Ja, til Island! The Icelandic Reception of Hærmændene paa Helgeland

The final lines of Hærmændene paa Helgeland point to Iceland, whither the survivors of Ibsen's 1858 Viking drama fare on longships. "Aye" says Ørnulf to Gunnar, "to Iceland." What befalls them there, we are not told. However, the play does have an Icelandic fifth act, after a fashion. More than thirty years later, the play lands in Reykjavík as Víkingarnir á Hálogalandi, an Icelandic translation by Indriði Einarsson. The performance of this work in 1892, also directed by Indriði,¹ was the first production of any Ibsen play in Iceland and one of the very first performances of drama on the Icelandic stage (it occasioned the printing of Iceland's first playbill). This was a historic moment, and the Icelandic press gave it attention as such.

It is pleasing to write about this encounter between Henrik Ibsen and Indriði Einarsson at the present historical moment. Not only is the year 2006 the centennial of Ibsen's death but it is also ninety-nine years since Indriði Einarsson first publicly called for the foundation of an Icelandic national theatre ("Þjóðleikhús"). Indriði died in 1939, having seen the foundation laid and the walls erected, but the theatre would not be formally opened for eleven more years. He is remembered today as the father of the National Theatre of Iceland, Þjó ð leikhú sið, where Peer Gynt is being performed this 2006 season as part of the international celebration of Ibsen's work. It seems appropriate, therefore, to try to increase knowledge among scholars of theatre in general and Ibsen in particular of Indriði Einarsson's work and his role in bringing Ibsen to the Icelandic stage.

In one way, there is nothing very remarkable about an Ibsen play's having being translated into Icelandic in 1892. Ibsen was, after all, a major cultural figure, and his works were translated into many languages and performed widely already during his lifetime, Hærmændene included. Nonetheless, this particular linguistic and physical translation is a remarkable case. It constituted a sort of homecoming for the play's subject matter. Ibsen sought inspiration for Hærmændene in medieval saga literature, especially in Egils saga, Njáls saga, and The Saga of the Völsungs [Völsunga saga], long prose narratives written in Iceland during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Not only did the borrowed elements from these sagas make a round trip when the play was translated and produced in Iceland, they had already undergone translation on their way to Ibsen in the first place. That is to say, as Ibsen could not read the language of the sagas (Old Norse-Icelandic stands in roughly the same relationship to Norwegian as Latin does to Spanish), his access to saga literature depended on translations by scholars like N.M. Petersen and C.C. Rafn (on Ibsen's use of sources, see Lynner).

The play, however, offers the audience the pleasurable illusion of witnessing the events of saga first-hand. The medium of theatre allows the purported words of the saga age to fall directly on the ear of the theatregoer, as if unmediated by the sagas as literary works. In the case of a Norwegian theatregoer, the illusion is greater for seeming unmediated by any process of translation from one language to another. By putting typical "saga life" on stage and recasting in dramatic form what had been given epic form in The Saga of the Völsungs,² Ibsen provides his audience with an apparently immediate experience of the ancient world of saga, diverting attention from how highly mediated and circuitous that access has actually been.

In stark contrast, Indriði Einarsson and the Icelandic audience for whom he translated Ibsen's play already had relatively unmediated access to medieval saga literature. Contemporary Icelanders knew many of the sagas well and read them in the original language with as much ease as a modern English speaker reads Shakespeare. They depended on printed editions made on the basis of medieval manuscripts - advertisements for an inexpensive popular...