Filologia Germanica

Ein heiden was der erste man / den got machen began: Der narrative Aufbau des Toleranz-Begriffs im Willehalm Wolframs von Eschenbach

2024-09-09T14:49:27+00:00

‘EIN HEIDEN WAS DER ERSTE MAN / DEN GOT MACHEN BEGAN’: THE NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF THE CONCEPT OF TOLERANCE IN WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH’S ‘WILLEHALM’. Over the past few years, scholars have been devoting increasingly more attention to Wolfram’s Willehalm, primarily because of Gyburg’s so-called Toleranzrede and its theological implications. The aim of the present paper is to analyse the narrative construction of the concept of tolerance by examining how the figure of Gyburg and its interaction with other narrative instances (i.e. the narrator and other characters) in Wolfram’s work are constructed on the diegetic level to articulate a complex discourse on religious alterity from different standpoints, both within and outside the Christian world.

L’alterità religiosa in Die Heidin

2024-09-09T14:54:15+00:00

RELIGIOUS OTHERNESS IN ‘DIE HEIDIN’. In the age of the Crusades the antagonistic encounter between Christian Europe and the Muslim Near East gave rise to a wealth of literary production in which the image of the ‘pagans’ oscillates from demonization to idealization. Between these two extremes there are many other representations of religious otherness, each of them characterized by their own peculiar shades, ambiguities, and degrees of explicitness. In order to give shape to a more detailed picture of the various, ambivalent representations of cultural and religious difference in the Middle Ages, it is necessary to open up analysis to those texts that have been generally overlooked by the critics. One example is the anonymous verse narrative Die Heidin, a work that has so far been judged mainly from the point of view of its poor aesthetic qualities, and has therefore been considered ‘marginal’ in the German literary system. This paper will investigate the ‘construction’ of the image of the ‘non-Christians’ in each of the four redactions of this work. In spite of the differences, all of them are characterized by the lack of the traditional Manichean dualism which divides the world into ‘good Christians’ and ‘evil pagans’, thus revealing, at least implicitly, an open-minded attitude towards members of other belief systems.

Wolframs Parzival und das Problem des festen Textes: Die Varianten des Bogengleichnisses

2024-09-09T14:56:28+00:00

WOLFRAM’S ‘PARZIVAL’ AND THE PROBLEM OF THE STABLE TEXT: THE VARIANTS OF THE BOW PARABLE. All of today’s editions of Wolfram’s Parzival continue to be based on Lachmann’s 1833 edition. They will soon be replaced by a computer-generated edition, whose editors will be harnessing the principles of the New Philology. This postmodern theory presupposes that the medieval vernacular is fundamentally incompatible with the notion of a stable text; it also postulates that all manuscripts are of equal value. But this calls into question the very notions of author and text. Above and beyond its philological foundations, parts of which can be easily grasped, the New Philology also aims to abolish humans, and human agency, as the subject of history. However, many of their more practical demands have long become common currency. This essay uses Wolfram’s Parzival to study the problem of the instable text in order to demonstrate that its textual history provides no reason not to consider this text as a work, nor to treat Wolfram as anything other than an author in the modern sense of an author-subject. The recent notion of three ‘Leithandschriften’, which postulates, next to the groups *D and *G, the existence of a further group *T, of which precisely the oldest Parzival relic is a part, confirms this thesis, which is illustrated here by using the *T-variant of the bow parable.

Su alcune varianti redazionali del testimone fiorentino dell’Iwein di Hartmann von Aue

2024-09-09T14:59:41+00:00

ON SOME TEXTUAL VARIANTS OF THE FLORENCE MANUSCRIPT OF HARTMANN VON AUE’S ‘IWEIN’. An important witness of Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein is preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence (pressmark: B. R. 226). This manuscript (which also contains Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan and its continuation by Heinrich von Freiberg), has been dated to the first half of the 14th century and seems to be of Bohemian provenance. The text of the Iwein shows peculiar and often exclusive textual variants, as compared to the other witnesses of Hartmann’s masterwork. Its main feature is a considerable simplification of syntactical constructions, which often entails a certain banality in the description of the characters’ psychological traits and of the events, as well as the loss of peculiar literary narrative strategies, resulting in an apparent decrease of the poetic quality of the romance. It is noteworthy that the Florence Iwein shares most of these features with the late courtly romances, so that a late remodelling of Hartmann’s original text may be conjectured. Moreover, from a number of syntactical and prosodic strategies it may be inferred that the Florence Iwein preserves some echoes of an oral performance of the text. Finally, it should be noted that at least two important thematic focuses of Hartmann’s work (concerning Iwein’s relationship to the lion and to his wife Laudine) are stressed in a peculiar way in the Florence witness, where they receive a much clearer exemplification than in the presumably original version of the romance.

