A Swedish tragedy

Åke Ohlmarks? 

"Tolkien och den svarta magin" is a book best forgotten. Thankfully, it only exists in a Swedish edition. No translation has ever been made. Let's hope it stays that way.

The author, Åke Ohlmarks, translated Tolkien's famous trilogy "Lord of the Rings" to Swedish in 1959-61. Tolkien himself hated this translation, and never authorized it. Yet, it was the only Swedish translation of LOTR until a few years ago. Ohlmarks (perhaps deliberately) mistranslated and distorted many of the names of places and persons in the novels. Thus, he called Rivendell "Vattnadal", which means Water Valley. In reality, Rivendell is based on two ancient English words meaning Rift Valley. Frodo Baggins was named Frodo Bagger in Ohlmark's version. In English, the name refers to a bag, but in Swedish, it refers to a ram. Many Swedish children who read LOTR imagined Frodo to have two horns!

Ohlmarks wanted the names in the LOTR to sound as "Swedish" as possible. In this, he succeeded to a large extent. Indeed, his idiosyncratic translation may have been one of the reasons why Tolkien's epic became so popular in Sweden. Still, the translation issue created a conflict between Tolkien and Ohlmarks, a conflict deepened by the fact that Ohlmarks appended a foreword to his translation, arguing that the novels were allegorical. For instance, he claimed that the ring symbolizes the atomic bomb. He also shortened the original text somewhat, and at one point made a serious translation mistake: in Ohlmark's version, the Witch-king of Angmar is killed by Merry, rather than by Éowyn!

Tolkien's son Christopher hated Ohlmarks even more, and eventually prohibited him from translating "The Silmarillion". The conflict between Ohlmarks and the two Tolkiens was something of a tragedy, since Ohlmarks, despite being both old and learned, nevertheless loved fantasy and participated in fantasy re-enactments. I believe he was over 70 years old when he agreed to play "Bombur the Fat Dwarf" at a fantasy party organized by the Tolkien Society in Sweden!

I never met Ohlmarks myself (he died in 1984), but I saw him on TV once, naturally together with some teenagers dressed in elvish outfits. The man was apparently a kind of maverick scholar of religion with an extensive knowledge of foreign languages, including Old Icelandic, French and Italian. However, some of Ohlmarks' translations are considered idiosyncratic, including one of the Icelandic Edda and another of Nostradamus. He also wrote a couple of novels set during the Viking Age (which I haven't read). I suspect that Mr. Ohlmarks considered himself to be a misunderstood genius of sorts. Small wonder he clashed with Tolkien, a man who believed that LOTR was written under some kind of divine inspiration!

At the end of his life, Ohlmarks made a sudden and inexplicable U-turn. He showed up at a fantasy event (I believe it was held in the Humlegården park in Stockholm), screaming and shouting that "The Silmarillion" was sheer crap, and that Christopher Tolkien was a sociopath. In 1982, just two years before his death, Ohlmarks wrote "Tolkien och den svarta magin", a truly bizarre book in which he claims that the Tolkien societies the world over are Satanists and responsible for at least one ritual murder. Ohlmarks further claims that a Satanist nicknamed Gandalf from the Swedish Tolkien Society attacked him and his wife in their house in Sweden, that LOTR was really written by C.S. Lewis, and that he is sorry for ever having translated it into Swedish. He also directs personal attacks at a competing compiler of Tolkien lore, at Christopher and naturally at Tolkien himself, who is depicted as quite insane. For some reason, Ohlmarks calls "The Silmarillion" blasphemous. As far as I know, however, Ohlmarks wasn't a Christian. (He expresses some sympathies with Zoroastrianism but seems to have misunderstood its message.)

"Tolkien och den svarta magin" is virtually impossible to get hold of even in Sweden. I read it at the Royal Library. I'm surprised that the book has a product page here at Amazon, albeit an empty one. Once again: the book is in Swedish, so unless this happens to be your first language, you can't read it. Indeed, it's so badly edited that it made even my head spin!

Having nothing better to do at 4 AM local time, I decided to retell this little story...