Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Blaðsíða 211
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battie and the search of the battlefield, the saga has the flight of Margariz,
and instead of the vague glimpse of the pagan army approaching, it has
the more prosaic division of the army. The dejection of the French army
and the speech of Turpin occur once only in both O and Kms, but the
laisses are not identical. It looks as if we have in the saga a variant version
of O, inferior, but far less so than V4.
The question now is: would it be possible for a translator, and our
translator in particular, to select from a text of the V4 type a series of
laisses that gave a coherent story without any other repetitions than those
dealing with Margariz, which should have been much easier to avoid than
the other repetitions in V4, since they occur in two consecutive laisses?
Even more strange is the faet that the translator has managed to select
the secondary laisses in every case, from beginning to end, and to leave
out all the original O laisses. True, any translator might be excused for
leaving out repetitions, but he has left out other things as well, e.g. the
laisse where Marsilie decides to have three batties, and appoints Grandonie
as his standard-bearer (V4 vv. 1452-64).
To my mind coincidences of this kind are extremely unlikely. I have
already pointed out cases in the translation which suggest that Kms is based
on a variant version of the Chanson de Roland, which has been combined
with the O version to produce the edition from which all the other
French texts are derived. The episode under discussion now is the best
evidence for this theory. That Kms is a variant version of O is probably
accepted by all scholars. It is difficult to prove that V4 and the version
rimée are derived from both O and the French text of the Kms version,
but the evidence put forward in the preceding pages seems to me to make
this conclusion almost inescapable.
The story of the second battie is told in much the same way in all
versions. There is the usual confusion between spear and sword in the
saga, and some stock phrases are left out, but only towards the end of the
episode is there any real discrepancy between Kms and the French MSS:
from v. 1653 on (Stengel v. 1610) the description leaves the single combats
and turns to a survey of the whole battlefield,
1653: La bataille est merveilluse e hastive, = V4 1634
Franceis i ferent par vigur e par ire, = V4 1635
1655: Trenchent cez poinz, cez costez, cez eschines, cp. V4 1636:
Trenga quelle aste et gelle targe florie,