Article

On Editing the Old Yiddish Arthurian Romance Viduvilt

Astrid Lembke, Tatjana Meisler and Ina Spetzke


A young knight embarks on a quest to find his father, vanquishes courtly knights as well as giants, fights monstrous female denizens of the woods, experiences defeat, and is ultimately rescued from an unwanted marriage by his betrothed, enjoying a felicitous reunion with different members of his extended family – the Old Yiddish Viduvilt, a fifteenth/sixteenth century Jewish adaptation of a high medieval Christian chivalric romance provided its audience with enough adventure, mystery, and love to have become a major success in the literary landscape of early modern popular fiction. 1 1 For an earlier version of this report in German see Astrid Lembke, Tatjana Meisler, and Ina Spetzke, “Ein jiddischer Artusroman. Werkstattbericht zur Edition des Widuwilt,“ in Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik. Wege der Germanistik in transkultureller Perspektive, ed. Laura Auteri, Natascia Barrale, Arianna Di Bella, and Sabine Hoffmann (Bern: Peter Lang, 2022), 625–636.

This work represents one of the most intriguing, creative, and distinctive adaptations of a medieval German narrative by a Jewish author that we know. It constitutes an ideal subject for scholars interested in a range of questions pertaining to the literary, cultural, and historical dimensions of intercultural contact between Jewish and Christian communities in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. The Yiddish Viduvilt may also serve to facilitate research about the development of literary tastes and fashions within urban milieus of the time, as well as about early modern Jewish perspectives on the courtly aristocratic culture of the high Middle Ages and the manifold metamorphoses of texts as they crossed over from a manuscript culture to the realm of print.

This Old Yiddish Arthurian romance can contribute, moreover, to a better understanding of how written Yiddish evolved to meet the needs of a growing audience spread across extensive parts of Europe. It holds particular significance not only for the fields of Yiddish and Jewish Studies but also for History, Comparative Literature, Translation Studies, and, owing to the intricate relationship between the German source material and its Yiddish adaptation, German Studies. Thus, the critical edition we are preparing is explicitly targeted towards an audience with interdisciplinary interests. We hope that it will serve as a stimulus to further engagement with this fascinating text, which is an often simplified, unadorned, and even coarse rendition of its source, yet also undoubtedly comical, witty, and immensely entertaining. As an exceptional example of premodern Jewish-Christian literary relations we aim to draw to it the attention and recognition it rightfully deserves.

A Middle High German Source and Its Old Yiddish Adaptation

Viduvilt is based upon Wigalois, a Middle High German courtly romance composed in rhyming couplets by Wirnt von Grafenberg in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. This narrative revolves around the exploits of Sir Gawain, a knight of the Arthurian court, who is abducted by an unknown lord and persuaded to marry that knight’s beautiful niece before eventually returning to the court of King Arthur. Years later, Gawain’s son Wigalois seeks out his father and garners significant attention due to his youthful display of knightly virtues. Shortly thereafter, Wigalois embarks on a dangerous journey to aid a lady in distress who had been exiled by a cruel usurper, and he successfully masters a series of adventurous challenges. Upon entering the lady’s haunted realm, Wigalois is compelled to navigate further perils, confronting and killing the dragon Pfetan, for example, and almost losing his life in an attack by a ferocious woman living in the woods. His journey culminates in a fight against and victory over his principal adversary, the giant-like knight Roaz. Subsequently, Wigalois leads a campaign against a rebellious nobleman before he can eventually devote himself to his wife and his newly acquired realm.

