In a forthcoming paper, I venture the following description of the difference between the Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone (Boeve) and the Old Norse Bevers saga (Bevers):

Here I shall consider this description and ask how such a change between the two text forms may have come about.

Bevers, a riddarasaga (‘saga of a knight’), survives in manuscripts and fragments, all of them Icelandic, rather than Norwegian, ranging from vellum manuscripts from c. 1350 (a fragment), to paper manuscripts, some eighteen in all, from as late as 1900. There are three medieval versions, one of which (the Ormsbók text) is aberrant and will not be discussed here. The two principal manuscripts of the main tradition are from c. 1400 and c. 1470 respectively, and the latter is slightly more rhetorical in style than the former. The saga is, of course, in prose and shows the features that are typical of the Old Norse renderings of French verse romances and of works based on chanson de geste, and, to some extent, regular features of certain Old Norse translations of historical works in Latin (see below). A dating for Bevers will be considered at the end of the chapter.

Among such typical features, most of them witnessed in the Bevers texts, are the following: pronouns are substituted for names or nouns, and viceversa; the sequence of events is made more logical – gaps and sudden leaps in the narrative are filled; direct speech is substituted for indirect speech, and vice-versa; there is a tendency to reduce exaggerations; there is a reordering of the sequence of the lines.