Bringing Back Viking Violence: Heroes In Icelandic Sagas Get Uncensored
Thursday, August 26, 2010 - 16:28
in Paleontology & Archaeology
The soon-to-be-published and complete Danish translation of all the Icelandic sagas, a literary cornerstone of the Western canon, will fundamentally change our perception of the Viking heroes that populate the stories. Saucy poems, supernatural creatures, explicit violence and emotional outbursts are an integral part of the Icelandic sagas, says assistant professor Annette Lassen from the Department of Scandinavian Research at the University of Copenhagen, but Danish translator N.M. Petersen, whose translations have been the standard for the past 170 years, left passages out and even ignored entire stories because they did not conform to contemporary Romantic norms. read more