Myller's Parcival and Lachmann's Critical Method

Since publication in 1952 of Friedrich Neumann's article on the subject, it has been well-known among Parzival scholars that Karl Lachmann made his Wolfram-Reise equipped primarily with a copy of C. H. Myller's 1784 printing of the St. Gallen manuscript (D) in Sammlung deutscher Gedichte aus dem XII. XIII. und XIV. Jahrhundert.2 Between the lines and in the margins Lachmann entered variant forms from G and corrections from D (Myller had used Friedrich Bodmer's copy of D, never having seen the original himself). A true understanding of Lachmann's critical method as regards Parzival must begin here, where Lachmann set his pen to paper. An enormous amount has been written about textual problems in WolframForschung, yet, as Joachim Bumke has pointed out, Ehrfurcht vor Lachmanns Leistung hat dazu gefiihrt, daB seine Ausgabe pietitvoll konserviert wurde und die Forschung auf dem Stand des Wissens vom Jahre 1833 verblieb, thus leaving scholarship without its most important tool-einen verlaBlichen Text.3 Careful examination of Lachmann's entries in the Reise-Parzival should precede the much-needed attempt at producing a new and dependable text, especially since that Vorlage, which I examined in the Murhardsche Bibliothek at Kassel (4? Ms. philol. 124), dominates the Lachmann edition in ways previously unrecognized or undiscussed. First, Lachmann seems to have conceived his notorious 30-line division4 on the basis of Myller's compact lay-out prior to the trip, leading him to ignore significant textual evidence. Second, Lachmann's errors in transcription of D (most of them corrected in the 1926 revision of Parzival) are almost all directly traceable to errors in Myller's edition. Lachmann sees the initials of D as originating with Wolfram himself; the 30-line division is offenbar gewollt, at least from the fifth book on.5 The

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