Canadian Book Review Annual
`Thrand of Gotu transports the reader back in time to a period of travel and discovery.'


University of Toronto Quarterly
`The chief success of Johnston's translation lies precisely in his ability to suggest the kinds of parody, burlesque...'


Book Description
Professor George Johnston, renowned for his translations from Old Icelandic including The Saga of Gisli, has recently translated two thirteenth-century Icelandic sagas from The Flat Island Book. His new volume, Thrand of Gotu, contains `The Saga of the Faroe Islanders' and the `Saga of the Greenlanders'. These two stories were among the first to have been written down, yet their narrative lines display the assurance of a fully developed art. Thrand himself, in the `Saga of the Faroe Islanders' is one of the more complex and memorable villains in European literature.


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Icelandic


About the Author
George Johnston was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1913 and educated at the University of Toronto. At the outbreak of WW II he joined the RCAF and served as a reconnaissance pilot in Africa. After the war he returned to the University of Toronto for graduate studies and then taught at Mount Allison University for two years before joining the faculty of Carleton University where he taught until his retirement in 1979. During that time he became internationally recognized as a translator of the Icelandic sagas.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The two sagas of the Faroe Islanders and Greenlanders may be counted among the 'Sagas of Icelanders', though Icelanders play no part in the first and little in the second, and events in both are remote from Iceland. They may be so categorized on account of their style, which is that of sober history, and not less so when events that we would consider supernatural occasionally take place in them. Both have been assigned approximate dates of composition early in the thirteenth century, among the first sagas to have been written down, yet their narrative lines have the assurance of a fully developed art. Their stories are told with finesse, many events in Faroe Islanders are given a comic slant that seems sophisticated, and both have small casts and little clutter of genealogies. Thrand of Gotu, in Faroe Islanders, is the most fully developed character in either, and one of the more complex and memorable villains of European literature.