Der mittelalterliche Tristan-Stoff in Skandinavien. Einführung - Texte in Übersetzung - Bibliographie (review)

As the title of this volume indicates, a number of medieval Scandinavian Tristan texts are here made available in German translation: Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, the thirteenth-century Norse translation of Thomas's Tristan; Geitarlauf, the thirteenth-century Norse translation of Marie de France's lay Chèvrefeuille; the Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd, a fourteenth-century Icelandic version of the Tristan legend; and three ballads, the Icelandic Tristrams kvæði, the Danish Tistram og Isold, and the Faroese Tístrams táttur. The Icelandic ballad is thought to have been composed some time in the fifteenth century, perhaps as early as 1400, whereas the Danish ballad was most likely composed in the sixteenth century. We do not know when the Faroese ballad originated; although it is preserved only in a nineteenth-century redaction, the Faroe Islands have a rich ballad tradition that goes back for many centuries. Of these texts, only Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar and Tristrams kvæði have previously been translated into German; the volume includes Friedrich Ranke's translation (1925) of the latter. Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar was translated into German by Eugen Kölbing and included in his edition of the saga (Tristrams saga ok Ísondar [1878]). Uecker's translations of the Norse and the Icelandic Tristram sagas are based on Kölbing's edition and that by Bjarni Vilhjálmsson (in Riddarasögur [1954], VI) respectively.

The volume opens with a short introduction that surveys the general development of the Tristan legend in its various texts (pp. 1-3). Subsequently, each of the Tristan texts translated here is introduced separately. In the case of Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar (pp. 7-10) the introduction includes a review of the foreign, mostly French, narratives that found their way to thirteenth-century Norway. There is one factual error: Flóres saga ok Blankiflúr and Partalopa saga are cited as examples of Arthurian literature—they are not—in addition to three romances by Chrétien de Troyes (p. 7). A survey of the ballad tradition in Scandinavia (pp. 159-62) precedes an introduction to each ballad and this contains useful information on the manuscript transmission and in the case of the Danish ballad, also a discussion of the variant versions. Especially helpful for comparative purposes are references to the corresponding verses in Gottfried von Straßburg's Tristan at the head of each chapter of Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar. The volume concludes with a bibliography of the Tristan legend in general, its European tradition and Nordic transmission, and each of the texts translated in the volume (pp. 187-94). The last omits the recent editions and translations into English of the two sagas, Geitarlauf, and Tristrams kvæði in Norse Romance, vol. 1: The Tristan Legend (1999). The volume is unfortunately marred by a number of typographical errors, especially in the bibliography.

Heiko Uecker remarks in the introduction that in translating the two sagas, he has attempted to stay as close to the original texts as possible and has tried to transmit the stylistic idiosyncrasies of the texts, such as changes of tense and repetitions, in order to provide some impression of the nature of the original language (p. 3). He does not always succeed. For example, in Geitarlauf, Tristan etches a message for Isolt into a piece of hazel wood, and this opens with the statement: "'Sva ferr með ocr,' kvað hann, 'sem viðuindil sa er binnz um hæslivið'" ("It goes with us," he said, "as with the honeysuckle that fastens itself around the hazel tree") (ed. and trans. Robert Cook, in Norse Romance, vol. 1: The Tristan Legend, pp. 4-5). The passage is noteworthy, since the word used here for 'honeysuckle' is not geitarlauf, literally 'goat leaf'—a calque of chèvrefeuille which occurs at the beginning and at the end of the short narrative—but rather the indigenous...