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The Folk-Stories of Iceland.

Article Excerpt
The Folk-Stories of Iceland. By Einar Olafur Sveinsson. Viking Society for Northern Research, Text Series 16. London: University College London, 2003. 318 pp.

The international status of works in folk-narrative scholarship (as in many other fields of studies) largely depends on their availability in one of the major Western languages; indeed, more and more even the existence of German or French versions does not guarantee their widespread usage in the Anglophone academic world. English translations have therefore gradually become fundamental desiderata, if awareness of important advances in folk-narrative research and in adjacent disciplines are to be made possible and their fragmentation or duplication is to be avoided. One of the most striking examples of the delayed impact of a seminal work on folk-narrative scholarship in English is Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, the original of which was published in Russian as Morfologija skazki in 1928; it was, however, not until its translation into English in 1958 and especially a second, revised edition in 1968, that it had any real impact on scholarly thinking in the English-speaking world. Similarly, Kaarle Krohn's Folklore Methodology, an augmented edition of his lectures given in German in Oslo in 1924-1925 and published in 1926 under the title Die folkloristische Arbeitsmethode, did not see the light of day in English until 1971. The dissemination of the work of the otherwise influential German scholar Kurt Ranke has likewise been severely limited by the absence of English versions of his seminal publications.

It is therefore reassuring that the book under review provides an opportunity to read in English The Folk-Stories of Iceland, one of the two major publications from the eminent Icelandic folklorist Einar Olafur Sveinsson. The history of this welcome translation is a lengthy and complicated one: the original was published in 1940 under the title Um islanskar pjodsogur, and according to the preface, its first translation was begun by Benedikt S. Benedikz in 1970; in this he was assisted by Jacqueline Simpson, while Sveinsson himself made some revisions in the Icelandic text, to which Einar G. Petursson also contributed up to 1980. Contributions to the translation of part 1 and the first two sections of part 2 were also made by him and Anthony Faulkes; and the final edition was at the hands of the latter. It is therefore truly a cooperative work of scholarship, the additional...