JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology

The monograph under review is a revised version of the author's 1999 doctoral thesis at the University of Leeds. It is a hefty book devoted to an Icelandic saga that very few people have heard of and almost no one has ever read. Alenka Divjak provides a translation of Kirialax saga in an appendix (pp. 297-352), however, and thus whoever reads her book will also have occasion to become acquainted with the saga, a rather learned, presumably fourteenth-century Icelandic romance. Kirialax saga belongs to a corpus of works known as indigenous or original riddarasögur, chivalric sagas, composed in the wake of translations of mostly French romances, lais, and chansons de geste, the most important of which is Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, a translation of Thomas de Bretagne's Tristan, undertaken in 1226 in Norway but transmitted solely in Icelandic manuscripts. Over a century ago, W. P. Ker dismissed the Icelandic romances as the "dreariest things ever made by human fancy" (Epic and Romance [1908], p. 282). His bias was shared over the years by a number of other scholars who measured romances against the Íslendingasögur, that is, Sagas of Icelanders, a very different genre, and found them wanting. Although the quality of some thirty romances—and even more, if one justifiably counts among them some of the so-called fornaldarsögur, that is, legendary or heroic-mythical sagas—is uneven, the corpus includes some works that are among the best that medieval romance has to offer, such as Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar. Kirialax saga is not among them, but what it lacks in narrative excellence it makes up for by its unique incorporation of medieval learned lore. It reveals its anonymous author's, and by extension, Iceland's, broad acquaintance with and use of European learned sources.

The name of the eponymous protagonist of Kirialax saga is a Norse contraction of the Greek Kurios Alexios, used for Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, Byzantine emperor from 1081 to 1118, and subsequent emperors by that name. The Norse form appears in a number of historiographic texts, including Heimskringla, Snorri Sturluson's monumental history of the kings of Norway. In Kirialax saga, the name is given to the central character, who eventually becomes Greek emperor. The saga, which Robert Cook called a bookish romance in one of only two articles ever written about this work (Les Sagas de Chevaliers (Riddarasögur), Actes de la V^e Conférence Internationale sur les Sagas, ed. Régis Boyer [Toulon, 1982], pp. 303-26), contains the obligatory bridal quests; tournaments; wars; journeys to Christian centers of pilgrimage, such as Rome and Jerusalem; and centers of classical antiquity, such as Troy, as well as accounts of exotic places, such as India. One is tempted to claim that Kirialax saga is a vehicle for showing off the author's learning, which was gleaned from Norse translations or derivations of such Latin works as Gautier de Châtillon's Alexandreis, Dares Phrygius's De Excidio Trojae, the Imago mundi of Honorius Augustodunensis, Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, and Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae. The author also borrowed material from various types of Icelandic sagas, including the Íslendingasögur.

After a survey of Icelandic romances, both translated and indigenous (pp. 25-58), Divjak's study turns to a discussion of tournaments, warfare, and bridal quests in Kirialax saga (59-117); learned elements, including information on Troy, Rome, Jerusalem, India, and Constantinople (pp. 118-261); and, finally, the structure of the narrative (pp. 262-85). The translation of the saga (pp. 298-352) is followed [End Page 112] by a second appendix containing accounts of and information about the Holy Land in medieval Icelandic texts (pp. 353-59).

Divjak's study is extraordinarily thorough, at times excessively so—one footnote, concerning Norwegian kings who, like Kirialax, bathed in the river Jordan, extends over more than two pages (n. 49, pp. 216-19). Among the more laudable aspects in...