Translating the Sagas: Two Hundred Years of Challenge and Response 2503507727, 9782503507729

Table of contents :
Preface vii
Chapter 1. Why Translate the Sagas? 1
Chapter 2. The Task of the Translator 21
Chapter 3. The Pioneer Saga Translations 51
Chapter 4. In the Shadow of William Morris: Saga Translations 1869–1913 77
Chapter 5. Translations of the Period 1914–50 107
Chapter 6. Saga Translations in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century 135
Chapter 7. The Future of Saga Translation 181
Bibliography 191
Index 209

Citation preview

KATERN 1

T RANSLATING THE S AGAS

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MAKING THE MIDDLE AGES THE CENTRE FOR MEDIEVAL STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY Series Editors Geraldine Barnes (University of Sydney) M argaret Clunies Ross (University of Sydney) Editorial Board Geraldine Barnes (University of Sydney) M argaret Clunies Ross (University of Sydney) Penelope Gay (University of Sydney) David M atthews (University of Manchester) Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne) Advisory Board Jürg Glauser (Universities of Zurich and Basel) Stephen Knight (University of W ales, Cardiff ) Ulrich M üller (University of Salzburg) Russell Poole (University of W estern Ontario) Tom Shippey (St Louis University) Richard Utz (W estern M ichigan University) Kathleen Verduin (Hope College, Michigan)

Volume 5

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T RANSLATING THE S AGAS Two Hundred Years of Challenge and Response

by

John Kennedy

H

F

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Kennedy, John Translating the sagas : two hundred years of challenge and response. - (Making the Middle Ages ; 5) 1. Sagas - Translations into English - History and criticism I. Title 839.6'09 ISBN-13: 9782503507729

© 2007, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2007/0095/53 ISBN: 978-2-503-50772-9 Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper

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C ONTENTS

Preface Chapter 1. Why Translate the Sagas?

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vii 1

Chapter 2. The Task of the Translator

21

Chapter 3. The Pioneer Saga Translations

51

Chapter 4. In the Shadow of William Morris: Saga Translations 1869–1913

77

Chapter 5. Translations of the Period 1914–50

107

Chapter 6. Saga Translations in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

135

Chapter 7. The Future of Saga Translation

181

Bibliography

191

Index

209

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P REFACE

T

ranslation is not an activity generally held in great esteem. This is despite the fact that it is necessarily ubiquitous in the majority of the world’s countries, which are officially or in fact bilingual (or multilingual), and that in major international organizations like the United Nations and the European Union small armies of people labour daily to create versions of documents of many kinds in languages other than those in which they were originally composed. Though indispensable, such translation work is usually anonymous and scarcely noticed except when a major blunder draws attention to it. Literary translation enjoys somewhat more prestige, particularly when the literary text being translated is regarded as a major artistic achievement or considered part of a ‘canon’ of works having a significant place in world literature. Scholars with established reputations do not utterly scorn to publish translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, the plays of Shakespeare, or Goethe’s Faust. Even when admired and judged to be successful, however, such literary translations are not likely to be regarded either by their creators or by commentators as outstanding scholarly achievements or significant contributions to the relevant discipline. With due acknowledgement of Dr Samuel Johnson Keneva Kunz has ironically titled an essay on saga translation ‘No One but a Blockhead ever Translated, except for Money’; and in gatherings of their academic peers literary scholars who translate may indeed proclaim such a mercenary motive, half defensively, half apologetically. Literary

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translation does not rate as prestigious scholarship on a par with editing a text or publishing a critical analysis. The book that follows is based on the premise that this attitude belittles the achievement of the translator, who is likely of necessity to be both an editor and interpreter of texts, and that by tending to diminish the perceived importance of translations it detracts attention from their significance as indicators of the value attached in different times, places, and contexts to the original texts and the cultures that produced them. The focus here is on translation of the medieval Icelandic sagas. This provides a corpus of translations that extends over the considerable but nevertheless manageable period of about two hundred years and reveals a diverse range of different approaches to translation. The task of identifying what published translations of Icelandic sagas exist has been much simplified by the comprehensive bibliographies of Donald Fry and Paul Acker, but it has of course been necessary to track down and examine firsthand the individual publications. A location in Australia may have had a role in ensuring that a small number of older and more obscure works listed by Fry or Acker remained inaccessible to this writer, though this was happily rare and on some occasions it proved possible to access older items unavailable to them, as well as translations published after their bibliographies appeared. Quite frequently bibliographic details mentioned here differ somewhat from those in Fry or Acker. A fascination with collecting saga translations extending back over nearly forty years to undergraduate days has assisted the author in bringing together the ‘raw material’ for this study, but an expression of sincere gratitude is due to Robyn Lonard and other members of the inter-lending staff in the William Merrylees Library at Charles Sturt University for their persistent work in locating quite esoteric items to be found only in a few of the world’s largest libraries and bringing them to Wagga Wagga as loans or in photocopy format. Special thanks are due to Will Larson for the gift of his attractively produced translation of Áns saga bogsveigis, to John Porter for his kindness in supplying a copy of his translation of Árons saga Hjörleifssonar, and to Otto Zitzelsberger for his translation of Konráðs saga keisarasonar. Finn Hansen in Copenhagen helped provide access to some secondary material that might otherwise have been unobtainable. Ian and Hanne Bock, themselves professional translators, assisted with access to published material and gave insights into modern translation practice, while John Martin answered questions about Old Icelandic studies at the University of Melbourne. At the University of Sydney Geraldine Barnes generously encouraged me to complete this book and offer it for inclusion in the series ‘Making the Middle

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Preface

ix

Ages’, as well as providing helpful advice, particularly in regard to early translations of the Vínland sagas and their interrelationships. Gratitude is due to her and to her colleague on the Editorial Board of the Making the Middle Ages series, Margaret Clunies Ross, who acted as this book’s content editor and suggested numerous improvements. Kaele Stokes as copyeditor performed her duties with skill and with good humour. It was rewarding to work with her and with Maryna Mews, who undertook the demanding task of preparing the index. Charles Sturt University, my employer during most of the period of work on this book, has been supportive at a time when throughout the Australian university system the focus of attention has necessarily not been on fostering works of this kind, and I record here my thanks to Ken Dillon, head of the School of Information Studies, his predecessor Bob Moore, and to Joy McGregor, acting head in 2007, for their interest in the project and their active support. John Kennedy Wagga Wagga May 2007

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Chapter 1

W HY T RANSLATE THE S AGAS?

T

hrough more than eleven hundred years of history, since it was first settled in the ninth century, Iceland has never attracted much attention from the overwhelming majority of those who live away from its shores. The population of the nation is very small, even by Scandinavian standards — an estimated 296,737 people in 20051 — and its location as an island in the North Atlantic, about 300 kilometres from Greenland, 800 kilometres from Scotland, and 1000 kilometres from Norway, means that is remote from almost all populated areas. Despite its abundance of geothermal energy and potential for generating hydroelectricity, it does not really possess major resources that the world eagerly covets, and in the post-Cold War era the strategic importance it formerly enjoyed by reason of its North Atlantic location between the two major ‘superpowers’ has greatly diminished. Iceland has indeed been discovered by international tourism in recent years: the country received over 300,000 visitors in 2003 and the tourism industry is now second only to fishing in the size of its contribution to the national economy.2 But while the annual numbers of visitors today are impressive by the standards of past decades in which only an adventurous or highly motivated few came to Iceland, they remain small by the tourism standards of European countries like Britain, France, Spain, Italy, and Greece. Iceland is a peaceful, prosperous, and ‘well-behaved’ country: no one has to fear aggression, efforts at destabilization, or an influx of refugees emanating

1

See ‘Iceland’ in CIA – The World Factbook (2005): http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/ factbook/geos/ic.html [accessed 13 January 2006]; Guðmundur Hálfdanarson, Historical Dictionary of Iceland, European Historical Dictionaries, 24 (Lanham: Scarecrow, 1993), p. 124. 2

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Editorial in Iceland Review, 41.4 (2003), 2.

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from its territory. Unlike more powerful or less happy lands, it is a country which outsiders feel they can safely ignore, and almost invariably do. The consequence of this is that most people know virtually nothing of Iceland, and many erroneously imagine that it is an Arctic realm entirely covered all year with ice and snow, and inhabited by semi-nomadic ‘Eskimos’ (Inuit). Those somewhat better informed may be aware that Iceland possesses spectacular scenery and, closely associated with it, the mixed blessing of dramatic geology, resulting in earthquakes or volcanic eruptions reported in the world’s media every few years. They may be aware that Iceland is a ‘paradise’ for birdwatchers. In recent years they may well have learnt that Iceland possesses remarkably complete genetic information about its human population, a somewhat controversial resource which some fear could be exploited for ill as well as good by researchers in other countries. But while one clichéd description of Iceland is that it is ‘the land of ice and fire’, another characterizes it as ‘the land of the sagas’. Though Icelanders, like Greeks, sometimes appear to have mixed feelings about the extent to which the reputation of their country rests upon cultural achievements many centuries in the past, and sometimes are heard to express the wish that outsiders would pay more attention to the artistic achievements of those of their compatriots not several centuries in their graves, there is little doubt that the existence of its sagas would rate highly on the short list of what educated foreigners know about Iceland. Knowledge of the existence of the sagas does not, of course, necessarily lead to a desire to read them, and it is not always associated with an accurate idea of their nature and content. In the English-speaking world, anyone who professes to be a student of saga literature will probably sooner rather than later encounter people who are under the impression that the Icelandic sagas are essentially verse compositions, or that their subject matter is primarily myths and folk tales in which trolls figure prominently. For well over a century, however, there has been a genuine interest in the sagas, and enthusiasm for them, among some English speakers. In his very scholarly and highly entertaining book, The Vikings and the Victorians,3 Andrew Wawn documents how this interest and enthusiasm appeared widely in British society during the second half of the nineteenth century, and a more recent manifestation is provided by the popularity of the translation of Brennu-Njáls

3

The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in 19th Century Britain (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000).

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saga by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, which Penguin first published in 1960. By 1990 sales were well in excess of 100,0004 — a respectable, even remarkable figure when one considers that it relates to a long narrative of feuding Icelandic farmers set one thousand years ago and written by an anonymous author, probably about the year 1280! Many who encounter the Icelandic sagas apparently do find them attractive. This is at least a little surprising, for most literature from medieval Europe is not popular with non-academic readers. One might reasonably expect texts recorded on parchment in the medieval Icelandic language during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries to be the exclusive preserve of professional scholars and their more advanced students, especially outside Iceland. The possible reasons for this relative popularity will need to be considered in more detail below, but it certainly has much to do with the feeling of many readers that the sagas are not typical medieval documents. The better-known sagas are not made inaccessible by tedious or unfamiliar stylistic conventions or saturated with ideas and beliefs alien to the modern developed world. They are accessible — or appear to be accessible — to a much greater degree than such major monuments of medieval European literature as The Divine Comedy, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, or indeed most of what was written by William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer in fourteenth-century England. The sagas are, however, written in Old Icelandic (or, as some prefer to say, Old Norse, a less precise term which perhaps has the advantage of taking into account that a very small proportion are probably of Norwegian rather than Icelandic origin).5 This language can be read without much difficulty by those fluent in Modern Icelandic, as the written form of the Icelandic language has changed remarkably little in the last eight hundred years; but it is not a language that modern Continental Scandinavians can read without extensive linguistic training and practice, and Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish are a lot more closely related linguistically to Icelandic than is English. Though English and Icelandic both belong to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, English speakers are likely to find that, while occasional saga sentences yield their meaning almost immediately, Old Icelandic is an unfamiliar language with many inflections, a rich range of declensions and conjugations, and a truly formidable array of ‘anomalies’ and ‘exceptions’. Even when a basic grounding in the language has been acquired, the profusion of idioms, often involving verb

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4

David Roberts, Iceland: Land of the Sagas (New York: Villard, 1990), p. 78.

5

The more precise term ‘Old Icelandic’ will normally be preferred here.

4

Chapter 1

plus preposition, is likely to interfere with full comprehension. If indeed there is any foreign language that speakers of English can ‘pick up’ with little effort, it is certainly not Icelandic in either its Old or Modern form. Such complexities would nevertheless probably not act as a major deterrent to learning Icelandic if there were pressing political and economic reasons for doing so: for example, Japanese, a non Indo-European language notoriously difficult for native speakers of English, is extensively studied in Australia, mainly on account of the importance of Japan to the Australian economy. Icelandic, however, does not offer major political or economic benefits to its learners, and while a knowledge of the language is an aid to anyone who wishes to learn Norwegian, Swedish, or Danish, studying it for this purpose would be akin to learning Latin with the primary aim of communicating with speakers of French, Spanish, or Italian. The advanced student of Icelandic might find that the written Faeroese language is largely accessible to him or her, but the population of the remote Faroe Islands is far smaller even that that of Iceland (about 48,290 people in 2005)6, and their political and economic influence far less. Moreover, it is mainly to written Faeroese that the Icelandic learner would have access: phonetic differences prevent speakers of Faeroese and Icelandic from easily understanding one another. Unsurprisingly, then, it has long been realized that if the Icelandic sagas are to become at all widely known and appreciated in the English-speaking world, it must be through the medium of translation. It is with the nature and history of these translations that the present work is concerned. Since the second half of the eighteenth century a great deal of Old Icelandic prose writing has been translated into English, and there are texts that have been independently translated on several different occasions, sometimes by translators with radically different approaches. The translators have included in their ranks many of the most distinguished Old Icelandic scholars working in English, as well as individuals far better known for their eminence in other fields of activity. By examining these translations and what has been written about them it should be possible to shed interesting light on varying attitudes in the last two hundred years to the sagas, and to Viking-Age Scandinavia, the time and place with which they are associated by the subject matter of most of the better known examples. Translations, and whatever editorial apparatus is associated with them, reveal how individual translators regarded the texts they translated, and what they

6

Gunnar Hoydal and others, Faroe Islands 2006: Tourist Guide (Tórhavn: Ferðaráð Føroya, 2006), p. 6.

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expected their audience to gain from reading their handiwork. In a real sense, each and every translation is an interpretation of the Icelandic text on which it is based. This raises the question of what constitutes a saga translation. Our interest here is obviously in ‘interlingual translation or translation proper’, defined as ‘interpretation of verbal signals by means of some other language’ (as distinct from varieties of translation involving rewording in the same language or transmutation into non-verbal signals).7 But such interlingual translation of a saga in English could extend from, at one extreme, interlinear glosses to the original text with no effort to produce coherent, idiomatic English prose to, at the other extreme, the retelling of the original narrative by a writer who allowed himself or herself almost total freedom to remove, elaborate, or rearrange what was in the Icelandic text. It might even encompass a transposition of the saga to quite another time and place — of Kormáks saga to colonial Australia in the 1850s and 1860s in Craig Cormick’s Kormak’s Saga, or of Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar to present-day Australia in Jeremy Stoljar’s My First Mistake,8 to mention two antipodean examples. Modern translation theory, reacting against older notions of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ translations, in fact accepts as ‘translations’ a wide range of responses to the original text.9 Most users of translations, however, want the translator as far as possible to provide them with a good representation of the content and style of the original source, while producing something grammatically coherent in the ‘target’ language into which he or she is translating. They want translations to be faithful substitutes for the original work in the source language. What constitutes faithfulness to the original is of course a major question which we will need to consider more fully, but it is probably safe to say that a version of Brennu-Njáls saga that transposed the action to the American ‘Wild West’ and had the principal saga figures settle their differences with six-shooters might be admired 7

Roman Jacobsen, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translating’, in On Translation, ed. by Reuben A. Brower (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 232–39 (p. 233). See also L. G. Kelly, The True Interpreter: A History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), pp. 1, 34. 8

Published Page, ACT: Merino Press, 1991 and East Roseville, NSW: Simon and Schuster, 1992, respectively. 9

See André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett, ‘Introduction: Proust’s Grandmother and the Thousand and One Nights. The “Cultural Turn” in Translation Studies’, in Translations, History and Culture, ed. by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (London: Pinter, 1990), pp. 1–13 (p. 4).

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as a tour de force or an independent work of fiction but would not be acceptable to most members of an audience which sought a ‘translation’ of the saga. A version set in Iceland about the year 1000 in which an omniscient author allowed Njáll, Gunnarr, Mörðr, Hallgerðr and other saga personalities from Brennu-Njáls saga to explain and analyse their thoughts and motivations in extended internal monologues would be almost equally problematical to an audience which had an awareness that such elaborations had no direct basis in the Icelandic text, and were in fact antithetical to its style. In the discussions that follow the guidance of two published bibliographies has been very valuable. The first is Norse Sagas Translated into English: A Bibliography (New York: AMS), published by Donald K. Fry in 1980, and the second is the article ‘Norse Sagas Translated into English: A Supplement’, which Paul Acker published in Scandinavian Studies, 65 (1993), 66–102. Both of these bibliographers label most of the English language works they record with the abbreviation ‘Tr’ (translated), indicating that they are translations of the Icelandic works under which they are listed, while others are described as having ‘Paraphrased’ the Icelandic work in question (Fry) or as being a ‘Summary’ or ‘Paraphrase’ (Acker). Fry professes to ‘include abstracts and paraphrases selectively, generally excluding retellings for children’ (p. xx), and Acker also flags a more selective approach to such works: I also add a number of paraphrases, summaries, and excerpts not recorded by Fry or under the translation subheadings in the Islandica bibliographies.10 These entries fall into three main categories: 1. summaries and excerpts (especially where these antedate complete translations) in nineteenth-century studies and journals; 2. summaries, excerpts, and reprints of works relating to the Vinland explorations; and 3. summaries of romances [...] Many of the entries of this last type are for as yet untranslated sagas and should be of use to translators seeking new projects. (p. 66)

The corpus of translations examined in the present work consists primarily, unless otherwise indicated, of the works Fry and Acker identify as translations, supplemented by more recent translations that appeared too late to be included in Acker’s bibliography. To a large extent what is involved is in fact an ‘operational definition’ of translations: a translation is a work which identifies itself as such.11

10

The periodical Islandica, issued from Cornell University, has published a number of volumes providing bibliographical information on various genres of Icelandic sagas. 11

For ‘operational definitions’ see S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, 3rd edn (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974), pp. 157–58, 171.

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Though Fry entitled his bibliography Norse Sagas Translated into English he in fact included several works which are not sagas or examples of the shorter Old Icelandic narrative form, the þáttr (plural þættir). Fry does this without comment, but Acker (p. 66) explicitly acknowledges he is doing so: ‘Like Fry, I add prose works that are not sagas in a strict sense (e.g. laws, translated histories, religious works, miscellanies, orthographical treatises), so that our combined bibliographies aim at covering English translations of all Old West Norse prose works’ (p. 66). By mentioning ‘Old West Norse’ he includes works in Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian, but not the very small number in the East Norse languages Old Danish and Old Swedish. This lead will be followed here. A desire for comprehensiveness might be one reason for including translations of works that are not sagas in a bibliography which declares that its focus is on sagas, but a more potent one for including them in the present context is that the works in question, notably legal texts and the seemingly historical Íslendingabók and Landnámabók, present many of the same challenges to translators as the sagas, and are often read by those whose interest in medieval Iceland and saga literature develops beyond the superficial. Though our attention here will be focused primarily on the sagas and þættir, references will be made to translations of other Old Icelandic prose literature when doing so seems to shed interesting light on the translation process and translation achievements. (The term ‘saga’ will normally be used for convenience to encompass sagas, þættir, and other Old Icelandic prose texts.) Like Fry’s and Acker’s bibliographies, this study essentially limits itself to prose texts. This is not from any conviction that poetic texts are less important or less interesting in terms of the translation challenges they present. But Old Icelandic poetry presents many special challenges and has probably appealed to rather different audiences from those that have admired the prose. Some of it, the poetry mostly found in the Elder or Poetic Edda, deals with Norse gods and legendary heroes in powerful and often dramatic verse to which most readers open to literary experiences can readily respond; but this Eddaic poetry comprises only a small part of the surviving Old Icelandic verse. The major part of what remains today is what is usually described as ‘skaldic’ verse. This linguistically and metrically complex and highly allusive poetic form certainly has its admirers, and currently a major international project to edit and translate the corpus of skaldic verse is in progress. But skaldic poetry bristles with difficulties that pose formidable barriers to comprehension and appreciation and will probably ensure it is always the preserve of the expert and the connoisseur. In this study Old Icelandic poetry will engage our attention only as a consequence

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of the fact that skaldic verses are embedded in many of the sagas and need to be presented in English guise if a translator aims to provide a comprehensive version of the Icelandic text. It could not be legitimately asserted that, in limiting ourselves to translations of Icelandic prose literature, we are focusing on a small body of texts, or a homogeneous one. For a society whose numbers probably never much exceeded 50,000 people, medieval Iceland was remarkably prolific in the vernacular — far more so, it would seem from the surviving evidence, than the Continental Scandinavian societies. Much of what was produced, including almost all the great many saints’ lives and other religious texts, has never been translated, but a great deal has. Apart from the religious literature (and works which are not strictly sagas) one can for convenience list six major genres of saga literature, all of which are represented in the translation corpus. This categorization has been widely employed by scholars over the last fifty years, though it should be borne in mind that it reflects modern rather than medieval ways of considering the sagas, and it is open to challenge.12 Íslendingasögur, ‘sagas of Icelanders’, or sagas dealing primarily with people and events in Iceland during the period 930–1030. (The term ‘family sagas’ has also been employed to refer to this group, but it is frequently avoided today as misleading, since the sagas in question are often not, in fact, accounts of families, and because the phrase tends to be associated with a largely discredited view of how the sagas originated.) Though comparatively neglected in the early modern period this genre has been by far the most popular in the past one hundred years, both amongst readers of translations and those able to understand the original Icelandic; Konungasögur, ‘sagas of kings’, by which is meant primarily kings of Norway, though this genre is frequently widened to include sagas relating to the rulers of other regions within the Scandinavian orbit, including the Orkney and Shetland Islands, which did not finally pass from Scandinavian to Scottish control until 1468–69; Samtíðarsögur, ‘contemporary sagas’, dealing with events in Iceland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, culminating in the loss of independence and acceptance of Norwegian overlordship in 1262–64. The period was characterized by an unedifying power struggle, but it was also the time when many of the

12

For a discussion of the issues surrounding the establishment of saga genres see Philip Westbury Cardew, A Translation of Þorskfirðinga (Gull-Þóris) saga (Lewiston: Mellen, 2000), pp. 2–70.

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better-known sagas were committed to parchment. As has frequently been observed, the samtíðarsögur in fact deal with relatively recent rather than contemporary events, but at least one important example, Íslendinga saga13 by Sturla Þórðarson, was written by a writer who himself participated actively in some of the events described; Biskupasögur, ‘sagas of the bishops’ who, from Iceland’s two sees of Skálholt (founded 1056) and Hólar (founded 1106), played major roles not only in the affairs of the Christian church in Iceland but also in much which a modern perspective would consider secular matters; Fornaldarsögur, ‘sagas of ancient times’, or ‘mythical-heroic sagas’, focusing on Scandinavian heroes who allegedly flourished before the settlement of Iceland, which in the Middle Ages was regarded as commencing about the year 870; Riddarasögur, ‘sagas of knights’, chivalric romances presumably translated from French originals or inspired by such models. In view of this diversity one would not expect a single motivation to have inspired all the translators who have published English language translations in the last two hundred years. In fact, as we look more closely in the following chapters at what was produced during various periods we shall discover a rich variety of reasons for translating, with many translators indicating more than one motivation for their work.

Translation for the reader interested in history Many of the more famous sagas read as though they are historical accounts written by people inspired like reputable modern historians by a desire to provide a factual and objective account of ‘what actually happened’. The Íslendingasögur describe events that they allege to have taken place in Iceland in the settlement period and, more especially, the first generations after the island had become fully settled by immigrants from Norway and elsewhere. In longer Íslendingasögur, such as Laxdœla saga and Eyrbyggja saga, the narrative follows prominent families through several generations and appears to provide a fairly comprehensive picture of the early days in the district concerned. Heimskringla, the acknowledged masterpiece among the konungasögur, is in the form of a series of accounts of the kings of Norway, reign by reign, from the earliest times down

13

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Not to be confused, of course, with the genre term Íslendingasögur.

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to 1177. Even some of the fornaldarsögur give the impression of having an historical dimension. Few modern readers would be inclined to treat them as reliable sources, as the adventures they record often seem far-fetched and generally improbable, but seventeenth-century and later scholars did mine fornaldarsögur for historical information, notably in regard to the early history of Scandinavia.14 The matter of whether the sagas have relevance to the work of the professional historian is one on which opinions have differed greatly. Before the middle decades of the twentieth century the majority of scholars probably did see them as trustworthy historical sources on the whole, though there were important dissenters from this view. It was accepted that some were more reliable than others, and that there were discrepancies and anomalies to be resolved, but this of course did not in itself distinguish the sagas from other kinds of historical documents. If one were writing a history of medieval Iceland or Viking-Age Europe it long seemed perfectly acceptable to draw on saga evidence, a practice encouraged both by the vividness of saga accounts and the fact that, for many aspects of the subject, the other evidence available was scanty and incomplete. A strong reaction to this approach set in, particularly in Iceland itself, culminating in the publication in 1956 of a major history of medieval Iceland which refused to make use of evidence from the Íslendingasögur (though it did employ evidence from the samtíðarsögur and biskupasögur).15 Reviewing the book Das alte Island by Hans Kuhn in 1972, another Icelandic historian, Björn Þorsteinsson, rather bitingly commented: On page 42 we are told that that Grettir Ásmundarson, ‘der letzte Held einer grossen Isländersage’, was killed in 1030. In Iceland today this information would be regarded

14

See Theodore M. Andersson, The Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins: A Historical Survey, Yale Germanic Studies, 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); Gerd Wolfgang Weber, ‘The Decadence of Feudal Myth: Towards a Theory of Riddarasaga and Romance’, in Structure and Meaning in Old Norse Literature, ed. by John Lindow, Lars Lönnroth, and Gerd Wolfgang Weber, The Northern Collection: Studies in Northern Civilization, 3 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1988), pp. 415–54 (p. 416). 15

Jón Jóhannesson, Íslendinga saga. I. Þjóðveldisöld (Reykjavík: Almenna Bókafélagið, 1956); English translation under the title A History of the Old Icelandic Commonwealth. Íslendinga saga, trans. by Haraldur Bessason, University of Manitoba Icelandic Studies, 2 ([Winnipeg]: University of Manitoba Press, 1974).

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as scholarship on a par with a determination of the date of Grendel’s death in an English history book.16

Most historians today would probably regard the reaction as somewhat overshooting the mark, but most would also accept that, while the sagas may appear to be recounting history, they generally have not stood up very well to academic scrutiny as historical sources.17 While the samtíðarsögur can, with caution, be used in compiling a history of thirteenth-century Iceland, an historian of Viking-Age Norway or Iceland around the year 1000 cannot safely draw on Heimskringla or the Íslendingasögur to supplement the meagre evidence available from such sources as runic inscriptions, archaeology, and numismatics, unless what is provided in the sagas receives independent corroboration from other sources. For the most part they are, at best, evidence of what thirteenthcentury authors believed to have happened hundreds of years earlier. Translators of the sagas have certainly seen themselves as providing material for the professional historian — or for the amateur historian, student, and general reader with historical tastes, since it is of course an accepted principle that a scholar should make every effort to examine sources in the original language. Thus Samuel Laing, author of the first English translation of Heimskringla, published in 1844, declared that he translated ‘for the ordinary reader of history’.18 Nearly ninety years later, in 1932, Erling Monsen outlined a more sophisticated historical purpose in introducing his Heimskringla translation: It was the study of various English chronicles that caused this translation of Heimskringla to be undertaken. By collating the chroniclers with Snorre it has often been possible to solve problems which have hitherto been obscure, and although we do not profess to have solved them in their entirety we believe that we have shown the right way for further research work in this uncertain and difficult path of English and Scandinavian history.19

16

Review in Mediaeval Scandinavia, 5 (1972), 186–88 (p. 187). Kuhn actually says that Grettir wahrscheinlich (‘probably’) died in 1031. See pp. 41–42 of the first edition of his book, published in Düsseldorf by Diederichs in 1971. 17 See Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 8–10. 18

The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway, Translated from the Icelandic of Snorro Sturleson, 3 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844), I, p. v. 19

Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla or The Lives of the Norse Kings, ed. with notes by Erling Monsen and translated into English with the assistance of A. H. Smith (Cambridge: Heffer, 1932), p. xxx.

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In 1964 Lee M. Hollander was more cautious in presenting his Heimskringla translation as history. The sub-title of his book is indeed History of the Kings of Norway,20 but it is notable that Hollander’s introduction places its emphasis far more on Snorri Sturluson as an historian than on his work as reliable history, and history is not of significant concern in his notes. The cover of King Harald’s Saga, the translation of the part of Heimskringla dealing with events in England in 1066, which Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson published in the Penguin Classics series in 1966, does indeed suggest that the saga is the work of an ‘Icelandic historian’, but the introduction states that ‘Heimskringla is not a work of history at all in the modern sense of the term’ (p. 13).

Translation for reasons of nation and race The historical dimension is particularly important in considering the motivation of English language translators, for in English-speaking countries those interested in the sagas as history have often seen them as more than just intellectually stimulating accounts of the past. They value them for the light they can shed on the early history of the British Isles or of North America, the areas of the world with which many of the translators themselves identify and expect their readers to identify. Texts mentioning the Norse incursions into the British Isles were among the first to be translated into English by James Johnstone and Grímur Thorkelin in the final decades of the eighteenth century; and the so-called ‘Vínland Sagas’, Grœnlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða, recording voyages of exploration and settlement to what is now Canada and possibly also the United States, have been by far the most frequently translated of all Old Icelandic prose texts. Even if translators may not themselves be especially nationalistic, publishers with an eye to ensuring sales have been very ready to emphasize the relevance of the text being presented to the national history of likely readers. The first saga translation published by Penguin was indeed Brennu-Njáls saga, generally regarded as the greatest of all the sagas, and a work whose action mainly takes place in Iceland itself, but the second, in 1965, was entitled The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America, and the third, one year later, was

20

Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway, trans. by Lee M. Hollander (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1954).

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WHY TRANSLATE THE SAGAS?

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the above-mentioned King Harald’s Saga.21 When the translation of Orkneyinga saga by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards appeared early in 1978, the first sentence of the dust-jacket ‘blurb’ informed potential purchasers that ‘This is a new translation of the only Norse Saga concerned with what is now part of the British Isles.’22 Even when saga narratives do not mention Britain or North America, English language translators might still have a patriotic motive. Nineteenth-century translators in particular were very conscious that Norwegian and Danish invaders had raided and settled in Britain during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, and many, including such prominent figures as Samuel Laing, George Webbe Dasent, and Rasmus B. Anderson,23 believed that what was fine in the culture of modern Britain and the United States was essentially a legacy of this Scandinavian infusion into the genetic stock of the British Isles, and the revitalization of Anglo-Saxon England with the concepts and institutions brought by the invaders. A splendidly vigorous statement of this view, and an indication of the reach of its appeal, is to be found in the final paragraph of a work which acknowledges (pp. iii–iv) a debt to the saga translations of Laing and Dasent, Erling the Bold: A Tale of the Norse Sea-Kings (London: James Nisbet, 1875), one of the very many adventure books for boys published by the once very highly regarded R. M. Ballantyne (1825–94): Yes, there is perhaps more of Norse blood in your veins than you wot of, reader, whether you be English or Scotch, for those sturdy sea-rovers invaded our lands from north, south, east, and west many a time in days gone by, and held it in possession for centuries at a time, leaving a lasting and beneficial impress on our customs and characters. We have good reason to regard their memory with respect and gratitude, despite their faults and sins, for much of what is good and true in our laws and social customs, much of what is manly and vigorous in the British Constitution, and much of our intense love of freedom and fair-play, is due to the pith, pluck, enterprise, and sense of justice that dwelt in the breast of the rugged old Sea-kings of Norway! (p. 437)

Thus, in providing texts relating to old Scandinavia the translators saw themselves as patriotically enhancing an awareness of what was really an integral 21 All three volumes were introduced and translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson. 22 23

Orkneyinga saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney (London: Hogarth Press, 1978).

See Lloyd Hustvedt, Rasmus Bjørn Anderson: Pioneer Scholar (Northfield, MN: The Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1966), p. 146; Jón Karl Helgason, The Rewriting of Njáls saga: Translation, Ideology and Icelandic Sagas, Topics in Translation, 16 (Cleveden: Multilingual Matters, 1999), pp. 60–62, 71; Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, p. 99.

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part of the history of the English-speaking peoples. Even if the saga being translated did not place any particular emphasis on people and events in Britain or North America, it still recorded the doings of ‘our kin of long ago’.24 Pride in nation, combined with pride in a heritage shared with the Scandinavian peoples, could manifest itself as pride in race – in a common Nordic or Germanic bond of blood. This, of course, was not confined to British Commonwealth countries and the United States of America; its manifestations in Scandinavia and more especially Germany in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century seem sinister and distasteful when viewed, as they inevitably are today, in the light of the atrocities that Germanic and Nordic racism were enlisted to justify during the period of the German Third Reich.25 References to race in the work of English translators tend, in contrast, to be relatively benign, though they can occur in perhaps unexpected places, such as the work of William Morris: In conclusion, we must again say how strange it seems to us, that this Volsung Tale, […] should never before have been translated into English. For this is the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks — to all our race first, and afterwards, when the change of the world has made our race nothing more than a name of what has been — a story too — then should it be to those that come after us no less than the Tale of Troy has been to us.26

Translation to assist literary appreciation A common motive for translating a text from another language is, of course, to allow readers who do not have an adequate command of the original language to experience something of the literary richness of the text. From at least the time

24

W. G. Collingwood and Jón Stefánsson in their introduction to their translation The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald Being the Icelandic Kormáks saga (Ulverston: Holmes 1902; repr. [Felinfach]: Llanerch Publishers, 1991), p. 21. 25

For discussion of the association between translation from the Old Icelandic and racist ideas in Germany see Maria Winkler, Isländersagas und ihre Übersetzungen, Weiner Arbeiten zur germanischen Altertumskunde und Philologie, 32 (Bern: Lang, 1989); Julia Zernack, Geschichte aus Thule: Íslendingasögur in Übersetzungen deutscher Germanisten, Berliner Beiträge zur Skandinavistik, 3 (Berlin: Freie Universität, 1994). 26

Eiríkr Magnússon and W illiam Morris in the preface to their translation, Volsunga saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda (London: Ellis, 1870; repr. London: Prior; Totowa: Cooper Square, 1980), p. xi.

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WHY TRANSLATE THE SAGAS?

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of Samuel Laing, who in 1844 expressed the hope ‘that his labour will be of good service in the field of literature, by bringing before the English public a work of great literary merit’,27 the sagas have been admired as literature, and translators have aimed at allowing English speakers to appreciate the literary qualities of the Icelandic texts. Much of the discussion of how best to translate the sagas, to which we will turn in the next chapter, has been a discussion of how best to convey the special qualities of saga prose, so seemingly simple and artless and yet so rich and complex, and the distinctive ethos of the more famous sagas, to an English-speaking audience. Interest in the sagas primarily as works of literature has certainly increased as trust in their historical reliability has diminished, though the relationship may not be a simple one of cause and effect: an increased willingness to look at texts as literary rather than philological monuments developed in other areas of medieval studies during the twentieth century, and the change in the case of the sagas may also owe more to the decline in the study of historical philology than to diminishing trust in the historicity of the sagas. While translators have seen literary merits in konungasögur and fornaldarsögur, and to a lesser extent in samtíðarsögur and riddarasögur, it is the Íslendingasögur which most readily spring to mind when one thinks of Icelandic sagas being presented in translation primarily as works of literature. The predominance of Íslendingasögur among English translations probably owes much to a perception that many of what are considered to be the most profound and insightful works — Brennu-Njáls saga, Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, Gísla saga Súrssonar, Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, and Laxdœla saga — are included in this genre.

Translation for the benefit of the student of comparative literature or literature in translation Several well-known medieval French romances, including the Tristan of Thomas of Brittany and the Erec, Perceval, and Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes, were translated into Icelandic and survive as sagas. Though such sagas can doubtless be enjoyed in their own right, and at least three translators of riddarasögur — Paul Schach in translating Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, and Foster W. Blaisdell and Marianne Kalinke in their jointly published translations of Erex saga and Ívens

27

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Laing, Heimskringla, I, p. iv.

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saga28 — expressed the hope that their work might appeal to general readers, a clear reason for presenting English versions of riddarasögur has been to assist scholars whose principal interest is in another medieval vernacular (particularly, though not exclusively, Old French). The principle that a scholar should read all his or her medieval texts in their original languages could hardly be enforced rigidly in the case of all those doing research on some of the Old French romances (notably those with an Arthurian connection) which were so remarkably influential in medieval Europe and which survive in so many disparate vernaculars from Spain to Russia, and Iceland to Greece.29 It is, however, not just the hard-pressed Arthurian scholar needing to trace the occurrence of a theme or motif in a dozen different languages who engages in comparative literature studies. Such studies, based largely on the consultation of translations, have blossomed in universities throughout much of the Englishspeaking world. While fifty years ago undergraduate students were, as a rule, required to learn Old English if they wished to read Beowulf, and Old Icelandic if they wished to read the sagas, and the existence of translations of those texts was officially ignored in the curricula prepared by academic staff, who often discouraged their use by students on the grounds that it would tend to interfere with efforts to master the linguistic intricacies of the original texts, a very different attitude now prevails. Subjects and courses proclaiming themselves as dealing with ‘literature in translation’ have been commonplace for many years, and students are encouraged to read the sagas in translation, often as part of a study which also includes Modern English language versions of works such as The Iliad and The Aeneid, or Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied.

Translation in the service of anthropology A desire to shed light on the customs and beliefs of medieval Scandinavia has been a frequent motive for translation, often closely linked with the historical one. Indeed, the very earliest appearance of an Icelandic prose text in English was that of the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, in a work significantly entitled 28

The Saga of Tristram and Isönd (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), p. xi, dust jacket; Erex saga and Ívens saga (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), p. [vii]. 29

See, for example, The Tristan Legend: Texts from Northern Europe and Eastern Europe in Modern English Translation, ed. by Joyce Hill, Leeds Medieval Studies, 2 (Leeds: University of Leeds Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies, 1977); The Romance of Arthur III: Works from Russia to Spain, Norway to Italy, ed. by James I. Wilhelm (New York: Garland, 1988).

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WHY TRANSLATE THE SAGAS?

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Northern Antiquities; or a Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion, and Laws of the Ancient Danes, published in 1770.30 In 1925, introducing his translation of Laxdœla saga, Thorstein Veblen acknowledged that it was highly regarded as a literary work but described it as ‘an ethnological document of a high order [...] of prime significance for any understanding of that peculiar phase of culture that makes up its setting; that is to say the period which comprises the close of the Viking Age, so called, and the advent of the Christian Faith in Iceland and in Northern Europe more at large’.31 However, saga translations from an avowedly anthropological perspective have been rare, the leading exponents being the husband and wife team of professional anthropologists Paul and Dorothy Durrenberger, who claim that their extremely close English versions are in the tradition of anthropological translations that are ‘used in the service of cultural description’.32 Their versions of Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu and Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings are among the most distinctive and controversial of recent saga translations.

Translation to assist readers of the Icelandic text In talking and writing about translations there is a temptation to divide the world into those who can read the text in the original language and do not need a translation on the one hand, and on the other hand those whose total ignorance of the original language makes them dependent on a translation.33 In reality, of course, an infinite number of stages lie in between, and not even serious scholars of Old Icelandic can reasonably be expected to be able to read an unfamiliar unnormalized text with no difficulty. In recognition of this some editions of the original texts, including several uncompromisingly scholarly

30

London: Carnan, 1770. The translator into English was Thomas Percy.

31

The Laxdœla Saga, trans. by Thorstein Veblen (New York: Huebsch, 1925), p. vi.

32

The Saga of Gunnlaugur Snake’s Tongue, with an Essay on the Structure and Translation of the Saga, trans. by E. Paul Durrenberger and Dorothy Durrenberger (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992), p. 47. See also their translation of The Saga of Hávarður of Ísafjörður, with an Essay on the Political, Economic and Cultural Background of the Saga (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik, 1996) and their essay ‘Translating Gunnlaug’s Saga: An Anthropological Approach to Literary Style and Cultural Structures’, Translation Review, 21–22 (1986), 11–20. 33

See, for example, Peter Foote, ‘Saman er bræðra eign bezt at sjá: A Personal View of Recent Scholarship in the Fields of Mutual Norse-Romance Interest’, Bibliography of Old Norse-Icelandic Studies (1975), 7–28 (pp. 12–13).

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publications from the Arnamagnæan Commission in Copenhagen, include English translations as part of their apparatus. In some cases, such as the translation of Plácidus saga by John Tucker in his 1998 Editiones Arnamagnæanæ edition of that saga, the English version is pleasantly readable,34 but in others, such as Foster W. Blaisdell’s edition of Erex saga Artuskappa,35 it is almost unreadable as a continuous narration, and no doubt was never intended to be read in such a way. In editing Ívens saga for the same Arnamagnæan series Blaisdell explains that The translation is designed to follow the Icelandic text as closely as possible. Its intent is to provide a close control of the unnormalized text, especially for those who may not be too familiar with such orthography; it consequently makes no pretence at any literary merit.36

Translation to provide a different or a ‘better’ version The following chapters will make it very clear that, in many cases, the same saga has been rendered into English on several occasions. The reasons for this are various: translators coming anew to a text may have a different kind of audience in mind (admirers of literature rather than amateur historians, for example), or they may believe that the earlier version employs an approach inappropriate to an audience in their own time (notably by the use of archaic language); they may just believe that they can provide a better translation. The reason for such a belief may not necessarily be a sense of personal superiority. The manuscript situation with many Icelandic sagas is far more complex that is typically the case with Old and Middle English literature. There are often numerous Icelandic manuscripts and recensions on parchment and paper, differing very significantly in completeness and contents, and interrelated in ways that are far from straightforward or obvious. Early editions and translations were often based on what now appears to be far from the best available manuscript evidence, and the process of establishing a text has often taken a long time and involved controversy. (In recent years the very idea of establishing a definitive text has itself become somewhat controversial.) The need for a new translation can arise because an edition of a text that presents the saga

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34

Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, Series B, 31 (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1998), pp. 73–86.

35

Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, Series B, 19 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1965), pp. 75–105.

36

Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, Series B, 18 (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1979), p. 150.

WHY TRANSLATE THE SAGAS?

19

in a new light has become available, or because there seems a case for providing readers of English with a version of the saga significantly different from that which has previously enjoyed canonical status or at least primacy – as Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson have done in the case of Fóstbrœðra saga and Gísla saga Súrssonar.37

Translations — for whom? It is a truism of translation theory that a practitioner who takes the task seriously does not just translate, but translates for an audience.38 It will be obvious from the discussion above that translators have envisaged readers with a variety of interests — literary, historical, or anthropological among them — and with varying degrees of scholarly sophistication. In fact, however, many translations seem to target more than one audience with the same version: often the history ‘buff’ and the connoisseur of literature are both promised something of interest. No doubt this largely reflects the exigencies of the publishing industry: saga translations are generally not likely to become ‘bestsellers’ and if the translators themselves are inclined not to be too concerned about maximizing the market, their publishers will aim to do so with a carefully worded ‘blurb’ on the cover or flyleaf. Discussing the origins in 1994 of the Leifur Eiríksson Publishing Company’s project to produce a complete English translation of the Íslendingasögur, Keneva Kunz indicates that the first question raised was ‘Who are the proposed reading audience?’. The question led her to reflect on an aspect of the intended audience for English language translations which, in her view, distinguishes them from translations into other languages: For some reason, English saga translations almost always seem aimed at that elusive figure, the ‘general reader’. This is not true, for instance, of Danish or Norwegian translations, which are often unashamedly for study purposes, or German editions which usually pride themselves on their scholarly aims. As a result their supporting apparatus: introduction, notes, commentary, etc., is often longer [than] the text itself.39

37

See The Icelandic Sagas, ed. by Magnus Magnusson and others, 2 vols (London: Folio Society, 1999–2002), II. 38

See Eugene A. Nida and Charles R. Taber, The Theory and Practice of Translation, Help for Translators, 8 (Leiden: Brill, 1969), p. 1. 39

‘No one but a Blockhead ever Translated, except for Money’, in Rimbaud’s Rainbow: Literary Translation in Higher Education, ed by Peter Bush and Kirsten Malmkjær

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Perhaps the ‘almost always’ in this statement is an exaggeration: we have already noticed English translations that clearly had a scholarly audience in mind, and which, embedded in the austere volumes of scholarly series’, would not come to the attention of many ‘general readers’. There have also been translations whose retail price meant that only a wealthy elite could ever be expected to purchase them, or otherwise obtain access to them, as all concerned must have realized. The lavishly produced six-volume ‘Saga Library’ of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, published by the firm of the famous bibliophile Bernard Quaritch between 1891 and 1905, was clearly one example, and despite the egalitarian sentiments of William Morris it would be hard not to suspect that those concerned with producing this demanding translation did not really have the ‘general reader’ in mind. But no one who peruses saga translations on the shelves of a library in the English-speaking world is likely to doubt the general validity of Kunz’s observation, at least where English language translations are concerned. Her observation needs to be kept in mind as we now turn our attention to an examination of how the sagas have been translated and presented to their audience.

(Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1998), pp. 69–78 (p. 72).

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Chapter 2

T HE T ASK OF THE T RANSLATOR

T

he translator of a computer manual may face considerable difficulties including, one suspects, an original that too often is by no means as clear and well written as it might be. But he or she does not usually need to agonize about the style that would be appropriate for the translation, or about the differing resonances that might be created in the reader’s mind by different stylistic choices. The aim of the translation exercise should obviously be to produce a utilitarian tool that will assist its readers in using their machines in the same way that users of the original manual are assisted by the manual in the original language. Though there have been saga translators who provided their translated text without any accompanying observations on how they envisaged the task of translation, most who have published English language versions of Icelandic prose texts have clearly not seen their work as comparable with translating a technical manual. Even when they have viewed the text being translated as primarily a source for the historian rather than as a work of literature, there has generally been a stated concern about ensuring that its impact on the reader is an appropriate one. This has entailed concern about matters of presentation and style, and an appreciation that saga translation is not a straightforward activity. A crucial question, of course, is what kind of impact a saga translation should make on its readers. This has been one of the most debated issues in the history of saga translation. It is possible to identify at least seven possible approaches: 1. A saga translation could aim at producing the effect on its modern audience that the creator of the medieval text intended the original to produce on the medieval Icelandic audience. In circumstances where the original author and translator are contemporaries an approach such as this is clearly a viable option, especially in a environment of inexpensive telephone calls and electronic

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mail. Some modern novelists and playwrights take a very active interest in the work of those translating them, and the resulting translation can be a collaboration between original author and translator, with the aim of doing everything possible to ensure that the translated text affects readers of the target language in the way that the original author intended readers would be affected by the original text in the source language. Obviously, being faithful to an original author’s intentions is more difficult when the author has been dead for well over six hundred years, as is the case with the sagas. However, it is possible to imagine a translator seeing his or her work as primarily an act of homage to Snorri Sturluson or to the anonymous author of a recognized masterpiece such as Brennu-Njáls saga or Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, and doing everything possible to achieve what the saga author apparently intended to achieve. Such an approach would face a major obstacle, however, in the nature of saga literature. The famous ‘saga objectivity’ has certainly been exaggerated: there are more clues to how authors wanted their audiences to regard characters and events than may be obvious at a cursory glance. No doubt the appearance of objectivity and sparseness is itself an important indication of intent: clearly those responsible for the better known sagas did not intend to create richly ornate narratives or to teach heavily underscored and unmistakable moral lessons. But the mainly anonymous sagas are in general at least as enigmatic as the Homeric poems or Beowulf: basically we can do no more than engage in informed speculation as to why they were created and how their authors intended them to be received. Indeed, though scholars today would generally accept that the sagas certainly had authors, the extent to which these people thought of themselves as authors in the modern sense of the word is a very moot point. They may possibly have seen themselves primarily as recording traditions current in the district, even if modern scholars are convinced that in fact they were doing far more than this. The sagas as they have come down to us may well be the work of several ‘authors’ in the modern sense of the term, undoubtedly a complication when one contemplates authorial intent. Trying to accomplish in a translation of a saga what one thinks the original author intended to accomplish must probably be rejected as an unusually unprofitable undertaking in view of the nature of the literature in question and the lack of available evidence: more than most writers, saga authors do not signal their intentions. There is in any case the issue of whether focusing on authorial intention is a valid way of responding to a saga. Arguably, a text should be

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KATERN 2

THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR

23

considered as an entity existing in its own right, with meanings and resonances independent of what the author consciously had in mind. 2. A translation could aim at having the effect on a modern audience that the original text would have had on the original audience. Here, of course, we have to do with the well-known ‘law of comparable effect’,1 or the ‘principle of equivalent effect’2 postulating that ‘that translation is the best which comes nearest to creating in its audience the same impression as was made by the original on its contemporaries’.3 It is a view with a long and respectable history, both in saga translation and in other areas of translation activity. This principle would seem to encourage fidelity to the original text. It would also seem to encourage translation of the sagas (apart from the skaldic verses) into clear modern English, since the available evidence suggests that most sagas were written in a somewhat spare and condensed version of the medieval Icelandic vernacular, as preserved, for example, in the utilitarian documents of the first volume of Diplomatarium Islandicum.4 A translation according to this principle should be an accessible one, as there is no reason to believe that the sagas were not accessible to those who experienced them in Iceland during the Middle Ages and the succeeding centuries. One major problem is, of course, that identified by Matthew Arnold in his famous 1861 essay On Translating Homer: I advise the translator not to try ‘to rear on the basis of the Iliad, a poem that shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have affected its natural hearers’, and for this simple reason, that we cannot possibly tell how the Iliad ‘affected its natural hearers’. […] Evidently the translator needs some more practical directions than these. No one can tell him how Homer affected the Greeks […]5

1

Einar Haugen, ‘On Translating from the Scandinavian’, in Old Norse Literature and Mythology, ed. by Edgar C. Polomé (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), pp. 3–18 (pp. 7–8). 2

Randolph Quirk, ‘Dasent, Morris, and Aspects of Translation’, Saga-Book, 14 (1955), 64–77, repr. with some revision in his The Linguist and the English Language (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), pp. 97–109 (p. 106). 3

I,

Cassell’s Encyclopaedia of Literature, ed. by S. H. Steinberg, 2 vols (London: Cassell, 1953), 555, quoted in Quirk, The Linguist, p. 106. 4

Diplomatarium Islandicum. Íslenzkt fornbréfasafn, 16 vols (Copenhagen: Hið íslenzka bókmenntafélag, 1857–1972), I. 5

Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer, ed. by W. H. O. Rouse (London: Longman, 1861; repr. London: John Murray, 1905), p. 35.

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The situation is basically the same with the sagas: no one can really tell the modern translator how the sagas affected those who encountered them in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Even rather fundamental matters are uncertain: did members of the first audiences believe they were encountering historical fact or historical fiction (and would they have understood the distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in a way resembling a modern understanding)? Did they see the Íslendingasögur as creations of writers whom they readily could have named, or did they see them as a distillation of local oral traditions, in which the ‘author’ played a minor role? There is a further problem that has in fact become even more acute than it was when Arnold wrote in 1861. What was everyday reality (or at least normality) for the first audiences of the sagas is very different from everyday reality in English-speaking countries at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Only a few examples need be mentioned here to illustrate the point. Thirteenth-century Icelanders lived on largely self-sufficient farms in a society that lacked towns, or even villages. They were entirely isolated from the world outside Iceland for several months of the year, and during the long winter even travel to other districts of Iceland was scarcely to be contemplated. Until matters began to change after Iceland’s submission to the Norwegian crown in 1262–64 theirs was a society where there was little or no executive power, where it was acceptable to settle differences with sword and spear and to pay compensation in various forms of wealth for killings and woundings. This is not the world of the modern English speaker, and a saga which describes it will not have the effect in translation on such a reader that the original had on a medieval Icelandic audience. Achieving exactly comparable effect is therefore impossible, and an interesting dilemma arises: should there be a reworking of the original in which the protagonists live in the suburbs, drive cars, can expect intervention by the police in their disputes if there is violence, and in extreme cases use guns? Would we really want to call such a reworking a translation? Yet another related difficulty deserves mention. The medieval audience of the sagas experienced them either by reading handwritten parchments, probably aloud, or — what is likely to have been the more common experience — by listening to another person reading. The modern edition of the original text, or modern translation, in a standardized printed book, or in a document on the Internet, provides a very different experience to the modern reader silently perusing it.

