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Icelandic Folktales and Legends. By Jacqueline Simpson. Foreword by Magnus Magnusson. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2004. 224 pp. £15.99 (pbk). ISBN 0-75243045-9
This delightful book is a re-issue of Jacqueline Simpson's Icelandic Folktales and Legends, first published in 1972 (London: Batsford and Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press). A foreword by Magnus Magnusson and a note on the second edition by the translator have been added, but the introduction and main corpus of the book remain the same. Nevertheless, this is a very welcome re-publication of a book on Icelandic folklore that has become a classic, and which was becoming increasingly difficult to get hold of.
Jacqueline Simpson translates and presents a wide selection of mostly Icelandic "folk legends"-as opposed to "wonder tales"-from Jón Árnason's monumental twovolume collection Íslenzkar Pjóðsögur og Aefintýri (The Folktales and Fairy Tales of Iceland), published between 1862 and 1864. The focus of her selection is on stories about supernatural beings, ghosts, and magic. The tales are divided into seven thematic categories, corresponding to the seven main parts of the book:...