Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Larrington, Carolyne

Titel

Queens and Bodies: The Norwegian Translated lais and Hákon IV's Kinswomen

Ist Teil von

• Journal of English and Germanic philology, 2009-10, Vol.108 (4), p.506-527

Ort / Verlag

Urbana: University of Illinois Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2009

Quelle

Project MUSE: Universal journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Among the texts translated from Anglo-Norman or French into Old Norse at the behest of Hakon IV Hakonarson were the Strengleikar, a group of lais including those attributed to Marie de France, and Mottuls saga (The Saga of the Cloak), the translation of Le lai du cort mantel. Both Strengleikar and Mottuls saga were translated in Bergen in the early to mid-thirteenth century as part of the king's program of translating courtly literature. These projects was guaranteed to some degree by the bodies of royal women: specifically those of his mother, his wife, and, to a lesser extent, his daughters-in-law and his daughter. Here, Larrington examines what Hakon's court might have made of the accounts of the irredeemably sexually-compromised queen and court and how the imported models chime with, or contrast with, available native literary, historical, and contemporary models of queenship. He also determines the impact of the chivalric material on the historiography written at the court of Hakon's son, Magnus, who commissioned his father's biography.