Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1968, Side 292
29TH JULY. DE S. OLAVO
This sequence was certainly the pride of the Norwegian Church
in the Middle Ages, and it accompanied the cult of the Norwegian
Martyr-King into several other countries into which this was intro-
duced, e. g. Denmark, Sweden, and Finland.
The author is no doubt to be sought among the divines of Norway
in the latter half of the 12th century (or towards 1200), and most
probably among the bishops or archbishops of that time.
As the text of our sequence reminds us of the works of Adam of St.
Victor in many ways, in its expression, metre, and thought, its author
had very likely studied in Paris some time before 1200. Reiss seems
to think Eirikr Ivarsson, archbishop 1188—1205, the likeliest author.
Professor Eirik Vandvik, in an essay on the text of this sequence
published in “Symbolae Osloenses” 1941, names three other Nor-
wegian divines about whom the same could reasonably be suggested;
he says: “Il est impossible de donner surement le nom de l’auteur,
mais on peut presque penser aux quatre ecclésiastiques qui étaient
en relations étroites avec le monastére de Saint-Victor: les arch-
evéques ØyStein, Eirik et Tore, et l’évéque de Hamar, Tore.”
We now turn to the music.
In a special chapter Reiss discusses the question of how far it can
be thought to be of Norwegian origin. That the music of the con-
cluding verse (8) is a direct borrowing from that of the concluding
verse of many of Adam’s sequences (or of sequences which are
wrongly attributed to him, e. g. “Laudes crucis attollamus”) Reiss
readily acknowledges, and also that the music of v. 5 uses the melody
from a verse of the Catharina-sequence “Vox sonora nostri chori”
and from several other places in sequences by Adam.
“Other melody congruences between the Norwegian Olavus-
sequence and the music of foreign sequences,” he says, “I have not
found so far.... From this negative result, however, nothing can
be inferred as to where the melodies of “Lux illuxit letabunda” have
originated. One might perhaps think that if 2 of the 8 verse melodies
are borrowed in part from France, the other 6 most probably were
also borrowed from there. But this inference is too rash. One would
have expected rather that our sequence writer would have “bor-
rowed” all his verse melodies from the music of the sequences from
which he has taken the main part of the melodies for vv. 5 and
8 ... Until the contrary be proved, we may, therefore, take it for
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