|
COPYRIGHT 1994 University of Illinois Press
In this monumental study of the surviving fragments of Gottfried's Tristan, Rene Wetzel has undertaken something no one else has really dared, or had the patience, to do: he has reexamined the data upon which Friedrich Ranke based his theories (19l7) concerning the filiation of the Tristan manuscripts and, using additional evidence provided by textual fragments discovered since Ranke's study, proposes fundamental revisions in our understanding of the transmission of that work. While Ranke was able to demonstrate that the critical apparatus to Karl Marold's Tristan edition (1906) was both incomplete and inaccurate, the apparatus volume to his own Tristan edition (1930) never appeared. Wetzel now attempts to set the record straight, at least for those passages covered in the fragments, by supplementing and in some cases emending Ranke's manuscript collations. He is certainly the right man for the job, having been trained by Eduard Studer (himself a student of Ranke), who has taken on the task of revising the Ranke edition and providing it with a critical apparatus based on a collation of all known manuscripts. Studer made available to Wetzel his collection of microfilms of the various Tristan manuscripts, as well as handwritten notes and collations found among Ranke's posthumous papers.
The great merit of this work lies in its almost daunting completeness. Ranke collated five complete manuscripts (BNOPW) and the fragments blrwszmfat (n was too fragile to travel and h was lost, though partially available through a printed extract). Since the publication of the Ranke edition, however, a number of new fragments...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
