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In some of these schools the curriculum included "Reading and sewing, threepence a week: a penny extra for manners." An old thirteenth century work, called the "Kleine Heldenbuch," contains a verse which may be thus translated: "Who taught me to embroider in a frame with silk? And to draw and design the wild and tame Beasts of the forest and field?
These, however, were seized upon by certain poets of the time, probably Henry of Ofterdingen, Wolfram of Eschenbach, and others, and reduced to the epic form, in which they have come down to us under the titles of the Heldenbuch and the Nibelungen Lied. They contain many singular traits of a warlike age, and we have proof of their great antiquity in the morals and manners which they describe.
None of the other poems which have come down to us from this period bear an earlier date than the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when they were remodeled and appeared in the form of the Heldenbuch and Nibelungen Lied.
Early Literature; Translation of the Bible by Ulphilas; the Hildebrand Lied. 2. The Age of Charlemagne; his Successors; the Ludwig's Lied; Roswitha; the Lombard Cycle. 3. The Suabian Age; the Crusades; the Minnesingers; the Romances of Chivalry; the Heldenbuch; the Nibelungen Lied. 4.
Once they were religious. Now they are in a condition analogous to that of the German Heldenbuch. They have been cast into a new form, but they are not as yet quite degraded to the nursery tale.
The Heldenbuch relates the deeds of Theodoric and Attila and the outpouring of the Goths into the Roman Empire. In the Nibelungen-lied the hero is Siegfried, the Achilles of the North, the embodiment of beauty, courage and virtue. The same personages are met with in these German legends, as in the Scandinavian mythology, only in the latter they take on a more godlike form.
The Heldenbuch, the ancient book in which are collected the deeds of the German heroes of old, says that God gave the dwarfs being because the land on the mountains was altogether waste and uncultivated, and there was much store of silver and gold and precious stones and pearls still in the mountains.
The German songs that Charlemagne had collected and put in writing are undoubtedly the outcome of these ancient Gothic poems of the first Christian era. Their substance is found in the Nibelungen-lied and the Heldenbuch.
By the time she was eighteen she could embroider to admiration, and had worked whole histories of the saints in tapestry with such strength of expression in their countenances that they looked like so many souls in purgatory. She could read without great difficulty, and had spelled her way through several Church legends and almost all the chivalric wonders of the Heldenbuch.
When it is borne in mind that the most ancient and mythic of these legends have been taken down from the trembling memories of old squaws who never understood their inner meaning, or from ordinary senaps who had not thought of them since boyhood, it will be seen that the preservation of a mass of prose poems, equal in bulk to the Kalevala or Heldenbuch, is indeed almost miraculous.
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