Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/11

Rh spared no labour in collating the passages he was in doubt about with the Swedish translation in Peringskiold's edition of the work,—with the Danish translation in the edition begun 1777 by Schöning under the auspices of the Danish government, and finished in 1826 by Thorlacius and Werlaug, in 6 vols. folio,—and with the excellent translation of it into Norse by M. Jacob Aal, published in quarto, in 1838, at Christiania. His notes and explanations are derived mostly from these sources, and principally from M. Jacob Aal's work: and where from his imperfect acquaintance with the Icelandic he found difficulties in the text, especially in the Scaldic poetry, which is often very obscure, he had recourse to M. Jacob Aal's translation as the best guide to the meaning and spirit of the original. That gentleman, as the last effort of a long life spent in commercial and literary pursuits, has translated Snorro Sturleson's Chronicle, and the Sagas of the succeeding times down to the end of Hakon Hakonsson's reign in 1263, for the use of the Norwegian peasantry. He remembered in his youth that these histories, although in the old and almost obsolete language of Peter Clausson's translation of 1599, were a housebook read at the fireside of almost every peasant in Norway; and at a great expense he has published a new translation of them into Norse, and has placed the book, at a merely nominal price considering its magnificence, again within reach of his countrymen. In the present translation the object has been to make it, like M. Jacob Aal's, not merely a work for the antiquary, but for the ordinary reader of history,—for the common man.