Thanks for the link, Grace. You're right, Dasent's version is no help
to us at all here:

"So it shall be," she answered, and sang two songs, in which she
revealed the cause of their misunderstanding; and when Mord
pressed her to speak out, she told him how she and Hrut could not
live together, because he was spellbound, and that she wished to
leave him.

Hún svarar: "Þegar hann kemur við mig þá er hörund hans svo mikið að
hann má ekki eftirlæti hafa við mig en þó höfum við bæði breytni til
þess á alla vega að við mættum njótast en það verður ekki. En þó áður
við skiljum sýnir hann það af sér að hann er í æði sínu rétt sem aðrir
menn."

The original Old Norse certainly does use euphemisms, as we've seen,
but is still much more explicit than this. Magnús Magnússon and
Hermann Pálsson in their introduction describe Dasent's translation as
"a magnificent and pioneering work, scrupulously accurate and heroicly
phrased; but it has a delibereately archaic flavour, a too literal
rendering of the Icelandic style and syntax, that make it
unnecessarily alien to the modern reader." But in this passage, it's
neither accurate nor literal. A lot is left out, and concepts
introduced that aren't in the source text: "Sang two songs"??

LN




--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "Fred and Grace Hatton"
<hatton@...> wrote:

>
> This translation completely glosses over the entire interaction - -

I take

> it that it was done in Victorian times and that one couldn't write such
> details!
> http://omacl.org/Njal/
>
> Thanks, Alan, the word order thing did help me with með. I think I

see how

> it works now.
> Grace
> Fred and Grace Hatton
> Hawley Pa
>