Judith Jesch, "The Saga of the Earls of Orkney" (Birlinn, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Judith Jesch, "The Saga of the Earls of Orkney" (New Books Network, 2025)

Episode Overview

In this episode of the New Books Network, host Dr. Miranda Melcher interviews Professor Judith Jesch about her new book The Saga of the Earls of Orkney (Birlinn, 2025). The discussion delves into the history, literary nature, and translation challenges of the Orkneyinga Saga—a medieval Icelandic saga chronicling centuries of political intrigue, landscape, and daily life in the Orkney Islands during and after the Viking Age. The conversation also explores the saga's authenticity, relevance, and the significance of a new translation for both scholars and general readers.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Background & Significance of the Saga

• Origins & Scope

  • The Orkneyinga Saga is an Icelandic saga, unique in its setting (predominantly northern Britain) and chronological range (c. 900–1200 CE).
  • It chronicles the rulers of Orkney and their extensive connections and activities across Scotland, Britain, Ireland, and beyond.
  • “As you said earlier, it is a story of the people who ruled that part of northern Scotland in that period.” (04:37, Prof. Jesch)

• Nature of Icelandic Sagas

  • Traditionally composed in 12th-14th century Iceland, sagas mix realistic prose narratives with embedded poetry—this saga contains 82 poetic stanzas.
  • Historical sagas usually focus on Icelandic or Norwegian settings, but Orkneyinga Saga stands out for its emphasis on northern Scottish life.

Compilation & Historicity

• Manuscripts & Transmission

  • No single complete manuscript—scholars reconstruct the saga from multiple partial sources dated c. 1300 to the early modern era.
  • The saga was “compiled” from many types of sources, including poetic stanzas and oral informants with local knowledge.
  • “It's obvious that there are different sources for whoever put this material together, because the different parts of the saga have very different character.” (07:17, Prof. Jesch)

• Corroboration & Accuracy

  • The saga’s events and settings are verified through place names (nearly 100 mentioned, with many being the first documentary attestation), mentions in other medieval texts, and extensive archaeological evidence.
  • "If you put all that together, you could say that possibly some of the detail is wrong, but this is an entirely plausible account of what happened in that part of the world in those 300 years." (09:43, Prof. Jesch)

• History vs. Fiction

  • While fictional and legendary elements exist, the saga is a crucial source due to a scarcity of other contemporary documentation.
  • The compiler’s intent was to record “history as they understood history to be,” though details might not be fully reliable.

Political Themes & Takeaways

• Power and Governance

  • Joint rulership by two or more earls is a recurring feature; power-sharing often collapses due to rivalry, betrayal, and ambition.
  • “It is a kind of meditation on politics... on the whole, they're all terribly flawed and that's what comes out. It's almost as if the saga is saying that this kind of way of ruling just doesn't really work.” (15:46, Prof. Jesch)
  • Ordinary people are positioned as the disillusioned subjects of unstable leadership, with modern parallels to contemporary politics.

• Character & Structure

  • The recurring cycle of alliance, betrayal, and consolidation among the earls is a central structural motif.
  • “People are either treacherous or weak or maybe both.” (20:46, Prof. Jesch)

The New Translation: Motivation, Process, and Approach

• Why a New Translation Now?

  • The most recent major English translation dates to 1978, and earlier versions often “gloss over some of the really interesting aspects of the saga” and may omit or mistranslate poetic material.
  • “Not one of those previous translations is identical to the others in terms of the content.” (21:32, Prof. Jesch)
  • Previous translators often obscured the saga’s stylized repetition, rapid tense switching, and syntactic quirks. Jesch’s translation seeks to replicate these features, favoring accuracy over artificial “novelistic” prose.

• Intended Audience

  • Suited for historians, archaeologists, literary scholars, and general readers—including tourists seeking to explore Orkney’s landscapes.
  • The translation is also crafted for oral reading: “Several people have commented that it's even better when I read it out loud... stories designed really for reading out loud.” (30:16, Prof. Jesch)

• Technical & Stylistic Decisions

  • Emphasis on literalness, including direct translation of idioms (with explanatory notes), preservation of Old Norse names and orthography, and use of modern place names where possible.
  • Names: Place names take present-day forms when possible; personal names preserve Old Norse spelling, using special characters like thorn (þ).

The Translator’s Experience

• Process

  • Worked on much of the embedded poetry first, drawing on her earlier scholarly edits.
  • The translation approach was largely linear, with iterative revisiting of sections for nuance.
  • Relied heavily on understanding context, etymological research, and careful choice of English equivalents.
  • Roget’s Thesaurus was an essential tool, especially for selecting precise synonyms.

