Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1981, Page 61

ing if one considers the discrepancies between extant redactions and their
French sources. In the introduction to Tristrams saga Brother Robert
informs us that he efnadi ok upp skrifadi the work - in other words, he
made the translation and wrote it down. Yet efnadi - strictly speaking -
conveys only the sense that he accomplished the task assigned to him by
his royal patron; the word does not indicate the manner in which Brother
Robert carried out the task. The concluding statement of Ivens saga from
which we learn that King Håkon lét snua dr franzeisu i norrænu is as
vague in terminology as that of Brother Robert. Like efna, the term snua
is rendered in English - for want of a better word - by “translate.” In
modern usage “translate” suggests an idiomatic, accurate rendering, an
exact equivalent insofar as such is possible; that is not the case with the
riddarasogur. Absolute fidelity to content, structure, and style of the
French matiére de Bretagne is the exception in the Old Norse-Icelandic
versions of those same romances.
Although scholars have on the whole distinguished between author
and redactor, references in editions and comparative studies to a “trans-
lator” and to a “translation” suggest that not infrequently the text of a
nineteenth-century edition of a riddarasaga is assumed to be identical -
normalized orthography excepted - with a translation made some seven
centuries ago. After comparing a section of Mottuls saga with the corre-
sponding text in Le mantel mautaillié, E. F. Halvorsen concluded that
Mottuls saga “est moins exacte qu’une traduction moderne peut-étre,
mais c’est une traduction, pas un remaniement.”1 After a similar compar-
ison of passages in Elis saga, Flores saga ok Blankiflur, and Ivens saga
with their respective sources, Geraldine Barnes confidently opined: “For
purposes of literary and historical analysis, at least, it seems safe to
assume that in their present State the riddarasogur MSS accurately repre-
sent the material translated, abbreviated or amplified by Brother Robert
and his nameless colleagues.”2 Her statement implies that the various
redactions of a saga do not diverge substantially from one another. Just
as extreme a position - but one diametrically opposed to the preceding -
is taken by Thorkil Damsgaard Olsen, who flatly denies that a valid
analysis of the style or translational technique of the riddarasogur is
possible:
1 E. F. Halvorsen, “La traduction scandinave des textes frangais,” in Les relations litté-
raires franco-scandinaves au Moyen Age. Actes du Colloque de Liége (Paris, 1975), p. 253.
2 Geraldine Barnes, “The riddarasogur: A Medieval Exercise in Translation,” Saga-
Book of the Viking Society for Northern Research, 19:4 (1977), 438.
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