Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2003, Page 42

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Michael Chesnutt
From the text on ff. 158-59 it can be seen that the continuation of the
Roskilde Chronicle (ch. XX in Gertz’s edition, SMHD I 32-33) quotes
at length from a section of the Vita altera occurring in K as the second
half of the seventh and the first half of the eighth lesson at Matins of the
Translation (edition §§ 10b:2:3:1, 10b:2:4:l). The continuator has made
his own additions, principally conceming chronology and the details of
the power struggle between Sven Grathe, Knud Magnussen, and Valde-
mar the Great in the period 1147-1157; he concludes with a pompous
description of how Archbishop Eskil supposedly crowned Valdemar as
sole king of Denmark in the latter year. Against Waitz, who argued that
the textual relationship was the reverse, i.e. that the Vita altera as trans-
mitted in K had borrowed from the continuation of the chronicle (Waitz1
9; Waitz2 8 and n. 4), Johannes Steenstrup offered the shrewd observa-
tion that sentences unique to the continuation have no alliteration, which
conversely is a distinctive stylistic trait of the Vita. Steenstrup also re-
jected the alternative proposition that the Vita and the continuation were
copying from a common source.51
Extracts from the continuation preserving a few echoes of the Vita al-
tera are to be found in a short history of the kings of Denmark in AM
1030 4to (KålKatAM II 298-99, no. 2162). This paper manuscript mea-
sures ca. 21.6 x 16.6 cm and is made up of four independent booklets,
the second of which contains three articles copied by Åmi Magnusson
himself - all three, as it would seem, from a lost original on parchment
in the University Library (cf. Gertz, SMHD I 149). The last of the three
articles is the short history here under discussion, actually not much
more than an annotated regnal list; the material from the continuation of
the Roskilde Chronicle is introduced under the entries for Erik Lam and
Sven Grathe (f. 30r-v). The complete text of the history, which ends by
mentioning the Estonian crusade of Valdemar Sejr and was presumably
written in the 1220s or 1230s, is printed in SMHD I 161-66 under the
title Series ac brevior historia regum Danie.
In the apparatus to his edition of the Roskilde Chronicle Gertz asser-
ted that the beginning of the continuation was borrowed from the Series
ac brevior historia and the remainder - “item nonnullis mutatis et aliis
51 Johannes Steenstrup, review article in: [Dansk] Historisk Tidsskrift 6. Række 4. Bind,
1892-94, 672-90, here 679-83, esp. 681; cf. Reich 236 and n. 1, endorsing the views ex-
pressed in an earlier work by Usinger.