Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1981, Page 94
The modern editor - unlike his medieval counterpart - signals the conclu-
sion of the young man’s speech by quotation marks. The Norwegian
translator had no punctuation marks to guide him, and he either under-
stood the following comment (vv. 606-07) to be a part of the young man’s
speech or at least thought that it should be. Moreover, he realized the
advantage of including a reference to the reaction of the knights in order
to convince the king of the seriousness of the situation. To stress the
significance of the conclusion of the speech - that is, what the editor of
the French lai had interpreted as an authorial comment - the reference to
the knights’ response to the situation is amplified in Mottuls saga:
“Herra,” segir hann, “haldid vid mik ord ydur ok Jteim for-
måla, er \>ér hétud mér! Fessir riddarar vitu eigi, hvat )>eir
skulu um ræda um sinar unnostur, at svå bunu, ef sumar eru
reyndar, en sumar oreyndar ok ganga undan frjålsar.” (ch. 9,
p. 24)
(“Sire” he says, “keep your word to me and the promise that you
made to me! These knights don’t know what they should say regard-
ing their lady-loves, if matters stand so that some are tested, but
others are not and get off free.”)
In the saga it falis to the young man to interpret the knights’ silence and
to use it as part of his argument. The decision to consider the content of
vv. 606-07 above as part of the young man’s speech is especially under-
standable if the French manuscript from which Mottuls saga was transla-
ted contained a reading similar to that in B.N. fr. 353, Cis chevaliers ...,
to which pessir riddarar corresponds.42 As the French text stands, one can
attribute the speechlessness of the knights to a variety of causes, such as
embarrassment. The author of Mottuls saga chose to let the visitor ex-
plain the phenomenon as a silent assessment of the advisability of allow-
ing some of the ladies to get off so easily that they do not have to submit
to the test. The amplification conforms to a recurring pattern in the saga:
general concepts are broken down into component parts, or alternatives
are presented. In the example above the author mentions both the posi-
tive - sumar eru reyndar - and negative aspects - en sumar oreyndar - of
the situation, and concludes with the tautological variation of sumar
oreyndar, that is, ok ganga undan frjålsar.
42 See F.-A. Wulff, “Le conte du Mantel," Romania, 14 (1885), p. 373, v. 616.
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