Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Side 16

2
English3 proves that these particular translations, at any rate, were made
at a time when foreigners who studied in England read and copied English
texts, i.e. probably not long after 1066.
Our earliest manuscripts, most of them only small fragments, contain
homilies, Saints’ Lives, and Laws 4. The religious literature was translated
from Latin, or in some cases, from English; it was to be used for religious
instruction, and the language of the translations is therefore usually simple
and direct, without any stylistic refinement. The translators successfully
avoid imitation of Latin syntax, and have clearly been at pains to make it
possible for their illiterate audience to understand what they wrote. They
are, on the whole, remarkably successful in adapting the rules that they
had been taught during their rhetorical training at school. The course of
rhetoric was primarily aimed at teaching the students how to expound the
Bible, and the style of the sermon must vary according to the audience;
this was a rule that every missionary and every translator of sermons
would have to keep in mind. The practice followed by the Church in this
respect is derived from the teaching of St. Augustine, according to whom
there are three genera dicendi which may be used in preaching: genus sub-
missum, used in teaching, genus temperatum, and genus grande, used to
movere and flectere5. The genus submissum was obviously the only suit-
able medium for the earliest religious literature in Scandinavia. The trans-
lations are not all equally successful; much depends on the ability of the
translators and the matter dealt with in the works translated. Thus, the
translation of Alcuin’s De virtutibus et vitiis6 is rather clumsy, and shows
that it was still difficult to discuss philosophical matters in the native
language.
Of secular literature there is very little in the 12th century. In Iceland,
there are the historical works of Ari and Eirikr Oddsson, and towards the
end of the century the “First Saga of St. Olaf” written in the vernacular,
3 Vide Hauksbok, udg. af Det Kg!, nordiske Oldskriftselskab (by Eirikur and
Finnur Jonsson, Copenhagen 1892-94), pp. 156-59, 167-69, cp. the introduction
pp. cxvm-cxx, and I. Reichborn-Kjennerud: Et kapitel av Hauksbok, in Maal og
Minne 1934, pp. 144—48.
4 A list of the earliest Norwegian MSS is given in D. A. Seip: Norsk språkhistorie
til omkring 1370, 2nd ed. (Oslo 1955), pp. 87-90.
3 E. Norden: Die antike Kunstprosa vol. II (Leipzig 1898), pp. 617-18, with
quotations from St. Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana IV 26.
* In Gamal norsk Homiliebok, ed. by G. Indrebø, Oslo 1931, pp. 1-31.