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Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde. Jaargang 112 (1996)

Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde. Jaargang 112

(1996)– [tijdschrift] Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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W.P. Gerritsen
Walewein goes international**

Abstract - Now that an English translation of the Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein has been provided by David F. Johnson, the editors of TNTL have invited three foreign Arthurian specialists, Norris J. Lacy, Felicity Riddy, and Walter Haug, to give their views on the Middie Dutch romance. Their articles have appeared in preceding issues of this periodical. The author of the present article discusses their contributions to the debate on the Middle Dutch romance. The article ends on a plea in favour of making Middle Dutch texts more accessible to foreign scholars.

I

The publication of David F. Johnson's 1992 edition-cum-translation of the Roman van Walewein has brought the most original of the Middle Dutch Arthurian romances under the attention of the international scholarly community.1 Although previously only small portions of the work had appeared in translation,2 the romance cannot be said to have been wholly unknown outside the Low Countries: a summary in French has been available since 1888 in Gaston Paris' Romans en vers du cycle de la Table Ronde (Histoire littéraire de la France, volume XXX).3 W.P. Ker's discovery of the identity of the plot of Walewein and the plots of Grimm's fairy tale ‘The Golden Bird’ and the folktale ‘Mac Iain Direach’ in Campbell's West Highland Tales was made widely known in his influential book Epic and Romance.4 Moreover, Bolte and Polívka discussed the romance in their authoritative Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- u. Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm.5 On the other hand, Sparnaay's cheeseparing comments in ALMA can hardly have inspired many non-Dutch scholars with a longing to get acquainted with the romance.6

In order to get an international discussion on Walewein going, the editors of TNTL invited three leading Arthurian scholars, specialists in the fields of, respectively, the German, the French and the English romances, to read the Middle Dutch work in Johnson's translation and to publish their views on the romance in the periodical. The German scholar Walter Haug opened the series with a study of Walewein ‘as a post-classical literary experiment’ (TNTL 111, 1995, p. 195-205); next came the American Romanist Norris J. Lacy with a discussion of ‘convention and innovation’ in the Middle Dutch romance (ibidem, p. 310-322); the series was closed by Felicity Riddy, an authority on Middle English literature, who contributed a comparative study on the exchange motif in Walewein and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (TNTL 112, 1996, p.

18-29). According to the original plan of the editors, the series was to have been rounded off by the comments of Jozef Janssens, a specialist of Middle Dutch Arthurian literature, who, however, had to recall his promise for health reasons. I gladly comply with the editors' request to act as a stand-in for my esteemed colleague from Brussels.

II

I should like to begin my remarks with a discussion of Norris Lacy's article. His opening sentence puts us immediately mediis in rebus: ‘Read against the extensive background of French romances, or perhaps even without that tradition, the thirteenth-century Middle Dutch Walewein is a surprising, fascinating, and sometimes perplexing creation.’ In fairness to Lacy, the reader should be reminded that the contributors to the series were explicitly left free by the editors not to take into consideration, if they so wished, the results of previous research on the romance, which has, for the most part, been published in Dutch.7 Therefore it seems plausible that Lacy, in writing the sentence just quoted, was not aware of the fact that the first words of his article are begging an important question. One of the central problems of research into the genesis, the cultural background, and the meaning of the romance is precisely to find out in how far the poets were familiar with, and were dependent on, the French romances.

Reading Walewein against the backdrop of the French tradition, Lacy views the Middle Dutch romance as the result of a transformation process. Penninc's Walewein, he assumes, is the product of a ‘fundamental redefinition of a hero widely known from other traditions’ (p. 311). In the French verse romances, Gauvain is often depicted ironically; he is a flawed hero: ‘indomitable, but frivolous’, recklessly brave and ambitious, but at the same time inconstant and prone to short-lived love-affairs. Walewein, on the other hand, has no negative qualities: he is as chivalrous and courteous as he is courageous, a man of high moral standards, a faithful lover and a pious christian. This is not to say that he is depicted as perfect. His fear of being ridiculed by the court, and especially by Kay, is a recurrent motif; in adverse situations he tends to loose his self-confidence and on several occasions we see him on the verge of despair. He is very human, and certainly no religious hero, as Lacy seems to suggest (p. 312-313).

