Gripla - 20.12.2009, Side 65

65
God’s behalf. There is thus not a total gap between the sagas and European
historiography but nevertheless, there is quite a strong difference in
emphasis.32
Secular literature and secular audiences were also to be found in other
countries at the same time; vernacular literature that developed from the
12th century onwards was largely intended for the laity and dealt with war,
heroic deeds and love. this literature demonstrates some of the same fea­
tures as the old norse sagas but also some differences. Descriptions of
kings, heroes and beautiful women are panegyric in tone in both genres,
but those in the sagas are closer to descriptions of missing persons in police
announcements, to draw a modern analogy: height, colours, special charac­
teristics.33 In contrast, European chivalric literature shows greater subtlety
in the rendering of emotions, particularly when dealing with love.34
Characteristically, such passages are omitted or abbreviated in the old
norse translations. Is this because of less understanding for such phenom­
ena or because of the tendency, very pronounced in the mature sagas, to
describe emotions through external signs (“red like blood” etc.) and to leave
the interpretation to the reader? Secondly, this european vernacular litera­
ture is more concerned with norms, chivalry and so forth, although it also
contains strategic­political features similar to those in the saga literature.
William Brandt’s characterisation, that this literature “seeks to celebrate,
not to explain”,35 catches a characteristic difference compared to the saga
literature, but is not entirely just. there is a considerable amount of strat­
32 Sverre Bagge, “Icelandic uniqueness or a Common european Culture. the Case of the
kings’ Sagas,” Scandinavian Studies 69,4 (1997), 418–42 and “Medieval Societies and
Historiography,” in Michael Borgolte, ed., Das europäische Mittelalter im Spannungsbogen
des Vergleichs. Zwanzig internationale Beiträge zu Praxis, Problemen und Perspektiven der histo­
rischen Komparatistik (Berlin: Akademie verlag, 2001), 223–47.
33 Lars Lönnroth, “Det litterära porträttet i latinsk historio grafi och isländsk saga skrivning.
en komparativ studie,” Acta Philo logica Scandinavica 27 (1965), 85 ff. and Bagge, Society and
Politics, 146–48. Cf. also the comparison between chivalric and a saga description in Bjarne
fidjestøl, Selected Papers (odense: odense university Press, 1997), 363 f.
34 See e.g. jonna kjær, “Censure Morale et transformations Idéologiques dans Deux
traductions de Chrétien de troyes: Ívens saga et Erex saga,” The Eighth International Saga
Conference. The Audience of the Sagas (Gothenburg 1991), 287–96; Liliane Reynaud, “når
en roman av Chrétien de troyes blir til en norrøn saga. fra yvain ou Le Chevalier au Lion
til ívens saga,” Historisk tidsskrift 83 (2004), 245–59.
35 William j. Brandt, The Shape of Medieval History (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1996), 88.
noRDIC unIQueneSS In tHe MIDDLe AGeS?