For those medievalists who have noticed them at all, Solomon and Marcolf have always formed, what the editor of this volume, with alliterative brio, calls “a dynamic duo”--the first, “sage and sovereign,” purveying “a plethora of platitudes,” the second “an unblushingly bawdy buffoon,” with “bowels as big and boisterous and his brains,” always ready to “bare his buttocks and moon the monarch.” Among the many benefits of Jan M. Ziolkowski’s mephitic miscellany of marcolfiana, however, is its demonstration of the pair’s remarkable ability to juggle roles, frustrate generic expectations, disregard geographic and temporal boundaries, and entertain widely disparate audiences.
In 2008 Ziolkowski, not only edited, translated, and annotated the fifteenth-century Dialogus Salomonis et Marcolfi (a work especially popular in Germany, though known throughout Europe), but outlined its prehistory, and provided us with an extensive catalog of sources, analogues, and testimonia. The current supplementary volume, Solomon and Marcolf: Vernacular Traditions, however, expands this penumbra dramatically. Ziolkowski himself, after providing us with entertaining biographical sketches of two early Marcolfians (John Kemble and Aleksandr Veselovskii), and a useful summary of Veselovskii’s Slavic Tales about Solomon and Kitovras, generally takes a back seat here, but, even while leaving us in the capable hands of an impressive band of editors and translators, his guiding hand is everywhere in evidence. To list all these contributors would be tedious, but Mary-Anne Stadtler-Chester who both translates (chapter 2) and edits (appendix 2) the four main versions (plus variants) of the Old French Salemon et Marcoul deserves particular mention, as do the two contributors of the longest pieces: James A. Schultz, translator of two Middle High German versions, including the remarkable Salman and Morolf (chapter 6), and the late Palmer di Giulio, refashioner of the eighteenth-century Italian Bertoldo (chapter 10).To give some idea of the intricacies of the tradition that Ziolkowski must pick his way through, di Giulio’s Bertoldo is a prose adaptation of Bertoldo con Bertoldino, a collaborative verse translation, organized by the savant Lelio Dalla Volpe (1685-1749), made from a prose original by the balladeer Giulio Cesare Croce (1550-1601), itself based on the fifteenth-century Dialogus Salomonis et Marcolfi!
The Dialogus itself is divided into two sections: a riddling proverb contest between the two protagonists, and a collection of vulgar tales in which an ingenious Marcolf effects a series of narrow escapes from traps contrived by Solomon. Only two of the versions represented here--the Middle High German Book of Markolf (chapter 7) and the Danish Merry Conversation between King Salomon and Marcolfus (chapter 9)--preserve this bipartite structure. Of the remainder, one group (chapters 2-4) is limited to dueling proverbs, and the rest to ribald narrative. With only one exception (Version D), the texts from France in the first category are unremittingly misogynistic, distastefully implying that prostitution is woman’s natural vocation; the sole Anglo-French example (chapter 3) is unusual in having Marcolf complement rather than contradict most of Solomon’s sentences, his only misogynistic outburst being sharply reprimanded by the king. The bulk of Ziolkowski’s collection, however, is devoted to texts in the second category (Russian, German, Italian, and Icelandic), where a series of fundamental motifs (the divided baby, the milk and the cow-pat, the bum in the oven, the choice of a hanging tree) flit intermittently in and out of view.
Most distinctive is the Middle High German Salman and Morolf (chapter 6), a rambling popular romance in which Marcolf plays Merlin to Solomon’s King Arthur, acting as his councilor, fixer, and general magical factotum. Described as Salman’s noble and wise brother (though at one point a mermaid claims to be his aunt), Morolf occasionally lets his vulgar origins slip, farting in the middle of a chess game with Salman’s queen, the beautiful Salome, for example. Some traditional motifs (like the bum in the oven) seem out of place in this setting, though others (such as the escape from hanging) are more skillfully integrated into the main plot. Morolf’s task is to rescue Salome, twice carried off, not unwillingly, by marauding pagans, and this he achieves with a bewildering array of disguises and magical objects--herbs, precious stones, even a seagoing leather boat he keeps in a bag. By contrast, the contemporary Book of Markolf (chapter 7) is far more traditional, though even there we encounter an echo of the exotic excesses of Salman and Morolf. In the eighteenth-century Italian Bertoldo (chapter 10), Marcolf has changed far more than his name: the divided baby motif, for instance, becomes an argument over an undergarment, and after Bertoldo has shown the king (King Alboino) his bum (in a doorway, not an oven), he mollifies him by recounting a wonderful shaggy-dog story of a Homeric battle between the weasels and the squirrels. Even further from the German tradition is the Old RussianJudgments of Solomon (chapter 5), where the Marcolf-figure, a hybrid of human and cow called Kitovras, makes only a brief appearance; indeed, were it not for Veselovskii’s exploration of its deeply buried affinities, one might wonder why it has been included here at all.
Not the least of this volume’s many attractions is its plentiful supply of illustrations, from the colorful woodcuts accompanying Salman and Morolf to Bertolo’s monochrome etchings. The two wonderful fifteenth-century wall-paintings of Marcolf and his wife from a church in Sweden, moreover, offer partial compensation for the brevity of the fragmentary Old Icelandic Saga of Melkofr (chapter 8).
Finally, an extended collection of Testimonia, translated from Sabine Griese’s 1999 book, Salomon und Markolf: ein literarischer Complex (appendix 1)demonstrates the popularity of the sayings and tales of Marcolf and Solomon throughout early modern Europe. Alongside the usual suspects like Rabelais and Hans Sachs, however, we encounter a surprising number of protestant reformers, particularly Martin Luther and his disciples. Luther’s own use of Marcolf offers a perfect illustration of the figure’s inherent elusiveness and instability, at once a symbol of vulgar common sense (with his own distinct brand of posterior analytics) and of repugnant corruption (“the noxious filth of the Pope”). In such Lutheran polemics Marcolf not only, as Ziolkowski has it, “speaks turds to power,” he also, like his distant cousin, Berthold Brecht’s Azdak, speaks power to turds. One could hardly ask for a clearer illustration of the mercurial subversiveness he displays throughout this thoroughly entertaining anthology.