Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Page 283

269
E Franga dolce n’oit perder sa lois,
and the Kms:
.. ef Frakkland hit gåSa skyldi tyna lofi sinu fyrir minar sakir (p. 50625),
it is apparently dulce France. The Welsh version seems to have had the
same verse:
God forbid, quoth Roland, that the French should be so much disparaged through
me, as that Roland should invite any to aid him---(ed. p. 5023"5).
The laisse is omitted in the version rimée, and it is possible that the asson-
anced laisses of the MS C in this part of the poem have been influenced
by, or even taken from, a MS of the O type. If so, the grouping KmsV4
against O C would be only natural. But the C verse may also be the result
of a secondary change in C: the scribe may have considered the notion
that a whole nation should lose its los (or onor, as C has it) a little extra-
vagant, and changed the verse a second time; after all, the alteration is
very easily made. Anyway, since the V4-Kms reading is supported by the
Welsh version, there cannot here be any question of a Kms reading agree-
ing with V4 against both O and the whole of the version rimée.
In O v. 1110 there is a slight syntactical difference between on the one
hånd Kms and V4, on the other all the MSS of the version rimée and O:
O 1110: Quant Rollant <veit que la bataille serat = C 1482 (assonanced) and
the version rimée
but
V4 1026: Or vede ben Rollant che batailla sera,
Kms: Nu sa Rollant at bardagi mundi verSa mikill1 (p. 50720-21).
But in the language of the translator the adverb nu is almost always
used to introduce a new episode, often corresponding to a new laisse in
the poem, and cp. the parallel expression in v. 1932:
Quan Rollant veit la contredite gent = all the other MSS
translated:
Nu sd Rollant ]?etta li3 blåmanna (p. 5207).
In O v. 1289, Engeler is described as
Engelers li Guascuinz de Burdele = version rimée
1 Note the epithet mikill, which is not based on the French text, and cp. the same
epithet in the translation of v. 610, discussed above.