Talk:En saga

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I don't know if they still do it, but many people used to pronounce the "En" as if it were the French word "en", meaning "in". If they thought about it for a second, they probably would have realised that French had nothing to do with it, and In Saga makes no sense. A better guess would have been Finnish; still wrong, because it's actually Swedish, but at least that would have been in the linguo-geographic ballpark.

This brings me to the issue of how to sort the title. Since "En" is simply the Swedish indefinite article (in English "A"), it should be ignored for sorting link titlepurposes, and the work should sort under S for "Saga". Trouble is, many people don't think of it as some other-language equivalent of A Saga but as a title starting with a word beginning with an E, and would expect to find it sorted under E. If it had a French title (Une saga), or an Italian one (Una saga), or a German one (Eine Saga), or even an English one (A Saga), there would be absolutely no issue. Swedish, though, that's a different kettle of fish, not being an international language.

I see that the good old 5th edition of Grove's Dictionary calls it by its English title A Saga in the text of the article on Sibelius (Vol. VII, p. 773), with the justificatory footnote:

• "Generally known as En Saga, but there is no reason why the Swedish article should be used for a Finnish work in English programmes".

However, having gone to that trouble in the article proper, when it comes to the Catalogue of Works starting on p. 775 they call it En Saga after all. I wonder if New Grove gets itself into these sorts of hopelessly confused contortions. It seems few people have abided by Grove's imprecation in any event, as it's still "generally known as En Saga".

Anyway, what I propose is to add a Defaultsort to have it sort under Saga, not under En. But I'd be interested to hear other comments.

Another issue is the capitalisation of "Saga". Our title capitalises it, but in the text it's all lower case "En saga". This needs to be made consistent, but I know nothing of Swedish capitalisation conventions. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 09:57, 21 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, fellow Sibelian and welcome to the wonderful world of the Sibelius tone poems! I am sure we are of one mind: the 13 Sibelius examples in this form represent, along with his seven symphonies and the violin concerto, the height of his orchestral powers. As such, I have taken the liberty over the last year of giving some of these tone poems (namely, The Wood Nymph and The Oceanides) the expanded treatment I think they deserve.

As part of this expansion project, I have added infoboxes onto each of the tone poem pages (save for

) to assist our readers in having the most important information about each piece at their fingertips. I feel that standardization of infobox information and form is something we should strive to maintain among these pieces, and as such, I suggest that any changes be agreed to by the community. If you're interested, I have the following opinions:

1. Let's keep the picture of Sibelius the same for all his compositions, so as to create the feel of 'articles in a series'
2. Let's have the opening title be the name in English (unless the native title is more famous, e.g., En saga)
3. Let's include 'native name' or 'English name' below the picture if the piece goes by more than one name
4. Let's have the form (e.g., tone poem) appear up-top next to the composer's name
5. Let's include the average duration
6. Let's have the caption under the image of Sibelius be "The composer in 1913"
7. Let's keep the dates of composition/revision (important for some pieces, e.g., the Fifth Symphony, consistent with List of compositions by Jean Sibelius
8. Let's have each infobox include information on 'movements', even if it is only one; this provides standardization among pieces.

Okay, thanks for reading! If you are so inclined to add the infobox to the seven symphonies (or the four tone poems mentioned above) or some of his incidental music, please be my guest. My focus, for now, is on the tone poems.

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Note: I have included this message on the talk pages of each of the existing tone poems that have infoboxes.

Expanded and improved article under construction in user sandbox

Hi all, just wanted to notify the editing community that I am working on an expansion of En saga in my sandbox:

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