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3. A translation could aim at having the effect on a modern English-speaking audience that the original text has on modern Icelanders. Here clearly we are on firmer ground. While the language of Beowulf is a foreign language to a modern English speaker, if not spiritually then at least in the sense that fluency in Modern English leaves one quite unable to read the medieval text, any literate Icelander today can read the sagas with little difficulty. Though most modern Icelanders are probably no more likely to spend the evening reading the sagas than their counterparts in Britain are to spend it with a volume of the works of Shakespeare, there is no shortage of educated Icelanders able to tell a translator how a saga affects them. Modern Icelandic is not Old Icelandic, of course. There have been some changes in spelling, morphology, and syntax, and the vocabulary has developed to meet the needs of a modern first world society — though generally by using existing words as ‘building blocks’ and avoiding the borrowing into Icelandic of loan words from other languages. An English translation of a saga which sought to have the impact on a modern reader that the original saga has on a modern Icelander would probably need to be slightly old-fashioned in its style — enough to be noticeable, but not enough to pose more than the most occasional barrier to comprehension. Icelanders have played a major role in producing English translations of the sagas from almost the very beginning of translation from Old Icelandic prose into English. In 1780 James Johnstone pronounced that ‘The translator wished to have openly acknowledged his obligations to a worthy and ingenious native of Iceland, who assisted him in this performance’, but was prevented by ‘that Gentleman’s extreme delicacy’.6 In Victorian England the Icelander and Englishman translator teams of Eiríkr Magnússon7 and William Morris, Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell were prolific, and in recent years a feature of the Leifur Eiríksson translation project was the ‘Icelandic readthrough’, which involved detailed examination of all the translations by native speakers of Icelandic after native speakers of English had written the first

6

‘To the Reader’ in his Anecdotes of Olave the Black, King of Man, and the Hebridean Princes of the Somerled Family, to Which Are Added XVIII Eulogies on King Haco of Norway by Snorro Sturlson, Poet to that Monarch (Copenhagen: Privately printed, 1780). 7

The Icelander seems to have preferred this spelling of his name rather than ‘Eiríkur’, the usual form in Modern Icelandic. See Andrew Wawn’s forward to Northern Antiquity: The PostMedieval Reception of Edda and Saga, ed. by Andrew W awn (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik, 1994), p. ix.

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versions. The purpose of those collaborations may not actually have been to produce translations which read to English speakers as the original texts read to modern Icelanders, but one suspects that most English-speaking saga scholars would feel that Paul and Dorothy Durrenberger overstate the case when they argue that just as Shakespearian English ‘is largely unintelligible to modern readers [of English] because of radical differences in the social and ideological system of his day and ours’, so ‘modern Icelandic is not a very good guide to medieval Icelandic, and modern Icelanders are not privileged in their access to the literary-historical tradition [of the sagas] any more than the English are to Shakespeare’.8 The fact that the Icelandic nation is a small community on an isolated island that was little affected by immigration in the eleven centuries from the Settlement Period until very recent years, the close affinity many Icelanders feel with the history and topography of their country, and the national enthusiasm for genealogy, as well as the close linguistic similarity of Old and Modern Icelandic, would probably mean that most English-speaking saga scholars would indeed consider the Icelanders as enjoying a privileged position when it comes to interpreting and appreciating saga literature. But for this very reason they would not really regard it as realistic for a translator to aim at creating in English the effect that the original saga has on an Icelandic audience. English language translations need to appeal to people whose links of blood and history to the saga world are far more tenuous, if they exist at all. 4. A translation could aim at providing its English-speaking reader with the sort of experience that an English-speaking scholar fluent in Old Icelandic would obtain from the original. When Matthew Arnold dismissed the idea of attempting to produce a translation of Homer that affected modern readers the way Homer had affected the Ancient Greeks, he proceeded to suggest a more appropriate source of guidance for the translator: No one can tell him [the translator] how Homer affected the Greeks; but there are those who can tell him how Homer affects them. These are scholars, who possess, at the same time with knowledge of Greek, adequate poetical taste and feeling. No translation will seem to them of much worth compared with the original; but they alone can say whether the translation produces more or less the same effect upon them as the original. They are the only competent tribunal in this matter: the Greeks are

8

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Durrenberger and Durrenberger, The Saga of Hávarður, pp. 36–37.

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dead; the unlettered Englishman has not the data for judging; and no man can safely confide in his own single judgment of his own work.9

While few translators of the sagas, apart from those whose versions appear as part of the scholarly apparatus of editions of the original texts, and some translators of riddarasögur, positively state that they are working for scholars, most translators today hold an academic appointment, and most are probably aware that university-based students, teachers, and researchers will provide a large proportion of whatever readers they attract. The idea of producing a translation which scholars will judge as not too poor a substitute for the original is likely to be somewhere in the mind of most saga translators, conscious both of their likely audience and their own scholarly reputation. The translation designed as a scholarly substitute for the original, or hoping to win the approbation of scholars, is likely to be accompanied by much of the apparatus one might expect in a scholarly edition of the original text, or at least that of a student edition. It may include a detailed introduction discussing provenance, date, manuscripts, editions, and so on, notes attempting to explain what might otherwise be somewhat obscure in the text or discussing points of special interest, maps and photographs, indexes, glossaries, genealogical charts, and bibliographies. In some cases, such as the translation of Morkinskinna by Theodore Andersson and Kari Ellen Gade,10 published in 2000, the translation volume is clearly a work of scholarship in its own right, rather than a popularization of the work of others. The style of a translation designed to create the impact that the original would have on the scholar is in fact not easy to predict. Many scholarly translators aspire to clear modern English, often regarded as one of the goals of good scholarly writing, but others, notably those attempting close translations as part of the apparatus of scholarly editions of the original text, deliberately sacrifice fluency to literalness, and may even reproduce obscurities and infelicities in the original. In fact there are many ways in which English-speaking scholars fluent in Old Icelandic could read a saga text. They might read it almost with the ease they would bring to a text in Modern English (particularly if it is a familiar text in normalized orthography). They might, particularly in the case of an unfamiliar and unnormalized text, read it as something inherently difficult which does not easily yield its meaning even to the expert. A scholar more 9 10

Arnold, On Translating Homer, pp. 35–36.

Morkinskinna: The Earliest Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings (1030–1157), Islandica, 51 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).

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familiar with Modern Icelandic than with Old Icelandic, perhaps as a result of an extended stay in Iceland, might read the text easily but with a strong sense that it was something old-fashioned. Or if, as is often the case in Britain and Australia, the English-speaking scholar has come to Old Icelandic studies from a background in Old and Middle English, he or she might be frequently aware of older English usages matching the Icelandic ones. Any approach to translation which focuses on the potential audience must consider the reality that no audience consists of individuals all with exactly the same knowledge and expectations, but saga scholars may well be even more diverse in their response to the sagas than other groups, making it rather difficult to use their responses as a yardstick in devising translations. 5. A translation could aim to provide English-speaking general readers with something which they will readily enjoy reading. While the physical appearance of some saga translations suggests strongly that the publishers have in mind a scholarly audience, others — notably some of the first saga translations published in the Penguin Classics series (eighteen volumes to date, 1960–2005)11 or the Iceland Review Saga Series (seven volumes, 1980–86) — are clearly designed for the much-invoked ‘general reader’. They appear to be designed to give the reader a strong sense of encountering a medieval Icelandic text, but also to provide enjoyable recreational reading for those prepared to experience fare a bit more challenging than that on the ‘bestseller’ list. Such translators will take steps to smooth the reader’s path. The translators aim for a text that reads easily. Saga genealogies likely to bore the reader new to saga literature may be eliminated or relegated to footnotes, and straightforward prose or simple verse renditions of the content of the skaldic verses may take the place of any attempt to represent the original complexity. Introductions and notes are likely to be modest in length and non-technical. The reader will be provided with what — at the risk of sounding a bit patronizing — could be described as a middle-brow cultural experience. Intellectual curiosity and probably a capacity for literary appreciation are expected, but he or she is not expected to deal with the difficult or obscure.

11 The general character of the saga translations appearing in the Penguin Classics series has changed markedly over the years, and the more recent volumes, including those presenting sagas originally published in Reykjavík by Leifur Eiríkson Publishing in their five-volume set entitled The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (ed. by Viðar Hreinsson and others, 1997) are a good deal more scholarly in approach than the earliest volumes from the 1960s.

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The difficulty besetting this approach is that in smoothing the reader’s path the translator can eliminate too much that is distinctive in the original text, and recast the saga as an unchallenging modern novel. We shall explore such criticisms more fully when we examine some of the Penguin Classics translations in a later chapter, but at this point the views of Paul and Dorothy Durrenberger may serve to sum up the objections to the approach: Speakers of modern English do not share the cultural outlook, values, time sense, sense of reality, or literary tradition of the Icelandic commonwealth or its sagamen. To transform the sagas into twentieth century pseudonovels is to deprive readers of the chance to confront the alien and to understand it. To deny that the sagas are alien, by transforming them into stories of killing and retribution, is to domesticate them to the peculiar tastes of the translators. Readers can never appreciate or understand cultural differences if translators insist they do not exist.12

On the other hand, translations which smooth the reader’s way can serve to whet appetites, and some thus encouraged may proceed to a more sophisticated appreciation of Old Icelandic texts in the original or in more challenging translations. The popular 1960 Magnus Magnusson–Hermann Pálsson translation of Brennu-Njáls saga might not now rate as one of the finest saga translations, and Penguin have since replaced it with a newer translation,13 but the more than 100,000 copies sold of its lively and accessible narrative are likely to have stimulated a worthwhile number of students and other readers to take a lasting interest in medieval Iceland and its sagas. 6. A translation could focus on making readers aware that the text translated emanates from the Middle Ages by employing archaic language. In some respects this approach is the reverse of the one just discussed. Instead of lowering barriers to ready accessibility, ‘archaizers’ introduce into their translations features which evoke the English of earlier centuries, with a view to stressing that the saga stems from a period long before the present. Typically their translations employ words, phrases, and grammatical features no longer current in English, though likely to be understood by reasonably well-educated readers, often including the obsolete second person singular pronouns ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ and the associated verbal

12 13

Durrenberger and Durrenberger, The Saga of Gunnlaugur, p. 77.

Njal’s Saga, trans. by Robert Cook (London: Penguin, 2001). Cook’s translation originally appeared in the five-volume Complete Sagas of Icelanders. In a recent review of the Cook translation Robyn Waugh compares it to its 1960 predecessor, referring to ‘these two fine translations’: Scandinavian Studies, 75 (2003), 450–51 (p. 451).

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forms ending in ‘-est or ‘-st’, still fairly familiar from their traditional use in ecclesiastical contexts.14 The main reason for employing such archaic elements is of course the belief that readers are likely to associate them, and the texts in which they appear, with a period long ago in which such forms were current. Because of dramatic changes in the English language over the last seven centuries it is not possible to translate the sagas into any thirteenth-century English dialect and expect that they will be understood by more than a tiny band of specialists (and it is not likely that any of the small number of scholars who could produce a passable saga translation in pseudo-thirteenth-century Middle English would be prepared to undertake the task!). But it is possible to use language to create a distancing from the present. To archaizing translators this distancing seems appropriate: the reader needs in their view to be aware that the translation represents a text surviving from the Middle Ages, and he or she needs encouragement to appreciate it in its medieval context, rather than being tempted to regard it as something created yesterday. Not to include older language forms is to provide the reader with an experience that is false. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries even translators who condemned ‘that sham antiquarianism […] from which Sagatranslations and viking stories have suffered too often’15 still felt strongly that a markedly antique flavour should be evident in a saga translation. According to W. G. Collingwood and Jón Stefánsson: in copying an old picture one may try to restore it — to make it look as it did to contemporaries when the colours were fresh; or one may take it as we find it now. It is always dangerous to restore. We have not the contemporaries’ eyes to see it with, even if we were successful in reproducing the old-fashioned handiwork. So in translating a Saga, we cannot hear it read or said by the ancient Saga-teller, nor put ourselves in the place of his medieval audience. It is impossible to treat it as a contemporary narration. Part of the charm they found in it is gone; another charm has come to it from its faded age and crusted varnish of antiquity, through which the

14

George W. Dasent’s often reprinted translation of Brennu-Njáls saga is not one of the more strikingly archaic saga translations, but just one chapter chosen at random, chapter 90 (chapter 91 in some editions of the saga and some other translations) yields the following words likely to have been more or less archaic even when the translation first appeared in 1861: ‘bade’, ‘busked’ (= prepared), ‘carle’, ‘carline’, ‘counsel’ (= advice), ‘ere’, ‘fare’ (= go), ‘hag’, ‘harlot’, ‘helm’ (= helmet), ‘housecarles’, ‘ingle’, ‘strait’ (= difficulty), ‘thine’, ‘thy’, ‘wight’, ‘wont’, and ‘ye’. One also encounters ‘art thou’, ‘methinks’, ‘thinkest thou’, ‘thou art’, ‘thou fairest’, ‘thou hast’, ‘thou oughtest’, ‘thou shalt’, and ‘thou wilt’. See The Story of Burnt Njal, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1861). 15

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Introduction to The Life and Death of Cormac, pp. 21–22.

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human nature still shines, attracting us to our kin of long ago. A modern manner, with long Latin words and the sentences of a ready writer, would be out of keeping with this obviously archaic narrative. We must give it something of the antique form.

This they try to do by attempting to translate the saga into ‘the talk of an oldfashioned peasant of Yorkshire or Cumberland’.16 A secondary reason for preferring archaism is the belief associated with it that a modern style of English is likely to rob the sagas of their natural dignity: People who have never given much thought to the question are apt to take the view that old-fashioned language must be artificial and therefore devoid of life. They forget that the sagas themselves are written in what is, to us (and to Icelanders to-day, for that matter), old-fashioned language. The heroic age itself is old-fashioned to us to-day: it will seem not old-fashioned only but unreal and ridiculous if we attempt to galvanise it into a semblance of modernity by putting into its mouth the sophisticated parlance of our own very different times.17

In an exchange on the listserv Oldnorsenet in January 1997 Sue Hawkins argued strongly for the use of archaisms: when faced with having to make a choice between a totally modern word or phrase and an archaic (yet still understandable) word or phrase, I would choose the archaic one. I did this because I felt it gave a better ‘feel’ for something that was from a time far removed from our own, and that it perhaps provided more ‘atmosphere’ than the modern one did.

In replying to her Rod McDonald raised what should be the obvious difficulty: One of the problems with getting a better ‘feel’ or providing more ‘atmosphere’ is that the feel and the atmosphere are no more authentic through the use of archaic words than through the use of modern words. Any feel and atmosphere being added arise out of the translator’s own sense of feel and atmosphere.18

Possibly one can go further than this. The only English language texts employing inflected second person singular verb forms and at all well known even to educated English speakers today are the King James Bible of 1611, the plays of William Shakespeare from the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, and possibly The Book of Common Prayer, which largely took its present form in 1552. For the

16

The Life and Death of Cormac, p. 22.

17

Egil’s Saga, trans. by E. R. Eddison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), pp. 239–40. 18

Sue Hawkins, ‘Translation Methods’, 20 January 1997; Rod McDonald, ‘On Translation Methods’, 21 January 1997.

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modern reader, archaic language forms, especially archaic verb forms, are likely to evoke Tudor and early Stuart England, if they evoke any period at all. This is hardly an association that can be expected to deepen one’s appreciation of medieval Iceland and its literature. There have been some who, while rejecting archaisms as inappropriate in translations of Íslendingasögur, would nevertheless accept or encourage their use in translations from another genre, the fornaldarsögur. Introducing her translation of one of the best known fornaldarsögur, Völsunga saga, Margaret Schlauch in 1930 justified archaisms on the grounds that ‘even to the Sagaman it [Völsunga saga] was a tale of remote, ancient days, of gods and demigods and half-mythical kings’,19 and three years later a similar argument was presented (perhaps with a hint of defensiveness and hesitation) by E. V. Gordon, probably England’s most distinguished Old Icelandic scholar then active. Commending Stella Mills’s translation of another well-known fornaldarsaga, Hrólfs saga kraka, he remarked: One considerable risk was taken by the translator, but she is justified by the result. The translation includes many archaic forms and idioms, though it is free from any trait of Wardour Street, where so many false antiques were sold. The habit of heavy archaism has in the past given a very misleading impression of Icelandic style. Saga-tellers and saga-writers had nothing equivalent: they used the language of their own time, almost the language of everyday use. In this translation the mild archaism is not misleading. Hrolf’s saga tells of events of ancient days (the sixth century), and the fourteenthcentury author was fully conscious of the antiquity of his matter. The flavour of archaism is just what is needed to express this consciousness.20

This, however, raises the question of whether the connotations of archaic English really are an appropriate way of signalling a saga author’s awareness of antiquity. As Gordon indicates, it would be difficult to argue in the case of an individual fornaldarsaga that for stylistic purposes it employed an archaic form of Icelandic different from what appears in Íslendingasögur or samtíðarsögur. Certainly R. G. Finch, in editing and translating Völsunga saga, failed to detect anything of the kind there. He rejected self-consciously old-fashioned language, arguing that ‘there can be little doubt that the legendary heroes were as real to the people of the mediaeval North as those of the more immediate past, and the compiler of

19 The Saga of the Volsungs, The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok, Together with the Lay of Kraki, trans. by Margaret Schlauch (New York: American-Scandinavian Association, 1930), p. xxxi. 20

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The Saga of Hrolf Kraki (Oxford: Blackwell, 1933), p. xii.

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Vo3 lsunga saga aims at presenting his poetic material in straightforward saga style and language’.21 As we shall see, the archaizing approach to translation enjoyed an extended period of popularity, though it never reigned unchallenged. It is certainly possible, and indeed quite easy, to point to occasions when archaizing translations achieve a more powerful effect than modernizing ones. At the end of chapter 43 of Laxdœla saga, for example, when King Óláfr Tryggvason is watching Kjartan Óláfsson and his companions leave Norway, Robert Proctor’s more archaic rendition of his prophetic comments — ‘yet shall it be no light matter to wrestle with their weird’ — might seem more weighty and evocative than Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson’s ‘there is no altering their fate’.22 But few recent translators have favoured an archaizing approach. One reason may be that it is difficult to do well: writing extended texts in the style of a period not one’s own without lapsing into stylistic anachronisms is not easy. More importantly, one suspects translators are reluctant to take the risk that, in what most people see as an ever more dynamic and rapidly changing world, texts in an archaic form of English will be dismissed as irrelevant, whatever merits they may possess. 7. A translator can attempt to translate into an ‘Icelandicized’ form of English. Many of the words appearing in Icelandic saga texts are closely related etymologically to English words with similar meanings, and it is often possible to reproduce Icelandic usages, sentence patterns, and rhythms in English without violating the conventions of the latter language to the extent that the translation becomes incomprehensible. Inspired by this, some translators have had as a major aim the carrying over into English of features of the Icelandic text, even though the result may be an English text which reads somewhat strangely to the reader who knows no Icelandic, or one which strongly declares itself to be a close translation to the reader who does know Icelandic. The best-known adherents of this approach have been the translation team of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, though the nature of their approach 21

In The Saga of the Volsungs, ed. and trans. by R. G. Finch (London: Nelson, 1965), p.

xxxix. 22

The Story of the Laxdalers, trans. by Robert Proctor (London: Chiswick Press, 1903), p. 138; Laxdæla saga, trans. by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 157. In the Íslenzk fornrit edition the original reads: ‘ok mun óhœgt vera atgørða við forlo3 gum þeira’. Some manuscripts read ‘at gera’ rather than ‘atgørða’. See Laxdœla saga, ed. by Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit, 5 (Reykavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1935), ch. 43, p. 132.

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has been frequently misunderstood. In 1883 there appeared a forceful critique of archaizing translations in the introduction to the two-volume Corpus poeticum boreale of Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell: There is one grave error into which too many English translators of old Northern and Icelandic writings have fallen, to wit, the affectation of archaism, and the abuse of archaic, Scottish, pseudo-Middle-English words. This abominable fault makes a Saga, for instance, sound unreal, unfamiliar, false; it conceals all diversities of style and tone beneath a fictitious mask of monotonous uniformity, and slurs over the real difficulties by a specious nullity of false phrasing.23

The offending translators are not named, but Eiríkr Magnússon, writing in 1906 after Morris’s death, clearly (and no doubt correctly) recognized as the main target the translations he and Morris had prepared: As to the style of Morris little needs to be said except this that it is a strange misunderstanding to describe all terms in his translations which are not familiar to the reading public as ‘pseudo-Middle-English’. Anyone in a position to collate the Icelandic text with the translation will see at a glance that in the overwhelming majority of cases these terms are literal translations of the Icel. originals, e.g., by-men — býjar-menn = town’s people; cheaping — kaupangr = trading station; earth-burg — jarð-burg = earth-work; [...] The question is simply this: is it worth while to carry closeness of translation to this length, albeit it is an interesting and amusing experiment? This is a matter of taste; therefore not of dispute.24

Eiríkr here does not offer a defence of the practice of imitating features of Icelandic style other than the vocabulary, but in fact it is this practice that underwent a revival in the second half of the twentieth century, rather than that of translating Icelandic words by cognate terms in English. The Canadian poet George Johnston and the Durrenbergers avoid selecting vocabulary items purely on the basis of their relationship to Icelandic, but they do reproduce Icelandic saga usages such as series of co-ordinate clauses and the seemingly arbitrary switches between simple past and simple present tense which are a distinctive feature of saga narrative.25 Various reasons can be adduced for preferring an ‘Icelandicized’ style of translation, apart from Eiríkr Magnússon’s suggestion that doing so is an ‘interesting and amusing experiment’. George Johnston came to favour it, after

23

Repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1965, p. cxv.

24

In The Stories of the Kings of Norway Called the Round of the World (Heimskringla), 4 vols (London: Quaritch, 1893–1905), IV , pp. vii–viii. 25

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See George Johnston, ‘On Translation – 2’, Saga-Book, 15 (1957–61), 394–402.

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experimentation of his own, because in his view ‘Icelandic English’ is effective and gives new vitality to contemporary English. For Eddison, some decades earlier, the approach was the only one available to a rational translator: If he [the translator] avails himself to the uttermost of the resemblances between the languages, it is within the bounds of possibility that he may succeed in producing an English version of a saga which shall convey in some degree the style and flavour of the original. If, from whatever motive, he ignores these resemblances, he is like a gardener who, wishing to grow rhododendrons and having a soil of sand and peat, digs up and throws away this suitable soil and at much pains substitutes chalk and clay.26

Icelandicizing the English text of course highlights similarities between Icelandic and English, an aspect of the approach congenial to Eddison, who suggested that no Englishman encountering Egils saga Skallagrímssonar could fail to become aware ‘that this is not a foreign book but curiously his own, curiously English’.27 For the Durrenbergers, on the other hand, the reason for carrying features of the Icelandic into the English text is anthropological: doing so, even if the resulting translation is difficult to read, provides the reader with vital anthropological data about how medieval Icelanders viewed the world. Their approach is ‘to stay as close to the Icelandic as we could within the confines of the English language in order to preserve a sense of difference’.28 By reproducing, for example, the apparently arbitrary tense changes found in original manuscripts, they attempt to recreate the sagaman’s temporal sense, one distinctly different from ours: In our modern conception, time is not flexible. It is either now or not now. The narrative technique of changing tenses within the same or adjacent sentences makes time at once both present and past. While there is no apparent pattern to the tense shifts, and there is some variation in different manuscripts, this underlies the point that it is not specific classes of events that were of concern, but the two periods, past and present. Shifts of tense stitch time together at the level of the sentences. This would suggest a consistent principle of stitching time together in saga literature […]29

The Durrenbergers cheerfully admit that their approach does not make for easy reading. But not every translator works primarily for anthropology specialists, and not everyone would be content when translating to have an audience limited to those willing to persist with a daunting text. The translations of those who 26

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Eddison, Egil’s Saga, p. 232.

27

Ibid., p. xii.

28

Durrenberger and Durrenberger, The Saga of Hávarður, p. 41.

29

Durrenberger and Durrenberger, The Saga of Gunnlaugur, pp. 52–53.

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attempt to write ‘Icelandic English’ are likely to read awkwardly, even if they eschew heavy use of cognates, and for some it would be at least a moot point whether something in obscure and sometimes marginally grammatical English30 really qualifies as a translation of classical Old Icelandic prose. Any attempt to identify and enumerate approaches to translation is inevitably an oversimplification. One would obviously hope not to find some of the differing approaches just considered combined in the one translation, but others, such as the archaizing and Icelandicizing approaches, could clearly co-exist. Earlier forms of English seem to have had more in common with Icelandic than more modern English. Despite Eiríkr Magnússon’s arguments, many today would still regard the translations he and Morris prepared as being heavily indebted to Chaucer and Malory for their vocabulary, as well as to the Icelandic lexicon.31 Other methods of categorizing approaches to saga translation, such as in terms of the degree of closeness or freedom in translating the original text, are also possible, though their effect may well be to consider the issues discussed above from a slightly different angle. One’s reason for a particular degree of closeness or freedom in translating will have much to do with how one regards the original and one’s intended audience. What does emerge clearly is that there is no right way of translating the sagas, though the comments of such exponents as Eddison and the Durrenbergers might suggest otherwise. The approach a translator takes may depend to some extent on the nature of the original text: a riddarasaga is something different from an Íslendingasaga. It will probably depend even more on how the translator regards his or her original text, and what the audience is expected to obtain from the translation. As any would-be practitioner will quickly find, however, the saga translator faces challenges other than those posed by such ‘global’ matters as style and audience. In any but the briefest of texts there will be grammatically obscure passages with which to wrestle. There is also a diverse collection of matters,

30

For example, ‘The earl said he wants to hear his poem, such a big man as he was in Iceland. Gunnlaugur recited the poem and it was a short poem and well worked. The earl gave him a broad-axe, all inlaid with silver which seemed to improve it, for a poem gift and invited him to stay with him’: Durrenberger and Durrenberger, The Saga of Gunnlaugur, p. 98. 31

See Karl Litzenberg, ‘The Diction of William Morris: A Discussion of his Translation from the Old Norse with Particular Reference to his “Pseudo-English” Vocabulary’, Arkiv för nordisk filogi, 53 (1938), 327–63.

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including some that at first glance might seem minor, which have in fact posed difficulties for saga translators in all eras. These include: — the appropriate treatment of Icelandic names, including personal names, epithets or nicknames, and place names; — the appropriate treatment of terms and expressions in the Icelandic text which relate to objects and institutions without a clear parallel in the experience of most modern English speakers, or to ways of thinking not familiar to modern readers; — the appropriate treatment of the sometimes extended genealogies which are a feature of some sagas, notably those in the popular Islendingasögur genre; — the appropriate treatment (or some would say, the least inappropriate treatment) of the skaldic verses embedded in many sagas; — the decision as to whether the translation text should be accompanied by an editorial apparatus, and as to what should be included in this apparatus.

Icelandic names Icelandic and other Norse personal names provide several issues for the translator to confront. Amongst them is a feature that survives to this day in Iceland and often provokes comment among foreigners. What the English speaker may at first regard as surnames akin to familiar English names like ‘Williamson’ and ‘Anderson’ — such forms as ‘Óláfsson, ‘Þorkelsdóttir, for instance — are in fact true patronymics, indicating that the individual in question is the son of Óláfr or the daughter of Þorkell.32 Unlike English surnames these elements are not transferred unchanged through the generations from father to child. Ketill Óláfsson’s sons will bear the patronymic ‘Ketilsson’ and his daughters ‘Ketilsdóttir. The daughters will remain ‘Ketilsdóttir’ when they marry, never adopting the patronymics of their husbands. Thus, a reader confronting a long saga with a large ‘cast’, such as Brennu-Njáls saga or Íslendinga saga in the Sturlunga compilation, will have to cope without the assistance of the surnames which help keep track of ‘who’s who’ in a modern English novel. Though potentially daunting, this is a problem fairly easily alleviated if the translator provides an index to the persons mentioned in the saga.

32

Unless otherwise indicated, names in this section are quoted in normalized Old Icelandic rather than Modern Icelandic orthography (which would require ‘Ólafur’).

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Particularly in the case of longer sagas, the index is also likely to give useful service in helping the reader keep track of typically large ‘casts’ of figures that often seem to have rather similar names. A generally sympathetic reviewer of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders comments wryly on the problem: At times I was reminded of that old Monty Python skit in which a British philosopher arrives in an Australia where everybody is named Bruce. […] There are passages in the sagas where it seems everybody’s named Thor or some variation on Thor. In ‘Gisli Sursson’s Saga’ we meet a man named Thorkel who, on the way to the Thorsnes Assembly, accompanied by Thorbjorn’s sons, meets up with Thorstein, the son of Thorolf, who was living at Thorsnes with Thora and their children, Thordis, Thorgrim, and Bork the Stout.33

Of greater concern is the nature of the personal names themselves. For English-speaking readers hundreds of names like ‘Auðgísl’, ‘Álöf’, ‘Sighvatr’, ‘Þorbjörn, and ‘Æsa’, with their exotic looking letters, diacritics, and unfamiliar consonant clusters, have a number of drawbacks. They do not come trippingly off the tongue for the monolingual English speaker; they look dauntingly ‘outlandish’; and they do not instantly reveal the gender of the persons they designate. Other names, by contrast, such as ‘Eiríkr’, ‘Jón’, and ‘Páll’, possess obvious but differently spelled English equivalents (Eric, John, and Paul) and the translator has to decide whether to employ the Icelandic forms or the familiar English ones. Still other names, such as ‘Björn’ and ‘Ljótr’, have a clear meaning when used as common nouns — a meaning to which the sagas sometimes draw attention34 — and despite the possible loss of seriousness one might wonder whether writing ‘Bear’ and ‘Ugly’ in the translation would be appropriate in order to reproduce the effect of the Icelandic. Most translators respond to the ‘foreignness’ of Icelandic names by slightly simplifying them. The letters þ and ð, unfamiliar to most English speakers (rather ironically, since Icelandic probably adopted them from early English orthographic practice), disappear, generally in favour of ‘th’ and ‘d’ respectively (though some translators employ ‘th’ for ð also). Æ and œ become ‘ae’ and ‘oe’, and ö, o3 , and ø usually become simple ‘o’. The acute accents on the vowels á, é, 33

Brad Leithauser, ‘Golden Notebooks. The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection’, New York Review, 20 December 2001, pp. 32. 34, 36–37 (pp. 36–37). 34 When an encounter with a bear appears imminent in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar a character called Björn bombastically remarks: ‘Skal ek nú prófa […] hversu leikr ferr með okkr no3 fnum’ (‘I’ll now test how the game will go between us namesakes’). See Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, Íslenzk fornrit, 7 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1936), ch. 21, pp. 74-75.

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í, ó, ú, ý generally disappear, though the distinguished translator Lee M. Hollander urged that they be retained ‘in order to prevent, if possible, mistaken pronunciations’. (He proceeded to suggest that ‘All that is necessary to make the device work is the categoric statement (perhaps in the Preface) that all vowels so marked are long, all others short’.)35 This holds good, however, only if one is an advocate of pronouncing the names according to what is believed to have been the practice at the time the sagas were written, rather than following the common modern practice of using Modern Icelandic pronunciation.36 (In Modern Icelandic the acute accents do not simply indicate differences in vowel length.) Icelandic is, of course, an inflected language, and translators of the sagas generally employ the nominative singular form of personal names, usually eliminating the nominative inflection ‘-r’ found on many words, such as ‘Óláfr’, ‘Sighvatr’, which typically become ‘Olaf’, ‘Sighvat’ in English language translations. Final double ll and nn, produced by assimilation of a former -r inflection, are typically reduced in translation to single ‘l’ and ‘n’, so we find ‘Thorstein’, ‘Thorkel’, based on Icelandic ‘Þorsteinn’, ‘Þorkell’. A problem can arise when characters are referred to using the patronymic: ‘Óláfsson’ and ‘Sighvatsson’ are unlikely to cause confusion, and translators use such forms freely. ‘Snorrason’ and ‘Thormodarson’ may be clear enough for the sons of ‘Snorri’ and ‘Thormod’, but the Icelandic genitive case endings create some room for confusion, and some translators prefer ‘Snorri’s son’, ‘son of Thormod’ instead. ‘Bjarnarson’, the patronymic derived from ‘Björn’, and others involving genitive case forms strikingly different from the nominative case forms, are probably best replaced by ‘Bjorn’s son’, ‘daughter of Bjorn’, and so on, especially if it is important that readers register the father–child relationship. While the approach of employing slightly simplified but still recognizable versions of Icelandic names has been overwhelmingly the most popular one, it

35

‘The Problem of the Proper Translation of Old Norse Names’, Scandinavian Studies, 26 (1954), 125–29 (p. 129). 36

For a discussion of whether modern students and scholars in the Old Icelandic field should employ Modern Icelandic pronunciation or a reconstruction of a medieval pronunciation see Einar Haugen (with contributions from sixteen others), ‘Two Views of Old Norse Pronunciation’, Mediaeval Scandinavia, 1 (1968), 138–73. Since 1968, with increasingly greater opportunities for students and scholars to visit Iceland and hear Modern Icelandic spoken, the use of Modern Icelandic pronunciation in reading and discussing the medieval texts seems to have become considerably more common, particularly among those from English-speaking countries.

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has not been universal. Like some other translators of their period Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell, for example, preferred to employ Anglicized forms of proper names. Thus, where the Hermann Pálsson–Paul Edwards translation of Landnámabók mentions ‘Thorvid, son of Ulfar’ and his children ‘Hrafn’ and ‘Hallveig’, Guðbrandur and Powell introduce ‘Thor-wid, the son of Wolf-here’ and his children ‘Raven’ and ‘Hall-weig’.37 In striking contrast Paul and Dorothy Durrenberger employ Modern Icelandic singular forms of personal names, with no elimination of any unfamiliar letters or diacritics. In their translation Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu commences: A man was called Þorsteinn. He was a son of Egill, Skalla-Grímur’s son, son of chieftain Kveld-Úlfur from Norway and Þorsteinn’s mother was called Ásgerður and was Björn’s daughter. (p. 79)38

This version, in keeping with the Durrenbergers’ policy of highlighting differences between the saga world and the modern one, may be contrasted with the version of the same passage by Katrina Attwood in the recent Penguin Classics volume Sagas of Warrior Poets (though it will be noted that in this version the Icelandic term hersir is retained — it is explained in the ‘Glossary’ to the translation, p. 332): There was a man called Thorstein. He was the son of Egil, the son of Skallagrim, the son of the hersir Kveldulf from Norway. Thorstein’s mother was called Asgerd. She was Bjorn’s daughter.39

The usual practice with names such as ‘Jón’ or ‘Páll’ is to retain the Icelandic form, modified to remove inflectional endings, unfamiliar letters, or diacritics when referring to Icelanders or most other Scandinavians, but to prefer the

37 The Book of Settlements. Landnámabók, trans. by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards, University of Manitoba Icelandic Studies, 1 ([Winnipeg]: University of Manitoba Press, 1973), p. 137; Origines Islandicae. A Collection of the More Important Sagas and Other Native Writings Relating to the Settlement and Early History of Iceland, ed. and trans. by Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), I, 219. 38

Icelandic characters (though Old Icelandic rather than Modern Icelandic orthography) will be found in the 2002 translation of Morkinskinna by Andersson and Gade mentioned above. In other respects, however, this fluent translation is dissimilar to those of the Durrenbergers. 39

The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent Tongue, trans. by Katrina Attwood, in Sagas of Warrior Poets, ed. by Diana Whaley (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 111–49 (p. 111). The translation is said to be reprinted ‘with only minor alterations’ (p. li) from the 1997 Complete Sagas of Icelanders, where, however, Asgerd is said to be ‘Bjarni’s daughter’, probably in error ( I, 305).

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English form (or the foreign form most familiar to English speakers) in the case of non-Scandinavians and perhaps well-known Scandinavians also. Obviously there is room for individual judgment in the application of such a policy: should Eiríkr inn rauði and Eiríkr blóðøx become ‘Eric the Red’ and ‘Eric Blood-Axe’ while less illustrious bearers of the Eiríkr name retain more or less the Icelandic form of their name? To have them do so is to risk striking inconsistency in the translation; but on the other hand complete consistency will be bought at the price of a certain preciousness and perhaps an element of oddness, if familiar English names appear in Icelandic guise. Most translators seem to accept that some inconsistency is unavoidable. In the Penguin translation of Gunnlaugs sags ormstungu quoted above Attwood normally uses modified versions of Icelandic names but reports that ‘King Ethelred, the son of Edgar, was ruling England at that time’ (p. 124). True to their principles, however, the Durrenbergers prefer ‘Then king Aðalráður Játgeir’s son ruled England’ (p. 93). People in the sagas are not always indicated exclusively by their given name and patronymic. Large numbers of them are identified or tagged with a descriptive epithet or nickname, often striking or colourful. Some of these have become quite well known: apart from Eric the Red and Eric Blood-Axe one thinks of Leif the Lucky and Harald Finehair (or Fairhair).40 The epithets and nicknames nevertheless pose some problems for the translator. This is evident even in the work of experienced and extensively published translators, such as Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson. In the second paragraph of their Laxdœla saga translation, mentioned above, we encounter, amongst others, Ketil Flat-Nose, Helgi Bjolan, Thorunn Hyrna, Unn the Deep-Minded, and Jorunn Wisdom-Slope (p. 47). Some of these epithets or nicknames will be meaningless to most English readers (who, unless advised otherwise, would probably regard ‘Bjolan’ and ‘Hyrna’ as parts of given names), and the others may well seem a bit outlandish or ridiculous. One must wonder if they struck the original audience with as much force as they do a modern one, or whether such epithets, and for that matter names like ‘Björn’ and ‘Ljótr’ functioned like our first names ‘Rose’ and ‘Victor’ and surnames ‘Smith’ and ‘Baker’ — in other words, as semantically fairly neutral labels most of the time, although virtually all speakers of the language could explain their literal meaning if asked.

40

‘Finehair’ is probably the more appropriate translation of the epithet hárfágri when it is used of the Norwegian king in question, but ‘fairhair’ remains a popular translation.

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In theory the translator could either translate the epithets and nicknames or leave them in the Icelandic, perhaps with modifications to remove non-English letters and diacritics. In practice the former option is not really open in all cases: even if the translator is not deterred by the likelihood that some of the terms are crude or obscene, many of the words in question are obscure or at least of doubtful meaning. That Magnus and Hermann did not try to translate bjólan and hyrna as well as the other terms is testimony to this, and their ‘WisdomSlope’ (for manvitsbrekka) is a bit mystifying, to say the least. The option of not translating any epithets or nicknames obviously does exist, but would lead to the pedantry of ‘Eirik inn raudi’ and ‘Finnbogi inn rammi’ rather than ‘Eric the Red’ (or ‘Erik’ or ‘Eirik’) and ‘Finnbogi the Strong’. A third option is to use footnotes or parentheses in the text to provide the reader with both the Icelandic word or phrase and an English translation of it, whether secure or tentative. But while this would be acceptable in a translation for scholars it could interfere with the smooth reading of the translation as a literary text. In practice almost all translators are not entirely consistent in what they do: they have no very viable alternative. Some Icelandic place names, like Langadalr in Laxdœla saga, have a transparency which invites translation into English, and many others, such as Helgafell and Laxá, have a clear meaning for anyone who understands Icelandic, a fact which saga writers naturally used when they indicated locations, routes of journeys, and so on. There is no need to explain to an Icelandic reader that Helgafell is a mountain and Laxá is a river: the word elements fell and á make it clear. But while ‘Holy Mountain’ and ‘Salmon River’ might seem acceptable translations, they have the disadvantage of not at all resembling in form Helgafell and Laxá, names still in use in Iceland and to be found on maps. One might also baulk at the logical extension of the practice to more awkward phrases such as ‘Salmon River Valley’ (for ‘Laxárdalr’) or ‘Clear Lake Pass’ (for ‘Ljósvatnsskarð’). As in the case of personal names, there are advocates for leaving place names in the unmodified Icelandic form, and advocates for Anglicizing them, but the most usual approach is a compromise which provides the names in an Icelandic form modified to suit the eyes and ears of English speakers – ‘Laxardal’, ‘Breidafjord’, for Laxárdalr, Breiðafjörðr. Tautology is common when it seems necessary to give the reader an explanation of the natural feature or location to which the place name refers — thus we find constructions like ‘Saudafell between the Tungua and Mida rivers’, though the final ‘a’ in the river names is the Icelandic word á, ‘river’, or ‘the valley Sokkolfsdal’, though the

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‘-dal’ element comes from dalr, ‘valley’.41 Another possibility, found for instance in some of the Penguin Classics translations, is to employ hybrid Icelandic and English forms like ‘Lax River’ and ‘Vestmanna Islands’ (for ‘Laxá’ and ‘Vestmannaeyjar’).42 Place names outside Iceland are usually rendered by the form best known to English speakers, if there is one, or failing that either by the names the places now bear in the countries where they are located, or a version of the Icelandic name. Parentheses or footnotes may be added to give the reader more than one version. Though normally in favour of retaining Icelandic forms, the Durrenbergers refer to ‘London’ (or ‘London-town’), not ‘Lundunaborg’, and to ‘Dublin’, rather than ‘Dyflinn’.43 One does encounter such manuscript forms as ‘Germaina’, ‘Flæmingialand’, ‘Cantuaria’, and ‘Bretland’ in the exceptionally close translation by Foster Blaisdell in his edition of Erex saga, though even there ‘stormerki Trojumanna’ becomes ‘great wonders […] of the men of Troy’.44

‘Problem’ concepts Like every other foreign language Old Icelandic has words and concepts that lack any straightforward English equivalents. Some, such as drengskapr and níðingsverk, probably require a fairly wide acquaintance with Old Icelandic literature to be thoroughly understood: one is reminded, appropriately enough for these particular concepts, of nineteenth-century British notions of ‘gentlemanly behaviour’ and ‘conduct unbecoming a gentleman’. The translator can hardly do much more than offer an English approximation and perhaps add a note explaining the difficulty. Other words refer to distinctive geographical features of the Scandinavian countries or to farming techniques, weapons, or other concepts now unfamiliar to most English speakers. These can be hard to translate without the use of extended explanatory phrases or, alternatively, words now rare, obsolete, or ‘dialectical’: ‘skerry’, ‘tarn’, ‘shieling’, ‘hallberd’, for example. A third category consists of words like goði, hersir, leið, and vetrnætr, which refer to medieval Icelandic or Norwegian institutions, office holders, and

41 The Saga of the People of Laxardale, trans. by Kuneva Kunz, in The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection (London: Viking, 2000), pp. 270–421 (p. 280).

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42

Magnusson and Pálsson, Laxdæla saga, pp. 53, 152.

43

The Saga of Gunnlaugur, pp. 93, 96.

44

See Blaisdell, Erex saga, pp. 25, 27, 28, 61, 85, 86, 101.

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the like. These can be dealt with in various ways: they can be retained, perhaps in modified form and with an explanation in parentheses or in the notes. Or they can be translated, inevitably somewhat imperfectly (‘chieftain’, ‘lord’, ‘autumn assembly’, ‘winter nights’), with or without explanatory matter.

Genealogies A feature of the Icelandic sagas, particularly the Íslendingasögur and the samtíðarsögur, that some readers find off-putting is the appearance of extended genealogical listings of the kind ‘A married B, their children were C, D, and E; C married F, their children were G, H, and I’, and so on. It is sometimes feared that readers new to the sagas — a category for whom translators are frequently attempting to cater — may find these boring and complain that they delay the progress of the narrative. Some translators deal with this possibility by largely eliminating the genealogies or relegating them to footnotes, but these approaches are not general practice. Apart from the fact that they detract from the completeness and integrity of the translation, they deprive the reader of information about interrelationships between individuals and families, including those prominent in sagas other than the one to hand. Even translators working for a general audience rather than scholars may not wish to discount the possibility that readers of one saga in translation may proceed to other translations, or to the originals, and gradually develop the ability to learn from and appreciate genealogical information, as they encounter the same figures, and the same families, in several sagas. Or readers may have examined other translations before encountering the one now to hand. Anyone who happened to have read a translation of one of the best known Íslendingasögur, Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, would be sure to experience at least the pleasure of recognizing familiar names from the genealogical information at the beginning of Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, quoted above in the translations by the Durrenbergers and Attwood.

Skaldic verse Skaldic stanzas, varying in poetic quality from impressively good to distinctly mediocre, appear in many sagas, especially amongst the Íslendingasögur and konungasögur. Few if any translators have ever expressed confidence in their capacity to give English-speaking readers more than a very imperfect notion of

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the qualities of these verses. The strict metres employed, the elaborate patterns of assonance and alliteration, the tortured, interweaving syntax, and the highly elaborate poetic terminology and metaphors calling for a broad and detailed knowledge of Norse mythology would pose a formidable challenge even to a translator whose target language is not as strongly dependent on word order as Modern English. There has, however, been a broad tendency for translators to become more sympathetic in their responses to skaldic verses. Victorian translators often seemed not far from the view that they were untranslatable but also not really worth translating. Thus, by his own admission Samuel Laing contemplated omitting them altogether from his translation of Heimskringla, stating that They are not essential to Snorro’s prose narrative of the events to which they refer. They are not even authorities for the facts he details, although he quotes them in that view; for they only give the summary or heads of events of which he gives the particular minute accounts.45

However, after consultation with his son he decided they are essential to the spirit and character of Snorro’s work. However obscure, unpoetical, monotonous in the ideas, or uninteresting and flat they may be, they show the mind, spirit, and intellectual state of the age and people.46

All that could be expressed in translation, however, were ‘the ideas […] not the forms and technical beauties of the expression of these ideas’, and in the ideas there is often a ‘very tedious monotony’.47 A brief sample from Laing’s translation of Haralds saga harðráða will indicate the style of the verses found throughout his translation: The brave king through his vessels’ throng His dragon war-ship moves along; He runs her gaily to the front, To meet the coming battle’s brunt.(ch. 3: III, p. 48)48

45

‘Preliminary Dissertation’ to Laing, Heimskringla, I, 207.

46

Ibid., I, 207.

47

Ibid., I, 210.

48

In ch. 61, p. 146 of Heimskringla, III, ed. by Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, Íslenzk fornrit, 28 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1951), the original reads: Lét vingjafa veitir varghollr, dreka skolla lystr fyr leiðangrs brjósti liðs oddr vas þat, miðju.

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One could not easily disagree with Rasmus Anderson, who, in revising Laing’s translation in 1889, stated that Laing’s verses ‘are not translations, but rather original songs or ballads in modern measures’.49 Like Laing, Anderson considered omitting the verses but Inasmuch as Mr Laing appears to have devoted much time and labour to these songs […] and inasmuch as they not essential to Snorro’s prose narrative, and can be skipped by the reader without any interruptions to the thread of the story, the editor finally decided to leave them as a monument of Mr Laing’s indefatigable industry.50

Even in 1965 the respected scholar and translator Jacqueline Simpson displayed a rather ambivalent attitude towards skaldic verse: The attempt to translate such verses is a fascinating, but almost certainly hopeless, exercise. The translator must choose between a clear rendering with the minimum of complications, or an attempt to reproduce something of their highly wrought patterns of related sounds and their richness of periphrasis. Fortunately the problem is eased by the fact that the verses are almost always decorative, not functional, and that the context goes far towards explaining the meaning. Indeed, the artistic essence of the poem is in its manner, and the content, though not negligible, is often subordinated to it. I have therefore adopted the opposite approach to that used for the Eddic poems, and have tried to reproduce some of the metrical and stylistic features, and above all the sound-patterns of the originals. It must however be added that the inset verses vary greatly in merit from one saga to another, or even within one saga; some are mere crude jingles, and have been rendered as such.51

Even in the last fifty years many translations have attempted little more than a prose rendition of the content of the skaldic verses, but in an era where poetry is expected to be linguistically complex and semantically challenging skaldic verse has won more admirers and seen more attempts to translate it in a way which does some justice both to its content and its form. Already in the nineteenth century William Morris viewed the verses in Heimskringla sympathetically, even enthusiastically,52 and in the mid-twentieth century Lee M. Hollander achieved considerable success in presenting a style of translation that gives readers some

49 Rasmus B. Anderson, ‘Introduction’, in Snorre Sturluson, The Heimskringla or The Sagas of the Norse Kings, trans. by Samuel Laing, 2nd edn rev. by Rasmus B. Anderson (London: Nemmo, 1889), p. xiii.

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Anderson, Heimskringla, p. xiv.

51

The Northmen Talk (London: Phoenix House, 1965), p. xxvi.

52

Eiríkr Magnússon, The Stories of the Kings of Norway, IV , pp. ix–x.

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idea of how skaldic verse might read to someone who can understand it in the Icelandic. His version of the lines quoted in Laing’s version is as follows: At the head, free-handed Harald, to wolves friendly – fore-front was that of our fleet – placed his dragon.53

More recently the ‘Poetry-Guidelines’ for participants in the Leifur Eiríksson translation project took a pragmatic and relatively ‘low key’ attitude to the task facing translators with skaldic verses embedded in their saga texts. Perhaps the motive was to encourage translators of predominantly prose texts not to be unduly daunted by the verses. The daunting nature of the task is evident, however. 1. It should look/sound like poetry in English too!!! That is, go for an independent English-language poem rather than a word-for-word translation. ‘Rich’ language works well but avoid archaisms (and old-fashioned poetic syntax). 2. Try to retain something of the kennings54 for the effect of their imagery, without losing the reader by ‘going too deep’. Simplify and paraphrase as necessary so that the underlying meaning comes across, without eliminating its figuration entirely. 3. Put across a strong sense of the effects that English can mirror — strong beat and short words. Try to alliterate as a way of ‘tying up’ the verse, but without imposing too strict a form. Assonance and half rhyme are good formal devices too, if they sound natural. 4. Aim for ‘normal’ English syntax, to make the flow of imagery easier to understand. Don’t worry about capturing the Icelandic word order. 5. There is space for some explanation of the kennings beside the poetry […] 6. Bear in mind that verses are often more comprehensible in context, so that they are not always as cryptic as they sound on their own.

Another approach to translating the verse is to regard it as a task for a specialist rather than for the translator responsible for the prose. The verses can be assigned to a poet, or to someone with special expertise in verse translation. In Christine Fell’s translation of Egils saga Skallagrímssonar the notes by Fell

53

Hollander, Heimskringla, pp. 625–26. See also the review of this translation by Assar Janzén in Scandinavian Studies, 38 (1966), 251–59, esp. p. 257. 54

Kenning (nominative plural kenningar) is a difficult term to define, but the word is usually employed to refer to the elaborate nominal periphrases used in skaldic poetry, and in particular to those involving metaphorical language.

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provide prose translations of the ‘content’ of the poems, while John Lucas provides poetic versions of them.55 There are other instances of one translator dealing with the prose, another with the verse. Lee M. Hollander produced the verse translations embedded in the prose translation of Brennu-Njáls saga by Carl F. Bayerschmidt, and performed a similar service in regard to the translation of Eyrbyggja saga where the prose was translated by Paul Schach.56

Editorial apparatus As mentioned above, a translation designed to be used by scholars as a substitute for the original may well be accompanied by an extensive apparatus of introduction, notes, indexes, genealogical tables, maps, and so on. There has not been much direct discussion as to how extensive the apparatus accompanying a saga translation should be, but the evidence of what has actually been provided suggests a wide divergence of opinion among translation practitioners. Some translators have provided their translation text with minimal auxiliary material, and some translations of þættir and saga extracts57 have been published in literary or general magazines much as though they were modern short stories. But most translators feel that some kind of introduction to the text is required. Normally this assumes no previous acquaintance with Iceland or its history, so matters such as the discovery and settlement of the island, its early history, customs and institutions, and the origins and development of saga literature are commonly dealt with in the case of translations of Íslendingasögur. The historicity, date, provenance, and putative authorship of the particular saga being translated may be considered, along with some discussion of its literary qualities, especially in publications after about 1950. Most translators feel the need for some notes to help elucidate the text, and maps are often provided to help the reader follow the movements of saga characters or ‘place’ locations in relation to one another: some saga authors seem to have assumed in their audiences a good knowledge of the topography of areas in Iceland or Norway. Indexes, 55

Egil’s Saga (London: Dent, 1975).

56

Njal’s saga (New York: Twayne, 1955); Eyrbyggja saga (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959). 57

For example, ‘The Saga of Thorstein Staff-Blow’, trans. by Erik Wahlgren, University of Kansas City Review, 11 (1945), 213–17; ‘The Saga of Thorstein Prod-Head’, trans. by Cecil Wood, Fat Abbot (W inter 1960), 5–14; ‘The Revenge of Breeches Aud’, trans. by A. Margaret Arent, Scandinavian Review, 67.4 (1979), 58–63.

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genealogical tables, or both can seem essential in the case of longer texts if the reader is not to become lost in a sea of Thorhalls, Thorlaks, Thorolfs, and Thorsteins, all of whom lack surnames. One problem with an elaborate and extensive apparatus is of course that it may well deter some readers, who perhaps imagine that texts requiring it are complex and obscure compositions unlikely to be lively and interesting reading for the non-specialist. Less easily daunted readers willing to persevere may nevertheless find that large numbers of notes detract from their enjoyment of the text. There is also an economic consideration: even if a translator wants an elaborate apparatus, a publisher may feel obliged to pare it back in order to be able to market the volume at a price that might bring reasonable sales. There clearly is no universally applicable set of guidelines: as so often in translation matters, the nature of the text being translated and the audience for whom one is translating are crucial considerations.

