The uniformity religion
12 April 2009
Raw literature used to resemble speech, in its messiness, idiosyncrasy, (& charm). Spelling was only made uniform very late, by printers, not by authors –which explains the idiosyncrasies of medieval authors.
This reminds me of some of the controversy surrounding the work of Iceland’s Nobel Laureate, Halldór Laxnes. The spelling of Icelandic had been standardised just the year before he published his first book1. The standard of spelling settled on by the government was based on the origin of each word; in effect they changed the accepted written language of the time to more closely match that of the Sagas.
The competing view at the time was that spelling should follow pronunciation; the written language should follow the spoken, not vice versa.
Which is the approach Halldór Laxnes used throughout his career and it has a distinct effect on the feel and tone and emotional quality of his novels. It renders his books even less translatable than most.
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He was seventeen at the time and it sucked balls. His second was even worse. His third was a critical darling, but was a ghastly, unreadable, misogynistic tract. His third, however, was when he found his groove, Salka Valka, and what is possibly the most popular book in the history of Iceland was his fourth, Independent People. It is also the single best depiction of the Icelandic national character in any form of literature. ↩
