you’re giving Njáls a go for fun, for study, or both, these are all great places to start. And if it whets the appetite, there is a whole world of material written about the saga. A quick search on JSTOR throws up myriad articles. That’ll keep me out of trouble for a few weeks…

Góða skemmtun / have fun!

A sundial - one way to measure the polyglot days! Image from freeimages.com

A Multilingual Manifesto : Daily Tactics for a Polyglot Plan

I’m always inspired by the work of other polyglot learners. This week, I was living for the enthusiasm in this post on working eleven active language projects into daily life. There’s inspiration if ever you needed it!

It’s not all work and no play, though. The post reminded me that keeping up your languages isn’t about interminable formal study sessions, or filling all your spare moments with strict heads-down books-open calendar scheduling. There is a place for that, of course, and many of us happily geek out over it.

But too much intensity will burn the shine off anything in the long run.

One antidote to this is to foster brief but very regular habits, or daily tactics. These draw on the trusty old little but often approach. But there’s a second, even simpler method for working this sage advice into your day: putting language in your path. Create an environment in which you naturally bump up against foreign language material in the course of your day-to-day, even when not officially studying.

Multilingual Manifesto

Setting this environment up requires just a little initial planning. It involves putting together a multilingual manifesto: a plethora of personal polyglot policies which create effortless exposure to language.

These tweaks, or displacements, help shift your focal centre to target language interactions with the media around you. Most importantly, they are dotted around, and embedded within you day. They are the kind of activities that work just as well for one or two languages as they do for handfuls of them at the same time – especially if you have both active and maintenance projects.

Here are a couple of my own personal favourites for levering in the languages almost imperceptibly!

Languages on Drip

I am a news junkie. I can’t help it – I just love knowing what’s going on. Under normal circumstances, I will be checking live UK news outlets multiple times a day. Yes, I acknowledge that this can be an unhealthy addiction in current times!

Predictably, bad news fatigue prompted me to make a change-up in my life. But this change-up could be useful; I decided that overseas, foreign-language news sources would now be my first port of call.

First, I shuffled my links and icons so that foreign sources (like the excellent NRK app from Norway) were more accessible. Next, I turned off notifications from English-language news apps, and turned on those in other languages. This is incredibly useful; I now get regular snippets popping up on my phone in multiple languages. I hear a ping, and get a little reading tester in any one of my languages. Bite-sized practice, drip-fed at regular intervals: perfect.

There’s another positive side-effect. The news is engaging again – the Fleet Street-induced media fatigue has subsided!

Subtitles and Chill

News-fixing via notifications is the perfect example of a zero effort change to make language pop up in your everyday. Another is to tweak your defaults on streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Of course, the obvious (and most full-on) language learning advice for using streaming is to watch foreign language series or shows dubbed into your language(s). But that can be quite hard work, and there is actually no need to max it out all the time. Heaven knows, watching nothing but shows in a language you’re still learning can frazzle the mind.

Instead, simply switch target language subtitles on by default. That way, there is always some foreign language content in front of you, even when you just want to relax and not bombard your brain too much. Your eye will wander to the bottom of the screen now and again, catching the odd new word or interesting translation. Believe me, I’ve picked up some very interesting Polish vocab watching Star Trek Enterprise.

And of course, the full-blown, polyglot, stereo experience is always there when you’re ready for the mental gym.

Switch Your Sauces

Of course, you don’t get more everyday than food and drink. And foodies can mix it up a bit by introducing a couple of kitchen-specific personal policies.

If you regularly cook from scratch, switch your sauces… I mean, ahem, sources. Find a target language recipe book or website, and commit to find dishes from there alone. It needn’t be for every meal. But once or twice a week, banish your native language from your meal prep.

2020 saw me resurrect my old, forgotten Greek, and initially through the medium of food. Making a night a week Akis Night has been transformational (at least for my food and drink vocabulary!).

The World’s Your (Polyglot) Oyster

This trio has worked a treat for me lately. But you can find polyglot tweaks to put languages in your path in all corners of your life. From gaming, to exercise, to background chatter while you work, there are ways to study multiple languages a day yet not be studying 24/7.

So what will your multilingual manifesto look like?

Vintage TV set for franchise hopping! Image by FreeImages.com

Franchise Hopping for Fun Televisual Language Learning

This week I’ve been practising my languages alongside tuneful trolls and celebrity sambas – all thanks to a bit of franchise hopping.

