German Romance Volume III: Hartmann von Aue: Iwein or the Knight with the Lion (review)

Hartmann’s circa 1200 Iwein is significant both for the tremendous influence it exerted as one of the first German Arthurian romances upon the subsequent Middle High German literary tradition as well as for its position as perhaps the most highly refined of the many medieval European adaptations of Chrétien’s Yvain. With this latest installment in the Arthurian Archives series, Edwards presents for the first time to an English-speaking public a superb translation and edition of arguably the most important Iwein manuscript.

Edwards’s edition of the medieval text is based on what is probably the oldest complete Iwein manuscript, namely, the early-thirteenth-century Gießen MS B. In choosing MS B, he departs from the standard critical edition by Lachmann, Benecke, and revised by Wolff (7^th ed., Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), which had relied heavily on both MS B and Heidelberg MS A, probably from the mid-thirteenth century. Significantly, the standard edition had not included most of the 128 ‘plus’ verses that occur in MS B but not in MS A, and which the earlier editors, with little justification, deemed not original to Hartmann. While most of the other several hundred divergences between MSS B and A are of a minor linguistic, lexical, or stylistic order, these ‘plus’ verses add what is arguably important meaning. Thus, of the six most important additional sections, the majority elaborate the role of Iwein’s women characters. (For example, MS B ll. 8227–58 rewards Lunete for her faithful service by bestowing upon her a duke in marriage.) Edwards’s edition is quite conservative, steering closely to the language and spelling of his manuscript. In its conservative nature and in its uniformly high quality, his edited text compares favorably to the other available edition of MS B, namely, Volker Merten’s very good 2004 edition (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag), with which Edwards’s text differs most in preserving the original spellings to a slightly greater degree than had Mertens.

While there have been several good translations of Iwein into English in recent decades, Edwards’s translation represents the greatest contribution to scholars and, especially, to the many non-Germanists who are dependent on reliable English translations. But not only is Edwards’s the first translation of MS B into English but also his very fine English rendering is, in terms of scientific quality, superior to all other Iwein translations into modern English or German. Presented in facing-page, line-by-line format, the translation is highly accurate and starkly literal. While the translation, in general, reads smoothly enough, such extreme faithfulness to the original necessarily leads on occasion to somewhat rough, unclear prose, especially when one compares Edwards’s Iwein translation with the facing-page English translation by McConeghy (New York, NY: Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 1984) or the prose translations by J. W. Thomas (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1979) and Richard Lawson (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). The same may be said when comparing Edwards’ translation to the modern German translation by Cramer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001) or the excellent translation that accompanies Merten’s edition of MS B. Like earlier English translations of Iwein—but very much unlike Edwards’s English text—these German translations also sometimes add language not reflected in the medieval text to achieve greater clarity and stylistic finesse.

The volume also includes items of supplementary material typical for the Arthurian Archives series. Thus, there is a list of proper names, an introduction (that is perhaps too basic for a general audience) to poet, source, and artistic achievement, as well as an explanation of editing principles. The notes following the text are somewhat disappointing in that they mostly describe manuscript issues and editing choices and neither give much...