Volume 142, Issue 3

In this article I examine the origin of the long vowel * ō in the West-Germanic verb * ōbi̯an . The verb is continued in OHG uoben ›to practice‹ and OS ōvian ›to celebrate‹. The current explanations are doubtful. They are: 1.) * ōbi̯a- is derived from the strong feminine * ōbō- . 2.) There is an exclusively Germanic root * ōb- . 3.) * ōbi̯a- is a causative-iterative formation to a lost strong verb PGm * afaną . Five new suggestions are introduced and ordered according to probability. The best solution seems to be the completion of a pattern in analogy to families like * bata- ›good‹, * bōtō- ›making/becoming good/better‹ and * bōt(i)i̯aną ›to make/become good/better‹.

How do narrators of courtly romance use the semantics of ›Weg‹ (path, journey)? Building on numerous publications on the Weg-topic, this study ›The Path of Narration. Observations on Hartmann von Aue and Courtly Literature‹ discusses how authors, particularly Hartmann von Aue, use ›Weg‹ as code for storytelling. This can be linked to forms of semantic usage which reflect the process of reception, particularly in the case of Wolfram von Eschenbach, and those which describe a change in the semantics of value, particularly in the case of Gottfried von Straßburg.

After the failure of Wilhelm Braune’s attempt to reconstruct a stemma of the Nibelungen manuscripts, traditional textual criticism lead in a dead end, even though some valuable editions (Hennig, Schulze, Reichert, Heinzle) were published. As a result of the editions of the so-called ›contaminated‹ manuscripts and a consequence of the easier access to the Nibelungen-fragments by digitalization, Nibelungen philology succeeded less and less to deal with the quantity of variants in the transmission of the text. The article proposes to distinguish three kinds of variants: First, variants due to a change in conception, a revision (for instance in the version *C). Secondly, variants based on errors in the process of transmission (by mishearing, misreading, defects of the model etc.). Only these two kinds of variants are relevant for textual criticism and for the reconstruction of a genealogy of manuscripts in the Lachmannian tradition. Thirdly, variants of lexemes, in morphology, in grammar, in syntax, which do not permit to decide between ›right‹ or ›wrong‹. It is the majority. These variants do not alter the sense of the text; they occur on all levels of transmission; the copier can use them ad libitum . They have to be excluded from textual criticism.

The article presents a text-critical problem from Peter von Reichenbach’s ›Geistliches Tagelied‹ and suggests that, unlike the editions by Bartsch, Cramer and Schnyder, it should remain in the handwritten tradition.

The ›Versio vulgata‹, probably written around 1170 in Paris (St. Denis), a thoroughly accurate Latin translation of its Greek model, the ›Historia of Barlaam and Joasaph‹, is the starting point for the legend of ›Barlaam and Josaphat‹, which was widely used in all literature in the Western Middle Ages. It itself had an unusually rapid and broad reception, in which, according to the testimony of more than 100 preserved manuscripts, especially the new monastic orders of the 12 th  century participated, led by the Cistercians. The narrative programme of the ›Historia‹ is the path of the king’s son Josaphat into an existence of radical religious renunciation of the world, the central act of the plot being his departure from power, from the country and its people into the eremitic wilderness. It takes place against the protest of the people, who do not want to let the beloved king go, and especially against the protest of Prince Barachias, whom Josaphat forces into his succession. Here the individual’s desire for salvation not only disputes the claim of the salvation of the many, but above all denies the forced successor the possibility of an equal path of salvation. Thus the ›Historia‹ is loaded with an insoluble aporia at its key point. The use of the Bible has a formative effect on the style of the ›Historia‹, not so much the frequent citation of marked exact Bible quotations as the even more frequent insertion of smaller or larger biblical excerpts into the narrator’s speech or that of one of his characters as if they were part of their own speech.