Árbók Landsbókasafns Íslands - Nýr flokkur - 01.01.1991, Síða 73

ANDREW WAWN
The Assistance of Icelanders to George
Webbe Dasent
Amongst the Landsbókasafn manuscripts which I first examined
in the Handritasalur under the learned and generous supervision
of the late Grímur Helgason was a sequence of some forty letters
(Lbs. MS 367 fol. and Lbs. MS 1839a 4to) written by the English
saga translator George (Sir George, after 1876) Webbe Dasent to
Grímur Thomsen in the period leading up to the publication in
Edinburgh in 1861 of Dasent’s justly celebrated translation The
story of Burnt Njal, or Life in Iceland at the End of the Tenth Century from
the Icelandic of the Njals Saga (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Doug-
las). The contrast between the tone of the correspondence and the
appearance of the published translation is at times striking. The
two expensively produced volumes of the translation create an
unmistakable impression of imperious and learned authority: the
sumptuous and sophisticated cover design, 1 the spacious presen-
tation of material on each quarto page, the sequence of splendid
plates by the Icelandic artist Sigurður Guðmundsson,2 the excel-
lent maps, the massive two hundred page introduction, the
translation itself served by fastidious textual and interpretative
annotation, and the informative appendices and meticulous
eighty page index. The book’s appearance does great credit to
1. George Webbe Dasent, The story of Burnt Njal (Edinburgh, 1861), p.xviii identifies it as
the work of James Drummond R.S.A., depicting within a curvilinear design Skarpheðinn’s
axe, Gunnar’s ‘Bill’ and Kári’s sword. Dasent’s anxiety about the shape of Skarpheðinn’s
weapon, several times expressed in the letters, may have been connected with the artist’s
work.
2. Dasent, 1861, p.xviii ‘[S.G.] is a living proof that the skill of hand which adorned the Hall
at Hjarðarholt [a reference to Laxchela saga, still untranslated in England in 1861] in the
tenth century, still exists in Iceland at the present day, and whose thorough knowledge of
the Sagas has enabled him to restore the dwellings of his forefathers’. In truth, the designs
seem closer to the nineteenth-century spirit of Thorvaldsen than to tenth-century
Hjarðarholt.