BothGod of WarandRagnarokwere scored with fantastic music, the latter taking home a prize for its score at 2022’sGame Awards. Performed in Old Norse, which is effectively a dead language, it has taken research and guesswork to figure out what the lyrics are even saying. That was until the composer for both of the most recent God of War games translated the lyrics from the first game’s opening theme and beyond.
God of War composer Bear McCreary has writtena lengthy blog postdetailing the decisions behind having singers perform the games' songs in Old Norse and has also finally translated them into English. Dedicated God of War fans have actually been attempting to translate the theme from the first game ever since it launched five years ago.
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“A handful of fans online translated the text of the main theme from Old Norse back into English, and they got impressively close to the original English text,” McCreary writes. As for what was being sung in the first game’s theme, considering it kicked off with a funeral for Faye, Kratos’s wife and Atreus’s mother, turns out the lyrics were naturally pretty heartbreaking.
“Exiled God, Father’s shame, Mother’s hope, Child in pain,” are the opening lines. Accurately describing what is going on, and quite rightly pretty dark. The songs were all performed by Icelandic singers as turns out the nation’s language is so similar to Old Norse that people from Iceland were able to read it. As for why McCreary has translated the lyrics five years later, he writes in the blog that if no one can understand them, then it kind of takes away from the tremendous effort he and theSanta Monicateam put in to have Old Norse songs in the game.
McCreary and others from the God of War studio have detailed a lot more about the music from both games and fully translated a number of different songs into English. As for what’s next for the series, even though it was confirmed the Norse saga won’t be a trilogy,the actor who played Tyr in Ragnarok claimed fans haven’t seen the last of the character.
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