Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Blaðsíða 119
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translator of the Chanson de Roland had any clear idea of the beauty of
the poem, or of its intricate structure. There were no textbooks to teach
him, and he is not likely to have lived long enough in a French literary
milieu to have learnt it. To him, as to his audience, the poem was first
and foremost the exciting story of the last fight and heroic death of Roland
and Oliver. Whatever the translator thought of the way in which this
story was told in the French poem, he must have seen at once that there
could be no question of translating it word by word. Some explanations
had to be added, and some repetitions needed to be left out. Some trans-
lators, notably Robert the Abbot, tried to preserve some of the flavour
of the original French poems by creating an elaborate Court Style (above,
pp. 9-10), but even they had to make numerous concessions to the liter-
ary tastes of their audience, as has been shown by Meissner in his book
on the Strengleikar. Runzivals påttr is written in ordinary “Translator’s
Prose”, and we are probably justified in concluding that the translator of
the Chanson de Roland was less concerned with creating a refined Court
literature than with retelling the story of Roland. To do this in an effec-
tive way he would obviously have to pay some attention to the Scan-
dinavian traditions of story-telling. We do not know much about the
tastes of the Norwegians of the 13th century in this sphere. The Icelandic
family sagas are an exclusively Icelandic creation, and were probably never
known in Norway, and even the Sagas of the Kings probably did not be-
come generally known in Norway until the 1240’s. But the Norwegian
traditions preserved in e.g. Ågrip and Historia Norwegiae, and the forn-
aldarsggur, can probably give us a better idea of the stories that were
familiar to the Norwegians of the 13th century. It is true that the written
Icelandic fornaldarsaga is contemporary with, or later than, the majority
of the Islendingasggur, but the themes of the fornaldarsggur are much
older: some of the stories are alluded to in the 12th century poem Hatta-
lykill by Earl Rpgnvaldr kali of the Orkneys and Hallr Rorarinsson1,
and some are also preserved in the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus.
This shows that oral fornaldarsggur must have existed outside Iceland,
and before the period when the written saga was created. Popular tradi-
tions, folktales, legends, myths etc. have existed among illiterate peoples
in all parts of the world, and with these traditions must have gone a
certain traditional way of telling them. To get an idea of how such tales
1 Vide J6n Helgason in Nordisk Kultur VIII: B p. 140, and Jon Helgason and
Anne Holtsmark: Håttalykill enn forni, Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana I.