Small print, big words, no sales.
—Janet Walker, in Alfred Hitchcock,
“The Rope” (1948) As the chronology of the years in which the journals were founded suggests, the 1870s and 1880s saw golden days in Romance philology. The combat in the hard power of warfare and military yielded to the competition in its soft equivalents of knowledge and culture. In Germany, Romance philology occupied a height of distinction no less estimable than the one it held in France. Yet the importance attached by the French and the Germans to cultural achievement should not mislead us into making overoptimistic assumptions about the direct impact of advanced research. Correct or not, Gaston Paris’s cursory generalizations about the poem netted Our Lady’s Tumbler far more attention than did all the editorial minutiae that preceded or followed it. Foerster’s edition was accessible only in the print of Romania, as were all the subsequent notes on textual improvements and other showcases of Romance philology. Philological refinements to the text of the poem were achieved by investigators from throughout the European scholarly community. The roll call included the Austrian Wendelin (or Wilhelm) Foerster, the Germans Gustav Gröber and Hermann Wächter, the Frenchman Gaston Paris, and the Finn Arthur Långfors. In the social order of the time, all these Romance philologists may have commanded from the public at large respect verging on awe. For all that, such esteem does not mean that their publications were widely read. On the contrary, their periodicals remained the province of specialists.
The story of the tumbler was summarized for cultivated German-speaking listeners and readers already in 1875, when the Swiss-born Romance philologist Adolf Tobler propounded a lecture on “the life of the minstrels” at the “Song Academy” in Berlin (see Fig. 1.32). As was commonly the case at this time in learned treatments of medieval vernacular texts, Tobler did not generate a word-for-word translation.
He offered instead a dense recapitulation of the poem. He basked in having sociable
ties with the great Gaston Paris, who contributed a preface to his book on French versification. Like his colleague in France, Tobler made apparent in the opening of his précis his ironic, even patronizing, presuppositions about the ingenuousness and impressionability of medieval faith—and poetry.
Fig. 1.32 Eduard Gärtner, Berlin Sing-Akademie, 1843. Oil on canvas. Image from Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gaertner2.jpg
Fast-forward nearly four decades. In 1914 the prolific Severin Rüttgers (see Fig. 1.33).
published the first German prose version of the entire Our Lady’s Tumbler. In doing so, he invoked the remark about the nature of the poem that Paris had made in a parenthesis. Childlike simplicity could have still tickled the fancy of potential readers on the eve of World War I. Disadvantageously, this author sought in his translation to replicate the medieval qualities in the language and style of the medieval French original. To this end, he resorted to old-fashioned German with occasionally convoluted rhetorical flourishes that enabled him to skate over obscure passages in the original. Where Paris had danced, Rüttgers danced around.
Already in 1886 a nearly complete German verse version was printed in a collection with a title meaning, more or less, Jongleur’s Book. The author was a professor at Munich (see Fig. 1.34). A Protestant, this Wilhelm Hertz specialized in the literature and lore of the Middle Ages. As a poet, he made a specialty of translating and reworking Old French and Middle High German poetry. His adaptation of Our Lady’s Tumbler, widely admired for its fusion of poetic art and scholarly craft, was reprinted even in the mid-twentieth century.
Fig. 1.33 Severin Rüttgers. Photograph, date and photographer unknown. Published in Neue Bahnen: Zeitschrift der Reichsfachschaft IV
im NSLB Leipzig 48 (1937).
Fig. 1.34 Frontispiece of Wilhelm Hertz, trans., Spielmanns Buch: Novellen in Versen, aus dem zwölften und dreizehnten Jahrhundert
(Stuttgart: Gebrüder Kröner, 1886).
Fig. 1.35 Heinrich Morf. Photograph, date, and photographer unknown. Published in Heinrich Morf, Aus Dichtung und Sprache der Romanen: Vorträge und Skizzen (Berlin:
Vereinigung Wissenschaftlicher Verleger, 1922), frontispiece.
Most noteworthy is the way in which Hertz’s German of the poem was received in 1900, when the second edition was published. In that year, the Swiss Romance philologist Heinrich Morf (see Fig. 1.35) celebrated the anthology by delivering a public disquisition on “Stories of Jongleurs.” By way of accompaniment, modern minstrels performed four of the stories contained in the anthology of translations, including Our Lady’s Tumbler. In the lecture, Morf commences with an editorializing exordium, setting up a stark contradistinction between his own day and the medieval past. His predilection for the Middle Ages rests upon nostalgia for its allegedly pure and piety-propelled spirit. He contrasts the religion-directed and heroic chivalry of yore with the profit- or greed-driven and capitalist colonialism of his own day. Morf’s hostility to the overheated economy and rapacious empire-building of his times can be compared with the like reactions of his close contemporary Henry Adams in the United States. The American hurled similar abuse at gold bugs and imperialist adventurers among his countrymen in the fin de siècle of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century.
Shortly after Gaston Paris died, Ezra Pound began to achieve impact through fresh translations and adaptations of troubadour lyric. The nineteenth-century French philologist knew nothing of what would happen in American poetry after his death. In retrospect, his guarded comments about the limited promise of Old Occitan literature for inspiring and enriching its modern counterpart look like very poor and grudging prophecy. He was not predisposed to believe that medieval literature could contribute much to modernity through adaptations in literature, music, or art. If he meant his reservations and circumspection about the literature of the Middle Ages to apply even to Our Lady’s Tumbler, he was soon to be proven even further off the mark.
In a final irony, the acknowledgment by Anatole France of his indebtedness to Gaston Paris caused a muddle later. It led even to the sad misapprehension that Paris himself had been the first to edit or present to the modern world Our Lady’s Tumbler.
This was another misascription, akin to the one that made Gautier de Coinci wrongly the author of the original poem. Paris deserves credit not for editing Our Lady’s Tumbler, nor for even translating it, but for contributing to the philological enterprise of inventorying and salvaging by publishing the first edition in a scholarly journal he oversaw. Even more, he initiated the broad diffusion of the story by promoting it to a larger public. His case demonstrates handily that the history of scholarship belongs without equivocation within medievalism. By the same token, the constant reinterpretation intrinsic within medievalism can enhance medieval studies.
In the year of Gaston Paris’s death in 1903, his short history of Mediæval French Literature appeared in English. In it, he singled out The Tombeur of Notre Dame as a pious tale worthy of mention because of its “altogether mediæval character.” At the same time, he furnished a slightly different capsule summary of it from his previous one. With his mention of the Virgin and Our Lady in this short recap as our prompt, we would do well to turn from the tumbler to Mary herself or, most pertinently in a
French context, to Notre Dame. She occupied a uniquely privileged position in the days of Gaston Paris and of those who learned from him and elsewhere of Our Lady’s Tumbler. Through apparitions, she was present in France as she had not been since the Middle Ages. Thanks to the interplay of literature and architecture that has been a consistent calling card of Gothic revivals for centuries, her buildings held as much importance, especially in the city of Paris, as they had done since the medieval period.
We should talk next about Notre Dame.