From the grass cutter
Von der Grasmetzen is a mini speech by the Swabian poet Hermann von Sachsenheim . The dialogue poem in Middle High German, which used to be considered offensive , was written around the year 1450. The small verse epic has come down to us in eight collective manuscripts and contained in two collective prints from the 19th and 20th centuries; a New High German translation is not available.
Overview
An old knight meets a simple peasant maid while she is cutting grass (“grass cutting”) and tries to trick her into having sex with courtly drivel. The quick-witted young woman sees through his licorice rasp and refuses to accept him. After a long and rough verbal battle, the knight overpowers his victim, but at the decisive moment the old man loses his strength and he earns scorn and ridicule from the maid. Last but not least, the old “Minner” confesses to the reader that even this failure will hardly save him from his folly in the future.
content
Note: Quote translation and Verszählung to the Middle High German text in handwriting B .
An old gate
In the opening credits of the poem, the first-person narrator frankly accuses himself of his youthful folly in front of the reader. In a dice game metaphor, he reveals himself to be a gambler, but when Fortuna is not on his side, “I'd rather read a psalter with a pretty little nun”.
Courtly advertising
The old knight had been eyeing a beautiful girl for a year. It is May now, and the opportunity seems right. He goes “to her in the clover” and greets “the minnigliche maid”. With a lofty courtly bell, he offers her his services, because “you have the shape you want”. She cannot understand how she got this honor, she says, he is completely unknown to her.
Only recently, he helps her on the jumps, in her cousin house with the dance, they had met. Now she remembers, and above all, how horrible it was to see him: "I think no scarecrow in the field has never been as ugly as you are."
Shocked, he implores her: “My happiness and salvation are entirely up to you, so please do me grace, if you don't do that, I'll be dead!” She doesn't care at all, she replies, “I'll take a peasant in a jacket for you in a velvet skirt! "The old knight in his self-satisfaction falls from the clouds and thinks to himself:" You right ram, that I like you so much and you don't like me, that takes me miracles. "
Fencing match
After his courtly behavior does not bring him to his goal, the rejected gentleman turns to begging - this is how the maid feels and recommends him to lie down like a cripple in front of the church door for this purpose, at least he has nothing to expect from her, " because if I had Pfeffers a thousand times, I wouldn't give a grain for you! "
The old knight again begs the maid for her grace: "Heart, mind and courage wrestle with me, depending on you, wherever I am." She insidiously asks whether he means a fencing match by wrestling. The simple peasant girl now reveals herself to be a connoisseur of the high art of fencing and introduces a scornful metaphor into the verbal exchange of blows, with which she drastically shows the old knight her doubts about his manhood.
She must be surprised, she remarks, whether an old man like him can still lift a sword and fear that his “fencing sword is too sick” and would break if “it was best”. To which he asserts: “Although I fought for a long time, my fencing sword is not in two.” In her opinion, she counters, it would be a real miracle, “if you had your fencing sword remained whole. You fought so many a fight that it would have been worn out cheaply. The seven blows are too heavy for you, if you can do three, let me know! "
The knight's outrageous request to give face value for love services (“My hoard, I would give a pound that you know what my will is”), the maid rebukes indignantly: “We will let that be good, because love suffered the purchase".
Ride of Aristotle
After the cutting work is done, the grass cutter complains about her tired back, and a funny banter develops about the ride of the maid on the old knight, based on the example of Aristotle and Phyllis (see cover picture).
Grass cutters What do you think if I load my load on you and send you home to the house? Knight Do you want me to straighten your back and strip off all your tiredness. Grass cutters Kneel down, i have to ride you! Knight I want to do what you want. I know well that a woman rode the wise Aristotle. Well here, well here, want to sit on me. I trot and run as you want.
The knight's pompous assurance that he has the image of her beautiful figure in his heart provokes the maid to one of her willful misunderstandings. In suggestive words, she reports doubts: “Well, I'm not a painter, how can I depict my face in your heart without a brush?” And finally, she gives her future riding horse the passport: “Well, well, you old drool, I don't like riding gray horses! "
Monk and nun
Since the maid, despite good persuasion, refuses to be at the old knight's will, he threatens to drag her before the spiritual council. She is not intimidated because her relationships with the clergy are not without:
- “I know someone with frizzy hair, he can write the right letters, he can read the text and gloss, if I were a nun in the monastery, I want to help him sing Metten so that all the bells should sound and the tiles wobble on the roof . "
Shame and abuse
Now the old knight is fed up with the unsuccessful banter. He announces to the maid "I have to try something" and grabs her "for a breast". She acknowledged the attack with a hearty comparison: “It's not good to dig beets with the tips of the caps.” He apparently agrees with her and cheekily grabs her for shame. "She gumps a lot and defends herself with cursing and scolding as much as she can," alone, now he penetrates her with his tongue, and she, subdued by his brute force, begs him not to hurt her.