As early as the thirteenth century, this Arthurian romance—which explicitly refers to the “classics” of courtly literature written only a few years earlier as its models, namely, Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneasroman, Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein and Armer Heinrich, and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival—gained widespread recognition and popularity. This phenomenon has occasionally stirred surprise among modern researchers, as the Wigalois, with its numerous homages to revered literary predecessors, was deemed by some to be derivative and, moreover, almost disconcertingly pious. 2 2 Many researchers have called Wirnt’s Wigalois a conspicuously epigonal work. See, for example, Walter Haug, Literaturtheorie im deutschen Mittelalter von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts. Eine Einführung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), 268, or Stephan Fuchs, Hybride Helden: Gwigalois und Willehalm. Beiträge zum Heldenbild und zur Poetik des Romans im frühen 13. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Winter, 1997). It has also been noted that Wigalois, in contrast to other protagonists of German adaptations of courtly French romances (e.g., Erec, Iwein, or even Parzival), is depicted as a veritable miles christianus. See, for example, Claudia Brinker, “’Hie ist diu aventiure geholt’ Die Jenseitsreise im Wigalois des Wirnt von Grafenberg. Kreuzzugspropaganda und unterhaltende Glaubenslehre?” in Contemplata aliis tradere. Studien zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Spiritualität. Festschrift für Alois M. Haas zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Claudia Brinker (Bern: Peter Lang, 1995), 87–110.
The fact that any such reservations were not shared by a medieval courtly audience is evidenced not only by the relatively broad transmission in no fewer than 38 manuscripts and manuscript fragments extant today but also by the Wigalois being swiftly referred to in the works of other notable authors soon after its creation, such as Heinrich von dem Türlin’s Krone and Rudolf von Ems’s Alexander and Willehalm von Orlens. 3 3 Christoph Fasbender, Der Wigalois Wirnts von Grafenberg. Eine Einführung (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 3–8.
The thirteenth century author Konrad von Würzburg, in turn, bestowed a literary monument upon his colleague Wirnt von Grafenberg by casting him as the protagonist of his tale Der Welt Lohn. 4 4 See Tatjana Meisler, Stina Metter, and Ina Spetzke, “Glanz und Gewürm. Konrads Inszenierung einer komplexen Frauengestalt in ‘Der Welt Lohn,’” in Beiträge zur mediävistischen Erzählforschung 10 (March 2021): 189-219. https://doi.org/10.25619/BmE20214156

Unlike many other high Medieval romances that were esteemed in their time but eventually fell into obscurity by the end of the Middle Ages, Wirnt’s Wigalois did not fade into oblivion. Instead, it continued to attract the attention of various adapters and audiences. In the fifteenth century, it was adapted by Dietrich von Hopfgarten and Ulrich Füetrer who still used rhyming verses (as was common for the courtly epics of the Middle Ages), now organized in stanzas.

In 1493, an early prose adaptation, titled Wigoleis vom Rade, was printed in Augsburg, followed by a series of prints in Strasbourg, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, and Nuremberg.

The Old Yiddish Viduvilt is probably not derived from the roughly contemporary prose Wigoleis, but rather from Wirnt’s original Wigalois. 5 5 For the relationship between Wigalois, Wigoleis, and Widuwilt, see Leo Landau, Arthurian Legends or the Hebrew-German Rhymed Version of the Legend of King Arthur (Leipzig: Eduard Avenarius, 1912), lxv–lxxxv; Irving Linn, Widwilt Son of Gawain, PhD diss. (New York University, 1942), lvii–cxix; Wulf-Otto Dreeßen, “Wigalois – Widuwilt. Wandlungen des Artusromans im Jiddischen,“ in Westjiddisch. Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit/Le Yiddish occidental. Actes du Colloque de Mulhouse, ed. Astrid Starck (Aarau: Sauerländer, 1994), 84–85.
It likely originated in the fifteenth or sixteenth century and initiated a reception history that proved to be as stable and complex as that of its source, the German Wigalois/Wigoleis, lasting well into the late eighteenth century.

Today, Viduvilt is preserved in three manuscripts from the sixteenth century. One of these manuscripts is housed at the Wren Library in Cambridge (F. 12.44), while the other two are located at the State and University Library Hamburg (Cod. hebr. 289 and Cod. hebr. 255).

None of the three manuscripts contains the Old Yiddish Arthurian romance from its beginning to its end. While the Cambridge manuscript does at least include the end of the narrative, it lacks a prologue and instead commences amidst a depiction of the customs at King Arthur’s court. The two Hamburg manuscripts commence even later, specifically with a conversation between Gabain and his abductor, during which Gabain learns that he is expected to marry the unknown lord’s daughter. Hamburg, Cod. hebr. 255 concludes with Viduvilt sending the knight he has vanquished in the contest for the prize of beauty to the court of King Arthur. In Hamburg, Cod. hebr. 289, the narrative ends when Viduvilt is freed from the broken spear embedded in his shoulder, subsequently losing consciousness.

In addition to these three manuscripts, there exist twelve printed editions from the seventeenth century onwards, 6 6 See Achim Jaeger, Ein jüdischer Artusritter. Studien zum jüdisch-deutschen Widuwilt (Artushof) und zum Wigalois des Wirnt von Gravenberc (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 33–35.
none of which seems to be directly derived from any of the manuscripts. Among these prints, two are particularly noteworthy: the version in rhymed couplets organized in stanza-like groups of lines, which was brought to print in 1671 in Amsterdam by Joseph Witzenhausen at the printing press of David de Castro Tartas and subsequently reprinted several times, and a print version in ottava rima stanzas, which was published in Prague between 1671 and 1679. 7 7 Robert G. Warnock, “Frühneuzeitliche Fassungen des altjiddischen Artushofs,” in Auseinandersetzungen um jiddische Sprache und Literatur. Jüdische Komponenten in der deutschen Literatur – die Assimilationskontroverse, ed. Walter Röll and Hans Peter Bayerdörfer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986), 13–15.
Witzenhausen’s 1671 print seems to be the earliest extant text that encompasses the whole of the Viduvilt romance.

