The busant
The Busant , also called The Bussard , is a Middle High German verse tale in 1074 rhyming couplets . It was probably created in the 14th century from motifs from French court literature.
content
The Princess of France is engaged to the King of Morocco as a result of an unwanted political marriage. To save her, the Prince of England dresses up, sneaks into her castle and then escapes with the princess. While she sleeps in a forest, the prince admires two of her rings until a buzzard flies over and steals one of these rings. The prince follows the bird, but gets lost in the forest and soon goes mad with grief and despair.
For one year the prince will live like a wild man in the forest. Meanwhile, the princess has found shelter in a mill and earns her living by sewing while she waits for his return. Unrecognized, she is later taken in by the prince's uncle, a duke, and his wife. One day the duke goes hunting and catches the feral prince. He takes him to his castle and tries to look after him for the next six weeks.
When the prince tries to prove his noble parentage and upbringing during a hunt, he catches a buzzard and bites its head off to everyone's amazement. In order to justify his actions, he tells his story, and so the princess is finally able to recognize him. After that, the two of them live happily ever after.
Subject
Central to the narrative is the motif of the buzzard descending from the sky to steal her ring from the lady, which in turn leads her knight to go out to find the jewelry. The lovers are separated for a while, and the knight is given the opportunity for adventure and great deeds before they are reunited. This topic can also be found in today's literature, for example in Peter Bichsel's short story Der Busant (1985), which takes up the motifs of the medieval model. The motif of the savage nobleman, as shown in the prince's metamorphosis, is also an old one: It goes back to stories from the eleventh and twelfth centuries with figures like Merlin , Tristan and Reinoldus , who also experience such a temporary transformation.
In medieval literature, “The Busant” deals with the same subject with Jean Renart's L'Escoufle , a somewhat older courtly novel from 1902 lines in which another bird of prey, a Milan, takes on the role of the robber. Paul Meyer suspects that both works come from a common source that has yet to be found; according to Sandra Linden, who cites Rosenfeld and Reinhold Köhler, this original is a French text. In a review from 1937, Philipp August Becker came to the conclusion that there was no such source and that Renart invented the subject.
Handwriting and genre
The poem is completely preserved in a contemporary manuscript. There are also three other fragments. Sandra Linden dates the work to the early 14th century.
"The Busant" is seen as a novel-like example of the fair , which typically contains between 150 and 2000 lines and deals with mundane things like love. “Der Busant” also takes up the French tradition of the Schöne Magelone , but also shows similarities with the work of Konrad von Würzburg and the Iwein .
Cultural influence
Numerous illustrations were created for the poem, including a long tapestry , the fragments of which are now kept in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Applied Art in Cologne , the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg and in Paris become. The piece in the Metropolitan Museum shows the Prince of England as a wild man, while the princess, riding on her tent, finds refuge with a poor man. According to Jennifer Floyd, the existence of such tapestries indicates a bourgeois market for wall hangings and tapestries showing, among other things, hunting scenes; Such wall decorations were not only reserved for the high nobility, but were also affordable for rich merchants and the lower nobility.
John Twyning writes that the plot in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream , in which four lovers get lost in the forest, was intended as a ridicule of "Busant".
See also
literature
- Wolfgang Stammler: Busant. In: Real Lexicon on German Art History . Vol. 3, 1951, col. 237-240.
Web links
- The Busant (Magelona) . In: Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen (ed.): Gesammtabventure. Hundred Old German Stories , Vol. 1, Section 16, pp. 331–366
Individual evidence
- ↑ Nikolaus Meyer, Friedrich Mooyer: Old German seals: From the manuscript . Gottfried Basse, Quedlinburg, Leipzig 1833, Dis is the Busant, p. 24-37 ( Google Books ).
- ^ A b c d e Sandra Linden: 'Bringing Texts to Speak': Philology and Interpretation. Festschrift for Paul Sappler . Ed .: Christiana Ackerman, Ulrich Barton. Max Niemeyer, Tübingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-484-10898-1 , storytelling as a therapeutic? The insane prince in 'Bussard', p. 171-82 ( Google Books ).
- ↑ Guy de Tervarent: Wild Men in the Middle Ages by Richard Bernheimer: Review . In: The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs . tape 96 , no. 617 , August 1954, p. 262, 265 (English).
- ↑ Sahar Amer: Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures . University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 2008, ISBN 978-0-8122-4087-0 , pp. 198 (English).
- ^ Philipp August Becker : L'oeuvre de Jehan Renart . In: Journal of French Language and Literature . tape 60 , no. 1/2 , 1937, p. 113-125 ( JSTOR review).
- ↑ Two scenes from 'The Busant'. In: Metmuseum.org. Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed August 31, 2013 .
- ^ HC Marillier: The Figdor Tapestries . In: The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs . tape 56 , no. 327 , June 1930, p. 312-14 (English, JSTOR ).
- ↑ Jennifer Eileen Floyd: Writing on the Wall: John Lydgate's Architectural Verse . Stanford University, 2008, p. 290 (English, online dissertation). Online ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ John Twyning: Forms of English History in Literature, Landscape, and Architecture . Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2008, ISBN 978-0-230-02000-9 ( Google Books ).
