Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
LITERA-JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE LITERATURE AND CULTURE STUDIES, cilt.31, sa.1, ss.177-202, 2021 (Hakemli Dergi)
As an accessory, the ring was considered a significant type of jewelry in Medieval Europe. Apart from its tangible existence as a material, the ring has been used in various poems, songs, paintings, engravings, and narratives with specific symbolic and iconographic connotations. It is known that rings had religious and social functions in the Medieval period of Europe. As a body of narratives, stories with a motif of three rings were told in Western literature during the Medieval period. In the 18th century, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a figure of the Enlightenment, wrote Nathan the Wise (Ger. Nathan der Weise), in which the motif of the three rings includes Salahaddin as a character. Recent studies emphasize that stories involving elements of the three rings have a non-Catholic Christian point of origin. Accordingly, narratives with the three rings as an image or motif show that their roots can be found in the Middle East and Mediterranean regions rather than in Continental Europe. This study focuses on Lessing's Nathan the Wise and James Clarence Mangan's The Three Rings, an adaptation of a scene from Lessing's play. After discussing the relationship between Lessing's and Mangan's works as an extension of a broader tradition of narratives with the motif of the three rings, this study investigates how Lessing and Mangan continued this tradition in the 18th and 19th centuries through the character Salahaddin, one of the major rulers of the Turkish-Islamic Medieval period.