In the year 1699, the Protestant Hebraist Johann Christoph Wagenseil published his work Belehrung der Jüdisch-Teutschen Red- und Schreibart (Instruction in the Jewish-German Style of Speaking and Writing) in Königsberg under the imprint of Paul Friedrich Rhode. 8 8 Johann Christoph Wagenseil, Belehrung Der Jüdisch- Teutschen Red- und Schreibart […] (Königsberg: Paul Friedrich Rhode, 1699), including Jüdischer / Geschicht- Roman / von dem grossen König ARTURO in Engelland / und dem tapffern Helden / Wieduwilt, 157– 292. This publication served as a form of instructional manual intended for a Christian audience seeking to acquaint themselves with the Yiddish language. Included within the Belehrung was a reprint of the Editio Princeps of Viduvilt from 1671 (Jüdischer Geschicht-Roman / von dem grossen König ARTURO in Engelland / und dem tapffern Helden Wieduwilt). Wagenseil complemented this by providing a transliteration of the text into the Latin alphabet, thereby rendering the Viduvilt accessible to a Christian readership that may have had limited familiarity with the Hebrew alphabet or did not know how to read Hebrew characters altogether.

Wagenseil’s edition was not only recognized by the emerging academic discipline of German Studies as an intriguing adaptation of Wirnt’s Wigalois (as noted, for instance, by the nineteenth-century scholars Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen and Georg Friedrich Benecke). Rather, it became, in turn, the foundation for further reprints and adaptations, now rendered in the German language and the Latin alphabet. In 1780, Daniel Ernst Wagner’s collection Erzehlungen aus dem Heldenalter teutscher Nationen was published in Danzig, comprising a compilation of premodern Scandinavian and English narratives, incorporating – a little peculiarly in this context – a rendition of Viduvilt in Latin characters based on the Wagenseil edition. A few years later, Johann Ferdinand Roth, in his narrative Vom Könige Artus und dem bildschönen Ritter Wieduwilt. Ein Ammenmärchen, published in Leipzig in 1786, takes a notably more liberal approach to the Wagenseil text. In contrast to Daniel Ernst Wagner, who stays rather true to his source, Roth creates an entirely new, satirical enlightenment-era prose narrative based on Wagenseil’s transliteration. Only a little later, in the subsequent Romantic era, Ludwig Uhland, in his Ritter Wieduwilt of 1809/1810, reengages with the material, once again closely following Wagenseil’s transliteration. Uhland adapts select passages from the beginning of the Old Yiddish Viduvilt for a non-Jewish, German-speaking audience. The intricate and multifaceted nature of this Christian-Jewish-Christian and German-Yiddish-German history of reception is ultimately further highlighted by a particularly idiosyncratic adaptation of the Yiddish Viduvilt. This version, appearing in 1789 in German in the Hebrew alphabet in Frankfurt an der Oder, narrates the marriage of Widuwilt’s father, Gabain, to the daughter of the Emperor of China. 9 9 For the early modern reception of Viduvilt up until the nineteenth century see Jaeger, Ein jüdischer Artusritter, 327–398 (chapter 5).

The Yiddish Viduvilt, as transmitted in the manuscripts and prints of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, adheres to the plot of its Middle High German source to varying degrees of fidelity until the beginning of the hero’s second series of adventures. Upon Viduvilt’s entry into the usurped realm of his future spouse Lorel, the narrative of the Yiddish romance progressively diverges from that of Wigalois – culminating in the protagonist’s defeat at the hands of the mother of the giant, his principal adversary, a narrowly averted involuntary marriage, and his subsequent deliverance and marriage to Lorel. 10 10 For comparative research from the late seventies onwards see, for example, Christoph Cormeau, “Die jiddische Tradition von Wirnts Wigalois. Bemerkungen zum Fortleben einer Fabel unter veränderten Bedingungen,” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 8 (1978): 28–44; Robert G. Warnock, “Wirkungsabsicht und Bearbeitungstechnik im altjiddischen Artushof,“ in Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 100 (1981): 98–109; Jaeger, Ein jüdischer Artusritter; Klaus Cuno, “Artushof und Aschkenasim. Beschneidung des Rittertums?“ in König Artus lebt! Eine Ringvorlesun des Mittelalterzentrums der Universität Bonn, ed. Stefan Zimmer (Heidelberg: Winter, 2005), 145–180; Astrid Lembke, “Ritter außer Gefecht. Konzepte passiver Bewährung im Wigalois und im Widuwilt,“ Aschkenas 25 (2015): 64; Annegret Oehme, The Knight without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptations (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

