1 MS: C (171r) alssi comenson las cansos de marcabru (C Reg. marc e bru)

Analysis of the manuscript

The single MS is defective. Apart from lacunae in stanza I caused by the removal of an initial, material has been lost in transmission (see the note to lines 43–54), the scribe may have misunderstood one stanza (see the note to lines 19-24), there are clearly copying mistakes (see the notes to lines 19-24, 26, 28, 33 and 40), and lines 55-58 are recorded in the MS as a single stanza.

Versification

Frank, Repértoire, 864.6: nine coblas doblas with a7’ b7 c7 d7’ e7 f7’ in odd stanzas and b7 a7’ d7’ c7 E7’ e7 in even stanzas. However, the poem uses derived rhymes that link morphologically the ‘a’ and V, the V and ‘d!, and the V and T rhymes in each stanza and between stanzas, thus (see Billy, L’Architecture, p. 185):

Chambers (Introduction, p. 54) suggests the rhyme scheme may in fact be represented ‘ababcc’, but a more accurate representation (see the table above) is Vbab’cc” for odd and ‘ba’b’acV for even stanzas. The use of derived rhyme means the melody would need modifying for even stanzas, though this is not as big a problem as Chambers thinks (Introduction, p. 54); indeed if the tune was strongly rhythmical, as the term tresc/tresca suggests (see the note to lines 55–58), the modifications needed would be slight, affecting only the end of each line.

The patterning of rhymes indicates material has gone missing in transmission: stanza VII in the MS is followed by a stanza which apparently has the rhyme scheme of odd stanzas, though it is clearly corrupt as in the first line it has a rhyme in -ans and a rhyme-word that is not morphologically linked to the rhyme-word of the third line of the stanza. Whereas previous editors assume a complete stanza is missing and emend twice (our lines 46 and 51; lines 43 and 45 in Dejeanne and Paterson) to produce a rhyme-pair that makes the stanza conform to the rhyme scheme of odd stanzas, we assume that the corrupt stanza in the MS has been confected from two stanzas: see the text, ‘Rejected readings’ and the note to lines 43–54. The song concludes with a two-line tornada.