Tolkien and The Black Magic
Today was awesome. Among other things (seeing Jurassic Park in 3D), I went to Swedish National Library to read a very special book that is impossible to find (unless you’re willing to pay 2500 SEK for a used one online - I am not).
It’s titled Tolkien and the black magic, and written by Åke Ohlmarks who infamously translated LOTR to Swedish (the first time, a few years ago we finally got a new translation).
I mean the cover alone is amazing, don’t you think?
A little back story: Åke Ohlmarks translation was crap. Really. There’s several problems with it: one is that Ohlmark belongs to the old school of translating, where it’s not so much about translating the work, as interpreting it. Like this:
Tolkien: “Night slowly passed. The sun rose. The hobbits rose rather later.”
Ohlmarks: “The night slowly approached dawn. The sun rose, but hobbits in general woke up a a little later than that.”
Tolkien: “The company was in the big common-room of the inn.”
Ohlmarks: “The rest of the guests were situated in the inn’s big common-room, the inn-keeper’s hall.”
Now there’s nothing wrong with these translations, but when the entire book is like this, using a prose much different from Tolkien’s own, it becomes weird. And Tolkien didn’t like it.
In fact, Tolkien hated it so much he published a guide on how to translate his works because of it (well, that and the Dutch translation, which apparently sucks too), because a lot of the names weren’t translated the way he wanted them to. They had to have the same meaning in both English and Swedish to please Tolkien, not just sound similar (so in Ohlmarks translation Frodo and Bilbo’s last name is Bagger, which means ram, in the new translation it’s Secker, from “‘säck” meaning bag).
And I think this is what pissed Ohlmarks of evenually.
Here’s the introduction to this book, translated by someone at Tolkien Gateway:
It has come to attention that, especially during the last years, the multitude of Tolkien societies (thousands in America, and not a few in Sweden) have degenerated to a kind of KU-KLUX-KLAN with a worship of open violence, crude orgies, alcohol and drug abuse. Murders have been commited, recurrent cases of assaults, kidnapping and desecrations of churches and sacraments.
Åke Ohlmarks, the man responsible for the translation and introduction of Tolkien in Sweden and who is also internationally recognized as one of the foremost experts on Tolkien, reveals in this uncanny book how far it has evolved even in our contry.
Yes, sitting in a quiet library reading room, it was REALLY hard not to laugh out loud when I read that.
The first chapter of his book is, quite frankly, unreadable. All he does is list a bunch of evil or cultish organisations, implying Tolkien and his fans are like them. They are compared to Ku Klux Klan, nazis, and Jim Jones (yeah, the guy that forced 900 people to commit suicide) and whole bunch of others I can’t even remember. It’s not coherent at all, he just lists them, and says the Tolkienists are that bad.
The next chapter is called “The half-witted old man Tolkien”. He never refers to Tolkien by his name, it’s always “Old Man Tolkien”. The fans are constantly referred to as children, or other deragotory words (all of them meaning 'children’, but not words you’d use about grown men and women… or actual children for that matter).
And if you’d thought that Ohlmarks would make any sense ever, here’s where you’d realize you were wrong. He starts out by hating on hobbits, since they are forever children with no adult supervision that walks around barefoot in the woods, and then goes on to hate a little more on Bilbo specifically, and his “never-ending birthday party”. Ohlmarks knows for sure Tolkien wrote this part of the book, and The Hobbit, because they’re crap.
After they leave Bree though, Ohlmarks thinks the books change dramatically in style. So much, that he does in fact not believe Tolkien wrote it himself. His guess is CS Lewis wrote part II-VI of LOTR, because this explains why Lewis said he liked it. Because you wouldn’t hate on something your wrote yourself, amirite?
If Ohlmarks hated Tolkien, that’s nothing compared to his feelings for Christopher Tolkien though. He is repeatedly called untalented, stupid and money-hungry, and Ohlmarks claims that C Tolkien has gone off to some unknown location to aviod paying taxes (IDK if this is true, it could be, but I’m not giving Ohlmarks credit for shit, so).
There’s another chapter dedicated to Silmarillion, which Ohlmarks was forbidden to translate. He did not like this. Also, he did not like Silmarillion, he claims, because it’s dumb. To prove this, he quotes a few pages from Silmarllion and adds snarky comments to them. It’s pretty hilarious, to be honest.
He is really mad at Tolkien for complaining about his translation though, because Tolkien didn’t know Swedish. Except, he kinda did, according to everyone else. Not according to Ohlmarks though, and that Tolkien complained about the translation of the word “hobbit” proves this. According to Ohlmarks you can’t possibly translate “hobbits” to “hobbitar” (Ohlmarks translated it “hober”, singular: “hob”), because Swedes would associate to sugar cubes (“sockerbitar”, except bitar in hobbitar and sockerbitar is not pronounce the same) or even worse, dicks (“pittar”). I am not making that shit up, and I am pretty sure no one I’ve ever talked to has made the connection between hobbits and dicks except for Ohlmarks.
These days we call them hobbitar, and I can only imagine Ohlmarks spinning in his grave because of it. Although, considering how famous LOTR is these days, that alone would piss him off.
It’s interesting though, because Ohlmarks knows his Tolkien. It’s clear, because he references it a lot, alhough most of his assumptions are rather dumb (he sees every character in the book as an allegory for WWII, and hates Tolkien for it). However there’s one thing he refuses to get right: he makes several mentions of Merry killing the Witch-King. Why does he do that? Because in his translation, Merry does! He changes the pronoun “she” in the sentence where the Nazgul is struck down to “he” for no apparent reason - and in Tolkien and the black magic he still maintain he got it right. This isn’t the only time in his translation that he radically misses what Tolkien is trying to say, but it’s probably the worst offender because it completely changes the plot (although, to be fair, at one point Legolas says he has children, which he does not in the original).
I didn’t have time to finish the book, and the library doesn’t let you bring them home, so I’ll have to go back and read the last 50 pages later next week. From what I can tell, he claims a Tolkien fan calling himself Gandalf made Ohlmark’s wife burn down his house, so clearly I’ve got more awesome things to look forward to.
Åke Ohlmarks died two years after publishing Tolkien and the black magic, and it’s a shame because if he was alive today I can only imagine him tagging his hate all over Tumblr. It would’ve been glorious.
It’s also rather sad, the whole thing, because before he snapped he was huge fan of Tolkien, was frequently invited to dinners with Swedish Tolkien societies, and even cosplayed Bombur at one point.
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