NINTH ADVENTURE
([St. I.]) According to Lachmann (L. St. XCV, Seventh Adventure) another continuation begins here. He thinks this addition is by another author than the composer of the first, and that it resembles in several respects the Third Lay of his edition, which answers to the Fifth Adventure ("How Siegfried first saw Kriemhild") of other editions.
([St. III.]) Hagan here speaks ironically, but with good nature, as to a friend. He exhibits the same turn, but with the bitterness that suits the change of circumstances and the person whom he addresses, in his dialogues with his enemy Kriemhild, when he meets her in Hungary.
([St. XXVII], Ninth Adventure.) The lady supplies the place of the modern pocket handkerchief mit snêblanken gêren in the original. The German gêre is evidently the English gore, a word which puzzled no less a person than Tyrwhitt, and which Johnson, who writes it goar, has confounded with the gusset. The latter is the piece under the arm of a shirt; the gore, as Tyrwhitt was afterward accurately informed by "a learned person," is a common name for a slip, which is inserted to widen a garment in any particular part. It is a wedge-shaped piece, as the German commentators say of their gêre. Shirts at present, however it may have been in Chaucer's or in Tyrwhitt's time, are not made with gores; the opening on each side renders gores unnecessary; but in the female of the shirt and in the smockfrock, gores are, I believe, still used. The passage in Chaucer illustrates the passage before us. The poet says of the Carpenter's Wife (Canterbury Tales, 3235)—
A seint (girdle) she wered, barred all of silk,
A barme-cloth (apron) eke white as morwe (morning) milk
Upon hire lendes (loins) full of many a gore.
In the last line the expression "full of many a gore" means, probably, full made, spread out by means of many a gore; otherwise "full of gores" would have been sufficient, and the addition of "many" an inelegant piece of surplusage. However that may be, it is clear that the apron stuck out and extended round the person of the wearer in consequence of the number of these gores, or wedge-shaped pieces, which made the bottom much wider than the top. An apron, thus made up of a multitude of gores, might not unaptly be itself called in the plural a woman's gores, and this seems to have been formerly the case in Germany. Kriemhild is here said to wipe her eyes with snow-white gores, and, in the Gudrun, the heroine of that name is rated by the tyrannical Gerlind for wrapping up her hands indolently in her gores. It is of course impossible for a translator to render these two passages literally, at least if he wishes to be intelligible.
([St. XLVIII.]) The commentators are not particularly clear as to what these garments, called in the original "noble Ferrans robes," really were. Von der Hagan says there must have been a city of that name in the East, from which these robes came, while Lachmann says there is a stuff composed of silk and wool, which still goes by the name of ferrandine. The Dictionary of the French Academy mentions a silk stuff as formerly going by that name.
TENTH ADVENTURE
([St. XLI.]) Lachmann's Fifth Lay begins here, and concludes with St. DCCV.