BI. Aim and background
This is not currently part of the peer-reviewed material of the project. Do not cite as a research publication.
The present site caters for the alpha version only: Latin and Old French parallels where available are provided alongside the Old Norse (ON) texts. The French text is largely hitherto unpublished and provides new insights into this particular translation from Old French to Old Norse.
The need for new editions of all of the sections of Kms has long been manifest (cf. Skårup 1980). C.R. Unger did magnificent service to the scholarly world by making texts available, but his Karlamagnús shares shortcomings with his other editions: principally that his choice of main texts and variants not infrequently presents only part of, and in some cases a misleading impression of, the transmission of the work in question.
The main texts of the alpha version of Agþ are both defective and it is understandable that when a choice is available Unger takes A as his base text rather than a, largely because a certain amount more of A survives than of a (cf. § B. IV. below), and perhaps under influence of the fact that A is the somewhat older of the two. Here, however, both are given in full when both are available, as are the scraps of the fragment in the Norwegian State Archives, so there is no need for a conventional variant apparatus. Indeed a close analysis of the two main texts to the French original would almost certainly bring a out on top as the closer representative of the original translation.