Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1992, Page 246

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Marianne Kalinke
tales is the same” (p. 249); 4) “the legends are chiefly based on the older sagas
[that is, the older Icelandic translations of Latin legends], and nevertheless
the compiler has succeeded in writing these legends in a style which agrees
with the style found in the other stories of the collection” (p. 251).
The above classification turns out to rest on a quite unsound foundation,
and raises a number of methodological questions. Implicit in the above
analysis of Reykjahólabók is the thesis that the translator selected a number
of legends from the Passionael and drew most of their content from the
same. His approach to the source texts lacked consistency, however, for
sometimes he proceeded as a translator, at other times as an adapter; in still
other cases, he seemed to conceive of himself as an author who elaborated
freely, or as an editor who translated his sources selectively. Widding and
Bekker-Nielsen’s classification and basic assumptions raise the question
whether such an inconsistent methodology on the part of a hagiographer or
a translator makes sense? To be sure, there is no doubt that the sources of the
Icelandic legends were Low German and that in many respects they
strikingly resembled those of the Passionael. The repeated word-for-word
correspondences between the Low German and Icelandic texts, the many
Low German loan words in the Icelandic translations, the not infrequent
occurrence of German syntax or idiom in Icelandic, and a few howlers in
translation make Low German provenance a certainty. Nonetheless,
Widding’s and Bekker-Nielsen’s taxonomy of the legends in Reykjahólabók
is invalid; the Passionael could not have been the source of the texts, as the
following should demonstrate.
The Low German origin of all but four legends is attested by the
language of Reykjahólahók.12 Many a passage is characterized not only by
semantic loans but also by an awareness, even advertising of their non-
Icelandic character inasmuch as the loan word occurs as one element of a
tautological pair or a synonymous doublet, of which the other member has
the function of providing a definition or an Icelandic synonym. In Erasmus
saga, for example, a Low German swarte kunst is transmitted in Icelandic by
a word pair consisting of a loan and its common Icelandic synonym, that is,
svartta kvnst og fiolkynnghe (II, 133:11-12). Two such loans in Reykja-
hólahók may in fact be the oldest attestations in Icelandic. They are the
words kvsthor, that is, ‘sacristan’, and nap, meaning ‘goblet’.13 The loan
kvsthor appears in the legend of Heinrich and Kunegunde and it is followed
immediately by an explanation: “<E>itt sinne var einn kvsthor. eþ er saa sem
geymer kirkiv” (I, 68:15). The corresponding sentence in the Passionael is:
12 Widding and Bekker Nielsen provided a sampling of some of the loan vocabulary in
“Low German Influence,” pp. 258-59.
13 Neither word is found in Chr. Westergárd-Nielsen, Laneordene i det 16. drhundredes
trykte islandske litteratur, Bibl. Arn., VI (Kobenhavn: Munksgaard, 1946).