Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1961, Page 147

RITFREGNIR
143
Apart from these inconsistencies the translator does not hesitate to use more
than one form for the same name; Bitra, for example, has no less than four:
‘Bitra’, ‘the Bitrafjord’, ‘the Bitra District’, ‘the Bitrafjord District’. But my
main objection to many of the English forms used in this translation is that they
sound so unconvincing and artificial.
Another curious feature about these place names is the indiscriminate use of
the definite article, which can be seen froni sorne of the examples quoted above.
Many of the explanatory foot-notes are useful, particularly for the non-special-
ist reader, but 1 should have liked them to be much fuller. The note on page 7
is based on a misconception. (“Since inn austrœni may mean either ‘the Eas-
terner’, i. e., ‘the Norwegian’ or ‘renegade, sheep straying froin the flock’, there
is a telling irony in the epithet”). The second meaning attributed to inn aust-
rœni has no authority. Note 1 on page 3 is misleading. There is no reason to
assume that the replacement of Hróljr by Þóróljr has anything to do with po-
pular etymology. ft is practically certain that the element Þór- simply replaced
the element Hró(ð)- in Hrólfr while the second element -óljr remained the same.
The author of Eyrbyggja saga was undoubtedly aware of the fact thal Hróljr
was a compound of Hróð-úljr as Þóróljr was a compound of Þór-úljr.
Professor Ilollander’s verse translations are decidedly the weakest part of the
book. Their diction is as unimaginative as it is artificial. The verbal richness of
scaldic poetry, with its evocative imagery and subtle allusions to heroic legend
and myth, is reduced to a jumble of absurdities. Professor Hollander seems to
have a predeliction for archaic words (sithen, leman, wight, hight, etc.), his
word order is extraordinarily unhappy and unfamiliar, and he coins a number of
ludicrous and unintelligible word combinations which he labels ‘kennings’ and
which have to be explained in foot-notes.
As an example of his style I should like to quote stanza 15:
Odious, armring-giver,
even to think — did bloody
swords dissever limbs — of
slaughter at my farm-yard
wlien, thrown in thing-of-wcapons
through the moon-of-gunwales,
murderous spears dismembered
many a tree-of-combat.
In his Preface the translator defends his method as follows (p. vii):
With regard to the Scaldic poetry here reproduced it should he borne
in mind that this genre of Old Norse poetry has an archaic vocabulary
radically different from prose; that its word order is free to an extra-