Das Lied vom guten Hirten (Schätze der Bibel) (German Edition)

Modem Lit- erature to the Present. Struggle for New Ideals. But before taking up the main subject it will be well to review the indications of literary activity in Germany before the beginning of the Old High German period. One of the earliest statements is that of the Latin historian Tacitus, who told in his Ger mania, in the year 98, all that he could learn about Germany and its people. He says concerning their poetry: In his Annals, written about A.

His name still lives in the songs of the barbarians. There were also songs which a single minstrel might offer with harp ac- companiment at public gatherings, or at some prince's court, or which a priest sang at religious ceremonies, and songs of praise and ridicule, love messages, charms, and riddles.

Even solemn legal proceedings were not without poetry; oaths, bans, and judicial decisions were expressed in poetic form. This form was the old Germanic hemistich or half-line, with two stresses and an indefinite number of unstressed syllables. A line was often formed by the combination of two half-lines, in which case the whole was more firmly welded together by means of alliteration, that is, by the repetition of an initial consonant or group of consonants, in two or more stressed syllables; the different vowels, however, were allowed to stand in alliteration with each other.

For example, we may take a line from an Old High German poem, the Hildebrands- lied: The style of Germanic poetry was largely determined by its strict alliteration and was highly developed, as the oldest German poems show. All Germanic poetry was handed down by word of mouth. When the Germans really began to write, that is, to draw or paint alphabetic symbols on parchment, they used the Roman letters, and retained only a few Runic signs for sounds that were exclusively Ger- manic.

The Goths of the fourth century were the first of the Germanic tribes to learn to read and write. Wtiifiia He was born about in what was then the ca. His parents were Christians, and as a youth he studied Greek and Latin in preparation for the priesthood. Consecrated as a bishop of the Arian faith, in , he spent his life preaching and spreading the Gospel among his people, and died in Constantinople dur- ing a Synod in Wulfila's influence on all the Goths survived him by centuries, not in his preaching alone, but mainly in the greatest bequest he could leave his fol- lowers, a Translation of the Bible in Gothic; this work became the basis of the conversion of all the Germanic tribes who embraced Arianism.

But he accomplished his work with re- markable success. He renders the Greek original accu- rately, and yet with force and skill. Judging by the lan- guage in this work, the speech of the early Germanic tribes must have possessed great dignity and melodiousness. Of Wulfila's translation there remain to-day only the greater part of the New Testament and a few fragments of the Old, preserved chiefly in the Silver Codex at Upsala, Sweden. As is the case with all peoples, the oldest products of the imagination among the Germanic tribes were mytho- logical.

In early German literature almost every indication of the Germanic belief in the gods has vanished. Heroic sagas, on the other hand, lived in manifold variety in the old Germanic epic. They are an outgrowth of myth-lore only in part; for example, Siegfried and his enemy Hagen, a demon of darkness, are taken from Low Frankish, or north German myths, and Ortnit from a Vandalic; Brunnhild and Hilda, the mother of Gudrun, were originally Valkyrs, or goddesses of war, of Low Frankish and Norse origin ; and Wieland the smith was a popular elfish creature, whose fame arose in the country of the Saxons, in the low land of north Germany, Among the historical figures in the heroic saga are Theodoric, Gundahari, Attila, Ermanarich, and many others who were leaders in the time of the migrations of various Germanic tribes between and These two centuries in- deed form the heroic age of the German people; this age gave birth to their heroic sagas, and informed them with its titanic spirit.

The His- The main events which the sagas cele- Sound? About the extensive kingdom of the East Goths, now a part of southern Russia, was invaded by the Huns, a The East Mongolian race, and the aged Gothic king manarich. Ermanarich, of the house of the Amals, killed himself in his despair of an honorable issue in the struggle. Forty years later the Burgundians, also a Germanic tribe, as were the Goths, established a kingdom in the The Bur- neighborhood of Worms on the Rhine, which gundians. A few years earlier Attila had become king over the vast country of the Huns, stretching from the river The Huns.

Volga to Central Germany. Rome and Constantinople, which were in constant fear of the Hunnish king, breathed anew when the tidings of Attila's sudden death reached them. He died in , in the night after his marriage to the Germanic princess Hilda. In the very next year the subject Ger- manic tribes threw off the yoke of the Huns, and shat- tered Attila's kingdom.

In Odoacer, the leader of wandering Germanic tribes in Italy, established himself in Rome, after putting aside the last of the Roman emperors. But Goth Theo- Theodoric, the son of Theodemer, and his East Goths fell upon him, and, after defeating him at Verona, they at last killed him in , at the conclusion of a long siege of Ravenna. Authari, who w'ooed the Bavarian princess Theudelinda in In the saga, Ermanarich became the uncle of the East Goth Theodoric, who lived, according to history, more than a hundred years later, and in late versions Ermanarich even took the place of Odoacer.

The saga of Hugdietrich and Wolf- dietrich kept the memory of the Frank Theodoric and his son Theodebert alive. Although the name of Alboin soon vanished, in spite of his fame among the Bavarians and Saxons, the knightly suitor Authari lived on in the saga of King Rother, really the name of Authari's successor Rothari who lived about fifty years later.

As the heroes of the sagas came into contact with each other, their adventures, or those afterward attributed to them, increased in number, and thus a saga The Growth , i. Taking them up according to the ' The Lay of the Xibelungs. The East Gothic cycle, or Amelung saga.

It arose from the combination of the older Ermanarich and the younger Dietrich the Amal Theodoric sagas, and was later increased by the addition of the Etzel Attila saga in the conception of the East Goths, that is, favorable to Etzel. The Burgundian-Low Frankish cycle, or Nibelung saga. This, too, was the result of a combination of sagas, the Burgundian treating Gunther, Kriemhild, and Etzel, the conception of the latter being west German and un- favorable, and the Low Frankish saga concerning Siegfried, Brunnhild, and the Nibelungs.

