Written as Þ in uppercase and þ in lowercase, the letter thorn is a holdover from a time when the Latin alphabet was not quite sufficient for the sounds of Old Norse and Old English. While it has faded from everyday use elsewhere, in Iceland, thorn remains part of daily written and spoken language.
A rune with staying power
Thorn’s earliest origins lie in the ancient runic alphabets. The rune ᚦ, called thurs in early Scandinavian poetry, signified the “th” sound. Anglo-Saxons called it thorn. When northern Europe shifted to the Latin alphabet, letters like thorn were introduced for sounds that Latin could not properly represent, and thus thorn entered the alphabets of Old English and Old Norse.
The letter was never used at the end of Icelandic words and even today, appears only at the beginning of words or as the first letter of the second part in compound words. Thorn’s pronunciation in modern Icelandic is [θ̠], similar to the “th” in the English word “thick”. Originally, it could also be used for a voiced sound (as in “the”), before the introduction of another letter, eth (Ð, ð), provided a distinct symbol for that purpose.
Thorn’s journey through the ages
For centuries, thorn was widely used in Old English and Scandinavian texts. Alongside “eth,” it was one of two letters that captured the “th” sound, sometimes both could be seen in the same word, even written by the same scribe. As time passed, especially from the 14th century, thorn began to disappear from England and Scandinavia, replaced by the now-familiar “th” digraph. Norwegian writers stopped using thorn around 1400. In English, the last manuscripts with thorn date to the mid-15th century.
The rise of printed books helped speed thorn’s demise outside Iceland. Early printers’ typefaces lacked the thorn character, so the similar-looking “y” was substituted, resulting in phrases like “ye olde”, a familiar sight, but a misreading of the thorn, not a new word. The pronunciation was always “the” rather than “yee.”
In Iceland, medieval scribes and writers never let go of thorn. It appears in texts from the mid-12th century onward and is a fixture of the language today, as the 30th letter in the Icelandic alphabet. While its frequency is not very high, it is the 19th most common letter in Icelandic, making up about 1.6 percent of texts, thorn’s presence is a link to linguistic history.
Though the letter vanished from other Scandinavian languages and from English centuries ago, modern-day Icelanders routinely encounter it in newspapers, novels, and the names of friends or public figures. The spelling of names such as Hafþór is sometimes adapted to English as Hafthor for clarity.
In everyday Icelandic, thorn continues to represent something a thousand years old, a spoken sound and a visual emblem, still thriving in a small North Atlantic nation.
Sources
- Wikipedia
- Wikipedia (Icelandic) in Icelandic
