”Hovets elokvens”. N är Yvain blev Herr I van

Abstract

Sofia Lodén’s book Le chevalier courtois à la rencontre de la Suède médiévale. Du Chevalier au lion à Herr Ivan focuses upon the philological and historical problems brought to the fore in the O ld S wedish romance of chivalry entitled Hærra Ivan, one of the so-called Eufemiavisor, composed round 1300. The dissertation falls into two parts, the first dealing with the textual sources of the romance, the second investigating the adaptation of French ”courtoisie” to domestic cultural values in contemporary S wedish aristocracy. A ccording to the established view, Hærra Ivan is a rather loose translation of—one or both of—two source texts: the O ld French romance Yvain ou le chevalier au lion by Crétien de Troyes and (a later Icelandic revision of) the West Norse Ívens saga. The investigation results, in the first part of the thesis, in an empirical confirmation of this double origin. Further, the priority of the French version in the swedifying process is established: the S wedish text maker has obviously used Crétien’s romance as his main source, consulting (the I celandic revision of) Ívens saga primarily in passages obscure to him. Decisive instances in the argumentation are the versified delivery (as in Yvain, as opposed to the prosaic West N orse version) and some rhetorical features uniting the S wedish and French versions, such as the author’s presence in the text. The second part of the thesis is an inventory of lexical correspondences between the three versions in such spheres of the vocabulary that are explicitly related to continental chivalry (essential terms are, e.g., French courtois and O ld S wedish hövisker). The author proves that this relation is rather loose: the concept of chivalry is referred to in a mainly didactic and explicatory way, the translator deliberately adapting foreign concepts to domestic culture.