Can someone please translate "Slave of the God" and "Servant of the God" into Anglo-Saxon/Old English and Old Norse?

Well, I don't know that I can help you much on the Old Norse, but in Old English “Slave of God” would be Godes Þeōwa, while “Servant of God” might be Godes Þeōw or Godes Scealc (although scealc is apparently also used as “soldier” and “sailor”). The words þeōwa and þeōw almost seem to be interchangeable...

Edit:

After looking through some Old Norse material, I've found quite a few words for "servant" but only one for "slave":

húskarl -- probably related to something like "house-churl", a man of the house? (OE hūs-carl)
(skó)sveinn
þegn -- I assume this is cognate with "thain" (OE þegn or þegen).
þjónustamaðr

þræll -- probably related to "thrall" (OE þrǣl)

Oh, and I do know that the word for "god" in ON is áss, but I'm unsure about the genitive sg...

Wouldn't this be þēow? Ie. the ēo is a diphthong.
I know this as ceorl, but maybe that's a dialectal difference.
I'm pretty sure this is the Norse word for slave. It's translated as "thrall" in everything I've ever read about the Viking age.

Ah, true. I'm using Hall's Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary and the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, both of which standardize everything as eō and eo (both being diphthongs). I notice, though, that Richard Hogg uses ēo in his Intro. to Old English.


You mean carl vs. ceorl? Yeah, that's (roughly) a northern vs. southern difference,since there's a palatal/non-palatal distinction and OE carl is pretty much identical with ON karl (from Norse contact in northern Britain).


Right, I should have distinguished. That was the one word for "slave" that I mentioned, whereas the preceding words were all for "servant".

I believe the first element is long, so I'm not sure why they write it that way.
That's the problem: which dialect of OE to use, and which dialect of ON. From my understanding Old West Saxon is the standard for OE, but I'm not sure which is for ON.

Apparently muhammadi posted this topic twice because I replied to a duplicate in the "Extinct Languages" subforum.

For Old Norse, I came up with guðsinnr þræll for "slave of the God" & guðsinnr þegn for "servant of the God". I think guð is better than áss here.

For Old English, I came up with se godes nīedling for "slave of the God" & se godes þēow for "servant of the God". I got nīedling from the Old English Wiktionary. You'll notice that I have se in front because muhammadi's phrases use "the God" as opposed to simply "God".

@Sobekhotep:

That would probably work better, since the þēow/þēowa distinction is kind of thin. Although the only record of "nīedling" that I can find (outside of Wiktionary, which I personally wouldn't use as a primary source) is nīd-ling, translated as "bondservant" or "captive".

Also, seeing as I forgot the demonstrative, you would also need to use the genitive sg. masc. form with godes:

þæs godes nīedling/þēow

@Talib:

Yeah, Old West Saxon is the standard for texts (since that was kind of the center of OE literature at the time). I guess I'm a little bit partial to Northumbrian dialects for some reason. More "Scandinavian" (not Shandinavian!).

How would you pronounce "þēow"?

Yeah, I forgot to decline the determiner.


Probably something like [θeːow].

Yes but we shouldn't assume he knows how to read IPA. Muhammadi, what is your native language?