4 - Heimskringla, Literalness and the Power of Craft

Summary

DESCRIBING THEIR WORKING practice as they translated Heimskringla (Volumes 3–6 of The Saga Library) (see Introduction, pp. 12–15), Eiríkur Magnússon commented that Morris emended the style ‘throughout in accordance with his own ideal’ (Preface to TSL, 6, p. vii). This remark raises the question of what constituted Morris's ideal of style and why he created it. Though Barribeau has highlighted the fact that in his translations from Old Norse Morris ‘attempted to point out to his English audience the common Germanic roots of Icelandic and English’, and Aho has suggested that ‘when Morris chose English words that were cognate to the original Icelandic, perhaps he was hoping that his readers would somehow thereby sense that old association’, no scholar has satisfactorily shown how the literal style that Morris gradually insisted upon for his saga translations was meant to bridge the temporal and cultural gap between the imagined medieval Icelandic society that he celebrated in the sagas and the degraded British one that he lamented in the present. This chapter, therefore, examines Morris's gradual insistence on literalness in translation and proposes that it represents an increasingly diligent attempt to reconnect his readers with an erstwhile kindred culture, but that this attempt was undermined by a misjudgement on his part of what his audience would recognise as familiar.

The literal style into which Morris chose to translate Old Norse, which first evolved between 1868 and 1876 during the two collaborators’ initial translation project but was further refined in the early 1890s when they redrafted earlier material for The Saga Library, proved controversial from its first appearance. In the broadest terms, its admirers considered it an appropriate register with which to impart the spirit of the sagas to a modern audience, while its detractors felt the opposite. Morris himself denounced it as ‘something intolerable’ to have ‘the simple dignity of the Icelandic saga’ rendered into the ‘dominant literary dialect of the day – the English newspaper language’ (Introduction to CW, vii, p. xvii). In his daughter May's view, it was necessary that he emend Eiríkur Magnússon's ‘unconsidered journalese’ into a language ‘more worthy of the subject’, since ‘the terse grim language of the Sagas’ was ‘far better rendered into [Morris's] more direct phrasing than in the looser speech of modern life’.