Half a pear

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Sheet 26 of a medieval codex with dark brown letters and red highlights. The headline: the knight with half piren. Codex 2885 of the Austrian National Library
The half pear in an Innsbruck codex from 1393 (w). of the Austrian National Library , f.26r.

The Märe von der Halben Birne (also Die Halbe Pear A ) is a Middle High German poem in rhyming verses . As an author, Konrad von Würzburg remains controversial. Depending on whether he is recognized as an author, the dating also varies from the second half of the 13th century to around the year 1300. The clear description of the comical-grotesque sexual act of the knight Arnold and a princess with the help of the chambermaid and a richly pictorial In research, sexual metaphors have repeatedly led to the thematization of the obscenity of the work, up to and including the designation as a "dirty poem".

content

In the first part of the story, at the request of his daughter, a powerful king organizes a tournament , the winner of which is to receive her hand. On the tournament ground, the knight Arnold stands out from the other fighters in such a way that he is invited to dinner at the king's table and is assigned the king's daughter as a neighbor. Cheese and pears are served for dessert . Here, however, Arnold commits a faux pas: He cuts the pear in half without peeling it first and greedily eats half of it and only then puts the other half down for the princess. This disregard for table manners annoys her, and when the knight returns to the tournament area she exclaims mockingly:

ei schafaliers, who helt,
who
threw the
pears in the boneless half into the munt, what he still needs!
egg schafaliers unguoc,
who nuoc half a pear!

(V. 103-108)

Hey, Chevalier, great hero who put the pear half and unpeeled in his mouth, uncouth Chevalier who cleaned up the half pear!

Publicly humiliated, Arnold rides home. There his squire advises him to disguise himself as a fool and be deaf and mute . As such, no longer bound by courtly norms , he should try to stay close to the princess.

In the second part, the knight follows this advice until one night one of the princess's society ladies discovers him lying naked and dirty in front of the kemenate . The king's daughter orders the fool to be brought in to pass the time. Now it does not take long before the strong natûre (v. 274) (the strong nature / the violent urges) begins to show itself in him and he gets an erection. This sight arouses such intense desire in the princess that she dismisses everyone present except for an old confidante named Irmengard. With this she agrees that the deaf and mute would be ideal for a sexual adventure, since above all he could not reveal anything. The maid lays the princess and the disguised knight together in the bed; But Arnold suppresses all his desires and does not stir, much to the displeasure of the king's daughter. The servant knows how to help and puts the gate between the legs of the princess, grabs a staff and stabs the knight's rump so that he moves. At the crucial point of increasing pleasure, however, the fool stops. The princess then calls:

stüpfa, likes Irmengart
through dîne wîpliche art,
diu begs you from birth,
but the door is agitated!
(V. 385-388)

Stitch, maiden Irmengart, for the sake of your feminine nature, which you have given you from birth, so that the gate moves again!

The act is brought to an end and the wrong gate from the Palas thrown. The next morning he sneaks home and, on the advice of the squire, returns to the tournament as a knight. Once there, the princess greets him again with her shout, which the knight counters by repeating the words addressed to Irmengart during the night. In order not to suffer disgrace, the king's daughter has no choice but to marry the knight. Morality at the end urges the women to live modestly and not to show their desire, the man, however, should be aware of how the knight Arnold lost his reputation through the princess and only regained it after he had made a fool of himself . An advertiser should therefore be careful not to make even small mistakes.

Lore situation

The tradition of the half pear begins with manuscripts from the first half of the 14th century:

The writing languages ​​range from Alemannic / Alsatian, Bavarian / Austrian, a mixed language from the Swabian region, to Thuringian.

Furthermore, in three of the manuscripts (w; i; k) a proximity to medieval table breeding is noticeable.

