Epic Beginnings of the Grisons: Simon Lemnius’ Raeteid

Simon Lemnius (a. 152250) was the most important humanist in eastern Switzerland. He is best known for the controversy he had with none other than Martin Luther (14831546) while still a student at the University of Wittenberg: Lemnius had published a collection of Latin epigrams, which Luther felt so offended by that he had the young Lemnius imprisoned and eventually forced him to flee Wittenberg. In return, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (172981) later dedicated a detailed hommage to him as a poet who fell out of favour and suffered because of his work. With the Raeteid, a Latin epic poem in nine books, Lemnius wrote a text in the middle of the sixteenth century that can justifiably be described as the national epic of the Grisons: In it, he celebrates the heroic struggle of three Swiss groups who had joined forces for the first time during the Swabian War in 1499 to resist Maximilian Is troops. The union of these three groups or Bünde (Gotteshausbund, Grauer or Oberer Bund, Zehngerichtebund) later gave rise to Graubünden, which found its national hero in the figure of the heroic Benedikt Fontana (c. 145099), who had given the decisive turn to the Battle of Calven on 22 May 1499. Fontanas first literary appearance was in Lemnius Raeteid. The well-known Swiss politician and intellectual Placidus Plattner (18341924), who was governor of Graubünden from 1873 to 1874, published an edition of the epic in 1874 for the "Historisch-antiquarische Gesellschaft von Graubünden" in Chur, which is to be welcomed, but which also has major shortcomings: Plattner apparently only relied on one single manuscript, but what is much more problematic is that he intervened massively in the text, restructuring it according to his own ideas and shortening numerous passages when, in his opinion, they could not be harmonised with the historical facts. The aim of this project is now, after a century and a half, to present a modern critical edition of the Raeteid on the basis of all known manuscripts, and to provide it with a reliable translation and a historical commentary that will make this allusive work accessible to a wider readership.