Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1981, Side 104
Hans frægd mun fara um alla veroldina, sem solar birti,
ok ber hann af ollum monnum heidr ok pris,
sem guil af eiri edr gimsteinar af grjoti.
Sæl er su modir er jwilikan son åtti.” (97:18-26)
(“Happy the woman who has given herself to such a knight and her
entire realm into his keeping, because no knight can surpass him,
who is as fierce against his enemies as a lion but gentie as a lamb
towards his men. His farne will spread through the whole world like
the radiance of the sun, and honor and praise are his above all men,
just as gold over brass or precious stones over pebbles. Happy the
mother who bore such a son.”)
The variants in the three primary manuscripts enable one to reconstruct
the substance of the passage in the Norwegian translation. In the vellum
AM 489 occur the comparisons to bodies of light, comparisons which
derive directly from the French. In the paper manuscript Stockholm 46
there is a faint but certain echo of the double simile in the comparison of
Iven’s farne with the radiance of the sun. In the other vellum, Stockholm
6, the first simile - as a wax candle above tallow candles - has been
replaced by the comparison of gold and brass, and this simile is common
to both Stockholm manuscripts, paper and vellum. Both similes could
have been present already in the original translation, or a later redactor
could have replaced the one with the other. In Stockholm 46 the antithet-
ical alliterating comparison of Iven with a lion and lamb derives from the
French romance. The similes are a modified and expanded interpretation
of the comparison of Yvain with a lion who throws himself upon hinds
when plagued by hunger (vv. 3202-04). The form that the French simile -
con li lions antre les dains - took in translation is not unusual for the
riddarasogur. The double comparison in Stockholm 46 - “fierce against
his enemies as a lion, but gentie as a lamb towards his men” - is merely a
variant of a descriptive cliché, such as hann var gladr ok litillåtr vid alla
slna menn, en hardr vid pjofa ok illrædismenn (‘he was cheerful and
amicable towards his men, but fierce towards thieves and evil doers’),
which is how Tristram is described in the Icelandic Tristrams saga (p. 36).
The eulogy of Iven as found in the paper manuscript H46 is a typical
example of the kind of scribal modification prevalent in some works, and
elucidates the relationship between some translated sagas and their sources.
There are two major differences of substance between the passage as
found in the vellums and in the paper manuscript; both discrepancies
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