• Challenges

  • Translating idioms with no modern equivalent: e.g., “you don't want to be thought to be a cat in a pile of stones"—possibly a lost Norse proverb akin to calling someone a coward or a hider. (39:14)
  • Annotated potentially opaque or untranslatable phrases and flagged ambiguous vocabulary uses.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Literary Value

  • “There are a lot of episodes that are actually quite fun. And then it's very easy to kind of dismiss it as just a story, a fiction. Obviously, I think there are fictional elements in it, but... the categories of history and fiction are not entirely binary, but it kind of vacillates somewhere between the two.” (13:13, Prof. Jesch)

• On Political Cynicism

  • “A plague on both their houses is the kind of attitude that I find in the saga... it does kind of remind me of politics in the world today, that the ordinary people are somehow a little bit let down by the people who claim to be ruling them.” (15:46, Prof. Jesch)

• On Oral Tradition

  • “I found... it's even better when I read it out loud... these are stories designed really for reading out loud.” (30:16, Prof. Jesch)

• On Place & Landscape

  • “You could even use it as a tourist guide if you're interested in that particular part of Orkney and Shetland's past.” (27:44, Prof. Jesch)

• On Translation Challenges

  • “Idioms are the worst kind of thing to translate... you don't want to be thought to be a cat in a pile of stones.” (39:14, Prof. Jesch)

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Favorite Scenes from the Saga (41:54)

• The Tragic:
  • The martyrdom of St. Magnus and the moving, dignified reaction of his mother Thora, who serves drink to her son’s killer and bravely requests to bury Magnus in a Christian grave. The hostile earl relents after a few pints—an episode highlighting moral courage and human emotion. (42:38, Prof. Jesch)
• The Humorous:
  • Chapter 85: Rognvaldr, Magnus’s nephew, shipwrecked in Shetland, makes light of his misfortunes in poetry, interacts with locals, and humorously demonstrates that “few recognize an Earl in his fishing clothes.” (44:38, Prof. Jesch)

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Practical Notes for Readers

• Best Reading Experience: Try reading passages aloud to appreciate the saga’s rhythm and structure.
• Character Names: Expect repetition and unfamiliar Norse spellings (but, as Dr. Melcher notes, you “definitely do get used to it after a point.” (38:53))
• Supplementary Material: Extensive notes clarify difficult idioms, explain translation choices, and guide readers through complex manuscript traditions.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction & Author Background: 01:56–04:20
• Nature of the Saga: 04:20–07:01
• Compilation & Sources: 07:01–09:10
• Historical Accuracy Discussion: 09:10–15:16
• Political Reflections: 15:46–18:48
• Approach to Translation: 21:14–27:26
• Intended Audience & Oral Reading: 27:26–31:45
• Translation Process & Name Choices: 32:09–37:28
• Challenges & Favorite Scenes: 39:14–49:56

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Conclusion

Professor Judith Jesch’s The Saga of the Earls of Orkney offers a fresh, accessible, and rigorously annotated translation of a crucial medieval text—balancing scholarly precision with engaging readability. Her wit, deep expertise, and sensitivity to the power of storytelling shine throughout the episode, making this book and podcast a must for historians, literary enthusiasts, and any curious reader drawn to the wild politics and landscapes of the Viking world.

Transcript

[Marshall Poe]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to the New Books Network, I imagine you like to read and I'm wondering if you have a goal to read more this year. How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread Podcast is here to help. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They feature 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. You'll get a brief synopsis, fun and witty commentary, no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. It's just what Casey and Tyler think. Life's too short to read a bad book. So subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming. Thanks very much.

[Professor Judith Yesh]

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[Marshall Poe]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello. And welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Judith Yesh about her book titled the Saga of the Earls of Orkney, published by Berlin in 2025. Now this is a really cool book because it gives us all all sorts of details of the Earldom of Orkney. So we're going right far back to sort of end of the Viking age. We're talking about the medieval period where the Earls of Orkney, which is today part of Scotland, were mainly reporting to the kings of Norway at that point, but they were doing a lot of other things in Scotland, Britain, Ireland, even further beyond that. And they were up to all sorts of things. I mean, in many senses, reading through these stories, I was like, wow, this could be a whole Game of Thrones type TV show show for quite a long time, really. So it's fascinating to have this translation available to get a sense of the kind of high powered people and the shenanigans that they were up to, but also kind of what life was like in this place and time. So we're going to be talking about, I think, probably some of the stories, some of the process of getting them to this point of a new translation. There's obviously a lot to discuss. Judith, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Professor Judith Yesh]

Oh, it's great to talk to you.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Miranda, could you start us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to take on this project?

