Translating the Sagas: Two Hundred Years of Challenge and Response (review)

This very timely volume from Brepols is the fifth in the Making of the Middle Ages, an internationally admired series whose editors, Geraldine Barnes and Margaret Clunies Ross, lead the Centre for Mediaeval Studies at the University of Sydney. The volume offers many competent, wide-ranging and helpful reflections on the task of translating the sagas into English from the pioneer work of Thomas Percy on the Gylfaginning in 1770 in his Northern Antiquities (2 volumes). Relatively early on here we are presented with a listing in chronological order of the pioneers' translations (i. e., up to 1868), while subsequent chapters treat of those in the shadow of William Morris (1869-1913), then from 1914 to 1950; and those later in the century. The last chapter is concerned with the future of saga translation, when 'mediaeval studies in general and the study of Old Icelandic literature in particular appear to be under challenge in the universities in which they have been supported' (p. 187).

The last assertion, accompanied with worried reflections that Australian's tertiary education is focused on 'more immediately relevant' subjects, derives solace from the fact that such translations may remain on the computer screen, where (at the Northvegr site: www.northvegr.org/translation/fornaldar.php), there may be found both classic nineteenth century and modern versions, some of which have not appeared complete before in English.

Whether all these sites and versions will remain accessible or not, John Kennedy is clearly of the opinion that earlier quaintness, formalism and archaisms will not persist, since the readers of these new translations are likely to have an urgency to understand 'philosophies and lifestyles strikingly different from those which now prevail in Western societies' (p. 187).

It is this last point which links us up with the central purpose of the series, Making the Middle Ages, to open up mediaevalism to 'a more general readership', explaining existing scholarship's influence on England, mainland Europe and North America to the present. Thus generally in the series, and in this volume in particular, we are concerned with two central perspectives:

• • the origins of mediaeval studies, both within and outside the academy; and,

• • the creation and recreation of the Middle Ages in post-mediaeval art, history, literature and popular culture.

Over and above Kennedy's reflective comments on those guides who have introduced us to the sagas and won our hearts for that age by a particular version which threw open a window on the northern past of Western Europe, the collected comments on the various older styles offer an original, enlightening and paradigm-shifting account, challenging academic 'mediaevalism' itself as to the very foundations of disciplines long practised and even canonised.

Quirky styles, variously fashionable in the past, clearly reflect dubiousness in the history and sociology of knowledge since c.1850, and show how successful such efforts were or are. While Kennedy does not refer to Erich Auerbach or mention nationalist politics, it is clear that the aristocratic antiquarianism of the eighteenth century had been replaced in the nineteenth by a fascination with the Nordic – and the primitive – as against the cosmopolitan and corruptive nature of romance. Thus the late nineteenth-century translations, contrastingly, were concerned with their own nation's past, its legacy and strength, its optimism and dynamic, its (story) space in which to be one's own person.

For most academics, the book offers a series of memorable reminders of one's first reading of various sagas and experience of their styles of translation - as with Magnusson and Morris, Rasmus Anderson, G. Vigfusson and York Powell, Paul du Challou, W. A. Craigie, W. G. Collingwood, and so on. Later names include Hight (1914), Brodeur (1916), G. M. Gathorne-Hardy's The Norse Discoverers of America (1921), or the later saga versions from R. S. Loomis, Eddison, E. Monsen and Hugh Smith, and, more recently, the enormous popularity...