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T HE P IONEER S AGA T RANSLATIONS

T

he beginnings of translation from Old Icelandic in the English-speaking countries are in one respect at least similar to the beginnings of recorded vernacular literary composition in medieval Europe. In both cases there was a very strong tendency for poetry to appear before prose. University students introduced to the study of Old and Middle English and other vernaculars are regularly made aware, and often rather surprised, that generally speaking there was an extensive and accomplished literature in verse long before there was anything comparable in prose. Perhaps it is also surprising that attempts to provide English versions of Old Icelandic poetic works preceded attempts at translating Old Icelandic prose. The reason for such surprise is of course that poetry seems to the modern mind to be a demanding form of composition which employs the resources of a language, often including patterns of metre and rhyme, in order to provide the reader or listener with a particularly heightened artistic experience, while prose seems by comparison a relatively mundane form of language usage, with millions of ordinary people routinely writing prose daily in unglamorous clerical jobs. It would seem to follow that translating poetry adequately would be a more demanding activity than translating prose, and that translators working from a language not much translated previously would be well advised to commence with prose, and proceed to the more exacting poetry only when they as individuals, and the collective body of translators, had gained experience and learnt how to deal with the difficulties. For the early translators into English from Old Icelandic, however, it was not really a matter of making a choice between translating poetry and translating prose. Strange as it may appear to modern admirers of saga literature, Old Icelandic prose was seen as unworthy of translation, even by people who

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esteemed the verse. Margaret Clunies Ross outlines the attitude that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, lay behind the translators’ preference for verse: The way now lay open to quarry Old Icelandic literature for examples of sublime ancient poetry, divorced from its textual and cultural context and unconstrained by questions of historical reliability. The movement of the eighteenth-century study of Old Norse literature thus comes to a position similar to that of those who, in the twentieth century, have considered Old Icelandic sagas as primarily works of literature, and unreliable in all other respects, but both the mode of approach and the rationale are quite different, as, indeed, is the emphasis of the study. Whereas twentieth-century interest for the most part has been in prose literature, and in the sagas of Icelanders (or family sagas) in particular, eighteenth-century people were almost exclusively interested in ancient poetry. The largely prose context in which most Old Norse poetry was transmitted in the form of medieval Icelandic sagas was to them a detritus to be cast away.1

The English translations that resulted from this preference for verse are by no means always lacking in interest or power. But they were often made from a translation of the original into Latin, or a modern Scandinavian or Continental European language, and to modern sensibilities they generally seem recreations of the original poetry in an eighteenth-century idiom, rather than something that would be acceptable to readers today seeking an English version of the original that tells them something of what it is like. Doing any justice to Old Icelandic verse in translation is unquestionably a difficult task, and despite the experiments and achievements of the last two centuries, producing tolerably accurate and readable versions remains very challenging at the beginning of the twenty-first century. But when the verse translator feels at liberty to create new poetry in eighteenth-century idioms, using the original primarily as a source of inspiration, as pioneering translators from the Old Icelandic often seem to have done, the nature of the challenge is obscured. Without the degree of poetic freedom allowed themselves by the translators of the verse, the early translators of Icelandic prose did indeed face formidable hurdles, as some comments from as late as the mid-nineteenth century confirm. Thus Sabine Baring-Gould, who in fact provided retellings of the sagas in his own words rather than accurate and faithful translations, was moved to write as late as 1863 in his Iceland: Its Scenes and Sagas: I give these specimens of the Sagas to the world with great diffidence, as I am by no means a proficient in the Icelandic tongue. I have worked at it for three or four years,

1

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and have arrived at the conclusion that both language and literature require the devotion of a lifetime for their proper mastery. The language is full of obscure idioms, and to these there is no tolerable dictionary.2

Writing two years earlier in the preface to his translation of Brennu-Njáls saga a more famous Old Icelandic scholar, George Webbe Dasent, commented tellingly and at greater length on the difficulties that had delayed until 1861 a project commenced in 1843. In doing so he illuminated the hurdles likely to face any translator of an Íslendingasaga at a time when scientific saga scholarship was still establishing itself: Indeed, on looking back over the years that have elapsed between the conception of the design [to translate the saga] and its fulfilment, the writer is more and more astonished at his own rashness in proposing to undertake such a task, with the means then at his command. There was a printed text indeed, but one very full of literal errors. There was no dictionary of the language, and no reliable work on the Law, which fills so large a part of the Saga. Since 1843, matters have happily changed, in some of these respects; the text still remains the same text, carelessly printed from good MSS, and a new edition, announced as forthcoming for several years, still remains to come forth. But the dictionary of the language, the materials for which were collected with so much toil and skill for many years by the lamented Richard Cleasby, who died just as he was reducing them to shape — that dictionary which was hastily finished after his death by the generosity of his family, […] and which will be published as soon as it is in a fit state to be laid before the world, has been the greatest help in the translation. In many of the darkest mysteries of the law, the critical genius of Maurer has held out a safe and certain guide, and [… ] the constant intercourse and communication which the translator has maintained with Icelandic scholars […]have enabled him to throw light on many points of Icelandic topography, as well as on the life, law, and customs of the early Icelanders.3

The purpose of this chapter is to look at what was produced in these pioneering years despite the difficulties, and to consider its characteristics. The

2 3

London: Smith, Elder, 1863, p. xvi.

The Story of Burnt Njal, I, pp. xvi–xvii of Preface. See also his translation of The Prose or Younger Edda, p. vii, listed under 1842 in this chapter’s chronological listing of translations. Not everyone would agree that difficulties beyond his control explain Dasent’s delay in producing his translation of Brennu-Njáls saga. Edward J. Cowan, who describes him as ‘one of the greatest procrastinators of the nineteenth century’, notes the eighteen year span of the project and adds: ‘while one would gladly attribute the best of motives in this respect, namely a desire for the greatest possible accuracy, the evidence for his numerous dealings over the English versions of Orkneyinga saga and Hákonar saga for the Rolls Series, is against him’ (‘Icelandic Studies in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Scotland’, Studia Islandica. Íslensk fræði, 31 (1972), 107–51 (p. 140)).

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stopping point, as almost always with such things, is a somewhat arbitrary one. The year 1868 has been fixed upon, mainly because in the following year the translating team of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon published their versions of Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu and Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, and the world of saga translation was confronted with a powerful new force. The copious work of this famous partnership has been greatly admired by many, and vigorously condemned by rather more, but probably no serious saga translator since 1869 has been totally uninfluenced by it. The bibliographies of saga translations prepared by Donald K. Fry and Paul Acker, mentioned earlier, provide sound and comprehensive bibliographical information about published translations from the beginning to about 1990, and it is not intended to reproduce in the present work this large body of data. Fry and Acker, however, arrange their entries alphabetically by translator under the Icelandic names of the works translated, which creates difficulty for the reader seeking to identify the earliest translations, or those produced in any specific period. What follows, therefore, is a listing in chronological order of the relatively small number of translations into English published up to 1868, including reprints that appeared during that period. The listing confines itself to works identified as translations, omitting abstracts,4 paraphrases, retellings, and so on, as well as translations of very brief passages no more than a few paragraphs in length.5 For obvious practical reasons Fry and Acker both normally

4

One abstract, that of Eyrbyggja saga by the famous novelist Sir Walter Scott, first published in 1814 (in Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, ed. by Robert Jamieson and Henry Weber (Edinburgh: Ballantyne), pp. 517–40) and reprinted several times, notably in I. A. Blackwell’s edition of Northern Antiquities, listed under 1847 in this chapter’s chronological listing of translations, does deserve special mention. It is indeed an abstract rather than a translation; it is based on a Latin version of the saga, perhaps imperfectly understood, rather than directly on the original Icelandic; and it incorporates numerous value judgments and comments alien to the style of the saga. But it does provide an interesting and reasonably complete English version of one of the Íslendingasögur at an early date. See Julian D’Arcy and Kirsten Wolf, ‘Sir Walter Scott and Eyrbyggja saga’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 22 (1987), 30–43; Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse, pp. 169, 189. 5

Including such short excerpts would allow the commencement date of the listing to be pushed back at least to 1678, when Aylett Sammes included extracts from the Prose Edda in his vast Britannica antiqua illustrata, or, The Antiquities of Ancient Britain Derived from the Phoenicians […] (London: Roycroft). There seems no disputing that Sammes did not translate from the Icelandic but from Latin: according to Christine E. Fell this ‘can be seen clearly in the turns of phrase and syntax’. See her article ‘The First Publication of Old Norse Literature in England and its Relation to its Sources’, in The Waking of Angantyr. The Scandinavian Past

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exclude unpublished translations, other than some in doctoral dissertations, and only published translations are considered in this book. No doubt there was some interesting work that never saw publication. It is, for example, intriguing to find the famous travel writer George Borrow referring in Wild Wales (1862) to his partial translation of Brennu-Njáls saga, produced in his youth — he was born in 1803 — but languishing in manuscript through its inability to interest a publisher.6 1770 The Prose Edda Gylfaginnimg translated by Thomas Percy (relying in part on the French of Paul Henri Mallet) in his Northern Antiquities: Or, a Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes, and Other Northern Nations […], 2 vols (London: Carnan). 2nd edn Edinburgh: Stewart, 1809. 1780 Hákonar saga gamla Hákonarsonar Partial translation by James Johnstone in his Anecdotes of Olave the Black, King of Man, and the Hebridean Princes of the Somerled Family […] (Copenhagen: Privately printed). 1782 Hákonar saga gamla Hákonarsonar Partial translation by James Johnstone in his The Norwegian Account of King Haco’s Expedition against Scotland AD MCCLXIII (Edinburgh: Privately printed). 1783 or 1784 Magnús saga Hákonarsonar Translated by James Johnstone in his A Fragment of Ancient History (Copenhagen: Privately printed).

in European Culture, ed. by Else Roesdahl and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, Acta Jutlandica, 71:1. Humanities Series, 70 (Aarhus: University of Aarhus Press, 1986), pp. 27–37 (pp. 29–30). See also Ethel Seaton, Literary Relations of England and Scandinavia in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), pp. 230, 250. 6

Wild Wales: Its People, Language and Scenery (London: Murray, 1862; repr. London: Century; New York: Hippocrene Press, 1984), p. 169, 169n.

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1788 Eyrbyggja saga, Laxdœla saga, and Ragnars saga loðbrókar ok sona hans Partial translations by Grimr Johnson Thorkelin in his Fragments of English and Irish History in the Ninth and Tenth Century (London: Nichols). Reprinted in John Nichols, Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica, VI (London: Nichols, 1790). A portion of the Laxdœla saga translation also appeared in Thorkelin’s An Essay on the Slave Trade (London: Nichols).7 1804 Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks konungs Partial translation by William Herbert in his Select Icelandic Poetry, I (London: Reynolds). Reprinted in his Works, I (London: Bohn, 1842). 1806 Gautreks saga Partial translation by William Herbert in his Select Icelandic Poetry, II (London: Longman). Reprinted in his Works, I (London: Bohn, 1842). 1834 Landnámabók, Laxdœla saga, and Ynglinga saga Partial translations by William Forbes Skene in his ‘Extracts from the Northern Sagas’, Transactions of the Iona Club, 1, 63–69. Reprinted in Collectiones de rebus Albanicis (Edinburgh: Stevenson, 1847). 1839 The Prose Edda Partial translation by Grenville Pigott in his A Manual of Scandinavian Mythology Containing a Popular Account of the Two Eddas and the Religions of Odin (London: Pickering). Eiríks saga rauða, Eyrbyggja saga, and Grœnlendinga saga Partial translations by Joshua Toulmin Smith in his The Discovery of America by the Northmen in the Tenth Century (London: Tilt). 2nd edition London: Orr, 1842. First edition also published as The Northmen in New England, or America in the Tenth Century (Boston, MA: Hilliard, Gray, 1839).

7

‘Grimr Johnson Thorkelin’ is the form appearing in the 1788 publication. ‘Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin’ appears to be the form preferred by scholars today.

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Friðþjófs saga hins frœkna Translated by George Stephens in his Frithiof’s Saga, A Legend of Norway by Esaias Tegnér (Stockholm: Bonnier; London: Black and Armstrong). 1840–44 Einars þáttr Sokkasonar (or Grœnlendinga þáttr) Partial translation by Þorleifur Guðmundsson Repp in ‘A Memoir of Einar Sockeson’, Mémoires de la Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord, 7, 81–100. 1841 Eiríks saga rauða, Eyrbyggja saga, and Grœnlendinga saga Translated (a small portion only, in the case of Eyrbyggja saga) by North Ludlow Beamish in his The Discovery of America by the Northmen in the Tenth Century, With Notices of the Early Settlements of the Irish in the Western Hemisphere (London: Boone). Grœnlendinga saga Partial translation by Elihu Burritt, ‘The Narrative of Thorstein Ericsson. Translated from the Icelandic’, The American Eclectic, 1, 109–11, 494–98. 1842 The Prose Edda Gylfaginning and part of Skáldskaparmál translated by George Webbe Dasent in his The Prose or Younger Edda Commonly Ascribed to Snorri Sturluson (Stockholm: Norstedt; London: Pickering). 1844 Grœnlendinga saga and Heimskringla Translated by Samuel Laing in his The Heimskringla, or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans). Sigurðar saga Jórsalafara from Heimskringla reprinted as ‘The Saga of Sigurd the Crusader A.D. 1107–1111’, in Thomas Wright, Early Travels in Palestine (London: Bohn, 1848).

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1845–49 Játvarðar saga konungs hins helga Translated by Þorleifur Guðmundsson Repp in ‘A Saga of St Edward the King’, Mémoires de la Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord, 7, 272–86. (Actually published 1853).8 1847 The Prose Edda Gylfaginning and part of Skáldskaparmál translated by I. A. Blackwell in Northern Antiquities […], ‘Translated from the French of M. Mallet by Bishop Percy. New edition, revised throughout, and considerably enlarged; with a translation of the Prose Edda from the original Old Norse text; and notes critical and explanatory, by I. A. Blackwell’ (London: Bohn). Reprinted 1859. 1849 Grœnlendinga saga Translated by James Eliot Cabot in ‘Discovery of America by the Northmen’, Massachusetts Quarterly Review, 6, 189–214. 1859 Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka Translated by George Webbe Dasent in ‘Audun and his White Bear’, Once a Week, 1, 4–7. Reprinted in his The Story of Burnt Njal (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1861). 1861 Brennu-Njáls saga Translated by George Webbe Dasent in his The Story of Burnt Njal (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas). 1866 Gísla saga Súrssonar Translated by George Webbe Dasent in his The Story of Gisli the Outlaw

8

261).

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(Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas).9 Víga-Glúms saga Translated by Edmund W. Head in his Viga Glum’s saga, the Story of Viga-Glum (London: Williams and Norgate). 1868 Eiríks saga rauða, Eyrbyggja saga, and Grœnlendinga saga Translated (a small portion only, in the case of Eyrbyggja saga) by Benjamin Franklin De Costa in his The Pre-Columbian Discovery of America by the Northmen (Albany: Munsell). It cannot be assumed that all the translations listed were made directly from the Old Icelandic. The earliest translation listed, Bishop Percy’s 1770 version of the work of the Geneva-born writer Paul Henri Mallet, would seem to fit into the ‘translation of a translation’ category. Percy states he is translating Mallet’s French language version of the Prose Edda; and indeed Mallet, though claiming to have consulted the original Icelandic, himself translated from Latin and also made use of Danish and Swedish versions of the work, stating (in Percy’s translation of his words) that he ‘should have been frequently at a loss’ without them.10 However, the matter may not be entirely straightforward. Margaret Clunies Ross argues that Percy had more knowledge of Old Icelandic than has usually been believed. She notes that his prospectus for the Mallet translation proposed comparing Mallet’s French translations with the originals, and that Percy claimed a leading scholar of the age, Edward Lye, had assisted him by comparing his translation with a text of the Icelandic original.11 The earliest translations of the so-called Vínland Sagas, primarily Grœnlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða, provide examples of translations which

9

Dasent provided a translation of a portion of Gísla saga Súrssonar as part of the introductory matter to The Story of Burnt Njal (I, pp. cviii–ix) and this translation is somewhat different from the corresponding portion of the 1866 one. See Wawn, The Vikings and Victorians, pp. 152, 152n. 10

See Percy, Northern Antiquities, II, pp. xxix–xxx, xxxii. See also the revised edition of Percy by Blackwell (1847), p. 397. 11

See her ‘Percy and Mallet: The Genesis of Northern Antiquities’, in Sagnaþing helgað Jónasi Kristjánssyni sjötugum 10. apríl 1994, 2 vols (Reykjavík: Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag, 1994), I, 107–17 (pp. 108–09, 109n); Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse, p. 77.

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were not in fact based directly on editions or manuscripts of the Old Icelandic texts. Though he claimed to have consulted the Icelandic, North Ludlow Beamish clearly stated in 1841 that his translations were ‘made substantially from the Danish version’ included in C. C. Rafn’s very influential 1837 publication, Antiquitates Americanæ, which appeared in Copenhagen with texts in Icelandic, Danish, and Latin.12 Indeed, on the basis of her work on nineteenth-century approaches to the Vínland material Geraldine Barnes has indicated to this writer that of the Vínland translations listed above probably only the version of Elihu Burritt represents an original translation from Old Icelandic. The versions of Smith, Beamish, Cabot, and De Costa are all likely to have been based on Rafn’s translation or on the version of Grœnlendinga saga by Laing.13 Probably the most important and influential translation on the list that may not be a direct translation from the Icelandic is Samuel Laing’s 1844 version of Heimskringla. Laing’s Heimskringla was seen by the bibliographers Halldór Hermannsson14 and Donald Fry, amongst others, as essentially an English translation of Jacob Aall’s Danish version of 1838–39, though the reputedly somewhat testy Laing would almost certainly have disputed such a suggestion. Commenting in his ‘Preliminary Dissertation’ on his translation practice, he admitted that his command of Icelandic was quite limited but he also clearly indicated that he worked from the text in its original language: It has since been the occasional and agreeable occupation of his [Laing’s] leisure hours to study the work of Snorro in the original. To much knowledge of, or familiarity with the Icelandic, he cannot lay any claim. To get at the meaning and spirit of the text, helping himself over the difficulties, which generally only lay in his ignorance of the language, by collating every passage he was in doubt about with the meaning given to it in the translations of Peringskiold, Schöning, and Aal, and to give a plain faithful

12

See the unpaginated preliminary material to Beamish’s Discovery of America.

13

Geraldine Barnes, Personal communication, 20 July 1998. See also her Viking America: The First Millennium (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001), p. 45. For information about the fairly complex interrelationships between the early Vínland saga translations into English, see De Costa, The Pre-Columbian Discovery of America, p. iv, and Eben Norton Horsford, Discovery of America by Norsemen. Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of Leif Eriksen Delivered in Faneuil Hall, Oct. 29, 1887 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888), unpaginated preface. 14

Halldór Hermannsson, Bibliography of the Sagas of the Kings of Norway and Related Sagas and Tales, Islandica, 3 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1910), p. 25.

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translation into English of the Heimskringla, unencumbered with antiquarian research, and suited to the plain English reader, has been his object.15

There are of course many possibilities in between being totally ignorant of the original language and totally dependent on an intermediate translation on the one hand, and on the other relying solely on the original text and resolutely refusing to consult any other translation in any language. A purist might demand the latter course today, though there are good arguments against it, and in favour of consulting one’s predecessors in a translation task (whilst of course taking care not to plagiarize them!).16 The purist option was hardly a viable one in Laing’s time or before, when the English language translator from the Icelandic needed all the help he or she could get. (The translators discussed in this chapter were in fact all male.) If one excluded Bishop Percy, whose work in any case did not, strictly speaking, involve a translation of a saga, the honour of producing the first English translation of any length from Old Icelandic prose goes to the Reverend James Johnstone, who in 1780 described himself on the title page of Anecdotes of Olave the Black as ‘Chaplain to His Britannic Majesty’s Envoy Extraordinary at the Court of Denmark’. For a clergyman of an established church who attained such a measure of public prominence little more than two hundred years ago Johnstone is a remarkably shadowy figure: we do not even know for certain whether he was Scottish or English. The extent of his command of Icelandic must be judged entirely from the evidence of the works he produced: E. V. Gordon concluded, a little enigmatically, that ‘there are no indications in his

15 Laing, Heimskringla, p. 202. See also his preface, pp. iv–v. Peringskjöld, who in 1697 published the first Heimskringla edition, provided a Swedish translation. Schønning in 1777–83 provided translations into Danish and Latin, and Aall in 1838–39 provided a Dano-Norwegian version. See Lee M. Hollander in his translation of Heimskringa, p. xxv; and Jon Gunnar Jørgensen, ‘Reisningsmakten i vort folk: Om norske Heimskringla-oversettelser på 1800-tallet’, in Artikler. Udgivet i anledning af Preben Meulengracht Sørensens 60 års fødselsdag 1. marts 2000 (Århus: Norrønt Forum, 2000), pp. 64–77 (pp. 65–68). 16

Donald Frame, a distinguished translator from the French, went on record as saying ‘I strongly favor regarding translation, like scholarship, as a cumulative undertaking, and therefore borrowing – or stealing – whenever you see that your own best solution to a problem is clearly inferior to someone else’s’. He did add that the translator had an obligation before publishing to ensure that he or she could ‘markedly improve on all existing translations, and do that without anthologizing (combining everyone else’s best parts)’. See his ‘Pleasures and Problems of Translation’, in The Craft of Translation, ed. by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 70–92 (pp. 82–83).

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work that he had a critical knowledge of Norse, though he was able to read it without difficulty’.17 In a note ‘To the Reader’ at the front of Anecdotes of Olave the Black Johnstone states that he had the assistance of ‘a worthy, and ingenious native of Iceland’ and regrets that the ‘Gentleman’s extreme delicacy’ prevented his thanking him by name. For Edward Cowan there is little doubt that the person in question was Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin, and more recently Margaret Clunies Ross and Bo Ralph have independently reached a similar conclusion.18 In 1788 Thorkelin was to provide the first published English translations from the Íslendingasögur. His translation from Eyrbyggja saga consisted of a single chapter, relating the visit of Guðleifr Gunnlaugsson early in the eleventh century to a mysterious land far to the west of Ireland — an episode which would understandably also attract the attention of several of those who translated the Vinland sagas in the following century. Thorkelin’s extracts from Laxdœla saga, though entitled ‘A Fragment of Irish History; Or, a Voyage to Ireland Undertaken from Iceland in the Tenth Century’, are in fact rather more extensive than this title suggests, and provide a unified narrative commencing with Höskuldr Kollsson’s purchase of the slave woman Melkorka and recounting the story of Óláfr pái down to the funeral feast for his father Höskuldr. One cannot now tell how much help Thorkelin received in polishing his English, but his translations, like those of the other Icelander among the pioneer translators, Þorleifur Guðmundsson Repp, are impressively correct and idiomatic. Reminders of eighteenth-century England are not entirely absent, however, and they can startle the modern reader: ‘Olaf had been now about a year in Iceland, when his father addressed him thus: “My son, of all things I wished to see you provided with an amiable consort […]”’(p. 43). The distinction of producing the first complete translation of a saga goes to the somewhat eccentric George Stephens, who spent much of his adult life in

17 An Introduction to Old Norse, 2nd edn rev. by A. R. Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. lxxiv. 18

Cowan, ‘Icelandic Studies’, pp. 116, 116n; Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse, pp. 173–80; Bo Ralph, ‘Den mystiske Johnstone och hans isländska skugga. Nordisk kulturförmedling under 1780-talet’, in Gudar på jorden: Festskrift till Lars Lönnroth, ed. by Stina Hannson and Mats Malm (Stockholm: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposium, 2000), pp. 225–40. See also Margaret Clunies Ross and Amanda J. Collins, ‘Johnstone, James (d. 1798)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); [accessed 3 February 2006].

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Copenhagen as Professor of North European Languages.19 The work he translated, Friðþjófs saga hins frœkna, is a fornaldarsaga which enjoyed great esteem in the nineteenth century — amongst many other signs of its popularity noted by Andrew Wawn in his article on ‘The Cult of “Stalwart Frith-thjof” in Victorian Britain’ is the fact that no less than three independent translations of it were published before 1900.20 This romantic, somewhat sentimental tale is unlikely to appeal to readers today, and it has not found a translator into English since Margaret Schlauch in 1928.21 Stephens’s purpose in translating it was not so much to bring it to the attention of English speakers as to enhance the apparatus associated with his translation of a far more modern work, Bishop Esaias Tegnér’s Swedish poem of 1824, called Frithiof but only loosely based on the medieval Icelandic work. Though all but unknown in the English-speaking world today, this was once immensely popular.22 Curiously, and somewhat disconcertingly for the twenty-first century reader, Stephens or his editor chose to distinguish his translation of the Icelandic text from the rest of the book by having it set in Gothic type. Few would be likely to dispute that the most impressive publications among the pioneering works of translation were Samuel Laing’s 1844 version of the complete Heimskringla and George Webbe Dasent’s translation of Brennu-Njáls saga, which appeared in 1861 after its long gestation period. Both were accompanied by very lengthy and influential introductions, and the presentation of Dasent’s 1861 translation, in dramatic contrast to the austerely utilitarian presentation of his version of the Prose Edda nineteen years earlier, provides an elaborately beautiful example of book production. Both Heimskringla and The Story of Burnt Njal were destined to be reprinted many times, and to be reissued

19

On Stephens see Andrew Wawn, ‘George Stephens, Cheapinghaven, and Old Northern Antiquity’, Studies in Mdedievalism, 7 (1995), 63–104; Wawn, The Vikings and Victorians, pp. 225–44. 20

‘The Cult of “Stalwart Frith-thjof” in Victorian Britain’, in Northern Antiquity: The PostMedieval Reception of Edda and Saga, ed. by Andrew Wawn (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik Press, 1994), pp. 211–54 (pp. 222–23). See also Wawn, The Vikings and Victorians, pp. 117–41. The reader of Fry’s bibliography will count four translations, but Wawn (‘The Cult’, p. 223) regards the 1877 version by Rasmus B. Anderson and Jón Bjarnason in Viking Tales of the North, (Chicago: Griggs) to be a reprint of Stephens’s 1839 translation, despite its pretensions to being a new translation. 21 22

In her Medieval Narrative (New York: Prentice-Hall), pp. 5–33.

Wawn, ‘The Cult’ reports (p. 225) that ‘in the period 1833–1914 at least fifteen independent (to a greater or lesser extent) English versions of Tegnér’s poem were published’.

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by Everyman’s Library after World War II with new introductions by two of Britain’s most distinguished scholars in the Old Icelandic field, Peter Foote and Gabriel Turville-Petre respectively. Indeed, in recent years both have been made available in their entirety on the World Wide Web! Even a casual perusal of the list of Old Icelandic prose works translated into English in the pioneering years will reveal that what was chosen for translation then was hardly what most modern admirers of saga literature would elect to take with them to a desert island if forced to make a rigorous selection. Our tendency is to think first and foremost of the Íslendingasögur, the ‘Sagas of the Icelanders’, but apart from the sagas dealing with the discovery of North America, the so-called ‘Vínland sagas’, only three complete Íslendingasögur — Brennu-Njáls saga, Gísla saga Súrssonar , and Viga-Glúms saga — had appeared in English by 1868, and all three translations were then recent. The pioneering translators were in general not primarily concerned with their texts as works of literature, though they were not necessarily insensitive to literary considerations: as we have seen in chapter 1, Samuel Laing expressed the hope that his Heimskringla translation would ‘be of good service in the field of literature’. Far more important, however, was the historian’s impulse, so that we find James Johnstone, for example, introducing his edition and translation of The Norwegian Account of King Haco’s Expedition against Scotland with the explanation that ‘The editor, from some particular advantages he enjoyed, was encouraged to collect such inedited fragments as might elucidate antient history’ (p. vii). The medieval Icelandic texts were seen as historically reliable sources, and ones that shed light on the early history of the English-speaking peoples and the lands they inhabited. This interest in the Anglo-Saxon (and Celtic) connection is already evident in the texts chosen for translation by James Johnstone and Grímur Thorkelin in the late eighteenth century, and it continued into the nineteenth century. That the fascinating and tantalizing saga narratives relating to the Norse in North America centuries before Columbus should attract a flurry of attention following the publication in Copenhagen during 1837 of C. C. Rafn’s monumental Antiquitates Americanæ was hardly surprising. But even Friðþjófs saga, translated by George Stephens, is set partly in the Orkney Islands; and Repp’s ‘Saga of St Edward the King’ deals with happenings in England during the reign of Edward the Confessor, as well as with the adventures of English exiles from the rule of William the Conqueror. Even translators whose subject matter did not have an obvious link to the British Isles or North America were keen to stress the relevance of their texts to

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the history of Britain and the United States. The Norse who settled in the British Isles from the ninth to the eleventh century were, they argued, responsible for much of what was admirable in British and thus also American political and social institutions, and so the history of the Old North was in a vital sense part of British and American history. Samuel Laing is notorious for his rather extreme and passionate presentation of this viewpoint in the copious prefatory material to his 1844 translation, but similar attitudes are evident in the work of Dasent, and in the comments of the Vínland sagas translator Benjamin Franklin De Costa, who urged his readers: Let us remember too, that in vindicating the Northmen we honor those who not only gave us the first knowledge possessed of the American Continent, but to whom we are indebted for much beside we esteem valuable. In reality we fable in a great measure when we speak of our ‘Saxon inheritance’. It is rather from the Northmen that we have derived our vital energy, our freedom of thought, and in a measure that we do not yet suspect, our strength of speech. (p. iv)

In James Johnstone’s case, at least, the desire to stress links between the English-speaking world and Scandinavia extended to matters linguistic. In an address ‘To the Reader’ towards the beginning of his Anecdotes of Olave the Black Johnstone claimed to have made his translation ‘as literal as possible’, risking a degree of ‘uncouthness’ in order ‘[t]o show the affinity of the English language with the most pure and original dialect of the Teutonic’. In translating Játvarðar saga konungs hins helga the Anglophile Þorleifur Guðmundsson Repp, may, if Andrew Wawn is correct, have had as one of his priorities the highlighting of another aspect of relations between Iceland and the English-speaking countries, one often overlooked by pioneer saga enthusiasts like Laing who saw the matter in terms of the somewhat degenerate Anglo-Saxons being revitalized by receiving benefits from the North, and one also rarely mentioned by later translators. In translating this saga with an English subject, according to Wawn, Repp probably wished to emphasize medieval Iceland’s British links by identifying an English influence on saga literature. ‘Repp may have felt that such revelations helped to legitimise his desire […] to establish a more fundamental English influence over modern Icelandic law and constitutional reform’.23 It may well surprise the modern reader that by 1850 there were available three more or less complete translations of the Gylfaginning portion of the Prose Edda, not to mention substantial extracts in the 1839 monograph by Grenville Pigott. 23

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Wawn, ‘The Anglo Man’, p. 212.

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By contrast there were only two translations of substantial portions of the Prose Edda published between the appearance of Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur’s version in 1916 and the end of the twentieth century.24 A large part of the reason for the early popularity of the Prose Edda was of course the belief which lay behind Mallet’s decision to translate it: it was seen as an unparalleled source of information about the religion and customs of the Old North. For people who considered themselves Anglo-Saxons, or better still English-speaking descendants of the Northmen, this meant that it shed light on the religious beliefs and practices of their forefathers, a subject about which information was otherwise sadly deficient.25 The remarkable role Scotland played in the pioneering period, both in providing translators and in seeing the translations into print, is hard to overlook: — James Johnstone may have been Scottish. The spelling of his surname suggests a Scottish origin, and his translations imply a special interest in Scotland;26 — Thorkelin visited Scotland and did some of his translation work there;27 — Skene’s translations were published by the Iona Club; — Laing was an Orcadian (though admittedly one more proud of the Norwegian associations of the Orkneys than inclined to stress the Scottish heritage of the islands); — Dasent and Head, though Englishmen, were published in Edinburgh. To this one might add that Friðþjófs saga is set partly in the Orkneys, though there is nothing to suggest this encouraged George Stephens to translate it.

24

The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson (New York: American Scandinavian Foundation, 1916); The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson: Tales from Norse Mythology, trans. by Jean I. Young (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1954); Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans. by Anthony Faulkes (London: Dent, 1987). A new (partial) translation, Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology, trans. by Jesse Byock, was brought out by Penguin Classics in 2005. 25

Unfortunately the translations were also deficient. Until the appearance of Anthony Faulkes’s translation in 1987 all published English translations of the Prose Edda presented only part of the Icelandic text, sometimes in bowdlerized form, and all omitted Háttatal. Moreover, most translations of the Prose Edda in the period covered in this chapter were based on inferior editions that severely limited their value. 26

See Cowan, ‘Icelandic Studies’, p. 116; Julian D’Arcy, Scottish Skalds and Sagamen: Old Norse Influence on Modern Scottish Literature (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1996), p. 21–22; Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse, p. 170 27

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D’Arcy, Scottish Skalds, p. 21.

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In considering the Scottish role we must certainly take into account that in the nineteenth century British publishing was not as centralized in London as would later be the case. But there was doubtless another factor, associated with the desire of some Scots to emphasize the Scandinavian associations of their country, and the Scandinavian involvement in Scottish history, as a means of establishing a Scottish identity that was neither English nor Celtic.28 Possibly the Scots did feel a closer affinity with medieval Scandinavia than did the rest of the United Kingdom: their nineteenth century links across the North Sea and with Iceland were stronger, and the Norse period in their history had arguably lasted down to the impignoration of Orkney and Shetland in 1468–69, far longer than the corresponding periods in England and Ireland. Though all the pioneer translations have a certain fascination stemming in part from their age, an attempt to examine all of them individually might well become somewhat tedious for the reader, and it would be impractical to continue such a comprehensive process when we moved in the following chapters beyond the pioneering period and into eras when translations were produced in far greater numbers. Even in the pioneering period assessing every translation would involve examination of very brief works and works which were not based directly on texts in the Old Icelandic language. However, some of the early translators and translations do deserve somewhat closer attention, either for their trailblazing role or because the work produced remained influential long after it was first published.

Translations of James Johnstone The mysterious Johnstone, possibly the first to translate directly from Old Icelandic prose into English, and the first to create an English translation from the prose text of an Icelandic saga, will not give any readers who encounter his work the impression of being an inept beginner who must be excused on the grounds that he was attempting to go where there were no predecessors. On the contrary he appears to have been a competent amateur scholar for his time, capable of manuscript research and of presenting his material with scholarly paraphernalia and in lucid English. His prose translations might strike the modern reader as sometimes rather awkwardly close to the idioms of the Icelandic, and at other times rather Latinate — an unsurprising characteristic at

28

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Cowan, ‘Icelandic Studies’, p. 184; Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse, pp. 19, 168–69.

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a time when Latin still enjoyed currency as the language of scholarship. But they are readable, and quite accurate.29 Johnstone uses archaisms sparingly, translates verse as prose (with notes to explain the kennings), and tends to Anglicize names. A short extract from his earliest published translation, Anecdotes of Olave the Black, provides a sample of his style: About spring, Haco the King went north to Bergen, and when he came there, he ordered an armament to be prepared, which should go with Uspac to the western seas. To this expedition Earl Skuli contributed some troops. Eleven ships had they from Norway. (p. 7)30

Translations of Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin As we have noticed there is a strong suspicion that Thorkelin anonymously assisted Johnstone in his Old Icelandic work, but the Icelander was also a published translator into English in his own right, under the name ‘Grimr Johnson Thorkelin’. One of the very earliest translators of saga literature into English, he is also one of the few Icelanders ever to publish English translations of Old Icelandic literature without being part of a declared collaboration with a native speaker of English.31 (In regard to a relatively small part of his translations, that of a portion of Ragnars saga loðbrókar, ‘writ shortly ten after my arrival in England in the year 1786’, he does speak in his preface of being ‘indebted to my friend the truly ingenious and learned Mr John Pinkerton’,32 but Fry attributes the Ragnar saga translation to Thorkelin, and Thorkelin’s words would seem to admit this interpretation.) If Thorkelin’s extended translation from Laxdœla saga was produced without the aid of a native English speaker it can only be described as an early example of the remarkable ability of Scandinavians to write correct and elegant English.

29

Johnstone enjoyed less success in translating skaldic poetry accurately. See Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse, pp. 179–80. 30 The translation is from Hákonar saga gamla (ch. 138 in the Íslendingasagnaútgáfan edition of the Konunga sögur, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, 3 vols (Reykjavík: Íslendingasagnaútgáfan 1952), III, 1–464 (p. 192). 31

Both members of the translation team of Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson were indeed Icelanders, but Magnus lived most of his life in Britain, having moved there with his family when nine months old. 32

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See Thorkelin, Fragments, p. xi.

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Thorkelin’s English may render the Icelandic rather freely, sometimes no doubt because he was working from inadequate texts of the original, and he may employ ablative absolutes and other Latinate constructions, but his English prose is certainly competent: Hoskuld, having put his ship to sea, got himself in readiness to wait on his majesty, to whom he had not paid his duty the preceding winter; and at the same time to make himself acquainted with this celebrated market, which was exceedingly numerous, and at the same time equally splendid and attractive, every interval of business being filled with banqueting, interludes, plays, and a variety of other entertainments equally enchanting.33

A modern reader who consults chapter 12 of Laxdœla saga or one of the more recent English translations of the Icelandic original of this passage will probably conclude that Thorkelin has significantly elaborated on what is in the saga. A recently published English language translation, that of Keneva Kunz, renders it as follows: Hoskuld had his ship set afloat. He also wanted to attend the assembly, as he had not yet paid his respects to the king that winter. The assembly also attracted a gathering of traders. People attended in large numbers, and there was plenty of entertainment, drinking and games, and festivities of all sorts.34

Such a reader might perhaps also wonder if Thorkelin’s Höskuldr has somehow found his way to the court of Versailles under the Ancien Regime rather than to tenth-century Norway. But it would be a rash commentator who asserted confidently that two hundred years from now the translations of the late twentieth century will in no way seem quaint period pieces to any who encounter them.

33 See ‘A Fragment of Irish History or, A Voyage to Ireland undertaken from Iceland in the Tenth Century’, in Fragments, pp. 3–59 (p. 3). 34

‘The Saga of the People of Laxardal’ in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, V , 1–120 (p. 10), reprinted with minor changes in The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection, pp. 270–421 (p. 287). The matter of what is currently the ‘most recent’ published English translation of Laxdœla saga is complicated by the fact that Magnus Magnusson published a translation of the saga (‘Laxdæla Saga’) in his 2002 publication The Icelandic Sagas, II, but this version is a revised version — albeit significantly altered — of one he and Hermann Pálsson published with Penguin in 1969 (Laxdæla Saga).

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George Stephens’s translation of Friðþjófs saga The first complete translation of an Icelandic saga into English is, unfortunately, not easy reading if encountered in the original publication or a facsimile of it.35 The Gothic script employed in printing the text of the translation is likely to test severely the endurance powers even of readers who have experienced German language texts in this script. Stephens, who claimed to have consulted a manuscript of the original and Rafn’s Danish translation, though translating from an edition of the Icelandic, attempted to produce an English version ‘as literal as a due regard to the genius of the two languages would admit’, employing ‘a style rather antique’.36 Andrew Wawn quotes a sample passage and comments on the achievement: Stephens achieves a variety of archaistic effects: coordinate syntax, inversion (‘hereby got he the name’), alliterative pointing (‘stretched the strand’), phrasal contraction (‘where was a sanctuary’), neologistic compounding (‘plank-work’), and some old northern vocabulary (‘reckoned’, ‘strand’). This, however, finds itself mixed in with Latinate and French usages (‘governed’, ‘sanctuary’, ‘considerable village’). Overall the translation seems uncertain in its register, with saga-like plainness subverted by moments of regency verbosity (‘hedged around with’ for um, ‘versed in all manner of exploits’ for vel at iþrottum buinn’).37

A brief sample of the translation, using a different passage from the one Wawn quoted, will illustrate the style (though what follows cannot suggest the impact of the Gothic script in Stephens’s original): Wherever he went, waxed Frithiof exceedingly in riches and in fame. Wicked and cruel men and grimful Vikings he slew, but peasants and merchants let he go free. Again, therefore, was he called Frithiof the Bold. Right many men, stout-hearted and true, had he under him, and in all kinds of precious goods abounded he exceedingly. (ch. 11, p. 29)

Quotation of direct speech would reveal that, like many other translators in the century following 1839, Stephens used archaic second person singular pronouns and the corresponding inflected verbs.

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35

Facsimile reprint by Felinfach: Llanerch Publishers, 1994.

36

Stephens, Frithiof’s Saga, pp. [2], 39.

37

Wawn, The Vikings and Victorians, p. 133.

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Translations of George Webbe Dasent (to 1866) Dasent (1817–96) was the first translator to produce an English version of an Íslendingasaga that was still being admired and reprinted long after it was first published. It must count as a tribute to the quality and appeal of his 1861 version of Brennu-Njáls saga that it remained the only complete English version of this longest and probably greatest of the Íslendingasögur for almost a century — until 1955, in fact.38 Dasent’s version was included in the popular Everyman’s Library in 1911, and a new Everyman edition of 1957, with an introduction by Gabriel Turville-Petre, went through a number of reprints. Long out of copyright the Dasent text has even become available on the Internet. Three translations of Brennu-Njáls saga have appeared since Dasent’s, and those responsible for each of them have paid tribute to his work, even while obviously seeking to justify their own.39 Bayerschmidt and Hollander in 1955 described it as ‘outstanding for its time’ despite bearing ‘many earmarks of Victorian style (and prudery) less appropriate for rendering the realistic manner of Icelandic sagas’ (p. v). Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, translating for Penguin in 1960, more generously described it as ‘a magnificent and pioneering work, scrupulously accurate and heroically phrased’ but claimed that ‘a deliberately archaic flavour, a too-literal rendering of the Icelandic style and syntax’ make it ‘unnecessarily alien to the modern reader’ (p. 33). In contrast Robert Cook more than forty years later asserted that Dasent’s version of the saga used ‘the ordinary idiom of his day, apart from certain exceptions for which he begs indulgence’, and he made it clear that he admired Dasent’s translation of the saga more than those of 1955 and 1960.40 The Story of Burnt Njal was not Dasent’s only Old Icelandic translation, however. He has in fact the curious distinction of being the only English language translator of Old Icelandic prose to bring out previously unpublished translations over more than fifty years during his lifetime. (William Morris and 38

Bayerschmidt and Hollander’s translation of Njál’s Saga appeared in that year.

39

The number would be four if one counted as a separate translation Magnus Magnusson’s significant revision for his 1999 Folio Society publication The Icelandic Sagas, I, of his version with Hermann Pálsson in 1960 (Penguin: Harmondsworth). 40 Robert Cook’s translation originally appeared in the 1997 Complete Sagas of Icelanders, and was reprinted by Penguin in 2001. Like the Magnus Magnusson–Hermann Pálsson version for Penguin it bore the title Njal’s Saga. Cook’s generally sympathetic attitude to the Dasent translation is evident in his ‘On Translating Sagas’, Gripla, 13 (2002), 107–45. The quotation is from p. 111.

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Eiríkr Magnússon achieved a comparable timespan, but only with the ‘aid’ of posthumous publications.)41 As indicated above, Dasent’s earliest translation, of the Prose Edda, appeared in 1842, and his very much-delayed translations for the Rolls Series did not finally appear until 1894.42 Dasent’s style and approach to translation developed considerably between 1842 and 1861. His Prose Edda translation is extremely close, often very much at the expense of being idiomatic in English. Diacritics and distinctive Icelandic letters are retained, and one even encounters Icelandic forms of familiar place names: ‘Trója’ (for ‘Troy’) and ‘that island in Greekland’s sea hight Krít’ (‘Crete’).43 The closeness of Dasent’s translation will be suggested by quoting his version of a passage likely to be familiar to many erstwhile users of E. V. Gordon’s Introduction to Old Norse: The beginning of this story is, that ÖkuÞórr fared forth with his hegoats and car, and with him the As who is called Loki; they came at even to an husband, and got there a night’s lodging, […] (p. 51)44

When he published his translations of Brennu-Njáls saga and Gísla saga Súrssonar in the 1860s Dasent remained close to the Icelandic — Turville-Petre commented appreciatively that ‘Dasent is one of the few who has succeeded in conveying the rhythm of Icelandic prose, and no translator so nearly gives the reader the impression he would gain by reading the Icelandic text’.45 Dasent’s aim was clearly to convey to the English reader some of the qualities of the

41

As noted above, their earliest translations were published in 1869. A partial translation of Egils saga Skallagrímssonar was published in May Morris’s William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, 2 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936; repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), and their version of Kormáks saga appeared in The Story of Kormak the Son of Ogmund, published by the Morris Society in London in 1970. Morris died in 1896 and Eiríkr in 1913. 42

Icelandic Sagas and Other Historical Documents Relating to the Settlements and Descents of the Northmen on the British Isles, ed. by Guðbrandur Vigfússon, trans. by George Webbe Dasent, Rolls Series, 88, 4 vols (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1887–94). 43

Dasent, The Prose or Younger Edda, pp. 102–03.

44

Compare ‘Þat er upphaf þessa máls, at O 3 ku-Þórr fór með hafra sína ok reið, ok með honum sá Áss er Loki heitir. Koma þeir at kveldi til eins bónda ok fá þar náttstað’ (Gordon, An Introduction, p. 8). 45

See his introduction to The Story of Burnt Njal, trans. by G. W. Dasent (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1957), p. x.

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Icelandic — not to smooth the reader’s path.46 But despite archaisms and Biblical turns of phrase, particularly evident in direct speech, his 1860s translations reveal English which is vivid, readable, and generally lacking in strange characters and distracting mannerisms (unless one counts in this category the reproduction of the tense patterns of the original): Gisli turns short away to the byre. He goes out where he had meant, and locks it up strongly behind him. Then he goes home by the same way, and his footsteps cannot be seen. Auda pushes back the bolts when he came home, and he gets into bed, and makes as though nothing had happened, or as though he had nought to do but sleep.47

Samuel Laing’s translation of Heimskringla Like Dasent’s translation of Brennu-Njáls saga Laing’s 1844 translation of Heimskringla was a work very influential in the Victorian era and long afterwards.48 Everyman brought out a re-edited version in three volumes in 1961–64, and the entire text was available on the Internet by May 1996. A reader today is likely to feel that Laing’s translation shows its age, and he or she may well prefer Lee M. Hollander’s 1964 version, which will probably seem livelier and which is not only far more firmly based on a good edition of the Icelandic text but also considerably more adventurous and effective in its treatment of the work’s many skaldic verses. But Laing’s version remains readable, and remarkably free from archaisms, apart from somewhat inconsistent use of ‘thou’, ‘thee’, and inflected verb forms in direct speech. Commending the translation in his introduction to part of the Everyman edition in 1961 Peter Foote admits that the quality of Laing’s version was somewhat compromised by the works he consulted in creating it, but he continues:

46

See Johanna Torringa, ‘The Icelandic Sagas and their English Translations’, Essays and Studies, n.s. 22 (1969), 1–15 (pp. 2–3). 47 48

The Story of Gisli, ch. 9, p. 53.

See W awn, The Vikings and Victorians, pp. 91–116. For reprints and new editions of Laing see John Kennedy, ‘The English Language Translations of Heimskringla from 1844 to 1996’, in Sagas and the Norwegian Experience, Preprints, 10th International Saga Conference, Trondheim 3–9 August 1997 (Trondheim: Senter for Middelalderstudier, 1997), pp. 347–56 (pp. 348–52).

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Chapter 3 although the basis of his translation was thus insecure in some respects, Laing had a quality which is not necessarily given to a better scholar with better apparatus: he could write English that is plain, spirited, natural and confident, and in vigour and clarity he thus comes near to doing justice to Snorri’s style.49

A short extract from chapter 93 of his version of Haralds saga harðráða may serve to illustrate Laing’s translation style: King Harald Godwinsson had come with an immense army, both of cavalry and infantry. Now King Harald Sigurdsson rode around his array, to see how every part was drawn up. He was upon a black horse, and the horse stumbled under him, so that the king fell off. He got up in haste, and said, ‘A fall is lucky for a traveller.’50

Sir Edmund Head’s translation of Víga-Glúms saga Compared to those of Dasent and Laing, Head’s achievement as a saga translator was modest. The saga he translated is of moderate length, and apart from a brief extract51 his translation does not seem to have been reprinted after 1866. That it remained the only complete English rendering of Víga-Glúms saga until 1972 probably testifies above all else to a comparative lack of interest in that saga in the period, though the appearance of independent English language translations in 1972, 1987, and 1999,52 as well as the version in the Leifur Eiríksson Complete Sagas of Icelanders presumably indicates a belief among translators and publishers that it might interest a late twentieth-century audience. Head is remembered by history as the Governor of British North America from 1854 to 1861. More interestingly in the present context, however, he was a pupil of Eiríkr Magnússon, taking Icelandic lessons with him three or four times a week in 1863.53 Eiríkr’s most famous pupil, acquired some years later, was 49

See his introduction to Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla: Part Two. Sagas of the Norse Kings (London: Dent; New York: 1961), p. xxx. 50

Laing, Heimskringla, III, 88.

51

See ‘Farms and Fences’, in A Pageant of Old Scandinavia, ed. by Henry Goddard Leach (New York: American Scandinavian Foundation, 1945), pp. 140–42, which reprints part of ch. 7, pp. 27–30, of Head’s translation. 52

Víga-Glúms Saga, trans. by Lee M. Hollander (New York: Twayne, 1972); Viga-Glums Saga, with the Tales of Ögmund Bash and Thorvald Chatterbox, trans. by John McKinnell (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1987); The Schemers & Víga-Glúm. Bandamanna saga and Víga-Glúms saga, trans. by George Johnston (Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 1999). 53

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Wawn, The Vikings and Victorians, p. 358.

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William Morris. It is instructive to note how different Head’s plain translation style was from that made famous by the William Morris-Eiríkr Magnússon collaboration, which we will consider in the next chapter: One morning Astrida waked Glum up, and told him that many of Sigmund’s cattle had got into their home-field, and wanted to break in among the hay which was laid in heaps, ‘and I am not active enough to drive them out, and the men are all at work.’ He answered, ‘Well, you have not often asked me to work, and there shall be no offence in your doing so now.’54

Even Englishmen of the same period with the same teacher can translate the sagas very differently. The translations focused upon in this chapter have probably all now been relegated to the history of Old Icelandic studies. Few would seek them out for help with a difficult passage in the original, or recommend them to a reader who did not know Icelandic, though there are some who self-consciously declare a preference for Laing or Dasent over what they see as the meretricious modernity of some more recent translations. In most cases vastly improved editions of the original Icelandic texts, based on study of the often very complex manuscript situation, along with other advances in scholarship, have enabled the production of translations — sometimes several translations of the one text — which are more accurate and more in keeping with the tastes of our own time. But the work of the pioneers remains in most cases very readable; it provides a fascinating insight into what Old Icelandic literature meant to those who valued it one hundred and fifty or two hundred years ago; and in most cases the writers overcame daunting obstacles to produce translations that did a considerable degree of justice to their medieval originals.

54

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Head, Viga-Glums Saga, ch. 7, pp. 29–30.

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IN THE S HADOW OF W ILLIAM M ORRIS? S AGA T RANSLATION 1869–1913

T

hough of course no one knew at the time, the year 1869 marked the chronological midpoint of the long Victorian era: the queen, who had come to the throne as an eighteen-year-old in June 1837, was destined to live a few weeks into the twentieth century, dying in January 1901. However, for anyone interested in the responses to the Icelandic sagas in the English-speaking world, the year 1869 has another significance. It saw the publication of the first of what may be collectively the most famous of all saga translations, those created by the collaborative efforts of William Morris, the distinguished English poet and prose writer, artist, entrepreneur, and social activist, and the Icelandic scholar Eiríkr Magnússon. The importance of the translations William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon produced in partnership lies partly in the fact that they constitute a very substantial body of work. In the years 1869–75 they published three books of translations, apart from more minor pieces, and from 1891 they brought out another six substantial volumes in ‘The Saga Library’, published by the famous bookman Bernard Quaritch. Their publications included translations of some major works, amongst them the massive Heimskringla and two of the ‘great five’ Íslendingasögur — Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar and Eyrbyggja saga. In fact they seem to have translated a good deal more than the vast amount they published, and as late as 1970 a previously unpublished work, their version of Kormáks saga, appeared. Remarkably, the major part of this joint translation activity was apparently squeezed into a few years between 1869 and 1872 or 1873: some revision and fresh translation probably occurred in connection with the Saga

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Library in the late 1880s and 1890s, but not much compared to the achievement of the initial years, it would seem.1 Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon faced major challenges in translating Icelandic saga prose into English, and it was fortunate that both were men of great energy and enthusiasm. As we have seen there were translations published from the closing decades of the eighteenth century, but the overall achievements were modest, and of the works from before 1860 probably only Samuel Laing’s 1844 version of Heimskringla is of more than historical interest. Matters had begun to improve in the 1860s with George Webbe Dasent’s long-awaited version of Brennu-Njáls saga in 1861, his version of Gísla saga in 1866, and Edmund Head’s version of Víga-Glúms saga in 1868, but when Morris and his Icelandic collaborator commenced work there were few models to study in attempting to resolve the special problems of rendering Old Icelandic prose into English. The translations on which Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon collaborated are famous for being characterized by a distinctive style, the merits of which are debated even today. In their own time it quickly won enemies as well as friends. In an earlier chapter we noted the vigorous attack in the Corpus poeticum boreale of 1883 on the ‘grave error into which too many English translators of Old Northern and Icelandic writings have fallen, to wit, the affectation of archaism, and the abuse of archaic, Scottish, pseudo-Middle-English words’ and Eiríkr Magnússon’s defence against what he no doubt quite rightly saw as an attack on Morris and himself. Somewhat ironically, in view of Morris’s well-known hostility to what he regarded as the dominant mores and culture of his own time, the view has developed that the imitators of the Morris–Eiríkr Magnússon style were indeed ‘too many’, and that the partnership was virtually responsible for a Victorian style of saga translation, to be challenged and rejected by later generations. Introducing the translation of Hrólfs saga Krake by one of his students, Stella M. Mills, in 1933 E. V. Gordon praised her for avoiding some of the faults of ‘William Morris and his many imitators’.2 How great then was the influence of Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon over translators in their own time? To assess this we obviously need to consider both their own translations and the works of other translators produced in the years after they began publishing saga translations.

