Studia Islandica - 01.06.1994, Side 75
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among the garments in day-to-day use among Norwegian
adventurers of the eighth or ninth century. In both these
cases the reader is offered an almost certainly misleading
interpretation, which must be considered regrettable even
though these are only minor characters.
Veblen’s translation is surprisingly inaccurate, tasteless,
and inconsistent in dealing with such problems. He turns
Saurbær into “Dirtyby”, Hellu-Narfi to “Narfi the
Caveman” (instead of Narfi from the farm Hella), and
Víga-Hrappr to “Hrapp the Killer”. He half-translates
many names, places some in brackets, others in quotation
marks, and still others in footnotes, without any discernible
rhyme or reason to the system. Even the diminutive form
sveinki for sveinn is misunderstood and rendered as a per-
sonal name.
Nor does Veblen merit a higher grade for his ortho-
graphy: we have both “the Laxdalers” and “Laxárdal”, the
ö is generally used in Höskuldr (but not in fjörðr), á
appears occasionally and ó in one instance (in Hóf (V 266),
where it shouldn’t be: this is an incorrect rendering for
Hof).
Ms. Arent translates the bynames which have comfort-
able equivalents in English and adds an explanatory note
(unfortunately not on the same page, but only at the back of
the volume) with suggested meanings for others upon their
first occurrence. As she explains, these epithets often pro-
vide important clues to the characters of the individuals
concerned and make it easier to follow them through the
maze of Þórðr, Þorkell, Þorleikr, Þorsteinn, et al. Magnús-
son and Pálsson simplify the orthography of the personal
names and attempt to translate most of the bynames, while
dealing somewhat erratically with most of the placenames.
Readers are assumed to know, for instance, what anglicized
suffixes such as -fjord and -ness mean, yet the part of the
word which precedes them is generally not translated, so