Now the question is whether this positive image of the hero is to be viewed as a reaction to the ironically treated Gauvain of the French romances. An alternative would be to assume the existence of an indigenous tradition which presented Walewein as a flawless or nearly flawless character. There is, indeed, evidence in support of this hypothesis: with the possible exception of the Middle Dutch adaptation of the Queste del Saint Graal there are, as far as I am aware, no Middle Dutch texts in which Walewein is seen in the same ambiguous light as in the French verse romances. A stronger argument is provided by the plot of the romance itself. Viewed from the point of view of the French Gauvain tradition, Penninc's Walewein looks indeed like a very unusual, not to say highly improbable romance. At the very beginning of the romance King Arthur swears a solemn oath that whoever will bring him the marvellous chess set will receive, after his (Arthur's) death, his kingdom and his

crown. The laws of the genre require that a romance in which the hero is successful in his quest should end by his obtaining the promised boon. A French Gauvain romance that would have Gauvain successfully establishing his position as heir to Arthur's throne is hard to imagine. The same goes for Walewein's love for Ysabele, which is certainly not one of the usual one-night stands characteristic for the French tradition, but a very serious relationship that by the inner logic of the story must lead up to marriage. (Why else would Vostaert have King Amoraen, who was to receive Ysabele in return for the Sword with the Two Rings, die so conveniently before Walewein returns to deliver the goods?) The conclusion seems inescapable: the romance Penninc set up was, at least as far as its main plot was concerned, of a type altogether different from that of the Old French Gauvain romances.

Where did Penninc get this story? In the prologue he announces his work in the following way (I translate lines 1-7 as literally as I can): ‘About King Arthur many adventures remain that have never been written down. Now I have begun a beautiful one - if I could find it in French I would translate it into Dutch - it is an extremely beautiful one.’ The parenthetic clause is revealing: I take it that Penninc wants to inform his audience that he would have preferred to have found a French version which he then could have translated into Dutch, instead of having no other choice than to put an oral story into writing. Penninc's main point is unambiguous: he is going to put down in writing a story which until then did not exist in written form. According to Maartje Draak's generally accepted thesis Penninc's source was a fairy tale, and it was he who transformed this fairy tale into an Arthurian romance. I for my part prefer a modified version of Draak's thesis: Penninc's oral source was, I have reason to think, a tale about King Arthur and Walewein, which in its turn was based upon a fairy tale of the type of Grimm's ‘Golden Bird’.8

The oral origin of the main plot (the three interlocking quests) does not detract from the fact that Penninc as well as Vostaert also used written sources. For brevity's sake I shall only mention a few obvious instances. The episode in which Walewein lends his horse Gringolet to a squire in order to enable the latter to take part in a tournament has in all probability been borrowed from one of Lancelot's youthful adventures as described in the Prose Lancelot. In Vostaert's part of the romance, a black knight kidnaps Ysabele while Walewein is taking a nap. Roges, the fox, awakes the hero; Walewein catches up with the abductor; a fight ensues, in which Walewein defeats the black knight, who then, surprisingly, turns out to be Lancelots's brother Estor. As far as we know the Prose Lancelot is the earliest text in which a brother of Lancelot called Estor (Hestor) occurs. Furthermore, it seems certain that both poets have made use of Gerbert's Continuation Perceval. Although Penninc's and Vostaert's intentions in making use of French written sources are still a matter of much discussion, the general picture is not one of a redefinition of the hero (as Lacy suggests), but rather that of a vindication of a traditional, indigenous picture of Walewein, brought up to date by a series of borrowings from French romances.9

A second point on which Lacy's arguments invite discussion is his treatment of the rôle of the narrator. In his view, the narrator ‘will regularly alert us to impending catastrophes, but unlike Chrétien, he will regularly be wrong.’ The false alarms

‘function by antiphrasis: once we learn that the narrator's intent and the conventions of this text ensure success for the hero, the expressions of alarm constitute ironic reassurance that all will be well and that Walewein will extricate himself from danger with little difficulty’ (p. 314). In reading Walewein, Lacy was struck by the narrator's unreliability: ‘the information [as provided by the narrator] that a problem appears to have no solution is consistently followed by a remarkably, sometimes ludicrously, simple one’ (p. 315). As an instance he refers to Walewein's salto mortale from the plateau above the river after his killing of the dragons. ‘Preferring death to despair [Lacy writes], he has his horse jump into the water (l. 709). His fears prove entirely unfounded, and he and the horse easily make their way to the shore’ (p. 315). Do they indeed? Not, as far as I can see, according to Penninc, who gives us a thrilling account (lines 710-737) of Gringolet's diving in and swimming across the river. The noble horse would certainly have drowned if it had not been able to pause in midstream on an island, and once it reaches the opposite bank it is left for dead and Walewein has to rub it for a long time with a tuft of grass until it is fit again to continue the journey.

