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finished the translation. Whether Professor Wilson himself knew Swedish is a little uncertain, but at all events he could be guided in his translation by Amalia von Helwig's German version, which had appeared in 1826.

In the interim Tegnér's poem had become better known in Continental Europe, and the chief periodicals granted commensurate space to the reviews of new editions and translations, partial or complete, with specimens of these renderings. Then the interest spread to America. Longfellow, as we know, had met the Swedish poet Nicander in Italy in 1828, and had become interested in Swedish. It is plausible to suppose that he then heard of Tegnér, if he did not already know of him. By 1835, when he sojourned in Sweden for a brief period-still without ever meeting Tegnér personally-Longfellow knew of five editions of the original, of the two Helwig versions (second ed. 1832), and of Frye's English translation. So he wrote in 1837, in the North American Review, his well-known article on the Frithiof Saga which occupies in a subsequently printed version sixty-two duodecimo pages. It is a tale in prose interspersed with short-some very short-specimen translations from cantos 3, 4, 10, 14, 17-21, and 24.34 A life of Tegnér and an account of life in Sweden at midsummer time are introduced into the beginning of the article. This tribute to Sweden, its famous author, and his masterpiece, by an American professor and poet, in a first-rate periodical, was an event of some moment; and although at least one review on a Scandinavian literary subject had appeared in the United States in the late twenties, Longfellow's contribution was the first truly notable review in America of a Scandinavian achievement. It had undoubtedly a pioneer import, historically. Yet it is difficult to conclude that it had any widespread or profound influence. Thirty years elapsed before an American edition of the Frithiofs Saga saw the light,

35

The total amount of the extracts translated into verse by Longfellow is, however, so small, relatively, that it does not warrant the subsequent reputation which he received as a translator of the Frithiofs Saga. But the magnitude of Longfellow's poetic work on the Saga has, somehow, grown so steadily in the minds of so many non-investigators that it has become nothing short of gigantic. The subject has become almost a legend, with Longfellow as its hero.

35 The Beginning of American Interest in Scand. Lit., by the present writer, Scand. Studies, VIII, 5, p. 133.

and Longfellow's article failed-so far as we can ascertain-to force the existing English translations into a second edition, though it may finally have had some influence on the sales of Stephens' version. But this is conjecture. At all events, American readers remained for a long time satisfied with the exposition of the Frithiofs Saga by their native poet and teacher, and did not seek a complete poetic rendering. Besides, in 1837 Longfellow's name did not mean what it means today. It was only later, when Longfellow himself was sufficiently well known and recognized, that his article of 1837 carried any considerable weight, and by that time the review had been largely forgotten. Mr. Holcomb, as we have seen, knew nothing about it. Before, it had aroused only the superficial interest that any well-told tale would have aroused temporarily, and then only within a comparatively limited circle. We may regret, with Tegnér, that Longfellow-the most illustrious name, after all, among those associated with the Englishing of any part of Frithiofs Saga-did not complete his poetic translation of the poem, and in 1837.

Consul Swan at the close of his Swedish essay which I have quoted several times directs attention to the fact that Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), who was by marriage related to Longfellow, at one time translated a few songs of the Frithiofs Saga, but that he lost the manuscript and nothing was ever published. Col. Higginson refers to his interest in and work on the Tegnérian poems in his Cheerful Yesterdays.36

Not being able to recognize "any living resemblance to the original" in any of the complete British translations then extant, Mary Howitt, the translator of Miss Bremer's novels and travelogues, Englished in 1852 Afskedet and Frithiofs frestelse for The Literature and Romance of Northern Europe, Constituting a Complete History of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland, etc., which was published in collaboration with her husband William Howitt.

"In Axel and Other Poems, translated from the Swedish and published in London, 1867, by Henry Lockwood, we find a translation of the cantos Frithiof och Ingeborg and Frithiof 36 Chap. IV, first paragraph. Higginson began also a translation of Fredrika Bremer's The H.

Family.

kommer till kung Ring.

