Norway and Iceland

Abstract

This essay examines the role played by two individuals in transmitting medieval French and German literature. The Norwegian King Hákon Hákonarson (r. 1217–63) commissioned the translation of French courtly romances, lays, and epics in the thirteenth century, while in the sixteenth century the Icelander Björn Þorleifsson translated twenty-two medieval Low German legends that have otherwise not survived. Both rescued medieval French and German literature from oblivion. Hákon Hákonarson commissioned the translation of Thomas d’Angleterre’s Tristran as well as of the French epic Élie de St. Gilles, neither of which has been preserved in its entirety in French. In the case of Tristran, the extant French text is fragmentary, and only the Old Norse translation, Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, contains the romance in its entirety. The Norwegian translation of Élie de St. Gilles in Elis saga ok Rósamundu transmits a variant version of the French epic, which is no longer extant. Three centuries later Björn Þorleifsson, a wealthy Icelandic farmer, translated twenty-two Low German hagiographic texts into Icelandic. A number of the legends are in their entirety or in part apocryphal, and three derive from Middle High German metrical narratives, namely Ósvalds saga, Henriks saga ok Kunegundis, and Saga hins góða syndara.