Tristan (review)

Gottfried von Straßburg's Tristan is one of the best-known literary works from medieval Germany; among the most popular texts of its own time, it has - like Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and the Nibelungenlied, but unlike most other medieval German works - also enjoyed a significant modern reception in various media, most prominently in the operas of Richard Wagner. A new edition of Tristan is therefore something of an event in the world of Altgermanistik.

Despite the eleven complete and seventeen fragmentary witnesses, modern scholars are in agreement that the manuscript transmission of Tristan presents a text that is relatively "fixed." This makes it all the more disconcerting to note that despite all the scholarly energy expended on this text, like Parzival, Tristan too has yet to be presented in a modern critical edition. The two volumes under review provide a new edition of Tristan; this is coupled with an edition of the fragment of Gottfried's source, Thomas's Tristran et Ysolt, line-by-line (but prose) translations of both, extensive commentaries and bibliography, subject and name indices, and brief introductions to both works.

Tristan has a complicated editorial history. The oldest text still considered usable is that of Reinhold Bechstein, first published in 1869/70 and revised and reissued by Peter Ganz in 1978; this is no longer in print. Bechstein/Ganz has no translation but does provide extensive linguistic notes and a glossary and is thus still a very useful edition for didactic purposes. Bechstein's text had, however, already been superseded by that of Friedrich Ranke, first published in 1930 and still in print along with a translation and commentary by Rüdiger Krohn (from 1980; last updated in 2002); Ranke's Tristan has generally been the edition cited by the scholarship of the past several decades. Ranke published it simply as a text, however, with no apparatus, nor even proper discussion of the editorial principles by which he had arrived at his text. His edition was rapidly accepted, in large part because Ranke had earlier published an extensive critique (still fundamental for work on Tristan's manuscript tradition), along with collations of the major manuscript witnesses, of a third edition, that of Karl Marold (1906). Because of the relative uniformity of the tradition, Ranke's own edition resulted in a text not very different from Marold's, a fact reflected in the reissuing of Marold's edition in 1969, in which the apparatus was thoroughly revamped by Werner Schröder on the basis of Ranke's critique and collations. This has since been further revised and reprinted in two volumes in 2004, along with a translation by Peter Knecht, an updated afterword by Schröder, and a new introduction by Tomas Tomasek. The competition for Haug and Scholz's edition is, therefore, Ranke/Krohn (Reclam paperback; lacking an apparatus but with a commentary), and Marold/Schröder (de Gruyter paperback; provided with an apparatus, albeit a flawed one, and no commentary).

Haug/Scholz is based on a thorough reassessment of the manuscript evidence; the text, however, is by the editors' admission essentially identical to that of Ranke, with only twenty-nine divergences from his text (many of which were already present in Marold/Schröder). None of these will have particularly significant consequences for the way we read Tristan; the only differences of note, in my view, occur at line 1: Gedenket for Gedæhte; line 2: den for dem; line 458: niuwe for niuwan; line 1,652: gewerdet for gewerldet; line 6,444: breche for enbreche; and the dispatching of the irritating and incomprehensible danne Setmunt of line 12,216, to be replaced by dan ie seite munt. In addition, the word wildenære has consistently been banished in favour of wilderære. The new edition also provides accent markings (lacking in Ranke but provided by Krohn and Schröder) and punctuation that occasionally diverges from that...