Pontus and Sidonia

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Cod. Pal. Germ. 142 , sheet 122r: Pontus with entourage disguised as wild people at Sidonia's wedding with Genelet. Illustration from the manuscript for Margaret of Savoy , made around 1475 by the workshop of Ludwig Henfflin .
transcription
Pontus on a French playing card (around 1500)

Pontus and Sidonia (French original title: Ponthus et la belle Sidoyne ) is a late medieval courtly novel , which was written around 1400 in French . Geoffroy IV de la Tour Landry (* before 1330; † between 1402 and 1406) or another member of the house of de la Tour-Landry is accepted as the author .

action

The protagonist Pontus is a prince from Galicia who, as a child, fled from his kingdom to Brittany from the Moors . Growing up there, he falls in love with the king's daughter Sidonia . This is followed by arguments with a rival who is also fighting for Sidonia's favor and slandering Pontus with her. He first has to move into the distance for a year, where he heroically defeats numerous knights. After his return he is again wrongly accused and has stayed away from the court for seven years. In time he gets back to his lover, whom he can save from being forcibly married to his rival Genelet . Instead, the wedding between Pontus and Sidonia now takes place, and the hero can drive the heathen out of his fatherly kingdom and completely eliminate his opponent.

interpretation

Pontus und Sidonia is the German translation of the French adventure story Ponthus et la belle Sidoyne , written at the turn of the 14th century to the 15th century , which in turn goes back to the Anglo- Norman verse story Horn et Rimenhild from around 1180 .

The plot is closely linked to the lords of la Tour, whose ancestors owned estates in Brittany. The whole narrative of the novel is geared towards the happy end of the two protagonists Pontus and Sidonia. The hero is portrayed as a flawless ideal of man, namely as extremely brave, beautiful, Christian, etc., while his enemies (the pagans and his rival) are characterized as vicious and non-religious. The author wants to provide his readers with a model and instruction for a virtuous and pious life through the flawless behavior of the protagonist. The central motif of the novel conceived in this way is therefore an idealistically portrayed chivalry and does not seem particularly realistic. In contrast, the somewhat earlier written works by Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken are rough and give a more realistic impression.

Lore

The work is preserved in 28 manuscripts , 23 of which date to the 15th century. There are several translations, including four in Dutch and two in German . All manuscripts are largely homogeneous in terms of content and show only minor deviations.

The German translations date from the 15th century, i.e. the transition from the late Middle High German to the early New High German written language . Traditionally, Eleanor of Scotland (1433–1480), Archduchess of Austria, was the translator of version A into German, which was written between 1449 and 1465. The reason for this assumption is that Johann Schönsperger's first edition reads in the introduction:

Here a beautiful hystori arises ... What hystori the translucent and hochgeporn fraw, fraw Heleonara, porne queen from scotland, ertzhertduchess zů œsterreich, commendably transferred from French tongues to teütsch ...

Doubts as to whether she is actually the author of this translation could not be confirmed. Since the history is extremely well written in terms of language, but Eleonore was less proficient in German than French, as two letters she wrote herself and now stored in the Tyrolean State Archives show, she could have had the help of a scribe in writing it. After the death of his wife, Duke Sigmund had her work, of which only one manuscript (Gotha, 1465; written by Nicolaus Huber) is available, first printed by Hans Schönsperger the Elder in Augsburg in 1483; the print also contains 47 woodcuts. Even before this first printing, there were several mentions of the story; from this one can see how popular the adventurous material was and how widespread Eleonore's work was. The first edition was followed by further prints in 1485, 1491 and 1498 and it enjoyed great popularity in the early modern period (16th / 17th century). There were considerable sales figures, numerous citations from other authors and also some adaptations of the material. Eleonore's work was last printed in 1792. Karl Simrock published a new version of the people's book in 1865. In addition to the translation of Eleonores (version A), there is another, independent translation, created around the same time by an unknown author (version B), which exists in five manuscripts but was never printed. In addition to the lack of a noble name, the fact that this version differs stylistically from Eleonores Pontus and Sidonia in that it uses a more artificial language with many rhetorical figures instead of the simpler and more concise language also contributed to this.

One of the late medieval Dutch translations is 1564 under the title end the history van Ponthus the schoone Sidonie as pressure in Antwerp appeared vandenberg publishing Niclaes Wouwere.

