Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1961, Page 145

RITFREGNIR
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Eyrbyggja Saga. Translated from the Old Icelandic by Paul Schach.
Introduction and verse translations by Lee M. Hollander. The Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press and The American-Scandinavian Founda-
tion. ÍLincoln, Nebraska,] 1959. xx+140 pp.
1T is now seventy years since William Morris and Eiríkur Magnússon
published their English version of Eyrbyggja saga. It appeared in 1892
under the title “The Story of the Ere-Dwellers” in the second volume of their
Saga Library. Despite the fact that they chose to render the sagas in a highly
artificial language, characterized by archaisms and bizarre imitations of the
Icelandic idiom, the Saga Library did much to enhance the reputation of the
mediaeval literature of Iceland in Great Britain and elsewhere. But these trans-
lations have long since outlived their purpose, and so there is aniple reason that
we should welcome a fresh translation of an important saga, which hitherto has
only been available to the English reader in the antiquated and ill-conceived
version of Morris and Magnússon.
The new American version of Eyrbyggja saga is, needless to say, a vast
improvement on “The Story of the Ere-Dwellers.” It is based on two scholarly
editions of the saga which have appeared since 1892 (one hy llugo Gering in
1897, the other hy Einar Ól. Sveinsson in 1935), and the present translators
have a more realistic idea about their task than their predecessors: “It was
undertaken in the belief that a new translation was called for, our conceptions
of the style of such a translation having changed since that of Morris and
Magnússon” (Preface, p. vii).
Professor Schach’s translation of the prose is a considerable achievement;
it is on the whole both readable and faithful and his style seems to suit the
saga well. There are, ltowever, some minor criticisms which the reviewer feels
compelled to make. In the first place, the translation is not entirely free from
misunderstandings of the original. Thus on page 1 the phrase jyrir vestan haf
(i. e. in the British Isles) is rendered ‘in the Western Isles’, which is not only
inaccurate but also made improbable hy the context: Hann lagSi undir sik
SuSreyjar ok gerSisk hp/Singi yfir; sœttisk hann fxí viS ina stœrstu liQfSingja
fyrir vestan haf. It is of course possible that the American professor was
unaware of tlie fact that the term ‘the Western Isles’ is synonymous with ‘the
Hebrides’ (SuSreyjar). It is evidently due to a misunderstanding of the word
hornaskvgl that the translator gives such a distorted description of the shep-
herd’s vision in Chapter II: ‘and he could hear noisy merriment and the hlaring
of horns from there’. According to the original, Þórólfr’s dead kinsmen were
only drinking and making merry (ok lieyrSi þangat mikinn glaum ok horna-
skvpl), but nothing is said ahout a fanfare of trumpets or the blowing of horns.
This is indeed only reasonable since we could hardly expect to find trumpets