The history of text editions goes back to the invention of print and the rise, from the 16th century onwards, of opera omnia editions of ancient authors (and modern ones, like Pontano and Dante). Textual scholarship was constantly fed by the need to expose forgeries, by the discovery of new MSS and the urge to establish the best textual basis for a printed edition. This skill was perfected in the fields of classical and biblical scholarship, in jurisprudence, as well as in the emerging historical specialism of diplomatics, following Mabillon and Lodovico Muratori. Muratori’s work in particular established new standards of source criticism, source editing and the collecting of scriptores veteres. In Muratori’s wake, many 18th-century antiquarians (Bodmer and Breitinger, La Curne de Sainte Palaye, Thomas Percy, Arni Magnusson) collected and/or printed medieval vernacular texts that were to prove an inspiration and challenge for the Romantics of the next generation.
Romantic-historicist interest with nationalist implications was launched, however, by a forgery: James Macpherson’s Ossian. Following his Fragments of ancient poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland of 1760 (gathered from dispersed oral and MSS sources, and speculatively translated with little historical knowledge and no philological-professional standards to go by), Macpherson pretended he could on that basis reconstitute the epics (Fingal and Temora, 1761-63) of a putative 4th-century, hitherto forgotten Caledonian bard, Ossian, the “Homer of the North”. While Macpherson’s claims as to this provenance were soon exploded, the Europe-wide Ossianic vogue of the 1760s and 1770s triggered a taste for vernacular (non-classical) ancient epic, and habituated Europe to the idea that each cultural community might look back to its own Homer, its own epic origin-text. In the next decades, editions of the Edda by Rasmus Nyerup, 1808) and of the Nibelungenlied (by Friedrich von der Hagen, 1807) fixed the idea of the “national epic”, at a time when many countries were resisting the great European standardization-system of the Napoleonic regime.
This historicist quest for the nation’s primeval roots coincided, ironically, with a drastic acceleration in Europe’s modernizing process: many ancient manuscripts were being rediscovered as a result of a major shake-up of the library system. Following the dissolution of the Jesuit libraries, monastic libraries were secularized in the Holy Roman Empire and in Revolutionary France, and “national” libraries emerged in capital cities on the basis of erstwhile royal libraries now opened to the public and enriched with former monastic holdings. It was in such libraries (in places like Paris, Napoleonic Rome, Vienna, Munich and Stuttgart), that important material, re-catalogued from erstwhile monastic holdings, came to light: versions of the Reynard the Fox fable and Chansons de geste in Paris; Lohengrin and many German chivalric romances, as well as a Galician-Portuguese cancioneiro, in the Vatican Library; etc. The discoveries also affected capitals further afield: Moscow (where the Russian Lay of Prince Igor was first printed in 1800), Copenhagen (where Thorkelin edited Beowulf in 1815; the Bodleian Library in Oxford (where the Chanson de Roland was discovered in 1836).
The sudden proliferation of ancient vernacular texts, often of a heroic or chivalric nature, which could be seen as the nation’s own foundational epic, created a sense that, much as each nation had its own language and literary tradition, so too it should have its own foundational epic. Many discoveries were canonized as such and gained huge cultural circulation. They were repeatedly edited, sometimes in diplomatic editions, sometimes in critical editions, sometimes in modern re-tellings or translations; they were recycled in other genres and provided inspiration to historians, painters, writers and composers (the Nibelungenlied spawning Wagner’s Ring cycle, the Lay of Prince Igor Borodin’s opera). In addition, various governments or semi-official bodies took it upon themselves to edit the corpus of medieval manuscripts that constituted, so it was felt, the nation’s literary and historical track record. These manuscripts could be literary, historical or jurisprudential. The paradigmatic enterprise was that of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, which from 1819 until the present day aimed to bring together all relevant documentation pertaining to the public affairs of the German tribes politically united by Charlemagne and, later, in the Holy Roman Empire. The edition of ancient laws was explicitly part of this enterprise, as laws and legal customs were considered (following the legal historicism of Savigny) to express the nation‘s moral outlook and values, and thus to be as faithful a manifestation of the nation’s “character” and identity (Volksgeist) as its language and literature. Conversely, legal and literary documents were studied also as sources and data for historical linguistics, exemplifying language usage at various periods, and as illustrations of ancestral life and manners.
