Both God of War and Ragnarok were scored with fantastic music, the latter taking home a prize for its score at 2022's Game 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 written a lengthy blog post detailing 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 the Santa Monica team put in to have
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