This cycle was afterward united in Germany with the Amelung saga, and adopted the latter's favorable conception of Etzel. Less extensive sagas are the following: The Vandalic Hertnid, or Ortnit saga, which was later increased by the addition of 6. The East Frankish Hugdietrich and Wolfdietrich saga. The Bavarian-Lombard saga of Authari or Rother, and 8. The Low Saxon Wieland saga. All these sagas we shall find recurring in one form or another in German literature.

TO The oldest extant manuscripts of German literature date from the second half of the eighth century, and are o u. These works are therefore often desig- nated as pre-Christian or pre-Carolingian. The other works of the Old High German period may be divided into two groups: The language of all the German literary remains is marked, like the Gothic of Wulfila, by unusual vigor and sonority. The man- uscript containing them was not written until the tenth century, but the contents of the charms show at once that ' Merseburg Charms.

The first charm, of four zaifber- alfiterative lines, describes the Valkyrs, with spruche. The second, a charm of eight alliterative lines, introduces a number of Germanic gods and goddesses, among them Wodan and Freya, who are to assist in heal- ing a lame horse. There were countless charms like these, many of which have been handed down in Old High Ger- man, and in the Old Saxon, or Low German dialect, but the others were evidently remoulded under Christian in- fluence.

Many are still current to-day. It is a master- piece in the portrayal of emotions as well as in its heroic spirit; it suggests what a great treasure was lost when the songs of the old heroes disappeared. Two monks in Fulda wrote it from their faulty memories some time after , on the cover of a theological manuscript. Thirty years later he returns, but his enemy meets him with an army, and a battle ensues.

In thej course of it Hildebrand comes face to face with his son Hadubrand, whom he had left behind as a child, and who is now on the side of the enemy. Hilde- brand tells his son who he is, but Hadubrand does not believe him, and insists upon fighting. The father now bewails his fate: The unavoidable combat begins. But the solemn tone of the poem and other reasons leave no doubt that the son was slain by his father. Christianity was brought into Germany from the west by numerous missionaries from the British Isles and by the Irish Columba died and Gall died , duction of the founder of the monastery at St.

They were followed by the Anglo- Saxon Winifred, or Boniface died , who organized the church in Germany and made it dependent upon the pope at Rome. The political power supporting Boniface in his labors was the kingdom of the Franks, then in the hands of the Carolingians. From the time this dynasty began its struggle to unite all the Germanic tribes on the continent under its sway, the Frankish kingdom had been The Carolin- , The furtherance of this impulse toward i unification and the permanent establishment of Chris- tianity throughout the Frankish kingdom were the work ' of Charlemagne.

He not only forced the last heathen Charlemagne tribe, the Saxons, to acknowledge his suprem- d. The clergy became the leaders 1 of this movement, and in the monastery schools at Fulda j and St. In Charlemagne issued important regulations j concerning preaching and church instruction, in conse-! Charlemagne was zealous, too, in the pro- duction of a German code of laws; he gave the months and winds German names; and, as his biographer, Einhard died , informs us, he ordered the old German heroic poetry to be written down in order that it might not be for- gotten.

But Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious died , despised the old heathen poetry, and the clergy in- veighed against it. The people continued to sing the songs, but they could not write, and in t ime all was Lost. In nine allit- erative lines an epic poet describes the chaos which existed before the creation, when there was only God, " the most generous of men," and with Him many divine spirits. A brief prayer in prose follows, a petition for true faith and strength to withstand the devil.

It, too, was written in the Bavarian dialect of the time. In order to crowd out the pagan heroic poetry, the church was forced to offer some substitute, and chose the Christian epic. With charming artlessness he con- ceives the action almost as if it were taking place on Ger- man soil, and makes the Saviour with His disciples appear like a German prince going forth with his vassals to re- deem his people. The poem thus offers a veiled portrait of its time, and certainly no one could have devised a bet- ter plan than this conception of Christ as a prince to at- tract the Saxons and further their real, peaceful conversion.

In the first place, the one is in Old Saxon, and the other in Old High German, each one of prime importance in the study of the dialect or language concerned. Furthermore, the style of the Evangelien- huch is not that of the popular epic, but didactic and learned, although Otfrid was lacking neither in warmth of feeling nor in patriotic pride.

Otfrid's effective use of end rime established this artistic device in German, although it had been employed sporad- ically before his time, and it had been long since known in Latin hymnology. It celebrates the victory of the l. The prose litera- ture of the Carolingian age consists of the translations mentioned above which were made for church purposes. The Saxon emperors accomplished much for Germany in building up a distinctively German nation, and the ever- closer union with Italy after the coronation of Emperors Otto the Great at Rome in was of great moment for German civilization, but neither the consciousness of nationality nor the influx of new ideas from the south advanced German literature.

On the con- trary, the development of German literature as it had started under the Carolingians halted almost completely under these succeeding rulers. A substitute in the form of Latin poetry occupied the foreground in the tenth and The study eleventh centuries.

The study of the ancients of Latin.

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The monastery schools were above all else centres of Latin culture. Gall, however, can boast that Ger- man prose also was fostered there, and at least a few of its monks and pupils were at home in the poetic world of the national sagas, although the cultivation of neither poetry nor prose followed the lines of independent creation, but only those of learning. Notker Labeo died , ' "Chick and child" and "Man and mouse.

Although the time had been so un- favorable, this poetry had lived on. The singers who had once been highly honored at the courts of princes now went from village to village as poor wandering minstrels, singing the old songs about Dietrich and Siegfried and other popu- lar heroes, and new songs on various events in history. About , a pupil in the monastery school at St. It tells the story of German songs, which were then extant, with genuine epic detail: One of these heroes is Walther's old comrade Hagen, who at first refuses to fight. All the king's other knights have fallen before Hagen consents to attack Walther, and then only in company with Gunther.

