Norn

“ The transition from the old to the new, in the case of the language, seems, when one compares the oldest with the youngest generation now living, to have taken place more rapidly in Foula than anywhere else in Shetland. The last man in Unst who is said to have been able to speak Norn, Walter Sutherland from Skaw, died about 1850. In Foula, on the other hand, men who were living much later than the middle of the present (19th) century are said to have been able to speak Norn. The Norn spoken towards the middle of the century and later can hardly have been of much account. ”

“ But there are, indeed, many other Norns, for, when a man is born, there is a Norn to determine his fate. Some are known to be of heavenly origin, but others belong to the races of the elves and dwarfs ”

“ In Scandinavian traditions a disagreement among the Norns is not uncommon. In one case, two Norns assign to a newborn child long life and happiness, but the third and youngest decrees that he shall only live while a lighted taper burns. The eldest Norn snatches the taper, puts it out, and gives it to the child's mother, not to be kindled till the last day of his life. ”

“ The variant forms are therefore often very different.
“The last lisp of a dying child” is the striking phrase applied by S. Bugge to those last remnants of Shetland Norn [1] . Of the worst mutilated fragments it will hardly be possible to give any translation or adequate interpretation. To explain isolated words and phrases with more or less probability is all that can be contemplated. This is particularly the case with the remnants of verse from Unstn (the sea-song) and Foula (the eagle-song) , which are only small, disjointed fragments. ”

“ The original Celtic element in the Islands was, as the place-names show, predominantly Cymric (Pictish) ; but of Cymric there is almost nothing left in the speech itself.
That Norn was able to gain so strong a foothold and to maintain itself so long in Orkney and Shetland is due, in great part, to the fact that the stretch of country on the mainland of Scotland, lying opposite to Orkney, that is Caithness, was also peopled by Northmen, and that Norn was the prevailing speech in the eastern parts of Caithness. ”

“ It was from the younger generation that I collected by far the greater part of the Shetland Norn vocabulary presented in this dictionary. The younger people were thoroughly interested in my work, had a certain understanding of its scope, and they formed a needed link between me and the older people. The younger people did not, of course, themselves possess such a fund of Norn vocabulary as the older generation ”

“ The first line is corrupt Norn. The only intelligible word is gonga, to go, O.N. ganga.
C. A third Fetlar version is:
Du at rides de rød
and rins de grey,
tell tūna [tuəna] tɩvla
at nūna nɩvla
is väᶅna väƫna [= fallinn í vatnit] .
de rød, the red horse or mare. In this version the water takes the place of the fire.
Nivla as a troll-name, name of a troll-child, may, if not formed simply to rhyme with Tivla, be set alongside No. nyvel, m., a small, insignificant person (Aa.) , a good-for-nothing (R.) . ”

“ It is not only in a merely statistical sense, that is, by reckoning the number of the words, that Shetland Norn shows a closer connection with the language of the south-west of Norway or of the south of Norway than with the other Norwegian dialect-groups. ”

“ As the i-mutation is so old and so usual a phenomenon in Norse as well as in German, it is almost as a matter of course that it appears in Shetland Norn. There is, however, the peculiarity that the i-mutation is wanting in a great many words in Shetland Norn, in words too, where no closely related words with an original vowel are to be found that could have a smoothing effect and abolish the mutation. ”

“ The Northern goddesses of fate, who were called Norns, were in nowise subject to the other gods, who could neither question nor influence their decrees. They were three sisters, probably descendants of the giant Norvi, from whom sprang Nott (night) . As soon as the Golden Age was ended, and sin began to steal even into the heavenly homes of Asgard, the Norns made their appearance under the great ash Yggdrasil, and took up their abode near the Urdar fountain. ”

“ And, even in cases where the words did not follow the phonetic rules of Shetland Norn, but were Lowland Scottish in form, doubt might exist, as Norn has been exposed, during so many centuries, to a strong influence from Lowland Scottish, on account of which approximations to the latter speech have occurred, both in the meanings and in the forms of the words.
Several Shetlandic words, although they are English (L.Sc.) in form, must be regarded as of Norse origin on account of their diffusion in Northern languages, especially in Norwegian, Færoese and Icelandic ”

