Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1981, Qupperneq 64

sion here they represent the only instance of the preservation of a narra-
tive in both a Norwegian and an Icelandic redaction.
Gvimars saga is found in a large Icelandic manuscript, Lbs. 840 4to,
that was written in 1737. The codex contains twenty-four items, among
them several romances, such as Rémundar saga keisarasonar and Partalopa
saga.9 Of greatest interest to us is Gvimars saga, since hitherto the Streng-
leikar translation was known from one text alone, in De la Gardie 4-7.
Despite the faet that nearly five centuries separate the Norwegian and
Icelandic redactions and despite the faet that the Icelandic manuscript
contains a somewhat reduced version, Gvimars saga furnishes evidence
that the thirteenth-century translation had preserved the content and
structure of the French Guigemar better than the text of the Norwegian
redaction suggests.
A comparison of the two redactions with the French lai establishes that
Guiamars Ijod in De la Gardie 4-7 is defeetive by reason of textual
attrition, scribal misréadings, and editorial tampering with narrative
structure.9 10 Evidence is furnished by Gvimars saga, for this Icelandic
redaction contains several notable instances of agreement with the
French Guigemar where Guiamars Ijod has ineurred loss of text or has
acquired corrupt readings. Confusion in the use of pronouns - probably
the result of misréadings of abbreviations - accounts for several discrep-
ancies between the Norwegian text and the French lai. The Icelandic
manuscript attests that the translator had not been in error, but that the
divergences occurred in the process of scribal transmission.
Some discrepancies between the Norwegian and Icelandic redactions
are the result of what might be termed complementary corruption: in one
redaction the structure of the passage is affeeted, whereas in the other
content is modified. Both redactions are evidently corrupt, yet compari-
son with the French text reveals that through conflation of the Norwegian
and Icelandic texts we can arrive at a reasonable faesimile of what must
have been the translator’s version. Of particular interest in this regard are
vv. 822-24 of Guigemar. Meissner had proposed that the deviation in
sequence in Guiamars Ijod relative to the French text reflected the trans-
9 For a description of the codex, see Sture Hast, Hardar saga 11. Pappershandskrifterna
(Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1960), pp. 145-47. Also published as vol. XXIII of Bibliotheca
Arnamagnæana.
10 For a comparison of Guiamars IjodlGvimars saga with the French source, see the
introduction to the edition of Gvimars saga, pp. 113-19; also, “Stalking the Elusive Transla-
tor: A Prototype of Guiamars Ijod,” in Scandinavian Studies, 52 (1980), 142-62.
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