Brisingr

As we all know, the Chronicler has a special space in her heart which she reserves for hating child genius author, Christopher Paolini. The latest in the Inheritance no-longer-a-trilogy will be coming out in September and the Chronicler is seething in anticipation. (The Chronicler is a bitter, horrible person who likes being angry.)

The Chronicler also happens to have an Old Norse exam on Wednesday and is writing a dissertation that requires her to do a lot of translating from that language. Veritably bathing in dictionaries and glossaries, she's noticed something that angers her to no end:

BRISINGR (BRIS-ing-gr), an Old Norse word for fire, will be familiar to fans of the cycle as the first word in the ancient language that Eragon hears.

from the Random House press release

No, it just doesn't. You're just wrong. Brisingr doesn't in any way, shape or form mean "fire." I really don't know what he's on. Brísingr, on the other hand, does mean "flame."

I know, it's just a bloody acute accent. But in Old Norse the accent makes it a different letter. They are considered different letters. They're listed separately in Zoëga's dictionary. They're pronounced differently. And they can make a different word.

And on the sidenote, it's also a very obscure word that means fire. Really, really seriously obscure. Zoëga's dictionary doesn't include it, for example. (Which is why certain people on the Internet think the word doesn't exist and Paolini is just pulling it out of his bag of I Make Shit Up.)

The Brísingar, by the way, are usually thought to be a family or a people. We don't know much about them at all. But they owned a necklace at one point, which may or may not be the same necklace that crops up in Beowulf.

Not to mention it has lots and lots of mythological baggage: I can't see the word without thinking of Brísingamen, Freyja's necklace. The exact significance of it we don't know, but there are theories associating it with Northern Lights, the rising sun and fertility rites. Either way, I'm sure Paolini wasn't trying to make me think of the obscure but powerful artefact, the very symbol of female sexuality belonging to the goddess Freyja that corresponds to Þórr's hammer (which is, incidentally too short). He almost certainly wasn't intending me to think about the goddess Freyja sleeping with four dwarves for four nights to obtain it...

It's telling that he probably read about Brísingamen, read the etymology and then came up with the word. It is not the way to do these things, especially considering the aforementioned mythological baggage.

Oh, and never forget: the great draumr kópa, the infamous dream-gawking!