Der Busant, also known as Der Bussard (both German names for the Common Buzzard), is a Middle High German verse narrative, containing 1074 lines of rhyming couplets. The story tells of a love affair between the Princess of France and the Prince of England, who elope but are separated after a buzzard steals one of the princess's rings. After more than a year of separation, with the prince having gone mad and living as a wild man, they are reunited.
Known from a single fifteenth-century manuscript and three fragments, Der Busant emerged from a thematic tradition of wild men, thieving birds, and adventures of separated lovers. It is close to several other contemporary stories, such that a common origin has been hypothesised. The work has been described as a novel-like example of the Märe style of poetry. Cultural impact of the poem is visible in several surviving tapestries, as well as a possible influence in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Contents
The Princess of France is engaged to the King of Morocco in an unwanted political marriage. To rescue her, the Prince of England (then studying in Paris) disguises himself, sneaks into the castle, and finds her. The two then elope. While she is sleeping in a forest, he admires two of her rings. Suddenly, a buzzard flies by and steals one of them. The prince follows the bird but gets lost in the woods and loses his mind from grief.
The prince lives for a year as a wild man. In the meantime, the princess has taken refuge in a mill and makes a living sewing, waiting all the time for her lover's return. She is taken in, unrecognized, by the prince's uncle (a duke) and aunt, who had become interested in the origin of the fine needlework and, after taking one look at the princess, recognizes her nobility. One day the duke is out hunting and captures the wild prince, whom he takes back to the castle and attempts for six weeks to cure.
When the prince is about to prove his noble upbringing during a hunt for falcons, he captures a buzzard and to everyone's surprise bites its head off. When he explains his actions, he recounts his story, and the princess is able to recognise him. The two then live happily ever after.
Manuscript and fragments
The poem survives in its entirety in one fifteenth-century manuscript, and there are three additional fragments. The manuscript is preserved in the State and University Library of Bremen, MS B.42b, which, according to Hans-Friedrich Rosenfeld, is "poorly and randomly corrected" (schlecht und willkürlich korrigiert). The three fragments are in State Archive of the Russian Federation, cod. 1432; Baden State Library cod. St. Georg 86; and in the private collection of August Closs, formerly owned by Baden State Library.
Sandra Linden, following Rosenfeld and Reinhold Köhler, dates the work to the early fourteenth century. The manuscript contains 172 double-sided sheets of cotton paper; a copy of the work of the thirteenth-century Swabian poet Freidank takes up most of the first half of the manuscript. Each page contains 24 lines; initials such as chapter titles and initial capitals are in red. The manuscript is bound with two parchment deeds serving as covers (one of them dated to 1403; the heavily damaged other, a deed of sale pertaining to a house in Basel, is older); the deeds prove that the manuscript was bound and held for a long time in Switzerland.
Meyer and Mooyer, who published the contents of the manuscript in 1833, comment that the copier and compiler seemed to have organized his materials haphazardly and all-too freely (even carelessly) adapted spelling to his own taste; a sixteenth-century editor corrected many errors in the manuscript's margins. Still, many lines appear to be missing and others make little sense. The manuscript was long thought lost, until it was rediscovered in the city library of Bremen. How it got there from Switzerland is unknown. A page is retained in the fragment of a collection c. 1380, written on paper in the Alsace and edited by Robert Priebsch; the fragment was in the collection of August Closs, which was bequeathed to the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies. Modern scholars of the poem cite it from Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen's Hundert altdeutsche Erzählungen (1850; republished 1961); a new edition was announced as part of a project by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Edition und Kommentierung der deutschen Versnovellistik des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts.