Early Yiddish Epic

6Vidvilt

181 6 Vidvilt ‫װידװילט‬ / Vidvilt Anonymous, fifteenth to sixteenth century One of the most enduringly popular of the “secular” Yiddish epics (alongside Bovo d’Antona) was the single Arthurian romance adapted into Yiddish by an anonymous poet in the fifteenth or sixteenth century from Wirnt von Gravenberg’s early-thirteenth-century Middle High German epic Wigalois.1 Versions of the Yiddish epic—variously entitled Vidvilt or Kinig Artis houf— are extant in numerous manuscripts, printed editions (with variously revised reprints), in rhymed couplets, ottava rima stanzas, and prose, over the course of three and a half centuries. While there were many narratives in which Sir Gawain played a major role in the various traditions of medieval Arthurian romance, in Wirnt’s poem and the Yiddish adaptation it is Gawain’s son Gwigalois2 / Vidvilt who assumes the primary role. The earliest extant version of the Yiddish epic comprises more than forty -two hundred lines in rhymed couplets (not organized into stanzas or the quasi-stanza-like groups of couplets, as in Joseph Witzenhausen’s later version), which reduces by almost two-thirds the twelve thousand verses of Wigalois. Irving Linn comments that the Yiddish poet displays “consummate skill in the manner in which he knew how to eliminate elaborate descriptions, long speeches and tiresome episodes, and to reduce the whole romance to a compact story full of lively incidents and uninterrupted progress.”3 In addition to his drastic abbreviation of the narrative, the Yiddish poet undertook other major changes. As was the conventional practice, the Yiddish poet de-Christianizes the narrative to a great extent, especially with respect to the divine role in mundane affairs. In Wigalois, for instance, the hero immediately frees himself—by means of prayer—from a split tree trunk into which he has been wedged by a giantess; Vidvilt, on the other hand, needs three days to get free, which he accomplishes by heroic means without prayer. Later 182  “Secular” Epic Gwigalois prays when confronted with the sword-wheel bridge, resulting in the freezing of the water that turned the wheel, enabling him to jam the wheel and cross. Wirnt’s narrator then claims that nothing is too great for God’s power (6714–6919). In Vidvilt there is no prayer or authorial comment on divine power. Instead, the giantess is so frightened by the screech of Vidvilt’s horse (which she mistakes for the dragon) that she flees at high speed across the bridge, destroying the mechanism in the process, so that Vidvilt is thereafter able simply to ride his horse rather anticlimactically across the bridge. The Vidvilt poet also drastically reduces the violence of the narrative. It is only in the direst of situations that the hero kills his foes; otherwise, he defeats them and sends them as prisoners to Arthur’s court (a characteristically Arthurian knightly mode of action, incidentally, the import of which the Yiddish poet obviously learned from a broader knowledge of the Arthurian repertoire).4 Finally, the Vidvilt poet quite effectively eliminated the anti-Muslim bigotry ubiquitous in Wigalois that likewise formed a widespread characteristic of medieval and early modern Christian epic: in Wigalois King Lar has been driven off his land by the Muslim Roaz, who is, characteristically for Christian epic, a monstrous giant in league with Satan, to whom Roaz has surrendered his soul in a pact that gives him superhuman strength. In Vidvilt the giant is not a Muslim, and Satan plays no role whatsoever. The king and his land have been ravaged because he refused to grant his daughter in marriage to the giant. In this manner the Vidvilt poet systematically excises the entire bigoted plot motive and substitutes for it an alternative motivation for the romance’s plot that indicates an extensive knowledge of Arthurian narratology. There are three closely related sixteenth-century manuscript versions of this earliest recension of the text, all probably of northern Italian provenance;5 Leo Landau and Linn suggest that while the Hamburg cod. hebr. 289 dates to the sixteenth century, its language may be as much as a century older.6 These three manuscripts rather closely follow Wirnt’s plot through most of the narrative (abridging the action and in general eliminating explicit Christian references), but offer a very different conclusion to the tale. Typically for the specific stylistic register developed in early Yiddish epic, the poet avoids Yiddish vocabulary from the Semitic component. The scribe identifies himself at the end of the Cambridge manuscript as “Sheftl by name...