Join Us For a Bite

Interesting Projects

Once, someone asked me what I would do if I had enough money that I didn't need to work. After thinking about it, I decided that I'd want to be like Mark Rober — I would do cool, creative things with my time. Even though I do have to work, this made me commit to trying to do interesting projects whenever possible.

As part of that, when I get the idea to try something, even if it's something dumb, I give it a shot. This has led to me working on a variety of high-effort memes, including reinstrumenting a Fetty Wap song or rewriting the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies. I recently had a burst of creativity, and wanted to do another project like that.

FNAF

At the same time as my burst of creativity, the movie Five Nights at Freddy's 2 had just released. Five Night's has a lot of pull in meme culture, so it has been in the zeitgeist. I can't open social media without seeing content about the film.

Five Nights at Freddy's (FNAF) is a media franchise based off of a 2014 indie survival game of the same name. In the game, the player plays as a security guard who must stay safe from several haunted malevolent animatronics.

In the past 10 years, FNAF has become a cultural force, with over 10 video games, three novels, and now two feature films. FNAF is well-represented on social media, inspiring countless YouTube videos, TikToks and Reels.

Arguably the most famous piece of FNAF audio is the 2016 song, "Join Us for a Bite". The sound of the franchise, it is heavily featured in fan content.

So what happened when my desire to make something ran up against the FNAF 2 release? I decided to put my Bachelor's degree in Linguistics to good use, and translate the chorus from "Join Us for a Bite" into Old English poetry.

Old English

In common parlance, people often use the term "Old English" to refer to Early Modern English. (The language of Shakespeare or the King James Bible) This is fine in day-to-day contexts, but in academic contexts, "Old English" refers to a specific type of English spoken at a specific time. Linguists break up the history of the English language into three periods:

• Old English (500-1100ish)
• Middle English (1100-1500)
• Modern English (1500ish-Now)

The fact is, if I got in a time machine and went back to visit my 40th-great grandparents in 950 AD, I wouldn't be able to understand a word they said, and they wouldn't be able to understand me.

Here's an illustration (borrowed from an earlier blog post) of how different Old, Middle, and Modern English are from one another:

It feels like you could maybe understand the Middle English, but the Old English is basically gibberish. There are unfamiliar symbols (ð, æ, þ) and very few of the letters you do recognize would be pronounced the same. If you look really hard, you might recognize a few words since the translations are line-by-line (Fæder = Father, heofonum = heaven, forgyf = forgive). Several of the small Old English words (on, and, us) persist in Modern English. In spite of all that, Old English and today's English are not mutually intelligible.

Translation

Translation is a really hard task. You can't just look up each word in a dictionary and map it one-to-one. Different languages use different grammatical structures and rules to convey things. On top of that, even when you do have a word with the same denotation (explicit meaning), it may have a different connotation (additional meaning)

While translating any text from one language to another is difficult, translating artistic language (lyrics or poetry) is particularly hard. You need to capture the meaning of the original, including the emotional intent. (both denotation and connotation) Then, you need to make sure all of that follows proper grammar, proper poetic structure, and is adapted to the cultural context of the target language.

All that to say, I had my work cut out for me.

Old English Poetry

Many of the extant manuscripts we have of Old English are poetic in nature. That means that we have a pretty good idea of what rules needed to be followed, and what were the hallmarks of poetry back then.

Kennings

One integral part of Old English poetry is kennings. A kenning is a compound word, usually a metaphor, that replaces a common word. One very famous example of a Kenning is the name Beowulf.

beo (bee) + wulf (hunter, literally wolf) = one who hunts bees, bear

Other examples include:

• hron-rade (whale-road) = The Sea
• ban-hus (bone-house) = The Body

Kennings were treated as riddles. For an audience member listening to a poem, part of the fun would've been understanding these metaphors. If I wanted to translate faithfully to Old English poetry, kennings would need to be an integral part of my translation.

