Engaging Moments: The Origins of Medieval Bridal-Quest Narrative. By Claudia Bornholdt. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, Vol. 46. berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005. EUR 78, $94.95.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye locates the successful quest in the form of romance; the quest involves the hero's perilous journey, the crucial struggle, and his exaltation. this quest is developed engagingly and eruditely as the bridal quest by Claudia bornholdt in her monograph Engaging Moments: The Origins of Medieval Bridal-Quest Narrative, her revised doctoral dissertation (Indiana University). bornholdt is fortunate in being able to build on foundational research on the bridal-quest narrative: Not only is there Friedmar Geissler's Brautwerbung in der Weltliteratur (of l955) and Curschmann's review of Spielmannsepen involving a bridal quest, but more importantly for her study, Schmid-Cadalbert's interpretation of Ortnit and its oral transmission as well as Marianne Kalinke's seminal research, Bridal-Quest Romance in Medieval Iceland of l990. Yet the hallmark study she takes most issue with is the work of theodor Frings and Max brown (1947), who claim to have found two separate traditions of bridal-quest narratives: a Mediterranean tradition involving cunning and deception and a Germanic tradition of heroic lays involving abduction by force without such trickery. bornholdt has ably succeeded in refuting not only this assertion but also Frings's claim that this Mediterranean tradition influenced the MHG minstrel epics. She demonstrates convincingly that the bridal-quest narrative involving cunning and deception is found fully developed in early medieval Germany in the Franconian area in Latin chronicles of the seventh to the ninth centuries. She is, moreover, able to point to intermediate links that connect it to the 12th-century MHG minstrel epics, to demonstrate its continued existence in the oral narrative tradition, and to argue conclusively that "bridal-quest narratives are an original German creation and that at least König Rother antedates the fashion of French romance" (p. 8).

Rosemarie Thee Morewedge
Binghamton University, SUNY