62 THE KING'S MIRROR 



century.* The striking resemblance between the ideas 

 expressed in the treatise and the guiding principles of 

 Sverre's regime led the editors of the Christiania edition 

 to the same conclusion: 1196 or soon after, f And so it 

 was held that the work is a twelfth century document 

 until a Danish artillery officer, Captain Otto Blom, be- 

 gan to make a careful study of the various types of 

 weapons, armor, and siege engines mentioned in the 

 work. His conclusion, published in 1867, was that the 

 King's Mirror reflects the military art of the thirteenth 

 century and that the manuscript was composed in the 

 latter half of the century, at any rate not long before 

 1260.J This conclusion has been accepted by Gustav 

 Storm, Ludvig Daae,|| and virtually all who have 

 written on the subject since Blom's study appeared, 

 except Heffermehl, whose belief that Ivar Bodde was 

 the author could not permit so late a date, as Ivar, who 

 was a man of prominence at Sverre's court about 1200, 

 must have been an exceedingly aged man, if he were 

 still living in 1260. Heffermehl is, therefore, compelled 

 to force the date of composition back to the decade 

 1230-1240. 



The weakness of Captain Blom's argument is that he 

 supposes the military art described in the Speculum 

 Regale to be the military art of the North at the time 

 when the work was written. If all the engines and ac- 

 coutrements that the author describes ever came into 

 use in the North, it was long after 1260* Nearly all the 



* See pages Ixv-lxvi of the Sorb" edition. | Christiania edition, p. viii. 



I Aarbogerfor nordisk Oldkyndighed, 1867, 65-109. See above, p. 32. 

 Arkivfor nordisk Filologi, III, 83-88. 

 || Aarbogerfor nordisk Oldkyndighed, 1896, 176-177. 



