Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Síða 33
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serve the translator’s purpose of presenting the tales to his audience in a
form which was more agreeable to them. In some of the lays there are
only a few unimportant omissions, in others the omissions are long and
affect vital points in the story.
4. Ivens saga. The source is the Ivain or Le Chevalier au Lion of
Chrétien de Troyes. The saga is preserved in two Icelandic MSS of the
15th century, but it is stated in the text46 that it was translated at the
request of King Hakon the Old, i.e. Hakon Håkonarson. The epithet “the
Old” cannot, of course, have been used in King Håkon’s earlier years; it
may have been added in a later MS, but if the translator himself wrote
Håkon konungr hinn gamli, it means that the translation belongs to the
years when Håkon was really “the Old”, in contrast to his son, Håkon
“the Young” (born 1232, died 1257), who was officially made king with
his father in 1240, but it would not be necessary to distinguish between
father and son by epithets like “Old” and “Young” until about 1250. The
style is less rhetorical than that of the Elis saga, alliteration is rare, but
there are many examples of the use of parallelism. Some of the differences
between the Ivens saga and the sagas mentioned above may be due to the
Icelandic scribes, but the Tristrams saga, where we have only one Icelandic
MS, shows more traces of “Court Prose” than the Ivens saga, and it is
unlikely that there would be no vestiges left of an original rhetorical style.
At the beginning of the 14th century, the saga was used by the Swedish
author of one of the Eufemiavisor, ILerra Iwan47. The text of the saga
follows the French poem closely, without important additions, but with
some omissions, which are, however, short in comparison with those made
in the Tristrams saga. Moreover, the text of the Swedish Herra Iwan
proves that many of the omissions are due to Icelandic scribes.
5 and 6. Parcevals saga and Vålvers J/dttr. The source for these two
sagas (the latter is only a continuation of the former) is another of Chré-
tien’s poems, Perceval le Gallois or Le Conte du Graal, which the poet
left unfinished. The sagas have Chrétien’s text without any of the later
continuations. The text is only preserved in one Icelandic MS of the 15th
century (the same as one of the Ivens saga MSS). The language is not
48 E. Kolbing: Riddarasogur, p. 136.
47 For a comparison between the Norse and the Swedish texts, see Riddarasogur
pp. xii-xxxvii, and Kolbing’s ed. of Ivens saga in Saga-Bibliothek 7 (Halle 1898)
pp. xvi-xxiii.
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