Despite its importance for the study of premodern European cultures and history, this intriguing adaptation of Wirnt’s thoroughly Christian chivalric romance for a Jewish audience has not yet been sufficiently explored, especially in philological terms. A comprehensive and modern edition is still lacking. Scholarly endeavors, especially within the realm of German Studies, currently rely on outdated transliterations of one or two textual witnesses, unable to encompass the entirety of the textual transmission and often without access to the Yiddish text rendered in Hebrew letters.

Our editorial project aims to address this lacuna. For the first time, the Old Yiddish Viduvilt romance will be edited, incorporating all extant manuscripts as well as the first printed edition. Enriched by a transliteration and commentary, this captivating work of premodern secular Yiddish literature is intended to address a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience.

Previous Editions

The first modern edition of Viduvilt was presented by Leo Landau in 1912. 11 11 See Landau, Arthurian Legends.
Unfamiliar with the Cambridge manuscript, he constructed his text from the two Hamburg manuscripts. As a supplement standing in for portions of the text absent in the two manuscripts, Landau included the text from the Wagenseil edition of 1699. In an appendix, he additionally presented the 23 ottava rima stanzas integrated into Witzenhausen’s text in 1683, as well as the prose narrative printed in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1789. Landau prefaced his edition with an extensive introduction, in which he elaborated on Jewish-Christian cultural interactions more generally, in addition to including information about the author of the Viduvilt, printing, rhyming techniques, linguistic features, and the text’s sources.

Taking a step further than Landau, Irving Linn, in 1941/1942, presented the text from the Cambridge manuscript both in Hebrew script and in transliteration. 12 12 Linn, Widwilt Son of Gawain.
As the author was unable to examine any of the manuscripts on-site due to World War II, he reconstructed the illegible passages of the Cambridge manuscript based on Landau’s transliterations (not always explicitly marking his interpolations).

Another edition that continues to arouse research interest, especially within German-speaking academia and notably in the field of German Studies, was provided by Siegmund A. Wolf in 1974. 13 13 Siegmund Wolf, Ritter Widuwilt. Die westjiddische Fassung des Wigalois des Wirnt von Gravenberc. Nach dem jiddischen Druck von 1699 besorgt und herausgegeben (Bochum: Studienverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer, 1974).
His transliteration is based on Wagenseil’s 1699 text. While this edition has proven highly influential in recent years, it falls short of Linn’s model by not presenting a text in Hebrew letters.

A long-anticipated project of Robert G. Warnock, involving the editing of the medieval manuscripts of Viduvilt as well as the Early Modern ottava rima version, unfortunately never came to fruition. Jerold C. Frakes published excerpts from Viduvilt in his anthology of Old Yiddish texts, 14 14 Jerold C. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts 1100–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), EYT 80 (453–460), 111 (692-702), and 112 (712-713).
as well as an English translation of the entire romance based on the three extant manuscripts. 15 15 Jerold C. Frakes, Early Yiddish Epic. Edited and translated (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 181–237.
Otherwise, no further attempts have been made to render Viduvilt accessible to research.

The adventure of editing Viduvilt

An examination of the digitized copies of all three manuscripts revealed that the two Hamburg manuscripts are easily legible. In contrast, while the Cambridge manuscript proved readable at its beginning and end, its condition deteriorates in the middle, as observed by Linn, 16 16 Linn, Widwilt Son of Gawain, III–IV.
making the text partially decipherable only with a lot of effort or, in some instances, not at all.

Experiments with various types of image editing software revealed that legibility can be enhanced in certain cases through the application of different kinds of filters. However, on many pages, ink corrosion has progressed to such an extent that entire lines are completely illegible in the digital scans. In other instances, the holes in the paper have been filled by the letters from the underlying sheet captured in the digital scan, resulting in initial transcription errors that became apparent only upon verification against the original during an in situ review process. Consequently, it was immensely beneficial for us to be able to travel to Cambridge shortly before the onset of the initial lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, enabling us to examine the manuscript and rectify previous transcription errors. This endeavor allowed the identification of almost all corrupted or otherwise challenging words and text passages, as well as the differentiation of similar-looking letters from one another.

