Ermenrich's death

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The song of Ermenrichs Tod is a Low German poem from the late Middle Ages , which tells how Dietrich von Bern successfully defended himself against the King of Armentriken and killed him.

Dietrich and his followers are threatened with the gallows by King van Armentriken, who ruled Franckriken . He sets out to drive the king out and gets the help of the gigantic King Blödelinck , son of a widow from Franckriken. With his eleven companions he moves past the gallows to Freysack , where the king resides. There, disguised as dancers, they ask the king what he would reproach them for. The king doesn't answer, Dietrich cuts off his head. The Bernese kill everyone in the castle except for the loyal gatekeeper Reinholt van Meilan .

With the king the well-known King Ermenrich (= Ermanarich ) of the Dietrichsage is meant. Freisack probably goes back to Breisach, the home of Eckhart, the guardian of the Harlungs who were killed by Ermenrich. The manner of killing is reminiscent of the Swanhild saga, handed down in the Edda Hamdir song and where the brothers Hamdir and Sörli kill King Jörmunrek after they have passed the gallows that Jörmunrek had built for his son. It is interesting that the king rules here in Franckriken, the empire of the Franks. There is, however, a note in Johannes Agricola's collection of proverbs from 1523, which says that the Franks under Ermentfried, named here, had seized Lombardy and killed the Harlung from there. Perhaps a memory of the conquest of the Longobard Empire by Charlemagne appears here .

The song was published around 1535/45 in a Low German pamphlet under the title 'Van Dirick van dem Berne' and in a songbook print from around 1590/1600. The pamphlet still contains the subject-related Landsknechtlied Van Juncker Baltzer , which describes the deeds of a Landsknecht heap during the attempt of the Danish King Christian II to regain power from exile in the Netherlands in 1531/1532. In the same way, the threat to Dietrich from King van Armentriken is reminiscent of the events in Dietrich's escape epic .

Ermenrich's death belongs to a late medieval genre that is misleadingly referred to as a folk ballad , in which moving events are told in an often dramatically pointed form.

literature

  • Joachim Heinzle: Introduction to Middle High German Dietrichepik . Berlin: de Gruyter 1999. ISBN 3-11-015094-8 (especially p. 53 ff.)