Neither is Lacy's second example, Walewein's crossing the tidal shallows in front of Ravenstene castle (lines 2886-2942), very convincing. Looking for a way to reach the castle, which is situated on a rock surrounded by the sea, Walewein notices a track of horses' hoofs in the sand pointing in the direction of the castle. He concludes that the strait can be crossed at low tide, and decides to venture into the water. Making his way towards the castle he is nearly overtaken by the incoming tide. Only just in time he reaches the island, where he is trapped between the waves dashing against the shore and a precipitous rock hiding the castle from view. Hard pressed, Walewein invokes God, wondering why he has come this way and what disaster is in store for him. As if God has heard his lament, he presently discovers a path leading up to the castle. Surprisingly, Lacy reads this dramatic account in an entirely different way, which may be due in part to Johnson's rather unimaginative translation of the passage. According to Lacy, Walewein ‘succeeds with almost comical ease’ in reaching Ravestene: ‘his horse simply walks across at low tide’ (p. 315).

Is the narrator ‘unreliable’, as Lacy believes him to be? In his view, ‘the narrator's dire warnings become nothing more than a prediction of success that further illustrates the hero's superiority. Ironically, by proving himself consistently wrong in such cases, the unreliable narrator becomes a reliable shaper of our expectations’ (p. 314). As far as I can see, the narrator nowhere predicts that Walewein will fail to achieve an adventure or will have to pay for it with his life. He generally prepares the audience for the danger in the offing by assuring them that Walewein will have a hard time to overcome it, but his warnings never prove unfounded. A remark like the one found in lines 524-26: ‘Neither before then nor since / did Walewein find himself in such dire need. / Now for the first time he expected to die’ (Johnson's translation), is a stock example of the way in which the narrator manipulates the reactions of the audience. Far from being unreliable, the narrator's comments often serve to articulate the intended emotional reactions of the audience. An analysis of the narrator's rôle reveals that in regulating the suspense he is continuously concerned with retaining the attention of the audience. On several occasions he explicitly

dissociates himself from the hero's decisions. I refer for instance to Walewein's resolution to wade or swim across the river which he cannot cross by the sword bridge: the narrator comments in an aside that he would like to advise Walewein to renounce his decision and that he would be wise to abandon his plan (lines 4974-75).10 I do not doubt that a thorough analysis of the entire romance would reveal that the narrator is a more complicated character than Lacy's observations suggest. In such an analysis, by the way, it would never do to neglect the differences between Penninc's conception of the narrator's rôle and that of Vostaert.

In spite of these criticisms, Lacy's article is to be welcomed as a valuable contribution to the debate on Walewein. The stress he puts on the romance's intertextual links with French Arthurian works will help us to determine its position at the crossroads of written and oral traditions. Moreover, his observations give us us a fresh awareness of the presence, in the fabric of the story, of the narrator, whom he describes as an ‘unusually intrusive consciousness that colludes with the hero to lead him and us through a maze of adventures’ (p. 311).

III

For Felicity Riddy, getting to know Walewein was - in her own word - a revelation. As an Anglicist she was thoroughly acquainted with the Middle English Gawain tradition which ‘exalts Gawain, against the French tradition, as a model of courtliness’ (p. 19). Now here was a Middle Dutch romance, ‘probably a century or so earlier than any of the surviving English Gawain romances’, and more sophisticated than all of them (with the exception of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), which testifies to the same positive attitude towards the hero. Struck by certain similarities between SGGK (to adopt the usual abbreviation of the Middle English poem's title) and Walewein, she even wonders whether the Middle English poet could have known the Middle Dutch romance. The fact that SGGK is written ‘in the dialect of the north-west Midlands’ does not stand in the way of this hypothesis, since the aristocracy among whom the patronage of the romance has been sought ‘moved back and forth between the royal court in the south-east and their own estates’ (p. 19). While SGGK, as has been argued by Jill Mann, seems to have been composed for an audience ‘familiar with mercantile discourses as well as courtly ones’, the patronage behind Flemish romances like Walewein has been sought by Besamusca ‘at one of the points at which lesser nobility and urban patriciates come together’. Is this enough to envisage the possibility of a direct link between the two romances? In the case of Walewein the text, to my knowledge, does not yield any indications pointing to an urban background, let alone to a mercantile interest.

