French Romance, Medieval Sweden and the Europeanisation of Culture by Sophia Lodén

Abstract

Reviewed by: French Romance, Medieval Sweden and the Europeanisation of Culture by Sophia Lodén Joseph M. Sullivan sophia lodén, French Romance, Medieval Sweden and the Europeanisation of Culture. Studies in Old Norse Literature. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2021. Pp. 216. isbn: 978–1–84384–582–9. $99. In this groundbreaking study of the reception of French literature in Sweden, Sofia Lodén convincingly shows how extensively Sweden and Europe's north were integrated into the larger medieval European intellectual and courtly currents radiating out of France from the beginning of the twelfth century. As Lodén demonstrates, the skillful translation into Swedish of narratives originating in French contributed in fundamental ways to the civilizing process and the Europeanization of Sweden from the beginning of the Late Middle Ages through the beginning of the sixteenth century. As her central case studies, the author analyzes four Swedish translations of courtly narratives alongside their ultimately French-language sources. To each of these case studies she devotes a chapter, in which she applies a separate, carefully chosen theoretical framework. Thus, she discusses the French Valentin et Orson and its fifteenth-century Swedish adaptation in terms of their authors' constructions of beastliness and the place of the animal alongside the human. And in a brilliant discussion of Paris et Vienne and its fragmentary Swedish adaptation from the sixteenth century, she employs ideas of gender to illuminate how these texts construct masculinities. Her remaining two case studies are devoted to narratives from the most important set of secular texts in the Old Swedish courtly canon, that is, from the so-called Eufemiavisor (or Tales of Eufemia), a group of three narratives from the early fourteenth century that were commissioned by the German-born Norwegian queen Eufemia, probably as political gifts for the Swedish court. For the Eufemiavisor's version of the Old French Floire et Blancheflor and its French sources, Lodén takes a close look at the very different roles that childhood plays in those texts. And with the best known of the Eufemiavisor, and the most influential of all secular courtly narratives in Old Swedish, namely, Herr Ivan—the masterful Old Swedish translation of Chrétien's Yvain—Lodén again turns to ideas of gender, this time however showing how varied the portrayal of female characters is in the French original and in its Swedish rewriting. Lodén's decision to employ different theoretical lenses for each of her case studies is admirable. Specifically, it allows her both to make use of some of the most significant current analytical frameworks in medieval studies and to choose that particular framework which works best to illuminate the particular narrative that the individual chapter treats. In so doing, Lodén deftly avoids a mistake common to many otherwise solid monographs, which use only one dominant theoretical framework throughout, even when that framework does not lend itself equally well to all the artifacts a monograph discusses. As if the author recognized that most readers would be interested in only one or two particular chapters, and not necessarily in reading her entire study, Lodén has chosen wisely to make each of her case studies stand on its own. In fact, all four case studies can be read independently and, indeed, out of order with no loss of comprehensibility. I would recommend, however, that those readers who wish [End Page 99] to read only one or two chapters also read the book's introduction and conclusion, both of which are excellent and which together concisely summarize the study's most important overall findings. Several other factors also make Lodén's study important and, as a work of comparative literature scholarship, exemplary. Thus, her focus is not limited to the consideration of Swedish translations and their French sources. Instead, Lodén extensively consults versions of these originally French narratives in other medieval languages as well, including, for instance, in medieval Spanish, Italian, German, Icelandic, and English. While holding so many strands simultaneously in the discussion of a particular narrative is perhaps the most challenging task of the comparativist scholar, Lodén manages such analysis almost effortlessly. (Only in the case of Floire et Blancheflor does...