Bardabunga
by wjw on October 4, 2014
I know that “Bardarbunga” sounds like something Silvio Berlusconi might do with one of his teenage girlfriends, but in fact it’s the volcano in Iceland that’s presently erupting. And the “d” isn’t a “d”, it’s a ð, which is to say a thorn, and pronounced like a “th.” (Vikings didn’t mind their Ps and Qs, they minded their ashes and thorns.)
All of which has little to do with today’s video, in Eric Cheng, director of aerial photography for drone maker DJI, flew his Phantom 2 drone so close to the eruption that his GoPro camera melted. Here’s a montage of his best shots.
And below, check out the a documentary of how the video was made.
Minor nitpick: “ð” is “edh” and not “thorn“.
Thorn (“Þ”) has (mostly) moved to “t” in modern Norwegian, and “ð” has (mostly) moved to “d”, which makes me pronounce “ð” as a softer “th” than “Þ” (which I pronounce like English “th”) when reading old Norse texts out loud. However what the difference in modern day Icelandic, I don’t really know…
It’s “thorn” in Old English, I think. Though I’m certainly willing to defer to anyone more expert in this matter than I.
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