Stefán Karlsson kindly gave me an offprint of ‘Tungan’ in September1995. The idea of translating it first occurred to me in the spring of 1997,and I am grateful to Örnólfur Thorsson, who was Visiting Fellow in Icelandic Studies at the University of Leeds in 1996–97, for help and advice in the early stages of my work on the translation. I had completed about half of it (to the end of section 1, ‘The language itself’) by the summer of 1998, and translated the remainder during my year as Visiting P...