Balos Gadedeis Aalhaidais

in Sildaleikalanda
Balos Gadedeis
Aalhaidais in
Sildaleikalanda
By

Lewis Carroll
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

BYRON W. SEWELL

TRANSLATED INTO GOTHIC BY

DAVID ALEXANDER CARLTON

evertype

2015
Usmerjada airh/Published by Evertype, 73 Woodgrove, Ballyn Road, Portlaoise, Co.
Laois, R32 ENP6, Ireland. www.evertype.com.

Namo frumist/Original title: Alices Adventures in Wonderland.

Gaskeirjada airh/Translation 2015 David Alexander Carlton.

Frisahteis airh/Illustrations 2015 Byron W. Sewell.
Sautmeleins airh/This edition 2015 Michael Everson.

David Alexander Carlton andsalji atei gadof ist faura Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act us 1988, ata manna mag imma gakuni haban swe gaskeirjands ist.
David Alexander Carlton has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identied as the translator of this work.

Frumists utmeleins Maius 2015. Usmerjada aftra mi garaihteinim Jiuleis 2015

First edition May 2015. Reprinted with corrections July 2015.

Gadofs ist in allamma. Ni manna mag aftrameljan os bokos, huzdjan ijos ana huzda,
aiau fradailjan, ni in waihtai airh liuhaamaht, biuhtamaht, manaleikameljandan,
aftrameljandan mi hliuda, jah alja, nibai fauris habands gameljada laubi is
gamelandins, aiau swaswe sunjaba witodeigs ist, aiau airh samafrajis wito mi
mahta aftrafrisahtjandins atei garaid imma.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the Publisher, or as expressly per-
mitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization.

Manna mag nan a izo boko ana Brutiskana Bokahus bi aim bokom.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-10 1-78201-097-1
ISBN-13 978-1-78201-097-5

Gameljada mi De Vinne Text, Mona Lisa, Engravers Roman, Liberty Sadagolthina, jah
Ullas airh Michael Everson.
Typeset in De Vinne Text, Mona Lisa, Engravers Roman, Liberty, Sadagolthina, and
Ullas by Michael Everson.

Frisahteis airh/Illustrations: Byron W. Sewell.

Frisahteis ana bokolaubam 63 jah 91 airh/Illustrations on pp. 63 and 91: John Tenniel, 1865.

Faurabokos/Cover: Michael Everson.

Birukjada airh/Printed by LightningSource.

 Foreword

T he Gothic language (Gutiska razda or Gutrazda) was

spoken by the Visigoths and Ostrogoths in many areas
(most notably Spain and Italy) throughout antiquity and the
early Middle Ages, and appears to have become functionally
extinct sometime in the eighth century. However, it may have
continued to be spoken in the Crimea until the sixteenth or
seventeenth century. The Gothic Bible, translated from a lost
Greek exemplar sometime circa 360 CE by the Gothic bishop
Wulla, represents the earliest extensive text in any Ger-
manic language. The language itself remains the only signi-
cant representation of the East Germanic branch of
languages, which have since died off completely. Members of
the West Germanic group of languages include High and
Low German, Dutch, Frisian, and English, while the Scandi-
navian languages (Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish,
Swedish, Elfdalian, and many others) represent the North
Germanic branch. Other extant works in Gothic include an
exegesis of the Gospel of John known as Skeireins, a partial
calendar, and some minor fragments. Unfortunately, all
extant texts are incomplete. While large portions of the New
Testament remain, Wullas translation of the Old
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 BALOS GADEDEIS AALHAIDAIS IN SILDALEIKALANDA

