Roman d'Énéas

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The Roman d'Énéas (Aeneasroman) is an old French verse epic from the 12th century that has been handed down without an author's name .

The work, which was probably written shortly after 1160, belongs to the genre of antique novels , which flourished in France from approx. 1160 to approx. 1180 and occupies a position somewhere between the older genre Chanson de geste (heroic deeds) and the less recent genre of courtly novels . It is written in pairs of rhyming octosyllables and is a good 10,000 verses long. Its template is predominantly Virgil's Rome founding epic Aeneid (around 20 BC), but it also uses additional sources, e.g. B. Ovid's works .

The target group of the unknown author is the aristocratic audience of contemporary royal courts. Accordingly, he likes the detailed portrayal of knight fights, but also, and this is new, the subject of love, to which he gives a significantly higher priority than his role model, the also unknown author of what is probably the first successful and school-setting ancient novel, the Roman de Thèbes .

It was certainly not least the sensitive design of the female characters Dido and Lavinia that prompted the minstrel Heinrich von Veldeke around 1170 to rewrite the novel d'Énéas in verse in Middle High German ( Eneasroman ).

literature

  • Le Roman d'Eneas. Translated and introduced by Monica Schöler-Beinhauer. Munich 1972 (= Classical texts of the Romanesque Middle Ages in bilingual editions , 9).
  • Josef Quint: The 'Roman d'Eneas' and Veldeke's 'Eneit' as early court changes of the 'Aeneid' in the 'Renaissance' of the 12th century. In: Journal for German Philology. Volume 73, 1954, pp. 241-267.

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