Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Blaðsíða 79
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Roland, and the description of Charlemagne’s death, which was more
fully treated in the last part of the Vie romancée. Aspremont is a sort of
Enfances Rollant, and Ogier is one of the chieftains: the branch then had
to be placed after Oddgeirs pattr, and before branches V-VIII.
d) A chanson de geste dealing with the war against Guitalin, king of
the Saxons, possibly the one that Jean Bodel used as a source for his
Chanson des Saxons. Storm thinks that the account of the war against
Sibilia and her son “Justam”, one of the short additional “branches” of D,
was really a second part of this branch88, while M. Aebischer is inclined
to regard it as a part of branch I89. His main reasons for this are that
Naimes is called Namlun in this place in D, and also in branch I, while
he is called Neymes, Nemes everywhere else, and that the episode is too
short to have been the second part of a chanson de geste, being more like
the brief summaries of epic traditions in branch I. To me the first argu-
ment is unimportant: the name Namlun is mentioned once only in the
passage, and we do not know if the distribution of the two forms (which
is of course based on the usage in the French sources) was the same in the
original Kms as it is in our comparatively late Icelandic MSS ; a systematic
exchange of the irregular Namlun for the more usual Nemes may have
taken place in Icelandic MSS, except for branch I, where the form Nam-
lun was more common. I am rather inclined to favour Storm’s theory,
especially in view of the faet that Sibilia and her son are mentioned in
branch V, but not in the short account of the war in Saxony in branch 190.
Roland is the hero of Guitalin, and the branch accordingly had to be
placed before the Runzivals pdttr. Finnur Jonsson suggests91 that branch
V is really a combination of two sources. His main reason for this is that
Alkain, who has already been mentioned in chapter 23, is introduced
again in chapter 30 as if he were unknown to the readers. But Finnur
Jonsson forgets that the branch is a translation of a chanson de geste, not
an Icelandic saga.
e) A Chanson d’O tinel. The source is of course French, not English,
as Mogk92 seems to think (probably because he has misunderstood Storm’s
words, op. cit. p. 58, about the English manuscript).
88 Op. cit. p. 58.
88 Les différents états de la Kms, pp. 311-12.
M. Aebischer is aware of this objection, op. cit. p. 312.
81 Litt. hist. II, 2. ed., p. 965.
02 Gesch. der norw.-isl. Lit. 1904, p. 864 (310 of the Sonderdruck).
5 Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana, XIX