Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1981, Page 17
remaining works, traditionally subsumed under the designation “court
literature,” are transmitted only in Icelandic manuscripts from the four-
teenth, fifteenth, and seventeenth centuries. With the exception of two
Arthurian lais in the Strengleikar collection, our assessment of the North-
ern branch of the matiére de Bretagne thus rests on the testimony of
Icelandic manuscripts that are several scribes - in some cases, several
centuries - removed from the original translations. Neither in regard to
the reliability of Icelandic manuscripts nor in regard to the relationship of
the translations to their sources have scholars been able to reach consen-
sus (see pp. 47-49).
Given the manuscript situation our assumptions concerning the trans-
mission of the matiére de Bretagne to the North are of necessity based
more on probability and inference than on direct textual evidence. Liter-
ary historians have generally assumed that the first of the romances of
chivalry to reach the North was Thomas’ Tristan, and that with its transla-
tion into Norwegian international literary activity at Håkon’s court com-
menced. Tristrams saga holds a unique position in the history of Scandi-
navian as well as French medieval literature: the saga is the only com-
plete extant representative of the Thomas-branch of the Tristan legend,
as well as the only Arthurian romance translated in Norway for which
both the name of the translator and the date of translation are known.
The pre-eminence of Tristrams saga in the corpus of translated fiction
derives in part from an introductory passage to the work that has the
function of a colophon:
Var J^å lidit frå hingatburdi Christi 1226 år, er Jjessi saga var å
norrænu skrifud, eptir bifalningu ok skipan virduligs herra
Håkonar konungs. En Brodir Robert efnadi ok upp skrifadi
eptir sinni kunnåttu.
(From the birth of Christ 1226 years had passed when this story was
written in Norwegian at the behest and request of noble King Hå-
kon. Brother Robert made the translation to the best of his ability.)
Since Håkon Håkonarson was only 22 years old in 1226, Tristrams saga
was presumably the first of the translations commissioned by the Norwe-
gian king himself.4 The passage above is extant only in seventeenth-
4 See Jon Helgason, Norrøn litteraturhistorie (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1934),
p. 211; Knud Togeby, “La chronologie des versions scandinaves des anciens textes fran-
3