Gripla - 2023, Síða 88

86 GRIPLA
Table 33.
L (113/241–42) P (114/65–68) N (281/6–7)
ubi multifaria
tua nunc eraria
[Where is your abundant
money now?]
ou sont or li denier
que tant avoies chier,
que soloies nombrer
et tant sovent conter?
[Where are your coins
now, those that you loved
so much, which you were
accustomed to gather and
frequently count?]
Hvar ero nu pęnningar
þinir þeir er þér þótto iam
góðer er þu vart vánr at
samca oc iðulega at tælia
[Where are your coins
now, those that seemed so
good to you, which you
were accustomed to gath-
er and frequently count?]
In addition to these, the French provenance of Viðrǿða líkams ok sálar is
supported in N not only by a very literal translation of the Desputisun but
also by the very same word order. Given the large number of instances, it is
sufficient to refer here to one example that was already noted in Widding
and Bekker-Nielsen.42 During her speech, the soul describes the condition
of the body post mortem, which, because of the wickedness of his actions,
is isolated from the world of the living and suffers the pains of a life of sin.
Through a sentence formed by an adjective, verb, demonstrative prounoun,
and noun, the text in P expresses “malvais ert li presens” (Bad are those
offerings), rendered in N as “ǿleg er su fórn” (Bad is this offering) (table
34). The latter construction of N may have been perceived as obscure in
the following Icelandic transmission, both because “ǿleg” is registered as
a hapax legomenon in the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose,43 and the entire
reading is completely omitted in Z.
The Flemish Redaction
The first scholar to investigate the manuscript tradition of the Desputisun
was Hermann Varnhagen, the only scholar to have prepared a stemma
codicum of the French text.44 Varnhagen hypothesizes a common
archetype, identified as O, from which two separate branches originate:
42 Widding and Bekker-Nielsen, 276.
43 ONP, s.v. “ǿ·ligr.”
44 Varnhagen, Das altfranzösische Gedicht, 113–87.