Studia Islandica - 01.06.1994, Blaðsíða 69

67
The reader is thus given scarcely any external assistance
to enable him to appreciate more fully the world into which
he is venturing. This approach perhaps reflects the spirit of
the time: a Victorian romanticism which welcomed the
Northern heroic past with open arms. For Press’s reader-
ship not the least of the attraction of the saga lay in its very
foreignness, at least to judge by the response accorded to
her immediate predecessor, William Morris, for his render-
ings of Norse legends and stories.
Morris is generally considered as the champion of what
could be termed the archaizing approach in saga transla-
tion.2 He believed that Icelandic words should be rendered
by English cognates, even if the English words were rare or
even unrecognisable (see excerpts in Appendix VII).3 His
translations were intended to share with his readers some-
thing of the pleasure he himself found in experiencing this
then remote and practically unknown literature - rather than
(1934:xlviii-lx) for an attempt to explain the discrepancies). The result is, as
Professor Foote points out in his later edition, that dates given in chapters
40-48, 50, 53, 56, 76 and 78 are fairly likely correct, those in chapters 57,
59, 64, 67, 71, and 72 are consistent with the chronology of the saga but
hardly historically accurate, and others are based on conjecture or estimation
and ought to be prefixed with circa. In his edition, however, Prof. Foote has
chosen not to do so, for some reason or other.
2 I use the term as explained by Kennedy (1973:22) for an attitude
which “wishes to make frequent use in translations of words which are now
obsolete in English or survive only in dialects”. As Quirk has demonstrated,
however, “... many of the most striking and unfamiliar words in Morris are
not, properly speaking, archaisms at all: they are rather cases of the re-intro-
duction, with new pronunciations and often with new meanings and into new
environments, of words or word-elements from a past so distant that they are
virtually new words to the modern reader. ... Nor were the syntactical con-
structions or word-order pattems in Morris so much archaic as entirely unfa-
miliar to the nineteenth-century reader; moreover, they are more directed to
simulating the original from which Morris was translating than recapturing
arrangements popular in an earlier form of English.” (Quirk 1953-57:70)
3 Morris’s approach to translation was followed by Proctor; excerpts
from that translation are given in Appendix IV.