1 See J. N. Swannell, ‘William Morris as an Interpreter of Old Norse’, Saga-Book, 15 (1961), 365–82 (pp. 372–74). 2

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The Saga of Hrolf Kraki (Oxford: Blackwell, 1933), p. xi.

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What follows is a listing of translations published in the forty-four year period from 1869 to 1913, the year before the outbreak of the First World War. This listing records first publication only: it does not include reprints,3 except in a few cases where the reprinted material appeared in a collection that also included new translations of Old Icelandic prose. Translated extracts of less than a few hundred words are omitted, as are abstracts and ‘retellings’. Like similar listings in other chapters the one here draws on the bibliographies of Donald Fry and Paul Acker, but as with those prior listings it has been possible in most cases to draw bibliographical details from firsthand examinations of the various translations and to make some minor additions and corrections to the details in those bibliographies. 1869 Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu Translated by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris in their ‘The Saga of Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue and Rafn the Skald’, Fortnightly Review, n.s. 5, 11, 27–56. Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar Translated by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris in their Grettis saga: The Story of Grettir the Strong (London: Ellis). 1870 Völsunga saga Translated by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris in their Volsunga saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda (London: Ellis). 1871 Friðþjófs saga hins frœkna Translated by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris in their ‘The Story of Frithiof the Bold’, The Dark Blue, 1 (March–April), 42–58, 176–82. 1873 Brenna Adams biskups, Orkneyinga saga, and excerpt from Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar

3

The Fry and Acker bibliographies provide useful details about reprints, which of course served to disseminate the translations and increase their influence.

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Translated by Jón A. Hjaltalin and Gilbert Goudie in The Orkneyinga saga, ed. by Joseph Anderson (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas). 1875 Friðþjófs saga hins frœkna (revised), Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu (revised), Hróa þáttr heimska, excerpts from The Prose Edda, Sörla þáttr, Víglundar saga, and Þorsteins þáttr stangarhöggs Translated by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris in their Three Northern Love Stories and Other Tales (London: Ellis and White). 1875–83 Thómas saga erkisbyskups Translated by Eiríkr Magnússon in his Thómas saga erkibyskups: A Life of Archbishop Thomas Becket, 2 vols (London: Longman). 1877 Friðþjófs saga hins frœkna and Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar Translated by Rasmus B. Anderson and Jón Bjarnarson in their Viking Tales of the North (Chicago: Griggs; London: Trübner). 1880 Eiríks saga rauða Translated by John Sephton in his ‘Eirik the Red’s Saga: A Translation Read before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, January 12th 1880’, Proceedings of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, 34, 183–212. Separately published in the same year Liverpool: Marples. The Prose Edda Partial translation by Rasmus B. Anderson in his The Younger Edda (Chicago: Griggs; London: Trübner). 1882 Bandamanna saga, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, and Þórðar saga hreðu

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Translated in John Coles, Summer Travelling in Iceland (London: Murray) [Though ostensibly by Coles the translations are probably in large measure the work of Eiríkr Magnússon].4 1883 Landnámabók, The Prose Edda, Völsunga saga, etc. Extracts translated by Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell in their Corpus poeticum boreale: The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue from the Earliest Times to the Thirteenth Century, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press). 1889 Translations of numerous extracts from various sources by Paul B. du Chaillu and Jón Stefánsson in The Viking Age (London: Murray; New York: Scribner’s). 1890 Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga Translated by Arthur Middleton Reeves in his The Finding of Wineland the Good: The History of the Icelandic Discovery of America (London: Frowde). Laurentius saga Hólabiskups Translated by Oliver Elton in his The Life of Laurence Bishop of Holar in Iceland (Laurentius saga by Einar Haflidason) (London: Rivingtons). 1891 Bandamanna saga, Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings, Hœnsa-Þóris saga, and Odds þáttr Ófeigssonar Translated by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris in their The Saga Library, Vol. 1: The Story of Howard the Halt. The Story of the Banded Men. The Story of Hen-Thorir (London: Quaritch). Karlamagnús saga Extract translated by Charles Sprague Smith in his ‘The Battle of Roncesvalles in the Karlamagnus saga’, Modern Language Notes, 6, 129–34.

4

Wawn, The Vikings and Victorians, pp. 299, 304, 304n. In an unpaginated preface Coles thanks Eiríkr ‘for kindly supervising the translation of the three Sagas’.

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1892 Eyrbyggja saga, Heiðarvíga saga, and Æva Snorra goða Translated by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris in their The Story of the Ere-dwellers (Eyrbyggja saga) with The Story of the Heath-slayings (Heiðarvíga saga) as Appendix, The Saga Library, 2 (London: Quaritch). Flóamanna saga Partial translation, from the French of Eugene Beauvois, by Daniel Van Pelt in his ‘The Voyage of Thorgils and his Adventures on the East Coast of Greenland about the Year 1000’, The National Magazine (April), 11–20. Grœnlendinga saga Translated by ‘Mr Arngrimsson’ in Eben Norton Horsford, The Landfall of Leif Erikson A.D. 1000 and the Site of his Houses in Wineland (Boston: Damrell and Upham). 1893 Egils saga Skallagrímssonar Translated by W. C. Green in his The Saga of Egil Skallagrimsson, Being an Icelandic Family History of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (London: Elliot Stock). Grœnlendinga saga Translated anonymously in Flateyarbók. The Flatey Book. Flatö Bogen (Copenhagen: Danish General Staff Topographical Department). 1893–1905 Heimskringla Translated by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris in their The Stories of the Kings of Norway Called the Round World (Heimskringla), by Snorri Sturluson, The Saga Library, 3–6, 4 vols (London: Quaritch) [Vol. 6 entitled The Stories of the Kings of Norway Called the Round of the World (Heimskringla) by Snorri Sturlason (sic)]. 1894 Annálar íslenzkir (extracts), Brenna Adams biskups, part of Brennu-Njáls saga (revised from his 1861 version), Dunstanus saga, Fundinn Noregs, Hákonar saga gamla Hákonarsonar, Helga þáttr ok Úlfs, Hemings þáttr Áslakssonar, Inga saga

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Haraldssonar, Játvarðar saga konungs hins helga, Magnús saga Hákonarsonar, Magnús saga helga eyjajarls, Orkneyinga saga, and Þorsteins saga Síðu-Hallssonar Translated by George W. Dasent in his Icelandic Sagas and Other Historical Documents Relating to the Settlements and Descents of the Northmen on the British Isles. Vol. III. The Orkneyingers’ Saga. Vol. IV. The Saga of Hacon and a Fragment of The Saga of Magnus, Rolls Series, 88 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office). Friðþjófs saga hins frœkna Translated by John Sephton in his ‘A Translation of the Saga of Frithiof the Fearless’, Proceedings of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, 48, 69–97. Ísleifs þáttr biskups and Þorvalds þáttr viðförla Translated pseudonymously by Mary Charlotte Julia (Mrs Disney) Leith in her The Stories of Thorwald the Far-farer and of Bishop Isleif (London: Masters). Þorsteins þáttr skelks Translated by F. York Powell in his ‘The Tale of Thorstan Shiver’, an appendix to The Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus, trans. by Oliver Elton (London: Nutt). Þorsteins þáttr stangarhöggs Translated by John H. Wisby in his ‘Saga Literature’, Poet-Lore, 6, 281–98. 1895 Eindriða þáttr ilbreiðs, Eiríks þáttr jarls Hákonarsonar, Finns þáttr Sveinssonar, Færeyinga saga, Hallfreðar saga, Íslands bygging, Kjartans þáttr Ólafssonar, Kristni þáttr, Otto saga keisara, Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, Rauðs þáttr ramma, Rögnvalds þáttr ok Rauðs, Seljumanna þáttr, Stefnis þáttr Þorgilssonar, Svaða þáttr ok Arnórs kerlingarnefs, Þiðranda þáttr Síðu-Hallssonar, Þorhalls þáttr knapps, Þorvalds þáttr tasalda, Þorvalds þáttr víðförla, and Ögmundar þáttr dytts ok Gunnars Helmings. Translated by John Sephton in his The Saga of King Olaf Tryggwason Who Reigned over Norway A.D. 995 to A.D. 1000 (London: Nutt). Hungrvaka, Ísleifs þáttr biskups (reprinted from 1894), Þorláks saga hin elzta, and Þorvalds þáttr víðförla (reprinted from 1894)

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Translated pseudonymously by Mary Charlotte Julia (Mrs Disney) Leith in her Stories of the Bishops of Iceland (London: Masters). Magnús saga helga eyjajarls Translated by W. H. Metcalfe in his Ancient Lives of Scottish Saints (Paisley: Gardner). 1896 Færeyinga saga Translated by F. York Powell in his The Tale of Thrond of Gata, Commonly Called Færeyinga saga (London: Nutt). Jómsvíkinga saga Translated by Rasmus B. Anderson in his ‘The Story of the Jomsvikings’, International, 1 (August–October) 3–24, 117–34, 208–23. 1897 Eyrbyggja saga and Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar (partial translations) Translated by W. A. Craigie in ‘The Marvels of Fródá’ and ‘The Story of Glam. The Foul Fords’, in Andrew Lang, The Book of Dreams and Ghosts (London: Longmans Green). 1898 Flóamanna saga Considerable excerpts translated by John Sephton in his ‘What the Sagas Say of Greenland’, Proceedings of the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society, 52, 119–54. Landnámabók Translated by T. Ellwood in his The Book of the Settlement of Iceland (Kendal: Wilson). 1899 Brennu-Njáls saga, Eyrbyggja saga, Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings, and Laxdœla saga (extracts) Translated by Albany F. Major and E. E. Speight in their Stories from the Northern Sagas (London: Marshall).

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Laxdœla saga Translated by Muriel A. C. Press in her Laxdæla saga (London: Dent). Mána þáttr skálds and Sverris saga Translated by John Sephton in his Sverrissaga, The Saga of King Sverri of Norway (London: Nutt). 1902 Kormáks saga Translated by W. G. Collingwood and Jón Stefánsson in their The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald (Ulverston: Holmes). Vápnfirðinga saga Translated by Robert Proctor in his The Tale of the Weaponfirthers Englished out of the Icelandic (Edinburgh: Constable). 1903 Laxdœla saga Translated by Robert Proctor in his The Story of the Laxdalers (London: Chiswick Press). 1905 Brandkrossa þáttr, partial translation of Droplaugarsona saga, Einars þáttr Sokkasonar, Eiríks saga rauða, partial translation of Eyrbyggja saga, Flóamanna saga, Fóstbrœðra saga, Geirmundar þáttr heljarskinns, partial translation of Gísla saga Súrssonar, excerpts from Grágás, Grœnlendinga saga, Guðmundar saga biskups góða II, Gunnars þáttr Þiðrandabana, partial translation of Hallfreðar saga, partial translation of Harðar saga Grímkelssonar ok Geirs, Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, partial translation of Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar, Hungrvaka, Hœnsa-Þóris saga, Ísleifs þáttr biskups, Íslendingabók, Jóns saga helga, partial translation of Kormáks saga, Kristni saga, Landnámabók, partial translation of Laxdœla saga, partial translation of Ljósvetninga saga, Mantissa, Oddaverja þáttr, Páls saga biskups, Svaða þáttr ok Arnórs kerlingarnefs, partial translation of Vatnsdœla saga, partial translation of Víga-Glúms saga, Þiðranda þáttr SíðuHallssonar, Þorhalls þáttr knapps, Þorláks saga hin elzta, partial translation of Þorsteins þáttr uxafóts, Þorvalds þáttr víðförla, and Ögmundar þáttr dytts ok Gunnars Helmings

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Translated by Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell in their Origines Islandicæ, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press). 1906 Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu Translated by Robert Locke Bremner in his ‘The Story of Gunnlaug the WormTongue and Rafn the Skald’, The Guide (August–September). 1907 Fljótsdœla saga (partial translation) Translated by W. G. Collingwood in his ‘A Legend of Shetland from Fljótsdœla saga’, Saga-Book, 5, 272–87. Guðmundar saga biskups góða I Excerpt translated by W. P. Ker in his ‘The Life of Bishop Gudmund Arason’, Saga-Book, 5, 86–103. 1908 Brennu-Njáls saga (translated in verse), Egils saga Skallagrímssonar (from his 1893 translation), Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu (translated in prose and verse), Óláfs saga Haraldssonar, the Prose Edda (translated in verse), Sigurðar saga Jórsalafara, Vatnsdœla saga (partial translations) Translated by W. C. Green in his Translations from the Icelandic (London: Chatto and Windus). 1910 Grœnlendinga saga Translated by Gustave Niebaum in his ‘The Discoveries of the Norsemen on the Northeast Coast of America and their Attempt at Colonization’, Transactions and Proceedings of the Geographical Society of the Pacific, 6.2, series 2, 59–81. 1911 Haralds saga harðráða and Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar Translated by Ethel M. Hearn in her The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald the Tyrant (London: Williams and Norgate).

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It is obvious from this listing that whatever might be said about the influence of Morris and Eiríkr, their publications in the years 1869–75 did not inspire any immediate upsurge of published saga translations. Apart from their own collaborative works and a scholarly translation of an Icelandic life of St Thomas Becket by Eiríkr Magnússon, acting independently of Morris, the 1870s saw only a translation of Orkneyinga saga which seems to have been primarily intended for historians, and a controversial publication in the United States to which the colourful Norwegian-American Rasmus B. Anderson probably contributed less than he implied. The 1880s also produced a very modest crop of translations from Old Icelandic prose, and of these only the translations in John Coles’s Summer Travelling in Iceland and John Sephton’s version of the often translated Eiríks saga rauða are complete works and of more than minor importance. It is at least possible that Eiríkr Magnússon was in fact largely responsible for the translations in the Coles book. Not until the 1890s was there a major upsurge in saga translations not from the pens of Morris and Eiríkr, or Eiríkr alone. Andrew Wawn, who unquestionably knows more about Victorian responses to the Old North than any other scholar who did not actually live during that golden age of popular enthusiasm for things Viking, has commented that ‘comparing the sagas read, translated, and enjoyed by the Victorians with an equivalent late twentieth-century list would surely confirm that the modern canon has shrivelled strikingly’.5 An examination of what appeared in published translations during the years 1869–1913 will reveal that, as would be the case a century later, the Íslendingasögur were particularly popular, accounting for about half the activity. But it will also reveal a willingness to attempt other types of texts, including lives of saints and bishops, very largely neglected by translators in the last fifty years of the twentieth century. The partnership of Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon did range fairly widely, translating from the konungasögur and the fornaldarsögur and attempting Íslendingasögur unlikely to have wide popular appeal, such as Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings and Heiðarvíga saga, as well as more readily appealing works like Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu. But it would be difficult to argue that they sanctioned efforts by other translators to move beyond the 5

‘The Spirit of 1892: Sagas, Saga-steads and Victorian Philology’, Saga-Book, 23 (1992), 213–52 (p. 230). According to Karl Litzenberg, The Victorians and the Vikings: A Bibliographical Essay on Anglo-Norse Literary Relations, University of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology, 3 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1947): ‘The golden age of Old Norse study in England extends approximately from 1842 to 1905 — from the date of Sir George Webbe Dasent’s translation of Snorri’s Edda to the year in which the last volume of Morris and Magnússon’s Saga Library appeared’ (p. 9).

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familiar. Even as late as 1890 most Icelandic texts, including ones now familiar to anyone with a passing interest in the subject, awaited their first published English translation: there was little scope for sticking to tried and true paths, even if one had a desire to do so. Moreover, the translators of saints’ and bishops’ lives received no overt encouragement from an example set by William Morris, though Eiríkr Magnússson, as we have seen, translated the Icelandic life of Thomas Becket. It would be hard to argue that Morris and Eiríkr in any way established a canon of works to be translated and retranslated. A good deal has been written about the motives that impelled Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon to translate Old Icelandic literature — or to be more precise, much about the motives of Morris, who though initially the pupil, was from the start the dominant figure in the partnership. In part Morris was impelled by a love of literature — the translation of Völsunga saga published in 1870 is directed to ‘the lover of poetry and nature’ (p. v). To some extent he shared the strong Victorian awareness of ties of blood and kinship with the Old North: Völsunga saga, readers are reminded, is ‘the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks’ (p. xi). But there was another motive, springing from his conviction that recorded in the literature of medieval Iceland was a more authentic way of living and thinking than that of nineteenth-century Britain, and one from which his contemporaries needed urgently to learn.6 Despite Morris’s declaration in the preface to Volume 1 of the Saga Library in 1891 that ‘the series of tales and histories to be published under the title of the SAGA LIBRARY is addressed to the whole reading public and not only to students of Scandinavian history, folklore, and language […]’ (p. v), it seems clear that the translations were not really intended as easy and entertaining reading. They were meant to be difficult, to require the reader to engage with them, and thereby to gain an insight into the distinctive qualities of the civilization they recorded.7

6 Swannell, ‘William Morris as an Interpreter’, p. 382; Magnus Magnusson, ‘William M orris’s Iceland’, in William Morris, Icelandic Journals (London: Mare’s Nest, 1996), pp. xiii–xxiv (pp. xx–xxi). For a sceptical view of the widespread notion that Morris derived his socialism from his Icelandic experiences see W awn, The Vikings and Victorians, pp. 276–77. 7 See Anthony Ugolnik, ‘The Victorian Skald: Old Icelandic and the Evolution of William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung’, in The After-Summer Seed: Reconsiderations of William Morris’s The Story of Sigurd the Volsung: Papers Read at the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association, December 1976, ed. by John Hollow (New York: The William Morris Society, 1978), pp. 37–67 (pp. 48–49); Kunz, ‘No One but a Blockhead’, pp. 74–75.

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Some other translators of the period 1869–1913 clearly translated because they admired the sagas as literature, and an awareness of the racial links to Scandinavia was common.8 Adherence to Morris’s belief in the enriching quality of exposure to medieval Icelandic civilization is not very evident in their work, however, and some translators clearly had motives that differed from those of Morris. Many worked for the benefit of the amateur or professional historian: this is evident in the case of the pioneering translation of Orkneyinga saga in 1873, in the work of Dasent for the Rolls Series, in the great though flawed Origines Islandicæ which finally appeared in 1905, and in the works dealing with the Norse discovery of America. Morris, though he and Eiríkr translated Heimskringla, which was often seen by nineteenth-century writers as an historical source, does not appear to have viewed the great work primarily in this light: the style and the editorial material suggest that the translation was for the lover of literature and the potential admirer of skaldic poetry rather than the historian (who, of course, had available Samuel Laing’s very well-known and stylistically much more accessible translation). A few translators were influenced in their translation work by their Christian faith. In 1890, Oliver Elton, who had links to the Oxford Movement, published a translation of the life of Laurentius Kálfsson, Bishop of Hólar in the north of Iceland from 1324 to 1331; and in 1894–95 the first woman to publish a translation of Old Icelandic prose into English, the Anglo-Catholic Mary Leith, brought out the first of two volumes of translations of materials relating to the medieval Icelandic church. Motives influenced by religious piety would have been alien to Morris, whose medievalism did not extend to any particular theological sympathy with Catholicism in any of its forms. William Morris is famous for the view that the things of everyday life could and should be beautiful and, as is well known, he took a keen interest in the physical production of books, particularly later in life.9 Even after more than a century his books of saga translations are physically attractive objects, especially in the case of the Saga Library, about which J. M. Swannell commented: These six handsome volumes are a pleasure to read and to handle. They are admirably printed, as one would expect, and the critical apparatus and explanatory notes, nearly all the work of Magnússon, are almost frighteningly elaborate and detailed.10

8

It finds a place in the Corpus poeticum boreale of 1883 ( I, p. cxvii)

9

See Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for our Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1994). 10

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The notes in the four volumes devoted to Heimskringla in the set are in fact almost entirely confined to the final volume, published some nine years after Morris’s death in 1896, and the extent of them is in contrast with what one finds in earlier publications of the partnership, where the philosophy seems to be to let ‘the texts speak for themselves’, without such intervention. The Saga Library volumes were expensive, and few other than wealthy bibliophiles could hope to acquire them. Most translators had to be satisfied with more modest publications, whatever their wishes might have been, though some volumes, such as Arthur Middleton Reeves’s Finding of Wineland the Good in 1890, Robert Proctor’s The Story of the Laxdalers in 1903, and Ethel Hearn’s The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald the Tyrant in 1911, are quite handsome. Interestingly, there is virtually no editorial apparatus in the latter two volumes, in sharp contrast to the daunting array of aids to interpretation and commentary that accompany translations such as that of Orkneyinga saga in 1873 or which is to be found in the rather intimidating Origines Islandicæ. As regards presentation of translations Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon can hardly be said to have founded a tradition. Perhaps one might wish that they had, but it is undeniable that the beautiful objects that the firm of Morris and Co. created were beyond the reach of all not in decidedly comfortable circumstances. When the saga translations in which William Morris had a role are praised or condemned, the focus is usually on the writing style they employ. It is indeed distinctive, and clearly identifiable even in a short passage: […]and when Helgi was born, Norns came to him, and spake over him, and said that he should be in time to come the most renowned of all kings. Even therewith was Sigmund come home from the wars, and so therewith he gives him the name of Helgi, and these matters as tokens thereof, Land of Rings, Sun-litten Hill, and Sharp-shearing Sword, and withal prayed that he might grow of great fame, and like unto the kin of the Volsungs. (Volsunga Saga, ch. 8, pp. 25–26).

The style was described, and condemned, as archaic in its own time11 and later, but ‘archaism’ is hardly in itself an adequate explanation of what makes it distinctive. Many, probably most, translations of ancient and medieval texts in the Victorian age and for some decades afterwards employed archaisms, especially in direct speech, as a means of indicating the distance separating the composition of the text concerned from the modern reader. As we have seen Eiríkr Magnússon defended Morris from the claim of excessive archaism and

11

An anonymous review of their Völsunga Saga translation in The Athenæum, 2224 (11 June 187), 763–64 condemned it as ‘too elaborately and intrusively archaic’ (p. 764).

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argued that what was actually happening in the texts on which he and Morris had worked (usually with Eirikr translating and Morris reworking what he had written, but sometimes the other way around) was actually a process of giving them a genuinely Icelandic linguistic flavour.12 More recent studies suggest that this is not in fact the whole story: Morris was indeed strongly inspired by Icelandic vocabulary items and Icelandic syntactical patterns, but he also drew heavily on his knowledge of medieval English writers, notably Chaucer and Malory. His words and constructions are in effect often obsolete forms and structures whose reintroduction in his texts was sanctioned, as it were, by what he found in the Icelandic text he was translating. There are very few true neologisms. An examination of the saga translations of the period 1869–1913 suggests that few translators followed Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon down this rather sophisticated and demanding archaizing and Icelandicizing path: Proctor is probably the main example, though the work of E. R. Eddison, a vociferous reactionary in translation matters who published his version of Egils saga Skallagrímssonar in 1930, provides an example outside the period. Many translators of the sagas indeed employed archaisms, but this in itself does not make them disciples of Morris, and they almost certainly would have done so had William Morris never published a word of saga translation. As Matthew Arnold’s influential essay ‘On translating Homer’ makes clear, the debate on the use of archaism in Victorian times was vigorous, and archaism in translation had powerful champions. Was then, saga translation in the years 1869–1913 conducted ‘in the shadow of William Morris’? It would probably be better to say that it was conducted in the presence of William Morris. He and Eiríkr did not in fact dictate what was translated, why it was translated, or how it was translated, and they had relatively few faithful disciples. If there was indeed a ‘school of William Morris’, as one

12

The style of the William Morris–Eiríkr Magnússon translations has inspired a large scholarly literature. See Litzenberg, ‘The Diction of William Morris’; Quirk, ‘Dasent, Morris’; Swannell, ‘William Morris as an Interpreter’; James Barribeau, ‘William Morris and Saga Translations: “The Story of King Magnus, Son of Erling”’, in The Vikings, ed. by R. T. Farrell (London: Phillimore, 1982), pp. 239–61; Sally Magnusson, ‘The Victorian and the Norseman’, Northern Studies, 12 (1978), 3–15; Linda Anne Julian, ‘William Morris: The Icelandic Influence on his Writing’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston University, 1989); Wawn, The Vikings and Victorians, pp. 259–63.

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reviewer suggested in 1904,13 it was small and select. But Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon together constituted a powerful presence of which all later Victorian and Edwardian translators were aware. In the sense that one is under the influence of something which affects the way one thinks and acts, even if one is impelled to react against it, it might be said that the shadow of William Morris extended a long way over the saga translations of the twentieth century and may not have wholly left us even today. To obtain a fuller picture of saga translating activity during 1869–1913 it is now necessary to look in more detail at some of the more important translators including, of course, William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon. It would probably be repetitive and unrewarding to attempt a detailed discussion of all translators who published in the period, but the major figures are included here, as well as a representative selection of those less eminent. Translators are discussed in a chronological order determined by the date of the appearance of their first work of saga translation.

Translations of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon Whether William Morris had translated any Icelandic before his first meeting with Eiríkr Magnússon, memorably described by the latter in the preface to the final volume of the Saga Library that appeared in 1905, seems a matter of dispute. According to Robert Gutman, ‘Even before starting work with Magnusson, Morris had dabbled in Icelandic and tried his hand at translation’; but Fiona MacCarthy states that, prior to his first meeting with Eiríkr, Morris ‘was already steeped in Icelandic literature but only in translation’.14 Certainly Morris published no substantial translation from the Old Icelandic without Eiríkr’s involvement as a co-worker, although the frequency of references to Morris’s translations from the Icelandic might suggest otherwise. Apparently this failure to acknowledge the Icelandic scholar was a problem even in the 1870s: in a letter to The Athenæum in 1879 Morris draws attention to the fact ‘that Mr Vigfusson, in his recently published Prolegomena to the Sturlunga 13

A. F. Major, review of The Story of the Laxdalers, done into English by Robert Proctor, Saga-Book, 3 (1904), 489. 14

Gutman, Introduction to Volsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, trans. by William Morris, with an introduction and glossary by Robert W. Gutman (New York: Collier; London: Collins-Macmillan, 1962), pp. 13–79 (p. 58); MacCarthy, William Morris, p. 279.

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Saga, speaks of me as the sole translator of the English version of the Grettis Saga and the Gunnlaugs Saga Ormstungu, omitting to mention the name of Mr Eiríkr Magnússon, my collaborateur’. He continues: As a matter of fact, when we set about those joint works I had just begun the study of Icelandic under Mr Magnússon’s mastership, and my share in the translation was necessarily confined to helping in the search for the fittest English equivalents to the Icelandic words and phrases, to turning the translations of the ‘vísur’ into some sort of English verse, and to general revision in what might be called matters of taste: the rest of the work, including notes, and all critical remarks, was entirely due to Mr Magnússon’s learning and industry […] Mr Magnússon’s responsibility and labour was, therefore, much greater than mine in these works, which if his pleasure in the labour was half as much as mine, it was great indeed.15

We do of course have published saga translations from the pen of Eiríkr Magnússon working alone. What follows is a brief sample of his translation of Thómas saga erkisbyskups: The blessed Thomas grew up in London, obedient to father and to mother, pleasing and gentle towards every man, bright and blithe of visage, and of a turn of countenance, as it seemed to wise men, that the sweetness of God’s grace was clearly seen in him. And now since this is the first season of learning in the growing up of man, that a good and loving mother talketh Christian words to him, maketh known unto him the fear of God, and teacheth him holy lore, so young Thomas hath even such a school to begin with, for his mother Maild was both wise, and willing to give good counsels to him. (ch. 4, pp. 17, 19)

The odour of hagiography is unmistakable here, inhibiting direct comparison with the saga translations in which Morris was involved. But while this is a close translation, and one that employs archaic language, it does not have the same tendency to employ English cognates of Icelandic words that one would expect in a translation involving Morris. Had Morris been involved, one suspects that ‘Sæll Thomas vóx upp í Lundúnum’ in the text facing Eiríkr’s translation might have become ‘Blessed Thomas waxed up in London’, and the ‘therewiths’ and ‘withals’ distinctive of Morris’s translations would be more in evidence. Writing long after the deaths of her father and Eiríkr, May Morris was rather dismissive of the prose drafts the Icelander contributed to the collaboration: ‘Magnússon would prepare a translation which Morris would then take in hand, and, with the text before him, amend the style and turn it from Magnússon’s

15

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Quoted in Swannell, ‘William Morris as an Interpreter’, p. 377.

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unconsidered journalese into a language more worthy of the subject’.16 Less partial students of the evidence of the surviving drafts are more sympathetic in assessing the merits of Eiríkr’s contributions.17 But Morris was certainly doing much more than simply improving the English, and (particularly in the later translations) more than he implied in his letter to The Athenæum. He had strong views on how the Icelandic sagas should and should not be translated. Morris believed that the Norman French influence on the English language had been harmful: The great works of the English poets since Chaucer’s time have had to be written in what is little more than a dialect of French and I cannot help looking on that as a mishap. If we could only have preserved our language as the Germans have theirs, I think we with our mingled blood would have made the world richer than it is now […]18

He lamented in particular that the sagas were not being translated into a form of English more worthy of them. In an account supplied to May Morris, presumably after her father’s death, Eiríkr Magnússon observed: ‘There must be […] many of his friends who heard him frequently denounce it as something intolerable to have read an Icelandic saga rendered into the dominant literary dialect of the day — the English newspaper language’.19 The style of the sagas, in his view ‘cannot be reached by the Romantic element in English. If it is to be reached at all – and then only approximately — it must be by means of the Teutonic elements in our speech — the nearest akin to Icelandic’.20 The style of the saga translations of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon provoked adverse criticism in their lifetime and afterwards, with the later translations appearing in the Saga Library being regarded as somewhat more mannered and difficult to interpret than the earlier ones. A common sentiment was expressed by Halldór Hermannsson, who in 1930 stated his belief that the translations of the collaborators were ‘apt to convey to the reader a totally wrong

16

May Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, I, 455.

17

‘His own style is fairly straightforward and not unattractive; it is slightly archaic, […]’: Swannell, ‘William Morris as an Interpreter’, p. 380. 18

Quoted in Barribeau, ‘William Morris and Saga Translation’, pp. 251–52.

19

Quoted in May Morris’s edition of The Collected Works of William Morris, 24 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910–15), VII, p. xvii. 20

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Ibid.,

VII,

p. xviii.

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impression of the simple, clear, concise and direct saga style’.21 The noted poet Kenneth Rexroth forcibly expressed another common reaction, describing their translations as a ‘terrible waste — I doubt if Morris’s wonderful Saga Library was ever readable by anybody — and there the great sagas are, locked up in that ridiculous language’.22 But their translations have also been admired for their accuracy, and Swannell (p. 377) pays them the compliment of saying that they ‘can give much pleasure to those who do read Old Norse’. No doubt it is legitimate to give pleasure to readers of a source language by demonstrating skill in carrying its linguistic features into a target language whilst creating something with its own particular beauty, even if the results are likely to appeal mainly to connoisseurs of literature.

Translations of Rasmus B. Anderson Like William Morris, Rasmus Bjørn Anderson possessed immense energy and was rarely far from some kind of controversy. Born to Norwegian immigrant parents in the United States in 1846, he enjoyed prominence as a leader of the American-Norwegian community, and as an academic, newspaper writer, and public speaker. From 1885 to 1889 he served as Minister Resident and Consul General of the United States in Denmark. Translations in which Anderson was involved are recorded above under the years 1877, 1880, and 1896. He was also responsible for revising Samuel Laing’s translation of Heimskringla for an elaborately produced limited second edition issued in London and New York in 1889.23 In 1905–06 he acted as editor-in-chief for the multi-volume set of translations with the title ‘The History and Romance of Northern Europe’, issued under the auspices of the Norrœna Society, which was said on the title page to have branches in London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Berlin, and New York. Much of this contribution to translation of the sagas has been in some way controversial. Anderson’s collaborator in the 1877 volume, the Icelander Jón 21 In the preface to The Book of the Icelanders, ed. and trans. by Halldór Hermannsson, Islandica, 20 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1930), p. vi. 22 23

Quoted in Haugen, ‘On Translating’, p. 13.

The Heimskringla or Sagas of the Norse Kings, 4 vols (London: John C. Nimmo; New York: Scribner and Welford). It was limited to 310 copies for the United Kingdom and 210 for the United States. See I, pp. xvii–xviii, and Kennedy, ‘The English Language Translations of Heimskringla’, p. 349.

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Bjarnason, took strong exception to some of Anderson’s editorial practices, and the dispute between the two men resulted in Anderson’s omitting any mention of Jón on the title page of the second edition, or in its dedication and preface, although the Icelander may well have done much of the translating.24 Moreover, though Fry attributes the 1877 translations to Anderson and Jón, Andrew Wawn states that the translation of Friðþjófs saga hins frœkna is in fact a reprint of George Stephens’s 1839 version.25 Anderson’s second edition of Laing’s Heimskringla involved some questionable orthographical innovations, notably the elimination of ‘superfluous consonants’, so that ‘Finn’ became ‘Fin’ and ‘Olafsson’ ‘Olafson’. It was one of several older translations reprinted in the Norrœna Society’s collection, which has become somewhat notorious both for its recycling of older illustrations in quite inappropriate contexts and for the fact that the allegedly international Society itself had no existence, except as a marketing device. According to Einar Haugen: Professor Anderson himself told me that he was approached by a publisher in St Louis, who made a practice of putting out reprints of famous books in expensive editions. Anderson suggested the titles that should be included in a series dealing with Scandinavian antiquities. In order to add impressiveness to the set, a fictitious society was created as sponsor, and on each title page appeared the name Norrœna Society, claiming to have offices in London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, and New York.26

The translations associated with Anderson were criticized in their own time for archaisms such as ‘busk’ and ‘hight’, and Fry judges them ‘unreliable’ (pp. 12, 29, 62, 97), but they are generally quite readable. Chapter 1 of the 1877 translation of Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar concludes: Vesete settled in an island or holm, which hight Borgund’s holm (Bornholm) and became the father of Bue and Sigurd, nicknamed Cape. Vifil sailed further to the east and established himself in an island called Vifil’s Isle. With his wife, Eimyrja, he got

24

Hustvedt, Rasmus Bjørn Anderson, p. 325.

25

The Vikings and Victorians, pp. 120, 222n.

26

Quoted in Hustvedt, Rasmus Bjørn Anderson, p. 334. See also Halldór Hermannsson, Bibliography of the Icelandic Sagas and Minor Tales, Islandica, 1 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1908), p. 83; Halldór Hermannsson, Bibliography of the Sagas of the Kings of Norway, p. 26; Wawn, The Vikings and Victorians, pp. 161–63.

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a son, Viking by name, who in his early youth became a man of great stature and extraordinary strength.27

The claim that Anderson reprinted Stephens’s translation of Friðþjófs saga hins frœkna seems at least an overstatement, as is evident from a comparison of the two versions. The following is the beginning of chapter 10 in the Anderson and Jón Bjarnason version: When king Helge had come to his senses he gave orders to follow quickly after Fridthjof and kill him and his companions. That man, said he, has forfeited his life, as he has spared no Place of Peace. Now the trumpet was blown, and all the king’s men came together; and when they came out to the hall, they saw that it stood in flames.28

This is sufficiently different from Stephens’s version to suggest at least some original translation.

Translations of John Sephton In 1895 Reverend John Sephton became the first Englishman to hold a major British university position in Icelandic, when he became Reader in Icelandic Studies at the University College of Liverpool, a post he was to hold until 1910. From 1866 to 1889 he had been headmaster of Liverpool Collegiate School, and his extensive publishing activity in the field of Icelandic, which was to lead amongst other things to four published translations, began during these years.29 His first translation, that of Eiríks saga rauða, won high praise from the Icelandic 27

‘Viking Tales of the North. The Saga of Thorstein, Viking’s Son’, at [accessed 22 January 2006]. For contemporary criticism of the Anderson translations see Hustvedt, Rasmus Bjørn Anderson, pp. 325, 327. 28

‘Viking Tales of the North. Saga of Fridthjof the Bold’, at [accessed 22 January 2006]. The Stephens version of the same passage reads as follows: No sooner had King Helge come to himself again, than he commanded that they should straightway pursue after Frithiof, and kill him with all his followers: — ‘For,’ said he, ‘this man forfeited his life, when he spared no place however sacred.’ Now blew they the gathering–sound for the Princes’-Guards, and as they came out of the Disar-hall, they saw that it was in a blaze. See Stephens, Frithiof’s Saga, ch. 10, p. 27. 29

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See Wawn, ‘The Spirit of 1892’, p. 215; Wawn, ‘The Cult’, p. 217.

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scholar Guðbrandur Vigfússon, who declared himself ‘much pleased with the freshness (and also the accuracy but that is a matter of course) of your rendering. Former translations are apt to be too stiff and wooden’.30 A modern reader would probably agree about the general accuracy but might be inclined to find Sephton’s work a bit stodgy in style. As in the case of Anderson, it is difficult to detect much influence of William Morris’s mannerisms, or any policy of avoidance of words borrowed from French, and Morris is on record as considering Sephton’s translation of Friðþjófs saga hins frœkna as ‘vile and not always correct’.31 Now, in the spring, Thorbjorn made a feast to his friends, and a goodly banquet was prepared. There came many guests, and the banquet was of the best. Now, at the banquet, Thorbjorn called for a hearing, and thus spake:— ‘Here have I dwelt a long time. I have experienced the goodwill of men and their affection towards me, and I consider that our dealings with one another have been mutually agreeable […]’32

Translations of Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell translated an enormous amount of Old Icelandic literature. The Corpus poeticum boreale of 1883 is primarily devoted to translations of Eddaic and skaldic poetry — its claim to provide in translation ‘all that part of the Prose Edda which has not yet been translated or printed in England, […] and an anthology of all the best passages relating to poetry or poets which occur in the Iceland Book of Settlement or Landnama-bok, the Kings’ Lives, and the Icelandic Family Sagas’ (I, p. cxvii) probably tends to give an exaggerated idea of its value to those interested in prose texts, particularly as the scattered translations of prose are not easy to locate. But the huge two volume Origines Islandicæ, published somewhat hastily in 1905 after Guðbrandur’s death in 1889 and Powell’s in 1904, provided a remarkably extensive collection of Icelandic saga literature in translation, including biskupasögur and samtíðarsögur material as well as Íslendingasögur and Íslendingaþættir. Most of what it contained had until then been unavailable in English, and much of it remained otherwise unavailable in that language for a long time afterwards.

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30

Quoted in Wawn, ‘The Spirit of 1892’, p. 217.

31

Quoted in Wawn, ‘The Cult’, p. 223n.

32

Eirik the Red’s Saga (Liverpool: Marples, 1880), ch. 3, pp. 10–11.

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Both Corpus poeticum boreale and Origines Islandicæ name Guðbrandur and Powell on their title pages as jointly responsible for editing and translating, but it seems clear that the bulk of the translation work was done by Powell, and that it was he who also wrote the section of the introduction to the Corpus poeticum boreale entitled ‘The Translation — Its Purport and Design’ (I, pp. cxiv–cxvii), in which a well-known attack is mounted on the translation practices of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, as discussed earlier.33 Powell was also responsible for some translations published independently of his Icelandic collaborator, notably a translation of Færeyinga saga, a revised version of one he first prepared in 1868, the year in which he turned eighteen.34 Guðbrandur Vigfússon is by any definition one of the greatest of all Old Icelandic scholars, whose name remains known today to most English-speaking students of Old Icelandic because of his role in creating the great IcelandicEnglish dictionary which first appeared in 1874.35 It would be pleasant to be able to record that the texts and translations in Origines Islandicæ were also a resource for which generations of students have had strong reason to be grateful. Unfortunately disagreeable surprise and frustration is likely to be the response of many who consult the volumes. The extraordinarily cluttered pages, the tiny type employed for what was considered subordinate text, and the diplomatic editions (more or less) of the Icelandic texts all serve to deter the reader, who may also dislike the way in which Icelandic place names and personal names are Anglicized.36 Accuracy, unfortunately, is also a major issue. Heather O’Donoghue describes both the Corpus poeticum boreale and Origines Islandicæ as ‘full of inaccuracies’,

33

See Oliver Elton, Frederick York Powell: A Life and a Selection from the Letters and Occasional Writings, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), I, 56, 102. 34

Ibid., p. 238.

35

Richard Cleasby and Guðbrandur Vigfússon, An Icelandic English Dictionary Based on the Manuscript Collection of the Late R. Cleasby, Enlarged and Completed by Gudbrand Vigfusson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1874). The second edition of 1957, with a supplement by William Craigie, has recently been reprinted. 36

Sveinn Haraldsson described the main drawback of their version of Landnámabók as being ‘the metamorphosis of the Norse names into Old English equivalents. Thus poor Auðunn skökull (in Vigfússon and York Powell’s diplomatic Icelandic text Auðunn Skœkoll) becomes the hopelessly inappropriate “Eadwine Shackle”.’ See his ‘“The North Begins Inside”: Auden, Ancestry and Iceland’, in Northern Antiquity, ed. by Wawn, pp. 255–84 (p. 274). Elton, Frederick York Powell, refers to Powell’s ‘unexplained and capricious habit of anglicizing proper nouns’ (I, 57).

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and she quotes Ursula Dronke’s memorable verdict on the former work: ‘So vast, so full of delights, and so unbelievably unreliable’.37 Perhaps the greatest problem, however, results from the editorial principles employed. These are based on an extraordinary confidence in the possibility of distinguishing genuine saga text from inferior matter and later accretions, with the possibility of stripping away and not translating all that was bogus and did not rise to true saga status, and restoring pure sagas. The result is of course texts whose integrity seems to us today to have been absurdly violated, and translations that are frustratingly incomplete. Origines Islandicæ does provide a complete translation of chapter 6 of Íslendingabók:38 The land that is called GREENLAND was found and settled from Iceland. Eiric the Red was the name of a Broad-frith-man that went out hence thither, and took in settlement there the land that is since called Eiric’s-frith.39 He gave the land a name, and called it Greenland, and said that men would be ready to go thither if the land had a good name. They found there men’s habitations both east and west in the land, both broken cayaks and stone-smithery, whereby it may be seen that the same kind of folk had been there as they which inhabit W ine-land, and whom the men of Greenland [Europeans] call Scraelings [the Eskimo]. But it was, when this land began to be settled, fourteen or fifteen winters before that Christendom came here to Iceland, according to what a man who himself went out with Eiric the Red told Thor-kell Gelleson in Greenland. (I, 294)

The approach to prose translation found in Corpus poeticum boreale and Origines Islandicæ involves the use of Modern English, except in direct speech, where the archaic second person form and the corresponding verbal forms are employed, and of course in the proper nouns. Discussing translation in the introduction to Corpus poeticum boreale ‘the translator’ (presumably Powell) claims that the translations in that volume ‘are primarily intended as a help to the scholar, and a faithful rendering for those who wish to know the content of the various poems and citations’ (p. cxiv).

37 O’Donoghue, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 129; Dronke, ‘The Scope of the Corpus poeticum boreale’, in Ur Dölum til Dala: Guðbrandur Vigfússon Centenary Essays, ed. by Rory McTurk and Andrew Wawn, Leeds Texts and Monographs, n.s. 11 (Leeds: School of English, University of Leeds, 1989), pp. 93–111 (p. 93).

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38

They refer to it as the Libellus Islandorum — perhaps more accurately.

39

One might have expected to find ‘firth’ rather than ‘frith’ in this paragraph.

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Though stressing that a translator needs some appreciation of literary qualities to be effective, he suggests that the translations in the work in question should not be judged from a ‘purely literary standpoint’. William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon (whose initial friendship with his fellow Icelander Guðbrandur had by 1883 been replaced by strong mutual antipathy)40 might not have welcomed a suggestion that their translations could be judged from such a standpoint, but the differences between the ornate style of the one team and the much more utilitarian style of the other is clear, and no doubt Powell intended that it should be.

Translations of W. C. Green A clergyman, like John Sephton, Reverend W. C. Green has been regarded as a rather artless translator. As we shall see in the next chapter, E. R. Eddison, a belated disciple of William Morris, refused even to acknowledge that Green’s version of Egils saga Skallagrímssonar should count as a translation of the saga, so allegedly lacking was it in understanding of what the task required. More moderately, in his study of William Morris’s diction, Karl Litzenberg suggests that Green, unlike other translators ‘found no problems in translating, hence he proposed no theory; but followed the rule that as long as the Old Norse was put into the obvious English which it suggested to the translator, the English version would succeed’.41 The suggestion that Green lacked art is on one level rather surprising, since he has left us several passages from saga literature translated into English verse. Predictably, these sometimes involved taking considerable liberties with the original text, such as rearranging some details, but the style, though somewhat archaic and self-consciously poetic, is generally clear. The following is part of his translation of a famous passage from Brennu-Njáls saga: Up started Gunnar from his sleep, as a weird and woful (sic) sound Rang through the silence. ‘‘Twas thy cry, my grey, my guardian hound! Surely foul play is on thee wrought: and ‘twixt us twain, I ween, Will be short space; who kills the dog to kill the master mean.’42

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40

See Wawn, The Vikings and Victorians, pp. 129, 356.

41

‘The Diction of William Morris’, p. 361.

42

Translations from the Icelandic, p. 170.

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Green’s prose translation of Egils saga may not be very suggestive of the rhythms and the diction of the translations in which William Morris was involved, but it has the virtues of being reasonably clear: Egil answered the king: ‘I will not that I and Thorolf be parted in the battle: rather it seems to me well that we two be placed together there where is like to be most need and hardest fighting.’ Thorolf said: ‘Leave we the king to rule where he will place us; serve we him as he likes best. I will, if you wish it, change places with you.’ Egil said: ‘Brother, you must have it your way; but this separation I shall often rue.’ After that they formed in the divisions as the king had arranged, and the standards were raised.43

To modern ears this may sound stilted, but it reproduces much of the syntax of the original Icelandic. Green, however, did allow himself more freedom in translating than is usual today, particularly in his second volume: a comparison of his prose translations in Translations from the Icelandic with the Icelandic texts shows that he did, as he announced, introduce ‘simplifications and amplifications’, and at times he moves in the direction of paraphrase. Wawn describes his 1908 translations as ‘more cavalier’ than his version of Egils saga.44

Translations of Mary Leith Mary Charlotte Julia Leith, known according to the convention of her time as Mrs Disney Leith, was a cousin of the poet Algernon Swinburne, and herself wrote poetry of some distinction on Icelandic subjects.45 She strongly admired the church of medieval Iceland — ‘a grand Church’, far superior to its nineteenth century Lutheran successor, which had lost the ‘Apostolical succession’.46 Mary Leith set out to remedy the neglect that medieval sagas relating to the church had experienced: It is a curious fact that, while the heroic or historical Sagas of the North have found skilled translators and appreciative readers amongst us, the ecclesiastical Sagas have been left hitherto almost entirely unregarded. Yet they are no less remarkable, and no

43

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Ibid., p. 39.

44

‘The Spirit of 1892’, p. 236.

45

Wawn, The Vikings and Victorians, pp. 168–71.

46

Stories of the Bishops of Iceland, pp. 4–5.

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less interesting — to Churchmen possibly more — than the secular branch of Saga: […]47

Her success in encouraging others to direct their attention to the overtly ecclesiastic literature was to be very limited, but she turned out close translations largely free from archaism, and from a tendency to seek after cognates of Icelandic words. The following sample, from her version of Hungrvaka, provides an English translation of a passage often cited in discussions of medieval Icelandic history: After that Gizur fared out to Iceland, and all the people received him joyfully. He took so great honour and esteem, early in his bishop’s orders, and so would every man sit or stand as he bade, young and old, rich and poor, women and men, that it is correct to say that he was both king and bishop over the land while he lived.48

Translations of Robert Proctor Mr. Proctor has studied in the school of William Morris, and has as far as possible Englished the Icelandic idioms in phrases as closely akin as the language will allow. The result is no doubt near the original, and to some of us not unpleasing, but we think that, as in the W illiam Morris later translations, the effort after antique simplicity is overdone, and, however faithful it may be, not many will find it readable.

These are the words of another saga translator, A. F. Major, reviewing Robert Proctor’s The Story of the Laxdalers in 1904, the year after it was published.49 Few would dispute his assessment that Proctor is a disciple of William Morris: the evidence is there from the first words of the translation, the highly predictable ‘Ketil Flatneb hight a man’ (ch. 1, p. 9).50 Through his translations Proctor aims to bring saga idioms (including the seemingly arbitrary variation between past and present tense) into English, and to use words cognate with what he finds in the Icelandic, even if the price is a measure of obscurity, as when línfé becomes

47

Ibid., p. 3.

48

Ibid., p. 47.

49

Saga-Book, 3, 489.

50

This sentence provoked Randolph Quirk to comment that Proctor is ‘using a word order which had never been common in English even at the time when hight was a common enough form; but it is, of course as close a translation as is conceivable of the Icelandic “Ketill flatnefr hét maðr”, — every word being replaced by a cognate form which is either English now or has been, sometime, somewhere’(‘Dasent, Morris’, pp. 70–71).

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‘linen fee’ (ch. 45, p. 138) rather than ‘wedding present’ or something similar, or an element of risibility, as when ‘Hann lét flytja heim lík Kjartans ok tjalda yfir’ becomes ‘He let flit home the body of Kjartan and tilt it over’ (ch. 50, p. 167). A reader who compares Proctor’s translations with the Icelandic texts is not likely to be impressed by his accuracy, even if Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson are unduly harsh when they refer to ‘Proctor’s incredibly inaccurate version’ of Laxdœla saga.51 In this respect at least he is not a true disciple of Morris, for even those most critical of the effect created by the Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon translations would have to concede that they are very rarely guilty of a basic grammatical misconstruing of the Icelandic text. In translating the second chapter of Laxdœla saga Proctor translates as follows the response to a speech by Björn Ketilsson: At this was made good rumour, and it was thought to be valiantly spoken. That rede was agreed on, that they should fare from the land, forasmuch as the sons of Ketil were eager therein, and none gainsaid them. (p. 10)

The ‘Morris-like’ quality of the Proctor approach is evident, as are its risks. Modern English ‘rumour’ has a quite different meaning from Old Icelandic ‘rómr’, and a different etymology, having entered the English language late in the Middle English period from French.52

Translations of Ethel Hearn At first glance the two quite lengthy texts translated by Ethel Hearn may also seem reminiscent of the translations by Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon. But a closer examination shows that the frequent use of a word order which mirrors Icelandic rather than English use, and the frequent appearance of ‘thereof’, ‘thereupon’ ‘withal’, and so on, are not the full story. Hearn in fact frequently uses constructions not in the Icelandic and most unlikely to be acceptable to Morris and Eiríkr. The participial phrase at the beginning of the following passage is striking (and somewhat discordant) to anyone used to saga prose: Plundering & pillaging whithersoever they went fared together both hosts during the summer, but when a battle was imminent would Harold cause his men to hold aloof

51

See the ‘Note on the Translation’ in their own 1969 translation, Laxdaela Saga, pp. 43–44 (p. 43). 52

See The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. by C. T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966); Jan de Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1962).

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therefrom, or at least over against that part where was the fight most open. Ever said he that he would take good care that he did not lose those that were of his company; but when a fight chanced and he with his men only were opposed to an enemy so fierce was he in battle that either must he win the day or die.53

Clearly this is awkward and a bit unclear, and Fry labels Hearn’s translations ‘unreliable’ (p. 47). But even if the limitations of Ethel Hearn’s skills are overlooked, one could clearly consider her to be only in a limited degree a disciple of William Morris. As is the case with most of the translators from 1869–1913 we have considered in this chapter, the influence of Morris, if it indeed exists, is both restricted in scope and open to question as regards its true nature.

53

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The Saga of Harald the Tyrant, p. 130.

