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  • Trojan Origins and the Use of the Æneid and Related Sources in the Old Icelandic Brut
  • Hélène Tétrel

There is no extant Old Icelandic “Saga of Aeneas” that we can use to compare with other medieval romances that draw on the Aeneid. Nevertheless, medieval Scandinavia was not untouched by Virgilian historiographical tradition. Though Scandinavian responses seem not to have followed the allegorizing tradition associated with the Aeneid, they were perfectly aware of the historical possibilities offered by the tale of Aeneas’s journeys. Indeed, the theory of origins that prevailed in Europe from late Antiquity to the late Middle Ages was imported to Iceland in early times. For this very reason, the tale of Aeneas and his descendants, founders of several empires, became an obligatory chapter in the history of Iceland as well as in the histories of Great Britain and France. Like their European counterparts, historians writing in Old Icelandic felt the need to present their respective Trojan lineages in a synchronic perspective, both because it helped to establish, indirectly, the Scandinavian branches themselves, and because it was a common feature in universal histories. Thus, Aeneidinspired episodes appear in historical contexts in Old Icelandic literature. I shall refer in this study, firstly, to a very brief Aeneas section in the Icelandic compilation AM 764 4to, which also contains a partial translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth;1 secondly, to a similar section in the so-called Veraldar saga (History of the World), in which there is no obvious knowledge of Geoffrey;2 and, thirdly, and the main focus of this study, to the [End Page 490] two extended variants of a shortened Aeneid to be found respectively in the longer and shorter versions of the Breta sögur (Saga of the Britons).3 The present study seeks to show that these four variants are connected and draw on similar sources.

As a consequence of the way in which the Aeneid was imported into medieval Iceland, the variants of Aeneas’s story which find expression in its ancient books naturally draw on late-Antique historical renderings of Virgil’s poem, as well as on the poem itself. The Icelandic texts reflect two categories of compendia that were based on the same story: the first category linked Aeneas’s tale to the history of the first kings of Alba, starting with Ascanius’s son Silvius, and from then on to the founders of the Roman Empire. As well as drawing on Virgil, the late Antique chronicles, which tell about the “Roman” lineages, include elements borrowed from several Latin historians, poets, and mythographers but place them in a general framework based, as was usual at that time, on Eusebius-Jerome’s Chronicon. The other category of chronicle attached to the branch of Aeneas that reached Iceland was dedicated to the founders of the British Empire, starting with Silvius’s son Brutus: these texts are mostly based on the Historia regum Britanniae but show knowledge of other materials as well. Lastly, these two categories of chronicle, which were often copied together in the same cycles, are always found in association with a Trojan prehistory based on interpolated adaptations of Pseudo-Dares’s account of the Trojan fall. Thus, it is appropriate to speak of a “Trojan-Roman- Briton” context and also necessary to connect the different parts of the cycle to understand how they came to Iceland, with the Aeneid serving as one chapter in this cycle.

Among the sources on which the Icelandic texts draw for their interpolated paragraphs, an important part is played by Ovidian materials (Ovid and indirect renderings of Ovid) associated with Servian comments and less easily identifiable glosses. Those borrowings from the grammatical tradition might have been transmitted through various accessus and sooner or later inserted to fit an historical background. Moreover, [End Page 491] the vernacular literatures drew little distinction between romance and history, as far as the Aeneid and the “matter of Rome” are concerned. As our knowledge of Anglo-Norman and French literature reminds us, translations of Latin chronicles and romans antiques were kept together in manuscripts: the widely circulated compilation that Paul Meyer called the Histoire Ancienne jusqu’à César is...

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