Höhepunkte des mittelalterlichen Erzählens: Heldenlieder, Romane und Novellen in ihrem kulturellen Kontext ed. by Hans Sauer, Gisela Seitschek, and Bernhard Teuber (review)

The contents of this introduction to the "Highlights of Medieval Narration/Story Telling" grew out of presentations that were held at a lecture series (Ringvorlesung) organized by Hans Sauer and Bernhard Teuber at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. One difficulty with editing collections such as this is the selection process. In this case, the editors decided to widen the geographic and chronological scope by including works that span seven hundred years of medieval storytelling (700 to 1400) that derive from three continents, encompassing the Celtic, Germanic, Mediterranean, Slavic, and Asian cultural spheres. The volume's comprehensiveness is laudable and yet it is almost impossible not to ask why neither Tristan nor Parzival is included. These two Middle High German verse epics are unquestionably groundbreaking masterpieces of medieval literature, and it would have been desirable to have at least one of them represented. Despite this regrettable omission, however, the present volume represents a wonderful introduction to much of the canonical medieval literature.

The editors' Introduction offers general observations that are concerned with the structure of the volume—by language and cultural region—and a summary of the complicated history of the transmission of the works, in particular the necessity to differentiate between three stages of transmission: the time of action; the creation of the narrative, often first in oral form and only later as a written work; and the actual date of the extant sources that transmit the works. All of the works included in this volume are considered to be major examples of world literature, some even national epics.

The individual chapters in the volume adhere to a rather cohesive structure: each provides a general introduction to the respective work's place in literary and cultural history as well as brief plot summaries; information about the author (if available); the time and place of composition; questions of dating (time of composition versus time of writing); the work's transmission and its later impact; stylistic and metrical particularities; discussions of major motifs and interpretations; and biographical information concerning editions, translations, and secondary literature.

Benedikt Konrad Vollmann's discussion on "Ideal and Reality in the Ruodlieb" opens the volume proper. After providing a thorough summary of Ruodlieb's plot and its transmission, Vollmann continues with an excellent discussion of the work's unique status in the medieval literary tradition. The fragmentary Ruodlieb, most likely composed by a Bavarian Benedictine monk in the last third of the eleventh century (p. 3), stands out in that it is an early Latin verse-novel ("Versroman") without being Arthurian or a true romance, legend, or epic, although it contains elements of all three of these genres.

Albrecht Berger's chapter, "In the 'Wild East' of Byzantium: The Story of Digenes Akrites," presents an epic whose transmission is representative of many of the works discussed in this volume: the plot of The Story of Digenes Akrites is set in the ninth and tenth centuries, its composition most likely occurred in stages since the twelfth century, and its manuscript transmission resumes as late as the fourteenth century. Berger's chapter is dominated by a detailed summary of the complex plot of the Digenes Akrites. Integrated in the summary are interpretations and excerpts from the epic, which are perhaps a little longer than necessary.

The next group of texts is concerned with the Celtic and Germanic world. It opens with Peter Schrijver's chapter on the Táin Bó Cúailnge, which today is considered to be Ireland's national epic. A highlight of this chapter is the author's explicit effort to shift the focus away from questions of the work's origin, which dominated scholarship previously. Schrijver instead provides an erudite reading of the passage that is concerned with the death of Etarcomol, which whets...