He throws her into the clover and falls on her, she defends herself desperately and "makes a great shout out of it, like a thief in a stable". He doesn't get a chance and fails miserably because his “device” “doesn't want to stand up” to him. She insults the failure according to all the rules of the art: “You act like an old horse who is angry and yet doesn't want to bite. I almost bend over, get the blast that comes from my whistles! "
The old knight stoops stooped "as a mute" and sees: "Unfortunately I never give wine, he advised me to have beer, I am an old camel animal." But all self-knowledge is not fruitful, and so he announces his conclusion : "We old miners don't let go and still serve with sick things!"
plant
author
Two testimonies point to Hermann von Sachsenheim as an author:
- The manuscript H ends on sheet 151r with six verses that are missing in the other editions and assign the text to Hermann von Sachsenheim: "... A knight well done, called Herr Hermann von Sachsenheim, did the adventure known to us ..."
- Manuscript D contains the name of the author in the heading added by a scribe: "Von der Gras Metzen Hermann von Sachsenhayn".
Work title
Of the 8 surviving manuscripts, 5 are given work titles. In manuscripts D and H, the title contains the term Grasmaze, which can also be found in the naturalized title “Von der Grasmetzen”; in the title of Manuscript G, the term Grasmaze is replaced by Grasmagd (see manuscripts ). The term grass-cutting or grass-maid does not appear in the work itself. When the first-person narrator speaks of the grass cutter, he calls her whore or tenderly whore, and her answers to his speeches are usually introduced with “she spoke”.
A grass cutter was a grass cutter, a peasant girl who cut grass. The word metze belongs to the word field butcher, knife and stonemason, in which the term cutting also resonates. In Middle High German dictionaries, for the keyword Metze, you can find the explanations “girl of lower class, often with the secondary term of frivolity” and “a very common name for women of lower class”.
An allusion to Countess Mechthild von der Pfalz (Metze is a pet form for Mechthild), to whom Hermann von Sachsenheim was connected in many ways, could be derived from the work title . Controversial reports about Mechthild's alleged immorality could have prompted the copyists of the manuscripts to subliminally point to the slippery rumors that were circulating.
Literary genre
The grass cutter is assigned to the literary genre of the Minnerede , it is a "saying" (spoken, speech), as the work title in handwriting F suggests: "Ain spruch zu ver anwurtten" (a speech with answers). The subject of a Minneede as a subspecies of courtly Minne Poetry is worldly, intersex love. Minneeds consist of rhyming verses and, in contrast to the sung Minneongs, were intended for spoken speech. The first-person narrator addresses the audience in his speech and describes (allegedly) events he has personally experienced, in the case of the grass cutter, the courtship of a knight for the favor of a maid.
The grass cutter also bears the traits of other literary forms. It can be seen as a parody of an advertising conversation, as the conventional minnesota are satirized crudely and self-deprecatingly. It resembles a pastourelle in which a knight meets a shepherdess in the wild and the encounter ends with the young girl's devotion to the man who advertises, or not. The grass cutter also fulfills the criteria of a swank , which is usually understood as a popular two-person piece with a surprising twist.
shape
With 341 verses, the poem is one of the small ones among Hermann's works, the larger ones include around 2000 to 6000 verses. It consists of four-part rhyming paired verses, i.e. the verses rhyme in pairs without any stanza division, and each verse contains four stressed syllables. Hermann von Sachsenheim consistently uses the Reimpaarbrechung (also: Reimbrechung), that is, the rhyming pair changes fall in the middle of a sentence, see also refraction (verse teaching) .
In the following example (verses 71-74), the first half of sentence 2 ends the rhymes a and the second half forms the beginning of rhymes b.
| sentence | Middle High German | New High German | rhyme |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ... I thought to myself in minem muot. | ... I thought in my courage. | a |
| 2 | the dúrnlin guot said: | The wench spoke well with breeding: | a |
| 2 | sammer der guot her Sant Lutz! | With good Mr. Sankt Lutz! | b |
| 3 | i wond you will be in barrel night butz ... | I think you're a carnival boon ... | b |
The poem begins with a short opening credits and ends with a short swan song. Embedded in this framework is the dalog between knight and maid, a series of 18 exchanges of speech and counter-speech by the opponents, which are typically introduced by "I spoke" and "she spoke".
reception
The Germanist Ingeborg Glier considers the “Grasmetze” after the “Mörin” to be the most widespread work by Hermann von Sachsenheim, “because we still know eight manuscripts from her”. Since the work only circulated in copies until the 19th century, it is difficult to make any statements about its popularity in previous centuries. Also, no critical reviews have come to light before the 19th century.