[Professor Judith Yesh]

Okay. I'm a recently retired professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham, and this project has been bubbling away for at least 30 years, or if not more, ever since I first went to Orkney in 1987. And at that stage, although I knew my subject quite well, I hadn't yet read the saga, which is traditionally called Orkneyinga Saga. But as a result of my visit, I became interested in the saga and I've been working on it in various ways over all those years. And then probably about seven or eight years ago, I started this process of producing a new translation. So, yeah, that's, that's how it came about. And it wasn't just me. I mean, I thought a new translation was needed, but I was delighted that the publisher had had the same idea and was very keen to have a new translation produced.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, definitely a massive, massive undertaking. So I'm not surprised to hear that it's been sort of in the works bubbling away for a long time. For those, however, who are listeners like myself, who are not professors of Viking history, can you give us a bit of background in terms of who, what and when the saga is about?

[Professor Judith Yesh]

Yes, it's an Icelandic saga, and I'll come back to that perhaps in a moment. But it's relatively unusual for an Icelandic saga in that it's set mainly in northern Britain, but also then the geographical range extends to England, Ireland, and even to countries around the Mediterranean. In terms of chronology, it starts in the distant mythical past of Norway, but most of the action is set in the Viking Age and the Medieval period. So in Scandinavian contexts, we use the term medieval for the period after the Viking Age. So the main chronological range of the saga is from about 900 to about 1200. And as you said earlier, it is a story of the people who ruled that part of northern Scotland in that period.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Do you want to tell us more about the Icelandic saga nature of it?

[Professor Judith Yesh]

Yes. Well, for those who are not very familiar with Icelandic sagas, they're a very large body of fascinating literature produced in the 12th, 13th, 14th centuries and in some cases even beyond in Iceland. And the sagas are long prose narratives on all kinds of topics. But this one belongs to the sagas that are more or less historically minded. So they're set in the past compared to the time when they were written. And most of them are set. Most of these historical sagas are set in either Iceland or Norway. And so this saga sort of fits into those genres, but is not quite the same as those. And the other interesting thing about many Icelandic sagas, and it's very true of this one, is that although they're fairly realistic prose narratives, they also contain poetry. And this saga has 82 stanzas of poetry in it, as well as the prose narrative, which is quite long. I think the definition of a saga on the whole is it's a relatively long narrative.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that's definitely worth emphasizing as we get into the text. Can you tell us a bit about how the saga was written or compiled? Do we have an idea of kind of when and where we get this end product with all the stanzas of poetry?

[Professor Judith Yesh]

We have ideas. I'm not sure we can definitively prove them. So there is no named authority. There are a bunch of manuscripts, not one of which is complete. So we don't actually have one single manuscript where you have the saga, all 112 chapters of the saga. And these manuscripts range in date from around 1300 into the early modern period. So what scholars have done and what I've followed as well is kind of put a saga together out of these fragmentary manuscripts. So we're already kind of compiling the saga. But I think originally the saga would also have been. I think I'd use a term like compile rather than compose or write even. It's obvious that there are different sources for whoever put this material together. Cause the different parts of the saga have very different character. And it does cover a long historical period of about 300 years. So I think there may have been texts that existed before. Certainly that's the case with the poems and Then out of a wide range of material, somebody probably in Iceland compiled it. But I would also say that although we think it was compiled in Iceland for various reasons, it's someone who either themselves had personal experience of northern Scotland or who knew a lot of people who had personal experience of northern Scotland, who were informants for much of what's recounted in the saga.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, that's very helpful to understand that we don't go around thinking this is sort of one individual person, right, trekking around and putting this together. It's definitely helpful to have a better understand understanding of the kind of complexity of what has resulted in this saga. Thinking though, about this sort of idea of informants, like, do we have any sense of the accuracy, I suppose, if that's the word, of the events here? Like, do we have corroboration of what the saga is talking about with other texts or archaeology or place names?

