Background

THE SÄCHSISCHE WELTCHRONIK is the primary historiographical source used by the author of Lohengrin to situate the story of the Swan Knight in the reign of Henry I and contextualize it against the backdrop of the subsequent Ottonian rulers. The Weltchronik exists in three main recensions with a rich and complex transmission and has been dated to the early 1230s (if not before) or the 1260s in two competing lines of argument, each based on a different assessment of the manuscript material and how its content relates to historical reality. In terms of localization, the sources used in recension A1 and the use of it in the Magdeburger Weichbildchronik make it possible to identify Magdeburg as the likely home of the original if the early dating is adopted; for C2, Erfurt seems a probable place of origin. The qualifier “Saxon” in the modern title of the work is apposite only in recension C.

Previous studies of the adaptation of the Weltchronik in Lohengrin have been tied to the nineteenth-century edition of Ludwig Weiland, which does not account for the full range of textual variation. Although Weiland saw A as the earliest recension, he based his edition on a manuscript from recension C, presumably because he felt its greater range of material was better suited to the needs of historians: manuscript 24 (Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, Cod. Memb. I 90), the earliest complete vernacular version of the Weltchronik in any form. Using Weiland's text as a basis for comparison, however, is problematic, not least because the balance of the evidence, according to Jürgen Wolf, is that some form of recension A was worked into Lohengrin. This appendix, therefore, provides an edition of the relevant section (from Henry I to Henry II inclusive) in a selected manuscript of that recension. It does not attempt to reconstruct the specific version of the Weltchronik adapted in Lohengrin, but it does address the reality of textual transmission with which one has to come to terms, thus illustrating the kind of material with which the Lohengrin author could have been working—as well as giving a glimpse into a hitherto neglected recension of this landmark in medieval German historical writing.