The Complete Sagas of Icelanders including 49 Tales (review)

318 Reviews The Complete Sagas of Icelanders including 49 Tales, General Edit Viar Hreinsson, Leifur Eiriksson Publishing, Reykjavik, 1997; 5 vols.; R.R.P. US$500. This, the first English translation of the complete corpus of Icelandic sagas of Icelanders, or family sagas, together with a number of short tales (pxttir), is a major achievement of its editors and its teams of translators and advisers w h o have worked together to ensure the overall publication's consistency of methodology and general scholarly approach. It comes handsomely packaged as a five-volume boxed set, printed on quality paper. It is, as its dark binding and gold lettering proclaim, a collection of 'Viking Age Classics', complete with no less than three Forewords by Icelandic dignitaries and the financial support of several Icelandic banks, insurance companies and Icelandair, the work's main sponsor. All these seals of official approval and support clearly demonstrate the importance of the medieval sagas of Icelanders in the modern Icelandic construction of nationhood and political independence. This English translation is a combined effort of native speakers of Icelandic and native speakers of English, most of w h o m are also scholars of Old Icelandic. The translators are drawn from a number of English-speaking countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia. The translation is designed to be as authentic and informed an experience of the world of the medieval sagas as it is possible for people to have who are not medieval Icelanders and cannot read Old Icelandic! There are a good n u m b e r of English translations of individual Old Icelandic sagas already in existence, although not all had been translated up to the time of the present publication. They vary a good deal in quality and character. Some are excellent, Reviews 319 with useful introductions and notes, while others are mediocre and inaccurate, still others being presented in stilted, archaic or strained English style. The Complete Sagas of Icelanders has numerous advantages over existing translations, w h e n these are considered as a group. It contains all k n o w n sagas that belong to the genre of family sagas, as they are usually called in English (the Icelanders calls them 'sagas of Icelanders', hence thetitleof this collection), together with a number of short tales. It does not, by the way, include numerous other prose works that also go by the name of 'saga' in Icelandic—historical sagas, sagas of legendary and heroic kind, and indigenous or translated romances. This collection tries for a uniform approach to questions of translation and the provision of information to the reader about the cultural world whose nature is taken more or less for granted by the saga authors. The editors have supplied m a n y helpful charts, maps and notes and have included in Volume Five a glossary of key concepts and special terms that refer to specifically Icelandic cultural phenomena that the ordinary reader is unlikely to know, words like 'Althing' and 'Moving Days', for example. These words are italicised in the translations, so the reader knows to look them up. Another useful resource is a cross-referenced index of saga characters, which tells at a glance all the sagas in which a particular character appears. This handy list (which will be useful to scholars perhaps even more than the general reader) would have been even better if it had cross-referenced the characters on the basis of kinship as well. A further advantage of the present collection is that the translators pay serious attention to the poetry which is embedded in many saga texts. This poetry, called 'skaldic', is complex and esoteric, both in diction and verse form, but it is of very great literary interest. Previous editors and translators have not, on the 320 Reviews whole, m a d e a very good job of presenting it to the non-specialist reader, and there is no doubt that this is a difficult undertaking. In the present collection, however, a number of the sagas are particularly well translated w h e n it comes to the poetry (several of the translators are experts in poetry...