Introduction

Manuscript, Editions, Translations

The lay of Nabaret is preserved only in MS P, f. 12v, cols 1 – 2. A translation of the lay into Norse (MS N) is found in the thirteenth-century Strengleikar collection (pp. 81–82). Only forty-eight lines long, Nabaret is the shortest of the narrative lays. It was first edited in 1836 by Francisque Michel on pp. 90–91 of the ‘glossarial index’ to his edition of a poem he called simply Charlemagne, but which is now known as the Pèlerinage (or Voyage) de Charlemagne. Michel provided an edition of Nabaret in the context of his explanation of the term gernuns, which occurs in vv. 479 and 588 of his text and in v. 39 of Nabaret (‘E ses gernuns face trescher’). In 1855 Auguste Geffroy included an edition of Nabaret by Sir Frederick Madden in his Notices et extraits (pp. 13–14). In 1973 both the Old French lay and the Norse translation were edited by Povl Skårup in his article ‘Le Lai de Nabaret’. In 1976 the lay was edited by Prudence M. O’H. Tobin in Les Lais anonymes des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (pp. 362–64).

Tobin's edition of Nabaret was reprinted in 1984 by Walter Pagani with a facing Italian translation (pp. 302–05) and again in 1992 by Alexandre Micha with a facing Modern French translation (pp. 344–48). The lay has also been translated into Modern French by Danielle Régnier-Bohler (1979, pp. 175–76) and Nathalie Desgrugillers (2003, pp. 109–10), into Dutch by Ludo Jongen and Paul Verhuyck (1985, p. 87) and into Japanese by Ryôko Ito in Lais bretons féeriques au Moyen Age (1998). The Norse translation has been edited three times: in 1850 by Rudolph Keyser and Carl Unger (pp. 81–82), in 1973 by Povl Skårup, and in 1979 by Robert Cook and Mattias Tveitane (1979) who also provide a translation into English (pp. 248–51). Geffroy's translation of the Norse text into Modern French (pp. 14–15) is reproduced by Skårup (pp. 265, 267). Nabaret also appears, under the title Nobaret, in the Shrewsbury School manuscript published by G. E. Brereton.