By examining the adaptations of Marie de France's Lais into Old Norse and Middle English, this chapter seeks to explore issues of cultural dominance and imperial influence in textual transmission during the late Middle Ages in Northern Europe. The interrelations of the various cultures and the respective medieval vernaculars, Old French, Middle English and Old Norse, will be explored through linguistic and contextual analysis of the translations. The intention is to provide a comparative model of translation as intercultural by drawing on and conversing with post-colonial studies.

Critical discourse about imperialism tends to focus on the aggression of a dominant nation, the empire, upon an ethnically defined ‘other’. Despite the complex interplay of cultural authority and subordination in late-medieval Europe, the definition of ‘empire’ tends to shift such discussions away from the Middle Ages towards latter periods of post-colonial activity. Recent studies, however, have borrowed the theoretical approaches of post-colonial studies to examine the complexities and ambivalences of intercultural relations in the medieval period. While many adherents of post-colonial theories warn against their geographical and temporal displacement in this way, I agree with Patricia Clare Ingham's counter-argument that ‘the modernity of post-colonial studies blocks certain routes to the past, and thus maintains certain nationalist and historicist exclusions’. The deliberate distancing of post-colonial studies from the dynamics of both cultural and geographical conflicts in pre-modern civilisations re-enacts the binary oppositions of modern and archaic, civilised and barbaric. The shifting of those temporal boundaries challenges this conception of modernity as oppositional to the medieval as ‘other’ by allowing for the inclusion of the medieval as a site of potential imperial dynamics.