Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 98

96 GRIPLA
view, Widding and Bekker-Nielsen’s hypothesis, which identifies the
translator as a Norwegian cleric trained in France.76 Historical evidence
of the production and circulation of the Latin text, as well as its subse-
quent reworkings in French are uniquely circumscribed in a Benedictine
milieu. As mentioned above, Nuper should be considered a very rare text
within the corpus of medieval Latin literature, being transmitted as a codex
unicus in the aforementioned L, a miscellany of historical and religious cha-
racter, produced in all probability by Bishop Laurence of Durham (d. 1154)
during the first half of the twelfth century.77 Approximately a century
later, manuscript H of Desputisun was also produced in Durham at the
Benedictine priory of St. Cuthbert (634–87), where it was kept for about
four hundred years until the seventeenth century.78 Approximately in the
same years, codex P of Desputisun was being prepared at the Benedictine
monastery of Saint-Bertin in Saint-Omer in Flanders.79 According to
Emily Jean Richard, manuscript C of the Insular version of Desputisun
could also be located within a Cistercian or Benedictine monastery in
the city of Worcester.80 It can thus be assumed that the Desputisun text
reached Norway due to the close connections between the Norwegian
Benedictine monasteries and their Continental counterparts. The high acc-
uracy of the variants of Viðrǿða líkams ok sálar, as well as their proximity to
the archetype of the Norse text Y, would naturally suggest that, in spatial
and temporal terms, the composition of Y occurred in close proximity
to the Benedictine monastery of Munkeliv in Bergen around 1200–25.
Consequently, the translation of the Flemish source-text should be dated
to shortly before or after the accession to the throne of King Hákon
Hákonarson in June 1217—the king who famously commissioned the
translation of numerous chivalric romances from French into Norse.81
76 Widding and Bekker-Nielsen, 275–76.
77 Henningham, Early Latin Debate, 20–31.
78 Capozza, 34.
79 Capozza, 70.
80 Emily Jean Richard, Body-Soul Debates in English, French and German Manuscripts, c. 1200–
c. 1500 (PhD diss., University of York, 2009), 38.
81 The oldest text among such translations is Tristrams saga ok Ísǫndar, a Norse rendition
of the French poem Tristan by Thomas of England (fl. c. 1100–99), translated in 1226 by
Brother Robert, an English or Norman monk active at the Norwegian court during the
first half of the thirteenth century. Subsequently, once he became abbott of an unspecified
Norwegian monastery, Robert wrote his translation of Elis saga ok Rósamundu around