Ambraser Heldenbuch


The Ambraser Heldenbuch is a 16th-century manuscript written in Early New High German, now held in the Austrian National Library . It contains a collection of 25 Middle High German courtly and heroic narratives along with some shorter works, all dating from the 12th and 13th centuries. For many of the texts it is the sole surviving source, which makes the manuscript highly significant for the history of German literature. The manuscript also attests to an enduring taste for the poetry of the MHG classical period among the upper classes.

History

The manuscript was commissioned by the Emperor Maximilian I and written by Hans Ried in Bolzano, who worked as a civil servant in Maximilian's government, over a period of years from 1504 to 1516. Apparently Ried deliberately prolonged the writing process, in order to continue receiving payment without having to return to his tax collecting job.
The Ambraser Heldenbuch was originally kept in the Chamber of Art and Curiosities at Ambras Castle, near Innsbruck, but in 1806, because of the uncertainty of the Napoleonic Wars, the Austrian Emperor Francis I had it moved to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. After the First World War it was transferred to the Vienna Hof-Bibliothek, which in 1920 became the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

Description

The texts are written on 238 folios of parchment — 476 pages, each 460 x 360 mm in size, each folio numbered with Roman numerals in the top right-hand corner of the recto page.
Before the texts are four folios containing a list of contents and a separate sheet with a full-page illustration on the verso page showing two armed men beneath the arms of Tirol. These five additional sheets were added after the texts were completed and have been numbered I*–V*. The table of contents provides cross-references to the folio numbers in the main body of the manuscript.
The works are set out as prose in a three-column layout, with a punctus to mark the end of a line of verse, or, in many cases, a colon marking the end of a rhyming couplet. Decorated initial letters mark the start of a work or chapter of a work. Lombardic capitals, alternating red and blue, indicate the start of a new strophe or section.
Many pages have illustrations on the outer and bottom margins. The right-hand margin of folio 215r shows a naked woman playing a fiddle beside a shield with the date 1517 and the initials VF, which are assumed to be those of the artist, variously identified as Ulrich Funk or Valentin/Veit Fiedler.

Contents

The works in the manuscript are grouped by genre: courtly narratives, heroic epics, and shorter narratives of a mainly didactic nature. The two final works, fragments of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Titurel and a German translation of the Latin Epistola presbiteri Johannis fall outside this scheme.
The list of works below follows the order in the manuscript, giving the modern titles.

Courtly narratives

Heroic epics

Dietrichs Flucht Rabenschlacht Nibelungenlied

Shorter narratives

Die böse Frau

Fragmentary texts

Language

Ambraser Heldenbuch's language is Early New High German. The work's orthography is Ried's own, although it bears the trace of the Bavarian dialect and . Thornton characterises Ried's language as "Tirolean written dialect of the age of Luther". It is consistent with the language of the Habsburg Imperial Chancery, though there are some idiosyncratic spellings.
In spite of the fact that Reid's texts must have come from a variety of sources, his orthography is relatively consistent between the individual works: variations between texts are minor, more likely reflecting gradual changes in his own orthography as the project progressed. This indicates that he must have made a conscious attempt to harmonise the spellings he found in his sources.

Editions

A complete transcription of the Ambraser Heldenbuch in XML markup is available from the University of Innsbruck's "Ambraser Heldenbuch: Transcription and Scientific Dataset" site. The texts have been published on Open Access by de Gruyter in a series of eleven volumes, each containing transcriptions and facsimiles of a group of works.
In many editions of the individual texts the language of the 16th century manuscript has been adapted into the idealised classical Middle High German of the 13th century, as established by 19th century editors.
Among the diplomatic editions of the texts are:
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