Hello everyone my name is Jonathan Riley and I'm back here today with Reed Moon at Moons Rare Books
and we're just gonna talk a little bit today about the Danish Book of Mormon.
So Reed what's the story behind the translation of the Book of Mormon into Danish?
Well Danish has the designation of being the first book of Mormon translated into a foreign language
and so a lot of people don't know that.
They would have thought that it would have been Spanish or one of the others
but it was Danish and this all goes back to when Erastus Snow
and a man named Peter O. Hansen were called to pretty much open the Scandinavian mission
but to understand what's going on we need to know who was this Peter O. Hansen
Well he was born in 1818 to kind of give you an idea
and he was 25 years old when he immigrated to America and he was living in Boston.
He's in Boston, he meets the elders and he joins the church in 1844
and by 1845 he makes his way to Nauvoo. Helps with building the Nauvoo temple
but on the side being from Denmark he wants the Book of Mormon in Danish
and so on his own without being asked begins a translation
and he spent five months translating the Book of Mormon into Danish.
Well then things get kind of rough in Nauvoo and the Saints are forced out in 1846 and by 1847
he's pretty early in arriving here in Utah, September 1847.
So a few months after, two years later he's called on this mission
to the Scandinavian mission and so he goes with Erastus Snow.
They go over to Denmark, they're in Copenhagen and they have this rough draft manuscript of a translation.
And Erastus Snow meets a Baptist minister.
The Baptist minister was somewhat fluent in English and he says we have this translation
and we just want to know what you think, being a local, if we published this.
And so the Baptist minister goes through it and says this is horrible.
And he said it's just, his words were it's very imperfect.
They had had some success, they had baptized actually young women and Miss Mathiason
and she was a teacher of German, French and English.
And she was a native speaker and so Erastus Snow asked her to begin the translation.
She starts translating it, but Peter Hansen gets a little upset, he goes, this is way too modern.
This is way to modern, this is not appropriate for scripture.
So he tried to translate in an older style because he felt that was better for scripture.
And then, so you have Erastus Snow who was just called to be an apostle in the previous year.
He's in-charge and he goes, okay
you and me, we'll do it again, we'll work on it, and so they spent the next seven months
retranslating the Book of Mormon into Danish.
Well Erastus Snow makes a trip over to England to visit the Saints.
To give you a comparison, this was 1850 but by 1851, in Utah there are 10,000 members of the church,
but in England there are 30,000, so the bulk of the members over there
and that was really the hub of where everything's going.
You have Franklin D. Richards who's running things over there.
Well Erastus Snow goes over to the Millenial Star office and says I need to borrow some money
so we can print the Book of Mormon. So they got 200 pounds
and he got promises from a couple of the elders to kind of support it and so they go back over
after they finished translation. They get another
like an editor from one of the newspapers and says can you go through this
and he pretty much passed off that they did a pretty good job,
but they just didn't print it.
In fact it was Charles Dickens who kind of popularized this subscription method of selling things a bit at a time.
He did his books like 12 to 24 issues.
Well Franklin D. Richards got 200 subscribers and started giving into him a page at a time
Just to kind of get it going.
Have we ever had that done with the Book of Mormon besides this.
You look at some of the earlier ones and it was quirky like this, but this is the first one.
This is the first time we're doing any to set the model for future translation of what could be done.
Translation is a tricky thing and one word here one word there can really make a difference.
And that was very apparent on the title page of the Danish.
And right here we have, first of all that's the first edition Book of Mormon
but it's not just any book of Mormon, this is Samuel Smith's first. So it's the first missionary, it talks about,
"unto the interpretation thereof."
Okay "gone by the way of the Gentile" and that's in there twice, "the interpretation thereof,
by the gift of God."
And you have Erastus Snow, and Peter Hansen, this is
the first edition book of Mormon. You see it was printed in Copenhagen 1851 but up here in the title page
where they ran into a little problem.
If we go over here the Danish you have a little circle with a line through it
and then you have a U.
Well there was a Brother Malling I believe,
he was kind of the first one to get a copy, and he goes, we have a problem.
Right here, that's supposed to be a U, that changes the meaning of that word.
It's supposed to be "the interpretation thereof"
That little line makes it the "destruction thereof."
Yeah that's a problem.
And so, that was embarrassing
And so they ordered new title pages, I mean they didn't have to do the whole book.
Just the title page.
