November 2026: Where is Haldenende?

Readers with a good memory may recall the 14 kg of Thule that once landed on my doorstep with a loud thud. Since then, the volumes have been standing on my shelf, and every now and then one of them gives something away. This time the find is considerably lighter than the whole parcel: a single double page at the very end of volume four, after some three hundred and fifty pages of feuds, lawsuits and burnings.

Have a look at the map above. Maps are always fun. If you have ever read Njáls saga, the landscape will seem familiar: the coastline of southern Iceland, the rivers fanning out across the plain, the mountains in the southeast. Now try to find your way around. Gunnar lives at Haldenende, just below the Stromhalde. Njál's farm is Bergthorsbühl. The Waldstromflows past the Inselberge towards the Land-Inseln, and somewhere behind Rotschlipfen lies Thorswald. Iceland, it seems, has quietly moved to the Black Forest.

The map belongs to Andreas Heusler's (1865–1940) translation of Njáls saga, first published in 1914 as the fourth volume of the Sammlung Thule. According to Heusler's note, it is based on Thorvaldur Thoroddsen's map of Iceland and the Danish General Staff maps, with distances that came out only “approximately” right.(1) Topographically, then, an honest attempt. Linguistically, not a single name survived the crossing – or almost not a single one: Oddi stayed Oddi.

Those who wanted to find their way back to Iceland were given a key. In the back of the volume, three pages list the “Verdeutschte isländische Ortsnamen”, some two hundred Germanized place names with their Icelandic counterparts.(2) Haldenende is Hlíðarendi, the “end of the slope”; Bergthorsbühl is Bergþórshvoll; Thorswald is Þórsmörk. Some entries sound almost poetic (Göttertäler for Goðdalir), others rather less so (Gänsesand for Gásasandr) – although, to be fair, the Icelandic names say exactly the same. They just do not sound like it to German ears. My personal favourite, however, is Örnshausen for Arnarbœli – a name that sounds as if it had been taken straight from a map of Duckburg, or rather Entenhausen, as German readers know it. And it is not even Adlershausen: the Icelandic örn stays. Perhaps Heusler did not read it as "eagle" at all, but as the man's name Örn, which would also explain the German genitive -s. Either way, only the farm turns into a German -hausen. Translated, but only halfway.

Today, Germanizing names like this is rare and looks like a considerable liberty. A fictional character like, let’s say, Jon Snow would hardly ever be translated as Hans Schnee, and the same is true for contemporary translations of sagas.(3) Heusler did not see it that way. He was anything but a friend of free adaptation: in his introduction he insists that the Thule series demanded »eine treue Übersetzung, keine Bearbeitung« – a faithful translation, not an adaptation.(4) What he meant was completeness. He refused to cut the conversion of Iceland, the battle of Clontarf or the endless legal proceedings, even though he admits that a shortened saga would have pleased the modern reader more. Names were simply not part of the question. For Heusler, faithfulness was a matter of content, style and syntax. As Julia Zernack has shown, he had already translated the place names in his Hrafnkels saga of 1900, and in an essay of 1920 he defended the practice explicitly: untranslated names, he argued, stick out of the German text »wie tote Flecken«, like dead spots, and reading aloud was the touchstone of a good »Verdeutschung«.(5) In their syntax, the sentences were allowed to sound Icelandic – for Heusler, after all, the Icelandic sentence was a living trace of a common Germanic style. The names, though, had to sound German.

One can read this as an aesthetic decision by a philologist who judged texts, above all, by ear. One can also read it in the context of the series and its publisher, as part of an effort to present the sagas not as foreign literature but as ›our own‹ Germanic heritage. Probably both readings are true at the same time.

Heusler was not alone in this, but the question was far from settled. As Zernack also shows, the treatment of place names was one of the most hotly debated translation problems of the time.(6) Within the Thule series, some translators Germanized the names, while others kept the Icelandic forms and merely fitted them into German grammar. Örnshausenshows that the two approaches were not as far apart as they might seem. And the results could be a little chaotic: Laxárdalr appears as Lachswassertal, Lachsachental or Lachsbachtal, depending on which translation you open.(7)

The verdict from abroad came later. In 1954, Lee M. Hollander mocked the series in Scandinavian Studies for requiring special maps "as imaginary and unreal" as Stevenson's Treasure Island. His example, of all things: "Is anything gained by putting Haldenende for the Old Norse Hlitharendi?"(8) Hollander does not say which map he had in mind. I have a suspicion.

This was my last Find of the Month. Thank you for reading along over the past years – and, as they say in Iceland: bless. Untranslated, of course.

(1) Andreas Heusler (Transl.): Die Geschichte vom weisen Njal, Jena: Diederichs, 1914 (Sammlung Thule 4), p. 386.

(2) Ibid., pp. 383–385.

(3) Cf. Julia Zernack: Geschichten aus Thule. Íslendingasögur in Übersetzungen deutscher Germanisten, Berlin: Freie Universität, 1994 (Berliner Beiträge zur Skandinavistik 3), p. 88.

(4) Heusler: Die Geschichte vom weisen Njal, p. 19. Translations in this contribution are my own.

(5) Cf. Zernack: Geschichten aus Thule, pp. 85–87; Andreas Heusler: Etwas über das Verdeutschen altisländischer Sagas. In: Mitteilungen der Islandfreunde, Vol. 7, 1920, pp. 47–51, here: pp. 48–49.

(6) Cf. Zernack: Geschichten aus Thule, pp. 87–88, 323.

(7) Cf. ibid., p. 324, n. 31.

(8) Lee M. Hollander: The Problem of the Proper Translation of Old Norse Names. In: Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 26/3, August 1954, pp. 125–129, here: p. 125.