“ The people of the island are lively and intelligent. Here I collected some fragments of Norn; but the Hildina-ballad, recorded by Low in 1774, was irrevocably lost.
The present Foula-dialect is not in any special way more old-fashioned than that of the Westside, in the main; but conversation with the old people in the Islands soon convinced me that ancient modes of life and language had been maintained longer here than on Mainland, — indeed, than in all the rest of Shetland. ”

“ This terrible fate the gods awaited with calm and cheerfulness, showing even greater courage than in their many deeds of war. They had to submit to this fate, for there were three beings even greater than they. These were the Norns, deciders of the fate of gods and men alike. They were three giant maidens who dwelt by a sacred, wisdom-giving fountain, and who controlled the lives of men, giving to each sickness and health, success and failure and death when they would. No man or god might escape what the Norns decreed for him. ”

“ Yell is in reality more isolated than Unst, and this large island, with its still very rich Norn vocabulary, will certainly be the part of Shetland where the old dialect with its intermixture of Norn will maintain itself longest. ”

“ In one group of words the mutated form, with the support of the mother-tongue, has gradually displaced the non-mutated form; while in other cases the non-mutated form has remained, and the mutated form has been dropped. Even at the present day there are to be found in Shetland Norn many such words with double forms, a mutated form and a non-mutated form.
In most instances, in the later Norn, the i-mutation has been carried out; but in a large group of words it is not to be found at all. ”

“ In view of the fact that the Old Norse element surviving in the Shetland dialect is so rich and varied, it cannot surprise one to find, mingled with the Norn or Old Norwegian element which is the kernel of the language, a large number of words that are only known as Færoese, Icelandic, Danish or Swedish. ”

“ Of the Norn words that are not in general use throughout Shetland, some belong to certain larger portions of the Islands, as, for example, North Shetland, more strictly, the North Isles; the Westside; South Shetland; but many are limited to a single district or to a single island.
Of the great mass of words that have become antiquated, some cannot be said to have perished, as they are still used by old people, though often only in certain islands, districts or neighbourhoods; they are not to be heard in the speech of younger people. ”

“ The old form *ol has been dropped, as the name for the fish, *ol has been superseded by Eng. “eel”, and the other *ol has then been changed similarly to “eel”. This change must have taken place at a time when the older (Norn) form *ol, as a name for the fish, and the more recent (Eng.) form “eel”, were used simultaneously in Shetlandic.
Many Norn words in Shetland have been fully or partly translated into English (L. Scottish) , but with the special Northern (Norn) meanings preserved.
bank, sb., ledge, as e.g. peat-bank, and banks, pl., steep coast, show anglicising of O.N. “bakki”. ”

“ I look on Norna as a woman of very extraordinary abilities, which are very often united with a strong cast of insanity; and I consider her as better skilled in the signs of the weather than any woman in Zetland. ”

“ Jakob Jakobsen that his Etymologisk Ordbog over det Norrøne Sprog på Shetland should appear in an English edition, but he knew that his wish would never be fulfilled by himself, all his time being devoted to further original research; a considerable collection of Orkney Norn required to be worked out, and he was also occupied with a Færoese dictionary which he had commenced. Death unfortunately intervened, and what he left undone no one else could adequately do. ”

“ Shetlandic handed down from Norn (with the exception of the irrelevant sense here: forward in the boat) .
The verb vog, properly to be awake, be watchful, means in Mod. Shetl. (U.) to remain at rest, or remain lying at the same fishing-ground. Both these words give countenance to the idea that the third line refers to deep-sea fishing: seeking out the fishing-ground at the haaf by day, and remaining there at rest by night. It was formerly the custom among Shetland fishermen, going out to the haaf-fishing, to take cooking utensils with them and stay away for several days and nights. ”

