Kudrun[110] or Gudrun—it is a little curious that this should be the name of the original joint-heroine of the Nibelungenlied, of the heroine of one of the finest and most varied of the Icelandic sagas, the Laxdæla, and of the present poem—is far less known to general students of literature than its companion. Nor can it be said that this comparative neglect is wholly undeserved. It is an interesting poem enough; but neither in story nor in character-interest, in arrangement nor in execution, can it vie with the Nibelungen, of which in formal points it has been thought to be a direct imitation. The stanza is much the same, except that there is a much more general tendency to arrange the first couplet in single masculine rhyme and the second in feminine, while the second half of the fourth line is curiously prolonged to either ten or eleven syllables. The first refinement may be an improvement: the second certainly is not, and makes it very difficult to a modern ear to get a satisfactory swing on the verse. The language, moreover (though this is a point on which I speak with some diffidence), has a slightly more archaic cast, as of intended archaism, than is the case with the Nibelungen.
As for matter, the poem has the interest, always considerable to English readers, of dealing with the sea, and the shores of the sea; and, like the Nibelungenlied, it seems to have had older forms, of which some remains exist in the Norse. But there is less coincidence of story: and the most striking incident in the Norse—an unending battle, where the combatants, killed every night, come alive again every day—is in the German a merely ordinary "battle of Wulpensand," where one side has the worst, and cloisters are founded for the repose of the dead. On the other hand, Kudrun, while rationalised in some respects and Christianised in others, has the extravagance, not so much primitive as carelessly artificial, of the later romances. Romance has a special charter to neglect chronology; but the chronology here is exceptionally wanton. After the above-mentioned Battle of Wulpensand, the beaten side resigns itself quite comfortably to wait till the sons of the slain grow up: and to suit this arrangement the heroine remains in ill-treated captivity—washing clothes by the sea-shore—for fifteen years or so. And even thus the climax is not reached; for Gudrun's companion in this unpleasant task, and apparently (since they are married at the same time) her equal, or nearly so, in age, has in the exordium of the poem also been the companion of Gudrun's grandmother in durance to some griffins, from whom they were rescued by Gudrun's grandfather.
One does not make peddling criticisms of this kind on any legend that has the true poetic character of power—of sweeping the reader along with it; but this I, at least, can hardly find in Kudrun. It consists of three or perhaps four parts: the initial adventures of Child Hagen of Ireland with the griffins who carry him off; the wooing of his daughter Hilde by King Hetel, whose ambassadors, Wate, Morunc, and Horant, play a great part throughout the poem; the subsequent wooing of her daughter Gudrun, and her imprisonment and ill-usage by Gerlind, her wooer's mother; her rescue by her lover Herwig after many years, and the slaughter of her tyrants, especially Gerlind, which "Wate der alte" makes. There is also a generally happy ending, which, rather contrary to the somewhat ferocious use and wont of these poems, is made to include Hartmuth, Gudrun's unsuccessful wooer, and his sister Ortrun. The most noteworthy character, perhaps, is the above-mentioned Wate (or Wade), who is something like Hagen in the Nibelungenlied as far as valour and ferocity go, but is more of a subordinate. Gudrun herself has good touches—especially where in her joy at the appearance of her rescuers she flings the hated "wash" into the sea, and in one or two other passages. But she is nothing like such a person as Brynhild in the Volsung story or Kriemhild in the Nibelungenlied. Even the "wash" incident and the state which, in the teeth of her enemies, she takes upon her afterwards—the finest thing in the poem, though it frightens some German critics who see beauties elsewhere that are not very clear to eyes not native—fail to give her this personality. A better touch of nature still, though a slight one, is her lover Herwig's fear, when he meets with a slight mishap before the castle of her prison, that she may see it and reproach him with it after they are married. But on the whole, Kudrun, though an excellent story of adventure, is not a great poem in the sense in which the Nibelungenlied is one.
Shorter national epics.
Besides these two long poems (the greater of which, the Nibelungenlied, connects itself indirectly with others through the personage of Dietrich[111]) there is a group of shorter and rather older pieces, attributed in their present forms to the twelfth century, and not much later than the German translation of the Chanson de Roland by a priest named Conrad, which is sometimes put as early as 1130, and the German translation (see [chapter iv.]) of the Alixandre by Lamprecht, which may be even older. Among these smaller epics, poems on the favourite mediæval subjects of Solomon and Marcolf, St Brandan, &c., are often classed, but somewhat wrongly, as they belong to a different school. Properly of the group are König Rother, Herzog Ernst, and Orendel. All these suggest distinct imitation of the chansons, Orendel inclining rather to the legendary and travelling kind of Jourdains de Blaivies or Huon, Herzog Ernst to the more feudal variety. König Rother,[112] the most important of the batch, is a poem of a little more than five thousand lines, of rather irregular length and rhythm, but mostly very short, rhymed, but with a leaning towards assonance. The strong connection of these poems with the chansons is also shown by the fact that Rother is made grandfather of Charlemagne and King of Rome. Whether he had anything to do with the actual Lombard King Rother of the seventh century is only a speculative question; the poem itself seems to be Bavarian, and to date from about 1150. The story is one of wooing under considerable difficulties, and thus in some respects at least nearer to a roman d'aventures than a chanson.
Literary poetry.
It will depend on individual taste whether the reader prefers the so-called "art-poetry" which broke out in Germany, almost wholly on a French impulse, but with astonishing individuality and colour of national and personal character, towards the end of the twelfth century, to the folk-poetry, of which the greater examples have been mentioned hitherto, whether he reverses the preference, or whether, in the mood of the literary student proper, he declines to regard either with preference, but admires and delights in both.[113] On either side there are compensations for whatever loss may be urged by the partisans of the other. It may or may not be an accident that the sons of adoption are more numerous than the sons of the house: it is not so certain that the one group is to be on any true reckoning preferred to the other.
Its four chief masters.
In any case the German literary poetry (a much better phrase than kunst-poesie, for there is plenty of art on both sides) forms a part, and, next to its French originals, perhaps the greatest part, of that extraordinary and almost unparalleled blossoming of literature which, starting from France, overspread the whole of Europe at one time, the last half or quarter of the twelfth century, and the first quarter of the thirteenth. Four names, great and all but of the greatest—Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried of Strasburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide—illustrate it as far as Germany is concerned. Another, somewhat earlier than these, and in a way their master, Eilhart von Oberge, is supposed or rather known to have dealt with the Tristram story before Gottfried; and Heinrich von Veldeke, in handling the Æneid, communicated to Germany something of a directly classical, though more of a French, touch. We have spoken of the still earlier work of Conrad and Lamprecht, while in passing must be mentioned other things fashioned after French patterns, such as the Kaiserchronik, which is attributed to Bavarian hands. The period of flourishing of the literary poetry proper was not long—1150 to 1350 would cover very nearly the whole of it, and, here, as elsewhere, it is impossible to deal with every individual, or even with the majority of individuals. But some remarks in detail, though not in great detail, on the four principals above referred to, will put the German literary "state" of the time almost as well as if all the battalions and squadrons were enumerated. Hartmann, Gottfried, and Wolfram, even in what we have of them, lyric writers in part, were chiefly writers of epic or romance; Walther is a song-writer pure and simple.
Excellence, both natural and acquired, of German verse.