In the terrible fight which soon begins, they wound each other frightfully, but at last make peace. The reck- less defiance characteristic of the heroic age surges to and fro in the epic, but there are moments of exquisite poetry; the variety in the description of individual combats is also singularly artistic.

With all its Latin garb the heroic, poetic tone and the national content of the Waltharilied make it one of the most valuable remains of old German literature. This is reflected in the literature, where the monkish renunciation of the world is in striking contrast with the bubbling joy in life among the people at large. The lower classes revelled in the popular rimes of the minstrels, the Goiiard higher classes in the graceful rollicking Latin Poetry.

It, too, is a Latin poem, in leonine hexameters, that is, an hexameter in which the caesura and the end of the line rime with each other, for example: The Hterary remains of the later time are very scanty. It was written about at Tegemsee in Bavaria. Ruodiieb is the oldest novel of the Middle Ages; here for the first time an imaginary action is presented with poetic art as a picture of life. The romantic adventures of the hero, partly in the Orient, anticipate by many years much of the poetry of knighthood as it flourished later during the Crusades.

Poetry of the Not until the second half of the eleventh cen- ciergy. The contents of their writings are religious exclusively. The story of the Re- demption was told in choruses which were to be sung on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and the Virgin Mary was often celebrated in poems that charm us still with their beautiful simplicity. German prose was cultivated to some slight extent toward the end of the eleventh century. The great strength which the between the church displayed in this conflict had a quick- Life and Lit-. In the course of time Crusades. Many thousand French and German nobles with their vassals followed the two monarchs, and thus the energy of the German nobility was turned toward a worthier goal than internecine warfare.

The knightly hosts suffered indeed great disasters and failed in their attempt to drive the Turk from the Holy Land, but in other respects the happy results of the Second Crusade, for Germany at least, were extraordinary. The Crusade had also brought the Germans into close relations with the French, and started the imitation of French manners and French culture by the German knighthood.

The experience of the Germans was further enriched by contact with the Orient, their general knowl- edge was increased, and new views of life were opened to them. Besides all this, Lothaire the Saxon, who followed the Franconian emperors, had been succeeded in turn by the Hohenstaufens, and under the latter a strong national The Hohen- consciousucss arosc in Germany.

Lastly, new struggles between emperor and pope called forth all the mental and physical powers of Ger- many, and led to an increasing intercourse with Italy. Thus the intellectual life of the nation was quickened by new impulses which came in from all sides. Warring Germany was an appropriate place for militant knights; here they inscribed upon their banners piety, honor, loy- alty, courage, good breeding, and the service of noble ladies, and they strove to embody in their own lives the ideals of the age. It is no wonder that the period of the Crusades and the Hohenstaufens became a golden age in German poetry, and that the class which fought out the momentous conflicts of the time also won the lead in the field of poetry.

The subjects of the secular poets were national, indigenous, and were presented in a popular style. On the other hand, the clerical poets, in order to retain the favor of the public and by preference, introduced sec- ular themes taken from foreign authors. Their works are largely translations of French epics. The verse-form they chose is the riming couplet of lines containing four stresses each, the so-called short couplet. The first pure lyric poetry of knighthood and the first gnomic, or senten- tious, didactic poetry of the town minstrels were also heard at this time.

The structure of the verse is still careless; imperfect rimes and assonance prevail, and good technic is acquired slowly. The numerous legendary accounts of the deeds of Alexander the Great were known in France first in Latin versions, and there they had found poetic ex- ciericai pressiou in the vernacular before the opening of the Middle High German period.

It was the unoriginal moUey content of the poem which attracted Lamprecht's contemporaries, but the German poet shows talent of his own in his vivid' descriptions of batdes. A large group of sagas glorifying Charlemagne and his paladins had arisen in Germany, but in time they had died out at home and were remem- ' Lay of Alexander.

In the German poem the strong national spirit of the French popular epic is replaced by a more universal Christian spirit, whose heroic and triumphant character expresses itself with vigor and terseness. Here the great emperor is an ideal Christian prince, and Roland an ideal Christian knight.

Konrad's poem was received with en- thusiasm and became so popular that it was rewritten as late as the thirteenth century, though with various altera- tions to suit a finer taste. The secular poets who wrote epics were mostly min- strels whose chief concern was to satisfy the taste of the Epics by people. Although very marked before this time. J The large mass of their verses was intended I Rother " merely for passing entertainment. It was written in Bavaria about by a min- ' Lay of Roland.

It tells, according to a saga which was shifted from one Lombard king to another, that Rother sent envoys to Constantinople to sue for the hand of the princess for him; but the ambassadors were thrown into prison, and Rother had to follow after and steal away his intended for himself. Later portions, in which a clever minstrel plays an important part, recount the abduction of the princess from Rother's court and his second expedition after her. The loyalty of German vassal and over-lord is the central theme of the poem.

On his return Ernest is pardoned by the emperor Otto I. The conflict between filial obedience and the claims of friendship, the kernel of the old story, is not fully developed in the poem as it is later in Uhland's drama, but it raises the whole above merely ephemeral literature. The poem, which has been preserved only in a fragmentary form, seems to have been written originally on the lower Rhine, but the main version now extant was probably completed in Bavaria about by a Middle Franconian minstrel.

The popularity of Herzog Ernst is shown by numerous revised versions of it in Beast Epic: Of this poem, too, there are now only fragments, and a single revised version. French influence appears later in lyric poetry than in epic. The oldest minne- singer known by name is Kiirenberg, an Aus- guTAn bers. Historical writing in Latin prose indeed Literature in attained what may be called its prime under the Latin. The lyrics of the Goliards reached their climax in the work of a man known as "the Arch- poet.

