Guta saga is best known from the manuscript Stockholm, Royal Library, B 64, the only extant manuscript to preserve the tale in its entirety in the Old Gutnish language. However, four additional manuscripts preserve the text — either in part or in whole — in translation: one in German (Cod. Holm. B 65), two in Danish (Copenhagen, Royal Library, GKS 408 4to and NKS 2414 4to), and one in Swedish (Cod. Holm. D 2).
While each of these texts have been edited (Schlyter 1852, Ljunggren 1959), they have received relatively little attention as they do not diverge greatly from the text found in B 64. Nevertheless, the four manuscripts appear to form two branches of the text which are independent from the Old Gutnish text as found in B 64.
This paper takes its point of departure in the versions of Guta saga preserved only in translation and addresses the following questions:
1. What do the material aspects of the manuscripts add to our understanding of the stemma?
2. From which language is each manuscript translated, and is it the original translation or a copy?
3. What gaps in the Old Gutnish text can be filled by these translations?
From a broader perspective, this paper addresses questions of establishing stemmtatic relations of translated texts, such as what types of variation may be considered useful for determining groupings of manuscripts.