Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Blaðsíða 30

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learnt French by travelling abroad would have had the necessary literary
culture to carry out the translations. A great many Norwegian clerics must
have travelled abroad in the 13th century, and most of them naturally
went to England or France. Our records are, unfortunately, very scanty;
we know the names of a number of men who went abroad on some specific
mission, and they may have brought back manuscripts, but they certainly
for the most part left the task of translation to their less distinguished
retainers39.
Since one of the three translators we know of was an Icelander, it is,
of course, possible that some of the anonymous translators were Icelanders,
too. It is very difficult to decide with any degree of certainty. The differ-
ence between Icelandic and Norwegian was very small, and the faet that
so many of the romantic sagas are preserved only in Icelandic MSS makes
it possible and even likely that Icelandic words and phrases may have crept
in later; besides, there are very few words of which we can say with cer-
tainty either that they were used only in Norway or that they were typically
Icelandic. There are a number of cases in all these sagas where we have
“Norwegian” alliteration, e.g. in the expression (h) raustr riddari, but
this soon became a cliché, and the later Icelandic ly gis q g ur are full of stock
phrases of this kind. On the other hånd, we find “Icelandic” alliteration
in the Tristrams saga, e.g. the stock phrase huglauss ok hrceddr: this must
be explained either as an Icelandic addition, or as a parallelism where
alliteration was not originally intended40. In the Alexanders saga, where
alliteration is not extensively used, we find the Norwegian ecke vetta (p. 7),
but also the undoubtedly Icelandic archaism /rørr (p. 46) for j?ar er40a.
On the whole, it does not seem likely that Icelanders have played any
prominent part in the translation of the romantic sagas. It was obviously
easier to find Norwegians who knew French than Icelanders: in Norway,
there were at all times a number of men who had to know some French
for commercial or diplomatic reasons, whereas in Iceland at this time there
were few merchants and scarcely any diplomatists. The importance of
Icelandic literature, and its higher quality, should not blind us to the faet
that although the superiority of the Icelanders in the literary field is re-
39 On connections between Norway and England in the 13th century, vide Leach:
Angevin Britain etc. pp. 48-55, 95-100.
40 The expression is known from Icelandic sagas, cp. Brennu-Njals saga (Islenzk
Fornrit XII, Reykjavik 1954), p. 356: — bædi hrceddr ok huglauss.
"a Unger’s edition.