Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Side 41
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Denmark. In the translations, the story is told in a very different way: the
author intervenes with his approval or condemnation, and Thomas, Chré-
tien, and Marie de France rely largely on long monologues to clarify the
finer psychological points of their tales. Nothing can be more unlike the
austere economy of the Icelandic saga than the lyrical descriptions used by
Marie de France to create the romantic atmosphere of her contes. The
rudimentary psychology and wild fighting of some of the chansons de geste
would be more easily appreciated, but even here the interventions of the
author, the epic repetitions, and the occasional lack of coherence must have
appeared strange. We find that it is precisely these details in the foreign
sources which have been changed or modified in the translations, and in
the cases where we have both Norwegian and Icelandic MSS, we can see
how successive generations of scribes have cut down or omitted monologues
and descriptions, and tried to create order and coherence as in the Ice-
landic sagas.
All the romantic sagas are prose translations, although the French
sources were poems. The translators were aware of the difficulties in
trying to imitate the French metres, and apparently none of them seriously
undertook the task of writing a metrical saga, but the few lines of rhymed
couplets inserted here and there in some of the translations are quite suf-
ficient to show that the choice of rhetorical prose for the new genre was
sound. As for the native metres, both skaldic and Eddaic, they had never
been used for longer epic poems, and the skaldic tradition, at least, was
lyric rather than epic. It was just as impossible to write a saga in the
drottkvætt metre as to write a chanson de geste in the form of sonnets62.
The Edda metres might have been used for epic poems, but the literary
development of the Old Germanic metre had never reached in Scandinavia
the stage seen in Beowulf; the Eddaic tradition is dramatic rather than
epic. Thus, since the literary tradition did not favour long epic poems, and
since none of the translators was enough of a poet to try to introduce the
European metres, the Norwegian literature of the 13th century is a prose
literature. The transition was made easier by the faet that mediaeval
literary theory did not distinguish sharply between potry and prose: the
difference between metrical and rhythmical poetry was felt to be almost
as important as that between poetry and prose, and the use of rhymed
62 The Icelandic Merltnusspd is written in fornyrdislag, but it is a prophecy, not
a part of a saga properly speaking. The Icelandic rimur are a later development.