Professor Riddy is intrigued by what she calls ‘some striking similarities’ between the two poems. One of these is that, when the adventure presents itself at Arthur's court and at first none of the knights seems willing to take it up, Arthur himself declares he will answer the challenge, whereupon Gawain / Walewein volunteers to go in his stead. The similarity is undeniable, but is it specific enough to suggest more than a generic relationship between the two texts? In SGGK it is the green knight

who challenges Arthur's knights; when none of them responds, the King feels compelled to take up the challenge in order to prevent his court from being put to shame. In Walewein the challenge comes about in a very different way: when the magic chess set has flown into the hall and settled itself on the floor, only to dissappear presently through the window, King Arthur, overcome by an overwhelming desire to possess the precious object, promises all his lands and his crown after his death to the knight who will capture it and deliver it to him. When nobody offers himself, Arthur declares that in that case he will pursue it himself. Hearing this, Walewein feels ashamed, and offers to ride after the chess set, having first - with less than courtly insistence - got Arthur to confirm his promise. The two stories are so different that it is difficult to assume that the Middle Dutch romance would have provided the inspiration for the Gawain poet.

In both romances - this is the second item in Riddy's list of similarities - the hero ‘is received in the courtly household of an otherwordly shapeshifter’ (p. 20). Bertilak, the Green Knight's alter ego, may certainly be called thus, and King Wonder in Walewein is said to be able to turn himself into any animal, fish or bird (lines 784-89). But this quality is only briefly mentioned and plays no rôle at all in the romance. It is true that Wonder's presence is required for the undoing of the spell cast on Roges (who, in the best of fairy-tale traditions, is bewitched into a fox by a malicious stepmother), but he takes no active part in bringing about the metamorphosis from fox into prince. Here again the resemblance of the two romances with their different types of magic cannot, in my view, be used as an argument in favour of a direct relationship.

The same must be said of Riddy's other examples: the exaltation, in both works, of an aristocratic lifestyle with elaborate rituals of hospitality, the common motif of Walewein's / Gawain's being known by reputation to the other characters, and the shared interest in the boundaries between animals and humans. Professor Riddy admits that ‘these similarities can probably be explained by reference to the poem's [lege: poems'? W.P.G.] common sources in French romance’, but she ‘can see no reason why we should not entertain the possibility, at least, that a Middle Dutch romance circulating in Flanders might also have been an intermediary between twelfth and thirteenth-century French romance and fourteenth-century England’ (p. 21). I venture to point to still another possibility, as yet equally unprovable: it seems to me that the poets were not only familiar with the French written tradition of their time, but also drew from a pool of older, wide-spread and more ‘fairy-tale-like’ oral traditions concerning Walewein / Gawain and Arthurian lore in general. Judging from her endnote 30 on page 29 I take it that Professor Riddy would be willing to concede this point.

It is perhaps more rewarding, however, to compare the two romances on a more abstract level, that of the central principle of exchange. It is on this idea that Riddy focusses the second part of her article. Walewein can be read as a chain of exchanges; the whole poem, in Riddy's words, ‘continually represents relations between people as established and identified by networks of giving and receiving that symbolize status, power, reciprocity and obligation’ (p. 22). In SGGK the principle of exchange is operative in the two main plot elements: the Beheading Game, an exchange of

blows, on the one hand, and the Exchange of Winnings Game on the other. In both poems the objects of exchange are ‘mobile and not static’, although in different ways. In both poems, she observes, the narrative ends where it began, at Arthur's court, to which she adds the following remark: ‘indeed it could be said of them both that the circulation of gifts is made explicit and literal in the circularity of their plots’ (p. 22).

The similarity of the poems on this level also reveals crucial differences. The closeknit exchanges in SGGK involve only two persons, whereas those in Walewein, involving a series of participants, are open and dynamic, ‘they move forward, driving the hero from one scenario of desire to another’, ‘crossing the boundaries between the known and the unknown’ (p. 24). Riddy links this up with a peculiar optimism that distinguishes Walewein from its Middle English counterpart, whose poet had a ‘more pessimistic sense of the inexorable pressure of time and the ruin it brings’ (p. 25).

