Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1981, Page 169

the French source,”27 and “a concession to its poetic original.”28 Consid-
ering how consistently alliteration also occurs in the saga to underline
significant speech and action, however, it is unlikely that the author of
Parcevals saga tried his hånd at verse merely because it was the form of
the original, or that he restricted himself in that poetic exercise to the
chapter endings because he experienced difficulty with rhyme. We may
more reasonably suppose that rhyme is only another manifestation of a
desire to make certain passages as euphonious as possible, especially
since rhyming couplets are sometimes found in conjunction with allitera-
tion, and thus further enhanced by it. The various instances of rhyme in
the sagas comprise but another aspect of the authors’ experimentation
with sound. We should distinguish, furthermore, between the work of the
translator and that of later redactors. In those sagas where rhyme occurs
only sporadically and in isolation, one can assume that it existed already
in the original translation, as with Tristrams saga. Because the rhymed
passages in Parcevals saga are found mostly at the ends of chapters, some
scholars would attribute them to the Icelandic copyists rather than the
Norwegian translators.29 That may well be the case, if one considers the
numerous liberties taken by later scribes with the content and style of
some of the riddarasogur that we are examining (see, for example, pp.
183-91). Nonetheless, except for the faet that rhyming couplets are unusual
in the prose sagas, they fit well into the context of Parcevals saga and do
not appear to be extraneous elements superimposed upon the text with-
out any thought given to the context.
Although the content of the verses in Parcevals saga derives from
Perceval, the rhymes are far from being literal translations or even at-
tempts to emulate the French verse form; on the contrary, the couplets
evolve out of the general context. For example, the couplets
Så er illa fallinn at berjask,
er eigi kann våpnum at verjask.
27 E. F. Halvorsen, The Norse Version of the Chanson de Roland, Bibliotheca Arnamag-
næana, XIX (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1959), p. 20.
28 Carol Clover, “Scene in Saga Composition,” ANF, 89 (1974), p. 67.
29 Finnur Jonsson takes this position, for example, in Den oldnorske og oldislandske
litteraturs historie, II, p. 959. Henry Kratz disagrees, but the reasons he advances are not
convincing; he maintains that “if the rhymes were indeed inspired by the French verse, the
copyist would have had to be familiar enough with French literature to realize the work was
in verse” (“The Parcevals saga and Li contes del Graal," SS, 49 [1977], p. 21).
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