At long, long last, we come to the end of the A-Z of Iceland! Some of these letters have been really hard (you may have noticed I’ve cheated a b

The A-Z of Iceland: Z, the deleted letter - I Am a Polar Bear

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2021-05-30 19:30:06

At long, long last, we come to the end of the A-Z of Iceland! Some of these letters have been really hard (you may have noticed I’ve cheated a bit on a few) but some of them – far more of them than the hard ones – have been sitting in my imagination since late last year when I first dreamed up this year-long epic.

If you’ve been to Iceland, or read much about them, you’ll have noticed that their alphabet is different to ours. It includes three letters that don’t exist in English and one letter that kind of isn’t a letter in English.

First up is thorn, Þ in capitals or þ in lower case. You may recognise thorn from Þingvellir or Þórsmörk. This was a perfectly common letter in the days of the Vikings. It’s pronounced th as in thick or thin. In case you’ve never noticed, and there’s no reason why you would for most people, we have two ways of pronouncing th in English.

The next one is eth, Ð or ð. This is the other th and it’s the lighter one used in this, the and other. You might recognise eth from Bláa lónið, the Blue Lagoon in Icelandic, or Bárðarbungar, the 2014-15 volcanic eruption, or from Hveragerði.