Stress

Old English poetry followed a regular scheme of stress. Lines were written in two parts, with a pause between them. The first half of the line (the on-verse) had two strong stresses (lifts), as did the second half of the verse (the off-verse). The number of unstressed syllables could vary, though they were partially cataloged in the late 1800s. This stress scheme is an integral part of Old English verse.

Alliterative Scheme

The other super important part of Old English verse is an alliterative scheme. Whereas many of today's poems use rhyme, Old English verse followed different rules. The first stress (lift) of the second half of the line determined the alliteration for the verse. Both of the stresses (lifts) from the first half of the line had to alliterate with that word. The final stress of the line was not allowed to alliterate with the other three. Let's look at an example from Beowulf (lines 4 and 5). Note how the first three stressed syllables in each line in bold alliterate with one another, but not the fourth.

Oft Scyld Scefing || Sceaþena þreatum,

monegum mægþum || meodosetla ofteah,

Actually Translating

With all of the rules regarding translation down, I was ready to begin translation. I grabbed the chorus from 'Join Us for a Bite', which is the part of the song people recognize.

Can't wait to meet you,

So join the animatronic family.

We open real soon,

Try your best to hold onto sanity.

Come get to know me,

And you won't wanna leave after tonight.

Down here we're lonely,

And we would love you to join us for a bite.

Part of what inspired this project is that these lyrics naturally lend themselves to the Anglo-Saxon style. This chorus is naturally broken up into two-line chunks, which is how a lot of Old English poetry is written. I broke this up into two-line 'stanzas' to make the task manageable.

Translation was a multi-step process. The first thing I needed to do was extract the 'intent' of each line, taking into account the cultural context of an Anglo-Saxon from back in the day. Then, I had to find words that worked from attested sources. (Big shoutout to Bosworth Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary). Let's go through the line pairs one-by-one, and discuss the translations.

Stanza 1

Can't wait to meet you,

So join the animatronic family.

There's an Old English word, Hwaet, which is often used to begin poems or tales. It is an attention-grabber, and translates as, "Listen!", "Hark!", "Behold!" or "Hear Me!". Culturally relevant, it is the most accepted way to begin a poem.

Now, the concept of an 'animatronic family' is pretty difficult. There really wasn't a notion of an animatronic in England 1000 years ago. It is, however, a great candidate for a kenning. I decided to go with searo-cynn, composed of searo (artifice) and cynn (kin). This gave me the closest possible word to machine-man that I could come up with. Both of these words are used in kennings in attested Old English writings.

Instead of 'joining a family', I decided to go with 'make peace between the clans', which strikes me as more culturally relevant. The translated lines ended up as:

Hwæt! Wē mōd-georne || gemōt biddað,

Sece searo-cynn || sibbe gemǣne.

Which literally translates to:

Behold! We, eager-of-mind || wait for the meeting,

Seek the artifice-kin || to make peace.

Stanza 2

We open real soon,

Try your best to hold onto sanity.

What exactly would be opening? In the song, they're referring to Freddy Fazbear's pizza. (A sort of fictional Chuck-E-Cheese) What would the Anglo-Saxon equivalent be? I think it would probably be a mead-hall or a hall for feasting.

The next line provided its own challenges. "Hold on to sanity" is a modern English idiom that doesn't translate super well. That makes it another great candidate for kennings. For holding on, we create heorte-hord, (heart-hoard) (treasure within your heart). Nowadays, we think of the 'self' as residing in our brains, but the Anglo-Saxons thought of the self as being in the chest or heart. This construction is similar to attested feorh-hord (soul).

I also needed one for 'insanity'. I went with hearm-gedwōlum. hearm means harm (fairly straightforward), but gedwōlum is a little trickier. It translates to something like heresy, error, or madness.

Symbelhūs sōna || sceal duru ontynan,

Heald þīn heorte-hord || wið hearm-gedwōlum

Literal translation:

The feast-hall soon shall open [its] doors,

Guard your mind/soul against madness.

