Gripla - 2023, Page 86

84 GRIPLA
The Old French Source Text
According to Henningham—who was responsible for the discovery of
the Nuper and the first study of its relationships with the Desputisun—
Viðrǿða líkams ok sálar, as transmitted in N, represents either a shortened
vulgarization of a now-lost version of the Nuper or a hybrid version
formed by a conflation of readings of the Latin and French texts.39
Widding and Bekker-Nielsen later speculated that the Norse text may
be a direct translation a now-lost French Vorlage, which presented a
significantly reduced text compared to PBCH, with which the now-lost
French text shared numerous readings and from which the Norse text
diverges through the addition of sporadic innovations,40 such as the
explanatory clause “þat cꜵllum vér vatncalf” (that we call water-calf) to
clarify the adjective “idropicus” (hydropic) (table 31).41
Table 31.
P (112/33–36) N (280/13–14)
com a l’idropicus,
tant com il en boit plus
et il gregnor soif a
ia saous ne sera
[Like the hydropic, the more he drinks
and the bigger his thirst, he will never
be satisfied].
þat heitir idropicus. þat cꜵllum vér
vatncalf. þess mæir er hinn dræcr er
þa sott hefir. þes mæir þystir hann. oc
værðr aldrigi fullr
[That is called hydropic. We call that
water-calf. The more the one who
has this disease drinks, the more he is
thirsty and never full].
39 Henningham, Early Latin Debate, 62–67.
40 Widding and Bekker-Nielsen, 273–89. Stefka Georgieva Eriksen recently has endorsed
Widding and Bekker-Nielsen’s hypothesis without, however, providing new textual evi-
dence in their favour. Stefka Georgieva Eriksen, “Body and Soul in Old Norse Culture,”
Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia c. 1100–1350, ed. Eriksen, Disputatio 28
(Turnhout: Brepols 2016), 393–428.
41 The compund vatnkalfr has only four attestations in the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose
(ONP, s.v. “vatn·kalfr”) and is in all probability a calque from Old High German waz-
zarkalb (hydropsy), which is also attested in the form wassersucht (hydropsy). See Ingjald
Reichborn-Kjennerud, “The School of Salerno and Surgery in the North during the Saga
Age,” Annals of Medical History 9 (1937): 321–37, at 334 n. 17.