Some courts, like that of the Dukes of Austria at Vienna and that of the Landgrave of Thuringia at Eisenach, were famous for their generosity. The dependence of the poets was very harmful in that it cost some their self-respect and forced all the poets to conform, at least in part, to the pre- vailing fondness for foreign customs and display.

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Thence sprang the long descriptions of festivals, tourneys, arms, and horses, above all, the intense glorification of love and the exaggerated conception of the service of noble ladies which had little to do with real love. These elements ap- pear most clearly in the epic of knighthood, as the epic poet at court told his story mainly not according to his own free choice but at command of his princely patron.

In the case of the epic two classes are to be distinguished: The court epic, or the epic of knighthood. Intended for courtly hearers or readers, it mixes the foreign and native in conceptions and form. The popular epic, or national heroic poetry. The material of these epics was taken from the native heroic saga and, deferring only to a limited degree to the demands of knightly custom, remained German in character, con- tent, and form. The speech of the common people in the various southern provinces differed, to be sure, so that one can speak of the Swabian and Alemannic, the Bavarian and Austrian dialects; but the higher classes of society, the court world, avoided word -forms that were distinctly dialectal, and there arose thus a universal south German polite language without marked colloquial forms.

This polite language was naturally employed by the poets of the time who were members of court circles, and their example was followed more or less closely by those who were not attached to courts. Thus it happens that the I native province of a poet can seldom be determined solely from the language of his works. Now and then the influ- '; ence of foreign culture appears unpleasantly in the strong I admixture of French words which were taken up in aris- ' tocratic circles along with French manners; this is, how-!

With the tacit adoption of a standard lan- guage, more attention was paid to its cultivation and use. Sentence construction grew more finished and less rigid, expression more choice; the careless treatment of THE COURT EPIC 29 the verse gave place to one that is strictly and richly developed, though it sometimes becomes artificial. The Ivric was constructed largely according to French and Provencal models. The epic poets of noble birth rarely treated native themes, and even then hardly ever without a Latin source. Many revived Christian legends, many told of the Court storics of Charlemagne and his nobles in ac- cordance with the French saga cycle that had been introduced into Germany by Kom-ad's Rolandslied ; others treated stories of antiquity and the Orient, which they read in French versions.

However, most of the poets, and among these the greatest, took their themes from the oft-told romances of northern France, which had gathered round the figure of King Arthur and which included the Legend of the Holy Grail. The stories of his deeds and those of his heroes soread among the related Breton tribes in Brittanv, or Bretagne, and they were passed on thence to the neighbor- ing French, who wTote them down in prose.

There in northern France, between and , the extraordina- rily prolific and fanciful poet Chrestien de Troyes gathered the Arthurian romances together in several voluminous works and embellished them with figments of his own imagination; these fantastic tales were first taken up by the people in the form which Chrestien gave them. They present Arthur as the ideal king of chivalry, who has gath- ered the flower of knighthood about him in his royal strong- hold Karidol, that is, Carlisle in Cumberland, England, where he and they practise all the knightly virtues.

The fabulous experiences of these knights, and especially their love adventures, were described and read with never-ending delight. By the time of Chres- tien the Legend of the Holy Grail, a saga of un- of the Holy Certain origin, had been connected with the story of Parzival's adventures as a knight of the Round Table. According to the legend the grail is the miraculous vessel made of an emerald stone which was used at the Last Supper and in which Joseph of Arimathsea caught the blood of Christ; it is preserved in a magnificent temple built by the king of the Grail, Titurel, on Mons Salvationis, and is guarded by the knights of the Grail, or Templars, who must exercise all the virtues of knight- hood, but especially those of piety and self-denial.

Besides this and nuTrerous other stories and legends, the romance of Tristan and Isolde, likewise of Breton origin, is also loosely connected with the saga of King Arthur; its theme is the irresistible and overwhelming power of love. The poems in which Chrestien and other French poets turned these sagas into the glorification of chivalry and of the service of ladyhood, were the most copious sources of the Middle High German court epic. The merit of its authors therefore, even of the most important poets, lies less in their inventiveness than in the artistic form of their poems and in the deeper spiritual meaning which they have im- parted to characters and events.

The epic of knighthood came first to central Germany, by way of the lower Rhine. There he revised and finished his work some time before at the instigation of Count Hermann, from Landgrave, of Thuringia. Eneit is written in carefully rimed short couplets, and is the first German treatment of an antique theme in the spirit of knighthood. But this mediaeval spirit often clothes the heroic characters of Virgil in a humorously inapposite garb; Heinrich's iEneas is a model of courtly, knightly manners, and Lavinia's mother gives her minute and dis- tinctly mediaeval instruction about the nature of love, for love plays here a conspicuous part.

Nevertheless the poem marks a significant advance beyond the narrative art of older German story-tellers.

It became a model for other poets at once, not only on account of its pure rimes and comprehensive descriptions of chivalrous love and knightly combats, but rather more because it was an attempt to write a long story closely and logically constructed, and to portray characters who were psychologically true and in- telligible. Eilhart, a Low Saxon from the vicinity of Hildesheim and a vassal of Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, wrote Trisirant about in the language of his native province. His poem, which is more popular and far less courtly than Heinrich's Eiuit, was soon overshadowed by Gottfried's epic on the same theme, and is preserved only in fragments, later revisions, and in a prose version.

He was a vassal of a Swabian nobleman, Herr von Aue, and took part in a Crusade, probably the one in , for which he wrote several inspiring songs. He was highly educated for his time, as he understood both Latin and French. With his first work, Erec, written in and based on a story by Chrestien de Troyes, he introduced the main body of Arthurian romances into German poetry. The long descriptions in the poem and the superfluous adventures of the hero are very tedious to us now, but the poem has a noble basic idea, the faithfulness of woman.

