Translating the Sagas: Two Hundred Years of Challenge and Response. By John Kennedy. Making the Middle Ages, 5. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007. Pp ix + 219. $87.

If "literary translation does not rate as prestigious scholarship" (vii), as John Kennedy writes in his preface to this new study of Icelandic saga translation (in English), nor offer much pecuniary reward, as any published translator can attest to, one might well ask why people even bother. And though this was doubtless not the question uppermost in the author's mind in compiling this volume, his thoughtprovoking examination of two centuries of saga translation certainly suggests one possible answer: because the task is at least far from uninteresting.

Keneva Kunz
Reykjavík