MIDDLE HIGH GERMAN POETRY.
POSITION OF GERMANY. MERIT OF ITS POETRY. FOLK-EPICS: THE 'NIBELUNGENLIED.' THE 'VOLSUNGA SAGA.' THE GERMAN VERSION. METRES. RHYME AND LANGUAGE. 'KUDRUN.' SHORTER NATIONAL EPICS. LITERARY POETRY. ITS FOUR CHIEF MASTERS. EXCELLENCE, BOTH NATURAL AND ACQUIRED, OF GERMAN VERSE. ORIGINALITY OF ITS ADAPTATION. THE PIONEERS: HEINRICH VON VELDEKE. GOTTFRIED OF STRASBURG. HARTMANN VON AUE. 'EREC DER WANDERÆRE' AND 'IWEIN.' LYRICS. THE "BOOKLETS." 'DER ARME HEINRICH.' WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH. 'TITUREL.' 'WILLEHALM.' 'PARZIVAL.' WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE. PERSONALITY OF THE POETS. THE MINNESINGERS GENERALLY.
Position of Germany.
It must have been already noticed that one main reason for the unsurpassed literary interest of this present period is that almost all the principal European nations contribute, in their different ways, elements to that interest. The contribution is not in all cases one of positive literary production, of so much matter of the first value actually added to the world's library. But in some cases it is; and in the instance to which we come at present it is so in a measure approached by no other country except France and perhaps Iceland. Nor is Germany,[105] as every other country except Iceland may be said to be, wholly a debtor or vassal to France herself. Partly she is so; of the three chief divisions of Middle High German poetry (for prose here practically does not count), the folk-epic, the "art-epic," as the Germans themselves not very happily call it, and the lyric—the second is always, and the third to no small extent, what might punningly be called in copyhold of France. But even the borrowed material is treated with such intense individuality of spirit that it almost acquires independence; and part of the matter, as has been said, is not borrowed at all.
Merit of its poetry.
It has been pointed out that for some curious reason French literary critics, not usually remarkable for lack of national vanity, have been by no means excessive in their laudations of the earlier literature of their country. The opposite is the case with those of Germany, and the rather extravagant patriotism of some of their expressions may perhaps have had a bad effect on some foreign readers. It cannot, for instance, be otherwise than disgusting to even rudimentary critical feeling to be told in the same breath that the first period of German literature was "richer in inventive genius than any that followed it," and that "nothing but fragments of a single song[106] remain to us" from this first period—fragments, it may be added, which, though interesting enough, can, in no possible judgment that can be called judgment, rank as in any way first-rate poetry. So, too, the habit of comparing the Nibelungenlied to the Iliad and Kudrun to the Odyssey (parallels not far removed from the Thucydides-and-Tennyson order) may excite resentment. But the Middle High German verse of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is in itself of such interest, such variety, such charm, that if only it be approached in itself, and not through the medium of its too officious ushers, its effect on any real taste for poetry is undoubted.
The three divisions above sketched may very well be taken in the order given. The great folk-epics just mentioned, with some smaller poems, such as König Rother, are almost invariably anonymous; the translators or adaptors from the French—Gottfried von Strasburg, Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and others—are at least known by name, if we do not know much else about them; and this is also the case with the Lyric poets, especially the best of them, the exquisite singer known as Walter of the Bird-Meadow.
Folk-epics—The Nibelungenlied.
It was inevitable that the whole literary energy of a nation which is commentatorial or nothing, should be flung on such a subject as the Nibelungenlied;[107] the amount of work expended on the subject by Germans during the century in which the poem has been known is enormous, and might cause despair, if happily it were not for the most part negligible. The poem served as a principal ground in the battle—not yet at an end, but now in a more or less languid condition—between the believers in conglomerate epic, the upholders of the theory that long early poems are always a congeries of still earlier ballads or shorter chants, and the advocates of their integral condition. The authorship of the poem, its date, and its relation to previous work or tradition, with all possible excursions and alarums as to sun-myths and so forth, have been discussed ad nauseam. Literary history, as here understood, need not concern itself much about such things. It is sufficient to say that the authorship of the Lied in its present condition is quite unknown; that its date would appear to be about the centre of our period, or, in other words, not earlier than the middle of the twelfth century or later than the middle of the thirteenth, and that, as far as the subject goes, The Volsunga
Saga. we undoubtedly have handlings of it in Icelandic (the so-called Volsunga Saga), and still earlier verse-dealings in the Elder Edda, which are older, and probably much older, than the German poem.[108] They are not only older, but they are different. As a Volsung story, the interest is centred on the ancestor of Sigurd (Sigfried in the later poem), on his acquisition of the hoard of the dwarf Andvari by slaying the dragon Fafnir, its guardian, and on the tale of his love for the Amazon Brynhild; how by witchcraft he is beguiled to wed instead Gudrun the daughter of Giuki, while Gunnar, Gudrun's brother, marries Brynhild by the assistance of Sigurd himself; how the sisters-in-law quarrel, with the result that Gudrun's brothers slay Sigurd, on whose funeral-pyre Brynhild (having never ceased to love him and wounded herself mortally), is by her own will burnt; and how Gudrun, having married King Atli, Brynhild's brother, achieves vengeance on her own brethren by his means. A sort of coda of the story tells of the third marriage of Gudrun to King Jonakr, of the cruel fate of Swanhild, her daughter by Sigurd (who was so fair that when she gazed on the wild horses that were to tread her to death they would not harm her, and her head had to be covered ere they would do their work), of the further fate of Swanhild's half-brothers in their effort to avenge her, and of the final threnos and death of Gudrun herself.
The author of the Nibelungenlied (or rather the "Nibelungen-Noth," for this is the older title of the poem, which has a very inferior sequel called Die Klage) has dealt with the story very differently. He pays no attention to the ancestry of Sifrit (Sigurd), and little to his acquisition of the hoard, diminishes the part of Brynhild, stripping it of all romantic interest as regards Sifrit, and very largely increases the importance of the revenge of Gudrun, now called Kriemhild. Only sixteen of the thirty-nine "aventiuren" or "fyttes" (into which the poem in the edition here used is divided) are allotted to the part up to and including the murder of Sifrit; the remaining twenty-three deal with the vengeance of Kriemhild, who is herself slain just when this vengeance is complete, the after-piece of her third marriage and the fate of Swanhild being thus rendered impossible.