The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1956, Síða 40

38
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Summer 1956
She journeyed six times to Iceland be-
tween 1908 and 1914 and worked in
libraries and visited archives in Stock-
holm and Copenhagen and a number
of German Cities. She had planned
especially a history of Iceland for
which notes are extant. Among her
writings are: Kindred and Clan, The
Elder Edda, Scandinavian Drama, and
Edda and Saga, which was her last
book published a year before she pass-
ed away in 1932.
In her introduction to Edda and
Saga, Dame Phillpotts wrote in part
as follows: “The Eddie heroic poems
represent the ancient thought and
experiences of the race to which we
belong. Without their help we can-
not understand the attitude to life of
our own forefathers. The ideas under-
lying them were the common heritage
of the English and Scandinavian
peoples. To a great extent they were
the common heritage of most of the
Teutonic peoples, for a similar attitude
to life can be traced in German stories,
especially in the Nibelungenlied, which
is a piece of the ancient tradition re-
shaped in the age of Chivalry. . . There
is another point which we must bear
in mind in considering Edda and Saga.
The tradition is not narrow or insular
or provincial. But neither are the
authors, whether Norwegian or Ice-
landers. In the period which saw the
creation of much of this literature, in
the form in which we have it, that is
from, the eighth to the thirteenth cen-
tury, the Norse language became cur-
rent over a large part of Europe. It was
spoken, with small local differences,
in the whole of Scandinavia, in con-
siderable area in England, Scotland and
Ireland, in part of France (for a time
at least), on the southern and eastern
sides of the Baltic, as far south as the
great Swedish Kingdom centered in
Kiev, the mother of Russian cities.1 It
became a recognized language in Con-
stantinople, for it was the speech of
the Emperor’s bodyguard. It was prob-
ably used by traders on the shores of
the Caspian, ... Its limit westward
was no nearer than the coast of Mas-
sachusetts, for it was the first Euro-
pean language to be spoken in the new
world. . . Old Norse literature, then,
belongs to a time when Norse was
one of the most widely spread langu-
age of Europe.”
Dr. Halldor Harmannsson, former
Curator of the Icelandic Eiske Col-
lection, at Cornell University, record-
ed in his Islandica, volume XXIII,
1934, a list of the translations of Old
Icelandic literature, which shows that
the Elder Edda and parts of the Prose
Edda, have been translated into thir-
teen languages. It further shows that
a large selection of the Sagas of Ice-
landers has been translated into from
six to ten languages. Almost all the
translations have been done by non-
Icelanders who have perfectly master-
ed the language. In volume XXIV of
Islandica, 1935, he gives a listing, full
twenty-four pages, of the names of
writers, and their works, where Old
Icelandic literature has been used as
subject matter or source material.
During the period from 1908 to 1935
seventy-five percent of those who have
used Old Icelandic literature as source
material or subject matter are non-
Icelandic.
Since the turn of the century the Ice-
1 • According to Jon Jonsson’s Vikingasaga
(1914), which is based on Snorri Sturluson’s
Heimskringla and the Chronicles of Nestor,
this kingdom was founded by northern Vik-
ings in 862 and gradually became the largest
independent nation in Europe. It was all
conquered by the Mongol hordes in 1240
except the Principality of Novgorod, which
had seperated from it in 1150 and was an
independent Trade Republic until about 1480
when it was united with Russia.