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T RANSLATIONS OF THE P ERIOD 1914–50

D

ivision into periods is almost inevitable in an historical survey, but the markers we establish to segment our material and assist in organizing it are always arbitrary to some degree, and open to challenge. In the previous chapter the coverage extended to 1913, as the outbreak of World War I the following year and the dramatic changes it rapidly brought in its train are usually seen as more important in the culture of the English-speaking nations than the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in 1901. Arguably, Victorian attitudes to Viking and medieval Scandinavia, and to the translation of the sagas, prevailed well past the death of the queen in 1901, and into the reign of her grandson, George V. The closing date for the period covered in this chapter is perhaps even more arbitrary. It does, however, mark the midpoint of the twentieth century and takes the survey down to a point a few years after the end of a war even more disruptive of normal life in Britain and the United States than World War I had been, and a year lived much more in the shadows of the great conflict which had ended five years earlier than in the light of the social and educational transformations soon to come. A natural question to ask is ‘Why study this period?’ Is there anything distinctive about it that would justify a chapter focusing on it? One important reason for such a focus is that it appears to be rarely attempted. The Victorian age of saga study and saga translation, with such major figures as George Webbe Dasent, Guðbrandur Vigfússon, and above all William Morris, has attracted a reasonable amount of attention from postgraduate students and other scholars, and the translation activities of the decades since 1950 have not lacked reviewers and other commentators. But even most of those sufficiently interested in saga translation to know something of the ‘Saga Library’ of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon in the 1890s, Guðbrandur Vigfússon

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and F. York Powell’s monumental Origines Islandicæ of 1905, and more recent saga translation projects such as those which led to the ‘Complete Sagas of Icelanders’ in English appearing in Reykjavík in 1997, would probably know little of the translators or translations of the period 1914–50. A second reason for looking at this period is simply that it lies between the great Victorian and Edwardian age of saga translation and the lively translation activity of the second half of the twentieth century. There was of course no one approach to saga translation a hundred years ago, any more than there is today, but one can venture a generalization that many Victorian and Edwardian translations were strongly characterized by what struck contemporaries as archaism, while most translators since 1950 have vigorously avoided archaic touches. The years 1914 to 1950 might be expected to display a general shift in approaches to style in saga translation. What follows is a listing in chronological order of the longer and more significant translations published in the years 1914–50. As in the previous chapter, the listing omits reprints. Brief translations appearing in journal articles or in monographs are also excluded, except in the case of volumes presenting anthologies of such material. More complete bibliographical information about what was translated in the period is available in the previously mentioned bibliographies of Donald Fry and Paul Acker. 1914 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar Translated by George Ainslie Hight in his The Saga of Grettir the Strong: A Story of the Eleventh Century (London: Dent; New York: Dutton). Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga Abridged translations by William Hovgaard in his The Voyages of the Norsemen to America (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation). 1916 Prose Edda Abridged translation by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur in his The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation).

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1917 Konungsskuggsjá Translated by Laurence Marcellus Larson in his The King’s Mirror (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation). 1917–18 Vápnfirðinga saga Translated by Robert Locke Bremner in ‘The Saga of the Wapenfirthers’, Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 49, 99–133. 1921 Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga Conflation of two sagas translated by Geoffrey Malcolm Gathorne-Hardy in his The Norse Discoverers of America: The Wineland Sagas (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks konungs, also known as Heiðreks saga konungs ins vitra, Hrómundar saga Gripssonar, Norna-Gests þáttr, and Sörla þáttr, also known as Heðins saga ok Högna Translated by Nora Kershaw in her Stories and Ballads of the Far Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 1922 Numerous generally brief extracts from a large variety of sources translated by Alan Orr Anderson in his Early Sources of Scottish History, A.D. 500 to 1286, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd). 1923 Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar Approximately seventy percent of the saga translated by Roger Sherman Loomis in his The Romance of Tristram and Ysolt by Thomas of Britain (New York: Dutton). Revised edition New York: Columbia University Press, 1931. 1925 Bolla þáttr Bollasonar, Gunnars þáttr Þiðrandabana, and Laxdœla saga Translated by Thorstein Veblen in his The Laxdæla Saga (New York: Huebsch).

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1928 Friðþjófs saga hins frœkna and Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu Translated by Margaret Schlauch in her Medieval Narrative: A Book of Translations (New York: Prentice-Hall). 1929 Laxdœla saga Extensive but partial translation by C. M. Fox in his The Tale of the Men of Laxdale (London: Nelson). 1930 Ágrip af Nóregskonungasögum, Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, Hemings þáttr Áslakssonar, Jómsvíkinga saga, Óláfs saga Haraldssonar, and Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar Extracts translated by Margaret Ashdown in her English and Norse Documents Relating to the Reign of Ethelred the Unready (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Egils saga Skallagrímssonar Translated by E. R. Eddison in his Egil’s Saga (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Íslendingabók Translated by Halldór Hermannsson in his The Book of the Icelanders (Íslendingabók) by Ari Thorgilsson (Ithaca: Cornell University Library; London: Milford/Oxford University Press). Ragnars saga loðbrókar and Völsunga saga Translated by Margaret Schlauch in her The Saga of the Volsungs. The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok Together with the Lay of Kraka (New York: Norton). 1931 Lækningabók Translated by Henning Larsen in his An Old Icelandic Medical Miscellany (Oslo: Det norske Videnskaps-akademi i Oslo).

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Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga Conflation of two sagas translated by Jean Young in A. W. Lawrence and Jean Young, Narratives of the Discovery of America (London: Cape; New York: Cape and Smith). 1932 Grœnlendinga saga and Heimskringla Translated by Erling Monsen and Arthur Hugh Smith in their Heimskringla or the Lives of the Norse Kings by Snorre Sturlason (Cambridge: Heffer). 1933 Hrólfs saga kraka Translated by Stella M. Mills in her The Saga of Hrolf Kraki (Oxford: Blackwell). 1934 Færeyinga saga Translated by Muriel A. C. Press in her The Saga of the Faroe Islanders (London: Dent). 1935 Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, Kjalnesinga saga, Vápnfirðinga saga, and Þorsteins saga hvíta Translated by Gwyn Jones in his Four Icelandic Sagas (Princeton: Princeton University Press; New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation). Frostaþing and Gulaþing laws Translated by Laurence Marcellus Larson in his The Earliest Norwegian Laws, Being the Gulathing Law and the Frostathing Law (New York: Columbia University Press). 1936 Gísla saga Súrssonar Translated by Ralph B. Allen in his The Saga of Gisli, Son of Saur (New York: Harcourt-Brace). Egils saga Skallagrímssonar Incomplete translation, chapters 1–40 only, reprinted as ‘The Story of Egil the Son of Scaldgrim’, in May Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist.

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Volume the First: The Art of William Morris. Morris as Writer (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press). 1938 Fóstbrœðra saga Translated into verse by Milton S. Rose in his The Thormod Saga (Colorado Springs: Colorado College Publication, General Series 219, Studies Series 26). Orkneyinga saga Translated by Alexander Burt Taylor in his The Orkneyinga Saga (London: Oliver and Boyd). 1940 Gunnars þáttr Þiðrandabana Translated by Walter Emery in his The Saga of Gunnar Thidrandi’s Bane Freely Translated into English from the Icelandic of an Unknown Author (Welwyn, Herts.: Broadwater Press). 1941 Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða Translated by Walter Emery in his The Saga of Hrafnkell Freypriest, Freely Translated into English from the Icelandic of an Unknown Author (Welwyn, Herts.: Broadwater Press). Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga Conflation of the two sagas translated by Einar Ingvald Haugen in his Voyages to Vinland: The First American Saga (Chicago: Holiday Press). Karlamagnús saga, the Strengleikar, and Þiðreks saga af Bern Extracts translated by Hamilton Martin Smyser and Francis Peabody Magoun Jr in their Survivals in Old Norwegian of Medieval English, French, and German Literature Together With the Latin Versions of the Heroic Legend of Walter of Aquitaine (Baltimore: Waverley Press). 1942 Einars þáttr Sokkasonar and Eiríks saga rauða Translated by Vilhjálmur Stefánsson in his Greenland (New York: DoubledayDoran). British edition London: Harrap, 1943.

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Guðmundar saga biskups góða II Translated by Gabriel Turville-Petre and E. S. Olszewska in their The Life of Gudmund the Good, Bishop of Holar (Coventry: Viking Society for Northern Research). 1944 Vatnsdœla saga Translated by Gwyn Jones in his The Vatnsdalers’ Saga (Princeton: Princeton University Press for the American-Scandinavian Foundation). 1946 An anthology of previously published translations from various hands and extracts from them, with some new translations, in A Pageant of Old Scandinavia, edited by Henry Goddard Leach (Princeton: Princeton University Press; New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation). 1947 Rauðs þáttr ok sona hans Translated by Joan E. Turville-Petre in her The Story of Rauð and His Sons (London: Viking Society for Northern Research). 1949 Fóstbrœðra saga, Kormáks saga, and extracts from Óláfs saga Haraldssonar Translated by Lee M. Hollander is his The Sagas of Kormák and The Sworn Brothers (Princeton: Princeton University Press for the American-Scandinavian Foundation). Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga Extracts translated by Edward Reman in his The Norse Discoveries and Exploration of America (Berkeley: University of California Press). 1950 Fyrsta malfræðiritgerðin Translated by Einar Ingvald Haugen in his First Grammatical Treatise: The Earliest Germanic Phonology. An Edition, Translation, and Commentary (Baltimore: Linguistic Society of America).

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Bandamanna saga, Droplaugarsona saga, and Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu Translated by H. M. Scargill (Gunnlaugs saga) and Margaret Schlauch (Bandamanna saga, Droplaugarsona saga) in their Three Icelandic Sagas (Princeton: Princeton University Press for the American-Scandinavian Foundation). Obviously the translations listed here, and the briefer pieces from the same period that are not listed, were not the only saga translations available to Englishspeaking readers during the years 1914 to 1950. Older translations continued to be available in libraries, and they continued to be reprinted. Everyman’s Library, for example, reprinted in both 1923 and 1931 its inexpensive version of George Webbe Dasent’s 1861 Story of Burnt Njal; and in 1930 it brought out the second and final part of its reprint of Samuel Laing’s 1844 Heimskringla, the first part of which had appeared in 1915.1 A reader who encountered the Icelandic sagas in English translation during the years 1914 to 1950 will in many cases have experienced them in a Victorian or Edwardian translation rather than in ones published during 1914–50, and such translators as Laing, Dasent, and Morris must inevitably have had a continuing influence over what saga literature meant to non-specialists in the English-speaking world during the first half of the twentieth century (and beyond). But some caution is necessary in assessing their influence, and that of their nineteenth-century contemporaries. That an older translation is reprinted, particularly in a series like Everyman, which attempted to create a comprehensive one-thousand-volume library of world literature at a modest price, may owe less to the translation’s intrinsic merits and continuing appeal than to the unwillingness of the publisher to pay for a better version. It may have had readers because nothing better was available to many people, at least at a price that seemed reasonable in difficult times of war or economic depression, and its readers may have persevered in spite of its style rather than because it spurred them on! Some readers of the period may not have persevered, their potential interest in Icelandic saga literature quenched by the old-fashioned dress in which the older translations presented them. A study of the new translations of 1914–50 in the light of what had been published before 1914 raises at least as many questions as it resolves. Possibly the existence of Dasent’s version of Brennu-Njáls saga did inhibit others from

1

Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla: The Olaf Sagas (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1915) and Heimskringla: The Norse King Sagas (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1930). Both parts are edited by John Beveridge.

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attempting a version of this longest and probably most highly regarded of the Íslendingasögur — there would not be a second published translation until 1955. But the existence of Laing’s version of the far lengthier Heimskringla, not to mention the stylistically somewhat inaccessible version by William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, did not deter Heffer in Cambridge and Appleton in New York from supporting a third complete version of Heimskringla in 1932. In 1928 Margaret Schlauch produced a new version of Friðþjófs saga hins frœkna, of which at least three reputable earlier versions existed, but as important a work as Droplaugarsona saga had to wait for its first complete version in English (from Schlauch’s hands, as it happened) until 1950. While by that year there would be a considerable roll call of sagas, with at least three independent English translations, almost the entire Sturlunga compilation, by any estimation a major Icelandic text, would remain without an English translation until the 1970s; and though the Norwegian Gulaþing and Frostaþing laws were translated by Laurence Larson in 1935, the Icelandic legal compilation Grágás, of far greater importance to most students of medieval Icelandic literature, remained almost entirely unavailable in English until the first volume of a two-volume translation appeared in 1980. Some of the translations that appeared in print for the first time between 1914 and 1950 had in fact existed before then. In a preface to the 1970 impression of his The Norse Discovers of America: The Wineland Sagas, originally published in 1921, G. M. Gathorne-Hardy claims that ‘Most of this book was written before 1914, at which point my study was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War in which I served until I was wounded in 1917’ (p. vii). Thorstein Veblen, far better known as an economist and author of The Theory of the Leisure Class than for his sole saga translation, had probably more or less completed his version of Laxdœla by 1890,2 but it did not in fact achieve publication until 1925. On the other hand, only two of the translators who published between 1914 and 1950 had published saga translations before the period started. Robert Bremner, who in 1917–18 published what he — in fact, erroneously3 — believed to be the first English translation of Vápnfirðinga saga, had in 1906 brought out a version of Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu and, more remarkably, Muriel Press, the author of the 1934 translation of Færeyinga saga, had thirty-five years before in 1899

2

Eric Stockton, ‘Thorstein Veblen as an Icelandic Scholar’, Scandinavian Studies, 26 (1954),

1–11. 3

See Bremner, ‘Saga of the W apenfirthers’, p. 99. Robert Proctor published his version in 1902.

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published the first complete English version of Laxdœla saga, with no published saga translation from her hands in the intervening years. Otherwise none of the many late Victorian and Edwardian translators published into the postwar era. It is tempting to speculate as to why this was so, but any theory that the world after the Great War was somehow generally uncongenial to translators of earlier decades would probably be fanciful. It is notable, however, that the translators of 1914–50 had somewhat more success in continuing into the post-1950 world, with Gwyn Jones and Lee M. Hollander in particular being among the major figures publishing saga translation into the 1960s. Any admirer of saga literature will notice important absences from what was translated between 1914 and 1950, but undoubtedly the translations of the period are considerable both in the number of them that appeared and in the range of works translated. They include the first substantial translation of one of the riddarasögur or Norse chivalric romances, Roger Sherman Loomis’s 1923 version of Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, and what appears to be the only complete English versions even today of such diverse material as the Old Norwegian laws and the Norwegian manual of behaviour Konungsskuggsjá (‘The King’s Mirror’). The period, then, was by no means a barren one in translation from the Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian. While nineteenth-century students of medieval Iceland often declared themselves interested in exploring the admirable qualities of the Old North which had, through the Viking incursions and settlement in England and Scotland, contributed much that was fine to the British character and thus helped to create the greatness of the British Empire and the United States, ideology is less directly evident in most of the 1914–50 translation volumes. There are some exceptions, notably E. R. Eddison’s attempts in the apparatus to his Egils saga translation to turn back the clock and reaffirm some of the values of the late Victorian age, and Thorstein Veblen’s creating of dubious opportunities to comment on the ‘system of Boss rule’ (p. xi) and to denounce Christianity in the introduction to his Laxdæla Saga. But the majority of the translators probably saw themselves as apolitical and non-ideological in a way that might well be seen as naive from the perspective of an age trained to ‘deconstruct’ texts and expose their hidden agendas. The reader may have noted a dearth of translations from the period 1943–45, though a few short pieces did in fact appear in journals.4 But it is very difficult

4

Francis Peabody Magoun Jr, ‘The Pilgrim Diary of Nikulas of Munkathvera. The Road to Rome’, Mediaeval Studies, 6 (1944), 314–54 (translation of part of Leiðarvísir at pp. 347–50);

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to find anything in the translations of 1914–50 or in the introductions and notes that accompany them to suggest that the works were produced during world wars or during periods of troubled peace and social upheaval. Gathorne-Hardy’s reference to the interruption of his work due to military service is an isolated indication that events outside the study could impinge on a scholar’s routines. The British edition of Vilhjálmur Stefánsson’s Greenland carries a symbol indicating that production of the volume conformed to the ‘Book production war economy standard’ and a few other translations appear in rather modest examples of the publisher’s craft. In reviewing the publications for the war years it should perhaps be remembered that the United States did not enter World War I until 1917, and World War II not until the end of 1941, though it is not easy to detect any impact of these facts in the pattern of published translations. The spirit of the 1955 Canadian children’s book, Return of the Viking, by Eva-Lis Wuorio,5 in which the famous explorer Leifr Eiríksson returns imbued by feelings of loyalty both to Norway and to Vínland/Canada to lead a successful Allied commando raid on Nazi-occupied Norway in 1942, was not foreshadowed by any effort by English language translators active in 1914–18 or 1939–45 to enlist the sagas and their heroes in the war effort.6 Possibly some of them were aware that the matter was a sensitive one, that the sagas could well be regarded as providing a cultural link with Germany, and that in both world wars they had indeed been enlisted to serve the German cause.7 When one turns to a consideration of why the translators of the period published their works one finds an assortment of stated motives, as is hardly surprising, given the number and the variety of the works translated. Predictably too, translators also sometimes profess more than one motive, and target more than one audience. The title of Margaret Ashdown’s 1930 work, English and

‘The Ghost of Glam’, trans. by Henry Goddard Leach, American-Scandinavian Review, 33 (1945), 244–50 (translation of a short extract from Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar); ‘The Saga of Thorstein Staff-Blow’, trans. by Erik Wahlgren, University of Kansas City Review, 11 (1945), 213–17 (translation of Þorsteins þáttr stangarhöggs). 5

Illustrated by William Winter (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Co.).

6

In a retelling of the Vínland story written in 1918, Gudrid the Fair (London: [n. pub], 1924), Maurice Hewitt attributed what he saw as the distinctive courage of British troops during World War I to their ‘Scandinavian blood’. See Barnes, Viking America, p. 106. 7

See Winkler, Isländersagas, pp. 109–15; Óskar Bjarnason, ‘The “Germanic” Heritage in Icelandic Books’, in The Manuscripts of Iceland, ed. by Gísli Sigurðsson and Vésteinn Ólason, trans. by Bernard Scudder and Mats Malm (Reykjavík: Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland, 2004), pp. 121–29 (pp. 124–25, 129).

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Norse Documents Relating to the Reign of Ethelred the Unready, suggests that her focus, in presenting Old English and Norse texts (usually as excerpts) with modern English translations, was on the needs of professional historians, but she expressed the hope ‘that the material here offered may interest students both of literature and history’ (p. ix). Several of the translations were prepared primarily with the historian in mind. This is true of what are probably the two most extensive of the translating projects listed above. In an earlier chapter we noted that Erling Monsen outlined an historical motive for creating the translation of Heimskringla he prepared with A. H. Smith. It might of course be asserted that translations of historical material are suitable only for the amateur and general reader with a taste for history, and that the scholar will need to consult the material in the original languages. In his great two-volume compilation of 1922, Early Sources of Scottish History A.D. 500 to 1286, Alan Orr Anderson dealt directly with this argument: In defence of the translations of historical materials, I would say that these collections are intended to be a guide to the sources, rather than a substitute for them. For special points the historical worker will not trust to a translation; neither will he be content with extracts removed from their context. The purpose of a book of translated selections is to give a primary interpretation of the principal materials; to be a convenient book of references for the worker; and at the same time, to bring before those who are unfamiliar with foreign tongues, or who have no large library within their reach, the sources from which history has drawn. (I, pp. vi–vii)

The author of one of the books of translations devoted to the Norse discovery of America, G. M. Gathorne-Hardy, is far from sharing Margaret Ashdown’s hope that the texts translated will appeal as literature. In his 1921 introduction he writes: It must be confessed [...] that a taste for Icelandic literature is not widely prevalent in this country. The man in the street, if the author’s experience of him is typical, does not find the method of story-telling which enthralled contemporary Icelandic audiences at all to his mind. (p. 10)

Somewhat patronizingly Gathorne-Hardy goes on to a explain that ‘As a sop to the indolent’ he has ‘marked in the table of contents the parts of the story dealing with the American discoveries, though he feels personally that those who skip the remainder will miss some very interesting matter [...]’ (p. 11). Similar marks reappear, albeit with a more neutral commentary, in Lawrence and Young’s Narratives of the Discovery of America, where Gathorne-Hardy’s conflated arrangement of Grænlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða is also to be found, though in a new translation.

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Other translators, of course, were more sanguine about the literary merits of the texts they translated. Several briefer translations, not listed above, appeared during the 1930s and 1940s in more or less generalist magazines and seem intended to be read almost as though they were modern literary short stories.8 Others are presented as admittedly imperfect substitutes for the Icelandic originals. Margaret Schlauch declares in the opening sentence of her preface to Medieval Narrative that ‘This book has grown out of the needs of an undergraduate course in medieval literature’ and she goes on to become far from the last academic teacher to lament the deficiencies in the ‘linguistic equipment […] of most American undergraduates’ (p. v). Several of the translations published in the period appear as part of the scholarly apparatus of books or articles clearly directed, not at the general reader with an interest in literature or history, or even undergraduates engaged in a survey course, but rather at professional academics and other researchers. Examples would include most of the translations appearing in articles published by scholarly journals,9 as well as those appearing in the books by Chambers,10 Kelchner,11 Halldór Hermannsson, and Henning Larsen. In such cases, of course, the translator could work with a highly educated audience in mind and did not need to concern himself or herself with giving the translation any popular appeal (though in fact Halldór Hermannsson did comment at some length in his preface (pp. v–vi) on the best way to translate Old Icelandic texts).

8

See ‘The Tale of Authun of the Western Fjords’, trans. by James M. Nosworthy, Tamiensis, n.s. 33 (1935), 85–88, and the revised version in The Adelphi 2, 6 (1936), 346–50 (translation of Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka); ‘The Icelandic Tale of Thorhall Ale-Cap’, trans. by Ralph B. Allen, University of Kansas City University Review, 8 (1942), 165–71 (translation of Ölkofra þáttr), and the articles by Leach and W ahlgren mentioned above (n. 4). 9

See, for example, G. T. Flom, ‘Thorgny the Lawman’, Scandinavian Studies and Notes, 4 (1917), 240–46 (translation of part of Óláfs saga Haraldssonar); and Margaret Schlauch, ‘Another Analogue of Beowulf’, Modern Language Notes, 45 (1930), 20–21 (translation of a portion of Flóres saga konungs). 10

Raymond Wilson Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921). Brief extracts from several Old Icelandic texts are provided, with an augmented selection in the second edition, published by Cambridge University Press in 1932. 11

Georgia Durham Kelchner, Dreams in Old Norse Literature and their Affinities to Folklore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), provides very brief translated extracts from numerous sources.

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There were other motives for translating, or at least for the publication of translations. Thorstein Veblen made it clear that he had no high opinion of Laxdœla saga as literature, but he anticipated some more recent approaches to saga scholarship by praising it as ‘an ethnological document of a high order’ (p. vi). May Morris published her father’s incomplete version of Egils saga Skallagrímssonar forty years after his death, as an act of filial piety, stating that ‘My Father had great admiration for this the finest of the Icelandic sagas’ (p. 9). The most surprising entry on the list above, Milton S. Rose’s translation of Fóstbrœðra saga into rather loose unrhymed verse, apparently sprang from the wish of colleagues at Colorado College to honour him shortly after his death. The translation was one of several found among his papers. Though often more accurate than one might reasonably have hoped, this rendition of a predominantly prose text into English verse manifests itself, sadly, as a rather curious concoction and as neither a wise nor a kind addition to the published record. A few lines will serve to convey the ‘flavour’ of the translation, but probably not the cumulative effect of the thirty-nine-page text: At Augur dwelt a woman whose name was Grima, A widow well provided for and somewhat wise, So certain ones looked on her as a witch. The name of her thrall was Kolbac, a big man and strong. (p. 10)

As already indicated, many of the translators who published between 1914 and 1950 were not the first to bring out English versions of the texts they translated. By no means all felt obliged to comment on the relationship of the new version to what had gone before, but many did do so.12 The most common reasons given for translating again are that whatever earlier versions exist are not readily available to potential readers (or never were, on account of their price) or that they are archaic in style, or dated — that Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris were responsible for several of these earlier versions added force to the argument. Thus Gwyn Jones begins the preface to his Four Icelandic Sagas by acknowledging that published translations of two of them already existed, but he immediately adds that ‘The Origines Islandicæ costs fifty shillings and the other two are unknown even to most students of Icelandic literature, so there is no danger that this book may offer stale fare’ (p. vii). In 1930 a price of fifty shillings would have placed the work beyond the range of all but a small number 12

See Brodeur, The Prose Edda, pp. xix–xx; Halldór Hermannsson, Book of the Icelanders, p. v; Schlauch, The Saga of Volsungs, pp. xxx–xxxi; Jones, Four Icelandic Sagas p. vii; Taylor, The Orkneyinga saga, p. 124; Wahlgren, ‘The Saga of Thorstein’, p. 213n.

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of private individuals, and would have deterred most librarians in their professional selection activity. Though not necessarily referring specifically to the previous translators of sagas he had chosen for Four Icelandic Sagas Jones goes on to add: ‘I have avoided on the one hand prosiness and a latinized vocabulary, and on the other that extraordinarily “precious” language of the full-blooded school that itself seems sometimes to need translation.’ A couple of translators are so unstinting in their praise of early efforts that one might wonder why they decided to provide the world with a new version: Thorstein Veblen observes that Muriel Press’s Laxdæla saga was ‘excellently well done’ (p. xii), and Erling Monsen describes the Heimskringla translation of Samuel Laing as ‘an admirable work, most conscientiously executed’, while that of Eiríkr Magnússon and Morris is ‘a magnificent literary work’ (p. xix). Perhaps there are implicit reservations here, indicated by the word ‘literary’, but Monsen does not spell them out. Two years before, in 1930, the fervently self-assured E. R. Eddison had, by contrast, no inclination to half measures in comparing his own achievement with that of his predecessor in the translation of Egils saga Skallagrímssonar: Egils saga has not hitherto been available to English readers. A previous attempt to translate it was made, some thirty-five years ago, by the Rev. W.C. Green. It is to be feared that the translator little understood the qualities of his original or the difficulties of his task. His version (now out of print) in its flaccid paraphrasing, its lack of all sense of style, its latinized constructions and (a comparatively venial offence) its foolish and unavowed expurgations, conveys no single note or touch of the masterpiece with which he was dealing. (p. xiii)

As in previous chapters the more important and interesting translations of the period deserve consideration in more detail. The translations are discussed in chronological order of first appearance, and it should be noted that multiple publications by a translator are considered together at the point his or her earliest listed translation is discussed.

George Ainslie Hight’s translation of Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar Hight published his translation in the first year of the period, 1914. His introduction suggests that he was consciously reacting against archaic styles of translating and approaches such at that of William Morris: My aim has been to translate in the colloquial language of my own day, eschewing all affectation of poetic diction or medievalism. So far as possible I have adhered to the words of the text; but Icelandic is a highly idiomatic language, and Icelandic idiom is

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Chapter 5 not English idiom. I have not hesitated, therefore, in departing from the verbal idiom, in order to preserve the sense.

Hight’s translation is indeed free of archaisms, except in the verses, and even after more than ninety years readers are likely to find it clear and idiomatic, though indeed not always absolutely literal. That it was reprinted several times and no other complete or substantially complete English language translation of the saga appeared between 1914 and 197413 are probably testimony to its merits, for Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar has long been recognized as one of the greatest of the Íslendingasögur and long regarded as of particular significance to students of the Old English poetic masterpiece Beowulf. A quotation from the well-known scene of Grettir’s fight with Glámr may serve to indicate something of the character of this lucid translation: When about a third part of the night had passed Grettir heard a loud noise. Something was going up on to the building, riding above the hall and kicking with its heels until the timbers cracked again. This went on for some time, and then it came down towards the door. The door opened and Grettir saw the thrall stretching in an enormously big and ugly head. (ch. 35, p. 97)

Roger Sherman Loomis’s translation of Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar As we shall see in the next chapter, the riddarasögur or chivalric sagas providing Norse versions of romances from medieval France, and works apparently inspired by such models, received a respectable amount of attention from translators in the second half of the twentieth century.14 It is therefore an eloquent implicit comment on the tastes of earlier generations that (apart from a very brief extract from Karlamagnús saga) none appeared in a published English translation until 1923, even though several deal with Arthurian subject matter, which might be expected to interest English-speaking readers. Either these sagas did not inspire great zeal amongst those competent to produce English translations from the Norse, or there was an expectation that there would be little demand in the market for such translations. The pioneer in the field was to be a scholar better known for his work in the Romance languages than in Old

13

In 1974 appeared Grettir’s Saga, trans. by Denton Fox and Hermann Pálsson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). 14

See also John Kennedy, ‘The Riddarasögur in Modern English Translation’, Parergon, n.s. 8, 2 (December 1990), 53–68.

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Icelandic, Roger Sherman Loomis, who in 1923 produced a version of Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar — or more accurately, a composite translation which followed the Old French Roman de Tristan of Thomas, where that now defective text is extant, and the saga which is a Norse translation of it where the Old French text no longer exists. Loomis translated about seventy percent of the saga, allowing himself by today’s standards a remarkable degree of freedom of action: I have omitted the prologue of Brother Robert, announcing his authorship and the date of composition, and have condensed the first fifteen chapters dealing with the loves of Tristram’s parents [...] In ch. XXX I have represented Tristram as going alone on the voyage to Iceland for the reasons given by me in The Modern Language Review, XIV, p. 39. In ch. LXIX I have introduced a French couplet supplied by Gottfried, which doubtless he had taken over from Thomas. In chapters LVIII and LXXXII the broad remarks of the ladies have been toned down. In ch. LXXXV I have omitted the sentence found in the Saga, p. 99, l. 10, as entirely superfluous. Finally in ch. LXXXVII I have substituted a passage based on [the Middle English] Sir Tristam, ll. 3083–124, for the version of the Saga, which [… ] I regard as here corrupt.15

Clearly Loomis’s aim was to present the reader with what he regarded as an acceptable version of Thomas’s original, rather than a translation faithful to the Icelandic saga. Nevertheless, his translation generally adheres closely to the sentence patterns of the Norse. It appears strikingly archaic, but unlike virtually all other archaizing translators Loomis does not make a special effort to use older English words cognate with the ones in the original text. Indeed, he introduces archaic words of French origin, without any encouragement from the Icelandic and despite the need he perceived to explain some to them in a glossary appended to the translation. Thus, ‘Konungrinn átti einn ræðismann; sá var hinn mesti metnaðarmaðr, írskr at ætt’ becomes ‘The king had a seneschal, which was a man right orgulous, and of his parage Irish’.16 The following more extended passage, chosen at random, will give an accurate idea of the Loomis translation: ‘What shall we do’, said they, ‘that have no falcons to delight us? Now be comen here in the ship many birds and right fair. If thou wilt help us, thou mayest compass all thou wilt require of our father, for never doth he nor our mother withsay naught thou

15

See his introduction to Thomas of Britain, The Romance of Tristram and Ysolt, trans. from the Old French and Old Norse by Roger Sherman Loomis, rev. edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951; repr. New York: Dutton, 1967), pp. viii–ix. 16

See Die nordische Version der Tristan Sage. Tristrams saga ok Ísondar, ed. by Eugen Kölbing (Heilbronn: Verlag von Gebr. Henninger, 1878; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olm, 1978), ch. 37, p. 45; Loomis, The Romance of Tristram, ch. 37, p. 104 (of the 1967 repr.).

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Chapter 5 askest. Rather will they buy VII of the fairest than to see thee in distress.’ They besought him so sore he assented unto them, and they all hied them to the ship, and Tristram let show the birds. (ch. 18, p. 20 of the 1967 reprint)

Thorstein Veblen’s translation of Laxdœla saga At an early stage in his career Lee M. Hollander, himself destined to become a distinguished translator from the Old Icelandic,17 praised Veblen’s 1925 translation of Laxdœla saga as: one of the best translations of an Icelandic saga which we have. It avoids, on the one hand, the affectation of a too modern fluent manner and, on the other, the overloading of the medium with indigestible, stodgy archaisms à la William Morris.18

Despite this praise, however, Hollander went on to provide a list of inaccuracies, and probably few, in 1925 or later, regarded Veblen’s translation so highly as Hollander did. Another distinguished Old Icelandic scholar, Einar Haugen, saw Veblen’s translation as being ‘at the opposite extreme from Morris’, simple, bald and contemporary’, and went on to comment that by making the saga a contemporary text Veblen was as misleading as Morris, though in a different way.19 Veblen seems to have had an ambivalent, perhaps even inconsistent attitude towards the style of the saga he translated. At one point he describes the language as that ‘of colloquial speech in its time; the speech of practiced storytellers, idiomatic in an extreme degree’ (p. xii). But a few paragraphs later we find comments not easy to reconcile with this: By comparison with the common run of sagas, the received text of the Laxdæla is a somewhat prosy narrative, encumbered with many tawdry embellishments and affectations of style and occasional intrusive passages of devout bombast. (p. xiii)

Like his attitude to the original, Veblen’s translation style is not as consistent through the work as might have been desired: one can encounter striking clashes of register, as in ‘I would follow the example of other men of honor and get out of this country’ (ch. 2, p. 2). He does not always avoid an element of the 17

Hollander’s career as a published translator began in the 1940s, but most of his translations, including his more important works, appeared after 1950, and his achievement will be considered in more detail in the next chapter.

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18

Review of Veblen’s translation in Scandinavian Studies and Notes, 8 (1925), 258–59.

19

‘On Translating’, pp. 13–14.

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ridiculous that would probably be best left to farces about ‘hillbillies’: ‘Thorkel was the name of a man who lived at Hafratindar (“Billygoat Buttes”) in Svinadal (“Hogvale”)’ (ch. 49, p. 172). But in general, despite some Latinisms, his translation style seems modern, conspicuously free of archaisms, and inclined to be colloquial. Most readers, one suspects, would be inclined to agree with Haugen’s remarks about simplicity and baldness rather than with Hollander’s view that Veblen steered a middle course. A brief extract from chapter 11 will give a fairly accurate idea of Veblen’s style, and particularly his tendency towards colloquialism, though it probably employs more short sentences than are usual: Thord Goddi was the name of a man who was living in the valley of the Laxá, on the north of the river, at Goddastadir. He was a very wealthy man. He had no children. He had bought the ground he was living on. He was a neighbour of Hrapp’s and was often put upon by him. Höskuld kept an eye on him, so that he was able to hold on to his homestead. (p. 23)

Translations of Margaret Schlauch Margaret Schlauch published English translations of six different complete sagas, two each in books appearing in the years 1928, 1930, and 1950. Her work is of particular interest in that it displays a very clear change in her attitude to the use of archaism, and indeed in her published comments she acknowledges such a development. In her 1928 translations in Medieval Narrative Schlauch uses ‘thou’, ‘thee’ and the corresponding inflected second person verb forms in direct speech, and also employs somewhat old-fashioned language in the narrative prose, not always in search of a cognate for an Icelandic term. Thus we find in the passage that follows, taken from her version of one of the best known of the Íslendingasögur, Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, that ‘a stead that is hight Grenja’s’ renders ‘bœjar þess, er at Grenjum heitir’:20 One day in spring Thorstein spoke with Bergfin and asked him if he wished to ride up with him under Valfell: at that place the men of Borgfirth had their Thing; and Thorstein had heard that his booth-walls had fallen in. The Easterner said he was fain to do it, and so they rode thence all day until they came to a stead that is hight Grenja’s; a poor man dwelt there who was called Atli, a tenant of Thorstein’s.

20

See Gunnlaugs saga ormstunga, ch. 2, p. 53, in Borgfirðinga so3 gur, ed. by Sigurður Nordal and Guðni Jónsson, Islenzk fornrit, 3 (Reykjavik: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1938).

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Chapter 5 Thorstein bade Atli to fare to work with them, and bear along a spade and hoe; and so he did. (ch. 2, p. 36)

In publishing her translation of Völsunga saga two years later she again employed archaic language, particularly in the direct speech: ‘Who are thou that ridest into this burg, where none may enter save by the leave of my sons?’ (ch. 26, p. 121). She noted, however, that William Morris had preceded her (actually in collaboration with Eiríkr Magnússon) in the translation of the saga, and raised the question of why it was necessary to re-translate, given that Morris produced a perceptive and sensitive version: In the first place, Morris’s version is no longer as accessible as such an important text surely deserves to be; and in the second, the excessively archaic language he chose to employ, out of very respect for his original, is unfortunately all but incomprehensible in places, especially to a reader who does not know Old English.

She went on to argue that the subject matter required a ‘slightly archaic style’ but added that she had tried to avoid any obscurity and had ‘confined most archaic locutions to the dialogue’ (pp. xxx–xxxi). Twenty years later, introducing her translation of Bandamanna saga in Three Icelandic Sagas, Schlauch was still prepared to justify archaic English for translations of fornaldarsögur (which include Völsunga saga) but she saw herself as very firmly committed to a more modern style for translating Íslendingasögur such as Bandamanna saga: As for the style of the translation, a word of explanation may be necessary. To some it may appear that I have gone too far in the direction of modern idiom, [...] But the most conspicuous virtues of the saga bring it closest to our own times. The shrewd maneuverings of Ófeig need no learned commentary to be understood in the twentieth century. Hence it would be a pity to make them remote (and sometimes incomprehensible) by means of an artificially archaic English such as no one ever spoke at any time in the history of our language. Such a style might be defensible for the mythical-heroic sagas, which belong to no one age or place, but are on [sic] the order of fictional legends. It has no justification, however, when one is trying to convey narrative and dialogue so racy, so unstilted, so appropriate to a vigorous frontier community that it is — despite chronology — far closer to Abraham Lincoln’s mode of diction in telling anecdotes than (let us say) to the Elizabethans’ or even the Augustans’ more formal writing. (p. 54)

Schlauch’s approach seems to have continued developing, though she did not publish any more saga translations after 1950. In 1967, reviewing the edition and translation of Völsunga saga published two years previously by R. G. Finch, she declared: ‘I may say that I now question the Biblical archaisms (morphological

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rather than lexicographical) which I introduced into my own translation of the saga back in 1930’.21 The development of Schauch’s thinking was in line with the broad trend in English language saga translation, though neither this nor her own development in the course of a long career was simple and linear. Certainly the way Schlauch translated in 1950, even when rendering direct speech, has much more in common with most translations of the 1950s and 1960s than her approach twenty or twenty-two years before: One time Odd came to speak with his father and asked him for an advance of money: ‘I want to go away from here. As things are’, he said, ‘you don’t esteem me much, and I am of no use to your household.’ Ofeig answered, ‘I shall not give you less support than you have deserved. I’ll reckon it very closely, and then you will know how far that will get you.’ (ch. 1, pp. 55–56)

E. R. Eddison’s translation of Egils saga Skallagrímssonar Few translators from the Old Icelandic have discussed the translation process as extensively as E. R. Eddison, aspects of whose views on the subject we have had occasion to discuss at several points in the preceding pages. Eddison felt impelled to append to his translation of Egils saga a ‘Terminal Essay – Some Principles of Translation’ (pp. 229–42), though it must be doubted if it has convinced many readers. Certainly Lee M. Hollander described it as ‘pretentious and for the most part utterly wrongheaded’ — a judgment made ‘quite rightly’, in the view of Einar Haugen.22 Early in his essay Eddison asserts that though translation of the sagas is by no means impossible, most translators have done a bad job, and there have been only two good ones. These turn out to be George Webbe Dasent and William Morris, each of whom is said to complement the other in their varying strengths and weaknesses. But though this would imply that Eddison’s translation ideal lay between the two, clearly he was essentially a belated disciple of Morris, urging the use of old-fashioned language and the retention of as much as possible of the structure and linguistic elements of the Icelandic. The result is probably best illustrated by a passage from his translation to which he drew specific attention

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21

In Medium Ævum, 36, 207–09 (p. 208).

22

Hollander, ‘The Problem’, p. 126; Haugen, ‘On Translating’, p. 14.

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in his essay (pp. 231–32), inviting the reader to compare his work favourably with the corresponding passage in the Egils saga translation of W. C. Green published in 1893: But when these were ware of unpeace toward, they gathered together and fared forth to meet it: — they looked for victory, like as before. But when they fell to battle, the Northmen went hard forward. They had shields withal, trustier than had the Kvens. And now turned it to man-fall in the host of the Kirials: much people fell of them but some fled. King Faravid and Thorolf took fee there past all telling: turned back to Kvenland and after that fared Thorolf and his folk to the Mark. He and King Faravid parted with friendship. (ch. 14, p. 26)

The translation of Heimskringla by Erling Monsen and A. H. Smith The title page of the third independent English translation of Heimskringla, and the first to be published in one volume, indicates that the work was ‘Edited with notes by Erling Monsen and translated into English with the assistance of A. H. Smith’. Perhaps it is not too cynical to suspect that Smith, clearly the junior partner, was in fact responsible for the major part of the translation work: in his introduction Monsen thanks him ‘for having undertaken the spade work of making the first draft of the translation into English’. Monsen goes on to observe that ‘As a Yorkshireman he [Smith] has used many old-fashioned words and expressions familiar to him’ (p. xxxii), and the resulting translation does have a somewhat old-fashioned quality to it, not least in the use of ‘thou’, ‘thee’ and second person singular verb inflections in the translation of direct speech and verses, though on the whole it makes lucid reading. A question hangs over the language from which the translation was made, however. In a 1934 book review Lee M. Hollander lamented that a ‘golden opportunity’ had been ‘utterly ruined’, claiming that the translation had been made directly and without acknowledgment from the modern Norwegian of Gustav Storm, the source also, in his view, of most of the editorial matter. Monsen and Smith could not even be credited with producing an intelligent and accurate translation of the Norwegian.23 This assertion was rejected by another distinguished reviewer, Bruce Dickins, who considered it ‘quite unjustified’, suggesting that it arose from an unfortunate decision to use modern Norwegian

23

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Germanic Review, 9 (1934), 210.

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forms of names in the English translation,24 but not everyone seems to have been convinced. Fry in his bibliography lists Storm’s work as the source text for the Monsen and Smith translation. In illustrating the style of the Monsen and Smith translation it may be interesting to use their version of the same short passage from Haralds saga harðráða as the one Laing was translating when we illustrated his work in an earlier chapter: King Harold Godwinson was come there with a mighty host of cavalry and infantry. King Harald Sigurdson then rode through his lines and saw how the lines were; he sat on a black blazed horse; the steed fell under him and the king fell forward; he stood up quickly and said: ‘A fall is good luck on a journey’. (ch. 90. p.564)

Stella M. Mills’s translation of Hrólfs saga kraka In an earlier chapter we noted that E. V. Gordon defended, in the introduction he wrote to her work, the ‘mild archaism’ his student employed in translating this fornaldarsaga. Gordon had in fact much to say about the style of the translation, most of it much more laudatory than his perhaps somewhat guarded comments on the archaism: The translation is a faithful one in the truest sense of the term: it is close to the original phrasing, and yet is not over-literal. The translator has rightly placed a high value on the directness and vigour of the original [...] here at last we have a translator who is willing to treat realistic writing as realistic, and has no desire to impose romantic colour upon it, as William Morris and his many imitators have done [...] There is no other translation of a saga into English which preserves so much of the realistic imagination and the terse phrasing which are the chief virtues of the Icelandic style of narrative. (p. xi)

Whether the translation deserves such generous praise might be questioned, but it serves as a good example of a ‘middle way’ in translating, avoiding most of the mannerisms of William Morris, but also being a long way from modern colloquial speech. The following is Mills’s version of a passage likely to be familiar to those who began their Old Icelandic studies using Gordon’s wellknown Introduction to Old Norse: Afterwards Bothvar went his way to Hleithargarth, and reached the king’s dwelling. Bothvar stabled his horse beside the king’s best horses and asked leave of no man; he

24

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Saga-Book, 11 (1928–36), 105–07 (p. 105).

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Chapter 5 went afterwards to the hall, and few men were there. He seated himself near the door, and when he had been there a short time he heard a rummaging noise somewhere in a corner. He looked thither and saw that a man’s hand came up from a huge heap of bones which lay there; the hand was very black. Bothvar went thither and asked who was there in the heap of bones. He was answered and very meekly, ‘Hort is my name, good fellow.’ ‘Why art thou here’, said Bothvar, ‘and what art thou doing?’ (ch. 23, pp. 52–53)

The translations of Gwyn Jones Gwyn Jones had a long and prolific career as a translator of the sagas: in addition to the monographs of 1935 and 1944 listed above, he produced a translation of Egils saga Skallagrímssonar in 1960,25 a volume of new translations of shorter works, Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas, for the Oxford University Press’s World’s Classics Series the following year, and extensive translations of sources relating to Norse settlement and exploration in his The Norse Atlantic Saga (1964, with some reassessment of the translations for the second edition of 1986).26 Apart from the 1935 volume all his translations reached a second edition or were reprinted,27 notably the World’s Classics publication, an inexpensively priced and well-promoted volume from a very prestigious publisher which in several reprints has probably served to introduce many readers of English to the sagas. Gwyn Jones, however, was far more than just a saga translator, as Desmond Slay’s obituary in Saga-Book makes clear.28 Had he never evinced any interest in the literature of medieval Scandinavia, and never translated a line of any Icelandic text, he would be remembered as a distinguished novelist and short story writer, a vigorous champion of Anglo-Welsh literature, and as a translator of the medieval Welsh Mabinogion. Perhaps Jones’s powerful dedication to literature helps explain the nature of his saga translations. His versions are lively, modern, and entertaining, and sometimes more colourful than a literal reading of the Icelandic texts would justify. Jones was one of the translators whose approach the Durrenbergers found

25

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Egil’s saga (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1960; repr. New York: Twayne, 1970).

26

Both editions Oxford: Oxford University Press.

27

Kraus Reprint Company reissued The Vatnsdalers’ Saga in 1975 (Millwood, NY).

28

Saga-Book, 25 (2000), 307–09.

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unacceptably free,29 and even the more sympathetic Paul Schach offered guarded praise, suggesting that Jones’s one venture into translating the fornaldarsögur, his version of Hrólfs saga kraka in the World’s Classics volume, was more successful than his far more numerous Íslendingasögur translations: ‘Jones’s uninhibited style seems more appropriate for fantastic combats with berserkers and giants than for the more subdued and realistic stories of Icelandic farmers and poets’.30 A short passage from Jones’s second translation volume, The Vatnsdalers’ Saga, may serve to indicate both the strengths and the limitations of his approach: It befell one day that Ketil had a word with Thorstein his son: ‘Youngsters’ ways are different now from when I was a lad. Those days men yearned for a deed worth doing, either by riding out to war or winning wealth and renown by an adventure with some edge to it. But now young men want to become stick-in-themuds and bake themselves over the fire and fill their bellies with mead and beer, and manhood and valour are all dwindled away [...]’ (ch. 2, p. 20)

This is lively, even arresting. But it is a curious mixture of the colloquial (‘fill their bellies’) and the formal, even elegiac (‘manhood and valour are all dwindled away’). And it does add touches of colour (‘Youngsters’ ways’, ‘when I was a lad’, ‘riding out to war’, ‘with some edge on it’, for example) that are not present in the Iceland (quoted here from the Islenzk fornrit edition):31 Þat var eitt sinn, at Ketill mælti við Þorstein, son sinn: ‘O 3 nnur gerisk nú atferð ungra manna en þá er ek var ungr, þá girntusk menn á no3 kkur framaverk, annattveggja at ráðask í hernað eða afla fjár ok sóma með einhverjum atferðum, þeim er no3 kkur mannhætta var í, en nú vilja ungir menn gerask heimaelskir ok sitja við bakelda or kýla vo3 mb sína á miði or mungáti, ok þverr því karlmennska ok harðfengi [...]’ (ch. 2, pp. 4–5)

Unusually, Gwyn Jones published two distinct versions of the same saga, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, which appears in translation both in his 1935 Four Icelandic Sagas and in the World Classics volume twenty-six years later. While the two versions are not dramatically different, they do suggest that at the later

29

See Durrenberger and Durrenberger, ‘Translating Gunnlaug’s Saga’.

30

‘Norse Sagas in English Translation’, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 33 (1964), 63–73 (p. 72; see also pp. 67, 69–71). 31

Vatnsdœla saga, Hallfreðar saga, Kormáks saga, ed. by Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit, 8 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1939).

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date Jones was more willing to add colour than at the earlier one,32 though he was also less willing to Anglicize place names. The following passage appears in chapter 3 of the Islenzk fornrit edition:33 ‘Eigi hefi ek varr orðit fyrri’, segir Samr, ‘at Hrafnkell hafi svá boðit no3 kkurum sem þér. Nú vil ek ríða með þér upp á Aðalból, ok fo3 rum vit lítillátliga at við Hrafnkel, ok vita, ef hann vill halda in so3 mu boð. Mun honum no3 kkurn veg vel fara.’ (p. 107)

In his 1935 book Jones translates this as follows: ‘I have not heard before’, said Sam, ‘that Hrafnkel has made such offers to others as to you. Now I will ride with you up to Manor, and we will treat humbly with him and find out whether he will hold to the same offer. He will behave well one way or another.’ (ch. 7, p. 43)

The 1961 version is not dramatically different, but typically it is a bit less literal and in a significantly more modern idiom: ‘I have never heard tell before’, said Sam, ‘that Hrafnkel has made such offers to anyone as to you now. So I am prepared to ride with you up to Adalbol, and let us approach him humbly and see if he will stand by the same offer. He is sure to behave well one way or another.’ (ch. 3, p. 98)

Alexander Burt Taylor’s translation of Orkneyinga saga As preliminary matter to a translation Taylor’s introduction is both unusually long (131 pages) and unusually technical. Its author was clearly aware of this, explaining that the length was ‘due to an ambitious but, it is hoped, not unworthy attempt to apply modern methods of textual study to an investigation of the structure and sources of the Saga’ (p. vii) and optimistically announcing in a separately paginated ‘Preface’ that: The general reader who is anxious to know more of Sagas and of the Norse way of life need not be deterred by the extent of the translation and commentary. Several chapters of the Introduction (chapters I and IX to XII) have deliberately been made less technical for his benefit. (Preface, p. viii)

32

Leo James Conroy, ‘Hrafnkels saga och sagaöversättning’ (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Melbourne, 2000), p. 22. 33

Austfirðinga so- gur, ed. by Jón Jóhannesson, Íslenzk fornrit, 11 (Reykjavík: Hið íslanzla fornritafélag, 1950).

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Chapter XIII of the introduction is devoted to ‘Previous Translations’ and chapter XIV to ‘The Present Translation’. Taylor explains in some detail his experiments in attempting to translate the verses (which he ultimately rendered into two stress lines with alliteration where possible) and his policies regarding place names, personal names, nicknames, and technical terms. Taylor’s impulse seems to have been to produce a version in modern English which was literal enough to be of value to the student of history but which also did justice to the colloquial vigour of the original. But he was less sanguine than some translators that this could be achieved: Although I have eschewed archaism and ‘Wardour Street’ English, it is impossible to escape a general flavour of both in translating a prose where past and present tenses may alternate in one paragraph, where sentences are commonly paratactic in structure, where pronouns are often ambiguous, where the characters ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ one another, where names and technical terms are at times repeated ad nauseam — where, in a word, one is dealing with a vernacular prose unaffected by that Latin influence which has formed the literary prose styles of Western Europe. (p. 127)

For Taylor, it would seem, archaisms and pseudo-archaisms are not so much something desirable to create an impression of the antiquity of the work being translated, as an unavoidable and somewhat undesirable element in the process of translating from the Old Icelandic. Not all translators would agree, of course, and one might perhaps wonder how sophisticated an appreciation Taylor had of the different impact a stylistic device might have when transferred from one language to another. The effect in an Icelandic sagas of characters using ‘þú’ and ‘þik’ to one another, as is their normal practice, is not the effect that ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ have in a text written in twentieth-century English. Taylor did indeed employ ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ in direct speech, and reproduced some other stylistic effects from the Icelandic, such as the frequent employment of parataxis and the use of personal pronouns whose antecedent is the last name in the previous sentence rather than the subject of the sentence (see his p. 127). But for the most part his translation is clear and readable: But some time after, King Harald himself sailed out west and landed in the Isles. And Einar fled from the Isles over to Caithness. But they sent envoys to one another, and so came to terms. King Harald imposed a fine on the Isles and fixed the sum at 60 gold marks. Earl Einar offered to pay the whole fine on condition that the odal rights were made over to him. And the bonders agreed to this; for the rich ones expected to be able to buy back their rights; and the poor ones had no money to pay the fine. (ch. 8, p. 143)

Before concluding this chapter it is worth considering the extent to which the translations of 1914 to 1950 are characterized by archaisms. In fact, no very clear

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pattern emerges. Hight and Hovgaard in 1914 avoided archaism; Allen translating Ölkofra þáttr in 194234 used it quite freely. In 1930 the distinguished Old Icelandic scholar Halldór Hermannson stated that archaism in saga translations was ‘to be deplored’ (p. v) and suggested that ‘the reader who can not use the original texts will get a much better idea of the style, form, and content of the sagas from a straightforward, natural translation like that of the Laxdæla Saga by Thorstein Veblen than from the artificiality of the others’, by which he meant Dasent, Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, Guðbrandur Vigfússon and Powell (pp. v–vi). But that same year Eddison, as we have seen, defended archaism with great vigour. Several translators seem to have opted for a middle course, avoiding archaism when translating narrative but employing ‘thou’, ‘thee’ and inflected second person singular verbs in direct speech, and touches of archaism in translating the verses embedded in many of the sagas. A policy of ‘mild archaism’ won the explicit approval of the distinguished scholar E. V. Gordon when in 1933 he wrote the introduction to Stella Mills’s translation of Hrólfs saga kraka, but he was careful to argue that this was a special case. Archaism, one might venture to say, had by then lost some of the respectability it had enjoyed before 1914, but it was far from a spent force even in the 1930s and early 1940s. Saga translation of the years 1914 to 1950 probably lacks any really enduring monuments, but it includes many works that are still very readable, in a way that some of the great Victorian and Edwardian achievements are not. That most of us would generally prefer to consult a more modern translation if a need arose owes relatively little in most cases to intrinsic imperfections in the 1914–50 translations. It is due in part to advances in scholarship that have enriched our understanding of the original texts in the course of the last half century; and probably far more to the changes in taste and fashion which are continuous in literary style as in so much else.