[Professor Judith Yesh]

There is in fact quite a lot of different kinds of corroboration. Whether that means that every word in the saga is accurate? No, that's not likely. But it depends on what you mean by accurate. Certainly, as I think we'll perhaps talk about in a moment, the saga is very clearly set in a particular landscape which still exists. And you can go and visit, and you can start with the place names. There's something close to 100 place names in northern Scotland that are mentioned in the saga. And for many of those, almost all of them, actually, this is the first, earliest document recording the mention of those place names. And many of the place names today are obviously derived from the place names that are recorded in the saga. So straight away you have a sense of where you are in the landscape. And it's not just someone far away in Iceland who knew two or three of the most important places. In Orkney and Shetland, there are a lot of smaller places mentioned. So it's a landscape that's familiar either to the compiler or their informants. Quite a lot of the characters and events in the saga are mentioned in other texts. For example, in other medieval Icelandic texts there. There's a slight issue in that, depending on when we think this saga was compiled, it's possible that the other Icelandic texts are actually getting their information from this saga, so they may not be separate witnesses. There are a few mentions in texts from Britain generally, but not really that many, because really at this time, that part of northern Scotland was a part of the Scandinavian world. It wasn't a part of the British world, as it were. So it kind of gradually becomes a part of Britain and Then you get more documents, certainly in the medieval period. And then there's archaeology. I mean, there are many standing buildings in the landscape that are mentioned in the saga. So that's, in a way, I mean, both from the Neolithic right through to the 12th century, there are various buildings that exist, either complete or in ruins. And then there are archaeological excavations that have taken place at places that are mentioned in the saga, where, again, they found material from the time that the saga is set. So if you put all that together, you could say that possibly some of the detail is wrong, but this is an entirely plausible account of what happened in that part of the world in those 300 years.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's really interesting to think about, the kind of multiple different kinds of corroboration that is available. But I do want to pick up on that point of to what extent does it matter if we can verify what's in the saga?

[Professor Judith Yesh]

I mean, I think it does matter. It certainly matters to historians and archaeologists. And there are a few details in the saga that archaeologists have found interesting corroboration for. So it's almost, you know, it's not one corroborating the other. It's the two kind of go together to help us build up a picture of what life was like in the past. Historians tend to be a bit more dismissive because if you've read the saga, you know, there's some really good episodes in it. You know, it's quite. It varies, but there are a lot of episodes that are actually quite fun. And then it's very easy to kind of dismiss it as just a story, a fiction. Obviously, I think there are fictional elements in it, but it's like many Icelandic sagas. I don't quite know how to put this because I don't think the categories of history and fiction are entirely binary, but it kind of vacillates somewhere between the two. I do think when it was compiled, that the compiler thought they were writing history as they understood history to be. And you ask why does it matter? Well, for that time and that place, there are no other documents or hardly anything, really. It's really only in the 13th century that we start getting other evidence for what really went on in that part of the world. So I think it's important from that point of view. And I think if you know how to read the saga, because different parts of it work in different ways, if you know how to read the saga, then you get a pretty good sense of what happened. I'm not sure you can actually rely on any particular detail at any particular time.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that makes sense. Right. Getting a general sense, even if that particular word is like, well, was the dress red? We don't know. But you could still get things from it, in fact, more sort of, I suppose, explicitly. What do you think are kind of the main things we can learn from the saga, even without sort of being able to say every single detail of it is exactly accurate. Like, obviously, we can definitely get a lot of entertainment from it, but from a sort of getting information point of view.

[Professor Judith Yesh]

Yeah, I think the main thing. This has kind of come on me gradually, although I've been thinking about it for a while. The way the earldom is ruled for much of the time in the saga usually involves more than one earl. And as you said earlier, Earl is kind of number two in the hierarchy. They owe allegiance to a king normally, and for that period, the king is in Norway. But it's a bit unusual to have these co. Earls, these joint rulers. And so I would say, actually that what the saga is. And this is why the kind of informants who are familiar with the place are important. It's a kind of reflection on how this process works. How can two people who are often closely related, they're often like cousin or uncle and nephew, they can get on for some years and do things together and rule jointly. How do they do that? And then why does it all suddenly fall apart? Because it almost always does. One of them gets eliminated in one way or another, not usually directly by the rival, but by someone working for, or at least having the interests of the rival at heart. And then you get these brief periods where there's only one earl who then, strangely enough, always seems to become a popular and successful ruler, having got rid of his main rival. So it is a kind of meditation on politics. And I have to say that the more I read it, the more I think that the sympathy of whoever compiled this, sometimes you feel there's a more sympathy with one or the other, but on the whole, they're all terribly flawed and that's what comes out. It's almost as if the saga is saying that this kind of way of ruling just doesn't really work, because people, being who they are, they get competitive and then one of them wants to get rid of the other one. That's kind of my. So a plague on both their houses is the kind of attitude that I find in the saga. And I can't help thinking, because there's an awful lot of. You use the word shenanigans, and that's one I use a lot as well. It's an awful lot of kind of deceit and treachery involved in this kind of form of rulership. And I also think, I mean I wouldn't draw this comparison too far, but it does kind of remind me of politics in the world today that the. The ordinary people are somehow a little bit let down by the people who claim to be ruling them.

