The stories about Charlemagne and his political and military achievements that circulated widely in medieval Europe, both in Latin and in the various vernaculars, found a fertile ground in the territories of Northern Europe. Stories featuring the Frankish king as the main protagonist are indeed known from all areas of the medieval North. The diffusion of the matière de France in the Nordic countries is held to have begun at the court of Hákon IV Hákonarson (r. 1217–1263), around the middle of the thirteenth century, and from there it subsequently branched out into the other territories (Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, and the Faroe Islands). This process presumably stretched over a long period of time if one considers that Icelandic copies of the Old Norwegian Karlamagnús saga are known to have been made as late as the seventeenth century.

A decisive contribution to the initial spreading of such narratives in Scandinavia was no doubt made by translations (as seen above in chapter 1). Indeed, in addition to Karlamagnús saga – itself a compilation of translated texts about Charlemagne, mostly based on Old French chansons de geste mediated through Anglo-Norman – both the Old Swedish Karl Magnus and the Old Danish Karl Magnus Krønike can surely be considered to be translated texts. The present chapter focuses on these three works and aims to analyse the cultural and ideological function that Charlemagne had in medieval Scandinavia through the transmission of the matière de France.

The fact that the three texts that will be analysed in the following sections are translations is relevant to the aim of the present chapter. Scholarship in the field of medieval literatures has over the last twenty years made clear that the notion of translation in the Middle Ages allowed various forms of reshaping and rewriting of the source text according to the norms that were dominant in the target culture. If translation can be defined, on a general note, as a negotiation involving two cultures rather than merely two languages, it may quite often be described as a manipulation, whereby both the wording and the meaning of the source text may undergo such major changes that the final result could be defined as an outright rewrite. What drives the manipulative process of the amendments of the source text is generally to be found in the target system.

Literary works from all time periods are read, studied and classified by way of generic definitions that are either more or less explicitly codified within the culture to which they belong or must be (re)constructed a posteriori. In either case, the importance of the notion of genre – understood both as a set of formal and stylistic conventions for composing all kinds of literature and as a hermeneutic instrument for analysing literary works and their semantic potential – is hardly disputable. Defining the relevant genre of a literary work is indeed the starting point of any critical work, whether aimed at historical contextualisation or the critical analysis of its stylistic aspects or narrative structures. The relevance of the question of genre goes far beyond what may at first appear mainly as a nominalistic modern preoccupation, for it has a bearing on how modern readers approach literary works and seek to interpret them as historically determined artefacts. The study of Old Norse literature is of course no exception. The broad corpus of texts that have been preserved to our day in an astonishingly large number of medieval and post-medieval manuscripts is quite varied and heterogeneous in terms of style, structure, content and mode, thus bearing witness to the vitality and richness of Old Norse literary expression throughout the medieval period.

The problem of the definition of genre has inevitably attracted sporadic attention from the very beginning of philological and literary studies in the nineteenth century, when the first editions of Old Norse works were made available. Over the last forty years, though, there has been renewed interest within Old Norse scholarship in studying genres in medieval Icelandic literature, especially with regard to the classification of sagas. Much scholarly effort has indeed been expended on discussing whether it is appropriate to categorise the surviving saga corpus using a taxonomy established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although some genre names, i.e. riddarasögur (chivalric sagas) and konungasögur (kings’ sagas), are attested in the Middle Ages, the current labels are largely modern constructs.

These opening lines in David Duff's anthology of seminal works on genre contain in nuce some of the main problems that the definition and use of genre as a major theoretical and methodological instrument in modern literary criticism poses for scholars. The very instability of this concept is closely tied to the heterogeneity of critical standpoints from which it has been approached over the course of the last two centuries: either to define and delimit it, or to decree its utter inutility, or even to castigate genre's pernicious nature as the negation of the author's freedom in the creative process.

The broad divergence of opinions that can be discerned in the history of the changing fortunes of genre as a literary category in modern criticism is best viewed against the background of the shift of theoretical paradigms and frameworks that characterise the development of Western literary discourse in increasing measure during the course of the twentieth century. In principle, though, it is safe to assert that any reflection on genre was, and still is, undertaken as a part of a broader investigation of the very nature of literature and the limits of literary activity.

Broadly speaking, modern genre theory can be described as developing around a polarisation of critical stances, corresponding to two major approaches: either normative or descriptive. The normative approach is based on a prescriptive principle and is usually traced back to the traditional tripar- tite system of epic, lyric and drama, derived from Aristostle's and Plato's works. The descriptive stance is ultimately rooted in Russian Formalism and aims to study literary genres as historically contingent artistic configurations, thus avoiding any kind of evaluation based on the degree of adherence of works to a formalised set of predetermined generic features.

If the critical perspective is broadened to include the discourse on genre in medieval literatures, the difficulties that are inherent in the reconstruction of the cultural coordinates of the production and reception of literature in the Middle Ages inevitably enhances the degree of uncertainty.