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See Allen, ‘The Icelandic Tale of Thorhall Ale-Cap’.

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reader of English who in 1951 discovered a need or a desire to explore the prose literature of medieval Scandinavia through the medium of English translations could not legitimately have complained that little had been published. By 1951 the earliest efforts to translate parts of sagas were more than 150 years old, and more than eighty years had passed since William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon had published their first saga translations in the 1860s. A great deal had appeared in English translation since then, and in theory at least, the English reader in 1951 would have had available substantially complete versions of well over half the Íslendingasögur, including three or more versions of some: Bandamanna saga, Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, Laxdœla saga, and the Vínland sagas. Three complete translations of Heimskringla had appeared, along with versions of other notable konungasögur — Hákonar saga gamla, the longer version of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, and Sverris saga. Several sagas of Icelandic bishops existed in English versions; and, leaving aside shorter works, one could read in English such diverse texts as Landnámabók, the Norwegian laws of the Frostaþing and the Gulaþing, Færeyinga saga, Orkneyinga saga, Konungsskuggsjá, much of the Prose Edda, Völsunga saga, and, in no less than four independent versions, Friðþjófs saga. To state that these English language translations existed, however, is not to imply that the reader of 1951 would find them readily to hand in any good library. Some, such as Samuel Laing’s version of Heimskringla and George Webbe Dasent’s version of Brennu-Njáls saga, both of which had been reprinted in the inexpensive Everyman’s Library series, might be easy to obtain, but others, such as most of what appeared in the six-volume Saga Library of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, could be found only in what were already rare books.

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Even when translations were to hand they were not always easy reading: this was notoriously true, of course, of the work to which William Morris had contributed, but anyone reduced to consulting the monumental Origines Islandicæ of Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell, perhaps in order to read their versions of texts otherwise unavailable in English, such as Kristni saga, could hardly have relished the encounter with tiny print and decidedly idiosyncratic editing.1 There were, however, significant gaps in the corpus of English language translations as it was when 1951 dawned. Even partial English language translations of several Islendingasögur — Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa, Finnboga saga ramma, Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls, Króka-Refs saga, Reykdœla saga, and Valla-Ljóts saga — had yet to appear, and for several others only excerpts or very much abridged versions were available in English — Fljótsdœla saga, Flóamanna saga, Harðar saga, Ljósvetninga saga, Svarfdœla saga, Þorskfirðinga saga (also known as Gull-Þóris saga), and Þorsteins saga SíðuHallssonar. However industrious in searching out obscure and long-forgotten publications he or she might be, the reader dependent on English versions had access only to a seriously restricted part of the corpus of Íslendingasögur. Almost all the great Sturlunga saga compilation remained untranslated into English, and the reader who wished to examine the sagas in the light of the law code Grágás but was daunted by Vilhjálmur Finsen’s challenging unnormalized edition of the Icelandic text, could turn only to some extracts in the Origines Islandicæ, an 1829 translation into Latin, Finsen’s Danish translation of 1870, or the German version of Andreas Heusler.2 For those with rather different tastes, the riddarasögur remained almost entirely without English versions, the only significant exception being about two-thirds of Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, rendered by Roger Sherman Loomis into extraordinarily archaic English using decidedly cavalier editorial principles. Like the corresponding sections in earlier chapters what follows is an attempt to list in chronological order publications providing new or previously 1

The Origines Islandicæ of 1905 was destined to provide the only substantially complete published English translation of Kristni saga for more than a century, despite the significance of the saga for students of the beginnings of Christianity in Iceland. In 2006 the Viking Society for Northern Research published Íslendingabók. Kristni saga. The Book of the Icelanders. The Story of the Conversion, translated by Siân Grønlie. 2

For bibliographical details of these translations see Laws of Early Iceland: Grágás, trans. by Andrew Dennis, Peter Foote, and Richard Perkins, 2 vols (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1980–2000), I, 277–78.

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unpublished English language translations of medieval prose texts written in Old Norse (and generally in Old Icelandic). As in the previous chapter, brief translations appearing in journal articles or in monographs are omitted, except in the case of anthologies of Old Icelandic translation. As before, guidelines were provided by the bibliographies of Donald Fry and Paul Acker, but it has been possible to include a few translations from 1951–91 not mentioned by Fry or Acker, and to offer some minor corrections to their work. An attempt is made to record translations that appeared too late to be included in Acker’s supplement. The focus here is on translations that appeared in print: Internetbased translations, which began to appear in the second half of the 1990s, are considered in the next chapter. 1951 Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar Translated by Anne Tjomsland in her The Saga of Hrafn Sveinbjarnarsonar: The Life of an Icelandic Physician of the Thirteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). 1953 Þiðranda þáttr Síðu-Hallssonar Translated anonymously (by Robert Gathorne-Hardy?) in The Story of Thithrandi (Stanford Dingley, Berks.: Mill House Press). Hœnsa-Þóris saga Translated by Eric V. Youngquist in his Chicken Thori’s Saga (Madison: University of Wisconsin Department of Scandinavian). 1954 Prose Edda Partial translation by Jean I. Young in her The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson: Tales from Norse Mythology (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes). 1955 Brennu-Njáls saga Translated by Carl F. Bayerschmidt and Lee M. Hollander in their Njal’s Saga (New York: Twayne).

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Jómsvíkinga saga Translated by Lee M. Hollander in his The Saga of the Jómsvíkings (Austin: University of Texas Press). 1956 Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða Translated by John C. McGalliard in World Masterpieces I, ed. by Maynard Mack (New York: Norton). 1957 Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu Translated by Randolph Quirk in The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue, ed. by Peter Foote (London: Nelson). 1959 Eyrbyggja saga Translated by Paul Schauch and Lee M. Hollander in their Eyrbyggja Saga (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). 1960 Egils saga Skallagrímssonar Translated by Gwyn Jones in his Egil’s Saga (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press and the American-Scandinavian Foundation). Brennu-Njáls saga Translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson in their Njál’s Saga (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Heiðreks saga vitra, also known as Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks konungs Translated by Christopher Tolkien in his The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise (London: Nelson). 1961 Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka, Eiríks saga rauða, Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, Hrólfs saga kraka, Hœnsa-Þóris saga, Vápnfirðinga saga, Þiðranda þáttr Síðu-Hallssonar, and Þorsteins þáttr stangarhöggs Translated by Gwyn Jones in his Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas (London: Oxford University Press).

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1962 Þorsteins þáttr skelks Translated anonymously (by Robert Gathorne-Hardy?) in The Story of Thorstein the Scared (Stanford Dingley, Berks.: Millhouse Press). Jómsvíkinga saga Translated by Norman F. Blake in his The Saga of the Jomsvikings (London: Nelson). 1963 Gísla saga Súrssonar Translated by George Johnston in his The Sage of Gisli (London: Dent; Toronto: University of Toronto Press). 1964 Laxdœla saga Translated by A. Margaret Arent in her The Laxdoela Saga (Seattle: University of Washington Press; New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation). Heimskringla Translated by Lee M. Hollander in his Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway (Austin: University of Texas Press). Einars þáttr Sokkasonar, Eiríks saga rauða, Grœnlendinga saga, Íslendingabók, and extracts from Landnámabók Translated by Gwyn Jones in his The Norse Atlantic Saga: Being the Norse Voyages of Discovery and Settlement to Iceland, Greenland, and North America (London: Oxford University Press). 1965 Erex saga Artuskappa Translated by Foster W. Blaisdell in his Erex saga Artuskappa (Copenhagen: Munksgaard). Völsunga saga Translated by R. G. Finch in his The Saga of the Volsungs (London: Nelson).

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Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga Translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson in their The Vinland sagas: The Norse Discovery of America (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Eiríks saga rauða, Grœnlendinga saga, and part of Íslendingabók Translated by Roy H. Ruth in his The Vinland Voyages (Winnipeg: Columbia). Part of Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar saga berserkjabana, part of Gautreks saga, part of Gests þáttr Bárðarsonar, part of Guðmundar saga dýra, Helga þáttr Þórissonar, part of Hemings þáttr Áslakssonar, Hreiðars þáttr heimska, Hrómundar þáttr halta, Íslendings þáttr sögufróða, part of Jóns saga helga, part of Orms þáttr Stórólfssonar, Óttars þáttr svarta, part of Páls saga biskups, part of Sturlu saga, part of Þorláks saga hin yngri, part of Þorleifs þáttr jarlsskálds, Þorsteins þáttr bœjarmagns, Þorsteins þáttr skelks, part of Þorsteins þáttr uxafóts, and part of Örvar-Odds saga Translated by Jacqueline Simpson in her The Northmen Talk: A Choice of Tales from Iceland (London: Phoenix House; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press). 1966 Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga Translated by Joan Tindale Blindheim in her Vinland the Good (Oslo: Tanum). Haralds saga harðráða Translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson in their King Harald’s Saga: Harald Hardradi of Norway (Harmondsworth: Penguin). 1968 Bósa saga ok Herrauðs, Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar saga berserkjabana, Gautreks saga, Helga þáttr Þórissonar, Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar, and Þorsteins þáttr bœjarmagns Translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards in their Gautrek’s Saga and Other Medieval Tales (London: University of London Press; New York: New York University Press). Parts of Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, Heimskringla, Hrólfs saga kraka, Orms þáttr Stórólfssonar, the Prose Edda, Ragnars saga loðbrókar, Samsons saga fagra, Sörla þáttr, Völsunga saga, Þiðreks saga af Bern, Þorskfirðinga saga, Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar, and Þorsteins þáttr uxafóts

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Translated by Jacqueline Simpson in G. N. Garmonsway and Jacqueline Simpson, Beowulf and its Analogues (London: Dent; New York: Dutton). 1969 Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga Translated by Erik J. Friis in Helge Ingstad, Westward to Vinland: The Discovery of Pre-Columbian Norse House-sites in North America, trans. by Erik J. Friis (London: Jonathan Cape). Laxdœla saga Translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson in their Laxdæla saga (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Sturlaugs saga starfsama Translated by Otto J. Zitzelsberger in his The Two Versions of Sturlaugs saga starfsama (Düsseldorf: Triltsch). 1970 Örvar-Odds saga Translated by Paul Edwards and Hermann Pálsson in their Arrow-Odd: A Medieval Novel (London: University of London Press). Kormáks saga Translated by William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon in the posthumously published The Story of Kormak the Son of Ogmund, ed. by Grace J. Calder (London: William Morris Society). 1970–74 Sturlunga saga Translated by Julia McGrew and R. G. Thomas in their Sturlunga saga, 2 vols (New York: Twayne and The American-Scandinavian Foundation). 1971 Seyðarbrævið Translated by Michael Barnes and David R. Margolin in their Seyðarbrævið (Tórshavn: Føroya Fróðskaparfelag).

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Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka, Halldórs þáttr Snorrasonar, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, Hreiðars þáttr heimska, Ívars þáttr Ingimundarsonar, Þorsteins þáttr stangarhöggs, and Ölkofra þáttr Translated by Hermann Pálsson in his Hrafnkel’s Saga and Other Icelandic Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin). 1972 Fyrsta málfræðiritgerðin Translated by Einar Haugen in his First Grammatical Treatise: The Earliest Germanic Philology, 2nd rev. edn (London: Longman) [Revised version of translation published in 1950]. Fyrsta málfræðiritgerðin Translated by Hreinn Benediktsson in his The First Grammatical Treatise (Reykjavík: Institute for Nordic Linguistics). Viktors saga ok Blavus Translated by Allen H. Chappel in his Saga af Victor ok Blavus: A Fifteenth Century Icelandic Lygisaga (The Hague: Mouton). Víga-Glúms saga and Ögmundar þáttr dytts ok Gunnars helmings Translated by Lee M. Hollander in his Víga-Glúm’s Saga and The Story of Ögmund Dytt (New York: Twayne and The American-Scandinavian Foundation). Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar Translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards in their Hrolf Gautreksson: A Viking Romance (Edinburgh: Southside). Landnámabók Translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards in their The Book of Settlements: Landnámabók ([Winnipeg]: University of Manitoba Press). Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga Translated by Frederick J. Pohl in his The Viking Settlements of North America (New York: Potter).

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Svínfellinga saga Translated by Richard Ringler in his ‘The Saga of the Men of Svínafell: An Episode from the Age of the Sturlungs’, in Saga og sprak: Studies in Language and Literature, ed. by John M. Weinstock (Austin: Jenkins), pp. 9–30. 1973 Eyrbyggja saga Translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards in their Eyrbyggja saga (Edinburgh: Southside). Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar Translated by Paul Schach in his The Saga of Tristram and Ísönd (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). Færeyinga saga Translated by G. C. V. Young and Cynthia R. Clewer in their The Faroese Saga (Belfast: Century). 1974 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar Translated by Denton Fox and Hermann Pálsson in their Grettir’s Saga (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). 1975 Egils saga Skallagrímssonar Translated by Christine Fell and John Lucas in their Egil’s Saga (London: Dent; Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Færeyinga saga Translated by George Johnston in his The Faroe Islanders’ Saga (Ottawa: Oberon Press). Bandamanna saga, Hœnsa-Þóris saga, and a portion of Landnámabók Translated by Hermann Pálsson in his The Confederates and Hen-Thorir (Edinburgh: Southside).

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Árons saga Hjörleifssonar Translated by John Porter in his Arons saga (London: Pirate Press and Writers Forum). 1975–80 Karlamagnús saga Translated by Constance B. Hieatt in her Karlamagnús saga: The Saga of Charlemagne and his Heroes, 3 vols (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies). 1976 Grœnlendinga saga Translated by George Johnston in his The Greenlanders’ Saga (Ottawa: Oberon Press). Egils saga Skallagrímssonar Translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards in their Egil’s Saga (Harmondsworth: Penguin). 1977 Erex saga Artuskappa and Ívens saga Translated by Foster W. Blaisdell Jr and Marianne Kalinke, in their Erex saga and Ívens saga (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). Tristrams saga ok Ísoddar Translated by Joyce Hill in her ‘The Icelandic Saga of Tristram and Isolt (Saga of Tristram ok Ísodd)’, in The Tristan Legend: Texts from Northern and Eastern Europe in Modern English Translation, ed. by Joyce Hill ([Leeds]: University of Leeds Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies), pp. 6–28. 1978 Orkneyinga saga Translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards in their Orkneyinga saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney (London: Hogarth). 1979 Ívens saga Translated by Foster W. Blaisdell in his Ívens saga (Copenhagen: Reitzel).

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Strengleikar Translated by Robert Cook in Robert Cook and Mattias Tveitane, Strengleikar: An Old Norse Translation of Twenty-One Old French Lais (Oslo: Norsk Historisk Kjeldeskrift-Institutt). Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka, Brands þáttr örva, Íslendings þáttr sögufróða, Odds þáttr Ófeigssonar, and Stúfs þáttr Translated by Pardee Lowe Jr in his King Harald and the Icelanders (Lincoln, MA: Penmaen Press). 1980 Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka, Brands þáttr örva, Einars þáttr Skúlasonar, Halldórs þáttr Snorrasonar, Hreiðars þáttr heimska, part of Íslendingabók, Ívars þáttr Ingimundarsonar, Kumlbúa þáttr, Odds þáttr Ófeigssonar, Stúfs þáttr, Þorvalds þáttr viðförla, and Ölkofra þáttr Translated by Alan Boucher in his A Tale of Icelanders (Reykjavík: Iceland Review). Göngu-Hrólfs saga Translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards in their Göngu-Hrolfs saga (Edinburgh: Canongate). Konráðs saga keisarasonar Translated by Otto Zitzelsberger in his ‘Konráðs saga keisarasonar’, Seminar for Germanic Philology Yearbook, 3, 38–67. 1980–2000 Grágás Translated by Andrew Dennis, Peter Foote, and Richard Perkins in their Laws of Early Iceland: Grágas, 2 vols (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press). 1981 Hallfreðar saga, fragment of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, and Þorvalds þáttr tasalda Translated by Alan Boucher in his The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Skald (Reykjavík: Iceland Review).

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Gunnars þáttr Þiðrandabana, Vápnfirðinga saga, Þorsteins saga hvíta, and Þorsteins þáttr stangarhöggs Translated by Alan Boucher in his Tales from the Eastfirths (Reykjavík: Iceland Review). Hálfdanar saga Brönufóstra Translated by Robert Hannah, ‘The Saga of Halfdan, Foster-Son of Brana’, Seminar for Germanic Philology Yearbook, 4, 9–27. 1982 Part of Norna-Gests þáttr, part of Prose Edda, and Völsunga saga Translated by George K. Anderson, The Saga of the Völsungs, Together with Excerpts from the Nornageststháttr and Three Chapters from the Prose Edda (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses). Önnur málfræðiritgerðin Translated by Fabrizio D. Raschellà in his The So-Called Second Grammatical Treatise: An Orthographic Pattern of Late Thirteenth-Century Icelandic (Florence: Felice Le Monnier). 1983 Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu Translated by Alan Boucher in his The Saga of Gunnlaug Snake-Tongue Together with the Tale of Scald-Helgi (Reykjavík: Iceland Review). Harðar saga Translated by Alan Boucher in his The Saga of Hord and the Holm-Dwellers (Reykjavík: Iceland Review). Partalopa saga Translated by Foster W. Blaisdell in Partalopa saga, ed. by Lise PræstgaardAndersen (Copenhagen: Reitzel). Duggals leiðsla Translated by Peter Cahill in his Duggals leiðsla (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar).

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1984 Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss Translated by Jón Skaptason and Philip Pulsiano in their Bárðar saga (New York: Garland). 1985 Bandamanna saga, Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa, Gísls þáttr Illugasonar, Króka-Refs saga, Sneglu-Halla þáttr, Valla-Ljóts saga, Þorskfirðinga saga, Þorsteins þáttr austfirðings, and Þorvarðar saga krákunefs Translated by W. Bryant Bachman Jr in his Four Old Icelandic Sagas and Other Tales (Lanham: University Press of America). Bósa saga ok Herrauðs, Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar saga berserkjabana, Gautreks saga, Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar, Helga þáttr Þórissonar, Þorsteins þáttr bœjarmagns, and Örvar-Odds saga. (Apart from the version of Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar these are revised versions of translations published by the authors in 1968 and 1970) Translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards in their Seven Viking Romances (Harmondsworth: Penguin). 1986 Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings and Hœnsa-Þóris saga Translated by Alan Boucher in his The Saga of Havard the Halt Together with the Saga of Hen-Thorir (Reykjavík: Iceland Review). Víga-Glúms saga Translated by Alan Boucher in his The Saga of Viga Glum (Reykjavík: Iceland Review). Knýtlinga saga Translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards in their Knytlinga saga: The History of the Kings of Denmark (Odense: Odense University Press). 1987 Parts of Þiðreks saga af Bern Translated by Theodore M. Andersson in his A Preface to the Nibelungenlied (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

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Prose Edda Translated by Anthony Faulkes in his Snorri Sturluson. Edda (London: Dent). Möttuls saga Translated by Marianne E. Kalinke in her Mo3ttuls saga, with an Edition of Le Lai du cort mantel (Copenhagen: Reitzel). Víga-Glúms saga, Þorvalds þáttr tasalda, and Ögmundar þáttr dytts Translated by John McKinnell in his Viga-Glums Saga with the Tales of Ögmund Bash and Thorvald Chatterbox (Edinburgh: Canongate). Magnús saga helga eyjajarls Translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards in their Magnus’ Saga: The Life of St Magnus Earl of Orkney 1075–1116 (Oxford: Perpetua Press). 1988 Valla-Ljóts saga Translated by Paul Acker in his ‘Valla-Ljot’s Saga. Translated with an Introduction and Notes’, Comparative Criticism, 10, 207–37. Þiðreks saga af Bern Translated by Edward R. Haymes in his The Saga of Thidrek of Bern (New York: Garland). Möttuls saga Translated by Marianne E. Kalinke in The Romance of Arthur III: Works from Russia to Spain, Norway to Italy, ed. by James J. Wilhelm (New York: Garland), pp. 55–68 [Said on p. 56 to be a ‘freer version’ than her 1987 translation of the saga, but based on it]. 1989 Ljósvetninga saga and Valla-Ljóts saga Translated by Theodore M. Andersson, and William Ian Miller in their Law and Literature in Medieval Iceland. Ljósvetninga saga and Valla-Ljóts saga (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

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Eyrbyggja saga Translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards in their Eyrbyggja saga (London: Penguin) [Translation significantly revised from their 1973 version]. Eymundar saga Hringssonar and Yngvars saga víðförla Translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards in their Vikings in Russia: Yngvar’s Saga and Eymund’s Saga (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). 1990 Finnboga saga ramma Translated by W. Bryant Bachman Jr and Guðmundur Erlingsson in their The Saga of Finnbogi the Strong (Lanham: University Press of America). Völsunga saga Translated by Jesse L. Byock in his The Saga of the Volsungs: The Norse Epic of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer (Berkeley: University of California Press).3 Droplaugarsona saga and Fljótsdœla saga Translated by Jean Young and Eleanor Haworth in their The Fljotsdale Saga and The Droplaugarsons (London: Dent). 1991 Hálfs saga ok Hálfsrekka, Hrólfs saga kraka, and Tóka þáttr Tókasonar Translated by W. Bryant Bachman Jr and Guðmundur Erlingsson in their The Sagas of King Half and King Hrolf (Lanham: University Press of America). Valla-Ljóts saga Translated by Peter A. Jorgensen in his Valla-Ljóts saga: The Saga of Valla-Ljot (Saarbrücken: AQ-Verl.). 1992 Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka, Brandkrossa þáttr, Brands þáttr örva, Egils þáttr, Einars þáttr Skúlasonar, Eindriða þáttr ilbreiðs, Eindriða þáttr ok Erlings, Eymundar þáttr, Gísls þáttr Illugasonar, Gull-Ásu-Þórðar þáttr, Halldórs þættir Snorrasonar, Haralds þáttr grenska, Hauks þáttr hábrókar, Helga þáttr ok Úlfs, Hrafns þáttr

3

In 2000 Byock’s translation of Völsunga saga became more readily available when it was published in the Penguin Classics series.

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Guðrúnarsonar, Hreiðars þáttr, extract from Hrólfs saga kraka, Hrómundar þáttr halta, Ívars þáttr Ingimundarsonar, Jökuls þáttr Búasonar, Mána þáttr skálds, Odds þáttr Ófeigsssonar, Rauðs þáttr ramma, Sneglu-Halla þáttr, Stúfs þáttr, Tóka þáttr Tókasonar (revised from 1991 version), Völsa þáttr, Þáttr Þormóðar, Þorgríms þáttr Hallasonar, Þorleifs þáttr jarlsskálds, Þorsteins þáttr austfirðings, Þorsteins þáttr skelks, Þorsteins þáttr stangarhöggs, Þorsteins þáttr sögufróða, Þorvalds þáttr tasalda, Þorvarðar þáttr krákunefs, Þórarins þáttr stuttfeldar, Ögmundar þáttr dytts, and Ölkofra þáttr Translated by W. Bryant Bachman Jr in his Forty Old Icelandic Tales (Lanham: University Press of America). Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu Translated by E. Paul Durrenberger and Dorothy Durrenberger in their The Saga of Gunnlaugur Snake’s Tongue, Together with an Essay on the Structure and Translation of the Saga (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press). Elucidarius Translated by Evelyn Scherabon Firchow in her The Old Norse Elucidarius: Original Text and English Translation (Columbia, SC: Camden House). Partial translations of Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, Bósa saga ok Herrauðs, Fljótsdœla saga, Flóres saga konungs ok sona hans, Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, Gríms saga loðinkinna, Harðar saga, Hálfdanar saga Brönufóstra, Hjalmþés saga ok Ölvis, Hrómundar saga Gripssonar, Jökuls þáttr Búasonar, Ketils saga hængs, Orms þáttr Stórólfssonar, Samsons saga fagra, Sörla saga sterka, Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar, Þorsteins þáttr uxafóts, and Örvar-Odds saga Translated by J. Michael Stitt in his Beowulf and the Bear’s Son: Epic, Saga and Fairytale in Northern Germanic Tradition (New York: Garland). 1993 Ála flekks saga, Ásmundar saga kappabana, Hrómundar saga Gripssonar, Illuga saga Gríðarfóstra, Sörla þáttr, and Yngvars saga víðförla Translated by W. Bryant Bachman Jr and Guðmundur Erlingsson in their Six Old Icelandic Sagas (Lanham: University Press of America). 1994 Svarfdœla saga, Valla-Ljóts saga, and Þorleifs þáttr jarlsskálds

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Translated by W. Bryant Bachman Jr and Guðmundur Erlingsson in their Svarfdale Saga and Other Tales (Lanham: University Press of America). Færeyinga saga and Grœnlendinga saga (Revised versions of the translations published in 1975 and 1976 respectively) Translated by George Johnston in his Thrand of Gotu: Two Icelandic Sagas from the Flat Island Book (Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill). Bandamanna saga Translated by John Porter in his Bandamanna saga (Felinfach: Llanerch Publishers). 1995 Heiðarvíga saga Translated by W. Bryant Bachman Jr and Guðmundur Erlingsson in their Heidarviga Saga (Lanham: University Press of America). Ágrip af Nóregskonungssögum Translated by M. J. Driscoll in his Ágrip af Nóregskonungaso3gum: A TwelfthCentury Synoptic History of the Kings of Norway (London: Viking Society for Northern Research). Extracts from Brennu-Njáls saga, Eiríks saga rauða, Grœnlendinga saga, Guðmundar saga biskups góða II, and Heimskringla Translated by Carolyne Larrington in her Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge). Áns saga bogsveigis Translated by Willard Larson in his The Saga of Aun the Bow-bender: A Medieval Norse Tale (Baltimore: Gateway Press). Extracts from Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, Eyrbyggja saga, Flateyjarbók, Frostaþing laws, Heimskringla, Íslendingabók, Knýtlinga saga, Landnámabók, Nóregskonunga tal, Orkneyinga saga, Prose Edda, and Völsunga saga Translated by R. I. Page in his Chronicles of the Vikings: Records, Memorials and Myths (London: British Museum Press).

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1996 Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings Translated by E. Paul Durrenberger and Dorothy Durrenberger in their The Saga of Hávarður of Ísafjörður with an Essay on the Political, Economic, and Social Background of the Saga (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik Press). 1997 Konungsskuggsjá Excerpts translated by Bernard Scudder in his The Vikings’ Guide to Good Business: Excerpts from the King’s Mirror (Reykjavík: Gudrun). Forty Íslendingasögur and forty-nine Íslendingaþættir Translated by a team of thirty translators in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders Including 49 Tales, ed. by Viðar Hreinsson and others, 5 vols (Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríksson). 1998 Áns saga bogsveigis Translated by Shaun F. D. Hughes as ‘The Saga of Án Bow-bender’, in A Book of Medieval Outlaws: Ten Tales in Modern English, ed. by Thomas H. Ohlgren (Stroud: Sutton), pp. 187–218. Hrólfs saga kraka Translated by Jesse L. Byock in his The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki (London: Penguin). Plácidus saga Translated by John Tucker in his Plácidus saga with an Edition of Plácidus drápa by Jonna Louis-Jensen (Copenhagen: Reitzel). 1999 Bandamanna saga and Víga-Glúms saga Translated by George Johnston in his The Schemers and Víga-Glúm: Bandamanna saga and Víga-Glúms saga (Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill). Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar Translated by Peter Jorgensen in Norse Romances. I: The Tristan Legend, ed. by Marianne E. Kalinke (Cambridge: Brewer).

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Erex saga Artuskappa and Ívens saga Translated by Marianne E. Kalinke in Norse Romances. II: The Knights of the Round Table, ed. by Marianne E. Kalinke (Cambridge: Brewer). Parcevals saga and Valvens þáttr Translated by Helen Maclean in Norse Romances II: The Knights of the Round Table, ed. by Marianne E. Kalinke (Cambridge: Brewer). Svínfellinga saga The Orðhenglar, ‘A New Translation of Svínfellinga saga – The Saga of the Svínafell Men’, in Fótarkefli rist Peter Foote 26.v.99, 2 vols (London: [n. pub.]), I, 15–31 [Translation by a group associated with the University of London]. 1999–2002 Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka, Bandamanna saga, Brennu-Njáls saga, Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, Eiríks saga rauða, Eyrbyggja saga, Fóstbrœðra saga, Gísla saga Súrssonar, Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, Grœnlendinga saga, Gunnars þáttr Þiðrandabana, Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, Hreiðars þáttr heimska, Hœnsa-Þóris saga, Ívars þáttr Ingimundarsonar, Laxdœla saga, Vatnsdœla saga, Vápnfirðinga saga, Þiðranda þáttr Síðu-Hallssonar, Þorsteins þáttr stangarhöggs, and Ölkofra þáttr Translated by Magnus Magnusson in his The Icelandic Sagas (London: Folio Society).4

4

Though the title page of the second volume attributes the translations solely to Magnus Magnusson, and the title page of the first volume mentions only Magnus as editor and author of the introduction, and Simon Noyes as illustrator, an ‘Editor’s Note’ in the first volume (p. xxi) and an ‘Author’s Note’ in the second volume (p. xiv) indicate that the majority of the works printed are based on previously published translations by Hermann Pálsson alone or in collaboration with Magnus M agnusson, Paul Edwards, or Denton Fox. In Volume 1 the exceptions are Magnus’s new translations of Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, Vápnfirðinga saga, and Þíðranda þáttr. In Volume 2 Magnus presents his own new translations of Vatnsdœla saga and of Hreiðars þáttr heimska, Ívars þáttr Ingimundarsonar, and Ölkofra þáttr, a new version of Fóstbrœðra saga by himself and Hermann Pálsson, a previously unpublished version of Gísla saga Súrssonar also by them, and a version of Gunnars þáttr Þiðrandabana based on the one published in 1981 by Alan Boucher.

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2000 Morkinskinna Translated by Theodore M. Andersson and Kari Ellen Gade in their Morkinskinna: The Earliest Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings (1030–1157) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Þorskfirðinga saga Translated by Philip Westbury Cardew in his A Translation of Þorskfirðinga (Gull-Þóris) saga (Lewiston: Mellen). Jóns saga helga Partial translation by Margaret Cormack in her ‘Saga of Bishop Jón of Hólar’, in Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology, ed. by Thomas Head (New York: Garland), pp. 595–626. Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa Translated by Alison Finlay in her The Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Men of Hitardal (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik) [‘[S]lightly different’, p. [iv] from her version of the same saga in the 1997 Complete Sagas of Icelanders]. Völsunga saga Translated by Kaaren Grimstad in her Vo3lsunga saga: The Story of the Volsungs (Saarbrücken: AQ-Verl.). Barbare saga Translated by Kirsten Wolf in her The Old Norse-Icelandic Legend of Saint Barbara (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies). A perusal of what was translated in the fifty-year period will reveal that several of the gaps identified at the beginning of the chapter have indeed been plugged, though it took almost until the end of the twentieth century for a substantially complete English version of Grágás to become available, a surprisingly long time if one considers its importance to students of the Íslendingasögur. Any sense of surprise is likely to be diminished by a consideration of the complexities of this legal text, however. A complete version of Sturlunga saga, by Julia McGrew and R. George Thomas, has indeed appeared, though to a somewhat mixed

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reception.5 Translations of the Islendingasögur, perhaps predictably, provided by far the single most important strand in the translation activity of the period: close to fifty percent of publications of Old Norse translations during the half century were largely or wholly devoted to this genre, which clearly is the one perceived by translators and publishers as having the most appeal to modern tastes. But the riddararasögur have to some degree come into fashion since the 1960s, though most of the translations identified are obviously intended more for the student or scholar than the general reader: they often appear as part of the apparatus of editions of the Norse text, or at least accompanying it. A renewed interest in comparative literature since the 1960s, and a new willingness by scholars to consider influences on Old Norse literature from outside Scandinavia probably do much to explain the existence of these riddarasögur translations. Translations of fornaldarsögur since 1951 are approximately as numerous as those of riddarasögur, but many of the fornaldarsögur translations are in volumes clearly aimed at least in part at the renowned ‘general reader’: we find such titles as Arrow-Odd: A Medieval Novel, Hrolf Gautreksson: A Viking Romance, and Seven Viking Romances. Clearly there has been a hope that what presumably entertained in the later Middle Ages could also entertain readers of novels in the twentieth century. When we turn to what is not prominent in the corpus of 1951–2000 translations, the konungasögur are one category that springs to mind. Lee M. Hollander brought out a translation of Heimskringla in 1964, but apart from that there are apparently only four clear and substantial examples of konungasaga translations from the last fifty years of the twentieth century.6 These are the version of Haralds saga harðráða translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson which Penguin published in 1966, on the nine hundredth anniversary of the battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings which figure so prominently in the saga; the version of Knýtlinga saga by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards which the City of Odense sponsored in 1986 to mark the nine hundredth anniversary of the death King Knud the Saint in that city; Matthew Driscoll’s 1995 translation of the Ágrip af Nóregskonungasögum facing his edition

5

See Claiborne W. Thompson’s review of the first volume, Scandinavian Studies, 45 (1973), 71–72; Schach, ‘Norse Sagas’, p. 68. 6

Inclusion in the konungasögur category of the sagas dealing with the Orkneys and the Faroes, and the Viking community of Jomsburg (Jómsvíkinga saga) would add another four distinct translations to the total, still leaving the category rather under represented in the total translation output.

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of the work, and the version of Morkinskinna by Theodore Andersson and Kari Gade which appeared at the end of the period, the first substantially complete translation of Morkinskinna into any language and part of an important contribution to scholarship on the work. Clearly there was a perception among publishers, and perhaps also translators, that at least for English-speaking readers the deeds of Norway’s medieval kings lacked the appeal of the doings of Icelandic farmers as recorded in the Íslendingasögur. But if the konungasögur are arguably under represented in the corpus of translations from 1951–2000, they are more numerous there than the biskupasögur dealing with medieval Icelandic bishops, which are represented only by some extracts in Jacqueline Simpson’s 1965 compilation The Northmen Talk, a brief extract from Guðmundar saga biskups translated by Carolyne Larrington and published in 1995, and Margaret Cormack’s partial translation of Jóns saga helga from 2000. Perhaps the five-volume Islenzk fornrit edition of the biskupasögur which began to appear in Reykjavík in 1998 will stimulate some translator attention to this rather underrated area of medieval Icelandic literature. The mass of non-Scandinavian saints’ lives and other explicitly Christian literature which survives in vernacular texts from medieval Icelandic and mainland Scandinavia is even less likely to attract the interest of translators and publishers, despite the initiatives of Kirsten Wolf in drawing attention to this material, and despite its importance to our understanding of the societies and cultures of the period. Well over a hundred substantial publications devoted in large part to translations from Old Norse into English have been published in the last half century, including several in two or more volumes. They are well spread out over the years — a healthy situation when one considers that for much of the latter part of the period talk of a crisis in publishing has been endemic. Volumes that are primarily translations far outnumber dual language volumes providing a Norse text with English translation, of which there appear to have been about twenty-five in the years 1951–2000. Some of the translations in these dual language works provide fluent and highly readable English language versions of their sources: an example would be R. G. Finch’s version of Völsunga saga in the brave but not very prolific or long-enduring publishing initiative, Nelson’s Icelandic Texts.7 Others are severely functional aids to the scholar confronting

7

The series began in 1957 with Randolph Quirk’s edition and translation of Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, and Finch’s Völsunga saga in 1968 was the last work published. Also in the series were the editions of Christopher Tolkien in 1960 and Norman Blake in 1962.

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the challenge of the unnormalized Norse texts. Thus Foster Blaisdell, introducing in 1965 his translation of Erex saga Artuskappa in the Editiones Arnamagnæanæ series, comments: I have provided a ‘translation’ [in inverted commas], which is designed to follow the Icelandic original (both texts) as closely as possible and thus provide a control for the unnormalized orthography. I must emphasise, however, that the translation is by no means intended to obviate a knowledge of Icelandic. (pp. xiii–xiv)

A perusal of translations published since 1950 will reveal that while some writers seem to have essayed only one published translation, the names of others keep re-appearing. One might mention Alan Boucher, who between 1980 and 1987 published seven relatively slim volumes in the Iceland Review Saga Series, mainly translations of Íslendingasögur and Íslendingaþættir, or the seven generally more substantial volumes of often less well known material which since 1985 W. Bryant Bachman Jr has published with the University Press of America, translating either alone or in collaboration with Guðmundur Erlingsson. But clearly the dominant figure in translating Old Icelandic literature into English during the second half of the twentieth century was Hermann Pálsson, who died in 2002. If one includes his involvement towards the very end of his life with Magnus Magnusson’s huge two-volume compilation for the Folio Society, Hermann was involved in producing no less than twenty-one books of translation from the Old Icelandic — thirteen in collaboration with Paul Edwards, five in collaboration with Magnus Magnusson, one in collaboration with Denton Fox, and two alone. The earliest of these translations dates from 1960, the latest from 2002, and nine have been published in the Penguin Classics series.8 Perhaps this leads naturally to the question of whether there was a dominant approach to translation of Old Norse literature in the second half of the twentieth century, and what it was. Generalizations about a large body of writing stretching over half a century are perilous, but if one leaves aside the very close translations provided as part of the apparatus of scholarly editions of the original texts, the most influential and popular approach appears to have been that

8

See the entries above under the dates 1960, 1965, 1966, 1969, 1971, 1976, 1984, and 1989. The 1978 translation of Orkneyinga saga by Hermann and Paul Edwards was reprinted by Penguin in 1981 (Harmondsworth). Though Hermann Pálsson remained a very active scholar until his death in an accident at the age of eighty-one he seems largely to have abandoned translation after 1989, declaring in this writer’s presence at the 1991 International Saga Conference in Göteborg that he had become a bit disillusioned with the financial rewards!

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generally taken by Hermann Pálsson and his collaborators — an approach strongly evident in their work for Penguin Classics. It is an approach that above all stresses accessibility and readability. The intention appears to be to provide the modern reader with a text he or she can enjoy, without archaisms, long sentences, and thorny grammar, and perhaps with potentially distracting genealogies relegated to notes, though the text is likely to be otherwise complete. This, of course, is not the only possible approach to saga translation, and it is diametrically opposite to the approaches of some major translation figures in the nineteenth century and later — not least William Morris. Its opponents argue that in de-emphasizing the cultural distance separating medieval Iceland from twentieth century Britain, America, or Australia, the approach runs the twofold risk of distorting the meaning of the original text and making it seem flat and banal. As early as 1962 Hedin Bronner complained that the Penguin version of Brennu-Njáls saga ‘simply is not a saga. The terseness, the dignity, the stylistic range between fire and ice have been replaced by a chatty and pedestrian prose’,9 and in the 1980s Shaun Hughes suggested that the effect of the Penguin Classics translation philosophy, which encouraged this approach, was to create the impression that ‘the world’s great classics, whether the Iliad, Njál’s saga, or the The Cloud of Unknowing, had all been written by the same author and differed from one another only in locale, time, and subject matter’.10 Probably the most distinguished translator to have rejected the prevailing approach to saga translation and produced versions strongly influenced by a different set of criteria was the Canadian poet George Johnston, who in 1963 published his distinctive version of Gísla saga Súrssonar, and who during a long retirement has remained actively involved in translation from the Icelandic. Johnston’s approach to saga translation has aimed for fidelity to the original, and vitality, by reproducing the tense variations of the original, even when this violates the norms of modern written English. It has resulted in the reproduction in English guise of much of the original Icelandic sentence patterns and idioms. Unlike many early translators, Johnston has avoided archaisms, but he has also 9 10

Review of the translation in American-Scandinavian Review, 50 (1962), 317–18 (p. 318).

‘On Translating Contemporary Icelandic Poetry’, Scandinavian Studies, 58 (1986), 372–406 (p. 378). See also Kunz, ‘No One but a Blockhead’, p. 75. Burton Raffel in The Art of Translating Prose (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) offers similar general criticism of the Penguin Classics approach: ‘In handling prose, Penguin’s editors apparently aim at comfortable sameness of style — no sentence too long or too short; as little variety as possible in sentence structure and rhythm and bland word-choices (monosyllables preferred)’ (pp. 47–48).

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deliberately employed words of French and Latin origin more sparingly than is usual in modern English practice. Another somewhat idiosyncratic approach, with some similarities to that of Johnston, has been vigorously advocated by Paul and Dorothy Durrenberger, anthropologists who view the sagas primarily as anthropological documents. Though their translations have stylistic similarities to Johnston’s, their primary aim is to provide translated texts that accurately convey anthropological data. Towards the end of the introduction to their 1996 version of Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings they challengingly summarize their uncompromising stance: Modern readers may well find the reading rough and strange. They may find themselves slowing down, rereading, puzzling over unfamiliar constructions and concepts. If so, we have succeeded. (p. 41)

Unsurprisingly, such approaches to translation have provoked adverse comment as well as a measure of praise. But at the end of the twentieth century perhaps translators from the Old Icelandic generally were indeed trying a little harder than in the preceding decades to produce readable English language versions which also respected the idioms and the syntax of the original. Certainly such a tendency is evident in the most comprehensive and elaborate project to translate saga literature into English ever attempted, that resulting in the publication during 1997 of the Leifur Eiríksson Complete Sagas of Icelanders, consisting of five large volumes translated by an international team of thirty native speakers of English from seven countries coordinated by an editorial group in Iceland. As in previous chapters, the examination in more detail of some translators and their work will need to be selective. The focus here is on the more prolific or influential translators.

Translations of Lee M. Hollander In the previous chapter there was occasion to refer to reviews published by Lee M. Hollander in 1925 and 1934, and the appearance in 1949 of his first book of saga translations, The Sagas of Kormák and The Sworn Brothers, was noted. Most of Hollander’s activity as a translator of Old Icelandic prose came after 1950, however. It was a major part, but definitely only part, of a distinguished career that established him as a magisterial figure in Old Icelandic studies, particularly in North America. He published many articles in the field, and was possibly better known and more highly regarded for his translations of Old Icelandic

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poetry than for his prose translations. In 1928 he published his translation of The Poetic Edda (Austin: University of Texas Press; 2nd edn 1962), and in 1945 appeared his The Skalds: A Selection of their Poems (New York: AmericanScandinavian Foundation). Both works were reprinted in paperback format at later dates. Donald Fry lists six books of saga translations in which Hollander was involved, and suggests that his contribution to two of these — Njál’s Saga (1955) and Eyrbyggja Saga 1959) — was the translation of the verses in the sagas. In fact the preface to Eyrbyggja Saga implies a more extensive role — ‘In addition to writing the Introduction and translating the verse material, Professor Hollander also collaborated, in general, in giving the book its present shape’ (p. vii) — and the statement in the Njál’s Saga preface that ‘Both the Introduction and the translation of the skaldic verses were prepared by L. M. Hollander’ (p. v) does not necessarily imply a restriction to these matters. Certainly the four volumes for which he did not have a collaborator — The Sagas of Kormák and The Sworn Brothers, The Saga of the Jómsvíkings (1955), Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway (1964), and Víga-Glúm’s Saga and the Story of Ögmund Dytt (1972) show a great willingness to translate extended passages of prose. All six volumes of translation for which Hollander was wholly or partly responsible display very similar approaches. The ‘apparatus’ accompanying the translations is largely restricted to a brief introduction and notes that are modest in number and generally short. Only the Heimskringla translation has an index, and one must wonder how many readers of the other volumes, particularly the lengthy Njál’s Saga, found themselves a bit confused about ‘who’s who’ as a consequence. Discussion of the approach to translation is always very concise, and largely restricted to a consideration of the treatment of names and to pronunciation, though the reader or the potential reviewer may be referred to scholarly articles in which Hollander discusses relevant matters at greater length.11 In all translations the acute accents are retained, and in the 1972 volume (though not the earlier translations) the letter ð, but not þ, is also to be found. Hollander’s prose translations tend to be in a clear modern style that retains a certain formality even when speech contractions are employed: Later in the winter Eyjólf said to Hreiðar that he would like to go abroad with him when spring came. He was slow to answer. Eyjólf said: ‘Why won’t you take me along? Don’t you like me?’ ‘Very well indeed,’ Hreiðar answered; ‘however, your father would think I repaid him poorly for his hospitality, and I don’t mean to do so, by taking

11

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along his son who is such a credit to him in every way. But if your father has no objections I shall be glad to take you along, and shall indeed be pleased to do so then.’12

The translations of Hermann Pálsson Hermann Pálsson was undoubtedly one of the leading figures in Old Icelandic studies throughout almost the entire period under consideration in this chapter, although his views on the influences that shaped medieval Icelandic literature were quite frequently challenging and controversial. Though he lived in Britain for much of his adult life, many of his numerous scholarly monographs and articles were in his native Icelandic, and he is likely to be best remembered in English-speaking countries as an extremely prolific translator from Old Icelandic into English. Writing Hermann’s obituary in The Independent newspaper on 28 August 2002 Peter Graves sums up his approach: Unlike many of his Victorian predecessors, Pálsson was no fan of horned helmets and the Boy’s Own view of the heroic north: his translations are characterized by commonsense and accessibility — in the jargon of modern translation studies he was a domesticator rather than a foreigniser.

Alone or with a collaborator Hermann was the translator responsible for all nine volumes of saga translations issued in the Penguin Classics series between 1960 and 1989, and thanks to the formidable power of the Penguin publishing and distribution ‘empire’ this made his translations by far the most readily available in the English-speaking world. Clearly Hermann found reasonably acceptable the Penguin Classics translation approach, even though, as we have seen, this approach has come in for some harsh criticism.13 His work has also won critical admiration. In his above-mentioned survey of English language saga translations the distinguished scholar (and translator) Paul Schach praises many of those in which Hermann was involved. The 1978 translation of Orkneyinga saga by Hermann and Paul Edwards is ‘both readable and accurate’ (p. 64); the 1966 translation of Haralds saga harðráða by Hermann and Magnus Magnusson ‘eminently readable’ (p. 65); their 1965 translation of the Vínland sagas ‘lively and accurate’ (p. 65); the 1975 version of Egils saga

12 13

Víga-Glúms saga, ch. 1, p. 19.

For a predictably sympathetic view of it see The Translator’s Art: Essays in Honour of Betty Radice, ed. by William Radice and Barbara Reynolds (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1987).

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Skallagrímssonar by Hermann and Paul Edwards ‘the most accurate’ of the several translations available (p. 69); the 1969 Magnus Magnusson–Hermann Pálsson version of Laxdœla saga ‘equally enjoyable’ as that of Margaret Arent and like hers, clearly superior to the older translations of the saga (p. 69). The Hermann Pálsson–Paul Edwards version of Eyrbyggja saga (1973) is rather generously proclaimed to be ‘livelier’ and ‘more appealing to the general reader’ than that by Schach himself and Hollander, though Schach claims that the latter version is ‘more helpful to students of Old Norse’ (p. 69). The 1974 Denton Fox–Hermann Pálsson version of Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar is ‘the only competent, felicitous version of the story’ (p. 70); Hermann’s 1971 version of Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða ‘the most readable and reliable’ English version of that saga, although ‘considerably more colloquial than the Icelandic original’ (p. 70). Hermann’s 1971 version of a passage from Þorsteins þáttr stangarhöggs is compared in detail with Gwyn Jones’s 1961 version and judged to be less literal but to read better and give a more faithful idea of the original. The charge of critics that Hermann ‘occasionally tends to “write up” the original text’ is noted, but it is said to be an almost universal tendency among translators, and largely justified by the results (pp. 66–67). Schach’s highest praise is reserved for the translation of Brennu-Njáls saga, though the date given for it appears to be that of a reprint, not the original publication in 1960: In Njal’s Saga (Middlesex and Baltimore, 1964) Magnusson and Pálsson skilfully capture and reproduce the cool, terse, impersonal, delicately shaded language of the Icelandic original. […] This translation is by all odds the best that Pálsson and his colleagues have produced. (p. 70)

A somewhat earlier study of saga translations, by Johanna Torringa,14 expresses cautious misgivings about the tendency in the 1960 translation for formulas meaning something like ‘now the story must be told how […]’ or ‘now the story must go back to […]’ to be rendered by ‘Meanwhile Unn […]/ ‘Meanwhile, Thorvald’s companions […]’, and so on (p. 7). But she enthusiastically praises the translation for making the work vivid and accessible for modern audiences: Yet, ideally at least, a translation should attempt to convey something of the same sense of immediacy and relevance as its original did. In this respect, the translation by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson has, to us, twentieth-century readers, a decided advantage over G. W. Dasent’s Story of Burnt Njal. Dasent’s version, with its many archaisms, dialect words and literal renderings, seems throughout preoccupied

14

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‘The Icelandic Sagas’.

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with a past that has no bearing on the present. The new version, however, erects no barriers of vocabulary and syntax between the present and the past. On the contrary, its convincing, twentieth-century idioms bring the lives of the people in the saga startlingly close to our own, so that we recognize at once Bergthora’s shrewish wit, the grinning, loutish modernity of Skarp-Hedin at his worst, the fierce temper and domineering will of Hallgerd […] (pp. 14–15).

Nearly thirty years after it was published one of Hermann’s translations became the subject of very strenuous criticism in an article in Saga-Book. Entitled ‘Female Experience and Authorial Intention in Laxdœla saga’15 the article by Loren Auerbach devotes several pages to a detailed denunciation of the 1969 Penguin translation of the saga for the ways in which it diminishes the stature enjoyed in the original Icelandic text by Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir. For Auerbach, Guðrún is the saga’s most important figure, and the saga is largely an account of how a remarkable woman was denied the opportunity to achieve her full potential. But she claims that in the Magnus Magnusson–Hermann Pálsson translation (unlike those by Muriel Press and Margaret Arent) and in the introductory matter the emphasis is subtly and not so subtly placed on Guðrún’s physical beauty and her shortcomings, thereby distorting the saga: The extremely interpretative and, I believe, wrong translations at these important moments in the Penguin edition cause Guðrún’s character to appear very differently from that carefully engineered by the saga author. Exactly the same happens to Guðrún as happens to her within the saga — she is forced to play a passive ‘feminine’ role where what is important is the way she looks, and her intelligence takes a second place. This is in direct opposition to what is clearly and painstakingly presented to us in the text. I believe this interpretation […] actively subverts the author’s intentions. (p. 50)

Auerbach’s at times angry presentation of the male translators’ failings undoubtedly uncovers some renderings of the Icelandic text that are to say the least questionable, though one might wonder if the fault lay more in the still largely unquestioned gender stereotyping of most males in 1969 rather than in a conscious conspiracy. To drive home her point, however, she is forced to pay a measure of tribute to the influence of the translators’ work: I believe that the way a work such as this is translated is extremely important, since, [… ] the majority of readers of Laxdœla saga will not read it in the Old Icelandic. Therefore translators have a responsibility to put across as much of the ideas and intentions of the author as they can. The readers of a translation should be able to gain an experience of the text in their own language. Given that the Penguin translation is the most widely available and most widely read English translation of Laxdœla saga I

15

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find the discrepancies between the translation and the text very worrying indeed. (pp. 50–51)

The passage quoted by Schach from Hermann Pálsson’s 1971 translation of Þorsteins þáttr stangarhöggs, one of the relatively few translations he published without a collaborator, serves as a good example of Hermann’s often very lively and entertaining translation style: ‘Why are you up so early, son?’ said Thorarin. Thorstein answered, ‘It seems to me there aren’t many men about to share the work with me.’ ‘Have you got a head-ache, son?’ said Thorarin. ‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ said Thorstein. ‘What can you tell me about the horse fight last summer, son’, said Thorarin, ‘Weren’t you beaten senseless like a dog?’ ‘It’s no credit to me if you call it a deliberate blow, not an accident,’ said Thorstein. Thorarin said, ‘I’d never have thought I could have a coward for a son.’ ‘Father,’ said Thorstein, ‘Don’t say anything now that you’ll live to regret later.’ ‘I’m not going to say as much as I’ve a mind to,’ said Thorarin. (pp. 73–74)

The translations of George Johnston George Johnston has not been a particularly prolific translator of Old Icelandic sagas, but few saga translators have attracted more attention, and few have been more influential. His first translation, of Gisla saga Súrssonar, appeared in 1963, and by 1999 it had been followed by four other volumes of translations, with some earlier translations ‘recycled’. The Gisla saga translation, with only minor changes, was republished in 2001 along with two new translations by Anthony Faulkes in the volume Three Icelandic Outlaw Sagas.16 In a relatively brief ‘Note on the Translation’ in the 1963 volume Johnston explains how the style of his translation came about: My first intention was to make a twentieth-century telling of the saga that would be as readable as a novel. After several attempts Peter Foote asked Ian Maxwell in Melbourne to read the version we then had, and because of his criticisms I decided to rewrite the translation from start to finish, following the Icelandic as closely as I could.