She ventures even further afield by applying the idea of exchange metaphorically on the social background of the two poems. Both are, she suggests, ‘products of cultural exchange, of negotiations between competing elements in thirteenth and fourteenth-century Flemish and English societies, both aristocratic and non-aristocratic’ (p. 25). With the phrase ‘competing elements’ she refers (if I understand her correctly) to the fact that the aristocratic life-style, and courtly culture in general, was in many ways dependent on the services and artifacts of non-aristocratic people. She clarifies this opinion in her endnote 26, where she writes: ‘My argument is that aristocratic life-styles are inseparable from the skills of the artificers who create them; that is, that in some sense the bourgeois is always an element in the aristocratic lifestyle’. This may be so (although I fail to see why the elements should be seen as being in competition), but could not the same be said with reference to, e.g., ecclesiastical, and even monastic, life-styles? And in how far would Walewein and SGGK be exceptional in showing this mixture of aristocratic and ‘bourgeois’ elements? Could not indeed the same be said of the majority of medieval literary works?

Although I find it difficult to follow Riddy in her concluding socio-symbolic excursion, I am convinced that her thematic approach, whether centered on the principle of exchange or on other aspects, is a fruitful and promising one. She is probably right in observing that ‘Both the Gawain-poet and the authors of Walewein are [...] engaged in the same project of creating a courtly literature of lower status than French’ (p. 21). A comparison of the two romances, focussing on their use of traditional elements, their narrative technique, and their symbolic meaning, opens fascinating perpectives. (To indicate but one of the many possible issues: comparing the opening scenes of both poems, the shortness and even relative bareness of Penninc's account of the events are striking - how is this to be explained?). It is certainly to be hoped that Riddy's study will give rise to other explorations of the interface between Middle English and Middle Dutch literature.

IV

Looking at the romance from a structuralist point of view, Walter Haug views Walewein as a literary experiment in the wake of the epochmaking works of Chrétien

de Troyes and the great German Arthurian poets. The post-classical character of the romance reveals itself in the absence of a psychological crisis which the hero of the classical romances after the model instituted by Chrétien has to pass through. The hero of post-classical romance undergoes no inner crisis, but (to quote the abstract at the top of Haug's article) ‘perseveres unchanged through a series of knightly adventures’. The adventures he finds on his way may constitute a mere additive chain of unconnected events, but may also be connected or even interwoven, as is the case in the various continuations of Chrétien's Perceval and particularly in the Prose Lancelot. The literary experiment mentioned in the title of Haug's article refers to the daring combination of two structural techniques indicated by the German terms ‘Verzahnung’ and ‘Verkettung’ (p. 201). The first term, which may be rendered approximately by ‘dovetailing’, relates to the graduated construction of the main plot with its three interlocking quests; the second, meaning ‘linking’ or ‘forming a chain’, concerns the additional episodes which have been inserted between the segments of the main plot and are connected to each other.

With characteristic decisiveness, Haug comes to the point. An outline of the plot presents a clear picture of the segments of the main action alternating with the additional episodes. This shows that the regular alternation is maintained up to and including the episode of Walewein's return to King Amoraen (whom Vostaert calls Amorijs), but then breaks down: episodes 6 and 6a seem to belong to the series of additional adventures, and an additional episode seems to be lacking between episodes 7 and 8. Haug's solution to this problem (an old acquaintance of Dutch Arthurian scholars) is new, ingenious and enticing. He begins by explaining that Penninc, wanting to write a Walewein romance, had - given Walewein's reputation as the embodiment of ideal courtly chivalry - no other choice than to opt for the post-classical type of romance with a hero unchallenged by an inner crisis. Next, he assumes, in keeping with the prevailing view, that Penninc adapted a fairy tale of the Aarne / Thompson 550 type which provided the outline of the main plot. The hero of this fairy tale, however, repeatedly fails to obey the instructions of the clever fox. Wishing Walewein to be blameless, Penninc had to discard all elements connected with the failings of the hero. The result of this was that the episodes at the courts of King Wonder and King Amoraen turned out to be rather uneventful. The poet made up for this lack of drama in two ways: by adding marvellous, fantastic and even demonic elements, and by inserting chivalrous adventures, Arthurian show-pieces, derived from contemporary French literature.