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[Professor Judith Yesh]

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Plague on Both youh Houses idea definitely makes a lot of sense. I remember the first time I read sort of one of these sorts of secretive behind the back, jockeying for power. Right. I was like, wow, okay, that's very dramatic. And then you go further and you're like oh. And again. Okay, all right then. And you know, by the third time it's like got it. So this is not one particular person who's sneaking around. This is a systemic, a sort of structural thing going on.

[Professor Judith Yesh]

Yeah, people either Are. Are treacherous or weak or maybe both.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that definitely seems to be a pattern throughout. So that makes sense as a kind of big picture takeaway. Thinking, then more about kind of your engagement with all of this. Right. To come to those kinds of conclusions, obviously, as we've been, I suppose, implicitly discussing this was not written in English that we can read now originally.

[Professor Judith Yesh]

Right.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So this is a translation that you've put together, not the first one that's ever existed. But how does your translation compare to previous ones? And to pick up what you said earlier, kind of you thought it was time for a new translation. The publisher agreed. What have you done differently? Why now?

[Professor Judith Yesh]

Well, the saga has been translated four times before and twice in the 19th century and twice in the 20th century century. And I think it's fair to say that each translation is very much of its time. And the most recent one was first published in 1978. You can still get it. It was still published in Penguin Classics, but 1978, I mean, it's a year I remember quite well, but probably the majority of the population don't. And so it is quite a long time ago. And it reads very much like it was written in 1978. And that one in particular, but I think it's true of the other translations, has various aspects that I wanted to make, various aspects that I think kind of gloss over some of the really interesting aspects of the saga. Just to take a small example, I mean, I mentioned there are 82 verses in the saga, the penguins Penguin translation leaves out two of them for a start. And one of the other translations does as well. There are errors in old translations. There are probably an error or two in mine as well. One always has this ambition to correct the errors of the past, but then one introduces new errors if one's not careful. But the main thing for me is that not one of those previous translations is identical to the others in terms of the content. And this goes back to what I was saying earlier about the manuscripts, that inevitably, because there is no one single manuscript from 1200 with the saga in it, we have to kind of reconstruct it from the existing manuscripts. If you pick up the Penguin translation, you don't really get a sense of that. You just get a sense of, oh, this is a novel, 112 chapters from start to finish, compiled by one person. And you're not told that at different points in the saga, you might actually be following the most extreme example. There is a manuscript that was well written in the 17th century, but probably first done in the. The 16th century, a translation into a form of. I call it Dano Norwegian. So the kind of language that the upper classes in Norway in the 16th century used. And that's important because it's a translation of a lost medieval manuscript which is earlier than, than the. It's got the whole saga in it, apart from some of the poems. Didn't like the poems, but it's got almost the whole saga in it. And for that reason it's quite important. But you should be aware that in certain chapters of the saga you're reading this 17th century manuscript in translation, not in the original language. And so little things like that. I think the reader needs to know that kind of thing. I don't want to make a big thing out of it because I follow previous editors in thinking that when there's a bit in only one manuscript, but we think it did belong to the original text, that we should use that, even if it is from a 17th century Danish manuscript. So I've tried to kind of bring that out a bit more in the translation. So that's a very technical thing, which may not be of interest to everybody. I think what might be of interest to more people is the style of the translation. And I don't know how you were taught in school, but I mean, one of the things you were probably taught in school when writing good English prose is that you shouldn't repeat words. You know, if you need to use the same word, you should try and find a synonym because it's boring to repeat the words. Well, the saga compilers weren't bothered about that. They just kept using the same word throughout if it was appropriate. The other thing about the saga style is that, and this is common to most sagas, not just this one, a narrative set in the past doesn't always use the past tense of verbs. It switches apparently at random sometimes between past and present tense. That's a very distinctive feature of saga's style. And then the sentences are very much. They don't really go in for coordinating conjunctions. So it's very much. And, and, and, and he did this and he got in a boat and he sailed there and then he got off the boat and then he went and killed someone. And, and, and, and I think those three aspects of the style don't come across in earlier translations. I think earlier translations they're all aiming for something that they think is good English for an English speaking readership. Whereas I wanted to produce a translation that certainly was readable but also gave the reader some kind of sense of the Old Norse text behind the translation. And I think in the 21st century, I think readers are actually more tolerant of that kind of thing than they might have been 50 or 60 years ago.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Speaking in fact, of readers in today's context. Right. As you said, it's been quite a few decades since the last translation. So who are you hoping now is a reader of the new translation? And is there anything kind of additional you want them to notice or take away from it that we haven't talked about yet?