16

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The version that came out seemed livelier, subtler and more readable, slightly outlandish in tone, the style directly geared to the telling of the story. I wrote in twentieth-century words, however, and kept out archaisms, which would have seemed quaint or remote. It seemed to me that the ‘otherness’ of the Icelandic was best preserved by letting its word-order and idiom, especially in the shifting of tenses, play their part in the English too. (p. xi)

Johnston has published an article in Saga-Book outlining his approach to translation, and two scholars have published studies considering his saga translation, on the whole sympathetically.17 Reviews have, however, been divided, with some quite hostile to what they see as the excessive literalness, awkwardness, and obscurity of Johnston’s translation. Paul Schach was markedly unsympathetic in a review of Johnston’s first saga translation for Scandinavian Studies in 1964 (Vol. 36, 152–54), and in reviewing Thrand of Gotu for the same journal thirty-three years later Eric Schaad reached a similar verdict: ‘Although accurate and thoughtfully translated, the literalness of the translations in this volume demands too much of the English reader’.18 Johnston clearly wishes to emphasize the ‘otherness’ of the sagas, and has continued to do so throughout his saga translating career, though Peter Foote felt that he somewhat moderated his approach after The Saga of Gisli. This puts Johnston in contrast to Hermann Pálsson, and John Tucker tentatively presents an intriguing possible explanation of the difference between the approach of a native English-speaking translator, and a native Icelandic speaker: To Icelandic natives the sagas are not exotic, which means that they can be domesticated without impropriety. Besides, the sagas belong to an unfolding tradition to which Icelanders are heirs; their translations merely continue a process of adaptation which began centuries ago. But foreigners, in any event those who have felt the pull of the magnetic north, approach the ancient texts with the reverence of new converts.19

A reasonable indication of Johnston’s style is provided by the following passage from his 1994 translation of Færeyinga saga. (Despite what Foote’s observation might lead one to expect the passage is somewhat less literal in his 1975 translation.)

17

Johnston, ‘On Translation’; John Tucker, ‘George Johnston’s The Saga of Gisli’, Malahat Review, 78 (1987), 83–91; Peter Foote, ‘How it Strikes a Philologist’, Malahat Review, 78 (1987), 92–97.

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18

69 (1997), 492–95 (p. 495).

19

Foote, ‘How it Strikes’, p. 94; Tucker, ‘George Johnston’s The Saga of Gisli’, pp. 87–88.

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Now it is to be told of Sigmund and his crew that a favourable wind comes for them, and they sail towards the Islands and see that they are approaching the Islands from the east, and there are men with Sigmund to ken the lie of the land, and they have come in close to Eysturoy. Sigmund said that he would most choose to lay hands on Thrand. But when they bear up towards the island there come against them both current and gale, so that they did not come near to reaching the island; they do get ashore on Svinoy because the men were skilful and handy seamen. They get there at first light and straightway up to the steading run forty men, and ten hold the ship. (ch. 24, p. 60)

The translations of Foster W. Blaisdell and Marianne E. Kalinke Between them Foster Blaisdell and Marianne Kalinke have provided English translations of some of the more important and best-known riddarasögur. Together they published translations of Erex saga and Ívens saga in 1977. Individually Blaisdell published versions of Erex saga (1965), Ívens saga (1979), and Partalopa saga (1983), while Kalinke published translations of Möttuls saga (1987, 1988, and 1999), Erex saga (1999), and Ívens saga (1999).20 Two questions seem to be posed by this activity. The first relates to the justification for translating the riddarsögur, several of which are arguably themselves Norse translations of well-known and readily available French texts (such as the Erec and Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes). A ‘translation of a translation’ might appear ipso facto difficult to justify if the original is available for consultation and translation. But even if one were not daunted by this consideration one might ask why a scholar would be involved in two or even three different translations of the same saga, as clearly has been the case for both Blaisdell and Kalinke. Peter Foote does not argue that the riddarasögur should not be translated, but in a 1975 essay he clearly attaches only modest value to them and states that the process of translating them normally need take place only once: There would seem small room for discussion as to what the aims of such translation should be. With at most one or two exceptions, the Norse works are not classics in their own right that can expect to be ‘transferred’ […] into modern literary languages every second generation or so. They are themselves translations and adaptations from foreign tongues, the interest in them of anyone but the Norse scholar (who does not need to told what they mean) must be in them as representatives of their French or Latin or English originals. Thus they should be put into a modern language as closely

20

Kalinke also translated Víglundar saga for the Leifur Eiríksson Complete Sagas of Icelanders, considered below.

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and as literally as possible, with due discussion of difficulties of interpretation, so that the translation will fulfil its purpose as a pedantic substitute for the Norse text.21

However, as a reviewer of the 1977 Blaisdell and Kalinke translations pointed out, it is possible to take a considerably more positive view of the riddarasögur, one which sees them as more than just translations of texts from other languages: In their introduction, Professors Blaisdell and Kalinke seem to feel considerable pressure to justify the publication of a translation of a translation. A servus servorum need not be conceived in such modest terms. As they demonstrate, Erex saga and Ívens saga are adaptations, not condensed translations. Nor do the departures from Chrétien’s stories result from misunderstanding the original. The Norse redactors were guided by clearly discernible artistic, ethical, and social standards. Their artistic consciousness governs the thematic alteration of Chrétien’s narrative structures; the ethics influence saga-character motivation and behavior; social attitudes shine through in parts of the story dealing with Courtly Love and conduct towards women. One important reason for making these sagas readily available is precisely the clarity with which they embody these standards, for they tell us much about Northern literary sensibilities.22

There are at least two possible reasons why a translator might publish significantly different translations of the same saga. One is that his or her views on how the text should be translated have changed with the passage of time, the availability of new editions of the Icelandic text, further reflection on the text, or changes in literary fashions. The other, and the one more probably relevant in this case, is that translations may be prepared for different purposes. Blaisdell’s comment on his 1965 translation of Erex saga, quoted above, can be matched by similar remarks denying any pretensions to literary merit in regard to his other two translations for the Editiones Arnamagnæanæ series, which publishes unnormalized editions intended for the use of advanced scholars.23 But it is also possibly to translate the riddarasögur for a non-specialist audience, as Blaisdell and Kalinke claimed to be doing in the preface to their joint translation in 1977: We hope […] that this translation of Erex saga and Ívens saga will appeal to a broad readership, and that it may serve to stimulate further interest in Scandinavian Arthurian literature. To that end we have prepared a translation directed towards a general audience and unencumbered by excessive scholarly apparatus.

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21

‘Saman er bræðra eign bezt at sjá’, pp. 12–13.

22

Kathryn Hume, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 77 (1978), 310–11 (p. 310).

23

Ívens saga, p. 150; Partalopa saga, p. 128.

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Intermediate positions are of course also possible. The 1999 Norse Romances volumes under the editorship of Marianne Kalinke will probably attract an audience consisting mainly of academic readers, but the normalized texts with facing English translations they provide are far less formidable than those in the Editiones Arnamagnæanæ series, and more accessible to students. It is not possible to present Blaisdell’s 1965 text of Erex saga accurately and fairly without both employing and explaining the special symbols he uses. The following sample may, however, serve to give the ‘flavour’ of a text that clearly is intended to assist the reader of the unnormalized Norse texts and record different manuscript readings, rather than to provide an attractive continuous English text: Malpirant spoke then to Erex: ‘(+ You fool,’ he says,) Let us rest.’ ‘No,’ says Erex, ‘sooner shall you get 1here (from me) many 1a great blow and besides (blows and big ones and afterward) loose 24 your life, or else I shall (+ now) lie dead. (+ He) swung 1up (÷) his sword 1afterward (now) with both hands and (+cuts) 1asunder (÷) [cf. note to text] the helmet and a big piece off the 1skull (hose[!]). (ch. 4, p. 81)

As would be expected the 1977 translation is far more fluent and readable: At this point Malpirant said to Erex, ‘Shall we rest?’ ‘No’ replied Erex, ‘not before you receive from me many another strong blow and so lose your life, or else I myself be dead here.’ Then Erex raised his sword with both hands and split the knight’s helmet and also a large part of the skull. (ch. 4, p. 9)

Kalinke’s 1999 version, drawing on a single manuscript rather than a conflation of two versions, as was the case in 1977, is also quite fluent. But it clearly takes more liberties with modern English idiom than the one just quoted, notably in regard to tense, and a comparison with Blaisdell’s 1965 version will suggest that it is a more literal than what was published in 1977: Morpirant then spoke to Erex, ‘Let us rest!’ ‘No,’ says Erex, ‘you will instead receive many fierce blows and also surrender your life or else I will lie dead here.’ He then raised his sword with both hands and he cuts into the helmet and a big piece off the skull. (ch. 4, p. 231)

24

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The translations of Alan Boucher The seven volumes of saga translations published by Alan Boucher between 1980 and 1986 in the Iceland Review Saga Series have probably not made Boucher a ‘household name’ even in the restricted circle of saga translators. The slim paperback volumes were sold in tourist shops in Iceland during the 1980s, as well as by more established booksellers and by mail, and there has perhaps been a tendency to associate them with the numerous picture books also produced by the publishers of the magazine Iceland Review, and to regard them as little more than a superior kind of tourist souvenir. Such a verdict would undervalue Boucher’s achievement. ‘A Note on the Series’ appearing at the back of each volume proclaims that two categories of readers are envisaged: The Iceland Review Saga Series is designed to serve two special needs: that of the general reader for a good, readable and yet accurate translation, and that of the student for basic but up-to-date scholarly and critical information for deeper study of this literature.

The volumes should indeed not be too daunting to the general reader. They vary in length between 93 and 104 pages, and the apparatus accompanying the translations is of proportionately modest length. Five of the seven volumes (those published before 1986) contain a short essay, ‘The Origin and Development of the Sagas of Icelanders’, which is designed to assist the reader by placing Icelandic saga literature in its historical context. But while inevitably this essay has little room for exploring complexities it does not patronize the reader. In addition, Boucher’s selection of works to translate includes some lesser-known compositions as well as some of the more familiar þættir and Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu that might be considered to have an immediate appeal to the casual reader. When he published his versions of Hallfreðar saga, Harðar saga, and Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings in 1981, 1983, and 1986 respectively none of the three works had been translated into English since they appeared in rather inaccessible form in the Origines Islandicæ compilation of 1905, and the 1905 translation of Harðar saga provided only part of the saga. The volume entitled The Saga of Gunnlaug provides, in addition to the well-known saga that gave the volume its name, a version of an interesting curiosity, Skáld-Helga saga, Gísli Konráðsson’s early nineteenth century recreation of a lost saga on the basis of metrical material. Boucher makes clear that this is not a genuine medieval text, and he provides us with what is probably the only published English version of any of Gísli Konráðsson’s texts, several of which appear in the popular

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Íslendingasagnaútgáfan of the Íslendingasögur. Though the translation volumes are mostly the work of Boucher, Tales from the Eastfirths contains a ‘special introduction’ by Óskar Halldórsson, and The Saga of Hord one by Anthony Faulkes. Like that of Hermann Pálsson, Boucher’s approach to translation is clearly one that tries to break down barriers between the Icelandic text and the speaker of English, and his English versions read easily and fluently, without necessarily imitating syntactic features of the original. The following passage is from his version of Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu: There was a man named Onund who lived at Mosfell in the south. He was a very wealthy man and held the chieftaincy of the southern headlands. He was married to a woman named Geirny, daughter of Gnup, son of Molda-Gnup who settled Grindavik in the south. Their sons were Hrafn, Thorarin and Eindridi, all promising men, but the leader in all things was Hrafn. He was big and strong, most comely of looks, and a good scald. When approaching manhood he travelled widely, and was well regarded wherever he went. (p. 28)

The translations of W. Bryant Bachman Jr Like Alan Boucher, W. Bryant Bachman Jr has to date been responsible for seven volumes of saga translations for a single publisher. His volumes for the University Press of America are generally longer books than Boucher’s, however. Like Boucher he has been very willing to translate texts previously untranslated or not readily available in English, and most of his translations are in fact of works in this category. He has translated sagas and þættir from the Íslendingasögur, the fornaldarsögur, and the konungasögur. In two volumes he worked alone, but the other five were prepared in partnership with Guðmundur Erlingsson, identified by James Anderson in a foreword to The Sagas of King Half and King Hrolf (1991) as ‘a native Icelander, now in America for many years’ (p. xi). Bachman’s seven volumes are all characterized by the exceptional brevity of the apparatus: the translation of Finnboga saga ramma, for example, provides the translated text accompanied only by a paragraph of acknowledgments, a contents page, a four page introduction, chapter titles, sixteen footnotes (in 107 pages), a selective thirty-seven entry glossary of proper names, and two rudimentary maps. Comments on the translation process are remarkably little in evidence in any of the seven volumes, and consist mainly of rather unrevealing remarks

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about the treatment of the skaldic verses, repeated in quite similar wording in most of the volumes.25 Reviewers have generally not been greatly enthusiastic about the translations in which Bachman has been involved. They are allowed to be lively and entertaining, but criticized for being often inaccurate, for clashes in register, and for a considerable number of inconsistencies in the treatment of names.26 The following passage from the translation of Finnboga saga ramma gives an indication of the style of the translations: They wrestled three rounds and seemed very equal to Bard, so he told them to stop. Gunnbjorn said he didn’t want to stop, and he dove at the boy’s legs, throwing him down and breaking three ribs. Then he said he would stop. Bard said he was a chip off the old block and gave him a gold ring weighing six ounces. He said he was likely to do well in life and become a fine man. (ch. 35, p. 78)

The translations of Theodore M. Andersson One of the most distinguished Old Icelandic scholars in North America during the second half of the twentieth century, Theodore Andersson is probably not best known for his translations, which have been few, though important. In 1987 he presented an English version of significant portions of Þiðreks saga af Bern in the ‘Sources and Analogues’ section of his A Preface to the Nibelungenlied, aiming to produce a ‘translation […] as faithful to the original as possible’ and stating that his version ‘does not, for example, consistently normalize the mixture of past and present tense characteristic of Norse prose or suppress the repetitive narrative particle “now”’ (p. 169). In 1989 he teamed with William Ian Miller to publish translations of Ljósvetninga saga and Valla-Ljóts saga,27 and their version of Ljósvetninga saga, revised to conform with the practices of the Leifur Eiríksson translation project, reappeared in the 1997 Complete Sagas of Icelanders. In 2000 25

Four Old Icelandic Sagas and Other Tales, p. ix; The Sagas of King Half and King Hrolf, pp. xv–xvi; Forty Old Icelandic Tales, pp. xix–xx; Six Old Icelandic Sagas, p. xxv; Svarfdale Saga and Other Teles, p. xxv; Heidarviga saga, p. xxiii. 26

See, for example, Peter A. Jorgensen, review of Four Old Icelandic Sagas and Other Tales, Scandinavian Studies, 59 (1987), 386–87; John Kennedy, review of The Saga of Finnboga the Strong, Scandinavian Studies, 64 (1992), 149–51. 27

The preface explains: ‘The initial translation of Ljósvetninga saga was done by Andersson, that of Valla-Ljóts saga by Miller, but they have passed between us so often that we no longer know who is responsible for a particular phrasing’ (p. xiii).

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appeared an English translation of Morkinskinna, the prose of which was primarily translated by Andersson and the verse by Kari Ellen Gade (p. x). Both the 1989 and 2000 translations are accompanied by a particularly elaborate and scholarly apparatus. Andersson and Miller saw themselves as pioneers in this, pointing the way to what should be done to remedy the deficiencies of earlier translations: Despite numerous saga translations, only one saga (Gísla saga 1963) has been made available in English with an introduction and notes that provide the necessary background for modern readers. Sooner or later this deficiency will be remedied, but in the meantime we offer the following texts as an experiment in how it might be done. (p. vii)

The reader encounters a substantial volume of xiv + 320 pages. Lengthy essays on ‘The Social Historical Setting’ and ‘The Literary Setting’ precede the translations, most pages of which are augmented by footnotes. Each chapter of the translations is preceded by a summary, and the volume concludes with a list of characters, genealogies, a lengthy ‘Select Bibliography’ and an index. Clearly Andersson and Miller do not subscribe here to the view that Icelandic texts can be left to appeal directly to the reader without introduction and explication. The Morkinskinna translation has many of the characteristics of a scholarly edition, and indeed the verses are presented both in Norse and English. The lengthy introduction discusses manuscripts, sources, time and place of composition, and authorship, and both textual notes and explanatory notes follow the text. There are also notes on stanzas, appendices, maps, a bibliography, and index. For Andersson a translation can and should clearly be a work of scholarship in its own right. Nevertheless, Anderson’s translations read clearly and fluently. This applies even when, as in the 2000 translation (unlike the earlier ones), he preserves distinctive Icelandic letters and forms of names: The next summer Þorsteinn came to Norway and had with him some excellent stud horses. They arrived in the north in Þrándheimr. People kept away from Þorsteinn because of the king’s prohibition. […] He always sat in a separate room with his men. The stud horses were pastured above the town at Íluvellir (Ilevolden), and Þorsteinn went there to see them. Einarr þambarskelfir and his son Eindriði were there, and one day Einarr went through the town and out to Íluvellir. He looked over the horses and praised them greatly. (ch. 20, p. 163) 28

28

Andersson’s translation of Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, published in 2003, outside the period under consideration here, also reproduces the Icelandic letters and forms of

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The translations of the Durrenbergers Though E. Paul and Dorothy Durrenberger have to date published only two slim volumes of saga translations, The Saga of Gunnlaugur Snake’s Tongue in 1992 and The Saga of Hávarður of Ísafjörður in 1996, there have been several occasions earlier in this book to mention their uncompromising views on the desirability, even necessity, of extremely close translation. The Durrenbergers have reflected at length on the translation process, both in an essay ‘Translating Gunnlaug’s Saga’ they published in 1986 and in both books. Indeed, at one point they go close to suggesting that consulting a good translation may be of more assistance in understanding the original text than reading it in the original language! The problem is how to achieve a translation that reflects the original and is still intelligible to a modern reader of English. […] One solution is not to translate, to simply suggest that if you want to read sagas, you should learn medieval Icelandic. This is one approach, and it has much to recommend it. One problem is that as with Shakespeare, the issues are not just linguistic. Knowing the language is no guarantee of appropriate interpretation.29

The Durrenbergers proclaim that they approach the sagas as professional anthropologists, but they suggest that their approach also serves to enhance literary appreciation of the sagas: Those who appreciate the sagas as cultural documents rather than as thirteenth century literature have an aesthetic sense that demands the closest translation possible given the limitations of the English language to fit into the Icelandic mold. Johnston (1961) has pointed out abstractly, and shown in his translation of Gísla saga (1963), that these limits are not as great as one might imagine. One of the virtues of English is extreme plasticity. Saga translators can take advantage of this feature in order to preserve the structure of the sagas rather than to permute them into something else. Such a policy of translation would serve the human sciences and history better, and on the aesthetic side, we think it would also make a more lively literature. If one’s objective is to appreciate and understand cultural differences, then the differences must be preserved, perhaps even accentuated, rather than obliterated.30

names, though the translator professes that his ‘object has been to produce as readable a text as possible’, and he observes, ‘I have therefore consistently opted for my sense of idiomatic English rather than trying to reproduce the idiosyncracies of the Iceland original’. See Oddr Snorrason, The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason, trans. by Theodore M. Andersson, Islandica, 52 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. vii.

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29

The Saga of Hávarður, pp. 36–37.

30

The Saga of Gunnlaugur, p. 77. See also p. 47.

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In the introductions to their two translations, especially that of Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, the Durrenbergers devote considerable space to demonstrating that their approach, unlike those of translators allegedly allowing themselves more freedom in reworking the text, highlights numerous stylistic features important to an understanding of the works in question. For John Frankis, reviewing The Saga of Gunnlaugur Snake’s Tongue, what is provided is literary analysis that is ‘at best familiar and at times somewhat laboured’, and he condemns their translation as giving a false idea of saga style as well as being all but unintelligible as modern English. He argues that it is based on some very dubious translation principles: There seems even to be an assumption that between the languages concerned there can be exact lexical equivalences, so that a given Icelandic word may always have the same translation: earlier translations are therefore censured because they use a variety of English words to render höggva, which the Durrenbergers decide is best translated as ‘chop’ (p. 73), and so we are given such absurdities as ‘chopped him a death chop’ (p. 96, see also p. 117) for hjó[…] banahögg.

Frankis concludes by observing that the Durrenbergers have produced ‘a work that seems to me to add little of value to our understanding of Gunnlaugs saga’.31 Others, however, have been far more sympathetic. Reviewing the same translation Peter Jorgensen described it as ‘a real alternative to its predecessors’, ‘a solid translation’ and one that ‘will be of especial use to anthropologists and could serve as a model for any text that is intended for use in anthropological investigations’.32 The following passage from The Saga of Hávarður of Ísafjörður should provide a reasonably fair example of the Durrenbergers’ style: After that she prepares for his journey and he rides on his way. He was a rather bent old man and he comes to assembly. Then booths were tented and all the people had arrived. He rode to one great booth and it was the booth Steinþór of Eyrr had, a powerful man and great aristocrat and the most warlike and gallant. He dismounts and goes in to the booth. There sat Steinþór and his men by him. Hávarður went in front of him and greeted him well. Steinþór took his greeting well and asked who he was. Hávarður told of himself. Steinþór said: ‘Are you the one who had the famous son, he who Þorbjörn killed and people praised greatly his defense?

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31

Review in Scandinavica, 33 (1994), 224–26.

32

Review in Scandinavian Studies, 66 (1994), 120–22 (pp. 120, 122).

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He said he was the same, — ‘And I want landowner that you would let me be in your booth during the assembly.’ (ch. 7, p. 59)

The Leifur Eiríksson Publishing The Complete Sagas of Icelanders An attempt to identify the single most remarkable project involving the translation of Icelandic sagas into English might well provoke some disagreement. The six-volume Saga Library of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon and the two huge volumes of the Origines Islandicæ of Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell would probably have their advocates, despite the frustrations both provide for their readers; and if a more elastic definition of ‘project’ were allowed the total achievement of Hermann Pálsson in making so much of Old Icelandic prose literature available to English readers by his many translations might well be considered. But almost certainly The Complete Sagas of Icelanders published in 1997 by Leifur Eiríkson Publishing would win most votes. Partly this would be a matter of the amount of translation that was involved. As indicated above, the five volumes published include forty sagas and forty-nine þættir, and while there might be some room for dispute as to whether some individual works should or should not be regarded as Íslendingasögur, the collection seems more likely to be faulted for including late or ‘unclassical’ sagas than for excluding ones with a strong claim to be included. According to Keneva Kunz, a member of the Editorial Team, the collection adds up to the equivalent of two bibles.33 The volume of material translated was, however, only part of what made the project such a major enterprise. Apart from the Editorial Committee in Iceland it involved the work of thirty translators in seven different countries, all of them native speakers of English, eleven ‘Icelandic Readers’, native speakers of Icelandic who examined the work of the translators with a view to ensuring accuracy in the translation, and fourteen ‘English Readers’ who conducted a further examination of the translations after they had been revised in the light of the comments of the Icelanders, their aim being to ensure that the translations read well in English. The work was done in a relatively concentrated period of time: the ‘Publisher’s Acknowledgements’ in Volume 1 state that the founders of the project began seriously promoting the idea in 1992 (p. xxvi), and the preface

33

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notes that ‘Leifur Eiríksson Publishing was founded in 1993, with the sole aim of publishing a new coordinated translation of the Complete Sagas of Icelanders in English’ (p. xiv). But Kunz’s reference to ‘when discussion of the project began, early in 1994’34 probably provides a better indication of when work began in earnest. Several translators were recruited at the Ninth International Saga Conference held at Akureyri in July–August of that year. By 1994 the Internet was a reality, and the Editorial Board made considerable use of it (as well as international telephone calls) to communicate with translators based in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and to encourage communication between translators. A feature of the project was the standardization it very successfully aimed to achieve in regard to the translation of certain terms and in regard to matters like place names and proper names, and indeed its effort to achieve a broad general agreement in regard to the approach to translation, without destroying all scope for individual initiative. Some important changes to policy did occur in the progress of the project: a letter dated 2 February 1996 and distributed ‘To all translators’ indicates that at that time the Editorial Board was leaning strongly towards employing Modern Icelandic forms of place names and personal names, including the use of the letter ð, though possibly not that of þ, which English readers would be inclined to regard as a p. The final decision, however, was to use only letters found in the English alphabet. The five very handsome volumes that appeared in mid-1997 were not cheap, but initiatives soon began to make some of the translations available at a more affordable price. In 2000 Penguin published a generous selection of ten mostly well-known sagas and seven þættir in The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection, with a preface by the novelist Jane Smiley, known inter alia for her successful novel The Greenlanders, set in the medieval Norse settlements. Robert Cook’s translation of Brennu-Njáls saga appeared in the Penguin Classics series in 2001, and has since been joined by several other volumes drawn from the Leifur Eiríkson corpus. The Leifur Eiríksson translations steer a middle course between the very close translation of George Johnston and the Durrenbergers, and the comparative stylistic freedom of the work associated with Hermann Pálsson and the translators who worked with him. One enthusiastic reviewer summed up the stylistic achievement:

34

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In the context of the usual challenges addressed to translations, the editorial procedures here employed have paid off most handsomely in terms of an accurate and readable edition. They are free from anachronisms, awkward syntax, and intrusive stylization. It is clear that great attention has been devoted to accuracy of translation as well as readability in modern English. Remarkably, the seemingly opposing demands of clarity and precision on the one hand, and a feeling for the prose style of the sagas on the other have been sensitively reconciled. The parataxis, minimal use of adjectives, absence of transitions, and abundance of relatively short declarative sentences provide the reader with a stylistic sense of the original, although the use of tense conforms to standard English practice.35

It is not possible to represent the work of so many translators by a single illustrative quotation, or even a well-chosen handful. Despite editorial control the translators had opportunity for individuality, particularly but not exclusively in regard to the treatment of the skaldic verses. In ‘A Note on the Translation’ in Sagas of Warrior Poets, a volume of Leifur Eiríkson translations published by Penguin Classics in 2002, Diana Whaley pointed out that in regard to the verses ‘the five translators who have contributed to this volume have adopted varying positions along the spectrum of good compromise’ between fidelity to the original and producing comprehensible and poetically satisfying English (p. liv). What follows is the version of the most famous passage in Laxdœla saga as translated by Keneva Kunz, a member of the Editorial Board and a writer with a particular interest in the translation of that saga:36 It is said that once when Bolli was visiting Helgafell, he sat with his mother, because Gudrun was always pleased when he came to see her, talking of many things for a long time. Then Bolli spoke: ‘Will you tell me something, mother, that I’m curious to know. Which man did you love the most?’ Gudrun answered: ‘Thorkel was the most powerful of men and most outstanding chieftain, but none of them was more valiant and accomplished than Bolli. Thord Ingunnarson was the wisest of these men and the most skilled in law. Of Thorvald I make no mention.’ Bolli then spoke: ‘I understand clearly enough what you say of the qualities of each of your husbands, but you have yet to answer whom you loved the most. You’ve no need to conceal it any longer.’

35 36

Steven P. Sondrup, review in Scandinavian Studies, 70 (1998), 144–49 (p. 146).

See Keneva Kunz, Retellers of Tales: An Evaluation of English Translations of Laxdæla saga, Studia Islandica. Íslensk fræði, 51 (Reykjavík: Bókmenntafræðistofnun Háskóla Íslands, 1994).

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Chapter 6 Gudrun answered, ‘You press me hard on this point, my son,’ she said. ‘If I wished to say this to anyone, you would be the one I would choose.’ Bolli asked her to do so. Gudrun then spoke: ‘Though I treated him worst, I loved him best.’ ‘That I believe,’ said Bolli, ‘you say in all sincerity,’ and thanked her for satisfying his curiosity. (V , ch. 78, p. 119)

The later translation activity of Magnus Magnusson The practice in this chapter has been to discuss translators in the chronological order of their first published translation, and according to this principle Magnus Magnusson, who published four volumes of saga translations with Hermann Pálsson in the 1960s, should have appeared early in the listing. Magnus’s return to saga translating in 1999, thirty years after his previous published volume, seems however to deserve special attention for what it reveals about his altered attitude to translation at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twentyfirst century, and for what it perhaps suggests about emerging attitudes to saga translation more generally. As indicated above, much of what Magnus provides in the two large and splendidly presented Folio Society volumes are revisions of works published earlier by him and other translators, notably Hermann Pálsson. In general the amount of revision is relatively modest — unsurprisingly in view of the amount of translated text presented (Volume 1 contains xxii + 809 pages, and Volume 2 xvi + 759 pages). New and previously unpublished work plays a lesser role but a significant one, and it is noteworthy that the previously unpublished versions of two sagas in Volume 2 — Fóstbrœðra saga and Gísla saga Súrssonar – are based on manuscript versions significantly different from those which formed the basis for the work of earlier translators of these sagas. Carolyne Larrington wryly comments on some of the curious features of the text that formed the basis for the Fóstbrœðra saga translation that appeared in 2002: this late text contains some unusual meteorological observations and quasi-poetical references to Rán and her daughters, together with frequent invocations of the Supreme Maker and his modification of Þorgeirr’s physiology.37

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Review in Saga-Book, 27 (2003), 135–37 (p. 135).

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Few could dispute, however, that it is useful to have translations of the less familiar versions of the sagas, rather than new translations of versions already translated competently more than once. In an editorial note near the beginning of the first volume Magnus outlines his policy in regard to names: As for nouns, I have used the Icelandic names, nicknames, place names and some words in their original form and spelling, accents and all, with a translation in brackets where possible and appropriate (however, in accordance with accepted custom, I have dropped the nominatival endings of Old Icelandic strong nouns and, usually, adjectives). The only exception is the Icelandic letter þ (capital Þ), […] to avoid undue difficulty for readers who are not familiar with Icelandic, I have transliterated this letter into th throughout (e.g. Thingvellir for Þingvellir). On the other hand, I have not hesitated to use the other additional consonant in Icelandic, ð (capital Ð), […]. This policy has led me to manifest inconsistencies, such as using the name Thiðrandi instead of Þiðrandi; but for the time being I prefer inconsistency to incomprehensibility. (p. xxii)

What this policy means in practice, and the extent of the change it involves from the Penguin Classics practice of the 1960s, can be seen by comparing the treatment of part of chapter one of Brennu-Njáls saga in the 1960 translation and in the new version based on it. In 1960 the main text read: The scene of the saga now moves west, to the Breidafjord Dales, where a man called Hoskuld Dala-Kollssson lived at Hoskuldstead , in Laxriverdale. (ch. 1, p. 39)

The genealogical information in the saga text was relegated to a footnote: Hoskuld’s mother was Thorgerd, the daughter of Thorstein the Red, the son of Olaf the W hite, the son of Ingjald, the son of Helgi and of Thora, the daughter of Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, the son of Ragnar Hairy-Breeks. Thorstein the Red’s mother was Aud the Deep-Minded, the daughter of Ketil Flatnose, the son of Bjorn Buna. (p. 39n)

In 1999 the reader was expected to be able to handle more challenging orthography and not to be daunted by the genealogical information: The scene of the saga now moves west, to the Breiðafjarðardalir (Breiðafjörður Dales). There was a man named Höskuld Dala-Kollsson; his mother was Thorgerð, the daughter of Thorstein Rauði, the son of Ólaf Hvíti (the W hite), the son of Ingjald, the son of Helgi and of Thóra, the daughter of Sigurð Orm-í-auga (Snake-in-the-Eye), the son of Ragnar Loðbrók (Shaggy-Breeks). Thorstein Rauði’s mother was Auð Djúpúðja (the Deep-Minded), the daughter of Ketl Flatnef (Flat-Nose), the son of Bjorn Buna. (ch. 1, p. 493)

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The Folio Society, which published this second version, markets its membership vigorously in mass circulation newspapers and magazines and appears to be attempting to sign up ‘general readers’ attracted by the idea of owning well-presented versions of books with a claim to classic status at a price which puts them well within the range of middle-class purchasers. Magnus cannot expect his new readers to be specialists in Old Icelandic, any more than was the case with readers of the Penguin Classics volume in 1960, but he clearly expects them to be far more receptive to a text which might seem very strange at first. It will have been noted that Magnus described his approach in the first volume as being to some extent one he accepted ‘for the time being’. Though Volume 2 is bound uniformly with Volume 1 and superficially seems to resemble it closely, in fact Magnus introduced ‘some major presentational changes […] which require explanation and justification’ (p. xiv). The Icelandic character þ is now regularly included, names are given in the Modern Icelandic nominative singular (so Eiríkur, Guðríður, Njáll instead of Eirík, Guðríð, Njál) and nicknames are normally given in Icelandic and in italics. He argues that ‘readers should be given the opportunity of seeing (and ‘hearing’) the names as they were and are used by Icelanders’, since lurid English versions of nicknames can give a false impression of the Viking Age, and that the avoidance of þ involved illogicality when other distinctive Icelandic characters were not avoided (pp. xiv–xv). Clearly in the relatively short period since the publication of the first volume Magnus’s faith in the ability of his readers to respond positively to strangeness had grown. It will be recalled that a few years earlier the Editorial Board of the Leifur Eiríksson project also contemplated the use of most Icelandic characters, though they ultimately decided against it.

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T HE F UTURE OF S AGA T RANSLATION

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o reader of the preceding chapters, and no one even slightly familiar with the diversity of responses to significant works of literature, would be likely to suggest that the process of translating the Icelandic sagas had reached some kind of natural stopping point at the end of the twentieth century. The sagas are clearly works that can be translated for a variety of different purposes by writers who can differ dramatically in how they believe the task should best be undertaken. There is every likelihood that readers will continue to interpret them in new ways, and translators will continue to highlight different aspects in their translations, for different audiences, and in the light of changing circumstances in the society that surrounds them. If this does not happen it will be because saga reading has ceased to be an activity that interests a significant body of people. It would be pleasant to dismiss this gloomy idea as an absurdity not worth contemplating, but there are of course some worrying signs. Medieval studies in general, and the study of Old Icelandic literature in particular, appear to be under challenge in the universities of the countries in which they have traditionally been supported. During a long period of financial stringency in higher education, which shows no signs of ending, such studies can be easily characterized, and caricatured, as dealing with DWEMS (dead white European males) rather than with matters of immediate relevance to a multicultural society facing almost overwhelming problems and challenges. The Australian experience provides a depressing illustration of what may happen. In 1971 Professor Gabriel Turville-Petre of the University of Oxford, probably the most distinguished Old Icelandic scholar then active in the English-speaking countries, predicted that

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‘the future of Icelandic studies in the English-speaking world’ lay in Australia,1 and about that time Old Icelandic was indeed offered to students in about ten Australian universities, well over half those then in existence.2 While achievement is not entirely a matter of the number of participants, and Australia can boast some distinguished Old Icelandic scholars who have been active in the last three decades, over thirty years later Professor Turville-Petre’s reputation as a great scholar does seem somewhat more secure than any claim that might be made for his prophetic powers. The number of universities in Australia has more than doubled, but in an article published in 2003 Kári Gíslason reported that ‘By the time of the Saga Conference in Sydney in 2000, the host university was the only campus in Australia which still offered subjects in Old Icelandic language and literature’.3 The situation in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada may be less grim, but very few scholars in any of these countries are able to devote a major part of their time to Old Icelandic studies, and in none of them could such studies be described as being in a strong and secure position. This state of affairs is disappointing because it is the universities of the English-speaking world which would be expected to train and provide competent translators of the Icelandic sagas into English, and students studying various branches of medieval studies in those institutions might be expected to provide an important segment of the readership of the translations. On the other

1 In his ‘Stray Thoughts on Scaldic Poetry’, in Proceedings of the Sixth Viking Congress, ed. by Peter Foote and Dag Strömbäck (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1971), pp. 105–14 (p. 114). 2

Margaret Clunies Ross, ‘A Survey of Courses in Old Icelandic Offered by Universities in Australia and New Zealand’, Australia and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Bulletin, 7 (August 1971), 18–21 (p. 18). 3

Kári Gíslason, ‘The Passion of the Old and the New: Saga Studies on the Fatal Shore’, Parergon, 20 (2003), 163–91 (pp. 189–90). In fact, Kári’s picture may be a little too gloomy: opportunities to study Old Icelandic have remained available to students at the University of Melbourne, and Old Icelandic classes are currently conducted there by Dr Katrina Burge, Lecturer in Viking Studies, though there was a hiatus in the holding of such classes around 2000 (John S. Martin, Personal communication, 18 January 2006). See also Margaret Clunies Ross and Judy Quinn, ‘Old Norse-Icelandic Studies in Australia’, The International Saga Society Newsletter, 5 (1991), 18, and (on medieval studies more generally) Helen Fulton, ‘Medieval Studies in Australia’, AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Modern Language Association, 100 (2003), 1–12. Ominously, however, The Australian newspaper on 9 May 2007 carried a report indicating that the University of Melbourne intended to ‘wind up subjects in Viking studies’ from 2008. See Lisa Macnamara, ‘Axed Viking will Harm Melbourne’, p. 44.

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hand, the popular appetite for history and archaeological television programs seems stronger than it has ever been, and programs relating to the colourful events of the ‘Viking period’ figure quite prominently on television screens and frequently draw upon the knowledge of experts in Old Icelandic. While the sagas are not of course literature from the Viking age, many are set in that period and might be expected to appeal to people whose tastes have been stimulated by the television programs. The outlook for saga translations should not be any poorer than it was before the (perhaps partly mythical) golden age of expansion and prosperity in higher education in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, and as we have seen, translation flourished before those years. Saga translations will surely continue to be published, and as the years pass they will be transformed in ways that are now difficult to predict, so that in time the translations produced in the 1990s will seem as old-fashioned and in need of replacement as most of the translations of the 1890s now seem to us. Almost certainly the computer will play a major role in this. Before about 1980 computerization probably had only a marginal effect on the lives of most people, but dramatic and continuing changes have flowed from the arrival of large numbers of personal computers in offices and homes during the 1980s, and the transformation of the Internet in the mid-1990s from a tool of a technocratic elite to a major source of information and recreation for a large and growing section of the population. The idea of using computers to help human beings avoid the very considerable labour involved in translating is a seductive one, and investigation of the possibility of machine translation was well under way in the 1960s.4 But the difficulties proved to be far greater than optimists expected, and for a long time practical achievements were very modest. While word processing, electronic file transmission, and email began to affect the lives of translators and others who worked with documents in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was only in the very last years of the twentieth century, when translation memory programs became commercially available, that computerization began to have a major impact on how professional translators undertook the actual task of translation. 4

See Anthony G. Gettinger, ‘Automatic (Transference, Translation, Remittance, Shunting)’, in On Translation, ed. by Reuben A. Brower (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 240–67. In 1957 the distinguished Bible translator R. A. Knox had predicted that within ‘a few years’ human translators ‘will be redundant’, explaining that ‘A process which they would be the first to describe as “automation” will have provided us with electronic typewriters which translate as they go along’. See his On English Translation: The Romanes Lecture Delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre, 11 June 1957 (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

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Translation memory programs work on the principle of ‘matching’ a portion of text to be translated with texts from the same language that have been translated in the past, and offering the translator the translations that were produced when the ‘matches’ were themselves translated. More sophisticated programs can offer a ranked listing of ‘fuzzy’ matches when an exact match of the text to be translated cannot be found, and allow the translator to adjust the translations provided to accommodate differences from the original source texts. Particularly in Western Europe TRADOS has become the standard, partly on account of its use by the European Union’s official translators, and large translation bureaux demand that their staff and sub-contractors employ it. Translation memory technology is obviously most likely to be useful when dealing with material where the element of originality and individuality is limited, and sophisticated nuances of register, idiom, and so on, are not likely to be frequent. The general view is that it is not very useful in the translation of literary texts. Perhaps, however, the Icelandic sagas may in years to come provide a partial exception to this generalization. There are unquestionably formulaic elements in saga writing, at various levels, and used sensitively, translation memory technology may have a role in reproducing these without imposing a misleading uniformity. What computerization has already made possible is the electronic publishing and dissemination of texts via the Internet to an international audience, in a way that does not demand high levels of computer literacy either from those mounting the texts for electronic distribution or those receiving them. Many of the traditional costs and delays of paper-based publication can be bypassed. Texts can be provided by a supplier who does not demand any payment from the recipients, or the supplier can demand a fee for access. Especially when no fee is charged, the arrangement is likely to seem attractive to the users of the texts, even if there are of course some costs involved in obtaining access to the computer and to the Internet service provider that enables the customer to access the Internet. A search of the Internet will reveal that quite a large body of translations of Icelandic sagas is available there. Some have indeed existed on the Internet since the middle of the 1990s. Heimskringla, for example, became available in 1996 as part of ‘The Online Medieval and Classical Library’,5 accessible at

5

Described in its ‘Copyright Statement’ as ‘an archive being assembled as a service to the Internet. The purpose is to provide a free and easy way for the average computer user to access some of the most important literary works of Classical and Medieval civilization’.

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. The text provided was basically Samuel Laing’s translation of 1844, as revised by Rasmus B. Anderson and republished by the controversial Norrœna Society in 1906. The choice of this elderly translation for the Online Medieval and Classical Library will come as no great surprise to anyone who has perused other collections of literary works available through the Internet. Although at the time of writing there are controversial initiatives to digitize and make readily available vast quantities of material still in copyright, a common characteristic of much of the material available today is that because of its age there is very little room for doubt that copyright on it has expired. Those mounting the material in electronic form are thus free to do so without seeking approval from copyright owners or making payment to them. While the material is often provided as a public service, and one must be grateful for the generous impulse that led to its provision, as well as the effort involved in data entry and other processing, the result is of course that the texts provided do not reflect recent scholarship and are often likely to seem old-fashioned and ‘stodgy’. It is an intriguing and rather piquant thought that someone using the technology of the 1990s and 2000s to ‘surf’ the Internet might have an interest in Old Icelandic literature awakened by a hundred-and-sixty-year-old translation of a thirteenth-century text, but one must wonder if any significant number of readers persevere for long in reading Laing’s vast Heimskringla text at a computer terminal or download it onto hundreds of sheets of unbound paper. But while the curious surfer of the Internet will find that many of the saga translations encountered do date from Victorian times or from the beginning of the twentieth century, there is of course no reason why more recent translations should not be mounted with the approval of the author and the publisher of the original print edition, or why new translations should not make their first public appearance on the Internet. This is indeed beginning to happen. For example a visit to the Northvegr site will uncover nineteenth-century translations by William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, and by Rasmus B. Anderson, but also modern translations by Gavin Chappell (who provides versions of Af Upplendinga konungum, Hrómundar saga Gripssonar, Illuga saga Gríðarfóstra, and Ketils saga hængs), by George L.

[accessed 31 January 2004]. In May 2007 it was making available eight saga translations, the most modern of which was G. A. Hight’s 1914 translations of Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar. See [accessed 24 May 2007].

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Hardman (Bósa saga ok Herrauðs, Frá Fornjóti ok hans ættmönnum, Hálfdanar saga Brönufóstra, Norna-Gests þáttr, and Þorsteins þáttr bæjarmagns) and by Peter Tunstall (Eiríks saga víðfõrla, Gríms saga loðinkinna, Hálfs saga ok Hálfsrekka, Helga þáttr Þórissonar, Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks konungs, Hrólfs saga kraka, Ragnarssona þáttr, Sörla þáttr, Tóka þáttr Tókasonar, and Yngvars saga viðförla). Five of the texts they translate (Af Upplendinga konungum, Eiríks saga víðfõrla, Gríms saga loðinkinna, Ketils saga hængs, and Ragnarssona þáttr) have never appeared in any complete English language print translation.6 The Northvegr site provides a listing of fornaldarsögur ‘not translated’, though in fact many of the items on the list have appeared in print translations, and the meaning is probably that they have not been translated for the Northvegr site. Gavin Chappell issues a call for volunteers: My proposition is that those members of the Heathen community (and others with similar interests) who wish to ensure that these incredible tales of Vikings and dragons, gods and wizards are made available to the English-speaking world should use the resources at hand to translate these sagas, and send them to Northvegr to be posted here. This way, we will be able to render these incredible and inspiring sagas accessible to those speakers of English who find Old Icelandic a stumbling block in their understanding of the Lore, and make a major contribution to contemporary literature. Wassail! Get translating!

Chappell’s call highlights some of the strengths and weaknesses of the Internet as a medium for publishing translations of the Icelandic sagas (or engaging in any other scholarly enterprise). On the one hand the door is open for widespread participation in a way far less possible if the activity is largely confined within the gates of universities. But on the other hand the participants may possibly include people bringing to the task more ideological enthusiasm than rigorous scholarly training. The sagas may be in risk of being perceived as cult documents for people with ‘New Age’ spiritual beliefs that are not widely shared in the general community or which are generally regarded as mildly eccentric. Another problem is the notorious volatility of Internet enterprises and Internet websites. While a small number of published saga translations in print form have defied the efforts of Donald Fry and Paul Acker (and the present writer) to track down a copy, the great majority of printed books remain accessible with moderate effort decades or even centuries after first publication, thanks to the well-developed world library network and the tradition of inter6

Most of these translations are also available on the Northvegr Foundation’s Northern European Scholarship Project Text CD (2004).

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library cooperation. Websites by contrast can and do disappear or migrate to a new Internet ‘address’ overnight and often without warning. That a saga translation has been placed on the Internet is no guarantee that it will remain there for readers to consult in years to come. A bibliography of online saga translations would probably date very quickly and might well provide significant frustration as well as assistance to those who consulted it. Sites like the Online Medieval and Classical Library and Northvegr make electronically available linear texts that are similar to those in print books, apart from the fact they appear on a computer screen rather than on paper. Increasingly, however, editors of texts of various kinds are exploiting the hypertext capabilities of computerization more fully, so that by ‘clicking’ appropriately on the keypad or the computer mouse the reader has access to variant manuscript and editorial readings of any section of the text, interpretations and comments upon it, and even representations of the text in other media, notably film and sound recording. Conceivably, readers of saga translations some decades from now may be bemused at the idea that people once read translations in a linear fashion from beginning to end, as by then they may be used to translations where an appropriate click at any point in the text gives immediate access to the Icelandic text (in written and spoken form, and with manuscript variations), the interpretation of other translators, and commentary on the complexities and significance of the passage in question (or whatever combination of these is desired). Time will reveal whether this happens, but a clear trend in saga translation today is to demand more of the reader than is asked by a magazine article or a typical novel on sale at an airport bookshop. In her 1969 article ‘The Icelandic Sagas and their Translation’ Johanna Torringa commented that it was then ‘the policy of most translators to smooth away the alien qualities and to make even the most intractably foreign work readable and easily assimilated’ (p. 4). Nearly forty years later this is not the approach that prevails in saga translation, as consideration of some of the major translation projects of the 1990s discussed in the last chapter indicates. In an age when political developments have given a new urgency to understanding philosophies and lifestyles strikingly different from those which now prevail in Western societies, it seems unlikely that translators of texts from very different times and places will generally feel disposed to translate them in a way suggesting that what is unfamiliar in them is of no consequence or should where possible be obscured from the reader’s attention.

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The preceding chapters suggest that at least from mid-Victorian times the Íslendingasögur have been very prominent among the Old Icelandic texts that have appeared in published translations. It remains to be seen whether the Leifur Eiríksson Complete Sagas of Icelanders deters translators from this genre in the years immediately ahead, or whether translators soon decide that there is a case, and a market, for translations of these sagas which do a better job, or at least a different job. It certainly seems desirable that the example of Andersson and Gade’s translation of Morkinskinna should lead translators to give increased interest in the konungasögur, so largely neglected in recent decades,7 and that the appearance of the biskupasögur in good modern editions published in the Íslenzk fornrit series in Reykjavík from 1998 should lead to long overdue attention being given to these texts, which often manage to be far more than arid hagiography. Some important riddarasögur, such as Flóres saga ok Blankiflúr, still await their first English translation, as do Norse versions of other works which reflect the reality that medieval Iceland was an integral but distinctive part of medieval Latin Christendom — a reality long downplayed by those who stressed Iceland’s role in preserving a distinctively Scandinavian heritage. Important examples to date not translated into English include Alexanders saga, an Icelandic version of a Latin epic on Alexander the Great by Galterus de Castellione; Barlaams saga ok Josaphats, a Norwegian version of a Christianized legend extremely popular throughout medieval Europe; Gyðinga saga, largely dealing with Jewish history in the period of the Maccabees and immediately afterwards; Máríu saga, a work

7 At the time of writing two major translations of konungasögur had recently appeared. In the United States Cornell University Press published the first complete English translation of the Oddr Snorrason version of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar (Oddr Snorrason, The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason, trans. by Theodore M. Andersson, 2003). In Europe Alison Finlay’s translation of Fagrskinna: A Catalogue of the Kings of Norway was published by Brill in 2004. It is the first complete English translation of that important work. Moreover, although translations of Latin works from Norway, Iceland, and other parts of the West Norse linguistic area are beyond the scope of this book, it is worth noting here that three volumes providing translations of medieval Latin texts of relevance to students of the konungasögur have appeared in recent years. Theodoricus Monachus, Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium: An Account of the Ancient History of the Norwegian Kings, trans. by David and Ian McDougall, was published in 1998 by the Viking Society for Northern Research. In 2001 the same society published A History of Norway and The Passion and Miracles of the Blessed Óláfr, trans. by Devra Kunin, which provides English versions of the Historia Norwegiae and the Passio et miraculo beati Olavi. A translation of the Historia Norwegiae, by Peter Fisher, also appears in Historia Norwegie, ed. by Inger Ekrem and Lars Boje Mortensen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003).

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devoted to the life of the Virgin Mary; and Trójumanna saga, a version of the story of Troy based on the work attributed in the Middle Ages to Dares Phrygius. A print publisher might well smile wryly at these suggestions, for at the beginning of the twenty-first century even the most scholarly of such publishers always needs to consider whether there are likely to be enough sales to make a work viable. The days when almost any scholarly text from a reputable English language publisher would be guaranteed sales of at least several hundred copies to major university research libraries have gone. Electronic publishing on the Internet may offer a publishing solution, however. Creating a website and mounting it on the Internet can be, quite literally, child’s play, but it is obviously highly desirable that saga translations appearing on the web be more than just the creations of enthusiastic amateurs who post them on their own initiative, without any competent person checking the accuracy of their work before it is made available to all with access to the Internet. Internet translations need to be peer reviewed and edited as reputable scholarly books traditionally are, and accompanied by an adequate scholarly apparatus. Already in other scholarly fields there are signs that electronic publishing bypassing traditional publishing but with vigorous peer reviewing is becoming an increasingly important reality, and though it is still a somewhat uphill battle, electronic publications which have undergone a process of academic ‘refereeing’ are being increasingly respected by employers and funding authorities as a legitimate part of an academic’s scholarly output. One must hope that saga translation will follow the same path. The result could be the development of a virtual library of reliable translations of sagas not previously translated, and of new versions of already translated sagas, including some based on manuscript versions not translated before. The need to make a translation appeal to as diverse an audience as possible to ensure sales and recoup publishing costs could disappear, and the same saga could be translated quite differently for the connoisseur of literature and the anthropology undergraduate. What is needed, perhaps more than anything else, is an acceptance that translation of sagas is not a slightly second-rate form of activity, inferior to other kinds of publication in the Old Icelandic field, and that it in fact requires interpretative skills of a high order. Fortunately, as the previous chapters have shown, saga translation has long enjoyed the services of some of the finest scholars in the field. In recent years some translations have unquestionably been much more than mere popularizations, and indeed are works of scholarship in their own right. The Internet may open up new horizons for Old Icelandic

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scholarship, and for saga translation, unimagined until very recent years even by the most enthusiastic of those who have worked in the field through the two centuries and more which separate us from the pioneer translators in the second half of the eighteenth century.

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his bibliography is in two parts. Part A lists works containing translations of Icelandic sagas and other Old Norse prose works mentioned in the text or footnotes of the book. They are listed under the name of the translator or translators. The vast majority of English language saga translations published before 1992 are recorded in the Fry bibliography and the supplement to it by Acker, under the Icelandic names of the sagas they translate, and Fry also provides an ‘Index of Translators’. Translations listed in Fry’s bibliography are therefore not normally listed here, as the reader will readily be able to locate details of them in Fry. This means that some works mentioned in the chapter notes do not appear in this bibliography. (A few reprint editions and new editions of translations noted by Fry do appear here, because these versions were consulted in preparing this book, and they are not amongst the reprints and new editions Fry records.) Acker, unlike Fry, does not provide an index of translators, and works recorded by Acker but not Fry therefore appear here under the name of the translator or translators responsible. Part A also lists a few translations published prior to 1992 and not listed either by Fry or Acker, as well as translations published after 1992. Part B lists ‘Other works consulted’. As in Part A, and in accordance with Icelandic practice, Icelandic authors are listed under their given name rather than their patronymic. Thus Hermann Pálsson appears in the ‘H’ section of the alphabetical listing, rather than under ‘Pálsson’.