“ He was afterwards married to Skada, daughter of the giant Thiasse.—Niord is of a very friendly and benevolent disposition. See the articles Skada and Vaner.
NORNA, pl. NORNOR, name of the Parcæ, or Fates of the Scandinavians; they were three in number, viz. Urda, Norna, or destiny of the past; Verdandis, of the present; Skulda, of the future. They sit near the Ash Yggdrassil, the tree of time, where they weave the woof of human destiny.
ODIN is the Chief Asa, the king of gods and men, the Jupiter and Mars of the Scandinavian mythology, and the grand progenitor of the Scandinavian kings. ”

“ These maidens assign the lifetime of men, and are called Norns.” [35] To their stream the gods ride every day along Bifröst to take counsel. For in the Norse creed the gods know not the hidden things of the future, nor have power to ward them off. Fate and death, the Twilight of the Gods, lies ahead for them also, as these things lie ahead of mortals.
It is possible that a trace of the rainbow bridge is to be seen in the Greek myth of the asphodel meadows, which are a part of the infernal regions. ”

“ The Norns sometimes wove webs so large that while one of the weavers stood on a high mountain in the extreme east, another waded far out into the western sea. The threads of their woof resembled cords, and varied greatly in hue, according to the nature of the events about to occur, and a black thread, tending from north to south, was invariably considered an omen of death. ”

“ Fetlar versions.
A. From Fetlar come some variants of this fairy-verse in a mixture, chiefly L.Scottish with scraps of Norn preserved in between. The Fetlar version, most similar to the Foula form, is the following: Geng hame to Fivla [fɩvla] , and tell Divla [dɩvla] at de honnins [hȯᶇɩns] wis lopen [lopən] in a “tuilly” [tøli] and brunt de bonnins [bȯᶇɩns] ; go home to Fivla, and tell Divla (Tivla) that the dogs were fighting and had "burnt the bairns", i.e., had knocked over the children into the fire. ”

“ Like them they are generally represented as three in number, and they are said to spin, or weave, the destiny of men. Their dwelling is beside the “Spring of fate,” beneath the “world-tree,” Yggdrasil’s ash, which they water with draughts from the spring. In some cases the Norns are not easily to be distinguished from the Valkyries (q.v) . Sometimes again they appear as prophetesses (völur) at the birth of children, whose destiny they foretell. ”

“ Some belong to the Æsir, some to the elves, and some are Dvalin’s daughters.’
“‘But if these Norns dispense the destinies of men,’ said Gangler, ‘they are, methinks, very unequal in their distribution; for some men are fortunate and wealthy, others acquire neither riches nor honour; some live to a good old age, while others are cut off in their prime.’
“‘The Norns,’ replied Har, ‘Who are of good origin, are good themselves, and dispense good destinies. ”

“ The character of Norna is meant to be an instance of that singular kind of insanity, during which the patient, while she or he retains much subtlety and address for the power of imposing upon others, is still more ingenious in endeavouring to impose upon themselves. Indeed, maniacs of this kind may be often observed to possess a sort of double character, in one of which they are the being whom their distempered imagination shapes out, and in the other, their own natural self, as seen to exist by other people. ”

“ They perfectly correspond to the three Norns seated under the tree, Igdrasil, of the Scandinavian legend. In two stories they take the form of dependents, and change sex, viz., as Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes. In Golden Locks they become ants, ravens, and a fish and a fly. In the Three Citrons (in part) , three giants. In another Slavonic fairy story they become identified with the four brothers themselves, and this change is beginning to manifest itself in Reason and Happiness. In the Scandinavian Norns we have the past, the present, and the future. ”

“ A Vala, druidess, or prophetess, consulted by the priests, revealed that the Norns had decreed that whoever wielded it would conquer the world and come to his death by it; but in spite of all entreaties she refused to tell who had taken it or where it might be found. Some time after this occurrence a tall and dignified stranger came to Cologne, where Vitellius, the Roman prefect, was feasting, and called him away from his beloved dainties. In the presence of the Roman soldiery he gave him the sword, telling him it would bring him glory and renown, and finally hailed him as emperor. ”