[Professor Judith Yesh]

Well, I think this particular saga has interest for many different kinds of readers. So I've already mentioned historians and archaeologists who don't know Old Norse. So I think I had them in mind when I prepared the translation. I wanted people who needed to know this stuff but couldn't. Not only didn't know any Old Norse, but also couldn't kind of wade through all the scholarship that explains how the saga came about and so on. But then people who are not historians or archaeologists, but are still interested in medieval Icelandic literature, of which there are many, because it's a very popular source of literature that kind of reads very well in the modern world. But even there it's sometimes helpful. However, many years you've been studying Old Norse to have a translation, and there are many people who are interested in the literature more generally who haven't got Old Norse. And then I also imagine, because of what I was talking about earlier, about the landscape and so on, I kind of imagine that people. And Orkney is a great tourist destination, a lot of people go there. That people will kind of take the saga with them as they go around the landscape and kind of try and imagine the events of the saga in a landscape which is still really. It's very easy to imagine what happened 800 or 1000 years ago in that landscape, because it's very much still an agricultural landscape. So you haven't got urban sprawl, although Kirkwall is sprawling all over the place nowadays. But you haven't got the situation. You have, certainly in England, where historical sites are kind of covered with some kind of suburban housing estate or whatever, as well as all the buildings I mentioned. So you could even use it as a tourist guide if you're interested in that particular part of Orkney and Shatland's past. There was something else you asked something about. Oh, what should they pay attention to?

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I mean, I feel like you've answered that with some of the kind of use cases there, but is there anything you want to add?

[Professor Judith Yesh]

The one thing I would add, I found. And this is something I anticipate, one of your other questions, perhaps I didn't anticipate this, but what I've done recently over the last couple of years is I've tried out the translation in various contexts, including with residents of the islands and up there in Scotland. And I found. And this comes back to the question of style that. I mean, most people find it readable, I think, but several people have commented that it's. It's even better when I read it out loud. And I think if people are struggling a little bit, there are things to struggle with. I mean, there are an awful lot of characters have the same name and you get confused. Plus, they all have funny foreign names. So you need to get used to that a bit. If you're struggling with it, try reading it out loud to yourself. And it does seem to work. And I think that comes back to the fact that I'm trying to imitate the. The way the original might have sounded. And that would have been not necessarily an oral saga. But we do know that people didn't read books sitting in a corner with an apple like Jo March, but they were read out to people in a public context. So these are stories designed really for reading out loud.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's quite a good tip. I'm glad we added that in. Thinking a little bit more then, about the process of figuring all this out.

[Professor Judith Yesh]

Right.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

As you've told us so far, there are some clear decisions you made in terms of the style and your approach to it. What was the process of doing the translation like? Did you start from the beginning? Did you do the poetry first? What is it like to grapple with all of this?

[Professor Judith Yesh]

