Seal Mother

The narrator of Cow Seal is a woman who lives by Iceland’s northernmost coast, where the struggle for life is hard, winters attack with sea ice and cold. Her husband dies, a child dies, and other calamities follow, but the woman and her children never give up. They endure. The woman helps a seal give birth – the boundaries between man and animal, culture and nature disappear in this magical book. The text is chiselled, the poems traditional in form with alliteration and internal rhyme reminiscent of ancient metres which underscore the timelessness and relevance of the work to the constant struggle for life that is the lot of both humans and animals.

Gerður Kristný is a phenomenally energetic Icelandic writer, having produced 18 books of fiction and non-fiction prose, as well as children's books and poetry, in the 18 years since the appearance of her first. She has won numerous prizes and awards, from the Icelandic Journalism Award in 2005 to the Icelandic Literature Prize in 2010 for Bloodhoof. She says she chooses each word of her poetry carefully so rarely needs to revise and it certainly shows in this volume. Rory McTurk graduated from Oxford in 1963, took a further degree at the University of Iceland, Reykjavík in 1965, and after teaching at the universities of Lund and Copenhagen, and then University College, Dublin, took up a post at Leeds University in 1978. In addition to his two authored books, Studies in Ragnars Saga Loðbrókar and its Major Scandinavian Analogues (Oxford, 1991) and Chaucer and the Norse and Celtic Worlds (Aldershot, 2005), he has edited the Blackwell Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2004), and co-edited, with Andrew Wawn, a volume of essays, Úr Dölum til Dala (Leeds, 1989) in commemoration of the Icelandic scholar Guðbrandur Vigfússon (1827-89). He has also contributed five edited texts to A New Introduction to Old Norse, Part II, Reader (5th edition, ed. Anthony Faulkes, London, 2011). His publications also include two Icelandic saga translations, two book-length translations of scholarly works on Icelandic topics (one from Swedish, the other from Icelandic), numerous essays and articles in journals, and a translation (published in 2007) of an Icelandic novel, The Thief of Time, by Steinunn Sigurðardóttir (Reykjavík, 1986).