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Many painstaking attempts have been made to discover the identity of the writer of our poem, but even the most plausible of all these theories which considers Kurenberg, one of the earliest of the "Minnesingers", to be the author, because of the similarity of the strophic form of our poem to that used by him, is not capable of absolute proof, and recent investigations go to show that Kurenberg was indebted to the "Nibelungen" strophe for the form of his lyric, and not the "Nibelungenlied" to him.
The first three orders were doubtless in existence long before Homer was born; they were the bards, trouveurs and minnesingers of their time; their like are the instruments of culture in any race during its pralayas. So you find the professional story-tellers in the East today.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, letters, so long monopolized by the clergy, passed from their hands to those of the princes and nobles; and in the next century the songs of the minnesingers gave way to the pedantic craft of the mastersingers. A great intellectual regeneration followed the Reformation, but it was of brief duration.
The predilection for ancient German art and poetry had, in the literary world, been merely produced by the reaction of German intelligence against foreign imitation; this literary reaction, however, happened coincidently with and aided that in the political world. The Nibelungen, the Minnesingers, the ancient chronicles, became a popular study.
No race in the world possesses a richer anecdotal lore than the Jews such pawky, even blasphemous humor, not understandable of the heathen, and to a suspicious mind Pinchas's overflowing cornucopia of such would have suggested a prior period of Continental wandering from town to town, like the Minnesingers of the middle ages, repaying the hospitality of his Jewish entertainers with a budget of good stories and gossip from the scenes of his pilgrimages.
The stiff and quaint but vigorous productions of the old German painters were drawn forth from the obscurity where they had long mouldered; the glorious old cathedrals were repaired and embellished; the lays of the minnesingers, collected by Tieck, were on every lip, and the records of the olden times were ransacked for historic and traditionary lore.
The earlier, the Austro-Bavarian school, flourished in the valley of the Danube: the later minnesingers form the Rhine school. In the latter case, Provençal influence is not disputed; but the question whether the Austro-Bavarian school was exempt from it, has given rise to considerable discussion.
The Middle Ages, so full of fashions in literary matters, possessed no classics; the minnesingers knew nothing of the stern old Teutonic war songs; the meistersängers had forgotten the minnesingers; the trouvères and troubadours knew nothing of "The Chanson de Roland," and Villon knew nothing of them; only in Italy, where the Middle Ages came to an end and the Renaissance began with the Lombard league, was there established a tradition of excellence, with men like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, handed down from generation to generation; even as, while in the north there came about the strange modification which substituted the French of Rabelais for the French of Chrestien de Troyes, the German of Luther for the German of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the Italian language, from Ciullo d'Alcamo almost to Boiardo and Lorenzo dei Medici, remained virtually identical.
Behold me, then, with five hours around my neck, like so many millstones, in Strasburg, on the abjured Rhine! Had I not vowed never to visit that bewitched current again? Was it not by Rhine-bank that I learned to quote the minnesingers and to unctuate my hair? From her owl-tower did not old Frau Himmelauen use to observe me, my cane, and my curls, and my gloves?
There are no minnesingers or bards nowadays, and celebrity is created almost exclusively by the newspapers. The day after the dedication of the bridge, I greedily snatched up the local Messenger, and looked for myself in it. I spent a long time running my eyes over all the four pages, and at last there it was hurrah!
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