Clara
NiiSka
October
19, 1996
FATE
AND DESTINY IN ICELANDIC
Geir Tomasson Zoëga
translates fate (1932:217) as:
n. forlög, örlög;
ft.
örlaganornir; fated l. ákveðinn
af forlögunum;
dauðadæmdur; fateful l. sem lýtur
að örlagaspádómi;
örlagaþrunginn; banvænn.
and destine
(1932:153) as:
s. ákvarða,
ætlae-ð (til
e-s, to, for); he was not destined to escape honum var
ekki ætlað
(hann átti ekki) að komast undan; destiny n.
forlög; ft.
forlagadísir ["The Fates"]
Zoëga (1910:144)
defines forlög [in old Icelandic] as a plural noun, and
translates the
singular forlag as:
n. (1) provision for living,
means of
subsistence; (2) settlement (in life, by marriage); (3) pl.
forlög, fate,
destiny.
Zoëga (1910:33)
translates
the old Icelandic ákvæði as a "decision,
verdict."
Icelandic-English-French
translator Gauti
Sigðórsson provided
(15 Oct 1996) the following translations of fate and destiny:
Örlög:
fate,
that which cannot be changed, a notion of unchangeability, the
eventuality of
things, destiny.
Forlög:
fate,
destiny, that which is decided beforehand.
When asked about the
difference between the two words in a variety of ways, including
substitution
of örlög and forlög in Icelandic
sentences, he insisted that they
were very nearly identical. He
theorizes that the reason for the seeming redundancy of lexical
equivalents was
that there is an ancient type of Icelandic poetry which depends on
alliteration
and rhythm rather than rhyme, and that sets of semantically identical
words are
a heritage from this traditional oral poetry.
Gauti
Sigðórsson gave me (16 Oct 1996) the following
corollaries of fate/destiny, all with feminine inflection:
Ætlað:
a
conception that someone was intended, that someone has a purpose or
intention
in life, so it's basically 'meant to be'.
Auðna: has
fatalistic connotations. [There is] an
expression, Að láta auðan ráða, which
basically means 'letting fate or
fortune take you where it wants to go. Auðna
is used as a proper name for women,
although none of the other
words [listed here] would be.
Gæfa: has a
more positive sense to it, it can either be fortune or good fortune;
both have
a fatalistic sense, that fortune has taken you where she wants to go.
Ógæfa:
the
antonym of gæfna, bad fortune or ill fortune.
The first translation attempted was:
She
was fated to be a failure.
Gauti Sigðórsson
observed that "being a failure is a tricky concept" in Icelandic:
I don't
have a concept for 'a failure as a person, a failure
in life.' One translation would be:
Henni
var ætlað að mistakast,
'He or
she was meant to fail,' but failure in this regard is
not used for a person. To call someone
a failure has different connotations. Failing
in this translation means failing at some
particular task,
rather than a general failure. A more
accurate translation would be:
ætlað
að verða undir í lífinn,
literally, 'he was meant to spend his life on his
back,' a
wrestling metaphor. 'Verða undir' is
literally to be 'put beneath somewhere else,' so it means 'losing that
bout of
wrestling, so if you were the one who is flat on his back, you lose.' ... It has several connotations, as does
'loser' in English.
I cannot
give you a verb for 'fated,' there is no
such thing as 'fating'--fate is something that is, it's not something
that does
something. Fate just is. One possibility would be,
Örlögin
ætlaðu honum að verða glæpamaður,
'destiny
meant for him to be the criminal,' and we're going
back to the very ancient folk concepts of fate. It's
not a very active concept in modern-day Icelandic--I'm
thinking more of Saga literature here.
Gauti Sigðórsson
offered the Icelandic parable, Ömegt mun forlögin að
flýga, "Fate
or destiny is difficult to flee (an understatement)."
When asked if this implied a kind of motion
to destiny, he replied:
Destiny
is everywhere, it's a part of you, that's why you
cannot escape from it. It's still you,
and no matter where you are, you are still yourself.
Icelandic concepts of fate all have to do with this
life--there is
no concept of afterlife with fate. One
is not fated for hell. Basically the
concepts for fate and destiny come from the Norse mythology, which
doesn't have
the heaven and hell concepts. ...
Valhalla is a totally different thing. The
afterlife is not much of a life. They were
more concerned with life than
death, so death is not very central in Norse mythology, except for
heroic
death, and rewards for heroic death, like Valhalla, but in any other
circumstances, you go to Hel, which is not hell, it's just a place of
the
dead. Hel is both a place, and
the woman who runs it--that's her name. It's
very cold.
I asked for a
translation to the phrase:
It
must be fate.
<>One could translate that, Það
hljóta að vera örlög,
but that's not something that anyone would say. The
problem is the 'must be'--usually fate is talked about in
very absolute terms, like fate is unavoidable. Örlögin
réðu þvi
is a very Icelandic sentence, 'fate decided
that.' It has been decided before, but
by whom is not exactly clear.
