ninth century, partly augmented and interpolated in the twelfth, but neither Grimm nor Raynouard will admit this opinion, considering the whole as a work of the twelfth century. I shall not decide this point*; neither shall I examine the question whether the narration of Reynard's adventures be or be not built upon a historical foundation. The matter seems to me still somewhat obscure, although before reading the judiciously urged objections of Grimm, I was not disinclined to coincide with the ideas of Eccard, Mone, Etmüller, and Saint-Marc Girardin. Whether Reinaert be or be not held the representative of the Lotharingian Earl Reginarius, and Isengrim of Zwentebold, king of Austrasia, the Netherland origin of our fable no longer depends upon this historical conjecture, but rests upon other, better-assured foundations. Leave we this point undisturbed, and pass to that which requires notice in the Flemish Reinaert. "It is very likely that the fable of the Fox and the Wolf might be current here, even before the ninth century, in the form of a legend or of a popular song; but the poem, in the form in which we are here considering it, appears to have been first written in the second moiety of the twelfth century, probably about the year 1170, save and except that in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, some alterations, of which we shall speak hereafter, were made in it. All circumstances concur to fix this epoch. And thus should Reinaert be the oldest known poem in our mother tongue, of which the Netherlanders may boast. "This hypothesis will perhaps appear unfounded to many persons, because no one has hitherto dared to think of a written Flemish language in the twelfth century, and Maerlant is generally esteemed, in the strictest acceptation of the words, the father of German † poets altogether. “But let my arguments be heard, ere judgment be pronounced. "It will not be unsuitable to observe, preliminarily, that, according to my views, most Netherland poems of the middle ages are usually assigned to times far later than those to which they actually appertain. Thus, with the single exception of Maerlant, the contents of all MSS. of the fourteenth century have been deemed the production of that age, or, at the earliest, of the last moiety of the thirteenth century. Were this so, the French romances composed about or before the year 1150, would not have been translated for a couple of hundred years! and Flanders, one of the most We might here very satisfactorily shame the diffident Heer Willems, and actually overwhelm the reader with antiquarian lore and critical reasoning; with the titles of all the various versions, editions, and even known MSS. of our poem, including a recent discovery at Cambridge, nay, of contemporaneous Latin poems, lately discovered by Grimm, as the Ecbasis, &c., and with the profound disquisitions of yet more foreign, philosophical archæologists than have been incidentally named in our comments, extracts, or the title-page of one of the volumes under review. But actually to settle this question, nay, even to state and compare all the different speculations and their grounds, of all these learned diligent inquirers, would require a treatise,-not an article in a review; wherefore we shall content ourselves with awakening the attention of the British public to this curious subject, and recommending it to the investigation of our own antiquarian scholars. Meaning, we presume, Low-German, although we are not aware that the obsolete Flemish word Dietsce was other than the old form of the modern Duitsch, i. e. German. flourishing countries in Europe, under her Earls Dirk (Dietrich or Theodoric), and Philip of Alsace, at whose court the poetry of the Trouvères may be said to have been reared, this populous Flanders would not have had a single poet in her mother tongue to show previous to 1250! But that ours was earlier a written language, is apparent from a registration of the year 1130, published by Mone." As the reader may like to know something more of the hypothesis, merely alluded to by Willems, which makes our epic fable a satire of the ninth century upon royalty and aristocracy, we extract a passage upon the subject from M. Delepierre's volume, (the third in our list). He tells us that one of the French commentators upon the French versions, or the Romans du Renard, M. St. Marc Girardin, "Has developed this thesis at great length in the pages of the Journal des Débats, when reviewing the Roman du Renard, published from the King's MSS., by M. Méon. Here is the fact upon which this hypothesis is built. In the year 898 Arnold, King of Germany, and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, gave Lorraine (Lotharingen) to his illegitimate son Zwentebold, whose chief counsellor and friend was Regnier, one of the greatest Lotharingian nobles. The chronicles call this personage Reginarius, Recochardus, and Reinecke, according to the German abbreviation. He was a prudent and crafty nobleman. After having long been the friend of Zwentebold, he lost his favour. Expelled from Lorraine he took refuge in his castle of Durfos. Twice did the incensed Zwentebold besiege him there, and twice in vain, thanks to the prudence of Regnier. This struggle is supposed to have struck the popular imagination, which compared Regnier to the fox, and, by the association of ideas, Zwentebold to the wolf." This is certainly possible, though we cannot readily suppose any poetic vassal in those days to have quite ventured upon depicting his liege lord and sovereign under the contemptible character of the ever-duped wolf. We shall, however, gladly follow Heer Willems's example in leaving the question undisturbed, especially as even the brief abstract we propose giving of the poem will enable the reader to form his own judgment respecting this historic theory. We return to Willems's Introduction. The investigation of the evidence as to the date of the Reinaert, gives occasion to the discussion of a question mooted by some of these commentators and by historians; to wit, whether the names by which two Flemish factions were distinguished in the very beginning of the thirteenth VOL. X.