I did do the poetry, or much of the poetry first, but not by design. It so happened that a lot of this poetry that we find in Sagas is cited in the saga by a compiler who was already aware of the poetry. So we don't think, certainly not all the time, that the poetry in the sagas was composed by the person who compiled the saga for them. It was a source that they're citing. So there has been, and it's still ongoing, a big project to edit all of this poetry that is found in the prose narratives of medieval Iceland. And I edited about half of the poetry in this saga as a part of that project. So I'd already done the work on quite a lot of the poetry, and other people had edited the other parts of the poetry. So in a way, I was familiar with that, but I am, on the whole, a fairly linear person. So Yes, I began at the beginning and just went through. But then obviously I went back over it many times. Really, I enjoy the process of translating. It involves at least two, well, many different things. But the two most important, I suppose in the first instance, you have to understand the text. And, you know, although I've been studying Old norse for like, 45 years or something like that, there's always the odd word that I'm not quite sure what it really means, so I have to look it up. And then when I've understood it, I then have to kind of think of what the best English word might be for that. So I'm a very devoted user of Roget's Thesaurus. I've had so many good ideas from that. And then, of course, the other thing that's harder, and I probably slipped up once or twice, is the decision of whether to always translate the same word in the same way throughout. Because, as we know, words often have more than one meaning. So you also have to kind of decide, is it always the same meaning when that word is used in the saga? And if it is, I tend to try and always translate it the same way, if possible. But then sometimes I think, no, it possibly has another one of those meanings that's well attested for that word, and then you translate it in a slightly different way. The other decision I had to make is what to do with the names, both place names and personal names. And I did two different things there for place names. The vast majority of the place names in the saga, including ones in other countries, still exist. You know, Rome, Aberdeen, Kirkwall. These places still exist. So I've given them the names that they are known by today. And in the case of names in other countries, like I mentioned Rome just now, if there is a standard English form of the name, I use the English form, like Rome, not Roma. That's straightforward, except there are a few place names that don't survive, mainly in Orkney and Shetland, or we're not 100% sure whether they correspond with the modern place name. And one or two of those I've had to leave untranslated and just have a note. But people's names are a different kettle of fish because to me, these are people who. Well, either they really did exist and lived then, or they're presented in the saga as if they were real people who lived then. And most previous translators have to some extent, anglicized these Scandinavian names. And that is an issue because the old Icelandic Alphabet has a number of characters that we don't find in the English Alphabet. So there's several characters in the saga called Thorfinn. We have that sound in English. We spell it th. But in Iceland, even today they don't spell it th. They have a special character that we call Thorn. And I kind of wanted to give these people the names that they had then. So I'm afraid I've used various of these characters like the Thorn and the ev and various other vowels and so on that aren't really English. And I kind of count again. It's another thing. I think the 21st century readership is more tolerant of that than they might have been in the middle of the 20th century. You get used to it. It becomes second nature by the time you've got through 112 chapters.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So good, so good, so good.

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[Professor Judith Yesh]

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Were there any other aspects of the translation that were really tricky for you to figure out? You've already told us about some key decisions, but were there any things you kind of, I don't know, had to look at, leave and come back to or anything like that?

[Professor Judith Yesh]

Well, there are, you know, I think it's fair to say that saga style is often idiomatic, particularly in direct speech, and idioms are the worst kind of thing to translate. I have a lovely example which I hope can kind of stand for. There's one section where one of the characters is trying to encourage another character to join him in a battle and saying, you don't want to be thought to be a cat in a pile of stones. Now, what does that mean, cat in a pile of stones? Well, that's my literal translation of what the saga says, because I try and keep as close to the original as possible. But the Old Norse actually says, SEM khattur ihresi, which means. It means literally like a cat in a pile of stones. But there is a word which just combines those two words switched round. And that is a word for a stoat, small animal, and gives you ermine, for example. And the interesting thing. So Izzy saying you don't want to be thought to be a stoat. Well, stoats. And this is something that you can look up easily. Stoats were completely unknown in Orkney until 2011, when they were accidentally introduced from the mainland of Scotland. And now everywhere you go in Orkney, there's stoat traps everywhere, because it's not an indigenous animal and they want to get rid of them. So what was this guy. Was he talking. Could he have been talking about stoats a thousand years ago when they didn't have them, but they did have them in Norway, which is where the Orkkadians, many of the Orcadians originally came from, where their language came from. So it's probably a kind of proverbial saying, being like a stoat, but we still don't know what it means. I think the implication is that somehow you're kind of hiding where you're, you know, you're not brave enough to do whatever needs to be done. So what I did there is I translated it literally, like a cat in a pile of stones, but I added a. A footnote kind of explaining this train of thought that I thought it might be some kind of proverbial statement. So what do you do with proverbial statements? It's not always easy.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, I'm not surprised. That was a tricky thing to wrestle with. Now, you've given us some great examples as we've gone through the discussion, but perhaps as a final question on the book, do you have any particularly favorite details or footnotes or stories that you want to kind of leave readers with to entice them? As we finish up our discussion here.

[Professor Judith Yesh]

How many do you want?

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I mean, two, three? Like, obviously, I can't ask you for.

[Professor Judith Yesh]

1200, but that's my problem is I have. I have so many favorites, and they vary from time to time. The. I'll give you one kind of sad one and one funny one. How about that?

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Sounds great.

