Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Side 67
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Chevalerie O gier de Danemarche55, attributed in some MSS to Raimbert
of Paris. A new edition of this poem is badly needed, but a comparison
with the edition of Barrois shows many divergences between the chanson
de geste and the saga. There are some omissions in the saga version, and
also differences which may be due to the translator’s insufficient know-
ledge of French. But there are some discrepancies between the French
poem and the Norse saga which must be due to the faet that the French
source used had a text which differed considerably from the existing
version56. The Scandinavian versions differ among themselves on certain
points: D has added certain details in the account of the fight between
Ogier and Brunament, which, as suggested above, are probably derived
from the ballad. Further D and Bb have a number of chapters at the end
of the branch which are lacking in Aa and the French poem. But the end
of the branch in Aa is so dif ferent from the account of the French chanson
de geste in any case, that this circumstance is not decisive. In Aa, the
branch comes to an end with the killing of “Burnament”; the pagan king
decides to leave Rome and go back to his own kingdom, “and there is no
report of any further wars between Karlamagnus and King Ammiral”
(p. 11936~37). In the French poem, the French conquer Rome and kill
Corsubles, the pagan king. In Bb and D, “Ammiral” is killed by the
two pagan kings who had come to aid him against the French, and Karvel
then defeats and kills them, aided by Ogier and Charlot, Charlemagne’s
son. The description of this incident looks as if it is derived from a French
source; it has none of the characteristics of the Icelandic imitations of
the translated sagas, and besides, D is probably based on a Norwegian
version of the saga. The faet that the end of the branch in Aa is ab-
rupt and unsatisfactory may also be adduced as an argument in favour
of the theory that Bb and D represent the original saga. The difficulty
then is to explain why these chapters have been omitted in Aa. It
seems unlikely that they were deliberately omitted, and the remark
quoted above, that there is no report of any further fighting, etc., looks
like a puzzled observation by the scribe of A (the passage is not in a),
and shows that he too was surprised at the abrupt end of the war. The
“ La Chevalerie Ogier de Danemarche, par Raimbert de Paris (Paris 1842), cp.
also B. Cerf: The Franco-Italian Chevalerie Ogier (ed. of MS XIII of the Library
of St. Mark, Venice; Modern Philology vol. 8, pp. 187-216, 335-61, 511-25).
M Vide Unger, introduction p. xvi, and Storm: Sagnkredsene, pp. 51-54.