Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Blaðsíða 19

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As we have already seen, the earliest translations are written in a plain
and “popular” language. We should expect, then, that when at last the
Norwegians began to write original works in the vernacular, they would
use the same kind of language, which had the additional advantage of
being close to the colloquial speech of everyday life. But this is not the case.
The language of the Ågrip, written probably about 119018, is anything
but colloquial. The author has a number of the figurae known from the
manuals of grammar19, especially Priscian, amplificatio (rgskr ok risuligr,
gremjandi ok emjandi), often with the use of alliteration and rhyme, as
in the examples quoted above, antithesis (Hann var kristinn ok åtti kono
heipna p. 73~4), rhytmical prose (hann festi ok fekk ok unni svå mep
ærslom p. 414), and balanced parallelism in the clauses (er gupi væri tign
i ok kristninni styrkr p. 2419)20. He also shows a great fondness for epi-
gram and startling combinations: til truar koma ok til skunar p. 2115, svik-
om mæta ok flokkom p. 2118, pat var bæ pi øx fostr a hans ok svå bani p.
2011. There can be no question of explaining this by assuming that the
author has translated an older Latin chronicle, the rhyme and rhythm of a
Latin expression would almost always have been lost in a close translation,
and the point of the epigrams would be blunted. A comparison with the
later translations from French poems shows conclusively that the difference
between the style of the original and that of the translation is practically
always fundamental. The style of the Ågrip is influenced less by the
author’s reading of Latin autores than by his theoretical and practical
training in rhetoric.
Even in the VarnarræSa, the style has a slightly rhetorical flavour (at
menn skili ok skyni p. I8, Su hin hcesta ok hin mesta villa 1825)21, in spite
of the faet that it was meant for instruction rather than amusement. Ap-
parently, it was becoming fashionable in Norway at the end of the 12th
century to apply the rules of Latin grammar and rhetoric to prose writings
“ Cp. Bjarni ASalbjarnarson: Om de norske kongers sagaer, Oslo 1937, p. 5, with
references.
18 Cp. E. R. Curtius: Zur Literarasthetik des Mittelalters, in Zeitschr. f. romani-
sche Philologie 58, pp. 129 et. seq., especially pp. 216-19. The figurae, which to the
modern scholar belong to rhetoric, were a part of grammar in the Middle Ages, cp.
C. S. Baldwin: Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (New York 1928), pp. 87-89.
20 Cp. Curtius, op.cit. pp. 216-18. The Ågrip was ed. by. V. Dahlerup, Copen-
hagen 1880. Quotations here from Finnur Jonsson’s edition in Altnordische Saga-
Bibliothek 18, Halle 1929.
21 Quotations from Anne Holtsmark’s ed.