-No, XX. 2 E century, when the popular party were called Blaeuwvoeters, and the court party Isengrimmers, were taken from the family names of their respective leaders, or from the animal heroes of our poem? Without entering at any length into this inquiry, we may say that, according to the result of Heer Willems's diligent researches, no names affording such derivative appellations are to be found amongst those of the Netherland nobility or of the leading demagogues, whilst some explanation of the singular name of Blaeuwvoeter's anglicè blue feet, which is not known to have been ever borne by the fox in the Low Countries, is supplied by his name of blufot in the Swedish and Danish languages. If this argument be admitted as conclusive, the fact is curious, as illustrating both the extensive popularity of the poem so far back as the year 1201, and the early prevalence of the Netherland practice of giving whimsical emblematic names to their factions. Of this we subjoin an instance or two about a century later: when Philip the Fair of France was struggling to subjugate Flanders, and convert it into an apanage for the princes of his blood, his Flemish partisans were called Leliaerts, from the lily in the arms of France, whilst the adherents of the native princes designated themselves, more fantastically, Claueverts, as we conceive, from a claw of the lion, the bearing of Flanders. Holland supplies a more ludicrous example of this custom, in the denominations (appropriate enough to a country of fishermen, which it then was) of Kabbeljaauws en Hoeks (codfish and hooks) taken respectively by the partisans of a countess regnant and her rebellious son, to intimate, according to the Dutch historian van Kampen's explanation, that the first would swallow up their opponents as the codfish devours the small fry of the ocean, and that the second knew how to catch the former. The age of the MSS. extant affords, as has been already stated by Willems, no data for that of the poem itself, the oldest of these, the Comburg MS., now in the Stuttgart library, not being esteemed of higher antiquity than the beginning of the fourteenth century. The only point worth noticing upon this part of the subject is the history of the MS. purchased at the sale of Heber's library, and called the Dutch Manuscript. It is the one edited by Willems, as cor rected and completed from the Comburg MS., that which he has modernized. "The Dutch copy, purchased last February for the Burgundian Library of Brussels, must have been written in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. This MS. is on parchment, and consists of 120 leaves, or 240 pages of 34 lines each. It is illustrated with five vignettes or miniatures, of no great beauty*; and on many pages are vacant places for the reception of more paintings. At the end is an enigmatical piece of sixteen lines, in which the copyist gives his name to be guessed at. Heer Groebe, sub-librarian of the Netherland Institution, who, in 1825, copied this MS., and gave the first information concerning it in the Kunst-en-Letterbode (Messenger of the Arts, and of Flemish Literature), of June 23, 1826, is as incapable as myself of reading the riddle of this signature. What is known of the earlier possessors of the MS. is this. From a memorandum upon one of the outside leaves (which, from the handwriting, I assign to the year 1500, or thereabouts), the book must have once belonged to a certain Margriet, daughter of Jan Beyers, and afterwards to Maria van Ham, daughter of Haendryck van Byler. In 1825 it was in the library of the Heer Rendorp van Marquette, of Amsterdam; and was there to be publicly sold under the superintendence of the bookseller, Den Hengst. But an Englishman bought up the whole of this copious library; and two years afterwards William Heber acquired this volume by purchase at a public auction in London." Willems elsewhere says: "Of this MS. we learned that a beautiful copy on parchment of the whole poem was to be sold in the library left by the celebrated book-collector William Heber. At the recommendation of Serrure and myself, government gave orders for its purchase, and we soon afterwards rejoiced in seeing it in the Burgundian Library. “ Since the month of May, when I was commanded [by the king] to prepare an edition of this MS., I have zealously employed myself upon it, *** the contents show a much later fashioning and development than those of the Comburg MS. I found the copy very defective, and certainly not answerable to the enormously high price given for it. Such monuments of national fame cannot, however, be too dearly purchased." With respect to the old poet, Willem, who announces himself in the opening of the poem, as the maker (author) of Madok, and the completer of the adventures of Reynard the Fox, his modern editor, Willems, says : "I have elsewhere shown, I think satisfactorily, that the oldest Flemish Reinaert (I mean the first 3394 lines, which make an indivisible whole, bearing, as Grimm says, a completely Flemish colour), was not written by These vignettes adorn the volume upon our table. Willem. What he thought not right written in the old poem, he improved and filled out; but what he thought left imperfect at the conclusion, in order to make known the whole life and adventures of Reinaert, he supplied from Walsche (Walloon) that is to say French books. "The Low-Saxon translation, Reineke, and the old prose impressions of Gouda 1479, and Delft 1485, have not the prologue, beginning at the 41st line; which makes it probable that this introduction may have been an addition of later times.** There is, in this prologue, a double commencement intimating a double object. Willem declares at its very opening, that he undertakes his task because it grieved him much' to see so much wanting to the history of Reinart: whilst twenty-six lines afterwards appears another declaration, probably by the original (or at least an earlier) poet, that he only therefore made the adventures of Reinaert, because a certain lady, of great courtesy prayed him so to do; otherwise he had been silent. "It is not unusual for a continuator or interpolator to add a prologue to the work of his predecessor. In almost all the MSS. of the Brabantsche Yeesten we find prologues of different purports and of different dates. "If Willem had written the first part from French originals, this would be in some measure apparent in the work. For instance, the she-wolf would, as in the High-German translation of the tale by Heinrich der Glichsenaere, be Hersant, and not Hersint or Erswinde; the dog would retain his name of Cortois in the French Branches (as the detached adventures are called), whereas he there becomes Roonel, Rooniax, and Morout. Then too, the scene of action and the treatment of the subject would not be so entirely, so innately Flemish; and finally, some remains, some traces would then be found in the French Renard of so excellent a work as the original poem must have been.*** If on the other hand Willem be regarded as the remodeller and continuator of the poem, everything is perfectly clear, His work is the text of the Dutch MS.; in which we find, first, a paraphrase of the first book, as is apparent from the many variations and additions, indicated in the notes to every page of the present edition; and secondly a continuation of the original poem, mostly compiled from the French poets and the Fabulæ extravagantes. * Willem has nevertheless his especial merits, and worthily distinguishes himself by the insertion of many inventions of his own. "But who was Willem? A man who made Madok and many books, says his prologue; and, from many passages, evidently an ecclesiastic: in all likelihood therefore, Willem Utenhove of Aerdenburg in Flanders, a contemporary of Maerlant, who thus speaks of him: "Promised I have A tale of beasts to poetize; A priest well-famed, whom all approve, |