Introduction

Manuscript, Editions, Translations

The lay of Guingamor is preserved only in MS S, f. 23r, col. 2 – 27v, col. 1; it is not found in the Strengleikar collection. It was first published by Gaston Paris in Romania (1879, pp. 51–59). The 1920s saw the appearance of editions by Peter Kusel (Guingamor: Ein Lai der Marie de France, 1922, reprinted three years later by Karl Warnke in an Appendix to his edition of the Lais of Marie de France) and by Erhard Lommatzsch (Le Lai de Guingamor; Le Lai de Tydorel (12. Jahrhundert), 1922, pp. 1–20). The latter half of the twentieth century produced further editions. Guingamor is one of the lays published by Erich von Richthofen in his Vier altfranzösiche Lais der Marie de France (Chievrefueil, Aüstic, Bisclavret, Guingamor) (1954, pp. 22–42), and Prudence M. O’H. Tobin included it in Les Lais anonymes des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (1976, pp. 127–55). Her text was reprinted in 1984 by Walter Pagani, with a facing Italian translation (pp. 44–83), and again in 1992 by Alexandre Micha, with a facing Modern French translation (pp. 64–103). Independently, Russell Weingartner edited the poem in 1985, along with Graelent and accompanied by an English translation. A partial edition (vv. 503–678) appears in Albert Henry's, Chrestomathie de la littérature en ancien français: I, textes (pp. 113–15). The poem has been translated, without the original, into Modern French by André Mary (1942, pp. 181–91), Danielle Régnier-Bohler (1979, pp. 47–62) and Nathalie Desgrugillers (2003, pp. 25–37). It has also been translated into English by Jessie Weston (1900, pp. 5–25) and Dell Skeels (1966, pp. 63–70), into German rhymed couplets by Wilhelm Hertz (1886, 5th ed. 1931, pp. 122–38) and into German prose by Erhard Lommatzsch (1947, pp. 167–72), into Dutch by Ludo Jongen and Paul Verhuyck (1985, pp. 77–83), into Spanish by Isabel de Riquer (1987, pp. 45–57) and into Japanese by Kuniko Denda in Lais bretons féeriques au Moyen Age (1998).

Author and Date

Beginning with Gaston Paris, the poem's first editor (1879), Guingamor was at one time considered by many to be by Marie de France, although the attribution was also soon contested on stylistic or linguistic grounds.