Places, Kings, and Poetry: the Shaping of Breta Sögur for the Norse Corpus
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Hugvísindasvið Places, Kings, and Poetry: The Shaping of Breta sögur for the Norse Corpus Ritgerð til MA-prófs í 2012 Ryder Patzuk-Russell September 2012 Háskoli Íslands Íslensku- og menningardeild Medieval Icelandic Studies Places, Kings, and Poetry: The Shaping of Breta sögur for the Norse Corpus Ritgerð til MA-prófs í Íslensku- og menningardeild Ryder Patzuk-Russell Kt.: 250284-3819 Leiðbeinandi: Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir September 2012 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgements.................................................................................................................2 Introduction.............................................................................................................................3 Texts and Manuscripts.................................................................................................4 Chapter One: Place and Genealogy.........................................................................................8 Genealogical Additions: Aeneas and the Anglo-Saxon Kings....................................9 Geography: Scandinavia, the Atlantic Isles, and Caithness......................................16 Geography and Haukr: Alreksstaðir and Hǫrðaland.................................................20 Conclusion: The Scandinavian Narrator....................................................................24 Chapter Two: Pagans and Christians.....................................................................................27 Interpretatio Germania...............................................................................................27 Interpretatio and Genealogy......................................................................................32 Other Pagan Elements...............................................................................................35 Christianization of Geoffrey's Text: Merlínusspá......................................................39 Christianization of the Prose Breta sögur..................................................................42 Conclusion: A Learned Narrator................................................................................46 Chapter Three: Form, Genre, and Prosimetrum....................................................................48 Functions of Prosimetrum.........................................................................................51 Genre.........................................................................................................................54 Conclusion: A Combination of Narrator....................................................................57 Chapter Four: A Comparative Study of Historiographic Texts.............................................59 Ynglinga saga and the Prologue of Heimskringla.....................................................59 Historia Norwegie.....................................................................................................61 Orkneyinga Saga.......................................................................................................63 Gesta Danorum.........................................................................................................65 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................73 Bibliography..........................................................................................................................75 Appendix: A Translation of the Hauksbók Breta sögur.........................................................79 2 Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without all the staff at the Medieval Icelandic Studies program at Háskola Íslands, nor without my undergraduate adviser, John Ott, and the head of the MIS program, Torfi Tulinius, who did most of the work of getting me into Iceland and started on the MA program in the first place. I would like to thank my adviser, Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir, for getting me started on this project and guiding me, in particular, through the early stages of research. I likewise owe a great debt to Haraldur Bernharðsson for teaching me Old Norse with amazing skill, passion, and efficiency and guiding me through all the difficult stages of translation in Breta sögur and Merlínusspá. My thanks to Hélène Tétrel, for her excellent advice, her generosity with her knowledge and transcriptions, and her help with the source material. Thanks also to Terry Gunnell, for introducing me to what hamingja and fylgja can represent, which provided one of the earliest inspirations for what this thesis would be about. Much appreciation, finally, to all my fellow students who helped edit and advised me on this work, particularly Magda, James, and Paul. 3 Introduction Breta sögur is an Old Norse translation, originally made at some point in the early thirteenth century.1 It translates the great Latin pseudo-history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Historia Regum Britanniae, which tells of the reigns of legendary British kings from their Trojan origins until the Anglo-Saxon conquest. Merlínusspá is a translation from prose into verse of Prophetia Merlíni, a semi-independent text of prophecies that makes up a part of Geoffrey's Historia. Both texts appear in the early fourteenth century Icelandic manuscript, Hauksbók, though they were very likely originally translated separately.2 This study examines the whole of the Hauksbók Breta sögur, including Merlínusspá as contentextually part of the same text, and examines how that text has been adapted for a Norse literary milieu and a Norse audience from an intensely topical and British source, written in Latin. While work has been done on the sources and transmission of Breta sögur, there remains little scholarship on how that transmission from Latin sources have resulted in a distinctly Norse text. Thus Breta sögur will not only be looked at relative to itself and its sources, but also in relation to works of the Old Norse corpus to show how it can fit within than corpus, despite its peripheral status as a translation.3 There is not nearly enough space here to attempt to fit Breta sögur into the full chronological and inter-textual literary history of Old Norse, nor are the questions of source and transmission sufficiently answered to be assured of any conclusions derived from such an analysis. However, by speaking in 1 The original translation has been dated to around 1200 by Stephanie Würth and other scholars (Würth, “The Common Transmission of Trójumanna saga and Breta sögur, 297), which seems to remain the generally accepted date. 2 Though he does not propose any concrete conclusions regarding this, see J.S. Eysteinsson, “The Relationship of Merlínusspá and Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia.” 3 This attempt is in part inspired by Trine Buhl's observation on the potential relationship between the translated sagas and the kings' sagas: “It seems likely that some answers to the emergence of the long prose form could be found by studying how the general process of translation, transmission, and copying gave rise to a new original approach to the old subject matter. We know that a variety of foreign literature was being transformed into long prose accounts in the vernacular in the latter part of the twelfth century and prior to the composition of the first kings' sagas, but only a few scholars have paid attention to the practice of translation as such and to the relationship between the production of translations and the development of domestic saga literature.” (Buhl, “Premises of Literary History: On Genre and Narrative Modes in the Sagas,” 60). 4 terms of genre and common, distinctive characteristics of Norse literature, it is hoped that Breta sögur can be shown to have developed by the early fourteenth century into a text that relates in form, detail, and character to the greater body of Old Norse literature. Three chapters will examine three of the most important changes made to the text of the Historia which adapt it into the Hauksbók Breta sögur, while a fourth will make a determined effort to contextualize these changes. Chapter One will examine geography and genealogy, the essential core of Geoffrey's Historia and likewise the most important aspect of Breta sögur. Chapter Two will examine religion in Breta sögur, both the literary use of Norse gods and pre-Christian ideas, as welle as the ecclesiastical qualities of the text, which are more prevelant than in the Historia. Chapter Three will examine the prosimetrical form of Breta sögur and Merlínusspá in Hauksbók, and its significance for the work as a whole, and the characteristics discussed in the previous chapters. Chapter Four will compare Breta sögur with the texts of the Norse corpus which share important characteristics with it: Ynglinga saga in Heimskringla, the origin legends at the beginning of Orkneyinga saga and the Historia Norwegie, and the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus. While this is an ambitious selection of topics, taken together as a whole they will suggest the most apparent and physical changes to Breta sögur in its adaptation into a Norse text. Likewise, though far from exhaustive in examining the ways in which Breta sögur is different from the many redactions of Geoffrey's Historia, these examinations aim to go some way towards showing, by example, exactly how a work of Latin historiography can be made into Norse historiography, and what the implications are of that change.4 Texts and Manuscripts The transmission of Breta sögur is problematic, both of