The Ethics of Empire in the Saga of Alexander the Great: A study based on MS AM 519a 4to (review)

The mid thirteenth-century Old Norse prose rendering of Walter of Châtillon's late twelfth-century Latin epic poem Alexandreis has long been regarded as a masterpiece of translation. In the late seventeenth century, Árni Magnússon contemplated producing an edition of it, and in 1945, no lesser authority than Halldór Laxness was behind the first Icelandic printing of the saga. Yet, despite consistent admiration for the technical and expressive merits of Alexanders saga and whether or not Bishop Brandr Jónsson (d. 1264) was the translator of Alexandreis, as is claimed in one of the saga's main manuscripts as well as in Gyðinga saga, little scholarly attention has been paid to it until relatively recently. 2009, however, may well be remembered as the turning point in the critical reception of Alexanders saga with the publication of digital and paper editions of the saga by Andrea de Leeuw van Weenen (AM 519a 4to. Alexanders saga. An electronic edition. Menota ms. 14, v. 1.0. [www.menota.org]; and Alexanders saga. AM 519a 4to in the Arnamagnæan Collection, Copenhagen. Manuscripta Nordica 1), a doctoral thesis on the saga's translation methods by Jonatan Pettersson (Fri översättning i det medeltida Västnorden. Acta Universitatis Stockholmensis, Stockholm Studies in Scandinavian Philology N.S. 51. [http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?searchId=1&pid=diva2:233382]) and David Ashurst's publication of the first monograph exclusively focused on the saga.

As Ashurst notes in detail in his introduction and as several previous critics have remarked, the Icelandic translator was perfectly attuned to the literary tastes and understandings of his readership. Where Walter alludes to mythological topics that were, in all likelihood, unfamiliar to readers in the far north, the translator admits explanatory material, and where Walter's style, rhetoric, and views become a little too insistent, the translator avoids personal responsibility by crediting Walter as the originator of such flourishes. This much, however, is not really what Ashurst is seeking to reveal, for:

the purpose of this book is literary exegesis: to illuminate what is actually there in the text; to break down faulty assumptions concerning the nature, content and message of the text; to examine whether judgements made within the text stand up to the evidence of the rest of the work, but nevertheless to investigate whether there is a logic underlying any apparent points of incoherence.

(23)

In short, Ashurst's title says it all: this book is a study of the ethics of empire or, to put it another way, of the medieval ideology of monarchic governance, a set of principles that, as Ashurst observes, would have been close to the heart of mid thirteenth-century Icelanders on the brink of annexation by the Norwegian monarchy (43-5). In this regard, Ashurst is set on refuting a broad, if somewhat undernourished, critical consensus to the effect that Alexanders saga is ambiguous to the point of being confused in its account of the heathen emperor's career, but that, in general terms, the narrative thrust is one that is critical of it, thus seeing Alexander the Great as a victim of his own publicity and his saga as a biographical study of the consequences of hubris.

The crux of the matter is the extent to which the Shining Visitant that comes to Alexander at the outset of his Persian campaign is understood to be an agent of the Hebrew God, for this visitation could be regarded as a divine promise of imperial supremacy on the condition that Alexander does not lay waste to Jerusalem. Although Alexander himself does not quite grasp the origin and so the import of this supernatural encounter, he nevertheless does exactly as he is asked. Yet, the original divine mandate has commonly been read as one that turns quickly to...