Saturday, February 2, 2019

A Lost Arthurian Manuscript

So, when I saw the news that scholars had found seven manuscript fragments* giving a previously unknown variant of the Prose Merlin from the French Vulgate cycle, I thought of my friend the late Jim Pietrusz, collector of all things Arthurian, who had read a vast number of accounts of the various iterations of the Arthurian legends, and how he wd have loved to have read this story about Merlin's exploits.

I suspect there will be discussions of this material at this summer's Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, and at the great medievalist conference at Leeds as well; have to keep an eye out for an eventual translation/edition.

Here's the link.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jan/30/undiscovered-merlin-tale-fragments-found-in-bristol-archives


--John R.

*equalling, they said, about twenty pages in a modern paperback

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