Gaul britannia!

“It was the year 43 AD…

All England came under Roman rule – except for one small village... Try as they might, the Romans could not force these British hardnuts to surrender.” Hard to believe as it may be, Asterix was initially presented to the English-speaking readership as a Briton, fighting against the Roman invaders of the island.

Sixty years ago, in November 1963, Asterix appeared for the first time in the UK in the weekly comics periodical Valiant, as ‘Little Fred’, together with his friend ‘Big Ed’, the name chosen for Obelix. The album Asterix le Gaulois was Britonised into Little Fred, the Ancient Brit with Bags of Grit.

Little Fred hardly took Britain by storm. In fact, it was terminated after just a few months. But that didn’t stop Asterix being introduced again as a Briton – this time in September 1965, in the British magazine for boys Ranger. Asterix was now ‘Beric the Bold’, Obelix became ‘Son of Boadicea’, and the album Le Combat des Chef (The Big Fight) was adapted into a strip called Britons Never, Never, Never Shall Be Slaves! Despite this tub-thumping title, Beric the Bold also failed to capture the imagination of its British audience.

Disaster now appeared to beckon for the comic strip’s British adventure. Yet Asterix’s fortunes began to change in 1969 when the task of producing English translations was handed over to Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge. Their take on Uderzo and Goscinny’s creation was witty and irreverent. Above all, it rendered its lead characters as they were always meant to be: Gauls. British readers were soon smitten.

One of the reasons that Bell and Hockridge’s translation was such a success was that it kept the humorous spirit of the original, while innovating with great freedom. This is perhaps most obvious in the naming of its characters. All Gauls’ names end in -ix, yet in the English version, some of these have been changed for comic effect: the dog Idéfix becomes Dogmatix, while Panoramix, the druid who administers a potion