The literary historian Karl Goedeke judged in 1859 in the 1st edition of his "Outline for the History of German Poetry, Volume 1":
- “His poems follow the allegorical direction of the time and lament the decay of chivalric life, the degeneration of love that is subject to money. A sense of humor interferes which sometimes degenerates roughly and loses dignity and discipline in the satirical juxtaposition of the lower classes with their supposed clumsiness against those formed in the old chivalrous manner. Herman’s poems are just as instructive for the history of the emerging urban education as they are for the survival of chivalry, which here bears entirely the colors of the Don quixotry. ... An old gray head explains his love to a grass maid with the old courtly idioms of Gnadenhort, Secundill and the like, who prefers a farmer in a Juppe to him in a silk skirt and rejects his cranky sugar words with gross meanness. That's the joke of this century. "
The Germanist Ernst Martin described grass cutting in 1878 as a "dirty story". While Karl Goedeke expressed himself relatively mildly in 1859, he also adopted the prudish tone of the German Empire in the second edition of his standard work in 1884:
- “In the mostly satirical taunts of him, Folz, etc., the completely mean spreads with incredible comfort. The bourgeoisie of the big cities and the nobility must have tolerated a shamelessness of morals and considered it unsavory, which one can hardly understand if one has not read the rascals of these poets. The most filthy things a wild imagination might think of is carried out with the most filthy words and images. The stimulus which the filthy poets often try to give their pranks by giving the narrator, in whose name they are writing, fine, elegant speech, and the other person, usually a whore of the rawest type, with the crudest expression of the meanest ideas , may have been a real attraction for those days, at present the vulgarity of the whole type of poetry is all the more difficult. "
The mediaevalist Gustav Roethe ("Wilhelminischer Großgermanist und Saubermann") also subjected the grass cutters to a drastic criticism in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie in 1890 :
- “The raw tale of the grass cutter… he wrote as an old man. An ugly parodic motif of the dying minstrel is kicked dirty here: the courtly educated knight's unfortunate advertisement for a lowly prostitute who answers his grandiose minstrel love phrases with mob-like diatribes. ... He coarsens the traditional motive by portraying himself, the advertiser, as old and impotent and allowing the advertising to run out into an emergency breeding attempt against the cursing grasscutters, which fails due to the inability of old age. "
The Germanist Dieter Welz countered Roethe's canon of abuse in 1981:
- “The sensitivity to dirt that Roethes explains reveals a deep-seated fear of uncleanliness, which is objectively justified. She only has very little to do with Hermann von Sachsenheim: he has to be used as any scapegoat, on which one wipes one's hands that have been made dirty elsewhere and elsewhere. In other words: the devastating verdict on Hermann von Sachsenheim would have to be written off as the result of a cleanliness heaven that torments German studies plagued by fear of corruption and prostitution, which has sold its liberal inheritance for an imperial lentil dish or believes it has sold it. In other words: there is nothing more to be given on this judgment. You can skip it. "
expenditure
Manuscripts
The miner speech "Von der Grasmetzen" is contained in 8 collective manuscripts with mostly closed, pure miner speech tradition, which are designated with the letters A – H. In handwriting D and H, the Minnerede has the established title “Von der Grasmetzen”, in E – G a different title and in A – C no title. None of the titles comes from Hermann von Sachsenheim, but from the writers of the manuscripts. According to the "Handbuch Minnereden" two groups of manuscripts can be distinguished:
- The manuscripts A, B, F and H largely correspond in the text. H also contains 6 closing verses that prove Hermann's authorship.
- The other manuscripts “mostly go together in their readings. The word and sentence variants of this group result in a less enigmatic, more understandable text. "
| → Column legend and sorting | ||||
| Legend | ||||
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| Sorting | ||||
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| #1 | # 2 | year | Library / signature | title |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A. | He3 | 1478 | Heidelberg, University Library, Cpg 313 (Cod. Pal. Germ. 313), online , page 454r-460r | - |
| B. | He9 | around 1450 | Heidelberg, University Library, Cpg 355 (Cod. Pal. Germ. 355), online , pages 138v-145v | - |
| C. | St5 | 15th century 2nd half |
Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Poet. Et philol. 4 ° 69 | - |
| D. | Pr2 | 1470/1471 | Prague, National Museum, song book by Clara Hätzlerin, XA 12, online , pages 215r-219v | From the grass Metzen Hermann von Sachsenhayn |
| E. | Be20 | around 1495 | Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Mgq 2370 (Ms. germ. Quart. 2370), online | An old man wants to court |
| F. | We1 | 1480-1490 | Weimar, Duchess Anna Amalia Library, Cod. O 145 (Cod. Oct 145), online , pages 160v-173v | Ain't saying to answer |
| G | Be15 | 1470-1480 | Berlin, State Library, Mgq 719 (Ms. germ. Quart. 719), online , pages 196r-200v | About the old ritter and the graß meyd |
| H | Be19 | 1496 | Berlin, State Library, Mgq 1899 (Ms. germ. Quart. 1899) | From the grass cutting |
Detailed overview: manuscript census.