However, a significant challenge arose due to the fact that twenty recto pages had been overlaid with tissue paper to prevent them from further falling apart. The procedure blurred the ink to such an extent that most letters and words on these pages can no longer be deciphered, as the next image will demonstrate:

To our great fortune, we received assistance from Prof. Dr. Andrew Beeby and his team from Durham University, as well as from Dr. Nicolas Bell (College Librarian of Trinity College) and his colleagues from the Cambridge University Library. They produced multispectral images of the relevant pages for us and organized the imaging process. Thus, for the first time since the pages were overlaid, the script on these pages could be read.

Therefore, we were able to transcribe the entire text of the Cambridge manuscript reliably – with the exception of a few exceptionally corrupt passages – and compare it with the corresponding text in the two Hamburg manuscripts.

Editorial Principles

Both the older linguistic form of Viduvilt preserved in the manuscripts and the more recent one in the editio princeps are significant objects of research. Therefore, our edition encompasses both the text from the manuscripts and that from the first Amsterdam edition of 1671. These two manifestations of the text are presented synoptically side by side in two columns on the right-hand page of each double-page spread. The close juxtaposition of the manuscript tradition and the editio princeps makes immediately evident the linguistic differences between the two stages of composition. Moreover, whenever certain passages of the text are not transmitted in any of the manuscripts at all, such as at the beginning of the composition, the presence of the Amsterdam version of the romance enables readers to still follow the plot in its entirety.

The Cambridge manuscript (MS Cambridge, Trinity College, F.12.44) was chosen as the main source or base manuscript (Leithandschrift) for the critical edition of the manuscripts because it offers the most extensive and also the best text. Its version of Viduvilt is rendered word by word and in most cases also letter by letter. Interventions are clearly marked in cases of obvious errors or uncertainties in reading the corrupted manuscript, and each intervention is noted in the critical apparatus. Additionally, readings from the Hamburg manuscripts that are not considered iterative variants are included in the apparatus. For the creation of this edition, we employ the software Classical Text Editor (CTE).

In addition to the two Yiddish versions of the romance in Hebrew letters, the edition will also feature transliterations of both versions into the Latin alphabet. The transliterations of MS Cambridge, Trinity College, F.12.44 and of the editio princeps into the Latin alphabet will be depicted on the left-hand side of each double-page spread, with the transliterated print in the left column and the transliterated manuscript text in the right. The critical apparatus is transliterated as well. The issues associated with producing transliterations of Yiddish texts in Latin characters, which can be interpreted as an appropriation of the Yiddish original text, 17 17 See, for example, Jerold C. Frakes, The Politics of Interpretation. Alterity and Ideology in Old Yiddish Studies (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), 108–111.
are well-known in Yiddish and German Studies. Our transliterations alongside the texts in Hebrew letters shall not replace the original but only supplement it. They are intended for an audience interested in the content of the Yiddish romance who may not (yet) be proficient in reading the Hebrew alphabet. They are meant to address and hopefully connect different kinds of audiences: scholars, students, and interested laypersons, individuals with or without knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet.

For the first time, scholars and students of Yiddish and Jewish Studies, as well as scholars and students of German Studies, European History, Comparative Literature, and Translation Studies can work with and discuss the Old Yiddish Viduvilt side by side. Our aim is to foster exchange between members of different disciplines and stages of expertise and to provide them with a basis for designing innovative research, with a fascinating Old Yiddish chivalric romance at its core.

MLA STYLE
Lembke, Astrid, Tatjana Meisler, and Ina Spetzke. “On Editing the Old Yiddish Arthurian Romance Viduvilt.” In geveb, July 2024: https://ingeveb.org/articles/on-editing-the-old-yiddish-arthurian-romance-viduvilt.
CHICAGO STYLE
Lembke, Astrid, Tatjana Meisler, and Ina Spetzke. “On Editing the Old Yiddish Arthurian Romance Viduvilt.” In geveb (July 2024): Accessed Feb 13, 2025.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Astrid Lembke

Astrid Lembke is Professor of Medieval German Literature at the University of Mannheim's German Studies Department.

Tatjana Meisler

Tatjana Meisler studied German literature and Jewish Studies in Frankfurt am Main.

Ina Spetzke

Ina Spetzke works at the German Department of University of Mannheim, where she is teaching courses on literary relations between Jews and Christians in the European Middle Ages and the early modern period.