Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Qupperneq 76

62
which the translator apparently did not understand. In some cases his
explanations are probably correct, but the author does not seem to realize
that the mediæval translator may have had other reasons for omitting
details, or for making changes.
Professor Aebischer’s contribution to Kms scholarship is valuable chiefly
because of his wide knowledge of the Old French sources. In some
cases, he might have saved himself from making false statements by a
doser study of Storm’s book, and I cannot but think that he sometimes
makes things more complicated than they are, as in the case of the last
branch in D. A more serious objection is that he is not sufficiently familiar
with Old Norse: there are too many mistakes in his translation of
branch VIII.
This survey of the more important contributions to the discussion of
the Kms shows that while there is general agreement among scholars on
the question of the sources of most branches, the problem of the original
form and later development of the saga has been much debated. From
what has been said above (pp. 42-43), it appears obvious that B repre-
sents the Bb version in its original form. Thus the Aa, 74, and Bb versions
all have branches I, III—VIII in the same order. But this again means
that these versions must be derived from the same source, the original
Kms; they cannot be three, or two, different collections of originally in-
dependent branches. The order is roughly chronological, but there is
nothing in the branches dealing with the “War against Guitalin”, “Otuel”,
and the “Voyage to the East” (branches V—VII) to indicate that these
events followed each other in exactly that order.
The Aa version breaks off towards the end of branch VIII, but I fully
agree with Storm and M. Aebischer that this version originally contained
the short additional branches now found only in D, branch IX ( = D and
Bb) and X. Further, I agree with Storm in thinking that D has branch X
in its original form, and I cannot see any reason why parts of the final
branch in D should be a later addition. M. Aebischer thinks83 that D is
derived from a form of the saga where certain changes had been made,
the most important of which was that Turpin was allowed to survive the
battie of Roncevaux, and to reappear in the account of the funeral of
Charlemagne at the end of the saga. But it is not necessary to attribute
83 Les différents etats de la Kms pp. 319-21.