Appendix - The Endings of Iwein
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2023
Summary
As Tony Hunt has pointed out, Chrétien's ‘conclusion of Yvain conspicuously fails to satisfy the expectations predicated of the genre. Love and chivalry are not depicted, in the final analysis, as mutually enriching.’ It was no doubt dissatisfaction with this ending, whether on the part of Hartmann himself, his audience, or a redactor, which led to the major alterations to the B redaction of Hartmann's Iwein, the expanded reconciliation scene and the marriage of Lunet. Later medieval scribes and redactors also imposed their personalities on the text of Iwein to a greater extent than is common in the copying of romances. The ending in the London Iwein manuscript, l, is an extraordinary example of the sixteenth-century reception of a thirteenth-century romance, the reader and creator of the new ending being Wiguleus Hundt zu Lautterbach, chancellor of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria and Rector of the University of Ingolstadt.
The ending in ms f derives almost line-by-line from the Willehalm von Orlens of the mid-thirteenth century author Rudolf von Ems. This takes the sense of closure even further than Iwein B, supplying the marriage of Iwein and Laudine with a dynastic succession. It also shows knowledge of the marriage of Lunet in the B redaction of Iwein.
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- German Romance III<i>Iwein</i> or <i>The Knight with the Lion</i>, pp. 391 - 402Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007