Found in Translation: Itinerant French Epics in Medieval Scandinavia - Paperback

by Marianne Kalinke (Translator)

This volume contains English translations of three Old Norse-Icelandic renderings of French chansons de geste (Elis saga ok Rosamundu, Bevers saga, and Flovents saga), and of one Icelandic chivalric romance (Baerings saga). The French epics translated into Old Norse-Icelandic were composed under the influence of courtly romance and were anonymous narratives subject to revision and recreation. These translations resulted in a new Icelandic genre, the riddarasaga or chivalric saga, of which Baerings saga is the first.

Author Biography

Marianne Kalinke is Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the editor of and a contributor to The Arthur of the North: The Arthurian Legend in the Norse and Rus' Realms (2011) and of Norse Romance II: The Knights of the Round Table (1999), as well as editor and translator of Mottuls saga, Ivens saga, and Erex saga in that volume; and author of Stories Set Forth with Fair Words: The Evolution of Medieval Romance in Iceland (2017). With Kirsten Wolf she is co-author and translator of Pious Fictions and Pseudo-Saints in the Late Middle Ages (2023), also published by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.