Abstrakt
In the publication "Ein Fund aus dem Jahre 1440: Ein bisher unbekannter Text in einer baltischen Sprache" (2013), Stephan Kessler and Stephen Mossman introduced an unknown text, the Trace of Crete, which was probably written in Old Prussian. The aim of the present article is to give alternative interpretations of the newly found monument and to provide arguments for a different decoding of the Old Prussian text.
The issues under consideration in this publication are as follows: 1) Petrus Wickerau, who figures in the colophon of the manuscript, is not the author of this Old Prussian text; 2) decoding difficulties were due to inaccurate transcription, whereas the analysis of mistakes helped to identify the features which pointed towards the interpretation of the Trace of Crete as belonging to the folklore tradition; 3) the real author of the Trace of Crete could have been Petrus Turnau, a Hussite from Prague, who visited Crete in 1422.