Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1981, Page 154
(The queen considered that if she became annoyed or angry on
account of this, then she would be exposed to shame and disgrace
since she had been unfaithful to such a chieftain. And so she turned
the entire situation into an amusement and entertainment, into
laughter, into a game, and ridiculing words.)
The words ire and honte undergo amplification: the noun ire generates
the nearly synonymous verbal pair angradisk: reiddisk, but the noun
honte is transmitted by two substantives, skemmd and svivirding. The
author focuses on jenglois by expanding the concept into a nearly synony-
mous pair, the non-alliterating gaman and skemmtan, and the two words
are supported, clarified, and emphasized by the following alliterating
collocation.
Amplification is a consciously used technique in the sagas, occurring
neither automatically nor always in the same grammatical structures, and
only in essential passages. Moreover, synonymous and antithetic colloca-
tions - the primary stylistic technique for amplification in the sagas - do
not always correspond to the use of similar techniques in the French
texts. In addition, analysis of some of the amplifications either in relation
to the context in which they appear or in regard to the nature of the
expansions themselves indicates that the authors proceeded according to
certain principles of amplification: principles of perspective, of intensifi-
cation, and of semantic or grammatical progression determined the na-
ture of the expansion of a particular passage.
In Parcevals saga, for example, one expansion is intended to affect the
reader’s perception of the hero. Blankiflur’s nocturnal visit to Parceval’s
bedside, her face bathed in tears, elicits a sympathetic response from him
in the form of three questions:
“Hvi, frida mær,” sagdi hann, “kvomu t>ér hér eda hvat er vili
yåvarr?
fyrir gu5s sakir, seg mér, hvi ert )ju svå harmsfull,
ongrud ok tiglod?” (ch. 7, 18:27-29)
(“Why, fair maiden,” he said, “have you come here and what is
your wish? For heaven’s sake, tell me, why are you so sorrowful,
grieving, and sad?”)
The tautological adjectival phrase in the last question, with two of the
adjectives alliterating, stresses not only the significance of Parceval’s