Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Blaðsíða 91
Chapter 3
THE TEXTS OF THE CHANSON DE ROLAND
I
Introduction
From what has been said about the translations in the first chapter of
these studies, it is clear that those who wrote the Norse versions of the
French romances and chansons de geste were translators, not poets, or
authors in their own right. Kms is no exception, and the eighth branch of
the saga may therefore be regarded as a version of the Chanson de Roland.
But before we can undertake a comparison between Kms and the other ver-
sions of the poem, we must establish a critical text of the Norse version, as
far as this is possible, and, perhaps even more important, we must try to
find out what the translator has changed, added, or omitted, and whether
he was a competent translator, for it must be borne in mind that mediæval
translations may be adaptations rather than close renderings.
Unger1 and Gaston Paris2 do not discuss the relationship between the
saga and the Chanson de Roland, but they both stress the faet that the
original end of the eighth branch must be sought in the Danish Chronicle.
Storm3 points out a number of details in which the Kms version agrees
with the Chåteauroux MS of the Chanson de Roland (the Versailles MS,
as he calls it), and he concludes that the translator used a MS in which
the original poem had already been considerably modified. He ascribes
the omission of the Baligant episode in the saga to the translator, and when,
in the Kms, there is no mention of the judicial combat between Tierri and
Pinabel, nor of the eruel punishment of Ganelon’s kinsmen, it is because
the translator knew that such combats were illegal in his days, and ob-
jected to the cruelties of the original version. On this latter point, Storm’s
view was criticized by Finnur Jonsson4.
1 Introduction, pp. xxxn-m.
2 Bibliothéque de l’École des Chartes, 1865, pp. 35-37.
3 Sagnkredsene, pp. 22-36.
4 Litt. hist., 2nd ed. II, p. 966.