SOURCE: Schwartz, Hillel. “Garin le Loheren: Preliminary Report on a Rhymed Manuscript.” Romania 98, no. 4 (1977): 541-50.

In the following excerpt, Schwartz investigates the manuscript status of Garin le Loherain and its place between oral and written traditions.

In 1966 the Bancroft Library of the University of California (Berkeley) acquired from Sotheby's a manuscript of two parts of La geste des Lorrains, Garin le Loheren and Girbert de Mez¹. The reappearance of this manuscript solves several problems which have plagued scholars since the 1870's. It promises also to shed some light on the more general issues related to the composition of the chanson de geste.

Listed in the Sotheby catalogue as Phillipps MS 24827 (originally [Cheltenham] 2937), this manuscript is not described in the printed catalogue of the vast collection of that nineteenth century bibliophile, Sir Thomas Phillipps, and must have been one of the numerous manuscripts renumbered in 1872.² Edmund Stengel in 1873 referred...