Anyone ever read this?I was browsing about something else and cam across it.It is set in the "post-apocalyptic" world of 1066 England after the Norman conquest. It is written from the point of view of a small landowner who has lost everything.The author made up his own hybrid language to simulate old English and avoid any latin, greek, or french derived words.Sounds really cool, so I bought it.Holy shit. I think he went completely overboard. It's nigh unreadable. He changes the spelling on works to be more phonetic, I guess, but he overdoes it, IMO. wife ==> wif speak ==> speclook ==> locetc.Has anyone finished it??
>>25296895I have shilled it here a few times. One of the better contemporary novels that might end up becoming a classic dow the line. It's like a more readable Oxen of the sun as narrated by a Beckettian narrator with Cormac McCarthy like tendencies in style.Read the glossary at the end first. It will be much easier once you know the conventions of old English spelling.
>>25296905Thanks. I'm really interested in the literary idea, but dude kinda went over my head, I guess....
>>25296895Wif is actual old english. Sounds like an interesting concept. Really old texts have “creative” spelling so this doesn’t seem too strange for me. Tolkien has poems in intermediary forms imitating brythonic and other languages so this isn’t such a wild project really. >>25296905I’ll add it to my tbr.
i enjoyed it a lot. I was put off by the old english thing as well but by page 50 or so you're reading at a normal pace without having to go to the glossary.
>>25298901also, a lot of the Old English words, the nouns especially, are a lot closer to modern Danish/Norwegian than the later Latin equivalents that superseded them. So if you're Scandinavian, a lot of the words that he changed, you can sort of guess their meaning without even having to go to the glossary.Like, dog becomes hund, bird becomes fogel, foreigner becomes indvandrer etc.
Kingsnorth is a charlatan
