15 - Lancelot in Germany

Summary

The importance of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle was recognized early in Germany – too early perhaps, for the reception of the work is highly fragmented, like a broken line of stops and starts. The long process of appropriation began before the mid-thirteenth century and reached its peak in the second half of the fifteenth century. Even so, a complete German translation of the Lancelot–Queste– Mort Artu trilogy did not appear for another hundred years, and the sole surviving manuscript, dated 1576, also marks the end of the history of the Cycle. Neither of the translations was printed, and we have no illuminated luxury codices that might have sustained an interest in the Cycle after the end of the Middle Ages. So the first – and for a long time the only – German prose romance was practically unknown, even after the discovery of its two oldest fragments which date back to the High Middle Ages. Scholarly interest in the prose romance revived with the publication of the first volume of a critical edition, in 1948. The (limited) popularity of the Cycle in recent years – Tankred Dorst's play Merlin oder Das wüste Land (1981) and Christoph Hein's Die Ritter der Tafelrunde (1989), for example – owe more to Malory/Caxton, T. H. White, and Hollywood's Grail films than to research.

Shortly after the completion of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, efforts were made to adapt it into German. The oldest extant fragment (M) dates from the midthirteenth century. Its language points to the Mosel region. Fragment A, in contrast, was made twenty years later and comes from the Main-Franconian area, so we know that initial interest in the Cycle was not limited to territory west of the Rhine. The German Prosa-Lancelot is as anonymous as its French counterpart. Who the translators were and who they worked for is a mystery, and the hypothesis that they were Cistercians is a mere assumption based on the romance's so-called Cistercian patterns of thought. Cistercians did begin to write religious prose in the vernacular in the mid-thirteenth century, but none of the extant manuscripts indicates a connection with a monastery or religious order. We can safely assume that the translators were related to the secular nobility.