Basler Trojanerkrieg. Edizione e commento

This paper presents the so-called Basler Trojanerkrieg, a short Middle-High-German rhyme-couplet epic (usually classified as a liet), which is transmitted only in a fifteenth-century miscellany manuscript, as introduction to the Roman history according to a southern version of the prose Sächsische Weltchronik. The rhapsodic liet surveys, into four narratively almost unrelated sections, the deeds of the second War of Troy, the destruction of the city and the heroes’ nostoi. The text established here will diverge from those of previous editions for the different evaluation of a few of manuscript readings, while in the commentary the codex structure will be addressed (mostly in relation to the so-called Basler Alexander, a further piece of rhyme poetry interpolated into the prose account of the Sächsische Weltchronik), in order to sort out the unique witness of Bale (and/or its antigraph), on the scope of late Middle-High-German epic and historiographic traditions.