German Romance. Volume 4: LanzeLet (review)

Ulrich von Zatzikhoven was not a great poet, but his Lanzelet (ca. 1194–1203), a romance of 9444 verses in rhymed tetrameter couplets, is an important text in the Arthurian canon, for it offers the earliest complete biography of Lancelot and relates adventures from his early life that are merely referred to, without further explanation, in the earlier and better-known works by Chrétien de Troyes. The text of Lanzelet has been preserved in two nearly complete manuscripts—W Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, cod. vindob. 2698, dating from the second quarter of the fourteenth century, and P Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. pal. germ. 371, dated 1420—as well as three (formerly four) fragments. The text of W, although the older of the two, is more lexically refined in terms of its courtly vocabulary than P, which would make the latter, though later, appear to be the more reliably authentic of the two, especially since P usually reads with the earliest fragment (b, first quarter of the 13th century) against W. The scribe of P—or his source—however, was not a careful copyist. He makes obvious errors that yield nonsensical readings, when compared to W, and has a tendency to expand the text with superfluous verbiage. The scribe of W, on the other hand, was a “thinking” scribe (p. xix), who makes changes when something does not make sense to him. Metrically these manuscripts also differ greatly: W shows a strong tendency toward apocope, while P tends to insert epenthetic syllables that disrupt the metrical integrity of the text. Reconciling these differences has made the construction of a definitive edition of Lanzelet very problematic.

A modern, reliable critical edition of Lanzelet has been a desideratum ever since the first admirable, but idiosyncratic text by Karl August Hahn appeared in 1845, which included emendations suggested by his teacher, Karl Lachmann. Hahn’s text was reprinted with slight revision by Frederick Norman in 1965 and again by Wolfgang Spiewok (1997), the latter accompanied by a modern German trans lation. Hahn also served as the basis of the French translations by Danielle Buschinger (1996) and René Pérennec (2004), and my own English translation (2005). Over the years forthcoming critical editions that follow modern editorial practice have been announced—Oskar Hannink (1914), Werner Richter (1934), Rosemary Combridge with Dominique Corazolla (1960s)—but none of these promised efforts reached publication. Only with the appearance of Florian Kragl’s monumental two-volume diplomatic edition of MS W (2006) did scholars finally have a modern, critically sound edition of Lanzelet. Suggesting that P and W may represent two versions of the text, each of which has its own literary value, Kragl rejected the idea of attempting to reconstruct a unified text and printed MS W, sparingly emended, with variants in MS P and the fragments in a separate column. As a logical result of his process, the sometimes obviously correct readings in MS P are not incorporated into the main text. Kragl’s edition has since been reprinted in a one-volume Studienausgabe (2009).

Kathleen J. Meyer now offers a critical edition and translation of Lanzelet that is also based upon MS W, but gives the variant readings in P their proper due. Her intended audience is “scholars and students of medieval literature,” especially those less familiar with Middle High German (p. xix). She provides a unified, normalized text and a critical apparatus listing selected variants. A brief introduction addresses the relevant and to some extent unanswerable questions regarding the work: the putative owner of the French source, Hugh de Morville; the relationship to Chrétien’s Charrette; Ulrich’s faithfulness to his source; Ulrich’s identity; the structure of the work and its interpretation; previous editions and translations; and her editorial principles.

The choice not to follow Kragl’s example and construct a critical edition of the text gives Meyer a certain editorial freedom: she can emend the text in those many places where...