Solomon and Marcolf: Vernacular Traditions, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski, with the assistance of Edward Sanger and Michael B. Sullivan. Cambridge, MA, and London: Department of the Classics, Harvard University Press, 2022, xxvi, 515 pp., 28 b/w and color ill.

The trickster figure can be found in literature from around the world, operating always as a clever, mocking, and provocative character. He is a rogue who tends to tell the truth although the authorities do not want to hear it. In the western world, especially in Germany, there were, above all, Pfaffe Amîs (Priest Amîs) by The Stricker (ca. 1220–1240) and Till Eulenspiegel, probably by Herman Bote (first printed in 1510). Another noteworthy trickster was Marcolf whose seemingly foolish but in reality smart sayings regularly counter comments or opinions by King Solomon. Although the latter is famous for his wisdom as already described in the Old Testament, Marcolf, Marcoul, Morolf, Melkólfr, Marolfus, or Bertoldo, among other adaptations, opposes him and can demonstrate that conditions are different, that people operate poorly or evilly, or stupidly. The original narrative might have emerged somewhere in northwestern Europe around 1200, but since the tree of the many different versions is so complex, many of the questions pertaining to authorship and dating are hard to answer. Ziolkowski and Margaret Ziolkowski first give full credit to two early scholars who shed much light on this matter, John Mitchell Kembole (1807–1857) and Aleksandr Veselovskii (1838–1906).