Another chapter in the saga of King Arthur is retold in Hartmann's Iwein, also after Chrestien and written about Al- though quite dependent upon his model for the contents of his poem, the German is far superior to the French- man in tenderness of feeling and in range of thought. But the poem lacks an ennobling fundamental theme, especially as compared with Erec. The overwrought conceptions of chivalrous love common at the time are well illustrated by the description of the fate of Iwein, who is rejected by his lady because he allowed an adventure to keep him away from her bfeyond an appointed time; crazed by the blow of her rejection, he sufl'ers agonies before his reason is restored.

But even this is not enough; he must now go through severe trials and adventures before he is reunited with her. Der arme Heinrich is a rare exception among the works of the court poets in that its theme is German; it was a tradition in the family of Hartmann's over-lord. With stirring warmth of feeling the poet glorifies the ca- pacity of woman for self-sacrifice and man's power of victory over self; Longfellow has made the story familiar to English readers in his Golden Legend.

Hartmann's gift j as a story-teller, his artistic restraint and clearness, and the j finish of his language and verse were admired even in hisj own day; Gottfried von Strassburg praises especially his "crystalline words. In this regard he is the model court epic poet. He grew to manhood poor and without schooling.

He was a vassal of the Counts of Wertheim, who had estates in that neighbor- hood, and after or he was often at the court of the Landgrave of Thuringia, where he met the lyric poet Walther von der Vogelweide. In he returned for the last time to his wife and family, who were then living on Wolfram's fief Wildenberg, now Wehlenberg, a few miles west of Eschenbach.

Proud of his escutcheon, a knight through and through, Wolfram's character was never tarnished by the corrupting excesses of court Hfe, especially by the extravagances of chivalrous love. He was a man of warm and tender feeling, and the peaceful happiness of married life gave him more con- tentment than court love ever could. He was a man of thoughtful character, and he was, therefore, more mind- ful of the moral and religious obligations of knighthood Uhan of its pomp and display.

Besides seven poems, five of which are morning songs. Wolfram left two unfin- ished epics, Schionatulander, also called Titurel, and Wille- halm, and one finished epic, Parzival. He had the originals read to him section by section, and then dictated his verses. His memory must have been prodigious, as he kept the most intricate plots clearly in mind throughout.

Wolfram's style is mucli less refined than Hartmann's, but it is more original; often as fresh as a folk-song, it lends itself easily to the expres- sion of every mood. It is also rich in figures of speech, although they are now and then very odd and obscure. Wolfram's chief work is Parzival, an epic of ngaily, twenty-five thousand lines based on a portion of the sagas of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. The two- " Parzival. The German poem was probably written between and But one day he meets four knights in ghttering armor, and an unconquerable longing for the life of knighthood is awakened in him.

His mother reluctantly sees him leave her, and dies of a broken heart. After many adventures Parzival arrives at King Arthur's court, receives instruction in chivalry from the aged knight Gurnemanz, and by his bravery wins the lady Condwiramur as his wife. Later he comes to the castle of the Grail, where he has a chance to release the suffering king of the Grail, Anfortas, from his trouble by asking about the cause of it, but in his simplicity and false understanding of knightly manners Parzival omits the natural question of human sympathy.

Thus he forfeits the crown of the Grail, and is unworthy of the Round Table which had received him. Reviling his fate he doubts the goodness of God, and wanders in gloom five long years. At length his soul wins peace through the gentle teachings of the hermit Trevrizent, the brother of Herzeloide and Anfortas. Par- zival returns to Arthur purified, is received again at the Round Table, and goes forth once more to the castle of the Grail. Now he asks the question and receives the crown in the place of Anfortas.

The poem closes with the reunion of Parzival and Condwiramur; the elder of their two sons, Lohengrin, is to succeed his father as king of the Grail. In the middle of the poem, at the beginning of Parzival's wretched wanderings, Wolfram has inserted a long series of adventures which the Arthurian knight Gawan undertakes, in this way contrasting the spiritual knighthood of Parzival with the worldly knighthood of Gawan.

In other places, too. Wolfram has interwoven various new episodes. The central theme of the epic as a whole is expressed at the beginning: This deep thought, the manner in which Wolfram illus- trates it by the development of his hero's character, and the lofty spiritual content of the poem raise Parzival far above all other poems of knighthood. This basic idea and the impulse to higher spirituality which Wolfram's epic con-j tains are not to be found in the French sources; they were; the creation of the German poet. Its subject is the love story, exquisitely told, of Schionatulander and Sigune, a great-granddaughter of Titurel.

Willehalm von Oranse, Wolfram's other unfinished epic, is based on a French historical saga concerning the sainted Count Willehalm, or William, of Toulouse. Wolfram tells of Willehalm's encounters with the Mohammedans, especially of the celebrated Battle of Aleschans in The poem is distinguished by a masterly characterization of the heroine Gyburg and the herculean squire Rennewart, both of whom are infidels at the beginning of the story. The toler- ance with which the poet recognizes the virtues of the un- believers is very remarkable.

To him Christianity is the religion of 1 ove and humanity, and he is free from all fa- naticism. Admired and praised by his contemporaries Wolfram commanded an almost superstitious veneration even beyond the end of the Middle Ages. It is the story of omnipotent love, of the ruthless adulterous passion of Tristan and Isolde, induced, and therefore mitigated, by a magic potion whose power they did not know when they drank. One must only regret that he was not permitted to end his epic.

From the solemn tone of the beginning and from suggestions here and there it is probable that he did not intend merely to glorify unbounded lust, but rather to present an agonizing struggle between unquenchable passion and the dictates of moral law. The Alemannic knight Rudolf von Ems died excelled in beauty of verse-form, which he learned from Gottfried. His stories are too long, but he tells them well. Its hero, Gerhart, finds the highest happiness in hfe in renunciation of self and in activity for others out of pure love of God and man. Rudolf's other noteworthy story is a version of an Oriental legend, Bar- laam und Josaphai.

