Heart marches

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The Heart Fair is a Middle High German verse novella that Konrad von Würzburg wrote in the second half of the 13th century. It tells a love triangle between a knight, a lady and her husband. The love between the lady and the knight is negotiated, the intensity and quality of which is revealed in the death of the lovers.

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In the prologue of the “Heart Marriage”, with a reference to Gottfried von Strasbourg (verses 9 ff.), The following story is declared as an example of perfect love; a love that lasts beyond death. In addition, the function and effect of literature is addressed to stimulate the recipients to self-observation and self-reflection of their own behavior.

A love triangle is told between three nameless characters : a knight loves a lady who is married. To divide the lovers, the husband wants to travel to the Holy Land with his lady. But she asks the knight to travel there to calm her husband down. On the way to Jerusalem the knight dies of a longing for love and sends his squire back to the lady with his embalmed heart. However, the squire is intercepted by the husband. He has the heart prepared as a dish and puts it in front of his wife, who eats it. After learning that it was her lover's heart, she recognizes his unconditional love and dies herself.

In the epilogue , the extraordinary and exemplary nature of the story is emphasized. Even if the narrator takes the position that there is or will not be a similar ability to love in the present and future, this love story could serve to increase the value of love in reality by placing the quality of a love relationship in the foreground will. The narrator calls himself Konrad von Würzburg .

Lore

The 'Herzmare' is attested by 14 sources: seven complete manuscripts , two almost complete manuscripts, one burned or one lost manuscript, a fragment and two lost manuscripts, of which only the tables of contents have survived.

The length of the text varies between 484 and 602 verses. The 'Herzmare' has been handed down in collective manuscripts together with other works of different genres, the only exceptions being the manuscripts “w” from the 1st half of the 16th century and “n” from the 14th century as individual traditions. The manuscripts are dated to the 14th to 16th centuries, with a focus on the 14th and 15th centuries. Century. The language is Upper German throughout (Alemannic, Bavarian, Upper Palatinate, Swabian). The manuscripts “l” (around 1430/33) and “m” (1455–1458) offer a detailed end to the mention of Konrad . In two manuscripts the text is incorrectly attributed to Gottfried von Strasbourg .

Material history

The heart itself is a common element of narrative motifs in all cultures in both sacred and profane contexts. The motif of eating a heart is the " most common, worldwide and spread over long periods of time ".

Ideas of the heart as the seat of life force and soul, as the seat of worldly and spiritual love and as the seat of understanding, courage, fear, cowardice and vice come into play . Metaphorically , the heart stands for the 'innermost part of man'.

Stories of the 'heart march' type are widespread in medieval European literature. This is usually an act of revenge by a jealous husband who sets the heart of a rival in front of his wife for dinner.

The first surviving testimonies come from the French-speaking world, for example in the Tristan novel (approx. 1170) by Thomas d'Angleterre , in which a Lai is summarized in eight verses and tells of how a jealous count gives his wife the heart of her lover Guirun Essen vorsetzt, or in the Lai d'Ignature (around 1200) of the Renaut de Beaujeu , in which the story is parodied: Here the protagonist Ignaure is killed by the husbands of his twelve lovers and his heart and genitals are served as pie to the women.

This story is widespread in the Middle Ages and modern times in the following form : The knight is wounded on a crusade . Before his death, he orders his squire to deliver his heart to his beloved. However, this messenger is intercepted by the jealous husband, who has the heart prepared for his wife. After unknowingly eating it, she learns the truth and dies because she no longer eats any more food.

Konrad von Würzburg introduced this motif into German-language literature. A presumed French oral or written source (reference in verses 23 et seq.) Has not yet been proven. It is noticeable that the three protagonists of the story - knight, lady and husband - remain nameless and are only characterized superficially, so that they are not embedded in a concrete context. With Konrad, however, it is not a revenge version, but the lover dies of a broken heart. This gives the heart a new function: from an “ object of vengeance ” it becomes a “ symbol of love ”. The motif has been used by Giovanni Boccaccio (in the Dekamerone IV, 1 and IV, 9), Hans Sachs , Gottfried August Bürger , the painter Müller , and Ludwig Uhland , for example, until modern times .

The minne concept

The different minne concepts of the three figures are striking : while the husband is of the opinion that love disappears through spatial separation, the lady takes the view that love survives separation. The knight himself also believes that love will continue, but assumes that the separation will lead to the death of the lovers, as the story tells. The separation does not represent a danger for love, but for the lovers, and causes their death: the knight dies from longing, the lady from dismay.

