Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Blaðsíða 80

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f) The Pélerinage Charlemagne. This is the text where the translator
follows his source most closely93.
g) A Chanson de Roland which included a short description of the war
in Libya94.
h) A Montage Guillaume.
The main concern of the editor of the Kms was to collect as many as
possible of the tales dealing with the life of Charlemagne and his men. He
did not try to combine dif ferent traditions dealing with the same incident ;
in the typically mediæval manner he refused to bother about questions of
textual criticism. He usually allowed inconsistencies and contradictions
between the different branches to remain, and only in the case of the
Pseudo-Turpin and the Aspremont has he tried to combine different
sources. He has had to suppress some parallel accounts: thus, he could not
very well allow the main hero, Roland, to be killed twice or even three
times over, and he has therefore chosen the longest of his descriptions of
the battie of Roncevaux, suppressing those of the Pseudo-Turpin and,
probably, the Vie romancée.
D has shortened the saga, and removed some inconsistencies by omissions.
The editor of the Bb version was an Icelander95, probably a cleric,
fairly widely read in Icelandic literature, both Saints’ Lives and other
sagas, and a man with some critical sense. He omitted chapters 43-59 of
branch I, because most of the incidents related there were obviously sum-
maries of some of the later branches; he rewrote branch IV, without
knowing any of the original sources, and he shortened some of the other
branches (notably V and VI). He knew the Michaels saga, and thus was
able to “correct” branch VIII: Turpin was not killed at Roncevaux; he
was with the emperor, and the Bb version has therefore eliminated him
from the description of the battie, substituting for him his “nephew”
Valtari (below, p. 91). Knowing, from the Tveggja postola saga and
the Speculum Historiale, that the vision in connection with the death of
the emperor was seen by Turpin, not by St. Giles, as in the original saga,
he seems to have looked with distrust on the account of the death and
83 Cp. Aebischer: Les versions norroises du Voyage de Charlemagne en Orient,
pp. 58-73, and E. Koschwitz: Ueber das Alter und die Herkunft der Chanson du
Voyage de Charlemagne &c. (in Romanische Studien, hg. v. E. Boehmer, vol. II),
p. 8.
81 Cp. Aebischer: Rol. Bor. pp. 246-52, and Storm, op.cit. p. 16.
83 Finnur Jonsson: Litt. hist. II, 2. ed. p. 965.