Árbók Landsbókasafns Íslands - Nýr flokkur - 01.01.1991, Page 90

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ANDREW WAWN
A man shall be friend
To his own friend’s friend
But to the friend
Of his own foeman
Shall no man be friend.46
And so with me I hope to live & die a friend of Denmark &
Iceland & their friends, & the foeman of their foes. Believe me
with the highest respect Your Excellency’s most faithful servant
George Webbe Dasent.
The second testimony derives not from one of Dasent’s unpub-
lished letters, but from the published Preface to his translation. In
the light of his wonderfully warm and passionate relationship to
the saga, as expressed in the following passage, his occasional
bouts of petulance and impatience in his dealings with Guðbran-
dur and Grímur may be forgiven. Dasent’s wife presented him
with a third son during his work on Njála, an event viewed as
almost a unwelcome distraction from his editorial and translating
labours. Yet readers of the 1860 Christmas Eve Preface are left in
no doubt about Dasent’s feelings of selfless and protective paternal
responsibility towards his translation. The „old fellow“ of his Good
Friday 1861 letter to Grímur becomes instead a vulnerable ‘foster-
child’;
It was a foster-father’s duty, in old times, to rear and cherish the
child which he had taken from the arms of its natural parents, his
superiors in rank. And so may this work, which the translator has
taken from the house of Icelandic scholars, his masters in know-
ledge, and which he has reared and fostered so many years under
an English roof, go forth and fight the battle of life for itself, and
win fresh fame for those who gave it birth. It will be reward
enough for him who has first clothed it in English d,ress if his
foster-child adds another leaf to that evergreen wreath of story
which crowns the brows of Iceland’s ancient worthies. (Dasent,
1861, p.xx)
46. Dasent’s own translation of Hávamál, v.43 [Edda, ed. Gustav Neckel; revised fourth
edition, ed. Hans Kuhn, 1962, p.23].