Ogier of Denemerken

The epic of Charlemagne Ogier van Denemerken is one of the great unknowns in Middle Dutch literature. This is not because of its literary quality, but because of its transmission. On the one hand, we have seven fragments from the beginning of the fourteenth century, which together survive about 786 verses, a fraction of what must have been. On the other hand, there is a complete fifteenth-century manuscript in the Heidelberg University Library, containing almost 24,000 verses, which, however, has had to wait a long time for publication. The first edition in book form was made by the German germanist Hilkert Weddige and appeared in 2002 as volume 83 of the series Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters in the Berlin Akademie Verlag. But even after that, the interest in Ogier of Denemerken has not increased greatly. This is probably due to the fact that the Heidelberg manuscript ‘Ogier von Dänemark’ is written in a remarkable kind of Middle High German, with which medievalists and even Germanists have considerable difficulties. It is therefore high time to present this not unimportant work in such a form that it can receive the attention it deserves.