Manuscripts

German-language editions

  • Version A, handwriting G. South Bavarian language area (probably Tyrol) 1465. Gotha Research Library Chart. A 590 ( proof )
  • Workshop of Ludwig Henfflin , made for Margaret of Savoy , poss. Stuttgart, around 1475, written language: Lower Alemannic with Swabian forms. University of Heidelberg , Cod. Pal. germ. 142 ( digitized version ).
  • Eleonore <Austria, Archduchess>: Pontus and Sidonia . Johann Schönsperger, Augsburg 1498 ( online [accessed on July 20, 2017] Incunabel, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, BSB-Ink E-48 - GW 12722).
  • Reinhard Hahn (Ed.): Eleonore von Österreich: Pontus und Sidonia (=  texts of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period . No. 38 ). Erich Schmidt, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-503-03757-8 .
  • Karin Schneider (ed.): Pontus and Sidonia: In the Germanization of an Unnamed from the 15th century (=  texts of the late Middle Ages . No. 14 ). Erich Schmidt, 1961, ISBN 978-3-503-00406-5 , ISSN  0340-9724 .
  • Karl Simrock : Pontus and Sidonia . A wonderful, funny and useful history. From the noble, honorable and manly knight Pontus, the king's son of Gallicia and the beautiful Sidonia, Queen of Britain. In: The German People's Books . Collected and restored to its original authenticity by Karl Simrock. 11th volume. H. L. Brönner's Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 1865, pp. 1-212 ( digitized version , Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg historical stocks).
  • Ottmar Schönhuth , Heinrich Friedrich (ed.): Knights Pontus and Sidonia . Fleischhauer & Spohn, Reutlingen 1845 ( mdz-nbn-resolving.de [PDF; accessed on July 20, 2017]).

literature

  • Danielle Buschinger: The German Middle Ages in France today . In: Eva Dewes, Sandra Duhem (eds.): Cultural memory and intercultural reception in a European context . De Gruyter, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-05-004132-2 , p. 237 .
  • Karin Schneider (ed.): Pontus and Sidonia: In the Germanization of an Unnamed from the 15th century (=  texts of the late Middle Ages . No. 14 ). Erich Schmidt, 1961, ISBN 978-3-503-00406-5 , ISSN  0340-9724 .
  • Paul Wüst: The German prose novels by Pontus and Sidonia . Inaugural dissertation […] University of Marburg , Marburg 1903 ( digitized version, Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg historical inventory).
  • Henrike Lähnemann : Pontus and Sidonia . Introduction to literary history and description of the manuscript [Cpg 142] ( Online (PDF) , Manuscripta Mediaevalia ). Part of: Pontus and Sidonia . Color microfiche edition of the Heidelberg manuscript, University Library, Cod. Pal. germ. 142 (= Codices illuminati medii aevi 52). Edition Helga Lengenfelder, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-89219-052-6 .
  • Reinhard Hahn: From French tongues in Teütsch: literary life at the Innsbruck court in the later 15th century and the prose novel "Pontus und Sidonia (A)" . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-631-41958-9 (University of Jena, habilitation thesis 1988/89).
  • Hans-Hugo Steinhoff : Eleonore von Österreich , in: author lexicon , 2nd edition, vol. 2, 1978/79, col. 470–474
  • Xenja of Ertzdorff : Pontus and Sidonia (version B) , in: author Encyclopedia , 2nd Edition, Vol 7, 1989, 780-782 Sp..
  • Kristina Streun: Pontus and Sidonia (version C) , in: Autorlexikon , 2nd edition, Vol. 11, 2003, Col. 1259-1260

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Transcription
    The abbreviations by means of upper and lower swings and the punctuation marks that were still missing at the time are inserted in square brackets in the transcription.
    Caption: Like kung pontus and sin journeyman with loub and flower [n] behenket in front of the tyschen jn the sale in front of the brut and brutjan dantzten [.]
    Romantic text: GEnelet the v [er] reter spoke [: "] see all the common people is heymly fro was vmb should I and jr ouch not be so happy [?"] But he didn’t want the wolff jm bush [.] He asked sydonie [n] the sy jr trure [n] wolt and remember that the common people jrer mahelschilden were required as sy [...]
  2. ↑ Quoting from Reinhard Hahn: Von frantzosischer zungen , 1990, p. 75
  3. ↑ Hans-Hugo Steinhoff : Eleonore von Österreich , in: author lexicon , 2nd edition, vol. 2, 1978/79, col. 470–474 considers Eleonore's authorship to be certain
  4. ↑ z. B. by Johannes Agricola , 750 Teutscher Sprichormen (1534); Johann Fischart , Podagrammisch Trostbüchlein (1577); Andreas Gryphius , Peter Squentz (1657/58)
  5. ↑ z. B. Hans Sachs (1558)