Introduction

Manuscripts, Editions, Translations

The lay of Tydorel is preserved only in MS S, f. 45v, col. 2 – 48v, col. 2. A translation into Norse of the first fifty-eight lines is found in the Strengleikar collection (MS N, p. 49; two leaves are then missing from the manuscript). First edited in Romania by Gaston Paris in 1879 (pp. 67–72), Tydorel was published by Erhard Lommatzsch in 1922 (pp. 23–36). No further edition appeared until the publication in 1976 of Prudence M. O’H. Tobin's Les Lais anonymes des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (pp. 213–24). Tobin's text was reprinted in 1984 by Walter Pagani with a facing Italian translation (pp. 128–55) and again in 1992 by Alexandre Micha with a facing Modern French translation (pp. 52–79). In 1886 a German verse translation was included by Wilhelm Hertz in his Spielmannsbuch (pp. 87– 97), and a German prose translation is found in Erhard Lommatzsch's Geschichten aus dem alten Frankreich (1947, pp. 181–91). The lay has also been translated into Modern French by Danielle Régnier-Bohler (1979, pp. 87–98) and Nathalie Desgrugillers (2003, pp. 53–60), into Dutch by Ludo Jongen and Paul Verhuyck (1985, pp. 29–34), into Spanish by Isabel de Riquer (1987, pp. 73–81) and into Japanese by Tadao Honda in Lais bretons féeriques au Moyen Age (1998). The Norse fragment was edited in 1850 by Rudolph Keyser and Carl Unger (pp. 48–49), and again in 1979 by Robert Cook and Mattias Tveitane with an English translation and a summary of the lost vv. 59–489 (pp. 136–41).

Date, Author

There are no precise indications which permit one to date Tydorel with certainty. It must predate the Strengleikar collection, which is of uncertain date (probably around 1230). There is a German tale by Wolfram von Eschenbach entitled Titurel, dated after 1217; Titurel is here a Grail king and the storyline has no link with Tydorel, but his name may be derived from the lay of Tydorel via the Erec of Hartmann von Aue.