Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Blaðsíða 59
45
M. Aebischer33 has pointed out that St. Giles plays a part in branch I
of the saga, and this branch is, in his opinion, based on a Vie romancée de
Charlemagne. Originally, this Vie romancée must have contained an ac-
count of Charlemagne’s death, and this is the source of branch X of Kms.
To the author of this work is due the transfer of the vision to St. Giles.
I fully agree with M. Aebischer on this point. Further, M. Aebischer
thinks that the account of the funeral was added in a later version of the
saga from some source apparently derived from Adhemar de Chabannes’s
Historia (llth century), and because Turpin appeared in this episode, the
author of this hypothetical version had to make a change in branch VIII
to enable Turpin to survive. This is unnecessarily complicated. The ori-
ginal editor of the saga did not bother about contradictions and repetitions,
so much is abundantly clear from the way in which he has included dif-
ferent accounts of the same episodes in his collection (see below). He may
therefore quite well have described Turpin’s death in branch VIII and
made him reappear in branch X if his sources had both episodes. D, on the
other hånd, was edited by a person with some critical sense, who has done
his best to get rid of some of the contradictions: he omits parts of branch I,
rewrites parts of branch IV, and, in my opinion, is responsible for the
change in branch VIII. To me, therefore, the whole of branch X as it
appears in D, i.e. the designation of “Lodarius” as successor, the vision,
and the funeral, is derived from the same source, the original Kms, and
the translator based his branch X on the Vie romancée de Charlemagne
which is also the source of branch I. One might ask why he did not prefer
the relevant part of the Pseudo-Turpin, which he must have known, and
the explanation is that Turpin describes the vision in substantially the same
form as the Vie romancée, but the latter had a number of additional details
about Charlemagne’s last years, and because of the completeness of this
source, our editor preferred it. This is not to say that he distrusted Turpin’s
account, but presumably he thought that both had had the same vision
(which, from his point of view, was by no means unlikely), and since one
visionary might be as good as another, he was content with one version.
The author of the T.P.S., as we have seen, knew the Aa version of the
Kms, and also the Speculum Historiale. Preferring the more authoritative
account of Charlemagne’s death given by Vincent to that of a mere Norse
saga (whose sources he naturally did not know), he translated the relevant
Les différents etats de la Kms p. 318.