Lars Wollin: Det humanistiska bibelverket. Kring den nordiska reformationens bibelöversättning. 2024. Samlingar utgivna av Svenska fornskriftsällskapet, Serie 1, Svenska skrifter 105. 409 pp. ISBN 978-91-979881-9-3.
The study is a piece of philology, combined with historical translation studies. It is intended to update, further develop and partly revalue the conception of the Swedish and Danish Reformers’ translation of the Holy Bible into the contemporary vernaculars, carried out in the second quarter of the 16th century.
A new angle of approach is the view of the early Reformation Bible in Scandinavia as a coherent complex of text, along with the attempt to sharply distinguish between the process of translation, i.e., the actual linguistic shift, and the subsequent revision of the text before printing. To that end, the term and the notion of translation philology has been coined. A third new feature in this biblical approach in Scandinavian philology is the focusing on the grammatical (syntactical) structure of phrases and sentences, not so much on the lexicon and vocabulary.
After an introductory chapter (1), the content of the book falls into two main parts. In the first (chapters 2–5), the focus is on “the documents and history”, in the second (chapters 6–15) on “the documents and language”.
Though treating the entire East Scandinavian Bible translation in the formative early Reformation epoch on the same methodologial terms, the author pays particular attention to the Swedish New testament 1526. The complicated preparation of this pioneering work is analysed and described with a method – and partly even a result – sharply opposed to traditional views.
Keywords: the Bible, the Reformation, translation history, the Union of Kalmar, history of Scandinavian languages, Gustavus Vasa, Christian III, Olaus Petri, Hans Brask, Christiern Pedersen