Medieval romance is perhaps best described as European rather than national. And yet, the French romance functioned as a means of establishing a Swedish literary culture and was instrumental in configuring borders that delimited a linguistic and cultural community. This book is an attempt to cast new light on how the French romance was translated, rewritten and interpreted in medieval Sweden – and how these processes need to be understood in the wider European context. It is predicated upon the assumption that translations of literary texts are interesting both for the role they play in the culture of their target languages and for the light they shed on their source texts. I will examine four European literary traditions that, in different ways, have contributed to the spread of French culture in medieval Sweden and to the formation of a Swedish national literature. At the centre of my study are Le Chevalier au lion and its Swedish translation, Herr Ivan; Le Conte de Floire et Blancheflor and the Swedish version, Flores och Blanzeflor; Valentin et Sansnom (the original French text has not been preserved, rather just its later prose rewriting, Valentin et Orson) and the Swedish text, Namnlös och Valentin; Paris et Vienne and the fragmentary Swedish version, Riddar Paris och Jungfru Vienna.

Whereas Herr Ivan and Flores och Blanzeflor are dated to the beginning of the fourteenth century, Namnlös och Valentin was written in the fifteenth century and Riddar Paris och Jungfru Vienna in the sixteenth century. I will argue that the status of these four translations of courtly literature should not be reduced to the level of less important, later versions of prestigious sources – rather they belong to more complex and above all European text traditions that, in point of fact, contribute to casting new light on the French romance more broadly.

Ever since Ernst Robert Curtius’ influential book Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter appeared in 1948, the question of cultural European unity during the Middle Ages has often been discussed. It was not just people and merchandise that were in continuous movement in the Middle Ages; ideas, languages and texts travelled just as widely. The circulation of the romance reflects the resulting Europeanisation of culture, and the genre of romance is thus a kind of a hybrid born out of the processes of translation and rewriting.