The Legend of Pallas's Tomb and its Medieval Scandinavian Transmission

Pallas, son of Evander, was an ally of Aeneas, and died heroically in combat against Turnus in Book 10 of the Aeneid. From at least the first half of the twelfth century, possibly earlier, a legend began to develop around the discovery of his body, perfectly preserved, in Rome, in strange contrast to the account of the Aeneid, where the body is burned. Most of these accounts note that the body was gigantic, in addition to being intact, but that soon after the tomb was opened, the body decayed as normal. While accounts of the excavation of a renowned historical figure were not un-common in the later Middle Ages, no similar legend seems to have had a comparable breadth of circulation and versatility of use throughout Europe, from Iceland and Norway to Italy and Spain. The legend of Pallas's tomb is highly flexible and self-contained, and it appears in different contexts in chronicles, romances, histories, and annals, in Latin and in a variety of vernaculars throughout late medieval and early modern Europe. The popularity of the legend owes much to its ability to be fitted into a variety of texts with different subjects and concerns. This modularity, in turn, can be partly attributed to the details of the legend itself, the distinctive combination of sources, information, and narratives that are used to construct the complete text.

The goal of this study is to explore the use and transmission of this legend in several medieval Icelandic and Norwegian sources in the context of its full transmission through medieval and early modern texts. Despite its popularity, very little scholarship has dealt with the legend and its transmission, and no study has been written focusing upon it.¹ No scholars seem to have yet noted the branching of the legend into two main versions or the relationship between the two versions. Hamm and Friedman have argued against the general consensus that William of Malmesbury's version is the oldest, from which all others derive, but they have not developed this argument beyond the text of their immediate discussion.² As such, the first two sections here will discuss the full transmission of the Pallas legend in as much detail as is possible. Allowing that many more may yet remain undiscovered, this study will proceed on the basis of forty-five iterations of the legend, many of them very closely related to each other, along with an additional text that contains an important description of the burial, but not the rediscovery. The vast majority of these are grouped into version A, with a handful grouped in version B, the latter defined by the additional detail of balsam or balm being pumped into Pallas's corpse through golden tubes.

From there, some of the distinctive characteristics of the Icelandic and Norwegian transmission will be explored. The legend in the twelfth-century Historia of the Norwegian Theodoricus Monachus is the earliest example of the legend used as scholarly evidence in giant-studies. The transmission of the legend in Iceland appears in the two versions of Breta sögur, the Old Norse translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, as well as in three different annals. The Icelandic transmission is thus the most extensive body of vernacular translations of the legend still extant, and texts from Iceland and Norway represent a very significant portion of the small collection of extant B version texts.³ Part of this extensiveness may be related to the fact that the legend entered the Icelandic-Norwegian milieu in at least three separate versions, and potentially as many as five. Contextualizing these versions and their transmission can thus reveal an important and neglected aspect of Old Norse translation and the adaptation of European culture into this corner of the medieval world.

This study can provide a foundation for further work on the medieval legend of Pallas's tomb and its significance and role in medieval and early modern culture. The legend should be understood as more than a mere intellectual curiosity. It is a key point of...