Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1981, Qupperneq 179

/zjarta mitt i /zugsott,
unnustu rnina i øvin,
/relsi mitt i'/ri51eysi;
eda hvf dvel ek at drepa mik? (ch. 10, 103:12-104:6)
(To what purpose should I, wretched man, live, I who have been so
heedless: what should I do but kill myself? I have lost my joy and
consolation and by my own misdeed turned my reputation into
remorse, my honor into annihilation, my delight into depression,
my life into loathing, my heart into anxiety, my beloved into an
enemy, and my freedom into outlawry. Why do I delay any longer
in killing myself?)
On reading a passage such as this one - and there are others like it in
lvens saga - one can hardly concur with Leach’s generalization concern-
ing the translation of Chrétien’s romances into Norwegian, to the effect
that “they do not exhibit the pains taken by the translator of Tristram and
the Lays.”36 Iven’s lament constitutes the most compact and rhythmic
concentration of alliterative pairs in the entire saga. The opening and
closing sentences are antithetic variations of the same question, and func-
tion as a frame for the monologue. The rhythm that results from a succes-
sion of alliterative pairs resembles more that of verse than prose. The
effectiveness of the passage is to a certain extent the result of an accumu-
lation of alliterative pairs. The redactor’s approach to the alliterative
cluster is gradual. He uses the non-alliterating pair huggan ok fagnadi at
the beginning of the passage and isolates virding; this seems to empha-
size the word, since it stands alone amidst a cluster of collocations. More-
over, the redactor links the initial sentence of Iven’s catalogue of miseries
by the use of tynt (alliterating with tign.tyning) and vent (alliterating with
virding) with the alliterative enumeration that follows.
The study of the style of the Arthurian sagas is facilitated by the
existence of similar episodes in the several works, and it is possible to
follow Régis Boyer’s suggestion - made in part in response to Peter
Hallberg’s lexico-statistical studies of the riddarasogur - to concentrate
“sur la composition (du texte, du paragraphe, ou de la phrase) qui est
l’æuvre de l’homme et tient (un peu) moins aux dictats de la rhétorique
36 Angevin Britain and Scandinavia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921), p.
229.
12 King Arthur
165