Testament is represented primarily by the fth, sixth, and

seventh chapters of Nehemiah. There is much which remains
unknown about Gothic. To what degree are the extant
fragments written in idiomatic Gothic? Exactly what dialect
of Gothic might they render? Given these difficuties, why
should I translate Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland
into such an ancient and idiosyncratic tongue? In part,
because Aliceitself a textbook of idiosyncrasieslends
itself well to linguistic ights of fancy, and in part because
there remains so little of the Gothic language, that I felt it
worthwhile to remedy this dearth of reading material.
The homeland of the Goths remains a matter of contention.
Though Jordanes, writing in the sixth century, asserts that
the Goths emigrated from the island of Scandza in Sweden
around the year 1490 BCE, most scholars today question his
conation of the Getae and Goths, as well as the con-
spicuous lack of any archaeological or linguistic evidence in
favour of the ancient historians assertions. If the Goths had,
indeed, broken away from the Germanic peoples at so early a
date, we would expect to nd signicantly greater divergence
between extant examples of Gothic and its neighbouring Ger-
manic languages, from circa 300500 CE. On the contrary,
there are many more fundamental similarities than differ-
ences between all extant early Germanic languages, which
suggests that the Goths separated from the Germanic
peoples at a much later date than Jordanes records. Ulti-
mately, the ephemerality and antiquity of the Goths make
the Gothic language a suitably mysterious vessel in which to
take the reader on a jaunt through the fantastical world of
Lewis Carrolls Alice.
Gothic was originally written using runes, until Wulla
devised his own alphabet based largely upon Greek letters
with some Latin and Runic additions. It employs Greek
orthographic conventions (for example, as in Greek, Wulla
vi
DALA IN GROBAI HASINS

employs gg and gk to represent the sounds usually

written as ng [] and nk [k] respectively). While there
were undoubtedly at least Ostrogothic and Visigothic
varieties of Gothic, our extant materials can only be
described as Wullan, since they render from Greek almost
verbatim and likely diverge signicantly from idiomatic
usage. Gothic syntax is especially problematic because the
materials available to usbeing nearly word-for-word
translations from Greek materialsprovide little evidence
for natural Gothic word order. Consequently, my translation
seeks to render Alice into the Gothic language as it was
employed in Wullas Bible. As with Wullas syntax, my
syntax often diverges from both the word order of my source
text, as well as the conventional word order of my target
language; it is my hope that this free-form syntax will
provide a superior aesthetic effect, and be suitably discom-
bobulating when it serves the narrative. The publisher,
Michael Everson, and I agreed to employ the Latin alphabet
for the translation to aid newcomers to Gothic and facilitate
comprehensibility for all; some examples in Gothic script
remain, however: the page facing the rst page of the text is
set in thoroughly modern fonts, and here and there in the
text, set in a more traditionally authentic font.
Perhaps the most mysterious and contentious aspect of
Gothic is its irregular deployment of the digraphs ai and
au forapparentlytwo primary sounds each: [] or
[ai], and [] or [au], respectively. While there remains
signicant debate surrounding the value of these characters,
I have used the aforementioned phonetic scheme when trans-
literating words or creating neologisms throughout my
translation.
Rendering Alices Adventures in Wonderland into an extinct
Germanic language has been a particularly exciting adven-
ture. Many of the objects, actions, and concepts that appear
vii
 BALOS GADEDEIS AALHAIDAIS IN SILDALEIKALANDA

in the text either didnt exist or existed in a very different

form during late antiquity. To respond to this I have, for
example, replaced the medieval (and anachronistic) treacle
with the more historically accurate mili honey; the tea-
party has become miduigg a mead-thing; and the pocket-
watch has become a stairnonima astrolabe (literally star-
taker). This last replacement was rst made by Brian S. Lee
in his translation of Alice into Middle English verse;1 astro-
labes would also have been known throughout the Hellenistic
world during Wullas time. The watch in Alices Adventures
in Wonderland could not have been easily replaced by a more
functionally accurate sundial, since a sundial has no moving
parts (and must remain stationary); neither could the watch
be replaced by a larger contraption, since it must remain
small and portable. Because Wonderland is a place where
animals are as intelligentor at least as madas humans,
I nd the use of an astrological implement as a time-telling
device relatively plausible. For similar reasons of authentic-
ity, the Caterpillar smokes not a hookah, but rather a period-
accurate pipe of a design found in paintings and carvings
from Greco-Roman antiquity.
Other ideas were translated rather easily. The word
crumb, for example, has an idiomatically sound Gothic
relative in the word drauhsno fragment, crumb, while
tea was readily replaced with midus mead. The word wein
wine is already present in the Gothic corpus, so no further
substitutions needed be made to preserve the prescriptive
and descriptive avour of the original term. Likewise, the
pool was easily translated with Gothic swumfsl, and
knife with Gothic sahs, a type of Germanic sword or dagger
now known by its Old English name seax. Other words,
however, required a more thorough re-branding. The tea-
1 Carroll, Lewis. 2013. The Aventures of Alys in Wondyr Lond. Translated into Middle
English verse by Brian S. Lee. Cathair na Mart: Evertype. ISBN 978-1-78201-031-9.