International rollouts of TV franchise successes are nothing new. I remember my excitement in the early noughties on discovering that the UK’s Pop Idol had a German version. Yes, it had the slightly unwieldy name Deutschland sucht den Superstar (Germany is looking for the superstar). But it was the same glitzy, shiny, melodramatic format that I loved in the UK.

Back then, of course, it was still pretty difficult to find clips online to watch (28.8k modem, anyone?). Needless to say, I came back from a trip to Cologne that year with both the series CD and DVD. I still have them somewhere, in my piles of foreign language authentica.

Nowadays, of course, it’s a completely different story. With whole shows widely available through national broadcaster platforms, there are few barriers to enjoying overseas versions of your favourite shows.

So what’s so great about franchise hunting as a language learner?

Franchise Fun

Franchise exports are excellent language learning resources for a number of reasons:

  • the format is familiar, so you can guess a lot of vocabulary from context
  • they are fun to watch, especially if you are already a fan of the original
  • franchise exports are often some of the biggest shows, so are both really easy to find, and have lots of supporting material on social media channels
  • transplanted shows often include local twists that give an insight in your target language culture
  • they can be a stepping stone to get to know well-known personalities in the target language country, which you can then track down in more home-grown shows

‘Easy to find’ is always a winner for language learning resources, of course. The simplest way to track down a particular franchise in a foreign language version is to locate its entry on Wikipedia. For instance, on the entry for The Masked Singer, you can find out local names for the show’s incarnations, and marvel at just how far the show has travelled.

The online encyclopaedia can throw out some quite surprising facts, too. Before my franchise hunt, I would never have guessed that the Masked Singer started life as a South Korean series. Now that’s a great excuse for Korean learners to watch some gloriously silly TV – not to mention further temptation in my way to learn Korean some day!

Local Twists

Another thing to look out for in franchise exports is how they are adapted to the local audience. There are often some lovely cultural twists; Norway’s 2020 edition of Maskorama, for example, featured the staple Nordic troll as one of the singers. And that’s not to mention the cultural crossovers. Looking up China’s The Singer (another South Korean export), UK learners can enjoy watching home-grown talent Jessie J storm to victory in the 2018 series.

Once you’ve located the show itself, you can then follow its social media trail for even more authentic material. Instagram is great for short texts and videos. For example, Skal vi danse– or ‘Norwegian Strictly’ to UK viewers – features bite-sized interviews and behind-the-scenes presentations which make for great listening practice. Likewise, the comments are great for reading some often very colloquial language (if you can handle the barbed tongues of irate viewers!).

Franchise telly might be as far away from highbrow as you can get with authentic material in the target language. But it can punch well above its weight as a bit of fun practice content!

An image of someone washing their hands by maripepa m, freeimages.com. Authentic resources on health topics are easy to come by in times of Covid-19.

Language Love in Times of Covid : Authentic Resources in Translation

Authentic resources in the target language are vital exposure to improve your skills. And during a public crisis, it just so happens that topical materials are even easier to come across.

Namely, there is an abundance of brief, to-the-point and free publications on the Covid-19 pandemic right now. You can find them on the sites of official bodies like government health agencies and local authorities. Just like political manifestos and mail-shots, they are a good source of vocabulary if you find yourself talking about these topics in lessons. Certainly, I am finding that the subject crops with dogged regularity in my 2020 conversation classes.

And I have to admit, talking about it – in any language – helps to get my head around it.

So how to source these informational nuggets?

Information Hunting

You can seek out government information material anywhere where there is a sizeable community language presence. Initially, a simple Google search like “Covid-19 posters PDF” plus the country of your choice will more than suffice. After that, you will find yourself clicking through a rabbit warren of links to downloadable PDFs.

And they are there in numbers. In the US, official Spanish resources are extremely widely available. This page of Covid-19 informational materials offers a Spanish option for almost everything. But many other minority languages are represented, especially when there is a large diaspora community in a country. For instance, in Australia, a large Greek community means the same kinds of material are downloadable in Greek. Swahili, too, features quite frequently in US materials, like this Covid-19 poster. In fact, the Centre for Disease Control in America lists a dizzying array of languages on this page (select ‘Filter by Language’)

Authentic resources on Covid-19 in Polish - an NHS poster about washing hands.

