The Introduction to the Ancient Language

1. Introduction

Kvetha fricai maerr,

        Hereby, we present the first grammar of the Ancient Language from the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini. His books take place in the mystical land of Alagaësia, where elves, dragons, dwarves, humans and every other kind of magical creatures can be found. Nowadays, only the elves, dragons and some humans master and use the Ancient Language. Once this language was the language of all creatures in Alagaësia. Unfortunately, it started to die out.

        The Grey Folk, however, somehow managed to tie the language to their magic, as a tool for regulating their powers. Significantly, it is impossible to lie in the Ancient Language; everything said in this tongue is irrevocably true. As a result, most of the original material from the books are spells and phrases commonly used in official, formal ceremonies. The bigger one’s knowledge of the Ancient Language, the more spells one possesses and the more power they have.

        During the creation of the language Christopher Paolini found the word ‘brisingr’ for fire in an Old Norse dictionary. He loved the word so much (and so do we), he decided to pull many more (if not most) of the lexicon of the Ancient Language from Old Norse. In addition, he pulled the rest of the lexicon from his imagination. For the grammar on the other hand, he chose English as his muse, which is not surprising, since English is Paolini’s mother tongue. The combination of Old Norse and English proves to be an interesting one as will discover when attempting to learn this fantasy language.

        We, as editors and expanders, were up for the challenge when this assignment was handed to us in our Interlinguistics class at the University of Amsterdam taught by prof. Dr. Frederico Gobbo. We hope that this first version of the grammar of the Ancient Language will satisfy, clarify, and most of all help one get into closer touch with this fantastical, mystical world.

 The Editors