But there are only five known copies
that have that error because only a few got out.
But this is one of those copies, in fact this is a copy presented by Erastus Snow
to fellow apostle George A Smith.
Another interesting note we know that a few years earlier
the missionaries in England had given Queen Victoria a copy of the Book of Mormon.
So these Elders, they want to give a copy to the Dowager Queen Caroline.
The precedent had been set.
Yeah and they printed her name on it and everything and they went to her and she goes,
"yeah i'm not gonna take that" and just rejected it.
Oh wow that's amazing.
And so that copy's at BYU right now.
That's a fun little story, the Queen she says "no i'm not taking it."
So a lot of interesting history. They printed three thousand copies of the first one
But only about ten in this really nice presentation.
So 1851 is the first time it's done in a foreign language.
But that got the ball rolling and the next year
they just jumped in with both feet and did German, French, Italian and Welsh,
and so it takes off from there.
That's more what you would have expected maybe as the first one.
Could other people read the Danish Book of Mormon?
If i'm in Norway or something would other people in
Scandinavian area have known enough Danish to be able to read the Book of Mormon in Danish?
Well it would be similar to well Spanish and Portuguese.
You would kind of be able to make it out.
Mostly this was just for Danish members?
Yes, it will be 1878 before there's a Swedish copy, and all the way till 1950 until there's a Norwegian.
So as the first translation into a foreign language how would you say this affected
other translations into foreign languages?
One of the things you mentioned was the serializing of it. Having a little bit at a time,
what are some other things where this affected the translation into other languages.
There just wasn't a formal method of funding this and so it was almost up to the local elders to figure that out.
And they made the arrangements and these early copies also would show who the translator was.
You don't see that on any of the translations from the past.
You know fifty or so years, they quit doing that but it was interesting to show who was the translator.
But it showed where the emphasis and where the focus of early missionary work
was being done by where these copies were done
and every single one of these foreign translations has a story that's interesting like that
who did the translation with the help
whom and there was typically an apostle that was kind of in charge of supervising that.
So why Danish, why was Danish the first book of Mormon translation.
Well the church there were quite a few converts who spoke Danish
and they had friends and relatives back in Denmark
and they kind of followed where the demand was. They wanted to best use the resources.
but it's also not like they sent a lot of people, they sent two people.
Well three, they sent three,
another early convert but he went to Sweden but it was two people to start, that's all there were.
In the beginning, but they had immediate success.
And over the next several decades tens of thousands of converts would come from Denmark.
So that was sort of the logical thing to do,
you translate the book where you have a lot of people who are gonna read it?
That makes sense.
What is this pocket watch here!?
Well this is a pocket watch E, F, S, Erastus Fairbanks Snow.
This would have been his pocketwatch. And it's fun to have these little
artifacts from history that bring these people to life.
Its not just a name on a page anymore this is somebody you can kind of see a little piece of their life.
that would have been something, he would have had a vest, that would have been in his pocket, pull it out.
That's fantastic, that's fantastic!
I think of these people in the past was oh yeah they lived a long time ago and
it's hard to connect with them but when you see these books you see
this really old book of them translating this and printing it you see his pocket watch you start to realize
these are real people with real lives who did hard but important things
like this translation of the Book of Mormon into Danish.
And this Peter Hansen who went over in 1849, he stayed for six years.
Just six years?!
Six years, and then he came back to Utah and they called him on another mission.
And he went back for a couple of years and then he came back home and they called him on a third mission.
So he ended up serving ten years of missions over the course of three decades.
That's amazing, that's amazing!
So Reed what else do you have here today.
Well since we're talking about Denmark and Danish,
probably the most notable 19th century figure
who was a contemporary of these missionaries was Hans Christian Andersen.
Oh really? I don't usually think of them as being contemporaries.
Yes, Hans Christian Andersen was born in 1805 the same year as Joseph Smith.
He was really at the peak of his career
at the time these two Elders, Elders Hansen and Erastus Snow we're over there
Just five years earlier he had the release of the Little Mermaid and he was doing
quite a bit. Well he became extremely popular and so
that would have been in the background of all of this.
The famous author who became internationally known for his fairy tales.
Yeah that's an interesting connection of trying to think about the time period in which this is all happening.
Reid thanks very much for letting us come here and look at all these great things that you have
and for telling us about the Danish Book of Mormon. it's great being with you today.
Happy to do so. Thanks very much