Tänk er om Star Wars var en isländsk saga:
Tattúínárdœla saga: If Star Wars Were an Icelandic Saga
A long time ago, in a North Atlantic far far away…
Earlier this week I was drawn into an enlightening discussion with my colleague Ben Frey about the complicated textual tradition that lies behind George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” which few outside the scholarly community realize is a modern rendition of an old Germanic legend of a fatal conflict between a father and his treacherous son. Below I present some remarks on the Old Icelandic version of the legend, with some spare comparative notes on the cognate traditions in other old Germanic languages.
The story as presented in George Lucas’s films represents only one manuscript tradition, and a rather late and corrupt one at that – the Middle High German epic called Himelgengærelied (Song of the Skywalkers). There is also an Old High German palimpsest known to scholars, later overwritten by a Latin choral and only partly legible to us today, which contains fragments of a version wherein “Veitare” survives to old age after slaying “Lûc” out of loyalty to the emperor, but is naturally still conflicted about the deed when the son of his daughter Leia avenges the killing on him.
This is also the ending that we infer for the Icelandic Tattúínárdœla saga (the Saga of the People of the Tattooine River Valley), though unfortunately the ending of that saga is lost and has to be reconstructed from the scant remains of the Old High German poem and from references in other sagas (it should be noted that the later chivalric Lúks saga Anakinssonar is derived from another tradition and may well be a translation of a continental epic, probably one closely related to the extant Middle High German Himelgengærelied, from which Lucas’s narrative is drawn). The author of the Old English poem Déor also knows an “Anacan, haten heofongangende” (“Anacen, named the sky-walker”), who later in the poem is referred to by an alternative byname, “sunubana” (“son-killer”), suggesting that the more tragic version of the tale was current among the Anglo-Saxons too. Hammershaimb seems to know a Faroese ballad on the two Himingangarar, but there is no trace of the text of this ballad in any known collection, and it was not known to the last exponents of the Faroese oral tradition in the early twentieth century.
Tattúínárdœla saga tells of the youth of Anakinn himingangari, beginning with his childhood as a slave in Tattúínárdalr, notably lacking the prolonged racing scene of the MHG version, and referring to the character of “Jarjari inn heimski” only as a local fool slain by Anakinn in a childhood berserker rage (whereas in the MHG version, “Jarjare” is one of “Anacen’s” marshals and his constant companion; Cochrane 2010 suggests that this may be because the MHG text is Frankish in origin, and “Jarjare” was identified with a Frankish culture hero with a similar name). After this killing, for which Anakinn’s owner (and implied father) refuses to pay compensation, Anakinn’s mother, an enslaved Irish princess, foresees a great future for Anakinn as a “jeði” (the exact provenance of this word is unknown but perhaps represents an intentionally humorous Irish mispronunciation of “goði”).
Läs vidare här:
http://tattuinardoelasaga.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/tattuinardoela-saga-if-star-wars-were-an-icelandic-saga/
