Besprechungen / Reviews C LAUDIA B ORNHOLDT : Engaging Moments: The Origins of Medieval Bridal Quest Narrative. Berlin & NY: Walter de Gruyter, 2005. 237 pp. $ 94.95. Large-scale diachronic analyses of Germanic bridal quest narrative have been surprisingly rare. This succinct study by Claudia Bornholdt re-examines four theories of the origin, dissemination, and morphology of these texts - specifically, those of Theodor Frings and Max Braun in the forties, Friedmar Geissler in the fifties, Michael Curschmann in the sixties, and Christian Schmid-Cadalbert in the eighties - and concludes that the genre is a uniquely northwestern European creation with roots and parallel transmission in oral traditions. In its pure form, the author argues, the medieval bride-quest narrative does not include abduction stories or the recounting of smooth and uneventful sequences of wooing, betrothal, and marriage. Instead (with a heavy dose of trickery intensifying the plot) it is primarily a narrative tradition that recounts the bride and bridegroom’s resolution of obstacles (usually initiated by the bride’s father) encountered on the path to marriage. It is a prerequisite that the bride lives in a foreign country, usually pagan, and will settle in the bridegroom’s home country (patrilinearity). But following, and modifying, Hinrich Siefken’s and Christian Schmid-Cadalbert’s schemata, the author argues that from their earliest appearance in Franconian chronicles of the seventh century to their elaborate appearance in Middle High German epics, bridal quests share eight core motifs: 1) the suitor’s decision to marry, 2) the selection of a suitable bride, 3) the wooing journey or journeys, 4) the meeting with the bride, 5) a secret betrothal, 6) elopement, 7) pursuit and battle, and 8) return to the bridegroom’s country and marriage. The defining «engaging moment,» to use the title’s pun, is the wooer’s secret meeting with the bride-to-be, her consent to wed the suitor against her father’s wishes, and the contribution of her own considerable talents and resources to the elopement. Bornholdt’s close reading of source materials allows her to propose significant shifts in theorizing the genre’s defining structure and origins. During the forties, Frings and Braun offered a hyper-militarized image of the bridegroom, harking back to nineteenth-century German nationalism and Richard Wagner’s stylized notion of the noble German warrior. In his bridal quest (so Frings and Braun) the bridegroom was driven by an ethics of «honor, duty, courage, kinship, and revenge» (217); textual references to his love, guile, and scheming were due to inferior «Mediterranean» influences, and thus could not have been part of the original Germanic bridal quest core. However, as Bornholdt demonstrates, already in the earliest examples of the genre, embedded in Franconian chronicles, the bridegroom employs cunning, secrecy, and disguises, and relies on the bride’s cooperation in his efforts to bring her to his country. His identity is composed of a more complex set of characteristics than the racist theories of Frings and Braun could allow or tolerate. This new central narrative role of the bride challenges another theoretical stance. Prior studies tended toward an extra-literary reliance on the early Germanic legal 88 Besprechungen / Reviews custom of Raubehe (literally translated as «marriage by theft») and proposed that the origin of bridal quest narratives was to be found in abduction stories, in which the bride must endure her removal from her home and country. It is true that abduction stories share the first three stages of a bridal quest narrative. However, the fact that the genre’s subsequent stages are already found in the earliest examples of bridal quests, all of which highlight a bride’s active contributions to the unfolding of the story, make the older theory of the genre’s dependence on abduction stories unlikely. In the bridal quest narrative, after her curiosity about the distant lover is aroused, the bride-to-be conspires to set up a secret meeting in order to learn more about the wooer. A secret betrothal and elopement are orchestrated with her full consent and ample resourcefulness. She might contribute treasures stolen from her father, and might even fight her father’s armies alongside her bridegroom. Bornholdt notes that the older the bridal quest narrative, the more incisive the bride’s actions and interventions (213). The author’s third contribution to our knowledge of this intriguing genre lies in her argument for the oral origin and transmission of the genre in northwestern Europe. The genre’s anchoring in oral traditions could explain the scarcity of written evidence of the genre between tales recorded in Franconian chronicles between the seventh century and the eighth century. These narratives re-emerge and are widely disseminated beginning in the twelfth century, possibly through the Crusades. Only the Latin poem Waltharius offers written evidence of the bridal quest genre in the ninth and tenth centuries. Framed by a substantial introduction and conclusion, the book’s theoretical position is developed in five deft, well-written chapters that trace the chronological emergence and dissemination of bridal quest narratives. Chapter one analyzes bridal narratives in six early medieval chronicles; chapter two offers a reading of Waltharius; chapter three investigates patterns of bridal questing in the Old Norse Piðreks saga; chapter four covers the German bridal quest epics König Rother, Orendel, Der Münchner Oswald, and Salman und Morolf; and chapter five revisits Scandinavian texts as recorded in the Poetic Edda, Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, and Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum. The author is to be congratulated on revisiting older theories on the development and origin of bridal quest narratives with a keen eye for nuance in a wide array of medieval texts and for ideological tendencies and lacunae in scholarly interpretations of the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Wake Forest University Ulrike Wiethaus E LYSTAN G RIFFITHS : Political Change and Human Emancipation in the Works of Heinrich von Kleist. Rochester: Camden House, 2005. 190 pp. $ 70. To adapt a famous epigram by Kleist: One might divide the family of literary scholars into two groups - those who read literature as a metaphor, and those who are experts in a formula. There are not enough of those who are experts in both; they do not constitute a group. The first group reads literature - to use a rudimentary definition of metaphor - as substituting for something it is not, for example as represent-