Part A Translations of Old Icelandic/Old Norse prose works Acker, Paul, ‘Valla-Ljot’s Saga. Translated with an Introduction and Notes’, Comparative Criticism, 10 (1988), 207–37 Acker, Paul, Sarah M. Anderson, Theodore M. Andersson, Katrina C. Attwood, Scilla Brumfit, George Clark, Robert Cook, Matthew James Driscoll, Ruth C. Ellison, Alison

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Bibliography

Finlay, Terry Gunnell, Fredrik J. Heinemann, Judith Jesch, Peter Jorgensen, Marianne Kalinke, John Kennedy, Robert Kellogg, Keneva Kunz, Anthony Maxwell, John McKinnell, Rory McTurk, William Ian Miller, John Porter, Judy Quinn, Martin S. Regal, Bernard Scudder, Marvin Taylor, John Tucker, Andrew Wawn, and Diana Whaley, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, ed. by Viðar Hreinsson and others, 5 vols (Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríksson, 1997) Anderson, Rasmus Bjørn, ‘Viking Tales of the North. Saga of Fridthjof the Bold [accessed 22 January 2006] ———. ‘Viking Tales of the North. The Saga of Thorstein, Viking’s Son’ [accessed 22 January 2006] Andersson, George K., The Saga of the Völsungs, Together with Excerpts from the Nornageststháttr and Three Chapters from the Prose Edda (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1982) Andersson, Theodore M., A Preface to the Nibelungenlied (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) ———. The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason by Oddr Snorrason, Islandica, 52 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003) Andersson, Theodore M. and Kari Ellen Gade, Morkinskinna: The Earliest Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings (1030–1157), Islandica, 51 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000) Andersson, Theodore M. and William Ian Miller, Law and Literature in Medieval Iceland. Ljósvetninga saga and Valla-Ljóts saga (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989) Anonymous (Gathorne-Hardy, Robert?), The Story of Thithrandi (Stanford Dingley, Berks.: Millhouse Press, 1953) Anonymous (Gathorne-Hardy, Robert?), The Story of Thorstein the Scared (Stanford Dingley, Berks.: Millhouse Press, 1962) Arent, A. Margaret, ‘The Revenge of Breeches Aud’, Scandinavian Review, 67 (1970), 58–63 Attwood, Katrina C., George Clark, Ruth E. Ellison, Terry Gunnell, Keneva Kunz, Anthony Maxwell, Martin S. Regal, Bernard Scudder, and Andrew Wawn, The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection (London: Viking, 2000) Attwood, Katrina, Alison Finlay, Marianne Kalinke, Rory McTurk, and Diana Whaley, Sagas of Warrior Poets, ed. by Diana Whaley (London: Penguin, 2002) Bachman, Jr, W. Bryant, Forty Old Icelandic Tales (Lanham: University Press of America, 1992) ———. Four Old Icelandic Sagas and Other Tales (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985) Bachman Jr, W. Bryant, and Guðmundur Erlingsson, Heidarviga Saga (Lanham: University Press of America, 1995) ———. The Saga of Finnbogi the Strong (London: University Press of America, 1990) ———. The Sagas of King Half and King Hrolf (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991) ———. Six Old Icelandic Sagas (Lanham: University Press of America, 1993)

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193

———. Svarfdale Saga and Other Tales (Lanham: University Press of America, 1994) Barnes, Michael, and David R. Margolin, Seyðarbrævið (Tórshavn: Føroya Fróðskaparfelag, 1971) Blaisdell, Foster W., Ívens saga, Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, Series B, 18 (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1979) ———. Partalopa saga, ed. by Lise Præstgaard-Andersen (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1983) Boucher, Alan, The Saga of Gunnlaug Snake-Tongue Together with the Tale of Scald-Helgi (Reykjavík: Iceland Review, 1983) ———. The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Skald (Reykjavík: Iceland Review, 1981) ———. The Saga of Havard the Halt Together with the Saga of Hen-Thorir (Reykjavík: Iceland Review, 1986) ———. The Saga of Hord and the Holm-Dwellers (Reykjavík: Iceland Review, 1983) ———. The Saga of Viga-Glum (Reykjavík: Iceland Review, 1986) ———. A Tale of Icelanders (Reykjavík: Iceland Review, 1980) ———. Tales from the Eastfirths (Reykjavík: Iceland Review, 1981) Byock, Jesse L., The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology, by Snorri Sturluson (London: Penguin, 2005) ———. The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki (London: Penguin, 1998) ———. The Saga of the Volsungs (London: Penguin, 1999) ———. The Saga of the Volsungs: The Norse Epic of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) Cabot, James Eliot, ‘Discovery of America by the Northmen’, Massachusetts Quarterly Review, 6 (1849), 189–214 Cahill, Peter, Duggals leiðsla (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, 1983) Cardew, Philip Westbury, A Translation of Þorskfirðinga (Gull-Þóris) saga (Lewiston: Mellen, 2000) Chappell, Gavin, Ketil Trout’s Saga; Of the Kings of the Uplands; The Saga of Hromund Gripsson; The Saga of Illugi, the Giantess’s Foster Son [accessed 21 January 2006] Collingwood, W. G. and Jón Stefánsson, The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald Being the Icelandic Kormáks saga (Ulverston: Holmes 1902; repr. [Felinfach]: Llanerch Publishers, 1991) Cook, Robert, Njal’s Saga (London: Penguin, 2001) Cook Robert, and Mattias Tveitane, Strengleikar: An Old Norse Translation of Twenty-One Old French Lais (Oslo: Norsk Historisk Kjeldeskrift-Institutt, 1979) Cormack, Margaret, ‘Saga of Bishop Jón of Hólar’, in Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology, ed. by Thomas Head (New York: Garland, 2000), pp. 595–626 Dennis, Andrew, Peter Foote, and Richard Perkins, Laws of Early Iceland, 2 vols (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1980–2000)

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Driscoll, M. J., Ágrip af Nóregskonungaso3 gum: A Twelfth-Century Synoptic History of the Kings of Norway (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1995) du Chaillu, Paul B., and Jón Stefánsson, The Viking Age (London: Murray; New York: Scribner’s, 1889) Durrenberger, E. Paul and Dorothy Durrenberger, The Saga of Gunnlaugur Snake’s Tongue, with an Essay on the Structure and Translation of the Saga (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992) ———. The Saga of Hávarður of Ísafjörður, with an Essay on the Political, Economic and Cultural Background of the Saga (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik, 1996) Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, Volsunga saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda (London: Ellis, 1870; repr. London: Prior; Totowa: Cooper Square, 1980) Faulkes, Anthony, Edda, by Snorri Sturluson (London: Dent, 1987) Finlay, Alison, Fagrskinna: A Catalogue of the Kings of Norway (Leiden: Brill, 2004) ———. The Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Men of Hitardal (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik, 2000) Firchow, Evelyn Scherabon, The Old Norse Elucidarius: Original Text and English Translation (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1992) Grimstad, Kaaren, Vo3 lsunga saga: The Story of the Volsungs (Saarbrücken: AQ-Verl., 2000) Grønlie, Siân, Íslendingabók. Kristni saga. The Book of the Icelanders. The Story of the Conversion (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2006) Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell, Corpus poeticum boreale: The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue from the Earliest Times to the Thirteenth Century, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883; repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1965) Hannah, Robert, ‘The Saga of Halfdan, Foster-Son of Brana’, Seminar for Germanic Philology Yearbook, 4 (1981), 9–27 Hardman, George L., Of Fornjot and his Kinsmen; The Saga of Bosi and Herraud; The Saga of Halfdan Eysteinsson; The Tale of Norna-Gest; The Tale of Thorstein Housepower [accessed 21 January 2006] Haugen, Einar, First Grammatical Treatise. The Earliest Germanic Philology. An Edition, Translation and Commentary (Baltimore: Linguistic Society of America, 1950; 2nd rev. edn London: Longman, 1972) Haymes, Edward, The Saga of Thidrek of Bern (New York: Garland, 1988) Herbert, William, Select Icelandic Poetry, 2 vols (Vol. 1 London: T. Reynolds, 1804; Vol. 2 London: Longman, 1806) ———. Works, I (London: Bohn, 1842) Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards, Eyrbyggja saga (London: Penguin, 1989) ———. Göngu-Hrolfs saga (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1980) ———. Knytlinga saga: The History of the Kings of Denmark (Odense: Odense University Press, 1986)

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———. Magnus’ Saga: The Life of St Magnus Earl of Orkney 1075–1116 (Oxford: Perpetua Press, 1987) ———. Orkneyinga saga: The History of the Earls of Norway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981) ———. Seven Viking Romances (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) ———. Vikings in Russia: Yngvar’s Saga and Eymund’s Saga (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989) Hieatt, Constance B., Karlamagnús saga: The Saga of Charlemagne and his Heroes, 3 vols (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1975–80) Hill, Joyce, ‘The Icelandic Saga of Tristram and Isolt (Saga of Tristram ok Ísodd)’, in The Tristan Legend: Texts from Northern and Eastern Europe in Modern English Translation, ed. by Joyce Hill ([Leeds]: University of Leeds Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies, 1977), pp. 6–28 Hughes, Shaun F. D., ‘The Saga of Án Bow-bender’, in A Book of Medieval Outlaws: Ten Tales in Modern English, ed. by Thomas H. Ohlgren (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), pp. 187–218 Johnston, George, The Faroe Islanders’ Saga (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1975) ———. The Greenlanders’ Saga (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1976) ———. The Schemers and Víga-Glúm: Bandamanna saga and Víga-Glúms saga (Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 1999) ———. Thrand of Gotu: Two Icelandic Sagas from the Flat Island Book (Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 1994) Johnston, George, and Anthony Faulkes, Three Icelandic Outlaw Sagas. The Saga of Gisli. The Saga of Grettir. The Saga of Hord. (London: Dent; Vermont: Tuttle, 2002) Jones, Gwyn, The Norse Atlantic Saga: Being the Norse Voyages of Discovery and Settlement to Iceland, Greenland, and North America, rev. and enlarged edn, with contributions by Robert McGhee and others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) Jorgensen, Peter A., Valla-Ljóts saga: The Saga of Valla-Ljot (Saarbrücken: AQ-Verl., 1991) Jorgensen, Peter A., Marianne E. Kalinke, and Helen McLean, Norse Romances. I: The Tristan Legend. II: The Knights of the Round Table (Cambridge: Brewer, 1999) Jón Skaptason and Philip Pulsiano, Barðar saga (New York: Garland, 1984) Kalinke, Marianne E., Mo3 ttuls saga, with an Edition of Le Lai du court mantel (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1987) ———. ‘The Saga of the Mantle’, in The Romance of Arthur III: Works from Russia to Spain, Norway to Italy, ed. by James J. Wilhelm (New York: Garland, 1988), pp. 55–68 Kelchner, Georgia Durham, Dreams in Old Norse Literature and their Affinities to Folklore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935) Ker, W. P., ‘The Life of Bishop Gudmund Arason’, Saga-Book, 5 (1907), 86–103 Laing, Samuel, Heimskringla, by Snorri Sturluson, rev. by Rasmus Bjørn Anderson [accessed 22 January 2006]

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Larrington, Carolyne, Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1995) Larsen, Henning, An Old Icelandic Medical Miscellany (Oslo: Det norske Videnskaps-akademi i Oslo, 1931) Larson, Willard, The Saga of Aun the Bow-bender: A Medieval Norse Tale (Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1995) Lowe Jr, Pardee, King Harald and the Icelanders (Lincoln, MA: Penmaen Press, 1979) Magnus Magnusson and others, The Icelandic Sagas, 2 vols (London: Folio Society, 1999–2002) Magoun Jr, Francis Peabody, ‘The Pilgrim Diary of Nikulas of Munkathvera. The Road to Rome’, Mediaeval Studies, 6 (1944), 314–54 Major, Albany F. and E. E. Speight, Stories from the Northern Sagas (London: Marshall, 1899) McKinnell, John, Viga-Glums Saga, with the Tale of Ögmund Bash and Thorvald Chatterbox (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1987) Orðhenglar, ‘A New Translation of Svínfellinga saga – The Saga of the Svínafell Men’, in Fótarkefli rist Peter Foote 26.v.99, 2 vols (London: [n. pub.], 1999), I, 15–31 Page, R. I., Chronicles of the Vikings: Records, Memorials and Myths (London: British Museum Press, 1995) Pigott, Grenville, A Manual of Scandinavian Mythology Containing a Popular Account of the Two Eddas and the Religions of Odin (London: Pickering, 1839) Porter, John, Bandamanna saga (Felinfach: Llanerch Publishers, 1994) Raschellà, Fabrizio D., The So-Called Second Grammatical Treatise: An Orthographic Pattern of Late Thirteenth-Century Icelandic (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1982) Reman, Edward, The Norse Discoveries and Exploration of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949) Ringler, Richard, ‘The Saga of the Men of Svínafell: An Episode from the Age of the Sturlungs’, in Saga og sprak: Studies in Language and Literature, ed. by John M. Weinstock (Austin: Jenkins, 1972), pp. 9–30 Schlauch, Margaret, ‘Another Analogue of Beowulf’, Modern Language Notes, 45 (1930), 21–22 Scudder, Bernard, The Vikings’ Guide to Good Business: Excerpts from the King’s Mirror (Reykjavík: Gudrun, 1997) Sephton, John, ‘What the Sagas Say of Greenland’, Proceedings of the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society, 52 (1898), 119–54 Skene, William Forbes, ‘Extracts from the Northern Sagas’, Transactions of the Iona Club, 1 (1834), 63–69 [reprinted with same pagination in Collectiones de rebus Albanicis (Edinburgh: Stevenson, 1847)] Smith, Joshua Toulmin, The Discovery of America by the Northmen in the Tenth Century (London: Tilt, 1839; 2nd edn London: Orr, 1842) ———. The Northmen in New England, or America in the Tenth Century (Boston, MA: Hilliard, Gray, 1839)

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Stephens, George, Frithiof’s Saga: A Legend of Norway by Esaias Tegnér (Stockholm: Bonnier; London: Black and Armstrong, 1839; repr. Felinfach: Llanerch Publishers, 1994) Stitt, Michael J., Beowulf and the Bear’s Son: Epic, Saga and Fairytale in Northern Germanic Tradition (New York: Garland, 1992) Thorkelin, Grímur Jónsson, An Essay on the Slave Trade (London: Nichols, 1788) Tucker, John, Plácidus saga, Editiones Arnamagnæanæ Series B, 31 (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1998) Tunstall, Peter, The Saga of Eirik the Traveller; The Saga of Grim Shaggy-Cheek; The Saga of Half and his Heroes; The Saga of Helgi Thorisson; The Saga of Hervor and King Heidrek the Wise; The Saga of Hrolf Kraki and his Champions; The Saga of Ragnar’s Sons; The Saga of Yngvar the Far Traveller; Sorli’s Tale or the Saga of Hedinn and Hogni; The Tale of Toki Tokason [accessed 21 January 2006]. Van Pelt, Daniel, ‘The Voyage of Thorgils and his Adventures on the East Coast of Greenland about the Year 1000’, The National Magazine (April 1892), 11–20 Wisby, John H., ‘Saga Literature’, Poet-Lore, 6 (1894), 281–98 Wood, Cecil, ‘The Saga of Thorstein Prod-Head’, Fat Abbot (Winter 1960), 5–14 Wolf, Kirsten, The Old Norse-Icelandic Legend of Saint Barbara (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2000) Young, Jean, and Eleanor Haworth, The Fljotsdale Saga and The Droplaugarsons (London: Dent, 1990) Zitzelsberger, Otto, ‘Konráðs saga keisarasonar’, Seminar for Germanic Philology Yearbook, 3 (1980), 38–67

Part B. Other works consulted Acker, Paul, ‘Norse Sagas Translated into English: A Supplement’, Scandinavian Studies, 65 (1993), 66–102 Adams, Robert A., Proteus, his Life, his Truth: Discussions of Literary Translation (New York: Norton, 1973) Anderson, John, ‘Medieval Poetry in Translation’, Balcony: The Sydney Review, 3 (Spring 1965), 41–46 Andersson, Theodore M., The Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins: A Historical Survey, Yale Germanic Studies, 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964) Anonymous review of Volsunga Saga, trans. by William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, The Athenæum, 2224 (11 June 1871), 763–64 Arnold, Matthew, On Translating Homer, ed. by W. H. O. Rouse (London: Longman, 1861; repr. London: John Murray, 1905) Auerbach, Loren, ‘Female Experience and Authorial Intention in Laxdœla saga’, Saga-Book, 25 (1998), 30–52

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Austfirðinga so3 gur, ed. by Jón Jóhannesson, Íslenzk fornrit, 11 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1950) The Autobiography of Samuel Laing of Papdale 1780–1868, ed. and supplemented by R. P. Fereday (Kirkwall: Bellavista Publications, 2000) Baigent, Elizabeth, ‘Laing, Samuel (1780–1868)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [accessed 3 February 2006] Ballantyne, R. N., Erling the Bold: A Tale of the Norse Sea-Kings (London: James Nisbit, 1875) Baring-Gould, Sabine, Iceland: Its Scenes and Sagas (London: Smith, Elder, 1863) Barnes, Geraldine, ‘The Fireside Vikings and the “Boy’s Own” Vinland: Vinland in Popular English and American Literature (1841–1926)’, in Reinventing the Middle Ages and The Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. by William F. Gentrup, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 147–65 ———. Viking America: The First Millennium (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001) Barribeau, James, ‘William Morris and Saga Translation: “The Story of King Magnus, Son of Erling”’, in The Vikings, ed. by R. T. Farrell (London: Phillimore, 1982), pp. 239–61 Bassnett-McGuire, Susan, Translation Studies, rev. edn (London: Routledge, 1991) Benedikz, B. S., ‘Guðbrandur Vigfússon: A Biographical Sketch’, in Úr Dölum til Dala: Guðbrandur Vigfússon Centenary Essays, ed. by Rory McTurk and Andrew W awn, Leeds Texts and Monographs, n.s. 11 (Leeds: School of English, University of Leeds, 1989), pp. 11–33 Björn Þorsteinsson, review of Hans Kuhn, Das alte Island. Mediaeval Scandinavia, 5 (1972), 186–88 Borgfirðinga so3 gur, ed. by Sigurður Nordal and Guðni Jónsson, Íslenzk fornrit, 3 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1938) Borrow, George, Wild Wales: Its People, Language and Scenery (London: Murray, 1862; repr. London: Century; New York: Hippocrene Press, 1984) Bossche, Chris Vanden, ‘Carlyle’s Færeyinga saga Translation’, Carlyle Annual, 10 (1989), 64–79 Bronner, Hedin, review of Njal’s saga, trans. by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, American-Scandinavian Review, 50 (1962), 317–18 Capildeo, Vahni, ‘Reading Egils saga Skallagrímssonar – Saga, Paratext, Translations (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 2000) Cleasby, Richard and Guðbrandur Vigfússon, An Icelandic English Dictionary Based on the Manuscript Collection of the Late R. Cleasby, Enlarged and Completed by Gudbrand Vigfusson (Oxford University Press, 1874; 2nd edn with a supplement by William Craigie, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957)

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Clunies Ross, Margaret, ‘The Intellectual Complexion of the Icelandic Middle Ages: Towards a New Profile of Old Icelandic Saga Literature’, Scandinavian Studies, 64 (1997), 442–53 ———. The Norse Muse in Britain 1750–1820 (Trieste: Edizione Parnaso, 1998) ———. ‘Percy and Mallet: The Genesis of Northern Antiquities’, in Sagnaþing helgað Jónasi Kristjánssyni sjötugum 10. apríl 1994, 2 vols (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka bókmenntafélag, 1994), I, 107–17 ———. ‘A Survey of Courses in Old Icelandic Offered by Universities in Australia and New Zealand’, Australia and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Bulletin, 7 (August 1971), 18–21 Clunies Ross, Margaret, and Amanda J. Collins, ‘Johnstone, James (d. 1798)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [accessed 3 February 2006] Clunies Ross, Margaret, and Judy Quinn, ‘Old Norse-Icelandic Studies in Australia’, The International Saga Society Newsletter, 5 (1991), 18 Conroy, Leo James, ‘Hrafnkels saga och sagaöversättning’ (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Melbourne, 2000) Cook, Robert, ‘On Translating Sagas’, Gripla, 13 (2002), 107–45 Cormick, Craig, Kormak’s Saga (Page, ACT: Merino Press, 1991) Cowan, Edward J., ‘Icelandic Studies in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Scotland’, Studia Islandica. Íslenzk fræði, 31 (1972), 107–51 ———. ‘Scotland’s Nordic Legacy’, in Heritage and Identity: Shaping the Nations of the North, ed. by J. M. Fladmark (Lower Coombe: Donhead, 2002), pp. 73–83 D’Arcy, Julian, Scottish Skalds and Sagamen: Old Norse Influence on Modern Scottish Literature (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1996) D’Arcy, Julian and Kirsten Wolf, ‘Sir Walter Scott and Eyrbyggja saga’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 22 (1987), 30–43 Dickins, Bruce, review of Heimskringla or the Lives of the Norse Kings, trans. by Erling Monsen and Arthur Hugh Smith, Saga-Book, 11 (1928–36), 105–07 Die nordische Version der Tristan Sage. Tristrams saga ok Ísondar, ed. by Eugen Kölbing (Heilbronn: Verl. von Gebr. Henninger, 1878; repr. Hildesheim: Olm, 1978) Diplomatarium Islandicum. Íslenzkt fornbréfssafn, 16 vols (Copenhagen: Hið íslenzka bókmenntafélag, 1857–1972) Dronke, Ursula, ‘The scope of the Corpus poeticum boreale’, in Úr Dölum til Dala: Guðbrandur Vigfússon Centenary Essays, ed. by Rory McTurk and Andrew Wawn, Leeds Texts and Monographs, n.s. 11 (Leeds: School of English, University of Leeds, 1989), pp. 93–111 Durrenberger E. Paul and Dorothy Durrenberger, ‘Translating Gunnlaug’s Saga: An Anthropological Approach to Literary Style and Cultural Structures’, Translation Review, 21–22 (1986), 11–20

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INDEX

Aall, Jacob 60, 61n Acker, Paul viii, 6–7, 54, 79, 108, 137, 148, 186 Af Upplendinga konungum 185, 186 Alexanders saga 188 Allen, Ralph B. 111, 119n, 134 Anderson, Alan Orr 109, 118 Anderson, George K. 146 Anderson, James 170 Anderson, Rasmus Bjørn 13, 46, 63n, 80, 84, 87, 95–97, 98, 185 Andersson, Theodore M . 10n, 40n, 27, 147, 148, 154, 156, 171–72, 173n, 188 Annálar íslenzkir 82 Arent, A. Margaret 48n, 139, 163 Ari Þorgilsson (Ari Thorgilsson) 110 Arngrimsson (M r) 82 Arnold, Matthew 23–24, 27n, 91 Ashdown, Margaret 110, 117, 118 Attwood, Katrina 40, 41, 44 Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka 58, 119n, 138, 142, 145, 149, 153 Auerbach, Loren 163 Austfirðinga so- gur 132n

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Ágrip af Nóregskonunga sögum 110, 151, 155 Ála flekks saga 150 Áns saga bogsveigis viii, 151, 152 Árons saga Hjörleifssonar viii, 144 Ásmundar saga kappabana 150 Bachman Jr, W. Bryant 147, 149, 150, 151, 157, 170–71 Bandamanna saga 74n, 80, 81, 114, 126, 135, 143, 147, 151, 152, 153 Barbare saga 154 Baring-Gould, Sabine 52 Barlaams saga ok Josaphats 188 Barnes, Geraldine viii, 60, 117n Barnes, Michael 141 Barribeau, James 91n, 94n Bassnett, Susan 5n Bayerschmidt, Carl F. 48, 71, 137 Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss 136, 147, 150 Beamish, North Ludlow 57, 60 Beauvois, Eugene 82 Becket, Thomas (Saint) 80, 87, 88 Beowulf 22, 25, 119n, 122

210 biskupasögur 9, 10, 98, 156, 188 Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa 136, 147, 154 Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson 45n Björn Þorsteinsson 10 Blackwell, I. A. 54n, 58 Blaisdell, Foster W. 18, 43, 139, 144, 146, 157, 166–68 Blake, Norman F. 139, 156n Blindheim, Joan Tindale 140 Bock, Ian and Hanne viii Bolla þáttr Bollasonar 109 Book of Common Prayer, The 31–32 Borgfirðinga so- gur 125n Borrow, George 55 Boucher, Alan 145, 146, 147, 153n, 157, 169–70 Bósa saga ok Herrauðs 140, 147, 150, 186 Brandkrossa þáttr 85, 149 Brands þáttr örva 145, 149 Bremner, Robert Locke 86, 109, 115 Brenna Adams biskups 79, 82 Brennu-Njáls saga 2–3, 5–6, 12, 15, 22, 29, 30n, 37, 48, 53, 55, 58, 59n, 63, 64, 71–72, 73, 78, 82, 84, 86, 114, 135, 138, 151, 158, 162, 176, 179 Brodeur, Arthur Gilchrist 66, 108, 120n Bronner, Hedin 158 Burge, Katrina 182n Burritt, Elihu 57, 60 Byock, Jesse L. 66n, 149, 152 Cabot, James Eliot 58, 60 Cahill, Peter 146 Calder, Grace J. 141 Cardew, Philip W estbury 8n, 154 Chambers, Raymond W ilson 119 Chappel, Allen H. 142 Chappell, Gavin 185, 186

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Index Chaucer, Geoffrey 3, 36, 91, 94 Cleasby, Richard 53, 99n Clewer, Cynthia R. 143 Clunies Ross, Margaret ix, 52, 54n, 59, 62, 67n, 68n, 182n Coles, John 81, 87 Collingwood, W illiam Gershom 14n, 30, 85, 86 Collins, Amanda J. 62n Complete Sagas of Icelanders, The 28n, 29n, 38, 40n, 71n, 108, 159, 166n, 171, 175–78, 188 see also Leifur Eiríksson publishing (translation) project Conroy, Leo James 132n Cook, Robert 29n, 71, 145, 176 Cormack, Margaret 154, 156 Cormick, Craig 5 Corpus poeticum boreale 34, 78, 81, 89, 98, 99, 100 Cowan, Edward 62, 66n, 67n Craigie, W. A. 84 D’Arcy, Julian 54n Dasent, George W ebbe 13, 23n, 30n, 53, 57, 58, 59n, 63, 65, 66, 71–73, 74, 75, 78, 83, 87n, 88n, 89, 91n, 107, 114, 127, 134, 135, 162n De Costa, Benjamin Franklin 59, 60, 65 de Vries, Jan 104n Dennis, Andrew 136n, 145 Dickins, Bruce 128 Diplomatarium Islandicum 23 Driscoll, Matthew J. 151, 155 Dronke, Ursula 100 Droplaugarsona saga 85, 114, 115, 149 du Chaillu, Paul B. 81 Duggals leiðsla 146 Dunstanus saga 82

Index Durrenberger, E. Paul and Dorothy 17, 26, 29, 34, 35, 36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 130–31, 150, 152, 159, 173–75, 176 Edda see Elder Edda, The see also Prose Edda, The Eddison, E. R. 31n, 35, 36, 91, 110, 116, 121, 127–28, 134 Editiones Arnamagnæanæ 18, 157, 167, 168 editorial apparatus 48–49 Edwards, Paul 13, 40, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 153n, 155, 157, 161–62 Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar saga berserkjabana 140, 147 Egils saga Skallagrímssonar 15, 22, 30n, 34, 43, 44, 47, 72n, 82, 86, 91, 110, 116, 120, 121, 127–28, 130, 138, 143, 144, 149, 151, 153, 161–62 Einar Haflidason 81 Einar Ól. Sveinsson 33n, 131n Einars þáttr Skúlasonar 145, 149 Einars þáttr Sokkasonar 57, 85, 112, 139 Eindriða þáttr ilbreiðs 83, 149 Eindriða þáttr ok Erlings 149 Eiríkr M agnússon (Eiríkur) 14n, 20, 25, 33–34, 36, 46n, 54, 71–72, 74, 75, 77–105, 107, 115, 120, 121, 126, 134, 135, 141, 175, 185 Eiríks saga rauða 12, 56, 57, 59, 60, 80, 81, 85, 87, 97, 108, 111, 112, 113, 118, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 151, 153 Eiríks saga víðfõrla 186 Eiríks þáttr jarls Hákonarsonar 83 Elder Edda, The 14n, 46, 98 Ellwood, T. 84

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211 Elton, Oliver 81, 83, 89, 99n Elucidarius 150 Emery, W alter 112 Erex saga Artuskappa 16n, 18, 43, 139, 144, 153, 157, 166–67 Everyman’s Library 64, 71, 73, 114 Eymundar saga Hringssonar 149 Eymundar þáttr 149 Eyrbyggja saga 9, 48, 54n, 56, 57, 59, 62, 77, 81, 84, 85, 138, 143, 149, 151, 153, 160, 162 Farrell, R. T. 91n Faulkes, Anthony 148, 164, 170 Fell, Christine 47–48, 54n, 143 Finch, R. G. 32, 126, 139, 156 Finlay, Alison 154, 188n Finnboga saga ramma 136, 149, 170–71 Finns þáttr Sveinssonar 83 Finsen, Vilhjálmur 136 Firchow, Evelyn Scherabon 150 Flateyarbók 82, 151 Fljótsdœla saga 86, 136, 149, 150 Flóamanna saga 82, 84, 85, 136 Flóres saga konungs ok sona hans 119n, 150 Flóres saga ok Blankiflúr 188 Folio Society 19n, 71n, 157, 178, 180 Foote, Peter 17n, 64, 73, 136n, 138, 145, 164, 165, 166–67, 182n fornaldarsögur 9, 10, 32, 15, 63, 87, 126, 129, 131, 155, 170, 186 Fox, C. M. 110 Fox, Denton 143, 153n, 157, 162 Fóstbrœðra saga 19, 85, 112, 113, 120, 153, 178 Frame, Donald 61n Frankis, John 174

212 Frá Fornjóti ok hans ættmönnum 186 Friðþjófs saga hins frœkna 57, 63, 64, 66, 69n, 70, 79, 80, 83, 96, 97, 98, 110, 115, 135 Friis, Erik J. 141 Frostaþing laws 111, 115, 135, 151 Fry, Donald K. viii, 6–7, 54, 60, 63n, 68, 79, 96, 105, 108, 129, 137, 160, 186 Fundinn Noregs 82 Fyrsta malfræðiritgerðin 113, 142 Færeyinga saga 83, 84, 99, 111, 115, 135, 143, 151, 165 Gade, Kari Ellen 27, 40n, 154, 156, 172, 188 Garmonsway, G. N. 141 Gathorne-Hardy, Geoffrey Malcolm 109, 115, 117, 118, 137, 139 Gautreks saga 56, 140, 147 Geirmundar þáttr heljarskinns 85 Gests þáttr Bárðarsonar 140 Gísla saga Súrssonar 15, 19, 38, 58, 59n, 64, 72, 73, 78, 85, 111, 139, 153, 158, 164, 172, 178 Gísli Konráðsson 169 Gísli Sigurðsson 117n Gísls þáttr Illugasonar 147, 149 Gordon, E. V. 32, 61, 72, 129, 134 Goudie, Gilbert 80 Grágás 85, 115, 136, 145, 154 Green, W. C. 82, 86, 101–02, 121, 128 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar 5, 15, 38n, 54, 77, 79, 84, 93, 108, 117n, 121–22, 140, 143, 150, 153, 162 Grimstad, Kaaren 154 Gríms saga loðinkinna 150, 186

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Index Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (Grimr Johnson Thorkelin) 12, 56, 62, 64, 68–69 Grœnlendinga saga 12, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 81, 82, 85, 86, 108, 111, 112, 113, 118, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 151, 153 see also Einars þáttr Sokkasonar Grønlie, Siân 136n Guðbrandur Vigfússon 25, 40, 72n, 81, 86, 92, 98–101, 107, 134, 136, 175 Guðmundar saga biskups góða I, 86 see also Sturlunga saga Guðmundar saga biskups góða II, 85, 113, 151, 156 Guðmundar saga dýra 140 Guðmundur Erlingsson 149, 150, 151, 157, 170 Guðmundur Hálfdanarson 1n Guðni Jónsson 38n, 68n, 125n Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir 163 Gulaþing laws 111, 115, 135 Gull-Ásu-Þórðar þáttr 149 Gull-Þóris saga see Þorskfirðinga saga Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls 136 Gunnars þáttr Þiðrandabana 85, 109, 112, 146, 153 Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu 17, 34n, 40, 41, 43n, 44, 54, 79, 80, 86, 87, 93, 110, 114, 115, 125–26, 135, 138, 146, 150, 153, 156n, 169, 170, 174 Gutman, Robert 92 Gyðinga saga 188 Gylfaginnimg see Prose Edda, The Göngu-Hrólfs saga 145 Halldór Hermannsson 60, 94, 95n, 96n, 110, 119, 120n, 134

Index Halldórs þáttr Snorrasonar 142, 145, 149 Hallfreðar saga 83, 85, 131n, 145, 169 Hannah, Robert 146 Hannson, Stina 62n Hansen, Finn viii Haralds saga harðráða 45, 74, 86, 129 140, 155, 161 see also Heimskringla Haralds þáttr grenska 149 Hardman, George L. 185–86 Harðar saga (Harðar saga Grímkelssonar ok Geirs) 85, 136, 146, 150, 169 Haugen, Einar Ingvald 23n, 39n, 95n, 96, 112, 113, 124–25, 127, 142 Hauks þáttr hábrókar 149 Hawkins, Sue 31 Haworth, Eleanor 149 Haymes, Edward R. 148 Hákonar saga gamla Hákonarsonar 53n, 55, 58, 63, 68n, 82, 135 Hálfdanar saga Brönufóstra 146, 150, 186 Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar 147 Hálfs saga ok Hálfsrekka 149, 186 Háttatal see Prose Edda, The Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings 17, 26, 34n, 81, 84, 85, 87, 147, 152, 159, 169 Head, Edmund W. 59, 66, 74–75, 78 Hearn, Ethel M. 86, 90, 104–05 Heðins saga ok Högna see Sörla þáttr Heiðarvíga saga 82, 87, 151 Heiðreks saga konungs ins vitra see Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks konungs Heimskringla 9, 11–12, 11n, 15n, 45, 46, 47n, 57, 60, 61, 63, 64, 73–74, 77, 78, 82, 89, 90, 95, 96, 111, 115, 118, 121, 128–29, 135, 140, 151, 155, 160, 184–85 Helga þáttr ok Úlfs 82, 149 Helga þáttr Þórissonar 140, 147, 186 Hemings þáttr Áslakssonar 82, 110, 140

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213 Herbert, W illiam 56 Hermann Pálsson 3, 12, 13, 19, 29, 33, 40–42, 43n, 69n, 71, 104, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 153n, 155, 157, 158, 161–64, 165, 170, 175, 176, 178 Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks konungs 56, 109, 138, 186 Heusler, Andreas 136 Hewitt, Maurice 117n Hieatt, Constance B. 144 Hight, George Ainslie 108, 121–22, 134 Hill, Joyce 144 Hjalmþés saga ok Ölvis 150 Hollander, Lee M . 12, 39, 46, 47n, 48, 61n, 71, 73, 74n, 113, 116, 124–25, 127, 128, 138, 142, 159–61, 162 Hollow, John 88n Horsford, Eben Norton 60n, 82 Hovgaard, W illiam 108, 134 Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða 15, 80, 85, 111, 112, 131, 135, 138, 142, 153, 162 Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar 85, 137 see also Sturlunga saga Hrafns þáttr Guðrúnarsonar 149–50 Hreiðars þáttr heimska 140, 142, 145, 150, 153 Hreinn Benediktsson 142 Hróa þáttr heimska 80 Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar 140, 142 Hrólfs saga kraka 32, 78n, 111, 129–30, 131, 134, 138, 140, 149, 150, 152, 186 Hrómundar saga Gripssonar 109, 150, 185 Hrómundar þáttr halta 140, 150 Hughes, Shaun F. D. 152, 158 Hume, Kathryn 167n Hungrvaka 83, 85, 103 Hustvedt, Lloyd 13n, 96n

214 Hœnsa-Þóris saga 81, 85, 137, 138, 143, 147, 153 Iceland Review Saga Series 28, 157, 169 Icelandic names 37–43 Illuga saga Gríðarfóstra 150, 185 Inga saga Haraldssonar 82–83 Ingstad, Helge 141 Íslands bygging 83 Ísleifs þáttr biskups 83, 85 Íslendinga saga 9n see also Sturlunga saga Íslendingabók 7, 85, 100, 110, 139, 140, 151 Íslendingasögur 8, 9, 11, 15, 19, 20, 24, 31, 32, 37, 43, 44, 48, 54n, 62, 64, 71, 77, 87, 98, 115, 122, 125–26, 135, 136, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 170, 175, 187 Íslendingaþættir 98, 152, 157 Íslendings þáttr sögufróða 140, 145 Íslenzk fornrit series (Reykjavík) 156, 188 Ívars þáttr Ingimundarsonar 142, 143, 145, 150, 153 Ívens saga 16n, 18, 144, 153, 166–67 Jacobsen, Roman 5n Jamieson, Robert 54n Janzén, Assar 47n Játvarðar saga konungs hins helga 58, 65, 82 Johnston, George 34, 139, 144, 151, 152, 158–59, 164–66, 173, 176 Johnstone, James (Reverend) 12, 55, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67–68 Jones, Gwyn 111, 113, 116, 120, 121, 130–32, 138, 139, 162 Jorgensen, Peter A. 149, 152, 171n, 174 Jómsvíkinga saga 84, 110, 138, 139, 155n Jón A. Hjaltalin 80

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Index Jón Bjarnason 63n, 80, 95–96, 97 Jón Jóhannesson 132n Jón Karl Helgason 13n Jón Skaptason 147 Jón Stefánsson 14n, 30, 81, 85 Jóns saga helga 85, 140, 154, 156 Julian, Linda Anne 91n Jökuls þáttr Búasonar 150 Jørgensen, Jon Gunnar 61n Kalinke, Marianne 144, 148, 152, 153, 166–68 Karlamagnús saga 81, 112, 144 Kári Gíslason 182 Kelchner, Georgia Durham 119 Kelly, L. G. 5n Kennedy, John 73n, 95n, 171n Ker, W. P. 86 Kershaw, Nora 109 Ketils saga hængs 150, 185–86 King James Bible 31 Kjalnesinga saga 111 Kjartans þáttr Óláfssonar 83 Knýtlinga saga 147, 151, 155 Kölbing, Eugen 123 Konráðs saga keisarasonar viii, 145 konungasögur 8, 9, 15, 44, 68n, 87, 135, 152, 155, 156, 170, 188 Konungsskuggsjá 108, 116, 135, 152 Kormáks saga 5, 14n, 77, 85, 113, 131n, 141 Kristni saga 85, 136 Kristni þáttr 83 Króka-Refs saga 136, 147 Kuhn, Hans 10 Kumlbúa þáttr 145 Kunin, Devra 188n Kunz, Keneva vii, 19, 20, 43n, 69, 88n, 158n, 175–78

Index Laing, Samuel 11, 13, 15, 45–46, 57, 60, 61n, 63, 64, 65, 66, 73–74, 75, 78, 89, 95, 96, 114, 115, 121, 129, 135, 185 Landnámabók 7, 40, 56, 37n, 71, 84, 85, 99n, 135, 139, 142, 143, 151 Lang, Andrew 84 Larrington, Carolyne 151, 156, 178 Larsen, Henning 110, 119 Larson, Laurence Marcellus 108, 111, 115 Larson, W illard (W ill) viii, 151 Laurentius Kálfsson (Bishop of Hólar) 89 Laurentius saga Hólabiskups 81 Lawrence, A. W. 111 Laxdœla saga 9, 15, 17, 33, 41, 42, 43n, 56, 62, 68, 69, 84, 85, 104, 109, 110, 115, 116, 120, 121, 124–25, 134, 135, 139, 141, 153, 161, 163, 177 Leach, Henry Goddard 113, 117n Lefevere, André 5n Leifur Eiríksson publishing (translation) project 19, 47, 74, 159, 171, 175–78, 180, 188 Leith, Mary Charlotte Julia (Mrs Disney) 83, 84, 89, 102–03 Leithauser, Brad 38n Litzenberg, Karl 36n, 97n, 91n Ljósvetninga saga 85, 136, 148, 171 Loomis, Roger Sherman 109, 116, 122–24, 136 Louis-Jensen, Jonna 152 Lowe Jr, Pardee 145 Lucas, John 47, 143 Lye, Edward 59 Lækningabók 110 M acCarthy, Fiona 89, 92 M acLean, Helen 153

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215 M cDonald, Rod 31 M cDougall, David 188n M cDougall, Ian 188n M cGalliard, John C. 138 M cGrew, Julia 141, 154 M cKinnell, John 148 M cTurk, Rory 100n M agnus Magnusson 2, 12, 19, 29, 33, 34, 41–42, 43n, 68n, 69n, 71, 88n, 104, 138, 140, 141, 153, 155, 157, 161, 162, 163, 178–80 M agnusson, Sally 91n Magnús saga Hákonarsonar 55, 58, 83 Magnús saga helga eyjajarls 83, 84, 148 M agoun Jr, Francis Peabody 112, 116n M ajor, Albany F. 84, 92n, 103 M allet, Paul Henri 55, 58, 59, 66 M alm, Mats 62n, 117n M alory, Thomas 36, 91 Mantissa 85 M argolin, David R. 141 M artin, John S. viii, 182n M aurer, Konrad von 53 M axwell, Ian 164 Mána þáttr skalds 85, 150 Máríu saga 188–89 M etcalfe, W. H. 84 M iller, W illiam Ian 148, 171–72 M ills, Stella M . 32, 111, 129–30, 134 M onsen, Erling 11, 111, 118, 121, 128–29 Morkinskinna 27, 154, 156, 172, 188 M orris, May 72n, 93, 94, 111, 120 M orris, W illiam 14, 20, 23n, 24, 33, 34, 36n, 46, 54, 71, 72n, 75, 77–105, 107, 114, 115, 120, 121, 124, 126, 127, 129, 134, 135, 136, 141, 158, 175, 185 Möttuls saga 148, 166

216 Nelson’s Icelandic Texts 156 Nichols, John 56 Niebaum, Gustave 86 Nordal, Sigurður 125n Norna-Gests þáttr 109, 146, 186 Norrœna Society 95, 96, 185 Northern Antiquities 54n Northvegr site 97, 185, 186, 187 Nosworthy, James M. 119n Nóregskonunga tal 151 Oddaverja þáttr 85 Odds þáttr Ófeigssonar 81, 145, 150 O’Donoghue, Heather 99, 100n Oldnorsenet 31 Olszewska, E. S. 113 Onions, C. T. 104n ‘Online Medieval and Classical Library, The’ 184–85, 187 Origines Islandicæ 89, 90, 98, 99, 100, 107, 120, 136, 169, 175 Orkneyinga saga 13, 53n, 79, 80, 83, 87, 90, 112, 120n, 132–34, 135, 144, 151, 157n, 161 Orms þáttr Stórólfssonar 140, 150 Otto saga keisara 83 Oxford University Press W orld Classics Series 130, 131 Óláfs saga Haraldssonar 86, 110, 113, 119n see also Heimskringla Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar 79, 83, 86, 135, 145, 172n, 188n see also Heimskringla Óskar Bjarnason 117n Óskar Halldórsson 70 Óttars þáttr svarta 140 Page, R. I. 151

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Index Parcevals saga 153 Partalopa saga 146, 166 Páls saga biskups 85, 140 Penguin Classics series (translations) 12, 28, 29, 43, 66n, 69n, 71, 149n, 155, 157, 158, 161, 176, 177, 179–80 Percy, Thomas (Bishop) 17n, 55, 58, 59, 61 Peringskiold, Johan 60, 61n Perkins, Richard 136n, 145 Pigott, Grenville 56, 65 Plácidus saga 18, 152 Pohl, Frederick J. 142 Porter, John viii, 144, 151 Powell, Frederick York 25, 34, 40, 81, 83, 84, 86, 98–101, 107, 134, 136, 175 Press, Muriel A. C. 85, 111, 115, 121, 163 Proctor, Robert 33, 85, 90, 91, 92n, 103–04 Prose Edda, The 53n, 54n, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 63, 65, 66, 72, 80, 81, 86, 87n, 98, 108, 135, 137, 140, 146, 148, 151 Pulsiano, Philip 147 Quaritch, Bernard 20, 77 see also ‘Saga Library, The’ Quinn, Judy 182n Quirk, Randolph 23n, 91n, 103n, 138, 156n Radice, W illiam 161n Raffel, Burton 158n Rafn, C. C. 59, 60, 64, 70 Ragnars saga loðbrókar ok sona hans 32n, 56, 68, 110, 140 Ragnarssona þáttr 186 Ralph, Bo 62 Raschellà, Fabrizio D. 146

Index Rauðs þáttr ok sona hans 113 Rauðs þáttr ramma 83, 150 Reeves, Arthur Middleton 81, 90 Reman, Edward 113 Rexroth, Kenneth 95 Reykdœla saga 136 Reynolds, Barbara 161n riddarasögur 9, 27, 14n, 15–16, 36, 115, 122–24, 136, 155, 166–67, 188 Ringler, Richard 143 Roberts, David 3 Roesdahl, Else 55n Rolls Series 53n, 72, 89 Rose, Milton S. 112, 120 Ruth, Roy H. 140 Rögnvalds þáttr ok Rauðs 83 ‘Saga Library, The’ 77–78, 81, 82, 87n, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 107, 135, 175 see also Quaritch, Bernard Sammes, Aylett 54n Samsons saga fagra 140, 150 samtíðarsögur 8, 9, 11, 15, 32, 44, 98 Scargill, H. M. 114 Schaad, Eric 165 Schach, Paul 48, 131, 138, 143, 161, 162, 164, 165 Schlauch, Margaret 32, 63, 110, 114, 115, 119, 120n, 125–27 Schöning, G. 60, 61n Scott, W alter (Sir) 54n Scudder, Bernard 117n, 152 Seaton, Ethel 55n Seljumanna þáttr 83 Sephton, John (Reverend) 83, 84, 85, 87, 97–98 Seyðarbrævið 141

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217 Sigurðar saga Jórsalafara 57, 86 see also Heimskringla Simpson, Jacqueline 46, 140, 141, 156 skaldic poetry 44–48, 68n, 73, 89, 98 Skáld-Helga saga 169 Skáldskaparmál see Prose Edda, The Skene, W illiam Forbes 56, 66 Slay, Desmond 130 Smith, Arthur Hugh 111, 118, 128–29 Smith, Charles Sprague 81 Smith, Joshua Toulmin 56, 60 Smyser, Hamilton Martin 112 Sneglu-Halla þáttr 147, 150 Snorri Sturluson (Snorro, Snorre) 11n, 12n, 14, 22, 25, 45, 46, 57, 59, 60, 66n, 74, 75n, 82, 87n, 108, 111, 114, 137 Speight, E. E. 84 Stefnis þáttr Þorgilssonar 83 Stephens, George 57, 62, 63, 64, 66, 70, 96, 97 Stitt, J. Michael 150 Stockton, Eric 115n Stoljar, Jeremy 5 Storm, Gustav 128 Strengleikar 112, 145 Strömbäck, Dag 182n Sturla Þórðarson 9 Sturlaugs saga starfsama 141 Sturlu saga 140 see also Sturlunga saga Sturlunga saga 9, 14n, 15, 36, 37, 53, 68n, 71, 92–93, 115, 136, 140, 141, 154 Stúfs þáttr 145, 150 Svaða þáttr ok Arnórs kerlingarnefs 83, 85 Svarfdœla saga 136, 150 Sveinn Haraldsson 99n Sverris saga 85, 135

218 Svínfellinga saga 143, 153 Swannell, J. N. 78n, 88n, 89, 91n, 93n, 94n, 95 Sörla saga sterka 150 Sörla þáttr 80, 109, 140, 150, 186 Sørensen, Preben Meulengracht 55n Taylor, Alexander Burt 112, 132–34 Taylor, Arnold R. 62n Tegnér, Esaias (Bishop) 63 Theodoricus Monachus 188n Thomas, R. George 141, 154 Thompson, Claiborne W. 155n Thómas saga erkisbyskups 80, 93 Tjomsland, Anne 137 Tolkien, Christopher 138, 156n Torringa, Johanna 73n, 162, 187 Tóka þáttr Tókasonar 149, 150, 186 translators see individual names Tristrams saga ok Ísoddar 144 Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar 109, 116, 122–23, 136, 143, 152 Trójumanna saga 189 Tucker, John 18, 152, 165 Tunstall, Peter 186 Turville-Petre, Gabriel 64, 71, 72, 113, 181 Turville-Petre, Joan E. 113 Tveitane, Mattias 145 Ugolnik, Anthony 88n University Press of America 157, 170 Valla-Ljóts saga 136, 147, 148, 149, 150, 171 Valvens þáttr 153 Van Pelt, Daniel 82 Vatnsdœla saga 85, 86, 113, 131n, 153

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Index Vápnfirðinga saga 85, 108, 111, 115, 138, 146, 153 Veblen, Thorstein 17, 109, 115, 116, 120, 121, 124–25, 134 Vésteinn Ólason 117n Viðar Hreinsson 28n, 152 Viktors saga ok Blavus 142 Vilhjálmur Stefánsson 112, 117 Víga-Glúms saga 59, 64, 74–75, 78, 85, 142, 147, 148, 152, 161n Víglundar saga 80, 166n ‘Vínland Sagas’ ix, 6, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65, 135, 161 see also Grœnlendinga saga, Eiríks saga rauða Völsa þáttr 150 Völsunga saga 14n, 32, 33, 79, 81, 88, 90, 110, 126, 135, 139, 140, 146, 149, 151, 154, 156 W ahlgren, Erik 48n, 117n W augh, Robyn 29n W awn, Andrew 2, 25n, 58n, 59n, 63, 65, 70, 73n, 74n, 81n, 87, 88n, 91n, 96, 97n, 98n, 99n, 100n, 102 W eber Henry 54n Web lists and sites see Oldnorsenet, Northvegr site, ‘The Online Medieval and Classical Library’ W haley, Diana 177 W ilhelm, James J. 148 W inkler, Maria 14n, 117n W isby, John H. 83 W olf, Kirsten 54n, 154, 156 W ood, Cecil 48n W right, Thomas 57 W uorio, Eva-Lis 117 Ynglinga saga 56

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Index Yngvars saga víðförla 149, 150, 186 Young, G. C. V. 143 Young, Jean I. 66, 111, 149 Younger Edda, The see Prose Edda, The Youngquist, Eric V. 137 Zernack, Julia 14n Zitzelsberger, Otto J. viii, 141, 145 Þáttr Þormóðar 150 Þiðranda þáttr Síðu-Hallssonar 83, 85, 137, 138, 153 Þiðreks saga af Bern 112, 140, 147, 148, 171 Þorgríms þáttr Hallasonar 150 Þorhalls þáttr knapps 83, 85 Þorláks saga hin elzta 83, 85 Þorláks saga hin yngri 140 Þorleifs þáttr jarlsskálds 140, 150 Þorleifur Guðmundsson Repp 57, 58, 62, 64, 65, 66 Þorskfirðinga saga 8n, 136, 140, 147, 154 Þorsteins saga hvíta 111, 146 Þorsteins saga Síðu-Hallssonar 83, 136, 140

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Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar 80, 96, 140, 150 Þorsteins þáttr austfirðings 147, 150 Þorsteins þáttr bœjarmagns 140, 147, 186 Þorsteins þáttr skelks 83, 139, 140, 150 Þorsteins þáttr stangarhöggs 48n, 80, 83, 138, 142, 146, 150, 153, 162, 164 Þorsteins þáttr sögufróða 150 Þorsteins þáttr uxafóts 85, 140, 150 Þorvalds þáttr tasalda 83, 145, 148, 150 Þorvalds þáttr viðförla 83–84, 85, 145 Þorvarðar þáttr krákunefs 147, 150 Þórarins þáttr stuttfeldar 150 Þórðar saga hreðu 80 Þættir 7, 175 Æva Snorra goða, 82 Ögmundar þáttr dytts ok Gunnars Helmings 83, 85, 142, 148, 150 Ölkofra þáttr 119n, 134, 142, 145, 150 Önnur málfræðiritgerðin 146 Örvar-Odds saga 140, 141, 147, 150

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M AKING T HE M IDDLE A GES

All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field.

Titles in series Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie Workman, ed. by Richard Utz and T. A. Shippey (1998) David Matthews, The Invention of Middle English: An Anthology of Sources, 1700–1864 (2000) The Old Norse Poetic Translations of Thomas Percy: A New Edition and Commentary, ed. by Margaret Clunies Ross (2002) Richard Utz, Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology: A History of Reception and an Annotated Bibliography of Studies, 1798–1948 (2002) Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholarship, ed. by Louise D’Arcens and Juanita Feros Ruys (2004) Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture, ed. by Stephanie Trigg (2005) Judith Johnston, George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism (2006)

In preparation Constructing Nation, Reconstructing Myth: Essays in Honour of T. A. Shippey, ed. by Andrew Wawn, with Graham Johnson and John Walter (forthcoming)

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