Words by

Jón Trausti Sigurðarson

Photo by

Wikimedia Commons

The Grapevine’s guide to sounding Icelandic, one word at a time

For a thousand years Icelandic has had its own Icelandic names for various places and geographic locations visited by Icelanders or discussed in the numerous sagas and other literature written in Iceland in the 12th and 13th centuries. Some of these names have stuck and are still in use. Gothenburg is always called Gautaborg in Icelandic, Copenhagen is Kaupmannahöfn. You catch our drift. 

Then there are placenames that sound nothing like the original. One is Mikligarður. The Icelandic for Constantinople, now Istanbul. In the time that Mikilgarður entered common use in Scandinavia, in the 9th or 10th century, Constantinople would have been the most densely populated city in all of Christendom. Many times the size and population of any so-called city in Europe at the time.  

And what does Mikligarður mean? Of course it means a great garden or a great farmstead. What better captures the essence of a sprawling metropolis than a word consisting of “big” and “farm”?  

But why? Well, back in the 10th century, there were precious few cities of a respectable size a Scandinavian would have seen. Scandinavia itself hardly had towns at all. So the Scandinavian languages, Icelandic included, may not have had a good vocabulary to describe towns or cities, not to mention anything as impressive as Constantinople. However Scandinavian farms, and that was pretty much all the infrastructure the area had at that time, were often delimited by a wall, made out of stone, without mortar. The Old Norse word for such a structure is Garður, and a farmer’s land is therefore, to this day, often called Bondegårde, e.g., in Swedish.  

So picture this. Young Scandinavian — let’s call him Ulfr — travels to Constantinople by way of doing some slaving, raping and pillaging on the Dnieper and the Black Sea. He then joins the Varangian Guard. Makes a buck. Travels back home. Now, Ulfr wants to describe to his mom the magnificent gigantic city of Constantinople in a way she’ll understand. He searches for words. Finds none. So what does he end up with? Well, the greatest city in the world looks like — yeah — a really, really BIG farm. 

Learn more Icelandic words hér.