Rask Rasmus Kristian.Investigation of the origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language

New edition of the 1993 English translation.— John Benjamins B.V.— 2013.—357p.— ISBN: 978-90-272-7198-3The Niels Ege translation of Rasmus Rask’s prize essay (1818) originally appeared in 1993 as volume 26 of the Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. The publishing house of the Travaux was the illustrious C. A. Reitzel, then owned by the enthusiast Sven Olufsen who however went insolvent in 2008. The books Olufsen held in commission for the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle, i.e., the remaining volumes of the series, not only went out of print but were for the most part destroyed in the chaotic period following the bankruptcy. However,the Circle and its series editor Una Canger managed to salvage enough copies of Ege’s translation to be in a position to offer one of them to the publishing house of John Benjamins for photographic reprint. The original files for the translation had been prepared most judiciously during an extended period of repeated turns of proof reading by Niels Ege and Una Canger, so that they would be as close to perfect as humanly possible. For that reason it would have been an immense waste of effort to do anything but reproduce photographically the original edition of the translation. Together with a new, much fuller introduction it now appears as volume 18 of the Amsterdam Classics in Linguistics series.