"The Hoard of the Gibbelins" by Lord Dunsany

8 months ago
27

Gibbelins... listening to some other recordings of this story, there is no consensus on that 'g'. Mostly the hard 'g' sound, some more of a softer 'j' sound. I could easily go either way. On the one hand, it's like goblins, but with an 'i'. On the other hand, it seems likely to be related to the word gibberish. Ugh. Once again bitten on the ass by made up words of unknowable pronunciation and no hints given by the author.

The online text uses "ho rhoos okeanoio", but the text I'm reading from tries to use Greek characters, yet several of the characters are obviously wrong. Like, there's a literal italic 's' at the end of the second word - there is no character in the Greek alphabet that looks like a Latin 's'. My best guess is ζ. And they start the third word with what looks like a Latin 'a', but clearly the word they are going for is ocean, so it *must* be ω, or if you prefer upper-case: Ω. So as best I can make out, given the transliteration provided in the online text versus the weird almost-Greek alphabet spelling in my physical book text, it is probably supposed to be "δο ροοζ ωκεανοιο" - the pink ocean. I guess? I really don't know. It's all very strange. I have no idea what Homeric passage is being referenced, I'm not that much into Homer - if you recognize it, please leave a comment below.

But then, shouldn't it really be Ὠκεανός (Oceanus)? Yes, that can be the name of a titan, but also the name of the world-encircling river that Homer definitely does make reference to. So okeanoio / ωκεανοιο isn't even the right word in the first place? It's all very confusing and annoying. It would be interesting to know what Dunsany wrote into his hand-written version of the text. Clearly nobody seems to have gotten it right in their transcriptions of it.

Since I can't even be sure what the words are supposed to be, I can't have any idea what the pronunciation is supposed to be. C'est la vie.

The picture used is an illustration by Sidney Sime in the 1912 edition of "The Book of Wonder".

To follow along: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7477/7477-h/7477-h.htm#THE_HOARD_OF_THE_GIBBELINS

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