'Poems, translated from the Swedish, and Original. By Ellin Isabelle Tupper, London, 1872,' contains a version of Isfarten; and the Dublin Review, in July, 1897, published an essay on the Frithiofs Saga by Margaret Watson, including a translation of Ingeborgs klagan and one strophe from Frithiofs frestelse" (Swan). The Young Observer, from August, 1893, to April, 1894, published in Rock Island, Illinois, a translation of the first six cantos of the Frithiofs Saga by the Swedish-American editor E. W. Olson, in which he sought to use, besides his own, the best expressions employed by other translators. This composite, eclectic product is said to possess substantial merit. Swan cherishes the hope that the fragment will some day be finished. Alfred J. Holmes, another SwedishAmerican, published in January, 1899, a translation of Isfarten in the Northland Magazine.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

There are in the strictest sense of the term but fourteen complete English translations of the Frithiofs Saga, thirteen in verse and one in prose. If we include Muckleston's inanely pruned version, we get fifteen as the total number, but no more. To these we may add three prose paraphrases indirectly based on Tegnér's poem and an undetermined, and probably indeterminable, number of partial translations, of which those by Longfellow and Mary Howitt are particularly worthy of note. W. M. Payne did not translate any portion of the Frithiofs Saga, so far as we know; neither did Professor Thomas. Of all the English versions prepared outside of America, only those by Stephens, Blackley, and Hamel went into a second British edition. There is no conclusive evidence that the first three translations ever reached a second printing, though Strong's may have. In fact, the writer has seen but one reference to a second edition of Hamel's. Nor could any of the editions have been very large, for copies of translations were scarce; they went quickly out of print; and time and again a translator started his work believing himself to be the pioneer in the field. The circulation must in all cases have been very limited. We can not declare that the Frithiofs Saga was well known in Eng

land before the late sixties or early seventies, and not any too well then. In 1862, as we have seen, Muckleston, the eighth English translator, had not heard of any other translations.

A little more than half a century ago Bayard Taylor's enthusiasm revived an interest in the Frithiofs Saga in America; and Taylor's name and judgment had in 1867 a more popular appeal than Longfellow's in 1837. At least five editions of the Blackley version have appeared in the United States. A popular stimulus to Tegnér's poem was, also, given by Professor Rasmus B. Anderson, when he included Stephens' translation in his Viking Tales, and since these have passed into several editions we must conclude that a number of readers became acquainted with the Saga through that medium. The most popular American translation before 1914 was the Holcomb version of which about five thousand copies had been sold at that time. About half as many were, ten years ago, credited to the Stephens-Anderson version, says Swan, and an equal number, i.e., about twenty-five hundred, to the translations by Shaw, Blackley and others. Since 1914 however, Shaw's version has required a third printing, and the Lieder-Blackley edition a second impression, each impression comprising one thousand copies. If we add to this the number-certainly not very large of copies imported at various times from England, we may roughly estimate the total number of copies of the Frithiofs Saga in English translation sold in America at fifteen thousand. This is not an imposing figure when we consider that it took a century to dispose of that number; and the variety and number of American editions would lead us to expect many more. But the editions were small-from about 500 to 1000 copies apiece, and some smaller than that—and most readers of the Frithiofs Saga in America would of course read Tegnér in the original or in a German, Danish or Norwegian translation. The present writer is compelled to draw the conclusion, from both personal observation and historical investigation, that among those who must read it in English, the Frithiofs Saga is, and has, relatively, been but little known, except possibly by name: to the vast majority of the exclusively English-reading public, both here and abroad, it is still virtually a closed book.

YALE UNIVERSITY

FRENCH ROMANCE IN EARLY FLEMISH PRINTS

BY MARGARET SCHLAUCH]

HEN, in the fifteenth century, the taste of the fictionconsuming public of Europe turned from metrical romances to prose compilations of the same tales, the writers and readers of the Low Countries were not slow to follow the change in mode. For generations they had been enthralled by orthodox verse romances on the French models, celebrating French heroes and heroines; and the gentle readers of the Netherlands had adopted the alien Arthurian, Carolingian, or Trojan tales for their own. Even the more original Flemish poets, like the author of Seghelijn van Jerusalem, contented themselves with the recombination of old and approved formulas in new order, or minor experiments in episodes and description. So the Flemish prose redactors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries found tried and honored models and material before them, both in France and at home, for the transformation of old martial and romantic poems into prose romances and Volksboeken.

What they produced was a body of fiction on old themes with a singularly changed spirit and atmosphere. Perhaps nowhere did prose romance achieve greater popularity at this time. It may be that the fiction-reading public of prosperous mercantile Flanders had grown; that the numbers of persons who craved the luxury of imaginary excursions into lands of faerie, among monsters and knights and fabulously beautiful ladies, had increased as trade increased; that the furred and brocaded merchants and their bewimpled wives, who still live in the paintings of the age, had learned to share the literary tastes of the aristocracy. Perhaps still other classes were learning to weep for Arthur and sigh over Lancelot and Guinevere. Certain it is that the printing presses of Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges,' Brussels, and the cities of Holland, began to turn out these prose stories

1 Caxton worked on his Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, translated from Lefevre, while he was still in Flanders, 1468-1471. The book is typical of the time and place.

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