Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1981, Qupperneq 29
only in Swedish and Danish manuscripts. According to the manuscripts
the translation was made directly from the French, but because of a
number of divergences from Chrétien’s text that the Swedish poem also
shares with Ivens saga, scholars have thought that the translator may also
have had a Norwegian manuscript of Ivens saga at hånd as he trans-
lated.37
An investigation of the Arthurian romances belonging to Old Norse-
Icelandic literature provides an introduction to a dynamic literature, but
is somewhat problematic because of the State of transmission of the man-
uscripts and lack of critical editions. The study of the Arthurian riddara-
sogur is a complex undertaking because of the scarcity and fragmentary
condition of old manuscripts, and the faet that merely one work, Streng-
leikar, is extant in a Norwegian manuscript. Even this Norwegian manu-
script is a copy (see pp. 50-52). All the other sagas exist only in Icelandic
manuscripts. Moreover, at least half a century elapsed between the Nor-
wegian translations of the Arthurian matter and their being written down
in the oldest extant Icelandic manuscript of the Arthurian riddarasogur,
represented today by a single vellum leaf from around 1300 that contains
the beginning of Mottuls saga. From Iceland’s “great copying age” - a
name bestowed by Halldor Hermannsson on the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries38 - comes a splendid codex of romances dating from around
1400, Perg. 4:o nr 6 in the Royal Library, Stockholm. Of its thirteen
romances, some represented only by fragments or otherwise defeetive
redactions, three are Arthurian: Ivens saga (two lacunae of [probably]
one leaf each), Parcevals saga with Valvens jyåttr, and Mottuls saga (the
last only a fragment consisting of little more than two leaves). The oldest
extant texts of the Norwegian Tristrams saga and of Er ex saga are pre-
served in fifteenth-century manuscripts. Unfortunately, the former is
represented only by four vellum leaves belonging to two different man-
uscripts; the latter consists merely of two horizontal strips of vellum that
were used in bookbinding in the seventeenth century. The Icelandic Saga
af Tristram ok Isodd is better represented in manuscripts than its Nor-
wegian predecessor; the complete saga survives in a fifteenth-century
vellum. For full texts of Erex saga, Mottuls saga, and Tristrams saga we
must rely on seventeenth-eentury paper manuscripts. Indeed, the seven-
37 E. F. Halvorsen, to the contrary, believes that the translation of Yvain into Swedish
was made from a Norwegian manuscript of Ivens saga; furthermore, he considers it unlikely
that the translator had a French manuscript available (“fvens saga,” KLNM, VII, 528).
38 Icelandic Manuscripts. Islandica, XIX (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1929), p. 19.
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