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Authors, dead and alive, in Old Norse fiction In Bergen, on Trinity Sunday, in the year 1225, Hakon Hakonarson IV, king of Norway, known as 'the Old', married Margret, daughter of Duke Skuli Bar8arson, the former regent. Tradition has it that to honour the occasion Thomas of England's Tristan was translated from Old French verse into Old Norse prose. This sad story of doomed passion, adultery, and marital misery seems like an inappropriate and ill-omened wedding tribute, but there is no evidence that it was for Hakon and Margret, even though the king had his ambitious, and later openly rebellious, father-in-law stabbed to death outside a monastery some fifteen years later.1 But its inappropriateness as an epithalamium is not the only discordant note in the marriage of saga and romance celebrated by Tristrams saga. Tristrams saga is one of a number of French verse romances and epics translated or adapted into Old Norse prose during Hakon's long reign (1217-63). French epic makes a relatively smooth transition into the collection known as Karlamagnds saga: the heroic spirit of the chanson de geste, governed by a straightforward code which demands loyalty to lord and kin and courage in the face of overwhelming odds, has a universal quality that makes its transmission from one cultural context to another fairly simple, especially when both societies have a solid grounding in the heroic ethic. Tragedy, too, has a 'universality' which transfers easily from one milieu to another, as it does in the case of Thomas's tragic romance Tristan and its Norse version, Tristrams saga. But the transference of twelfth-century French chivalric narrative or romans courtois, a culturally elitist literature composed for court circles in northern France, into an alien context, in this case the royal court of thirteenth-century Norway, and thence to Iceland, is a very different matter. In their Old Norse versions, the works of Chretien de Troyes undergo a process of remodelling more profound, although less immediately obvious, than the transition from verse to prose. The term riddarasogur ('sagas of knights') itself seems somewhat paradoxical.2 Of its two components, 'sagas', for most m o d e m readers, evokes On these events see Hdkonar Saga, ed. Gudbrand Vigfusson, Icelandic Sagas U, Rerum Britannicarum Medii AZvi Scriptores, London, 1887, chs. 128 and 241. There is an English translation, The Saga of Hacon, by Sir G. W . Dasent in the companion volume, Icelandic Sagas IV, London, 1894. The term is, however, found as early as the fifteenth-century manuscripts of Victors saga ok Bldvus, in which it is said that King Hakon Magnusson had many riddarasogur translated into Norse from Greek and French. See Agnete Loth, ed., 6 G. Barnes the doings of the landed families of medieval Iceland, as told in the essentially historical mode of the Islendingasdgur; 'knights', on the other hand caUs to mind the ideals of chivaky and their literary expression in medieval romance, particularly in its classical form, the self-consciously fictional twelfth-century French romans courtois. B y 'self-consciously fictional' I mean that which explicidy draws attention to itself as a product of creative imagination. B y 'historical mode' I mean the presentation of material, which may or m a y not be historical fact, in a framework of verisimilitude, such as a geographical and chronological context identifiable from outside the text. This paper wid consider three forms of Old Norse literature which attract the label 'fiction' but which differ significandy from each other as narrative types: the versions of the romans courtois of Chretien de Troyes known as 'translated' riddarasogur (Erex saga, hens saga, Parcevcds saga, Valvens pdttr); the so-caUed 'independent' Icelandic riddarasogur; and those episodes in some Islendingasdgur in which the hero travels abroad as a young man. For the purposes of the discussion, medieval narrative will be broadly classified according to three principal modes of composition: fictional (that which, like the roman courtois, makes no serious claims to veracity); historical (that which claims to record that which has happened, or might plausibly have happened; for example, epic, chronicle, Islendingasdgur); didactic or exemplary (that which says what does happen, should happen, or should not...

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