Zum Marner als Minnesänger

2024-09-09T15:01:53+00:00

MARNER AS ‘MINNESÄNGER’. This article deals with poems associated with a German poet of the 13th century known as ‘Der Marner’, under whose name both Latin and German Lieder as well as Sangsprüche have come down to us. Starting from the peculiar textual history of Marner’s Lieder, the paper discusses crucial questions such as stanza-linking and the overall unity of the poems, while examining the conception of the ‘author’, the formation of the œuvre as a whole, and the poetic status of the different types of poems. Finally, the important question of the authenticity of Marner’s Minnelieder is raised. The central thrust of the article is a new interpretation of Marner’s Minnelyrik, one that allows specific poetic patterns to emerge, and thus throws light on the underlying literary interests of the author and cultural movements of which he was a part. What will be argued is that this œuvre, notwithstanding its close adherence to tradition, has in fact a far from conventional organisation and a striking originality of detail. These, it will be claimed, are two strong reasons why – as is also suggested by the unequivocal findings from the textual records – the whole œuvre might more convincingly be attributed to a single Sänger than to a series of different poets. The conclusion is that the corpus of Minnelieder transmitted under the name of ‘Der Marner’ in the so called Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift (Codex Manesse) should be seen as the work of a Sänger who firmly belongs to the tradition of professional singers whose repertoire comprised both Minnelieder and Sangsprüche and who could rely on a considerable poetic ability of their own

Liebestod im Minnesang Heinrichs von Morungen

2024-09-09T15:03:56+00:00

‘LIEBESTOD’ IN THE LYRIC CORPUS OF HEINRICH VON MORUNGEN. This essay explores variations of the motif of the ‘Liebestod’ in the lyric corpus of Heinrich von Morungen, seen against the general background of the genre. The constellation of relationships, the absolute surrender despite the isolation of the lovers, serves to accentuate the classical paradoxe amoureux (Lieder XIX/XX; XVII); it directs the audience’s attention towards a literary life after death (Lieder VIII; XXII) and creates a conflict between love and Christian beliefs (Lieder VII; XXII; XXXIV). In the tradition of the classical Latin literature, and in contrast to the romantic ‘Liebestod’ of the 19th century, here every attempt at a harmonic resolution is rejected.

Das Gedächtnis des Schreibers B4/E. Ein Experiment zum Eingangsteil des Nibelungenliedes

2024-09-09T15:07:00+00:00

THE MEMORY OF SCRIBE B4/E. AN EXPERIMENT WITH THE OPENING SECTION OF THE ‘NIBELUNGENLIED’. The paper discusses the consequences emerging from the identity of scribe B4/E, who wrote in the following codices: St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. 857 (Nibelungenlied, manuscript B); Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Fragm. 44 (Nibelungenlied, fragment E); Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 13070 (Parzival, fragment a). It is argued that this identity leads to the existence of ‘Reminiszenzlesarten’ in the initial part of the Nibelungenlied in manuscript B (St. Gall, Cod. 857).

Oswald von Wolkenstein, Lied Kl 18: Liebe als Passion — Eine Symptomatik

2024-09-09T15:08:56+00:00

OSWALD VON WOLKENSTEIN, SONG 18: SYMPTOMS OF LOVE AS PASSION. The song (‘Lied’) Es fúgt sich is probably the most discussed text of Oswald von Wolkenstein. Mostly the focus has been on the abundant autobiographical information which is presented by the author. Instead the following article concentrates on the topics of love and passion which are exhaustively listed in the song according to the European tradition of love poetry. The poet depicts himself as addicted to a young woman whose name is not mentioned, and he imagines that a suitable marriage with a noble lady could be a solution for his problems. But he is afraid of a bickering wife and crying children, and he puts his only hope in the grace of God. Nevertheless at the same time he was indeed wooing a noble lady and wrote passionate songs for her. It is not biographical reality which is depicted in these songs, but they are subject to their genre, i.e. the tradition of a religious summary of life in one case, the tradition of love poetry in the other one. Oswald’s description of a yelling wife and children seems to have been so impressive to his audience that he used the topic later in two more songs, complaining his political problems and asking for support.

Metrica orale e tradizione scritta: l’esempio dei wechsell neidhartiani

2024-09-09T15:11:17+00:00

ORAL METER AND WRITTEN TRADITION: THE EXAMPLE OF NEIDHART’S ‘WECHSELL’. The present paper deals with a group of songs – the so-called wechsell – handed down with music in MS Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. Germ. Fol. 779 (MS c, ca. 1460) and attributed to the 13th-century poet Neidhart. The analysis of the songs is developed within a framework that combines Zumthor’s theoretical assumptions concerning the oral nature of medieval literature and the use of performance models elaborated in the fields of ethnomusicology and folklore studies. It is suggested that explorations of the performance of analogous expressions in contemporary traditions may provide a potential for new perspectives on medieval poetry and help develop an analytical matrix for the understanding of earlier texts

Hermann di Turingia, politico e mecenate, alla luce della poesia cortese

2024-09-09T15:13:35+00:00

HERMANN OF THURINGIA, POLITICIAN AND PATRON OF THE ARTS, IN THE LIGHT OF COURTLY POETRY. Between the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century, the court of Hermann of Thuringia was one of the most important literary centres in Germany, and many poets mention and praise Hermann as a patron of the arts and a politician. In this essay some poetic passages will be analyzed in order to reconstruct the literary and cultural life of the Thuringian court. It will be argued that two phases can be distinguished in the literary production. In the first phase Hermann commissioned three poets (Heinrich von Veldeke, Herbort von Fritzlar and Albrecht von Halberstadt) to write adaptations of classical works; these adaptations reproduce traits typical of courtly literature. Minne and Herrschaft are the main themes; the theme of Herrschaft, in the Eneit of Veldeke in particular, was intended to enhance the prestige of the Emperor Barbarossa and to legitimate the authority of Hermann of Thuringia. In the second phase poets like Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide worked for this patron and his court, but the contents of their poetry differ from the previous phase. In fact, both poets were seeking support and shelter and were therefore prepared to praise their patron, but also to criticize the decay of the court, since courtly values and rules were no longer observed.