viii
DALA IN GROBAI HASINS

pot, for example, is now a miduaurkeis mead-jug. To

replace instances of French and haughty Latinate speech I
have used plain Latin, the growing lingua franca of the day,
and for instances of lower dialectical speech I have chosen
a slightly-archaic form of Proto Norse congruent with Elder
Futhark runic inscriptions set down circa 100400 CE.
Although this early language is more properly named Proto-
North-West Germanic, since it represents a more-or-less
unied Germanic tongue (sans Gothic) during the period in
question, it remains conventionally assigned to the North
Germanic (Norse) family, since most extant inscriptions
using Proto Norse were produced in Scandinavia.
Alices Gothic name was surprisingly easy to settle on.
While Alice itself is a French loanword, it ultimately
derives from the Germanic compounds Aal- and Haid-,
which likely entered into French through Old High German
Adalhaidis; Adelaide also derives from these two Germanic
components. I devised Gothic Aalhaids by rst reconstruc-
ting Common Germanic Aalhaiduz, and then re-imagining
the name as a strong feminine i-stem noun, rather than the
more historically accurate neuter u-stem noun above; this
process yielded Aalhaidiz. Following the rules of Gothic
phonetics, I then removed the nal unstressed i and devoiced
word-nal z. Thus, Aalhaids (genitive Aalhaidais) was
born. The complete title of the work, Balos Gadedeis
Aalhaidais in Sildaleikalanda, is best translated as The
Bold Deeds of Alice in Wonderland. As the form gadedeis, with
the prex ga- can mean makings, the title of this present
work also suggests that Alice's deeds are really products of
her own fertile imagination, rather than adventures foisted
upon her by external forces; semantically speaking, Alice's
adventures thus represent both makings and doings.
The Dormouse presented a number of etymological prob-
lems. Ultimately, I decided to work with the folk-etymology
ix
 BALOS GADEDEIS AALHAIDAIS IN SILDALEIKALANDA

that led from Latin dormeus to English dormouse, rather

than follow other attested early terms, such as Old English
sisems. Just as the Late Middle English dormowse is
(perhaps) a portmanteau of dormeus sleepy one and
mouse, so too is my Gothic Slemus a portmanteau of the
Gothic verb slepan to sleep and mus mouse. Since Carrolls
Dormouse is particularly sleepy, I felt this was appropriate,
on both narrative and philological grounds. Gothic Hattareis
simply means Hatter, and Martjuhasa literally translates to
March Hare (using the stem Marteis (March) and a
reconstructed Gothic hasa, cf. Old English hara). Similarly,
the White Rabbit becomes the eitahasa, using the the stem
eits white and my reconstructed hasa. The word for bat
has been reconstructed as mustriggs from the Spanish loan-
word mostrenco, as per the entry in Kblers Gothic
dictionary.2
For the King, I simply used Gothic iudans king, while
for the Queen, I constructed a new feminine on-stem
equivalent: iudano.
The Duchess is named a Harjatugo, which is a new
feminine on-stem cognate with modern High German Herzog
Duke. As in Brian S. Lees Middle-English Alys, the Dodo
has metamorphosed into a Fainiks Phoenix, which would
have been known to the Greeks, and thus, to Wulla. Other
names, such as Ailsei, Laisei, and Tilei (Elsie, Lacie, and
Tillie), were transliterated phonetically as foreign loan words
in the native Gothic language of the story. Most other
neologisms are self-explanatory with the help of the glossary.
While it was possible to transform the amingos into swans,
other conceptssuch as the Kings spectacleshad to be cut
entirely for the sake of period-accuracy, such as it is.
2 Kbler, Gerhard. 2014. Gotisches Wrterbuch. 4. Auf lage.
http://www.koeblergerhard.de/gotwbhin.html