For a Performer's Personal Use: The Corrector's Lines in the Lower Margin of the Middle Dutch Lanceloet Manuscript

GERALDINE HENG's SEMINAL study The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018) is thought-provoking in many ways, even in minute details. In the Acknowledgements she thanks many people, including ‘David Johnson and Geert Claassens [who] shared their important translation-in-progress of the Middle Dutch Roman van Moriaen’. And indeed, Heng's excellent analysis of the story of the adventures of a black knight from Moriane in King Arthur's realm has benefited greatly from this well-made modern translation, where the only alternative in print would have been Jessie Weston's outdated and often not quite precise translation, published in 1901. The new translation-in-the-making would bring the number of Middle Dutch romances translated by the Johnson-Claassens team up to eight. The three volumes containing the already published translations, dating from 1992 to 2003, were re-issued in paperback in 2012. The translations areof great value for anyone studying Middle Dutch Arthurian romances, both in the Netherlands and abroad, since they combine a fine critical edition of the original Dutch text with an excellent rendition into modern English. The publication of their Moriaen translation, hopefully in the near future, will no doubt also stimulate the study of this very interesting romance in international and Dutch Arthurian research.

They have already done so much, and yet the team's intention at the time was, and hopefully still is, to bring to the international research community translations of more, perhaps even all ten, texts in the Lancelot Compilation, the flagship of Middle Dutch Arthuriana. This intention may be read between the lines of the elaborate introduction to the compilation accompanying the translation of five romances in 2003, where the acknowledgements suggest that there may be ‘further volumes in the Middle Dutch Romances series’. The Moriaen translation is perhaps one of these volumes-to-be, and there are a few more parts of the compilation that still remain un-translated. The manuscript (The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, hs 129 A 10), dating from around 1320, contains a verse translation of the final third of the prose Lancelot, followed by the Perchevael romance and Moriaen, then another translation from the French vulgate Cycle, the Queeste van den Grale, followed by five more romances and, as closure, the translation of La mort le roi Artu, Arturs doet.