Stanza 3

Come get to know me,

And you won't wanna leave after tonight.

This line made me think of the Irish legend of Queen Medb, which dates back as far as the first century AD, though its most famous version was written down in the 1200s. At one point in the legend, Medb offers her hospitality to a man (Dáire mac Fiachna). Her offered hospitality included: Fifty heifers, chariot worth 21 bondmaids, an estate of land equal to his own, "And [her] own friendly thighs on top of that." I wanted to evoke an ancient offer of hospitality like that in my translation.

I stretched the meaning of the next line just a little bit for poetic reasons. Night was much scarier 1000 years ago. There were no electric lights, no policemen, etc. Traveling at night was very dangerous. For that reason, I changed the meaning from, "leave after tonight" to "leave during the night." I also wanted to use a kenning borrowed from Beowulf, niht-helm (the cover of night), which fit better if I changed the meaning.

Cum tō cunnian || cyste mīne,

Nǣfre on niht-helm || nēde þū fērest.

Literal translation:

Come to know/investigate the goodness of mine,

Never in the night will you need to travel

Stanza 4

Down here we're lonely,

And we would love you to join us for a bite.

How did I want to convey the concept of being "lonely down here"? I found the kenning wine-lēase meaning friendless. (literally wine-less, nobody to share wine with) I also found a term for strangers/foreigners, wer-gengan. This is used for strangers in a foreign country, which is evocative of the the "down here" phrase.

The final line was pretty tricky. "Join us for a bite" is a play on words. It is both an invitation to eat and a reference to being bitten by the animatronic characters. I don't know Old English well enough for double meanings like that. I decided to base the alliteration of this line on a word, slīte, which means a tear/gash. (think of Modern English slit) It can even be used for an animal bite! I combined that with an invitation to sit at a feast. (which is great since we used feast hall imagery earlier)

Wē wær-gengan || wine-lēase,

Sitt tō symle || slīte tō þolian!

Literal translation:

We are strangers, friendless

Sit at the feast, suffer a bite!

So the whole thing was written, following the conventions of Old English poetry. It needed a title. I use the same word, slīte, from the last line that means tear/bite/strife. I wanted to capture the, "join us" meaning, so I called it Sēo Slīte-gelaðung; literally "The Invitation be Bitten/Torn" or "The Invitation to Strife."

Sēo Slīte-gelaðung

Hwæt! Wē mōd-georne || gemōt biddað,

Sece searo-cynn || sibbe gemǣne.

Symbelhūs sōna || sceal duru ontynan,

Heald þīn heorte-hord || wið hearm-gedwōlum

Cum tō cunnian || cyste mīne,

Nǣfre on niht-helm || nēde þū fērest.

Wē wær-gengan || wine-lēase,

Sitt tō symle || slīte tō þolian!

I realize there's a whole song I could translate, but just translating the chorus took me several hours. Besides, nobody would want to read 5 times more translation analysis than I already included.

The Performance

I had finished writing the poem, but that wasn't enough. Anglo-Saxons were largely illiterate (at least 95% of people wouldn't have been able to read). Poetry would've been recited in a mead-hall by a Scop (a professional poet/musician), probably accompanied by a lyre.

If I wanted to really 'bring this to life', I'd need to record it. My Old English pronunciation isn't great, but since everyone who spoke Old English as a native language died almost 1000 years ago, I'm probably safe. (I did find an Old English pronunciation guide and practice first, though)

Of course, I needed some lyre accompaniment, so I whipped one up using Musescore, and set it as a backing track. It's not 100% faithful to Anglo-Saxon musical norms, but then again, I didn't have an ancient lyre lying around, so I had to make do. Thankfully, ancient Anglo-Saxon lyre music was probably pretty simple, so my accompaniment could be too.

I put the whole performance together in a little video, with the Old English, modern translation, and source material on screen at the same time.

Enjoy!