The result of these nationally-motivated and often state-sponsored editing enterprises was a close cooperation between archivists, librarians and philologists/historians. Most leading historians or philologists to be appointed to professorial chairs had gained professional experience and standing as librarians or archivists; in many cases a university librarianship was a career step towards, or institutionally linked to, a professorship. In yet another irony, this wealth of professional opportunities created strong professional rivalries; philologists often jostled with each other for the honour of an editio princeps, and looked at each other’s work with great professional jealousy. In particular, there was a strong antagonism between, on the one hand, popularizers and bibliophiles (who often strove to provide their readers with the sensation of an old codex by using ancient letter-fonts and other retro-design features, sometimes to the point of facsimile reprints) and, on the other hand, textual technocrats (who austerely gave variants and complex critical apparatuses in a relentlessly uncompromising and bald page layout). These textual scholars were also divided between a tradition of diplomatic editing (which selected the best available MS as the master text and gave variant readings in relation to it) and a critical tendency (which on the basis of a stemmatological “family tree” of MS transmissions extrapolated a putative, ideal and primal Urtext from which all existing variants were seen as derivations). This last school had as its figurehead the imposing Karl Lachmann (1793–1851), who enjoyed the additional prestige of having originally earned laurels in classical and biblical philology before turning to medieval German literature. Famously, Lachmann tended to see texts like the Nibelungenlied as a conglomerate of different “lays” or rhapsodic strata. This idea of a pre-existing, fluid, oral-rhapsodic praxis underlying the epic text in its written fixity had already been applied to Homer (F.A. Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum, 1795, triggering the now-notorious “Homeric Question”), and chimed with the idea that the oldest epic texts in a literary tradition had no single, named author but were, like folktales, the collective creation of the nation as a whole. This attitude led men like the Grimm brothers to regard medieval texts by known individual authors (i.e. post-1200 chivalric romances) as being inferior to archaic, anonymous epic when it came to expressing the true Volksgeist.
While the interest in these ancient vernacular texts was intensely nationally motivated, the texts themselves dated from a pre-national period in European history. This frequently led to sharp conflicts between competing national appropriations. The Reynard the Fox fable, which can be traced back to the area around Gent and of which the oldest versions were in Latin and French, was claimed as Frankish (and hence, German) by Jacob Grimm on the basis of the Germanic name-forms of protagonists (Isengrim, Hersinde, etc.); this triggered a century of dispute between French and German claims to the seniority of, respectively, the Roman de Renart and Reinhart Fuchs, with the Flemish version (rediscovered in the 1830s) fanning the flames of this Germanic-Romance conflict. Methodologically, the conflict also involved a preference among French editors for a diplomatic approach, drawing on the best available MS. First stated by Paulin Paris and later linked with the name of Joseph Bédier, this approach was held by them to reflect a “French” penchant for deftness and clarity, as opposed to the complicated obfuscations and transcendental speculations of Lachmann’s critical and therefore “typically” German method.
French-German antagonism was not the only national rivalry. Beowulf, with a Nordic storyline but set on the Saxon-Danish coastline and Anglo-Saxon in its language, was a bone of contention between British, German and Danish claimants; Eddic and saga material was considered to “belong” to different Scandinavian countries. “National epics” were highly prized crown jewels in a nation’s sense of identity, and jealously vindicated against neighbouring claims.
For the same reason, the lack of a national epic provoked a palpable desire to meet the cultural-historicst demand by other means. In many cases this led to “editions” that were either manipulative or wholly fraudulent, and, indeed, reminiscent of the original sin of James Macpherson. The most notorious example is that of the Czech “Manuscripts of Dvůr Králové (Königinhof) and Zelená Hora (Grünberg)”, “discovered” in 1815 and 1817 and ultimately exposed as forgeries, though not after protracted conflicts.
