Despite being a small Danish colony on an isolated North Atlantic island with few resources and no towns, Iceland participated in the discovery of folklore during the nineteenth century, and its intellectuals were part of the web of those interested in collecting and publishing folklore. As the articles collected in Terry Gunnell’s Grimm Ripples (2022) show, legends were central in this movement across northern Europe, and such was the case in Iceland. Although there were other earlier efforts, the foundational work was that of Jón Árnason (1819-1888), a librarian in Reykjavík, Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og ævintýri (Icelandic Folktales and Fairy Tales), published in 1862-64, in Leipzig through the auspices of the German legal historian Konrad Maurer; the title is misleading, since the two volumes mainly contain legends. Although he did some collecting himself, most of the materials were collected around the country by persons (mostly clerics) who then sent them to Jón. An English translation of some of the tales in Jón’s work appeared astonishingly quickly (George Powel and Eiríkr Magnússon, 1864-66). Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og ævintýri did not contain all of Jón’s collection, which appeared in print nearly a century later, in a six-volume set with useful apparatus (Árni Böðvarsson and Bjarni Volhjálmsson, 1954-61).
In compiling her attractive anthology of Icelandic legends of the supernatural in English translation from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir draws largely but hardly exclusively on this edition, and, when they are available, from the translations of Powel and Eiríkr Magnússon; in other cases, the translations are by Alice Bower, Sigurður Líndal, or Dagrún herself. She alerts the reader to the textual meddling that Powel and Eiríkr carried out and flags it in the endnotes to the stories. She also warns the reader to expect differences in register between the nineteenth-century and contemporary translations (6-7). I find the use of the different kinds of translations—Victorian versus modern English—to be a perhaps paradoxical strength of the book: readers can see for themselves the influence that style and register have on a text when one cannot approach it in the original language.
A concise but exemplary introduction sets forth the nature of Icelandic society during the period when the legends circulated, the context of folklore collection at the time, and some up-to-date words on the role and function of legends. The book itself is divided into six chapters, and this division is of some theoretical interest, since the chapters focus not on supernatural beings or other phenomena, as in nearly all collections of Nordic legends, but rather on places. This makes sense, given the close association of legends to place. The places Dagrún presents are the Farm, the Wilderness, the Dark, the Church, the Ocean, and the Shore, and in a headnote to each chapter Dagrún explains the specific role of the given place in the society of the time, with useful remarks too on the contemporary situation. My one reservation is that the Dark is not really a place, although it is perhaps a convenient way to group legends about ghosts, as Dagrún does (even if the story “A Naked Woman Deals with a Ghost” takes place “during June, the month of daylight” [147]). The other places also bring with them certain kinds of beings: the hidden people in the Farm, trolls in the Wilderness, sea-monsters in the Ocean, Mermen by the Shore. The Church exhibits greater variety, as is fitting for a space that is by nature somewhat contradictory.
Dagrún appends short explanatory endnotes to most of the stories, pointing out which have become famous in Iceland, the probable thematics, any editorial meddling that may have taken place, the existence of other variants, and so forth. Often the endnotes highlight just one aspect of the text. An example is the endnote to “The Man-Whale” (208-213), a fairly lengthy story about a boy marooned on an island who survives with the help of a supernatural woman with whom he fathers a child; subsequently he disclaims the child and reneges on a promise to have the child baptized, upon which he is changed into a whale that kills some of the human population; finally the father of two of the whale’s victims magics the whale to death. In her endnote, Dagrún rightly points out that in this and similar legends, “the common message in all the variants is the importance of men acknowledging their children who were born out of wedlock, the narrative serving as a warning to men who do not” (213). That is certainly true. A longer endnote might have mentioned that this legend apparently also served an etiological function—the origin of the name Hvalfjörður (“whale-fjord”) and that the narrator tried to enhance the verisimilitude through the use of “tokens,” in this case huge whale bones near the lake where the whale died.
A few stories lack endnotes (e.g., “The White Cap,” 45-6). Perhaps these missing endnotes are meant to inspire the reader to provide some kind of thought commentary?
Numerous black and white illustrations add a useful visual element to the book. Although a few are photos of sites, and some are from Powel’s and Eiríkr Magnússon’s translation or other foreign sources, most are by Icelandic artists. In the captions and other discussions, Dagrún shows not just how Icelandic artists illustrated folklore but also how Icelandic artists were inspired by folklore and more generally the role it played in the history of Icelandic art.
What takes this work from an exemplary legend collection with perfectly appropriate supporting material to a really delightful read are the personal remarks in the introduction and epilogue about Dagrún’s family ghost, a vengeance spirit conjured up by a scorned suitor long ago. Reading of how Dagrún has heard and told this story shows that legends are still around and that they affect people. A folklorist will enjoy reading this, but it should be particularly engaging for a non-folklorist’s edification.
This excellent book begins with an appreciatory foreword by Jack Zipes. If his reputation draws readers to the book, we can only be grateful.
Works Cited
Árni Böðvarsson and Bjarni Volhjálmsson, eds. 1954-61. Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og ævintýri: Safnað hefir Jón Árnason. Ný útgáfa. 6 vols. Reykjavík: Bókautgáfa Þjóðsaga.
Gunnell, Terry, ed. 2022. Grimm Ripples: The Legacy of the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen in Northern Europe. National Cultivation of Culture, 30. Leiden: Brill.
— . 2022. “Jón Árnason and the Collection of Icelandic Folk Legends.” In Gunnel 2022: 385-419.
Powel, George E. J., and Eiríkr Magnússon. 1864-66. Icelandic Legends: Collected by Jón Árnason. London: Richard Bentley.
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[Review length: 1088 words * Review posted on April 13, 2026]