Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Qupperneq 290

276
hergr (p. 53014-15) and almenningr (p. 49729-30) are Scandinavian, not
French, and the translator has iised them to render the French phrases
by something which he regarded as the Norse equivalent. But both ex-
pressions are, strictly speaking, Norwegian, not Icelandic, although they
are naturally used occasionally by Icelanders who were writing about Nor-
wegian institutions (cp. the dictionaries of Fritzner and Cleasby/Vigfus-
son), and a Norwegian would be more likely than an Icelander to choose
just these words to render the French terms: it is significant that the MS
b has med alt lid Jntt instead of med almenning (p. 497 note 18). The
verb moldskeyta is another case in point: it suggests the ceremony of
skeyting (described in the Gulajnngslgg 292) as the normal way of trans-
ferring land, but the ceremony is unknown in Icelandic laws, and the MSS
Bb have changed the expression lét hann moldskeyta miklar jardir to
keisarinn lagdi ok miklar jardir (p. 530* * 8 and note 5). The word skeyta
was apparently little known among Icelandic scribes, e.g. when Snorri
uses the word in his anecdote of how King Canute conciliated the monks
after he had caused Earl Olfr to be killed in a church by bestowing gifts
on the church: pa sceytti hann iarp'tr miklar til kirkio1, the word sceytti
is used in the main MS of the 6Idfssaga helga and in one other MS, but
the other scribes have changed it3. It is quite natural that Snorri, who
obviously knew that skeyting was the usual way of transferring land
abroad, used the word in his saga to give “local colour” to his tale, but
the word moldskeyta is not, of course, the direct translation of a French
term, since the ceremony was not known in France, and it is unlikely
that an Icelandic translator would have chosen just this term, unfamiliar
to most Icelanders, instead of perfectly adequate expressions like leggia til.
Details of this kind are by no means conclusive, and there are very few
of them, but our knowledge of the differences in vocabulary between Ice-
landic and Norwegian is imperfect.
Whatever his nationality, the translator was certainly not a naturalized
Frenchman. The numerous mistakes in the påttr, e.g. the misunderstanding
of such terms as Munjoie, barnage, prenent sei a braz, and the translation
of porz by (borgar) hiid, prove that he cannot have lived among French-
8 Den store saga om Olav den Hellige, utg. ... av O. A. Johnsen og Jon Helga-
son, Oslo 1930-41, p. 4454.
8 One MS uses the verb leggia for skeyta, which is correct, but the others have
the form ieypti, which suggests that the scribe(s) did not even know the verb skeyta,
and considered sceytti a scribal error for keypti.
A