Medieval Translations and Cultural Discourse: The Movement of Texts in England, France and Scandinavia by Sif Rikhardsdottir (review)

The critical framework comprehensively outlined in the introduction to Sif Rikhardsdottir’s comparative study of Middle English and Old Norse versions of French and Anglo-Norman epic and romance addresses some key issues in the field of cultural studies: postcolonialism, literary translation, and societal perceptions of gender. The book maps out new interpretive territory for these Middle English and Old Norse narratives by considering them as comparable products of a continuing process of cultural transmission, exchange, and transformation, in which translation becomes an act of literary appropriation through the assertion of native traditions of storytelling over foreign literary conventions. Individual chapters offer analyses of the Middle English and Old Norse versions of the Lais of Marie de France, Chrétien’s Yvain, the Chanson de Roland, and Partonopeu de Blois, each from a different critical perspective. Summaries of French, English, and Norse versions of the textually complicated Partonopeus are usefully provided as an appendix.

“Cultural imperialism” and different forms of linguistic resistance to it are the lens through which Chapter 1 views the transmission of Marie’s Lais into Middle English and Old Norse. The focal text is Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal, which is characterized as both a “loose adaptation” (38) and an “independent reworking” of the French lai (43). Since Chestre’s decidedly uncourtly poem derives partly from Sir Landevale, an earlier Middle English adaptation of Marie’s Lanval, the question that arises here is precisely on what basis Sir Launfal can be said to engage in a “contestatory dialogue” (45) with Lanval. The Old Norse Januals ljóð, a direct translation of Lanval preserved in the thirteenth-century Norwegian collection of lais known as Strengleikar, offers opportunity for a three-way comparison, but the sole reference to Janual comes in a note (52) concerning the apparent lack of enthusiasm for Strengleikar in Iceland—an interesting byway of reception history in itself, which seems to warrant more than a footnote. More compelling is the comparison in Chapter 2 between behavioral conventions in the Chanson de Roland and the Norse Runzivals þáttr (“Tale of Ronscesvalles”), which argues that the ideology of the French epic, with its emphasis on interpersonal relationships and projection of contemporary French cultural identity, is reconfigured in the Norse narrative through a focus on actions rather than their agents. Roland’s weeping and grief-stricken swoon at the sight of his fallen comrades at Roncesvalles, conduct likely to signify “unmanliness” for Scandinavian audiences, is, for example, downplayed in Runzivals þáttr by a shift in narratorial perspective to the witnessing of the scene by Archbishop Turpin. The focus in the Norse translation at this point is wholly on the archbishop’s immediate practical actions (he takes the oliphant and carries it toward a running stream to get water for Rollant), unencumbered by the expressions of emotional anguish that accompany them in the Chanson de Roland.

In Chapter 3’s three-way comparison between Yvain and its Middle English and Old Norse versions, the apparent fidelity of Ívens saga and Ywain and Gawain to their common source is, it is suggested, essentially superficial: occasional deviations from the original in the two translations are not “misunderstandings” (80) but rather deliberate transformations of ideology in which the preservation of social structures is of primary importance. Drawing on the emphasis on trowthe in Ywain and Gawain identified by a number of critics, Rikhardsdottir argues that Ywain functions not as a character but as the “semiotic representation” (104) of a set of chivalric principles in which fidelity to one’s bond is foremost. Ívens saga, by contrast, exhibits an uneven pattern of ideological reconfiguration possibly attributable to modifications by successive generations of Icelandic scribes of the no longer extant work of a thirteenth-century Norwegian translator.

Gender theory is the principal frame of reference for Chapter 4’s three-way comparison of the Middle English and Old Norse translations of the...