Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1981, Side 15
I. King Arthur, North-by-Northwest
Ok eptir unnit Irland stefnir hann til Noregs ok léttir eigi fyrr en
hann hefir unnit allan Noreg. Ok i fiessi ferd lagdi hann undir sik 611
Norørlond - Noreg, Danmork, Hjaltland, Orkneyjar, Færeyjar,
Sudreyjar, Skotland - ok skattgildi alla er jrar réQu jjeim (Breta
sogur, 51v).'
(And after he had conquered Ireland, he proceeded to Norway and did not
rest until he had conquered all of Norway. And in this campaign he van-
quished all the Northern lands - Norway, Denmark, Shetland, the Orkn-
eys, the Faroes, the Hebrides, Scotland - and laid tribute on all who ruled
there.)
En er hann hafdi undir sik lagt alla nordrhålfu heims, f>å for hann sudr -
Only after the quasi-historical British king Arthur had conquered the
“northern half of the world,” did he turn his attention and troops south-
ward, towards France, where soon thereafter the people of Paris acqui-
esced to him and presented him with their city. It was otherwise with the
Arthur celebrated in romance, whose farne proceeded from south to
north, from France to Scandinavia. In Norway the figure of the legendary
king was warmly welcomed when King Håkon Håkonarson (1217-63)
ordered the translation of a number of Arthurian romans courtois. From
that country his farne spread and captured the imagination of the people
on an island in the North Atlantic: Iceland. Ultimately, the Icelanders
were responsible for the preservation as well as transmission of Arthurian
literature in the North, a foreign import at a time when their own litera-
ture was at its height. In the same epoch that the deeds of Gunnar, the
poetry of Egill and of Kormåkr, and the loves of Gudrun were set down
in writing, the North also learned of the magnificence and munificence of
Arthur, of the chivalrous deeds of Erec, Yvain, Gawain, and Perceval, as
well as of the tragic love of Tristan and Isolt.
During the thirteenth century Norway was extraordinarily receptive to
foreign impulses. The maliere de Bretagne and the matiére de France
1 Citations from Breta sogur, the translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum
Britanniae, are from the manuscript AM 573 4to.
1