In other cases, the absence of medieval MSS was made up for by using legendary episodes from mythical or pseudo-historical sources. The Czech use of the legend of Libuše, or the Irish use of the figures of Deirdre, Cú Chulainn and Finn McCool, are cases in point. In Finland, the mythical material was retrieved not from documented sources but from oral literature, resulting in Lönnrot’s “edition” of the Kalevala (1835), which was immediately recognized as the Finnish “National Epic” even though it was in reality a composite aggregation of folk songs on a cluster of legendary themes. Indeed, the retrieval of ancient textual sources could as easily turn to manuscript remains as to oral material (like the Croatian Hasanaginica, Vuk Karadžic’s Serbian “oral epic” or the fraudulent Bulgarian Veda Slovena). Folktale studies and textual philology thus show a considerable overlap, as befits the twin offspring of their common progenitor, Jacob Grimm.
An intermediary position between the oral and the high-literary register was addressed in editions of medieval or early-modern ballad collections: following the model of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of ancient English poetry (1760) or of the Iberian romancero or cancioneiro (e.g. Jacob Grimm’s Silva de romances viejos, 1815; Lopes de Moura’s Cancioneiro de Dom Dinis, 1847), such collections range from troubadour material (Fabre d’Olivet’s fraudulent Le troubadour, 1803; Milà i Fontanals, Romancerillo catalan, 1882) to Scottish, Irish or Flemish collections of textually transmitted ballads (Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish border, 1803; James Hardiman, Irish minstrelsy, 1832; Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Antwerpener Liederbuch vom Jahre 1544, 1855).
In some cases, modern writers used historical scenes, documented or imagined, to give literary treatment of what they considered formative-heroic moments in the nation’s history: for example, France Prešeren’s imagining of the end of paganism in Slovenia in his tragic poem Krst pri Savici (1836), or the Flemish, Polish and ancient-Germanic historical novels of Hendrik Conscience, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Felix Dahn. Such Romantic narratives on historical themes could take their place alongside the recyclings of genuine epics (like Wagner’s Ring cycle, Henri de Bornier’s 1875 drama La fille de Roland); having themselves become “national classics” for a late-19th-century Slovene, Flemish, Polish or German readership, they acted as modern-day proxies for the ancient epics whose absence they tried to obviate.
What is remarkable in this European quest for national epics is the fact that, while ostensibly they are deeply internalist, concerned with the inner rootedness of the nation in its own cultural ancestry, they in fact follow a pattern of transnational dissemination, carried by a tight network of scholars and literary fashions. The dissemination could proceed in various modalities: by positive inspiration (following shining examples from other countries), defensive assertion (contesting appropriations by other countries) or hostile/competitive imitation. The Société des anciens texts français, for example, was founded by Paulin Paris in 1875 on the inspirational model of the “Early English Texts Society” (1864); that society was itself founded to collect specimens for an English dictionary (the future Oxford English Dictionary), which project was in turn inspired by the Grimms’ projected German dictionary); and in the same gesture the French Société, in patent hostility to German philologists, invoked the French-patriotic duty not to leave the editing of French texts to Germans. Four years after the Franco-Prussian war, that patriotic duty was driven home by references to the Chanson de Roland, a role model for noble heroism-in-defeat and an undying love for douce France – qualities also brought out in Léon Gautier’s 1872 re-edition of the Chanson de Roland with a fervently nationalistic introduction (“Il a fallu la guerre de 1870 pour nous en donner l’intelligence et l’amour. Sedan a fait comprendre Roncevaux”). In a less fraught interaction, the example of the Finnish Kalevala spurred Estonian folk ballad collectors to arrange their oral-legendary material into a national Estonian epic in similar fashion, the Kalevipoeg (1857-61); that instance of positive inspiration in turn triggered, in a gesture of competitive imitation, the Latvian epic poem Lāčplēsis by Andrejs Pumpurs (1888), which may initially have been intended to be passed off as a genuine ancient text, but was in fact published as an original poetic creation – and which in any event has become the Latvian national epic.
Thus the realms of folklore, philological historicism and the Romantic literary imagination overlap around the textual scholarship of “national epics”. In all of these instances, they play into the function that Jacob Grimm ascribed to, specifically, the epic. Unlike the timelessness of the lyrical genre, and the dramatic genre which brought the past home to the reader’s present, the epic transported the contemporary reader back into the nation’s remote past, and in unmediated form placed the modern imagination in a direct connection with the nation’s literary origins and cultural foundations.
