Dietrichs Flucht: Textgeschichtliche Ausgabe by Elisabeth Lienert , Gertrud Beck (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.4, 2004 1083 author could have learnt from two works nowhere mentioned by him: Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing by Monika Otter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) and Wahrheit und Fiktion : Der Status der Fiktionalitdtin der Artusliteratur des 12. Jahrhunderts by Brigitte Burrichter (Munich: Beck, 1996). The latter work is particularly relevant in view of Reuvekamp-Felber's suggestion that Wace could be a possible model for what is to be found in German literary history (pp. 168-70). One of the merits of this book is the immense amount of literary material that has been quarried for information. This makes it the more regrettable that the index, al? though broken down to some extent, makes retrieval ofthis information very difficult. The production of this book also betrays an annoying quirk with word-divisions at the end ofa line, producing such awkwardnesses as 'E-pen', 'ii-ber', 'a-mour', 'o-der'. On page 165, footnote 430 remains incomplete in the middle of a word. Trinity College, Cambridge D. H. Green Dietrichs Flucht: TextgeschichtlicheAusgabe. By Elisabeth Lienert and Gertrud Beck. (Texte und Studien zur mittelhochdeutschen Heldenepik, i) Tiibingen: Niemeyer. 2003. xxx + 352pp. ?56. ISBN 3-484-64501-6. For the present reviewer, whose first close acquaintance with the poems dealing with Dietrich von Bern goes back to the acquisition, more than fortyyears ago, of the two-volume set of Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen's Heldenbuch: Altdeutsche Heldenlieder aus dem Sagenkreise Dietrichs von Bern und der Nibelungen (Leipzig: Schultze, 1855), the appearance of this, the firstvolume of a new series of editions of the historical epics, is most welcome, and indeed the book may expect a warm reception generally. For all the charm of von der Hagen's edition and the convenience of the five-volume Deutsches Heldenbuch, ed. by Oskar Janicke and others (Berlin: Weidmann, 1866-70; repr. 1963-68 and 2004), these nineteenth-century editions fall far short of twenty-first-century expectations. Dietrichs Flucht, telling of Dietrich's fruitless struggles with Ermenrich over his rightful inheritance (a literary reflex of a supposed conflict between the fourth-century Ermanaric and the late fifth-/early sixth-century Theodoricthe Great, clearly a chronological impossibility), was edited, together with Alpharts Tod and Die Rabenschlacht, by Ernst Martin in vol. 11,pp. 55215 , of the Deutsches Heldenbuch in 1866 (reprinted in 1967, 1975, and 2004), but that edition stands no comparison with the new one. Martin's text had a cramped appearance, printed two columns to the page, with variant readings set in very small type at the foot. The introduction, nearly thirty pages, though helpful, was much preoccupied with the widespread occurrence of impure rhymes in the poem. In contrast, the new edition, the work of Elisabeth Lienert and Gertrud Beck and a team of about a dozen helpers at the University of Bremen, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, is much more appealing and will assuredly provide a sound basis for future study. Solidly bound and reasonably priced, it is in a larger, more spacious format. The text of the poem is printed in a single column on the leftof the page, the right half being used to record whole-line variants. Substantive variants of less than a whole line are noted in the traditional way in smaller type below the text, and at the very foot of the page there are separate notes on editorial divergences from Martin's edition and on points of lexical and literary interest. The text is followed by a useful index of names (persons, places, horses, weapons) and a bibliography. As for the introduction, running to only twenty-two pages, this firstdescribes the four principal manuscripts: R (late thirteenth century,now in Berlin), W (early fourteenth century, Vienna), P (mid-fifteenth century, Heidelberg), and A (early sixteenth cen? tury,Vienna), together with the Innsbruck fragment K. They form two groups, #RW 1084 Reviews and #PA,with K related to A. K, discovered only in 1879, was unknown to Martin in 1866. Moreover, he had not seen R but had relied on a copy made by Wilhelm Grimm in 1831, after which the original disappeared from view...