Translation of The Lord of the Rings into Swedish
Ohlmarks’s version was superseded in 2005 by Erik Andersson's more direct translation of the prose, with Lotta Olsson's rendering of the embedded poetry.
Ohlmarks's experience translating Old Norse enabled him to find suitable old Swedish words for some of Tolkien's terms: Tolkien scholar Anders Stenström (pen name Beregond) praises his choices of alv for "elf", and of väströna (modelled on norröna, North Sea coast people of the heroic age) for "Westron".
On the other hand, Beregond notes, Ohlmarks failed to use harg for the cognate "harrow" in Dunharrow, or skog for "shaw" in Trollshaws, things that "should have been obvious".
[6][T 2][T 3] He thought Ohlmarks's version was even worse than Shuchart's 1956–57 Dutch translation, as is evident from a 1957 letter to his publisher Rayner Unwin:[T 4] The enclosure that you brought from Almqvist &c. was both puzzling and irritating.
[T 10] Some of the initial reception was warm; author and translator Sven Stolpe wrote in Aftonbladet that Ohlmarks "has made a ’swedification’ [försvenskning] – he has found wonderful, magnificent, Swedish compound words, he has translated poem after poem with great inspiration, there is not a page in his magnum opus that does not read like original Swedish work by a brilliant poet".
In 2000, Leif Jacobsen [sv] of Lund University's Institute of Linguistics noted among other things Ohlmarks’s confusion/conflation of Éowyn and Merry in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, and wrote that "There can be no doubt that the Swedish translation is defective and in many ways a failure".
[13] In 2004, Malte Persson wrote in Göteborgsposten that the translation was "so full of misunderstandings, misconceptions, inconsistencies, and arbitrary additions that it must mean that Ohlmarks was either significantly worse at English than Icelandic, or that he had not taken the assignment seriously".
[14] Also in 2004, Tolkien scholar Anders Stenström (pen name Beregond) wrote that Ohlmarks’s translation contains numerous factual errors, mistranslations of idiomatic expressions, and non-sequiturs.
[15] Andreas Brunner commented in Sydsvenska Dagbladet that Ohlmarks' prose is hyperbolic in style, where the original uses simple or even laconic language.
[17] Andersson retained some of Ohlmarks's more popular and well-established choices, such as Vidstige (roughly ”Wide-walker”) for "Strider", Midgård for Middle-earth and Fylke for the Shire.
[19] Malte Persson wrote in Göteborgsposten that "the new translation follows the original's fluent prose very closely, and only a linguistic pedant could find anything to object to".
Ohlmarks omits the "Fellowship" from Volume I, giving what Strömbom suggests is a more epic feeling to the title, where Andersson's is more grounded in reality.
[1] Commentators including Petter Lindgren in Aftonbladet have remarked on Ohlmarks's wordy text compared to Andersson's more laconic version.
[20] Strömbom notes the following as an instance of the difference in styles and length:[1] Aftonbladet wrote of the poetry that "Lotta Olsson has had the thankless task of translating the book's numerous verses which many readers skip, though she does it well and economically".