The adapting poet had no use for the fairy-tale episode of the treacherous brothers of the hero conspiring to drown him in a well. Therefore, Haug assumes, this episode was transformed into the scene of the black knight who kidnaps Ysabele while Walewein lies sleeping near a fountain (i.e. nr. 6 in the outline). He hesitates, however, in assigning the episode to the main plot, ‘since the contemporary audience can hardly have been in a position to recognize the relationship with the source’ (p. 201, my translation). There seems to be, as Haug concedes, even more reason for doubt when one realizes that the black knight will turn out to be Hestor, a character which the contemporary audience can only have associated with the Prose Lancelot. This brings to light what must be called a weak point, or at least a severe limitation,

of Haug's structuralist approach to the romance. Was the intended audience supposed to be aware of the artful ‘mixed’ construction of the romance, that is of the regular alternation of episodes of fairy-tale origin and episodes of other (c.q. Arthurian) provenance? And is there any way of discovering this?

Analogous questions may be asked about the intertextual connections between the Middle Dutch romance and the Tristan tradition. For the sake of briefness, I restrict myself to the first case which Haug discusses. The scene of the discovery of the lovers in King Assentijn's dungeon presents several similarities with the famous farewell episode in Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan. But there are also, as always, pertinent differences: Isolde and Tristan are discovered in the act of adultery by King Marke, her husband; Ysabele and Walewein are discovered in each other's arms by her father; their love is not aldulterous. Tristan flies; Walewein stays where he is.

Now as to my doubting questions. Did the Middle Dutch poet know Gottfried's version of the farewell scene? As far as I can see there are no indications of this Middle High German version having being known around 1250 in the Low Countries. A direct or indirect acquaintance with Thomas' Old French version (the original of Gottfried's work) is perhaps more plausible. Now part of the farewell scene is extant in the 52 lines of the Cambridge fragment of Thomas' poem, and it presents some conspicuous differences with Gottfried's much more elaborate and sophisticated adaptation. In Thomas' version the king and his dwarf do not catch the lovers in the act, but find them sleeping (Mès, merci Deu, bien i demorerent Quant aus endormis les troverent.11) And Tristan justifies his flight by arguing that when he disappears Iseut will have nothing to fear, since there will be no proof (Vos n'avét garde de vie, Car ne porez estre provée...12). If Thomas' version (or a Middle Dutch derivative of it) is postulated as the point of departure, an intertextual allusion in Walewein must have been much less obvious for the audience. That the meaning of the allusion would have been, as Haug presumes, to present Walewein's love as more perfect than that of Tristan, is for the time being not much more than a attractive but speculative hypothesis. In order to prove it, or even to underpin it with evidence, we would have to know much more about the intended audience, about its familiarity with the international narrative literature of the time, and about the way this audience experienced romances and their heroes.

But even if Haug's arguments perhaps sometimes tend to be a little bit ‘überspitzt’, his masterly command of a wide field of medieval literature and his combinatorial ingenuity never fail to impress and enthral the reader of his work. It is an exquisite pleasure to see what a scholar of his calibre can do with a text like our Middle Dutch Walewein.

V

My conclusion can be a very short one. The three Arthurian scholars who gave their verdict on Walewein agree in their admiration for the romance. It is fascinating to see what attracts them to it, and also which aspects they leave outside of consideration (the intriguing question of Vostaert's information on how to finish Penninc's

work, for instance). All three articles contain methodological suggestions that Dutch and Flemish Arthurian scholars would be wise to follow. All three articles formulate, or imply, problems that should be addressed in the first instance by Netherlandists, given their greater familiarity with Middle Dutch. If, on the other hand, we Netherlandists want Walewein to become an internationally well-known text, part and parcel of the Arthurian canon, much will still have to be done in order to provide our foreign colleagues with the tools to study the text in the original. Any serious work on the text, with its innuendos and subtle shades of meaning (but its occasional clumsiness, too) will require at least a reliable working knowledge of Middle Dutch. An English grammar of Middle Dutch and a Middle Dutch-English dictionary will be indispensable, as well as fully annotated editions of easy texts for learners. David Johnson's helpful translation and the three stimulating articles discussed above are the first steps on a long way.

 

Address of the author: University of Utrecht, Vakgroep Nederlands, Trans 10, 3512 jk Utrecht, The Netherlands.



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