Motifs

The market takes up elements that can be combined with one another, which other literary works also use again and again. According to Kurt Ranke , the half pear is composed of the following three motifs:

The stupid beau

The Knight of the Half Pear is described as extremely exemplary and even experienced in dealing with women, but still makes a mistake that earns him the resentment of the courted. Something similar can be found in a novella by Luigi Alamanni (1495): The Count of Barcelona drops a pomegranate at a banquet, but eats it anyway. The daughter of the Count of Toulouse then mocks him. Also in Jón Halldórsson's Clarus saga , which goes back to a Latin poem (circa 1300), Prince Tiburtius Clarus smudges himself in the presence of Serena, the daughter of the Frankish king, when he is eating an egg. The faux pas is based on an intentional push by the princess, but the prince is thrown out nonetheless.

Mockery and Replica

Often associated with this motive is the revenge of the vilified. In the Clarus saga, the prince seduces the princess with a trick. Similar to the revenge of the knight of the half pear, it takes place in the fragment of a fairy tale by the poor baker (15th century): As punishment, a wood thief has to kiss the buttocks of the mistress disguised as a man in the forest. However, he notices the masquerade and disguises himself as a fool who can only shout "Yes, ever, ever, yes". The story breaks off there, but due to the clear parallel to the Nouvelles récréations et joyeuxdevis des Bonaventure, it can be assumed that the reputation, as in the pear, will serve as a later revelation feature.

The pretended fool

The revenge happens, as in the fair of the poor baker, in the form of the disguised fool. In such stories, fools are repeatedly assumed to have a potent masculinity; In addition, the women do not have to fear repression because of the lover's social untrustworthiness. A motif that was used in the first troubadour Wilhelm IX. from Aquitaine appears, whereby in one of his songs the latter puts himself deaf and mute, in order to then have a longer rendezvous with two women. The same thing happens to the protagonist in Boccaccio's Dekameron in the first story of the third day, who as an alleged mute actually only wants to make a living through auxiliary work in the monastery, but is then used by the nuns for sexual services.

imagery

Image of a pear cut lengthways from the stem to the bottom
Half a pear

The pear is arguably the most striking symbol in history. The titles of the mare in four of the surviving manuscripts explicitly mention the pear or the half pear ( Dis is from the bir (S), Dit mer heyzet dy albe bern (p)). The pear meal in the first part already refers to the kemenate scene: while the knight at the table cannot hold back while eating, the princess in the kemenate no longer has any inhibitions after seeing the erect member (and thus shows the supposed real weakness of her sex on). Pears can also be seen as a symbol for female breasts or the male member in the literature of the swan . Eating pears together also indicates the sexual act. For example, in a song attributed to Neidhart , in which the lyrical I pears are offered (Neidhart Winterlieder 8, IV). Even the insult of the knight by the princess can already be seen as an allusion when she calls out to the whole court society: hiute und iemer vice hat he, / who has half biren az (v. 112f) (shame, today and forever, on him who ate half a pear). This deliberately mentioned half and not whole pear may indicate the knight's lack of steadfastness in the sexual sense. In the second part, disguised as a fool, he proves the opposite. The princess's sexual pleasure, described in the bower as deliciousness (v. 345), then refers back to the table scene and the knight's gobbling down of the pear.

On the other hand, one can see in the pear a mirror of courtly norms and table manners . This includes a discussion not only about correct behavior at court, but also about how to deal with violations of these rules. The public exposure of Arnold by the princess because of the wrong pear meal could become a greater embarrassment for her if her night of love with the fool were made public. Their exaggerated criticism therefore falls back on them. The interpretation of Stephen Wailes , the pear food was a satire on the medieval, aristocratic manners at the table, as well as pears with cheese actually be along a rural food is contradicted it.

The particularly pictorial description of the protagonist's penis by means of metaphors is also one that is “unparalleled” within fairytale poetry. The male member in the flaccid state is dubbed hedgehog (342) or worm (279). The erect penis, on the other hand, is known as the eleventh vinger (289) (eleventh finger), even age (277) ( alter ego ) or minnedorn (290) (love sting ). The connection to the first part is clearly drawn when the phallus is described as an ûfgerihter sper (282) (erect barrier). The upright lance was also used in the tournament. The word ger (281) just one line above also refers to the reckless behavior at the table, which is reflected here in the sexual, instinctual behavior. Female sexual pleasure, on the other hand, is usually equated with a fire ( dâ lac from minnen unde bran / diu minneclîhe künigin (350) The beautiful king's daughter lay full of love desires and fire), which is triggered by the erect penis.

