'Bottom, thou art translated.'

[davem]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli

A rather obsolescent theory, I'm afraid: work with Greenland ice cores has shown that in Eric's time mean temperatures on the South Greenland coast were much warmer than today, and suitable for Scandinavian-style agriculture. It was the onset of the global cooling known as the 'Little Ice Age' that doomed the Greenland colony- although I suppose they might at that stage tried adapting to Inuit living.

Its unfortunate the whole approach isn't obsolete. There seems to be an attempt on the part of the author to make out the Norse settlers to be a kind of almost proto-fascist group who swept into Greenland/Vinland & attempted to impose the final solution on the natives & brought about their own Gotterdammerung by rejecting the wisdom of those 'noble savages' (the 'Vikings as bad guys' approach as typified in the recent movie 'Pathfinder') whereas the translator of the Graenlendinga Saga seems to want to erase any perceived 'racist' attitudes on behalf of the Norse settlers & present them as a combination of heroic warrior poets & peaceful traders (the 'Vikings as good guys' approach).

To me this kind of 'Hollywoodising' simplification & desire not to 'offend' anybody is a major problem. The good guys must be without fault & the bad guys without virtue - one can't imagine, for instance, a WWII movie aimed at the mass market which showed a Nazi soldier performing a selflessly heroic act or a US soldier as racist or anti-semitic (a British soldier maybe, because, as Tony Parsons put it Hollywood mainly shows the British as 'Nazis with good table manners' - but I digress...). There are stereotypes which the good guys & the bad guys are expected to conform to - when the good guys are good they must be very, very good, but when the bad guys are bad they must be horrid.

EDIT

Of course, the other problem with translation is when the translator uses modern idiom to make a work like LotR more 'accessible'. I've noticed this a few times with these recent translations of the Sagas. phrases like 'Now that I see you're in good shape', or 'The lights (in the hall) went out' & 'When the lights came back on' simply don't work as they put us too much in mind of contemporary neovels, & , in the second instance, of electric lights being switched off & back on. Brian Rosebury commented on the speech patterns of the Orcs in LotR & how Tolkien took care not to make them sound like contemporary gangsters. The language a translator of the Sagas employs must not simply reflect contemporary usage 'because the originals used everyday speech - they must use a language which reflects that these events took place many centuries ago (or in the case of LotR many millennia ago) & so pharaseology which puts us in mind of contemporary drama or electrical appliances is simply out of place.