"This awful and distressing circumstance": A Sudden Death, The Danish Literati, and the First English Translation of Ibn Fadlan

In 1814, Ibn Fadlan’s tenth-century Arabic description of a Rus funeral began to circulate in western Europe, first in Danish, and then in English, Swedish, and French. It did so alongside a series of other Arabic and Persian sources on the Rus and the Vikings, collated by Danish orientalist Jens Lassen Rasmussen in a lengthy essay. This first European encounter with an extract from Ibn Fadlan’s travel account has not been heavily discussed, however; the manuscript relied upon for this initial Danish study of Ibn Fadlan was quickly superseded, and scholarship moved elsewhere. Rasmussen’s essay did not remain a critical piece of scholarship on Ibn Fadlan or the other geographical texts which he used.
This paper considers this forgotten aspect of early modern scholarship on Ibn Fadlan and other geographical sources for the Viking world. Looking in particular to the unacknowledged identity of the scholar who translated Rasmussen’s 1814 essay into English for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and the tragic personal circumstances leading to his encounter with this source material, I outline the appeal of this Arabic and Persian material on the Vikings and consider the national and emotional resonances of the subject matter both to the English translator and to Danish- and English-speaking audiences. By surveying his personal and emotional connections with Denmark, his introduction to members of the Danish literati (Rasmussen included), and by considering the justifications he offers for his English translation, I use the translator’s awful and distressing circumstances as a framework through which to view an emerging interest in Arabic-Viking interactions within Danish and English cultural and scholarly milieus.
 
Tonicha Upham is a Past & Present postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, working on cross-cultural comparisons of sacrificial rituals in medieval Arabic geography. She defended her PhD, on gender in the Islamicate sources for the Rūs, at Aarhus University in 2023.