Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Síða 131
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tius8; he was an educated man who had learnt his grammar and rhetoric,
and he applied the rules he had learnt to the writing of the Chanson de
Roland. Some of the devices which he inherited from classical rhetoric are
quite common in other literatures as well, e.g. the use of antitheses, pro-
verbs, and speeches, but others did not go well with the general simplicity
and directness of the traditional tales of the North. The elaborate parallel-
ism in the structure of the poem was scarcely even understood by the trans-
lator, but even in smaller details, the translation has lost almost all the
poetic epithets and most of the “repetitions with variation” which give the
chansons de geste their peculiar flavour. The following groups of omissions
may be regarded as unimportant because the verses in question did not fit
in with the Norse prose narrative:
1. Elaborations and amplifications, usually in the form of a variant or
a repetition of a preceding verse. This device, the amplificatio of the
manuals or rhetoric, is very common in the chansons de geste. In Norse
“Court Prose” amplificatio is used, but only in the form of a “Doppelung”
of a single word (rpskr ok risuligr), while in the French poems both verses
and laisses are repeated with slight variations9.
2. Anticipations10. I use the word to denote an ordinary anticipation,
but also of some verses which cannot be regarded as real anticipations from
the point of view of mediæval rhetoric: When the translator had before
him two verses which were only variants of each other, he usually omitted
the second of the two, which must then be regarded as an amplification.
But in some cases, he retained the second verse, mostly because it con-
tained more concrete details, and I then designate the omitted verse as
an anticipation. Strictly speaking, there is of course no real difference be-
tween an anticipation of this kind and an amplification.
3. Repetitions of details and phrases used earlier in the poem (i.e. not
in the immediately preceding verse); e.g. when Marsilie’s offer to the
emperor is repeated three times, in vv. 27-41, 125-36, 181-90, in much
the same words, the translator may be excused for wanting to summarize
or shorten two of the passages. Cp. above, p. 107.
4. Unimportant facts, not related to the main theme.
8 Zur Literarasthetik des Mittelalters II, in Zeitschr. f. romanische Philologie 58,
1938, pp. 220-31.
“ I bidem, p. 216-18.
10 Cp. Curtius, ibidem, p. 229.