Konrad von Würzburg as an author

Drawing from the Codex Manesse. Konrad von Würzburg dictates to a clerk.
Conrad of Würzburg. Representation in Codex Manesse , beginning of the 14th century, f.383r.

Konrad von Würzburg unanimously named four manuscripts as the author. Nevertheless, the authorship has been questioned again and again, since Karl Lachmann claimed the unknown author had put the story on Konrad.

It was not until Georg Arnold Wolff tried to prove Konrad's authorship with his edition from 1893 by showing stylistic similarities. However, it was primarily Hans Laudan and Konrad Zwierzina who opposed this , refuting Wolff's theses and showing deviations in style and rhyme from Konrad's other works. The authorship was then long considered refuted, although Horst Brunner noted in the author's lexicon in 1985 that it needed further clarification. In his edition, Klaus Grubmüller also considers Konrad to be at least likely as an author or someone who was well acquainted with his style. Finally, in 2000, Edith Feistner pointed to the no longer tenable methods of Laudan and Zwierzina and also showed a great deal of agreement with Konrad's oeuvre in terms of content . She therefore demanded: "Give him back the 'half pear'!" Since then, Konrad's authorship has again been considered more likely in research.

In retrospect, the more recent research also suggests that the older research wanted to protect Konrad's reputation as a poet from the obscene eyesore of the half pear and that less scientific-objective motives were based than moral concerns.

Hans Folz: The half pear B

The Nuremberg master- singer Hans Folz also wrote a version of the half pear, which is preserved in a Nuremberg print from 1483/88. It is so closely based on the older version that Folz must have known the fairy tale, and it probably comes from a variant close to the manuscript k. It is also called The Half Pear B to distinguish it from the older version A.

However, some differences can be determined: The knight is not introduced as otherwise exemplary, but does not really know how to behave around the princess from the start. In addition, Folz's interpretation lacks the abundance of metaphors that pear A has, such as the numerous names for the male member. The reproach for the princess' sexual derailment also seems to be less of a focus in Pear B than in A. The moral at the end then only applies to the female gender and even more than in its counterpart is the scolding of the knight by the king's daughter in the pillory, but no longer demands feminine modesty. In contrast to the older pear, there is no warning to the man.

literature

Text output

  • Hans Folz: The half pear. In: Jürgen Schulz-Grobert (Ed.): Smaller Middle High German verse stories. Middle High German - New High German (= Reclams Universal Library. Volume 18431). Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-15-018431-2 , pp. 218-231.
  • Konrad von Würzburg (?): From the knight with the half pear. In: Klaus Grubmüller (Ed.): Novellistics of the Middle Ages. Fairy poetry (= library of German classics. Volume 138). Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-618-66230-0 , pp. 178-207.
  • Georg Arnold Wolff: Diu halbe bir, ein Schwank, with introduction and remarks  - Internet Archive in the older edition from 1893.

