A letter sent by Jacob Grimm to Karl Lachmann on Reinhart Fuchs, on the the German version of the Reynard the Fox stories, from manuscript fragment in Universitätsbibliothek Kassel, 8° Ms. poet. et roman. 1. Includes a transcription of the text.

Until then, we must stick to the High German translation, which, according to all characteristics, was also written in the twelfth century, in Alsace, and is full of those animal names that were originally German and only reveal a Romance influence. Unfortunately, this poem has not come down to us in its original form, but only in the form in which it could remain after it had undergone a more recent revision. To my great joy, last year I was given parchment pages from an old German manuscript that had been miserably cut up here in Hesse in 1515. These had been used as covers for account books. On one side of one of the pages, a small space had been scratched out, in which the words had been written. Everything - the small format in two columns, the unset verses, the neat, elegant letters - made it clear at first glance that it was a manuscript from the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century, and the contents left no doubt that fragments of the old, unrevised Reinhart had been found. There are two layers of two pages that belong together, so four pages, each of which has four columns, plus two narrow strips, one just half a page, i.e. two columns, the other, more stingily cut, only providing about two-thirds of two columns. So, in total, twenty columns, each of which contains thirty lines in a regularly marked space. But because the verses are written continuously like prose, there are on average about 35 on the column, so in total there are about 700 verses. As it soon became clear that the number of verses matches that of the re-poet, who, as he himself says at the end of his work, only added a few rhymes and threw out others, almost a third of the original poem has been preserved and a fairly reliable determination of what is missing could be made based on what is still there. - [Author]

Language: German