Printouts
The work is included in two printed collective editions from the 19th and 20th centuries.
-
Manuscript B: Gerhard Thiele (editor): Mittelhochdeutsche Minnereden, 2. The Heidelberg manuscripts 313 and 355, the Berlin manuscript Ms. Germ. Fol. 922. Dublin: Weidmann, 1967, pp. 100-106.
- Online with download: Digital Middle High German text archive .
- Online without download, with a link to the manuscript: Bibliotheca Augustana .
- Handwriting D: Hermann von Sachsenheim: Von der Gras Metzen. Herman von Sachsenhayn. In: Carl Haltaus (editor): song book by Clara Hätzlerin. From the manuscript of the Bohemian Museum in Prague. With introduction and dictionary. Quedlinburg & Leipzig: Basse, 1840, pages 279-283, online .
Translations
- A New High German translation is not available.
- Excerpts translation: opening and closing verses 1–70 and 320–341 in #Finkele 2004 , pages 70–77.
- Detailed table of contents: #Klingner 2013.1 , pages 368–369.
literature
- Ingeborg Glier: Artes amandi: Investigations on the history, tradition and typology of the German Minnereden. Munich: Beck, 1971, especially pages 328–334.
- Karl Goedeke : Outline of the history of German poetry: from the sources. 1. Volume: [The Middle Ages]. Dresden: Ehlermann, 1859, pages 85-86, online .
- Karl Goedeke : Outline of the history of German poetry: from the sources. 1. Volume: The Middle Ages. 2nd, completely revised edition. Dresden: Ehlermann, 1884, pages 292-294, online .
- Dietrich Huschenbett: Hermann von Sachsenheim. In: Kurt Ruh (editor): The German literature of the Middle Ages - author's lexicon, 3rd [Ger - Hil]. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1981, column 1091-1106.
- Dietrich Huschenbett: Hermann von Sachsenheim - names and terms: Commentary on the list of all names and selected terms in the complete work. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007.
- Jacob Klingner ; Ludger Lieb: Handbuch Minnereden, Volume 1: [Repertorium]. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013, pages 367–369.
- Jacob Klingner; Ludger Lieb: Handbuch Minnereden, Volume 2: [Directories]. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013.
- Ernst Martin (editor): Hermann von Sachsenheim. Stuttgart: Litterarian Association, 1878, online .
- Otto Neudeck: Narrative self-presentation between culture and nature. On the immanent poetology of the sexual in Hermann von Sachsenheim's Grasmetze. In: Alan Robertshaw (editor); Gerhard Wolf (editor): Nature and culture in German literature in the Middle Ages. Colloquium Exeter 1997. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999, pages 201-213.
- Gustav Roethe: Hermann von Sachsenheim . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 30, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1890, pp. 146-152.
- Dieter Welz: The grass cutter as an old man's fantasy: To an obscene Minner speech by Hermann von Sachsenheim. In: Acta Germanica: German studies in Africa; Yearbook of the Association of Germanists in Southern Africa, year 14, 1981, pages 51–81.
Web links
Footnotes
- ↑ #Klingner 2013.1 , page 367, #Huschenbett 1981 , column 1092.
- ↑ The curly-haired monk is a literate monk who is familiar with the Holy Scriptures and their commentaries (the glosses).
- ↑ Quoted from Manuscript D, which describes the facts more clearly than Manuscript B.
- ↑ copy of the Final verses in handwriting H .
- ↑ Not in today's contemptuous sense.
- ↑ #Welz 1981 , pp. 72–73, #Huschenbett 2007 , pp. 184–1855.
- ↑ #Klingner 2013.2 , pages 2–5.
- ↑ #Klingner 2013.1 , page 367.
- ↑ #Glier 1971 , page 328.
- ↑ #Goedeke 1859 .
- ↑ #Goedeke 1884 .
- ↑ #Welz 1981 , page 51.
- ↑ #Roethe 1890 , pp. 149–150.
- ↑ #Welz 1981 , page 52.
- ↑ #Huschenbett 2007 , page 123, keyword “Grasmetze”, #Klingner 2013.2 , pages 367–368, manuscript census .
- ↑ #Huschenbett 2007 , page 123.
- ↑ #Klingner 2013.2 , pages 367-368.
- ^ Formerly Lana, Family Archives of the Counts of Brandis, Cod. XXIII D 33.
- ↑ For example: "An old man wants to woo."
- ↑ For example: "A speech with answers."
- ↑ Formerly Wemigerode, Gräfliche Stolbergische Bibliothek, Zb 15.
- ↑ Manuscript Census .