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A new view of King Rother in which not only the wooer but also his
bride-to-be enacts a quest. King Rother, a twelfth-century
bridal-quest epic, occupies an important place in the history of
German literature. The earliest surviving and structurally most
sophisticated of the so-called minstrel epics, verse narrativesonce
assumed to have been recited by itinerant minstrels before a
courtly audience, it has its roots in German folklore and documents
the transition from orality to the culture of the book. The text
belongs to the subgenre of theperilous bridal quest, in which the
disguised wooer deceives the bride's father and abducts her with
her consent. This simple quest structure is doubled, if the wooer
must win his bride a second time from her father, who has rescued
her. The bride is almost always a passive figure in these events,
the main conflict being the disparity in status between the wooer
and his prospective father-in-law. King Rother is structurally
complex, as the presentstudy is the first to recognize: the quest
structure is doubled not only in the wooer's second quest, but also
in the bride's own actions -- including her use of deception in a
parallel quest for her wooer. This underscores her equality in
status, which is her essential qualification to be his wife. The
study includes an important English-language summary of scholarship
on King Rother, on the minstrel epics, and on the bridal quest.
Thomas Kerth is Associate Professor of German at Stony Brook
University.
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Lanzelet (Paperback)
Ulrich Von Zatzikhoven; Translated by Thomas Kerth; As told to Kenneth G .T. Webster, Roger Sherman Loomis
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R1,171
Discovery Miles 11 710
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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"Lanzelet," one of the first known versions of the Lancelot
story, is a critical work in medieval literature. This Middle High
German romance is a rendering of a lost French tale of Lancelot
that likely predates Chr?tien de Troyes's famous "Lancelot or the
Knight of the Cart." Ulrich von Zatzikhoven obtained a copy of the
original book in 1194 and translated the work from French into
German. Kenneth G.T. Webster made the first English translation in
the 1930s, and Columbia University Press published it in 1951.
Following Webster's death, the famed Arthurian scholar Roger
Sherman Loomis made slight modifications to the text and expanded
Webster's notes. Thomas Kerth's new translation, prepared with the
highest accuracy and scholarly insight available to date, includes
a new introduction and revised bibliography, notes from both Loomis
and Webster, and a commentary reflecting the fifty years of
scholarship on "Lanzelet" since the publication of Webster's
translation.
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