Árbók Landsbókasafns Íslands - Nýr flokkur - 01.01.1991, Page 77

GEORGE WEBBE DASENT
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transpires) long-suffering Copenhagen-based Icelanders. So it
was that the correspondence with Grímur Thomsen and (indi-
rectly) with Guðbrandur Vigfússon developed over the period
from the mid 1840s to 1862. The lavish cover design of the 1861
volumes reminded readers of the Icelandic ancestral wisdom that
‘bare is the back without brother behind it’: the correspondence
reveals just how bare would have been the translator’s back
without the support of the Icelandic fraternity in Copenhagen.
The following extracts (from Lbs. MS 367 fol. unless otherwise
stated) have been selected not only to illustrate aspects of the
correspondence dealing directly with the Njála translation, but to
show how other events and problems, major and minor, could cast
their light over the The story of Burnt Njal: the vexed question of
payment for services rendered by the Icelanders; the tiresome
unavailability in London of important Scandinavian reference
works; the birth of a son in the Dasent household; Dasent’s hectic
editorial labours at The Times newspaper, after his appointment as
Assistant Editor in 1845 — these sometimes serve to set his private
scholarly work on Njála against a background of major European
revolutionary upheaval, or against the more localised but no less
keenly felt struggle for Icelandic independence. There was, too,
the significant iníluence of Dasent’s supervisory work on the
printing of a new edition of Orkneyinga saga for the major new
Rolls Series of medieval historical texts sponsored by the British
government: doing for Britain what the Arnamagnæan commis-
sion had been doing for Denmark since the 1770s. The progress of
Orkneyinga saga through the press was marked by acrimonious
exchanges between London and Copenhagen (notably over the
facsimiles) at a time when the help of Grímur and Guðbrandur was
most needed. Though the printing went ahead, the first of this ill-
starred project’s four volumes was not published until 1887,7 and
then only in drastically revised form. These specific tensions apart,
it can be said that not the least attractive feature of the Dasent-
Grímur Thomsen correspondence is the way it reminds the
increasingly robotic late twentieth century scholarly world that the
nineteenth-century tradition of humane letters was not ashamed
to exhibit its sometimes fallible humanity.
7. The four volumes were part of the Rerum Britannicarum Medii Ævi Scriptores (Rolls Series)
published by Her Majesty’s Stationary Ofiice from 1857 onwards. See Orkneyinga saga, I,
xxxii for details of the printed but unpublished 1859 text.