< style="color: rgb(22, 11, 5);">
< style="color: rgb(22, 11, 5);">There is
very little idea of a who--it's almost as if fate or destiny is
part of
nature, part of the fabric of the universe. There
are the 'Normið' or
'Örlagnnornið', 'the Fates,' but they are
bureaucratic and impersonal. They spin
the threads of life: each life is a thread in their cave.
They spin long or short threads, and when
you die, it's because they cut the thread. It's
fate, and even the gods are subject to fate. Örlög
and forlög
both have the
word lög, which means 'law'. Ör
is a complex prefix, but for literally means 'pre,' so it's an
idea of
pre-determination. Forlög
literally means 'before the law,' something that has been decided and
made law
before, it's somehow mapped out. ...
Fate is a very neutral force, neither good nor bad.
< style="color: rgb(22, 11, 5);">
<>
He/she
met his/her fate.
Hann
maætti örlögum sínum. That is a literal translation--he met his
fate.
He
fulfilled his destiny.
Hann uppfyllti örlög sín. That's a sentence that I've seen
somewhere. The difference between the
two is that Hann maætti örlögum sínum is
an euphemistic phrase for
dying. It's a common phrase, like
saying 'fate finally caught up with you.' It's
usually used for dying unexpectedly, so it's a
phrase which has a
connotation of the unexpected. Hann
uppfyllti örlög sín means that he did something
that he was meant to do,
something that it's obvious after the fact that it was intended.
Manifest
Destiny.
I cannot formulate a sentence in good Icelandic,
containing
language that anybody would find graceful, saying that someone's
Manifest Destiny
is this or that. We're talking about
something that somebody decided, 'my destiny is to conquer the planet,'
and
goes about to do it, that's something that is announced 'destiny.' It all goes back to intention, 'he intended
to conquer the world.' Bandaríkin
héldu það vera örlög sín að sigra
heiminn, the United States thought it was
their destiny to conquer the world.
It
was an ill-fated turn.
Það var örlagarík
ákvörðun, 'it was a decision
filled with destiny', or Það var ógæfuleg
ákvörðun, 'it was a decision
that did not attract good fortune. Örlagarík
ákvörðun is not necessarily negative.
The sentence can mean that it was something that led
to disaster, or
that it was something that led to great success, but nothing in between. It has a be a turning point, a watershed
with significant consequences.
Do
you believe in predestination?
Trúir þú þri að allt
sé ákveðið
fyrirfram. It
would be a little sloppy to use örlög
or forlög for 'predestination.' Predestination would be forákvörðun,
so you literally say, 'do you believe everything is decided beforehand?' Predestination is a strong word‑‑I wouldn't
use it.
We
were fated to meet.
Okkur var aætlað að hittast. The back translation is 'we were intended to
meet.'
To
be tempted by fate.
The only way that I think of it would be exactly
backwards, að
freista gæfunnar, to tempt fate. ... Without any contextual
information for
the sentence, I would translate it láta freistast, 'to
be tempted,' but
fate would not be an actor in the sentence. ...
If I would be holding a lightning rod in my hand
in a thunderstorm,
I'm 'tempting fate' in English. In
Icelandic, I would be inviting ill fortune. Að
bjóða ógæfunni heim,
to 'tempt fate,' that is literally to
invite ill fate to my house, or to my home... to my personal space, heim
has a wider application than 'home' in English.
The
judge determined his fate.
Dómarinn
ákvað örlög hans, 'the
judge decided
his fate.'
I asked, "So, even
though fate is 'out there,' it can be decided, too?"
I think we've crossed into a different period of
history. Fate has, in conjunction with
the judicial system, acquired the meaning of how your life turns out in
the
end, so if you look at at your moment of death, you see, 'that has been
your
fate, that is how your life was.' So,
yes, a person's life will probably be marked by a lifetime of
imprisonment, so
the judge had considerable influence over his fate, so in that regard, örlög
means 'how your life turns out. Örlög
can refer to how your life turns out in its totality; it can also refer
to
something that has been decided beforehand, but is only revealed in its
entirety at the moment of death, so your fate, or destiny, spans you
whole
life, your life's gestalt, and in that sense, fate can be
decided by
people, in terms of how they affect another's life.
If I
decided to go out and bash the next person's
head in, I would be deciding that person's fate, because I would be
determining
how that person's life in its entirety had turned out, by providing the
end
point. It's another idea that this
person's destiny was to have his or her head bashed in by me. Örlög can refer to either or
both,
but it does not necessarily entail a belief in any fate in itself, just
the
totality of his life, so one is an option to the other.
You can tell from the context, and as with
many other contexts, this is very fluid and changeable.
I am drawing on a
thousand year literary tradition, and because these are very
old words, their signification has probably changed somewhat in the
past
thousand-and-something years. These two
definitions that I offer, they are not mutually exclusive, they are
just like
two facets of the same diamond. ... I
do not want to exclude any other usage of the term.
I am just one person speaking here, not the language
community
itself. I am just one of the language
community, and others might use the language in ways that I cannot
predetermine.