Research literature

  • Horst Brunner: Konrad von Würzburg. In: The German literature of the Middle Ages. Author Lexicon. 2nd Edition. Volume 5, Berlin / New York 1985, Sp. 272-303.
  • Edith Feistner: Culinary encounters: Konrad von Würzburg and Die Halbe Pear. In: Dorothea Klein, Elisabeth Lienert, Johannes Rettelbach (eds.): From the Middle Ages to the Modern Times. Festschrift for Horst Brunner . Wiesbaden 2000, ISBN 3-89500-192-9 , pp. 291-304.
  • Irmgard Gephard: Half pears and other merrymaking. To the medieval tale of the "Halben Pear" by Konrad von Würzburg. In: Karl Fallend (Hrsg.): Witz und Psychoanalyse (= psychoanalysis and qualitative social research . Volume 5). Innsbruck 2006, ISBN 3-7065-4237-4 , pp. 87-94.
  • Satu Heiland: visualization and rhetoric of gender. Strategies for staging female sexuality in the market. (= Literature - theory - history . No. 11). Berlin / Boston 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-042707-3 . (See dissertation Uni Bonn 2014)
  • Gaby Herchert: "Field with my best field" . Investigations into erotic songbook songs of the late Middle Ages. With dictionary and text collection . (= International university publications . Volume 201). Münster / New York 1996, ISBN 3-89325-423-4 . (See Diss. Univ. Duisburg 1995)
  • Jan-Dirk Müller: The hovezuht and its price. On the problem of courtly behavioral regulation in Ps.-Konrad's "Halber Pear". In: Yearbook of the Oswald von Wolkenstein Society. Volume 3, 1984/1985, pp. 281-311.
  • Kurt Ranke: Pear. Half a pear. In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales. Volume 2, Berlin / New York 1979, Col. 421-425.
  • Rüdiger Schnell: Literary rules for staging and evaluating missteps. In: Peter von Moos (Ed.): The misstep. Failure and oversight in the modern age (= norm and structure. Volume 15). Cologne / Vienna / Weimar 2001, ISBN 3-412-06101-8 , pp. 265-315.
  • Mireille Schnyder: The discovery of desire. The fairy tale of half a pear. In: Contributions to the history of the German language and literature. Vol. 122, No. 2, 2000, pp. 263-278.
  • Stephen L. Wailes: Konrad von Würzburg and Pseudo-Konrad. Varieties of Humor in the “Märe”. In: The Modern Language Review. Volume 69, No. 1, 1974, p. 107.
  • Norbert Richard Wolf: The half pear A. In: The German literature of the Middle Ages. Author Lexicon. 2nd Edition. Volume 3, Berlin 1981, Col. 404 f.
  • Volker Zapf: Konrad von Würzburg. In: German Literature Lexicon. The middle age. Volume 5, Berlin / Boston 2013, Col. 587-607.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Codex 2885
  2. ↑ Irmgard Gephard: Half pears and other merrymaking. To the medieval tale of the "Halben Pear" by Konrad von Würzburg . In: Karl Fallend (Ed.): Witz und Psychoanalyse (=  psychoanalysis and qualitative social research . Volume 5 ). Innsbruck 2006, ISBN 3-7065-4237-4 , p. 87-94 .
  3. ↑ Norbert Richard Wolf: The Half pear A . In: The German literature of the Middle Ages. Author Lexicon . 2nd Edition. tape 3 . Berlin 1981, Sp. 404 f .
  4. ^ Wilhelm Grimm: Konrads von Würzburg golden smithy . Berlin 1840.
  5. ↑ Mireille Schnyder: The discovery of desire. The fairy tale of half a pear . In: Contributions to the history of the German language and literature . tape 122 , no. 2 , 2000, pp. 263-278 .
  6. ↑ Hans Laudan: The half pear not by Konrad von Würzburg . In: Journal for German Antiquity and Literature . tape 50 , no. 1,2 , 1908, pp. 158-166 .
  7. ↑ Quoted and translated from: Gephart 2006, p. 88
  8. ↑ Quoted and translated from: Gephart 2006, p. 89.
  9. ↑ Manuscript census : Die halbe Birne A. Retrieved on October 23, 2017; see also edition by Grubmüller, p. 1083.
  10. ↑ Edith Feistner: Culinary encounters: Konrad von Würzburg and the half pear . In: Dorothea Klein, Elisabeth Lienert, Johannes Rettelbach (eds.): From the Middle Ages to the Modern Times. Festschrift for Horst Brunner . Wiesbaden 2000, ISBN 3-89500-192-9 , pp. 296 .
