Studia Islandica - 01.06.1994, Blaðsíða 185
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value, the sagas attracted the interest of many a scholar as
relics of a fascinating civilization and of ancient Germanic
culture. The most prolific, most renowned, and most out-
spoken of the proponents of this culture was without doubt
William Morris.
Morris speaks of the Icelanders as:
... a specially intellectual family of one of the most active of those
races, to whom fate, which has deprived them of so much, has allot-
ted the honourable task of preserving the record of the thoughts, the
aspirations, and the imaginations of their earliest ancestors. (Morris
and Magnússon 1891:v)
Morris, in common with a number of 19th-century
English translators, subscribed to the idea that a separate
language, combining elements of both the source and target
languages should be created for the purposes of translation.
In an essay on Homeric translation, F.W. Newman, for
instance, maintained that a translator should preserve each
peculiarity of the original, “with the greater care the more
foreign it may be”, (1914:313-77) a working maxim Morris
most certainly put into practice.
Morris’ translations are deliberately, consciously archaic, full of
such peculiarities of language that they are difficult to read and
often obscure. No concessions are made to the reader, who is
expected to deal with the work on its own terms, meeting head-on,
through the strangeness of the TL, the foreignness of the society that
originally produced the text.1 (Bassnett-McGuire 1980: 67-68)
Pronouncedly different from the Romantic view is the
following assessment voiced by Thorstein Veblen in his
introduction to the saga. As a result, his translation takes a
completely different approach:
... Laxdæla remains also an ethnological document of a high order;
perhaps standing in this respect at the head of the list. So that it is
1 Morris never published a full translation of Laxdœla saga, only
excerpts in several compendiums.