Establishing a text for
Erec is problematic. The main manuscript, the Ambraser Heldenbuch (MS A), has no text matching the first 80 lines of Chrétien's poem, and indeed starts in mid-sentence. In addition, the text of the Wolfenbüttel fragments (MS W) indicates that MS A has a gap of 78 lines later in the poem, while non-rhyming lines indicate several individual incomplete couplets. The MS was written some 330 years after the work was created and, even though the scribe, Hans Ried, seems to have based his text on a good source, its language shows many features which could not have been part of a 12th century version. Conversely, syntactical features that were common in MHG but would have been archaic in the 16th century have been more or less consistently modernised.
Der Mantel In MS A the text which corresponds to Chrétien's poem is preceded without a break by a separate (and incomplete) Arthurian episode, now called
Der Mantel ("The Cloak"), which involves a chastity test with a magic cloak. This episode is introduced in the manuscript by a single heading which treats
Der Mantel and
Erec as constituting a single work.
Der Mantel has its source not in Chrétien but in the Old French
fabliau Du manteau mautaillié. The link with
Erec is that, of all the ladies in the court, Enite comes closest to winning the contest. In the 19th century
Der Mantel was ascribed to
Heinrich von dem Türlin, whose
Diu Crône ("The Crown") was thought to contain a reference to a lost Lancelot romance of his which included this motif of the chastity-testing cloak. This attribution is now discounted and the work regarded as anonymous. The most recent editors of the Ambraser text make a case for accepting the manuscript compiler's view that
Der Mantel is part of
Erec, a preface, with the main story showing how Enite came to be deserving winner of the cloak. However, even if the dating of the German version is uncertain, the dating of the
Old French original to the last decade of the 12th century or later (i.e.
after the composition of
Erec) appears to disqualify the German adaptation as an original part of Hartmann's work. Nonetheless one specific change made to the French tale by the author of the
Der Mantel links it with
Erec: in the original the cloak is won by Briebriz, the wife of Caradoc, while the German author awards it to Enite, wife of Erec. Whether this change was undertaken specifically in order to make it a suitable preface to
Erec, or whether it was made independently and is the reason for two texts becoming associated, is impossible to determine, as is the likely date of their combination into the single work that Hans Ried used as a source.
The Central German Erec The "new" Wolfenbüttel fragments and the Zwettl fragments adhere much more closely to Chrétien's original than the text of
Erec represented in the other manuscripts (including the "old" Wolfenbüttel fragments). A number of characteristics set these most recently discovered fragments apart from the established text of
Erec: more accurate, sometimes word-for-word translation of the Old French, a much greater prevalence of French
loanwords in the German text (some not found elsewhere in MHG), and a number of triplet rhymes. For these reasons, the fragments are taken to provide evidence of a distinct German version of Chrétien's poem, called, on the basis of their dialect, the "Central German
Erec" (German:
Der mitteldeutsche "Erec"), or simply the "Second
Erec" With the "old" Wolfenbüttel fragments matching Hartmann's text and the "new" representing a different version, it is unclear why the scribe of this manuscript switched source in the middle of the text, and the relation between this version of
Erec and Hartmann's remains a matter of debate. ==Synopsis==