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Updated: July 28, 2025
Whether Tannhäuser himself was real is an open question; but there can be no doubt about Walther von der Vogelweide, who was one of Germany's greatest masters in the shorter forms. Examples of still another style in the work of the Minnesingers are almost surely a direct imitation of the work of the Trouvères of Northern France.
A spark from the Saracenic schools and poets of Spain may have flitted into Provence to kindle the elements of modern literature into its first development, the songs of the Troubadours. Almost contemporary were the lays of the Minnesingers in Germany and the romances of the Trouvères in Northern France.
There the minnesingers had gathered in contest a song; thither as a modern Elijah came the great monk, weary of soul, yet whose immortal genius unfolded the page of Sacred Writ; and down the wood-clad slope came issuing the melody of the Hebrew psalmist, translated into German speech and entering into German hearts, mingled with the narrative of the Redeemer's passion lit by awful and solemn glory of Eternal Love.
The language ordinarily used by the Minnesingers was that of Suabia, which was that employed at the imperial and many lesser courts of Germany. They used it with a skill and delicacy which was generally far superior to the style of the Troubadours.
What do I care for all the worshippers of a very poor idol who call themselves my 'adorers'? I need only detain wandering pilgrims, or invite minnesingers to the castle, to shorten the hours. And he for whom yonder child-angel's heart yearns would he not be a fool to prefer a Will-o'-the-wisp like me? Besides, it is easy for the peasant to give his neighbour the cloud which hangs over his field.
Those high and mighty barons, those great dukes and princes, would be as if they had never been they and everything that related to them far and near. Their strong castles, their palaces, their fortresses fall and moulder away into masses of ruin, vague remembrancers! Of all that greatness one monument alone remains the chronicles, the songs of bards and minnesingers. Parchment alone remains!"
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries the influence of German customs and habits is apparent in Bohemian literature; and in the thirteenth and fourteenth this influence increased, and was manifest in the lyric poetry, which echoed the lays of the German Minnesingers. Of these popular songs, however, very few are left.
And those devotions I am now to pay, Are written in my heart, not in thy book; And I shall read them there without a taper." They were right, those old German Minnesingers, to sing the pleasant summer-time! What a time it is! How June stands illuminated in the Calendar! The windows are all wide open; only the Venetian blinds closed.
Equally significant is the growth of the service des dames which, although invested by troubadours and minnesingers with a halo of religious allegory, was disliked by the Church, not merely from a dread of possible abuses, but as inherently idolatrous. The cult of the Virgin, while doing honour to the new conception of womanhood, was also a protest against a secular romanticism.
Nay, more difficult still to believe because the whole madness of individuals is more credible than the half-madness of the whole world is it possible to believe that, as the poems of innumerable trouvères and troubadours, minnesingers and Italian poets, as the legion of mediæval romances of the cycles of Charlemagne, Arthur, and Amadis would have it, that during so long a period of time society could have been enthralled by this hysterical, visionary, artificial, incredible religion of mediæval love?
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