The statements in the prologue and epilogue make it clear that the minne concept of the narrator corresponds to that of the knight. In this story, love expresses the closest togetherness and equality of lovers. This sets this form of minne apart from the one that characterizes Hohe Minne . The special qualities of this love are intensity and constancy, whereby love proves itself in pain - as a sign of increased sensitivity - and death in overcoming all obstacles (love-suffering complex). This love seems to stand outside the valid social and moral orders, since the ties between wife and husband hardly seem to affect it.

Text output

  • Smaller poems by Konrad von Würzburg, I: Der Welt Lohn - Das Herzmaere - Heinrich von Kempten. Edited by Edward Schröder . 3rd edition Berlin 1959.
  • Middle Ages. Texts and certificates. Edited by Helmut De Boor. Munich 1965, Vol. 2, pp. 1229-1236 (Das Herzmaere).
  • Novellistics of the Middle Ages. Fairy poetry. Edited, translated and commented by KLAUS GRUBMÜLLER (Library of German Classics 138). Frankfurt a. M. 1996, pp. 262-295 (Das Herzmaere) and pp. 1120-1132 (Commentary).

literature

  • David Blamires: Konrad von Würzburg's 'Herzmaere' in the context of the stories of the heart eaten . In: Yearbook of the Oswald von Wolkenstein Society 5 , 1989, pp. 251–261.
  • Rüdiger Brandt: Konrad von Würzburg. Smaller epic works 2nd , revised and expanded edition. Berlin 2009.
  • Klaus Düwel: Heart . In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales (EM) 6 by Rolf Wilhelm Brednich (Ed.). Berlin, New York 1990, col. 923-929.
  • Barbara Feix: "... with minneclichen eyes": the visualization of love and knowledge in the 'Herzmære' of Konrad von Würzburg . In: Frauenblicke, Männerblicke, Frauenzimmer. Studies on look, gender and space . Edited by Waltraud Fritsch-Rößler . St. Ingbert 2002, pp. 83-93.
  • Albert Gier : Heart mare . In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales (EM) 6 , 1990, Sp. 933-939.
  • Anne Gouws: Construction principles of the verse novellas of Konrad von Würzburg . In: Acta Germanica 14 (1981), pp. 23-38.
  • Christian Kiening: Aesthetics of love death. Using the example of Tristan and Herzmaere . In: The strange beauty. Dimensions of the Aesthetic in Medieval Literature . by Christopher Young and Manuel Braun (Eds.) (Trends in Medieval Philology 12). Berlin - New York 2007, pp. 171–194.
  • Christa Ortmann, Hedda Ragotzky: On the function of exemplary triuwe evidence in Minne-Mären: 'The faithful wife' of Herrand von Wildonie , 'The heart of the world' Konrad von Würzburg and the 'honor of women' . In: Smaller narrative forms in the Middle Ages . by Klaus Grubmüller (Ed.). Paderborn u. a. 1988, pp. 89-109.
  • Heinz Rölleke: To build up the Herzmaere Konrad von Würzburg . In: ZfdA 98 (1969), pp. 126-133.
  • Ursula Schulze: Konrad von Würzburg's novelistic design art in 'Herzmaere' . In: Mediaevalia litteraria. Festschrift for Helmut de Boor . by Ursula Henning and Herbert Kolb (eds.). Munich 1971, pp. 451-484.
  • Wolfgang Stammler: Wolframs Willehalm and Konrads Herzmaere in tradition from the Middle Rhine . In: ZfdPh 82 (1963), pp. 1-29.
  • Burghart Wachinger: On the reception of Gottfried von Straßburg in the 13th century . In: German literature of the late Middle Ages . Hamburger Colloquium 1973. Ed. By Wolfgang Harms and L. Peter Johnson (ed.). Berlin 1975, pp. 56-82.

Web links

  • Konrad von Würzburg: The heart fair . Text with New High German translation and commentary by Albert K. Wimmer and WTH Jackson.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ s. [1]
  2. ↑ Brandt 2009, p. 82
  3. ↑ Düwel 1990, Col. 924
  4. ↑ See Düwel 1990, Col. 923
  5. ↑ See Blamires 1989, p. 252
  6. ↑ See Gier 1990, Col. 934
  7. ↑ Gier 1990, col. 935
  8. ↑ See Brandt 2009, p. 85
  9. ↑ See Schulze 1971, p. 459 f. - See also Brandt 2009, p. 83 f.
  10. ↑ See Schulze 1971, p. 454
  11. ↑ Schulze 1971, p. 465 f.
  12. ↑ Schulze 1971, p. 469