Throughout his works Rudolf exhib- its a charmingly simple, pious view of life. Konrad von Wiirzburg died , a thoroughly educated townsman, is also a master of graceful form after the pattern of Gott- fried. The poem contains wonder- fully vivid descriptions of contemporaneous life, which make it especially valuable for the study of German man- ners and customs in the thirteenth century.

Provinccs in the south-east, Aus-j tria and Styria, were its original home; there it grew up' according to its own nature and inclinations, strong in itself and affected but little by foreign example. The authors of the most important heroic poems were members of the knighthood who observed the taste of their courdy audiences especially in regard to language, but from the beginning their epics remained German in theme, concep- tion, and form.

The sources of the popular epic were old ballad-like folk-songs, which have now disappeared en- tirely, but whose existence is well attested. These songs, which were still sung in the thirteenth century by minstrels of a lower order, treated only single chapters of a saga. As they in all probability often contradicted each other, the authors of the great epics must at times have been obliged to deviate from some of the folk-songs, but they seem to have avoided unnecessary alterations as well as additions of themes which were not based on credible tradi- tion; to these poets the saga was history.

These char- acters were indeed so real and near to mediaeval poets, that almost no sense of historical perspective can be found in their poetry. As already suggested in connection with Heinrich von Veldeke's greatest work, customs and people, even those of the most remote age, are treated as con- temporaneous with the poets, or as of a time only slightly earlier. The style of the popular epic is simple and concise, and, with the exception of technical words and phrases used in describing court affairs, it is free from strange and unnatural turns of expression.

The versifica- tion clings to the old rule of a fixed number of stresses and an indefinite number of unstressed syllables; but the num- ber of both tended to become fixed after the example of the court epic. The poets use partly the popular Nibelung strophe and imitations of it, partly the short rimed couplets of the court epic and minstrel poetry, where each line con- tains four stresses, or, in the case of feminine or two- syllable rime, either three or four stresses.

All the heroic epics, strophic or otherwise, were intended to be read aloud, not sung as their sources were. The epics of this era which now exist in a complete form treat the Amelung, Nibelung, and Hegeling sagas as well as those of Ortnit, Hugdietrich, and Wolfdietrich, all of which have been outlined in a previous chapter.

It was written by an unknown knightly poet in Austria about , and has been handed down in numerous copies ' Cf. The phraseology of the original can not be restored, still less the words of the folk-songs used by the poet. The poem contains nearly ten thousand lines grouped in the so-called Nibelung strophe, the use of which by Kiirenberg has already been mentioned.

This strophe consists of four lines, each of which is divided by a caesura, the first half of the line containing four stresses throughout, and the second half three stresses in the first three lines and four in the last one; the rime is masculine, that is, of only one stressed syllable. The style is simple and without many figures of speech, but forcible and sincere. A dream, in which she sees a pet falcon torn to pieces by two eagles, warns her never to love; but Siegfried, a young courageous prince at Xanten in the Netherlands, hears of her beauty and comes to woo her.

Gunther consents to the union on condition that Siegfried will assist him as a vassal in winning Brunnhild, Queen of Iceland. Accompanied by his chief vassal Hagen of Tronje, and many others, Gunther sets out, and Brunnhild is won by the aid of Sieg- fried, who is made invisible by his magic hood. All now return to Worms, where the double marriage is celebrated and a season of happiness begins. Ten years later, Siegfried and Kriemhild come to Worms from Xanten to attend a festival.

Brunnhild's jealousy leads to quarrels between the two queens over the rank of their lords, and Hagen promises Brunnhild to avenge her for the insulting words of Kriemhild. He slays Siegfried treacherously on a hunting party by hurling his spear at Siegfried's one vulnerable spot. Kriemhild is crushed by grief; for a long time she refuses to be reconciled even with her brothers, and she lives now only to avenge Siegfried's death.

The Nibelung treasure is brought back from Xanten, but Hagen sinks it in the Rhine, as he fears its power in winning friends for Kriemhild. With the promise of the mes- senger Riidiger to avenge whatever wrongs have ever been done to her, Kriemhild gives her consent and journeys down the Danube to her new lord. After thirteen years she and Etzel invite Gunther and his vassals to visit them, an invitation which they accept in spite of Hagen's fore- bodings and the prophecies of nixies in the Danube, whom they see on the way.

When they arrive at Etzel's court Kriemhild demands the Nibelung treasure left to her by Siegfried, but Hagen refuses to disclose its hiding-place, and insolently acknowledges the murder of Siegfried. Kriemhild thereupon incites the Huns to attack the Bur- gundians, or Nibelungs as they are now called, and the terrible fight begins. Kriemhild vainly offers to save her brothers if they will deliver up Hagen to her, and the frightful slaughter rages for two whole days.

Again Hagen will not reveal the hiding-place of the hoard, and Kriemhild orders the head of Gunther to be brought to him as a warning not to persist in concealing the secret. Exultant now that he alone of living men knows the secret of the hoard, and that it will never be revealed, he defies Kriemhild, and she completes her revenge by striking off his head with Siegfried's sword. Dietrich's vassal Hildebrand, unwilling to see the brave Hagen die in this way unavenged, slays Kriemhild. How much of this is the poet's own, and how much he found in the old heroic songs, can not be determined in detail.

Legendary elements in the Siegfried saga are suggested by the accounts of Siegfried's fight with the dragon, his invulnerability, the winning of the Rhine gold, and the magic hood. But the poet of the N ihelungenlied knew how to construct a unified whole and infuse new meaning and life into it, and he gave in this way quite as much as he took from his sources. Here and there indeed he has allowed a contradiction in fact to stand as his sources con- tained it, or he fills in a gap with little success; he also even leaves some obscure passages unexplained, or only half succeeds in clothing semi-pagan ideas and episodes with the knightly Christian garb which he and other mediaeval poets like to use.

