Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/246

 240 Williams (our text A has 'Damit'). He would then have rescued almost the entire acrostic (GRV. WA. LD). Thus Kopp's painstaking attempt to restore version B stands out in sharp contrast to the superficial treatment of F. M. Bohme, who did not suspect Grlinwald's authorship and who rejected five of the nine stan- zas, assuming that they were " wahrscheinlich von einem Hof- bediensteten (!)." 6 In spite of the complete acrostic, text A as given above is probably not in exactly the form Griinwald gave it. I should be the last to assert that he was incapable of composing verses as clumsy as some of these are. Many restorers of the "origi- nal" form of a poetical production of older days are altogether too ready to assume for that "original" faultless metrical form and rimes and the clearness and consistency of thought which one could expect from a modern author. Yet it would not be going too far to point out several readings for text A which might well have been in Grlinwald's own version or ver- sions. There will still remain passages in the poem which are awkward and obscure but which I do not feel justified in attempting to restore. An acrostic poem is not easy to compose and Grunwald's production is at least less grotesque than some contemporary ones, for example, a song, "Unmoglich ist es das man findt / ein Mensch als ich mir eine weiss / Herr bhiit wie ist mir dass ein Kindt / erst gadt mir auss der angstlich schweiss," etc., made light of by Fischart near the beginning of Ch. VI of the Gargantua. 7 The beginning of stanza 2 of A is obscure (version B seems better here, whether it represents Grunwald's own words or the idea of some later singer or editor); stanza 3, line 1/nimmer' ( = nicht mehr, cf. B) would seem to make better sense than 'jmmer'; st. 5, 1. 4 does not seem plain; from B we get a hint that lines 7 and 8 of the first stanza might well have had rime instead of assonance in fact Kopp 8 and Bolte 9 make the lines 'With the acrostic "VRSVLA Blaurerin"; reprinted in PBBeitrage 35, 431 ff., No. 52. Voksliederbuch f. Mannerchor ("Kaiserliederbuch"), Leipzig, Peters, 1906, Vol. 1, No. 213.
 * fo*0r*,Na.473.
 * ArchivlQ7, 11.