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Updated: June 28, 2025
Pour out thy holy wine of song upon the soft-footed darkness, till, like a priest of the inmost temple, 'tis drunken with fair intelligences! Thus the old minstrels and minnesingers. Strong and full sang the nightingales that night Farina held watch by the guilty castle that entombed his living beloved. The castle looked itself a denser shade among the moonthrown shadows of rock and tree.
Finally, the German minnesingers knew and appreciated troubadour lyrics, and imitations or even translations of Provençal poems may be found in Heinrich von Morungen, Friedrich von Hausen, and many others. Hence the poetry of the troubadours is a subject of first-rate importance to the student of comparative literature.
"Pshaw!" said the old man; "she will never have your color in her cheeks, if she persist in moping in her chamber, reading old legends and missals, and the rhymes of worthless minnesingers. But let her go; I have one daughter who can live with the hunt, and see the boar at bay without flinching. Sound, bugle, and forward!"
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.
They fight till set of sun, and then slacken their armour to waft a ballad to their beloved by moonlight, covered with stains of battle as they are, and weary! 'What a girl! Minnesingers! Yes; I know stories of those Minnesingers. They came to the castle Margarita, a bead of thy cross is broken. I will attend to it. Wear the pearl one till I mend this.
The Minnesingers and their coevals spoke fairly enough about Love, and probably had studied their subject; but, rely upon it, passionate Romance died in Germany when once the close stoves prevailed. Don't you envy the imagination of the dreamer who could trace a shape of loveliness in those dreadful glazed tiles?
"These artists, especially, became imbued with the new ideas, and instead of continuing to create for art's sake only, as had been the custom of their fathers, embellishing their houses and articles of use with their artistic creations, or spreading their poetry and music and national sagas abroad after the manner of the Minnesingers of old, they, with the others who had become affected, began to adopt new customs to build churches and temples in which to worship and preserve their arts, and sought to introduce money and taxation and all that they entail among the people in order that the new institutions might be maintained.
Whatever the troubadours and minnesingers may have done toward establishing a metrical melodic form of monophonic character was soon obliterated by the swift popularity of part singing and the immense vogue of the secular songs of the polyphonic composers.
The food for its satire, too, is most admirably chosen, for no feature of the social life of that place and period is more amiably absurd than the efforts of the handicraftsmen and tradespeople, with their prosaic surroundings, to keep alive by dint of pedantic formularies the spirit of minstrelsy, which had a natural stimulus in the chivalric life of the troubadours and minnesingers of whom the mastersingers thought themselves the direct and legitimate successors.
Scott was also numbered in this class; and it is from these old German legends of the Minnesingers that Richard Wagner has drawn the material for Lohengrin, Parsifal, and others of his magnificent operas. In one department German scholars have attained a high standard, and that is as historians of ancient classical literature.
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