Árbók Landsbókasafns Íslands - Nýr flokkur - 01.01.1991, Qupperneq 74

74
ANDREW WAWN
William Edmonston and David Douglas,3 its enthusiastic and
painstaking Edinburgh publishers. Yet behind the book’s com-
manding appearance, and perhaps as befits the turbulent saga
events it narrates, there lies, as revealed in the Dasent-Grímur
Thomsen correspondence, another story of tension and tempera-
ment, of confusion and controversy, as a visionary but impatient
Victorian Englishman questions, pesters and bullies two Copenha-
gen-based Icelanders, Grímur Thomsen and the young Guðbran-
dur Vigfússon, about every sort of interpretative detail whose
clarification could, even at the eleventh hour, help to do greater
justice to the Icelandic saga which Dasent revered above all others.
Dasent proved to be a demanding and occasionally ill-tempered
task-master; the long-sufíering Grímur and Guðbrandur appear
at times to have displayed the patience of scholarly saints. It is a
recognition which might well have brought a wry smile of recogni-
tion to Grímur Helgason’s face as he recalled his own dealings in
Landsbókasafn with eager and no doubt occasionally tiresome
enquirers from many lands.
Dasent’s 1861 preface (p.xvi) indicates that a considerable
portion of his Njála translation had been drafted as early as 1843.
This was the year which saw the publication of his influential (in
Britain) English translation - A Grammar of the Icelandic or Old Norse
Tongue (London, 1843) - of Rasmus Rask’s Anvisning till Islándskan
eller Nordiska Fornspráket (Stockholm, 1818). The translation of the
Grammar no doubt played its part in making Dasent an accom-
plished translator of Icelandic sagas; its publication certainly
lielped create a readership for Dasent’s subsequent Icelandic
translations, notably those of Njála and of Gísla saga Súrssonar (The
Story of Gisli, Edinburgh, 1866). Certainly the 1843 Preface to the
Icelandic Grammar sets out the case for studying Old Norse in
ringing tones - it can help to save the English language:
3. They were also the publishers of Dasent’s Popular Tales from the Norse (Edinburgh, 1859),
translated from P. Chr. Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe, Norsk folkeeventyr (Christiania, 1843;
second edition 1852); the translation sold 1000 copies in the first three months and paved
the way for subsequent support of Dasent’s later enterprises. He introduced J.F. Campbell
of Islay to the same publishers, resulting in Campbell’s Popular Tales of the Western Highlands
(1860). Douglas said of The Story of Njal - ‘I have always considered it one of my choicest
publications’, quoted in Hermann Pálsson and Edward J. Cowan, ed. Grímur Thomsen, On
the Character of the Old Northern Poetry, Studia Islandica, 31, 1972, p. 16. Dasent (1861, p.xviii)
claimed that the publishers ‘had spared no expense nor pains to lay Njal before the world in
a beautiful and becoming shape ... no work has seen the light of late years in this country
with a better index.’