But such minor blemishes are easily overlooked in view of the vivid and essentially harmonious picture presented by his work as a whole. The construc- tion of the poem is so simple and compact that it has often been compared with a drama; indeed when Hebbel wrote his drama Die Nibelungen, he followed the course of the action in the poem without any significant changes. The great moral precept of it, faithfulness, is taught through a variety of forms, the faithfulness of lovers and friends, the faithfulness of vassal and king. The characters, especially those of Kriemhild and her chief enemy Hagen, were wrought by the hand of a great master.

With fine restraint and effect they and their emotions are made real and clear, not by objective description, but by their own actions and words. The general tone of the Nihelungenlied is, in harmony with the subject, profoundly serious; occasionally it is tender and idyllic. The domi- nant note is tragic, and this is struck at the beginning and the end: The best parts of Die Klage are the description of Hildebrand's nephew Wolfhart and the story of the way in which the news of Riidiger's death was received at his home. The great model of the Nihelungenlied soon aroused emulation, and within a few years, between and , some unknown poet of knightly birth in Austria "Gudrun.

In the style, too, although this is less popular, the model is unmistakable. Gudrun is divided into three parts, as the poet begins not only with the story of Gudrun's mother, Hilde, but even with that of her grandfather, Hagen of Ireland. The third part is the story of a Frisian princess Gudrun, who ' The Lament. For thirteen years Gudrun suffers, patient and calm throughout; even when forced to wash the clothes of her masters on the sea- shore, barefoot and meanly clad, she preserves her pride and dignity.

At last one day, when she is at her task on the shore, an angel in the form of a bird foretells her speedy deliverance, and the next day she sees two men approach- ing in a boat. They are Herwig and her brother. Joined by Wate and other vassals, they fight with the Normans the following day and win the victory.

Gudrun returns in joy to her people, and is united with Herwig. The first part of the poem, the story of Hagen, is prob- ably a free invention of the poet after the model of the The Origin of court cpics; the other two parts, however, are the Poem. The bird, or angel of prophecy, and the description of Wate at the slaughter of the Normans remind us vividly of the swan virgins and the sea giants of early Germanic myths.

The second part of the epic, con- cerning Hilde, is nearer the original form of the Hegeling saga than either of the other parts; but, as frequently hap- pened with the sagas, the conclusion, which was originally tragic, is here toned down into a happy one, and the story thus loses much of its power. A similar conclusion has already been noted in the story of Gudrun, which is really no more than a richly elaborated repetition of the Hilde story, the chief difference being that Hilde followed her captor willingly.

In spite of its long wanderings Gudrun preserves the character of its native country, the north German coast, with remarkable fidelity. Gudrun is a tale of Its Character and Pres- the sca, of wind and wave and voyages and castles by the sea with their views of passing sails; it offers a striking contrast with the inland scene' of the Nibelungenlied. Gudrun, a heroine even as Kriemhild, is, however, not driven to frightful acts of vengeance which are a denial of her womanly nature. Her heroism is revealed in unabating faithfulness, in proud endurance of suffering, in her indom- itable hopefulness, and in her preservation of lofty moral purity in the presence of her tormentors.

Her character is one of the noblest and most real in poetry. The poem has come down to us in a very unlucky form; the only extant manuscript of it was not written until the beginning of the sixteenth century, and even this manuscript is not a copy of the original poem, but a reproduction of a version dating from the end of the thirteenth century. The other popular epics vary considerably in merit. The former, which is written in the strophe of the Nihelungenlied, has been very much distorted by the countless interpolations of later re- "Aibharts visers; but it contains a stirring portrayal of the heroic young Albhart, who keeps faithful watch in the conflict between Dietrich and Ermanarich, until he is treacherously murdered by Witege, the inan he "Laurin.

LauHn, an idyllic minstrel compo- sition in rimed couplets, skilfully unites the Dietrich saga with one from the Tyrol concerning the pugnacious dwarf king Laurin and his strictly guarded rose garden. The hero of " Bern " breaks into the garden, overpowers Laurin, and then in turn becomes his captive and is finally rescued by a maiden.

Zuletzt angesehen:

Other phases of the Dietrich saga were often treated until the end of the thirteenth century, but with less force "DasEcken- and art. Die Rahenschlacht tells in six-line "DieRaben- strophcs of "the Battle of Ravenna" between Ermanarich and Dietrich; it suffers from too great length and clumsy presentation, but the murder of Etzel's two sons and Dietrich's brother at the hand of Witege, and Dietrich's vengeance are described well, al- " Der Rosen- though the merit of these passages seems to be garten.

The form is the so-called " shortened Nibelung strophe" ; that is, the last stress is usually missing. The poem has been preserved in five different versions, and tells how Kriemhild invites the heroes of "Bern" to her rose garden in Worms to measure themselves with the champions there. The victor is to receive a kiss and a wreath of roses from her. The visitors are victorious in the twelve contests; even Siegfried succumbs before the might of Dietrich.

In this contrast of the two greatest heroes of the popular epic, Siegfried and Dietrich, lies the chief interest of the poem. The figures of Dietrich and the brawny bellicose monk Ilsan are the most finished in the poem. Several epics by minstrels, written in the same shortened form of the Nibelung strophe, stand apart, in content, from the Dietrich saga. In Ortnit, an old saga of Vandalic origin has been interwoven with stories of travel which had been popular since the Crusades: An expedition after a bride " woifd?

The versions of Wolfdietrich, a story of East Frankish origin, as that of the hero's father Hugdietrich, vary greatly; but the central theme of the saga, the glorification of the faithfulness of king and vassal, is not wholly lost even in the maze of constantly increasing adventures. Tacitus tells us that a profound veneration of the divine in woman was inherent in the members of the old Ger- its Ori n Dianic tribes, and the part which women play in the heroic sagas indicates a similar fine moral relation between the sexes.

