Canonicity, Popularity and the Relevance of Medieval Texts

MODERN INTEREST in medieval texts often depends on marketing strategies by publishers, academic reading lists, the work's canonical (or non-canonical) status and often also on a number of random circumstances that have nothing to do with aesthetic quality, narrative content, genre, themes or motifs. Popularity today either among scholars or among the broader reading public is no firm gauge by which to measure the value and meaningfulness of a medieval narrative, poem or treatise, either in the context of its own time or for modern heuristics. Further pursuing the reception history of the Charlemagne myth in the late Middle Ages, we come across the example of Malagis, a text virtually unknown today despite having been available in a solid and trust-worthy critical edition since 2000. This epic poem continues to slumber away in our libraries, still mostly undisturbed by scholars and general readers alike, often hidden from public view.

In North the epilogue, he comments: ‘Als ich university libraries, for instance, the German Malagis is often indiscriminately identified as part of the larger corpus of medieval French literature, probably because it was based indirectly on a French source, but even that is not so certain, while the Dutch tradition matters much more significantly with respect to the German epic poem. The narrator confirms at the beginning that he drew from a French epic poem: ‘Eyn hystorie uß dem welschen’ (57; A story from the French), but at the conclusion of his monumental work (23,004 verses), in the epilogue, he comments: ‘Als ich diß buch in flemsch fant’ (22995; as I found this book in Dutch). Though there are also other references to his allegedly ‘French’ source (22519), there is little doubt today that we have to accept the final note in the epilogue as the only correct one, as we can trace this German translation specifically to the Dutch tradition, which, in turn, importantly, was based on a French source. The German poet closely rendered the Dutch into his language, including the Dutch composer's references to his own French source, and those remarks then erroneously entered the German version.