Das Lied vom hürnen Seyfrid

K. C. King über seine Edition (p. 28 f.)

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... In conclusion, I admit that there are certain forms in all the prints which bear signs of antiquity, but we have no evidence whether they are genuine survivals or innovations in so many of the cases; nor are they sufficiently numerous to give a passably MHG appearance to a critical text, even if they were all used. To use them all – simply because of their approximation to MHG – would result in a text of bastard appearance: neither an ENHG print, nor a MHG poem, and too conjectural to be of real value for practical purposes. With the evidence at our disposal, however, we can with a fair degree of certainty reconstruct a text which can be said to be possible both as an early sixteenth-century print and as a source for all the extant versions. I maintain that the evidence of the two printed versions of the Heldenbuch quoted confirms quite conclusively the policy to be adopted in preparing the text of the Hürnen Seyfrid. The stemma points quite unequivocally to the descent of all the extant prints from one source, which we have called A, and the degree and magnitude of the differences between these prints indicate that A was not far removed in time from the earliest of them. It is this print which an editor is in a position to attempt to reconstruct with a fair degree of confidence and it should be his aim to do so in a critical edition. It is not likely that its linguistic form will have differed greatly from that of the earliest preserved print, and we should therefore allow ourselves to be guided by what is preserved. I have pursued this policy in the orthography I have adopted *), and I propose to follow a very similar policy for the linguistic form of the present edition. This means in practice that the text will be based on the Hergotin print (K), and that I shall deviate from it only for the reasons and in the class of cases stated above.

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*)

See my article in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol. 35