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Updated: June 28, 2025
Popes, kings, and knights incited the peoples to free the Holy Land; but the people did not go, for the unknown cause which had previously impelled them to go no longer existed. The history of the Godfreys and the Minnesingers can evidently not cover the life of the peoples.
"Is that from Shakspere?" "No; from Lope de Vega." "You are deeply read in the lore of antiquity, and the Aubades and Watch-Songs of the old Minnesingers. What do you think of the shoe-maker poets that came after them, with their guilds and singing-schools?
In medieval times, when the Nibelungenlied story was popular, minnesingers and harpers, in an attempt to please their audiences, would cast about for fresh incidents to introduce into the story.
We can thus see how novel and subsidiary passages might attach themselves to the epic. But a day came when the minnesingers of Germany felt that it behoved them to fix once and for all time the shape of the Lay of the Nibelungs. Indeed, not one, but several poets laboured at this task.
Sometimes the song took the form of a warning from the watchman, telling that daylight was near and the knight must depart. Besides giving the world a host of shorter songs, the period of the Minnesingers brought forth some really great poets who were successful in the larger forms.
It is, this earliest Italian poetry, like the more refined poetry of troubadours and minnesingers, eminently an importuning of highborn but loosely living women. And as it becomes more Italian and urban, it becomes also, under the strict vigilance of burgher husbands, considerably more platonic.
First of all, let us look at the epic cycle, which, although known to us only in poems no older than those of the trouvères and minnesingers who sang of Charlemagne and Arthur, is in reality far more ancient, and on account of its antiquity and its consequent disconnection with mediæval religious and political interests, was thrown aside even by the nations to which it belonged, by the Scandinavians who took to writing sagas about the wars of Charlemagne against Saracens, and by the Germans who preferred to hear the adventures of Welsh and Briton, Launcelots and Tristrams.
"I have taken the cross on account of my sins," sings Albrecht von Johansdorf, one of the most earnest of the minnesingers; "now let God help, till my return, the woman who has great sorrow on my account, in order that I may find her possessed of her honour; let Him grant me this prayer.
From this extreme worship arose the schools of the Minnesingers and the Troubadours, who paid her manifold homage in the shape of poetry and song. According to the general statements of history, the Minnesingers began their career in the time of Frederick Barbarossa, of Germany. This would place their origin in the latter part of the twelfth century.
In this democratic and philosophizing Italy, there was not the gulf which separated the chivalric poets, men of the sword and not of books, from the great world of religious mysticism; for, though the minnesingers especially were extremely devout and sang many a strange love-song to the Virgin; they knew, they could know, nothing of the contemplative religion of Eckhardt and his disciples humble and transcendental spirits, whose words were treasured by the sedentary, dreamy townsfolk of the Rhine, but would have conveyed no meaning even to the poet of the Grail epic, with its battles and feasts, its booted and spurred slapdash morality, Wolfram von Eschenbach.
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