twistedchick: watercolor painting of coffee cup on wood table (Default)
posted by [personal profile] twistedchick at 03:11pm on 2018-09-08
It looks to me like a thorn, the th letter in runes. Is the melody known?
eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 04:08pm on 2018-09-08
The first place I saw the lyrics (liner notes for a Sequentia CD), there were both thorns and eths in it. Looking at the manuscript I found online, there are things that I'm pretty sure have to be 'd', some but not all of which were eths in the liner notes, and which looked kind of eth-like, so I transcribed all of those as 'd' but preserved the thorns because I could be sure they were thorns. I would have kept the wynns as well, but I don't think most computer fonts have that letter (almost none have a yogh, which is why I substituted a three for that), and the wynn is so very 'p'-like that reading it as 'w' instead of 'p' takes a while. (Way more so than thorn.)

I also took the liberty of switching between 'u' and 'v' to make it easier for modern readers, even though at the time those were still the same letter (and the manuscript uses the 'u'-shape for it). I've seen at least one transcription that changes thorn to 'th' but retains 'u' throughout.

The melody is known, and pretty. The first link has it in F, in modern notation; I've also seen it transposed to G. And IIRC there are performances/recordings of it on YouTube in a couple different tempos (I think?). I like it just fast enough to feel "bouncy".

It is an earworm-capable tune.

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