From Old English to Old Norse by John Frankis (review)

The relationship between the early textual culture of Scandinavia, particularly Norway and Iceland, and that of England presents a difficult knot to untangle. In academic and popular contexts, Old English and Old Norse are often linked due in large part to the significant Scandinavian settlement in England and in no small part because of the considerable ways in which the literatures of the two languages serve to illuminate one another. Yet, textual culture using the Latin alphabet begins to be attested in Scandinavia itself beginning in the mid-eleventh century, and the earliest vernacular fragments are dated to the century thereafter. In other words, the institutional frameworks that underpin the personal networks, training, and materials necessary for predominant forms of medieval textual culture develop in Scandinavia at approximately the same time as the Old English period comes to an end. How then do we explain the clear links and parallels that characterize the relationship between early homiletic writing in Old Norse and earlier material in Old English? Our understanding of this question is significantly advanced by John Frankis’s detailed and careful examination of an Old Norse translation, found in a fourteenth-century manuscript, and its Old English source, De falsis diis, by Ælfric (ca. 950–ca. 1010).

In 1968, John C. Pope, the editor for the supplementary collection of Ælfrician homilies, demonstrated that an Old Norse homily, Um þat hvađan ortu hofst, found in Hauksbók, was translated from Ælfric’s Old English homily De falsis diis and not independently derived from the same Latin material. Shortly after Pope’s edition appeared, Andrew Taylor published a study of the translation and suggested that English manuscripts were being taken to Iceland and were intelligible in the thirteenth century. Subsequent references have queried the date of the translation but have not fully probed questions related to the possible date and place for the translation activity. For example, Magnús Fjalldal in Anglo-Saxon England in Icelandic Medieval Texts suggested that the text was characteristic of those related to missionary activity (p. 11) and so more likely to have been translated earlier than Taylor suggested. In his more extensive treatment, Frankis presents compelling arguments for a date in the twelfth or later eleventh century and suggests that it may have been carried out in England (or possibly Norway) rather than Iceland. To support his alternative, Frankis offers a parallel text of the two homilies as well as an analysis of two other Old English texts for which there is evidence that the Old Norse relied on the English material in question, namely De auguriis and the Prose Phoenix.

Frankis’s examination begins with a description of the texts and their manuscripts, treating De falsis diis and related texts in their manuscript transmission and then Hauksbók, which now bears three separate shelfmarks (Copenhagen, Arnamagnæan Collection, AM 371 4o; AM 544 4o; and AM 675 4o). After these descriptions, Frankis endeavors to determine the Old English manuscript or version from which the Old Norse translation was made. After a sound, detailed, and convincing analysis based on the varied ways in which vernacular homilies were modified during their textual histories, Frankis suggests that the translator worked from an OE base text in the tradition represented by three manuscripts (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 303; London, British Library MS Cotton Julius E. vii; and Cambridge, University Library MS Ii. i. 33) rather than that found in another two (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Hatton 116 and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 178). This view supplants Taylor’s belief that CCCC 178 or a version similar to it represented the textual state from which the Old Norse translator worked. While Frankis is cautious, I believe that his conclusion is consistent with other studies on Old Norse homiletic writing: “One can say that the translator worked from a text of De falsis diis...