Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2003, Side 23
Liturgy of St Knud Lavard - Introduction
9
far by musicologists is the publication by Angul Hammerich of a hand-
ful of hymns and Mass sequences in facsimile and modern notation; the
discovery by Jacques Handschin and Bergsagel of English parallels to
the melodies of one of the hymns and of an antiphon incipit; and
Bergsagel’s identification of the Office of St Alban, the English proto-
martyr, as a likely source of liturgical borrowing.19
The following sections of this introduction describe and analyse the
manuscript and printed sources and discuss the date, provenance, and
textual history of the liturgy of St Knud Lavard. At the end there are
some remarks on the Nachleben of the saint’s legend.
2. Manuscripts
In addition to the printed text of the Older Zealand Chronicle, which
represents the no longer extant codex used by Arni Magnusson (see p. 3
with n. 1), seven Danish manuscripts have been studied in connection
with this new edition. The oldest and most valuable of them is now pre-
served in Germany, two others are now in Sweden, a fourth is in the
Danish Royal Library, and the remaining three are in the Arnamagnæan
Collection at the University of Copenhagen. The seven manuscripts are
as foliows:
19 The work of Hammerich and Handschin is briefly discussed in a review article by Peter
Ryom, “Sankt Knud Lavard-liturgien,” in: Catholica [Copenhagen] 27, 1970, 78-82. See
further John Bergsagel, “Liturgical Relations between England and Scandinavia: as seen
in selected musical fragments from the 12th and 13th centuries,” in: Foredrag och diskus-
sionsinlågg från Nordiskt kollokvium III i latinsk liturgiforskning (Kåytannollisen teolo-
gian julkaisuja A 3/1975), Helsinki 1975, 11-26, here 14—18. Ole Wierød, “Ordinale San-
cti Kanuti Ducis - ‘Ringstedordinalets’ liturgi,” in: Jørgen Nybo Rasmussen, Ole Wierød,
and Kirsten Jacobsen, Sankt Knud Lavard i liturgi og drama (Ælnoths skriftserie 7), Grenå
1998, 10-27, is an impressionistic but stimulating essay on melodic and metrical patterns
in the Knud Lavard liturgy. Augusta Eschricht, “Ordinale St. Kanuti Ducis et Martyris. Of-
ficiet ved Knud Lavards Helgenfester,” in: Musik. Tidsskrift for Tonekunst [Copenhagen]
8, 1924, 19-23, summarises earlier scholarship and reports on early twentieth-century per-
formances of Hammerich’s transcriptions. - Though this is primarily a philological study,
I have made some observations on the chant in my commentary and will take this oppor-
tunity to point out that the differentiae to the Gregorian psalm tones, some of which devi-
ate from the forms given in modem Roman Catholic books, may repay doser comparative
study along with the freely-structured chants of the liturgy (especially the responds).