  11. ↑ Luigi Alamanni: The Countess of Toulouse . In: Adalbert von Keller (Ed.): Italiänischer Novellenschatz . tape 2 . Leipzig 1851, p. 62–91 , urn : nbn: de: bvb: 12-bsb10756468-2 .
  12. ↑ Jón Halldórsson: Clari saga . Ed .: Gustaf Cederschiöld (=  Old Norse Saga Library . Volume 12 ). Hall 1907, p. 17-24 ( archive.org ).
  13. ↑ Kurt Ranke: Pear. Half a pear . In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales . tape 2 . Berlin / New York 1979, Sp. 422 .
  14. ^ Wilhelm IX. (Aquitaine): Ferai un vers, pos mi sonelh . In: Dietmar Rieger (Ed.): Medieval Poetry of France I. Provencal - German (=  Reclams Universal Library . No. 7620 [5] ). tape 1 . Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-15-007620-X , p. 28-35 .
  15. ^ Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron. Il Decamerone . Ed .: Michael Holzinger. Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-1-4823-3480-7 ( zeno.org ).
  16. ↑ Neidhart von Reuental, Edmund Wiessner: Die Lieder Neidhart (=  Old German Text Library . No. 44 ). Berlin 1955, p. 67 .
  17. ↑ Satu Heiland: Visualization and rhetoric of gender. Strategies for staging female sexuality in the market. Zgl. Diss. Uni Bonn 2014 (=  literature - theory - gender . No. 11 ). Berlin / Boston 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-042707-3 , pp. 130-134 .
  18. ↑ Feistner 2000.
  19. ↑ Jan-Dirk Müller: The hovezuht and its price. On the problem of courtly behavioral regulation in Ps.-Konrad's "Halber Pear". In: Yearbook of the Oswald von Wolkenstein Society. Volume 3, 1984/1985, p. 294 f.
  20. ↑ Satu Heiland: Visualization and rhetoric of gender. Strategies for staging female sexuality in the market. (=  Literature - theory - history . No. 11 ). Berlin / Boston 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-042707-3 , pp. 200 (additional dissertation at the University of Bonn 2014).
  21. ↑ Cod. Pal. germ. 848 Great Heidelberg song manuscript (Codex Manesse - Zurich, approx. 1300 to approx. 1340). uni-heidelberg.de.
  22. ^ Karl Lachmann: Selection from the High German poets of the thirteenth century . Berlin 1820.
  23. ^ Georg Arnold Wolff: Thu half bir. A Schwank Konrad von Würzburg . Erlangen 1893 (see Dissertation University Erlangen).
  24. ↑ Laudan 1908, pp. 158-166.
  25. ↑ Konrad Zwierzina: Middle High German studies 1-7 . In: Journal for German Antiquity and Literature . tape 44 , 1900.
  26. ^ Horst Brunner: Konrad von Würzburg . In: The German literature of the Middle Ages. Author Lexicon . 2nd Edition. tape 5 . Berlin / New York 1985, Sp. 299 .
  27. ↑ Feistner 2008, p. 304.
  28. ↑ Janota (1997) only mentions that the pear pretends to be written by Konrad (Johannes Janota: Die deutsche Literatur im late Mittelalter. Von Helmut De Boor † (= History of German literature from the beginning to the present . Volume III / 1 ) 5th edition. Munich 1997, p. 242). In 2002 he noticed that Konrad's authorship was being claimed again recently. (Johannes Janota: From the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the modern age. Orientation through vernacular writing (1280 / 90–1380 / 90) (= history of German literature from the beginnings to the beginning of the modern age . Volume III / 1) Tübingen 2004, p . 266)
  29. ↑ Heiland 2015, p. 195.
  30. ↑ Hans Folz: In franckenreich ein künig sas ..., [Nuremberg approx. 1483/88], Wolfenbüttel Herzog-August-Bibliothek Rara: A 117 Eth. (7); see also the complete catalog of the incontinence prints .
  31. ↑ Wolff 1893, p. CVII.
  32. ↑ Rüdiger Schnell: Literary rules of the game for the staging and evaluation of missteps . In: Peter von Moos (Ed.): The misstep. Offense and oversight in modern times (=  norm and structure . No. 15 ). Cologne / Vienna / Weimar 2001, p. 265-315 .