Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Page 31

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cognized now, both the Islendingasggur and the written fornaldarspgur
were probably completely unknown outside Iceland before 1250. The
Sagas of the Kings were known, and the Icelanders were recognized as
the historians par excellence all over Scandinavia, but the Arthurian
romances have nothing to do with Scandinavian history. Thus there was no
special reason why the King should prefer Icelanders as translators, while
also there was naturally no reason why he should not ask an Icelander to
translate a text if he found one with a reputation for learning, as he did
in the case of Brandr. When it came to translating from Latin, the lan-
guage of the Church, the Icelanders were of course just as competent as
the Norwegians.
IV
The transi at ed sagas
The translations that have been preserved are the following:41
1. Tristrams saga ok Isondar. The saga is based on the twelfth century
Tristan of the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas, of whom practically nothing
is known. The poem is lost, save for a few fragments, but it has been used
by Gottfried of Strasbourg in his Tristan and by the author of the Middle
English poem Sir Tristrem. Comparison between the texts is made difficult
by the faet that only the saga is a real translation.
The saga survives in an Icelandic MS of the 17th century, and in a
few fragments of the latter half of the 15th century. We know from other
sagas how great the difference may be between a Norwegian original and
a late Icelandic copy, and in this case, where the French original can only
be reconstructed with the help of the saga, it is doubly unfortunate that
we have to rely on only one Icelandic MS. There seem to be few additions
to the French text, and in the comparatively short passages where the
French text has been preserved (Kolbing’s ed., pp. 8132-8725, 9437—9535,
10020'32, and 1088— end of the saga), the most characteristic difference
between the two versions is that the saga leaves out a number of descrip-
tions and monologues. The extent of the omissions is made clear by the
faet that of the 1815 verses of the longest French fragment (the Fragment
Douce), more than 800 verses have disappeared in the translation. The
original translator is no doubt responsible for many of the omissions, but
41 A list of editions will be given at the end of the chapter.
2 Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana, XIX