Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2003, Page 90
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Michael Chesnutt
down through the eighteenth century. It was also reproduced in a pam-
phlet from 1727 containing Fire skiønne udvalde Kiempe-Viser (a defec-
tive copy is in the Danish Folklore Archives in Copenhagen, cf. DV IV
117, 120). The saintly biography of Knud Lavard, first essayed by
Robert of Ely and reformulated by the anonymous author of the Vita al-
tera (and Saxo), thus survived in an unbroken chain of literary and sub-
literary tradition for well over half a millennium. Vedel’s ballad version
was still available as reading matter for both high and low when Jacob
Langebek began to collect material from the pre-Reformation bre-
viaries, blazing a trail for all future students of the medieval liturgy of St
Knud Lavard.137
The Arnamagnæan Institute
University of Copenhagen
1371 wish to express my thanks to those friends and colleagues who have contributed in
various ways to the successful completion of this study. First of all Emeritus Professor
John Bergsagel of the Department of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen, an ac-
quaintance of long standing and fellow-member of Magdalen College, Oxford: he origi-
nally stimulated my interest in the Kiel manuscript, and the present edition might well be
described as an elaborate palimpsest on the performing material he supplied in 1996 when
my vocal ensemble, Schola Caeciliana, sang long extracts from the Knud Lavard liturgy at
concerts in Copenhagen and Lund. Next the librarians in Denmark, Sweden, and Germany
who have facilitated my work; Erik Christiansen of the Roman Catholic Bishop’s office in
Copenhagen, whose inexhaustible fund of Biblical and liturgical knowledge has always
been at my disposal; Karsten Christensen, administrative adviser to the Arnamagnæan
Commission, and Ulla Haastrup, Copenhagen, both medievalists with an interdisciplinary
mindset congenial to my own; and Britta Olrik Frederiksen of the Arnamagnæan Institute,
who edited my draft in exemplary fashion. Above all I must thank the Copenhagen classi-
cal philologists Karsten Friis-Jensen and Christian Troelsgaard, both of whom generously
responded to my many, and at times I fear even peremptory, requests for help and infor-
mation.