Polish NHS poster on fighting Covid-19, downloaded via manchester.gov.uk

The Double Benefit of Authentic Resources in Translation

A key benefit of public information resources is that they are short and snappy. For beginner to intermediate learners, there is a lot to be taken from them without the sense of being overwhelmed by a huge authentic text. 

So why not just go straight to the source, and find materials from the target language country itself?

Well, the big bonus is that these documents are usually just one-to-one translations of the original English documents. That means you have a ready-made cross-reference source to check your comprehension of the target language. Look at them side by side, and compare the vocabulary and structures used, without having to second-guess or scrabble for a dictionary.

For certain, we live in difficult, frightening times. But authentic resources can be a great talking therapy, as well as a language learning boost.

Good luck, and stay safe!

A bear hunting resources. Probably not language learning ones, though. From freeimages.com.

We’re going on a resource hunt! Finding language learning freebies on educational sites

We’re going on a bear hunt, sing the children in Michael Rosen’s children’s book of the same name, gorgeously illustrated by Helen Oxenbury. And that’s what much of my recent language work has felt like – if the bears are target language resources out in the wild of the web (a stretch of a metaphor, I know).

The children’s book reference isn’t by accident, as I have recently held in mind a recent podcast that suggested a lack of utility in them for language learning. The key argument is the use of low frequency vocabulary and lack of real-world application. Resources for youngsters, the advice goes, is the last thing a language learner should be plumping for.

However, I tend to disagree on two points – firstly, that this material isn’t useful, and secondly, that it features low-use, unhelpful vocabulary and structures. My own ‘bear hunt’ this week has produced some brilliant evidence of this.

Fun factor

First of all, children’s books are flippin’ fun! And fun means motivation, and motivation means staying power and progress. If you’ve found certain young adult books rewarding in your native language (like Harry Potter, for example), it’s a big carrot to get you reading in the target one.

But secondly, not all children’s books are about low frequency, fantasy words. To that end, my resource trawl turned up a very serendipitous find. It was a prize that convinced me more than ever of the utility of books for youngsters in your language learning arsenal.

Resource hunt bonanza

I am always on the lookout for useful digital media in my target languages. This week, on a regular trek through Google, I stumbled across an absolute goldmine. It was the website of Iceland’s education department, Menntamálastofnun.

A bit dry and official, you might be thinking. But in fact, the site is a treasure trove. Scores of school textbooks are available to download for free in PDF format on subjects from history to maths. Incredibly, for many of them, entire audiobook versions are also downloadable. Reams of reading and listening material, pitched at young adults; it’s almost too good to be true!

Not just stories

The key point here is that children’s books are not just about fantasy stories. They include non-fiction books that cover many aspects of life, from the prosaic to the historical and cultural. And that setting is a vital part of any language learning project.

Faced with such a richness of reading, it’s important to go for what you love. In particular, a set of books on Icelandic history, aimed at Icelandic school students, caught my eye. Written for the average Icelandic 10-year-old, the syntax isn’t complicated. But the ideas, constructions and concepts are incredibly useful for learning about Iceland. And, crucially, they are excellent practice for talking about why I like learning Icelandic myself.

Even much simpler books aimed at even younger students have their place. This primary school level book on the kitchen, for example, could never be accused of a lack of real-world application. Stuffed with food and cooking words, it makes for excellent prep for shopping and cooking in Iceland!

Spoilt for choice?

Admittedly, my Icelandic textbook find is a stroke of luck largely thanks to choosing a ‘small’ world language to study. The pressure on the government of a tiny country like Iceland to support the language is relatively high. In larger countries, there are any number of competing educational resource companies. Each is trying to make money from the textbook publishing market. In that environment, freebies are a rare and precious thing. (Note: that isn’t to say that there aren’t some tidbits, like this free guide to linguistics from Routledge.)

It is true that we are spoilt as Icelandic learners. It’s even possible to get full, official courses in Icelandic as a foreign language for free online. But that isn’t to say that a bit of hard digging on your own resource hunt won’t turn up educational goods in other languages.

True, books for youngsters may not always accurately model everyday, face-to-face language in the target language. But there is more to language than face-to-face use. And these resources make a captivating way in to many aspects of the target language culture, as well as wonderful motivators.

Have you found similar caches of free resources for school students in your target language? Let us know in the comments!