Here men and women are not drawn together merely by physical passion, but '"love of God. Nor does the conception of love as entertained by the best minnesingers differ essentially from the Germanic notion, at least in as far as these poets were not contaminated by foreign customs and literature. But from the end of the twelfth century on, both the corrupt court life of France and the passionate, sensuous poetry of French, and espe- cially of the Provencal troubadours, were often imitated in Germany. The worship and service of a lady, or mistress, usually a married woman of noble birth, became the fashion, and the praises of their ladies were sung by the poets in imitation of their models.

Provincial differences are unmistakable in this poetry. The lyrics of the Rhine country and western Germany in general were naturally most influenced by their immediate neighbors; in the north the poets of northern France were the models, in the south the Proven9al poets. In Bavaria and Austria the 1 1 lyric remained truer to its origin, namely, as a natural outgrowth of native popular songs. The poets, who were for the most part members of the knighthood, were also composers; to each kind of strophe they invented they also created a tune, which The Verse- ,.

Whoever used it without authority was dubbed a "tune filcher. The third part, the Ahgesang, or "con- cluding song," is built on different lines from the other parts, and has its own melody. Its oldest representative was Her-' ger, who has already been mentioned. Apart from its form, in three parts, it shows no foreign influence. Songs and gnomic verse were often written by the same poet; the greatest song-writer, Walther von der Vogelweide, was also the greatest author of gnomic poetry.

Poems by about a hundred and sixty minnesingers have been handed down in manuscript collections; the Weingartener, the Litde Heidelberg, and the so-called Manesse, or Large Heidel- berg manuscripts, are the most important. The last- named was written about and is now, together with' the second, in Heidelberg.

It is the most comprehensive collection, containing about seven thousand strophes by a hundred and forty poets. The Alsatian Reinmar von Hagenau made this refined art of the court familiar to the German-speaking south-east, when he setded in Austria toward the end of the twelfth century.

Walther's origin is a mat- ter of dispute; he may and may not have belonged to a lower order of the knighthood, and he was von der perhaps, but not certainly, born in Austria, ca. After Frederick's death the destitute poet began, in the fashion of the wandering singers, a life of roaming which lasted some twenty years. At first he tarried for a time at the court of the Hohenstaufen Philip, third son of Frederick Barbarossa and Duke of Swabia, who was then contending with the Guelph Otto, Duke of Brunswick, for the succession as Emperor of Germany, Walther assisted Philip with several political verses and celebrated Christmas of with him in Magdeburg.

Walther was at the court of Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia, in Eisenach several times. On the occasion of his visit in he met Wolfram von Eschenbach. The legend of the minstrels' contest in Hermann's castle, the Wartburg, which Richard Wagner later united with the legend of the poet Tannhauser in the music drama of that name, sprang from this meeting of the two greatest poets of their time at the court of the art-loving landgrave.

How Walther had to struggle for the necessities of life is suggested by a voucher dated , which records that Bishop Wolfger of Passau gave the poet five solidi, that is, about four dollars, for the purchase of a fur coat. Walther found favor for a time also at Meissen in Saxony with Margrave Dietrich, and elsewhere with other princes.

After Philip died in , and Otto was generally ac- knowledged as emperor, Germany hoped for lasting peace. Walther defended Otto's imperial rights against the claims and encroachments of the church in several vigor- ous poems written in Frederick rewarded his enthusiastic devo- tion in by the bestowal of a small fief in Wurzburg, which filled the aging poet with jubilant gratitude.

Burger, Gottfried Burgess, Daniel L. Daniels, Danny Danoff, B. Fisher, Lucy Fisher, William G. Green, Frederick Pratt Green, H. Klein , Stephanie Heinen, K. Michael Herms, Bernie Hermstadt, G. Hoffmann, Friedrich Hoffmann, Klaus W. Hoffmann, Kurt Hoffmann, L. Hanz Jabusch, William F. Jarnagin, Chad Jarvis, H. Morris, David Morris, Lelia N. Morris, Mabel Morris, M. Pappas, Alexander Pappe, H.

Shomron, Elisheva Showalter, A. Smith, Deborah Smith, Deborah D. Smith, Paul Smith, Paul B. Torello, Junior Torrey, R. Volke, Gaby Volkening, H. Jesu, eile Amen, Amen Kanon Amen! Christus resurrexit Christus spricht: Psalm Der Herr ist mein Hirte, mir wird nichts mangeln. Nun enden unsre Wege. Dir wollen wir Ehre geben Du bist unsre Zuversicht.

• About the author.
• A Madness (The Darbas Cycle Book 1)!
• MEMORIES OF MOUNTAIN HOME SCHOOL.
• Consumed (The Hunger Book 2).

Einmal nur nahm Eva die Frucht! Ich bin geborgen in Gott Ein neuer Tag beginnt. Was wird er bringen? Ein neuer Tag beginnt. Er lebt, der Siegesheld! Folge mir nach Folge mir nach, noch an diesem Tag! Der Herr ist nah Freut euch, freut euch Freut euch, freut euch alle Tage Freut euch, freut euch all insgemein Freut euch, freut euch, Menschenkinder Freut euch, freut euch! Engel haben Himmelslieder auf den Feldern angestimmt. Kommt her Gott, lass uns mit deinem Segen leben Gott lebet!

Der Tag ist nun zu Ende. Er hat so viel gebracht Gute Nacht! Der Heiland lebt Halleluja! Himmel und Erde werden vergehn Halleluja, Halleluja! Jesus liebt dich, Halleluja Halleluja, Halleluja. Singt und jubelt eurem Herrn Singt Halleluja Halleluja, Jauchzet dem Herrn mit lautem Jubel Halleluja! Halleluja, Jesus lebt Komm mit mir an das leere Grab Halleluja! Lob Deinem Namen Halleluja,