Riddarasǫgur: The Translation of European Court Culture in Medieval Scandinavia ed. by Karl G. Johansson and Else Mundal (review)

This coedited collection of essays on Old Norse translations and adaptations of foreign romance (riddarasǫgur) has its origins in a 2008 conference at the University of Oslo on the transmission and translation of European court culture in Scandinavia during the thirteenth century. Wide-ranging in topics and methodologies, the contributions extend from background surveys of chivalric culture and translation theory to examinations of individual riddarasǫgur, scenes, and motifs. The broad aim of the volume, as identified in the editorial Preface, is to provide a forum for established and early career scholars “to present a view of contemporary scholarship on the Scandinavian riddarasǫgur with a clear Continental perspective.” Else Mundal’s Introduction identifies key concerns of the undertaking as the understanding of chivalric culture at its French source, the reasons for its appeal to Northern Europe, particularly to the royal court of Norway, and its radical narrative transformation in late medieval Iceland. These clearly articulated focal points could have provided a useful organizing framework for the collection in the form of signposted sections and, given its sometimes seemingly random groupings, a more satisfying sense of structural and thematic cohesion. Reverse ordering of the first essay, by Keith Busby, and the second by Martin Aurell, would, for instance, bring a more logical introductory sequence to the volume.

Aurell’s wide-ranging survey of “Chivalric Culture in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries” is a comprehensive essay on the historical relationship between knights and the ideals, trappings, politics of chivalric culture: horses, weapons, conduct in battle, religion, literacy, and patronage. Busby’s mapping of a “medieval Francophonia”—stretching west to Ireland, north to Utrecht, south to Italy, and east to the Levant—goes to the key question concerning the transmission of chivalric narrative to Scandinavia, namely the precise origin of the manuscripts translated in Norway in the thirteenth century. Noting that Snorri Sturluson relates the genealogy of the Dukes of Normandy three times in Heimskringla, Busby raises the possibility of Franco-Scandinavian cultural connection through Normandy as a reason for Scandinavian receptivity to Francophone literature. At the conclusion of his essay, Busby proposes a number of pertinent topics for consideration in a suggested nine-part “model of adaptation” for the riddarasǫgur, an invitation for researchers to address “issues and questions which may prove useful within the larger framework of riddarasǫgur research.” The volume is nevertheless well underway before the contributions address any of the questions in Busby’s model or reach the primary site of cultural transmission identified by Mundal in the Introduction, the court of the Norwegian king, Hákon IV.

Ingvil Brügger Budal’s essays on the riddarasǫgur associated with Hákon’s court, Stefka Georgieva Eriksen’s on the Arthurian ethos in its Old Norse expression, and Bjørn Bandlien’s on riddarasǫgur production and audiences in the two generations after Hákon’s reign make a complementary trio that would have enhanced the intellectual cohesion of the collection had they been grouped together. Brügger Budal offers a new perspective on the impetus for translation by locating it in the context of the royal politics of gift giving—in this case the prestige-enhancing “gift of entertainment” for Hákon’s entourage. In an extensively researched and thought-provoking essay, Georgieva Eriksen sets four of the five texts in the manuscript De la Gardie 4–7 (ca. 1270) in the context of medieval practices of reading. The only Norwegian manuscript to preserve the translations of Elie de Saint-Gille (Elis saga) and the Lais of Marie de France (Strengleikar), DG 4–7 also contains a partial translation of the Latin Pamphilus de amore and a fragment of a translation Hugrekki and Æðra from the Latin Dialogue between Courage and Fear. A tropological or “ethical” reading of...