Breta saga

Between 1130 and 1138, probably in Oxford, Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1100–1154) wrote his major work on the British kings, Historia Regum Britanniae, which quickly became very popular. Already in the mid-12th century the French poet Wace translated and reworked this work into verse, a reworking known as the Roman de brut. It is assumed that Geoffrey’s entire work was translated in Iceland at the beginning of the 13th century, and in the Old Norse tradition it was most often called Breta sögur. In this publication series, however, it has been given the title Breta saga. In the manuscripts, Breta saga is conceived as a continuation of Trójumanna saga, since the two texts always accompany each other. Breta saga is preserved in two versions: a long one and a short one. The long version is preserved in AM 573 4to, in Holm papp 58 fol (a copy of the lost chivalric-saga manuscript Ormsbók) and in the fragment TCD MS 1023 a. The short version is preserved in AM 544 4to, which forms part of the composite manuscript Hauksbók. The text of the short version is closest to Geoffrey’s Latin text, whereas the text of the long version contains interpolations that point toward Wace’s French translation.

The present edition of Breta saga reproduces these four transmissions of the saga. The texts are laid out in the same manner as in Jonna Louis-Jensen’s edition of Trójumanna saga (1963), with the long version of the saga printed at the top of the page and the short version at the bottom. The introduction discusses the various parts of Breta saga, with a focus on the translation’s rendering of the Latin text and on the relationship between the two versions. Material from Swedish dictionaries from the 17th century has been included to shed light on the long version of the saga, since this material contains many quotations from Ormsbók.