[Professor Judith Yesh]

One of the key scenes in the saga is of course the martyrdom of St. Magnus, who was co earl and in the process I was describing earlier got murdered at the behest of his cousin and rival earl. And he actually became a saint as a result of that. And the way it worked, I mean, they'd worked together for some years, no problem. But I think Haakon, the other guy, got restless and kind of decided that he wanted to get rid of Magnus, who was perhaps a bit weak in some ways. So when the conflict occurred between them, various people tried to make peace and so on, and they did agree some kind of a truce. And it was proposed that they would meet on the island of Aiglesey to confirm this truce, basically, and that each would bring a certain number of ships and men with them. And this is where the treachery comes in. Haakon came with twice as many men as he was supposed to, and they tracked down Magnus and there were various negotiations, but in the end, Magnus was just blatantly killed because Haakon's followers said to him that they couldn't put up with two earls alive. It had to be just one or the other. But my favorite bit is in the following chapter, after he's killed, well, Haakon says, oh no, you can't bury him in Christian ground, he's a traitor, blah, blah, blah. But because the meeting had been in intended to be a confirmation of a truce, there was going to be a party afterwards, and Magnus mother Thora had invited both of them to come to her house after the truce meeting for a feast. And so she's sitting there, she's prepared the feast, and along comes just one Earl, not two, and not her son, but the other one. And she behaves incredibly bravely. She basically says, I was expecting two of you. She's obviously understood what's happened, or someone's told her. So she kind of serves drink, which is what a good hostess would do to the killer of her son, and says to him, well, look, I've lost my son, but why can't I be a mother to you? And would you please allow me to bury my son in a Christian grave? And Haakon is first. He plays the hard man. No, we can't be doing that. But gradually, after he's had a few pints of beer, he starts weeping and obviously begins to regret what he's Done. And so in the end, he says, yeah, okay, bury him where you like. But it is just this very, very moving account of this mother who has to be brave in this particular situation and, you know, still trying to make things right even after her son has been killed. I just love that scene. And it's the way it's told. I mean, the way I've told it now isn't quite as good as the way it's told in the saga. So that's one of my favorite scenes. My other favorite bit, it's a long chapter, but I have to kind of say you really ought to read the whole of chapter 85. Magnus, nephew, who was brought up in Norway, but thinks as a result of being the nephew of Magnus through his mother, that he ought to be Earl of Orkney. He starts making a claim on the earldom of Orkney. So he's traveling back and forth between Norway, and on one trip he gets shipwrecked in Shetland. And there's so many interesting things in that chapter. First of all, there's a very detailed description of the shipwreck, so much so that in the 1970s, various archaeologists thought they might be able to find the ship at the bottom of the sea. They didn't, unfortunately. And then he was a bit of a jokey character. So he composes several poems about how the shipwreck. They lost the ships and everything on them, but nobody died. That was the good thing about the shipwreck. So he makes a joke about how being soaked in the sea has kind of ruined his clothes, especially when he's warming himself by the fire of a farmhouse. And the lady of the house has given him a sheepskin to keep him warm and dry, and he really doesn't appreciate this. Sheepskin wants his finery back. But then there are also little glimpses of people in Shetland while they're sitting by the fire. A serving woman comes running into the house, her teeth chattering. She can't talk. And everyone says, what are you saying, woman? What are you saying, woman? Her teeth was chattering so much. And old Rugenwaldr actually says, oh, I understand what she's saying. And he gives a little jokey account of what she's saying. But then it turns out to be quite serious. The reason the woman is distressed is not just because she's cold and wet, but because her. Her friend has just fallen into a well outside in the snow and rain. We never find out what actually happened to her. Let's hope she was rescued. And then there are two more anecdotes in that chapter, and a really nice one about Regenwaldr in disguise, accompanies a very poor fisherman on a fishing expedition because the fisherman's crew never showed up for work. The Reganwalder, he's not recognized by the poor fishermen. He just offers to help out. And then he takes them, he navigates them into a whirlpool, and the poor fisherman is terrified. But Reganwaldr says, no, everything will be fine, and everything is fine, and they catch an awful lot of fish, and the poor fisherman is very happy. But as he's getting off the boat, the Regenwaldr slips in the mud and there's a bunch of ladies sitting there and they start laughing at him. And the conclusion of this anecdote is, few recognize an Earl in his fishing clothes, because I don't think they would have laughed at him if they'd recognized that he was the Earl. So that's just a couple of glimpses of highlights in this saga.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's a lovely set of glimpses there, I think. A great way to end our discussion about the book because there's so much more in there, and that gives people a sense of what they might find. And of course, while people are exploring the saga themselves, is there anything you are currently working on or want to share about what you're up to now that the book is off your desk?

[Professor Judith Yesh]

I am retired, so I can be a lot more choosy now about what I do. I have also, over the years, worked with runes and runic inscriptions, and that's probably what I'm going to focus on over the next few months, at any rate.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, that sounds fun. So while you are off enjoying retirement, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled the Saga of the Earls of Orkney, published by Berlin in 2025. Judith, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Professor Judith Yesh]

Well, thank you, Miranda. It was great talking to you.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

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