A
terrible fate befell him.
Hraðileg örlög biðu hans. It's sort of a cliche, 'a terrible
fate befell him.' It's something you
would put in a romance novel, the foreshadowing of the hero's, or the
bad
guy's, horrible death.
She
had a great destiny.
Hennar
biðu mikil örlög. In
both of these sentences we are using biða,
'to wait,' this is something that lies in the future and waits, so
these people
are ambushed by the future--they didn't know what was coming to them. It can be either good or bad. ...
The future is feminine, and is definitely
animate. There is a phrase, 'the future
is pregnant with': franmtiðin ber i skauti sér,
literally the future
carries in her womb--the future is pregnant with the coming of the
'now,' so
the now is constantly being born of the future.' It's
a dead metaphor, but by talking about it in English I brought
it to life in my mind again. The future
is very definitely an animate being, and she is a woman, and the gender
of the
term is antiquated.
I asked for Icelandic
phrases relating to "fate" and "destiny."
Það var mikil gæfa, auðna
ræður, að
láta auðna ráða. 'Whatever will be, will
be,' whatever happens,
happens--things will go the way that fortune hits us.
I also asked for the
word for seer, noting that the idea of being able to foretell
the future
had to do with concepts of "fate" and "destiny." I
guessed that there wasn't a deep tradition
of fortune-telling in Iceland because "if the future was already a fait
accompli, if was a part of the immutable fabric of the universe,
then there
wasn't much anybody could do about it, anyway." Gauti
Sigðórsson told me:
There is fortune-telling, it is used as foreshadowing
in the
south. The words are sjándi,
seer; spámaður, a male fortune-teller; and spákona,
a female
fortune-teller. They are people who can
see the future, and that's too restrictive, to say that the future is a
fait
accompli. The role of a seer
depends on that. The future is already
decided, and the seer is someone who can see that.
The idea of a seer is inherent in the future being
mapped
out--it's just that very few can read the map. (There's
also a new-age kind of fortune-telling,
which is somewhat
underground.)
The old
tradition conceptualizes destiny as something
that is a part of you at birth, mapped out before.
That's the heroic spirit of the Sagas--they do what
they do in
spite of their destiny. There is an
idiom, að storka örlögunum, to spite destiny, to
act contrary to what
you know will happen, or what you know is some sort of fact of life. When one refuses to acknowledge that, it
happens anyway--it has to happen.
Within
the constraints imposed by the parameters of this
paper (and with the observation that Gauti Sigðórsson
strongly disagrees with
the assumptions inherent in such definitions), I tentatively propose
the
following partial definitions in accordance with Wierzbicka:
Örlög1:
(a) different things happen to people
(b) not because they want it
(c) these things can be good or bad
(d) sometimes these things are very good or very bad
(e) one cannot think: these things will not happen
to me if I
say: 'I don't want it'
(f) it is good to say 'I don't want it'
(g) I imagine I know that someone can say of all
persons:
'these things will happen to this person, one after another'
(h) this someone is a woman, or many women
(i) this woman or many women is/are not a part of this world (j) what this woman or many women want(s) is
part of this world
(k) if this woman wants something, it cannot not
happen
(l) after a person dies, they know all that this
woman wanted
to happen
(n) some people can know: this is what will happen to this
person
Örlög2:
(a)
different things happen to people
(b) not because they want it
(c) these things can be good or bad
(d) sometimes these things are very good or very bad
(e) one cannot think: these things will not happen
to me if I
say: 'I don't want it'
(f) it is good to say 'I don't want it'
(g) I imagine I know that someone can say of all
persons:
'these things will happen to this person, one after another'
(h) one can say that it is something, or someone
(i) if this someone or something wants something, it cannot
not happen
(j) after a person dies, they know all that this someone
wanted to happen
(k) a person can be a part of something that happens
(l) some people can know: this is what will happen to this
person
Forlög:
(a)
different things happen to people
(b) not because they want it
(c) these things can be good or bad
(d) it cannot not happen
(e) one cannot think: these things will not happen
to me if I
say: 'I don't want it'
(f) I imagine I know that someone can say of all
persons:
'these things will happen to this person, one after another'
(g) after a person dies, they know all that this
something
wanted to happen
(h) some people can know: this is what will happen to this
person
Ætlað:
(a)
different things happen to people
(b) not because they want it
(c) these things can be good or bad
(d) one cannot think: these things will not happen
to me if I
say: 'I don't want it'
(e) I imagine I know things happen to all people because
someone wants it
(f) this someone is a woman, or many women
(g) this woman or many women is/are not a part of this world (h) what this woman or many women want(s) is
part of this
world
(i) if this woman wants something, it cannot not
happen
(j) some people can know: this is what will happen to this
person
References
Cited
Zoëga, Geir T. A Concise
Dictionary of Old Icelandic. 1910.
Oxford.
-----.
English-Icelandic
Dictionary. 1932.
Reykjavik.
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