h. Comparison of Torrent and Eglamour, [p. xxvii];
i. the 2 Romances independent, [p. xxx].
§ [5.] Arrangement of this Edition, p. xxxii.
[§ 1.] The manuscript from which the following romance of Sir Torrent of Portugal is taken, is a folio volume on paper, of the fifteenth century, preserved in the Chetham Library at Manchester.
A description of this volume is given by Halliwell in his Account of the European MSS. in the Chetham Library at Manchester, Manchester, 1842, page 16, and by Prof. Koelbing in his Englische Studien, vii. 195. The only edition of this romance that we have hitherto had was done by Halliwell. As he had, besides his own transcript, another copy made by Madden, his text is a pretty accurate one, and therefore the results of Prof. Koelbing’s collation, printed in his Englische Studien, vii. 344 ff., concern, for the most part, things of little importance, except one very curious passage, l. 88, where Halliwell renders the quite correct reading of the MS., p la more de dewe = par l’amour de dieu, by Pericula more bedew[n]e. Also, from l. 1720, the counting of the lines is wrong by 100 lines.
A few short fragments of a printed edition were found by Halliwell in the Douce Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford, and added to his work as an Appendix. They contain the following passages of the MS.:
| Fragment | III. = | lines | 462–489. |
| „ | II. = | „ | 492–520. |
| „ | VI. = | „ | 820–851. |
| „ | V. = | „ | 917–948. |
| „ | IV. = | „ | 949–970. |
| „ | I. = | „ | 1807–1866. |
A seventh fragment, of which not much more than the rhyming words are preserved, was omitted by Halliwell, and was printed for the first time in Prof. Koelbing’s collation.
This Chetham MS. contains the romance in a very debased and corrupt form, so that the original reading in many passages can hardly be recognized.[1] The scribe, who copied the poem from an older MS., lived (no doubt) at a far later period than the poet; he did not therefore understand a great many old expressions, and these he used to supplant by words of his own; he also transposed and even omitted many lines, and spoiled the rhyme, because he had not the slightest idea of the nature of the stanza in which the poem is composed. Halliwell did not trouble himself about the restoration of the true readings; he merely reproduced the traditional text, even where it would have been very easy to do more, though many passages are hopelessly corrupt; still worse is the fact, that he did not recognize the metre as the tail-rhymed twelve-line stanza, for he prints six-line stanzas.
In consequence, the whole of the philological work on the text had still to be done, and a new edition was plainly necessary; the more that this poem, though not written in the best period of romance poetry, treats of a legendary subject widely spread in the Middle Ages, and is nearly related to another poem, Syr Eglamour of Artois.