[In the following essay, Gertz surveys critics' responses to Walther, noting that their interpretations have been influenced by their preconceptions, their choice of approach, and their critical styles.]

The questions that scholars of medieval literature might pose are, of course, manifold. It appears, however, that their responses to such questions must be more constrained than those of critics of more contemporary literature, since medieval literary studies examine a spottily documented textual culture. The medievalist often has no recourse to many of those aspects of popular culture that create social contexts; very often, he or she does not even have access to an author's life records, or, worse yet, to an author's identity.

Because of these conditions, it would seem apparent that critics of medieval literature differ from their colleagues in the degree that they must re-create worlds to contextualize the literature. Such re-creations of contexts are fueled by the natural scientific predilection for verifiable data that characterizes contemporary modes of inquiry,¹ making medieval literary criticism, by comparison, seem a more risky venture. However, all such re-creations are simply critical acts. Here, “critical act” refers to Maria Corti's assimilation of T. S. Eliot's term, to mean the poet's experience of increasing restriction as he or she moves from pre-textual creation to writing, a restriction that stems from demands made by the structure of the envisioned text.²

In spite of the obvious differences in content and expression between literary theory and poetry, the literary critic's recreation of contexts, or critical act, is structurally similar to some poets' encounters with their literary traditions. That is, both the critic's and the poet's individual confrontations with tradition (as part of pre-textual creation) can feed into the process that will structure the finished product. For the poet, traditional material stereotypically means literature highly esteemed by that poet, literature that is shaped by recognizable conventions which the poet must confront and in which he or she must communicate (whether using them as they are received or reacting against them). For the critic, traditional material would seem to mean objectively collected data. Such data, however, do not come to critics through objectively determined channels. On the contrary, they are selected, and acquire conventional value by being transmitted from one generation of interpreters to another. In other words, both critic and poet create worlds in which they begin to frame their work, worlds that are based on mainly non-objectively determined conventions.

The following essay is divided into two parts. First, I examine traditions in critical responses to Walther von der Vogelweide, a German poet of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with special attention to the re-creation of contexts. Secondly, after generally discussing his poetry, I examine two poems attributed to Walther that articulate responses to literary conventions: “Ich minne, sinne, lange zît” (“I love, feel/mean for a long time”) and “Maneger frâget waz ich klage” (“Some ask what it is I complain of”).³ In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that literary critics share literary theoretical concerns with poets, as expressed through their treatment of conventions.

The problem that seems to be particular to the medievalist is actually endemic to literary scholarship as a field of inquiry. Whether literary scholarship aims to mediate individual literary texts or to generalize literary principles,⁴ the critical process rests on at least three informing elements: the scholar's subjectivity, the creation and evaluation of contexts, and findings expressed within a field molded by tradition. These three elements, of course, are not bound to chronological progression, nor are they mutually exclusive. On the contrary, varying combinations of these elements permit scholars to explore perceptively (one of scholarship's greatest strengths), while at the same time, and paradoxically, also creating the field's problem. The problem, stated simply, is authority, which makes a critic's modes of measurement and evaluation seem absolutely verifiable.

The literary scholar interprets a text, naturally responding in part to the text itself, but also in part to the subjective determinants of his or her own social context.⁵ The element of subjectivity is objectified, made as accessible as the literary text, through the scholar's attempts to make sense of and communicate responses. He or she re-creates literary contexts based on indices provided by various apparently relevant instances of literature, historical information, and surviving artifacts. It seems to me that this process of re-creation is accepted as sound partly because of the contemporary preference for proof by data, but more importantly because the establishment of a context allows readers access to the critic's responses, thereby permitting communication. Problems in the procedure arise, however, because the re-created context often appears to be authoritative and constant, when, in fact, it cannot be.

In re-creating contexts, the critical reader must perform an act of fiction, in the original sense of the term.⁶ The specialized reader pieces together subjectively determined responses to texts and objectified facts until they fit, more or less, and evolve into a unified picture, fiction, interpretation. Describing one method of re-creating contexts as practiced by Auerbach and Spitzer, for example, Geoffrey Green writes:

The tradition of Geistesgeschichte encourages the historian to find an integral concordance among the artistic, cultural, scientific, and historical realms of man's activities.⁷

Of course, these objectified data have varying degrees of measurable accuracy. For example: surviving artifacts reveal aesthetic values (or simply data) whose representative value depends on subjective interpretation; historical data may be recorded inaccurately, for whatever reason and by whatever standards of measurement; and the testimonies of historical figures, including historians and writers, present material through yet another subjective or perhaps purposely distorted filter. Chance plays a role by further reducing the objective value of these facts; whether examining a sparsely documented culture or a culture teeming with data and aesthetic artifacts, the critical reader's exposure to the facts cannot be scientifically controlled. The scholar's ability to envision contexts is dependent upon subjective responses and other variables, not constants.

The process, then, begins in the objectifying of events and other elements into data, a process which is, in and of itself, partly subjective and structurally similar to the writer's creative act. Ironically, when used to interpret a subjectively formed context, this partly subjective process appears to be objective to a high degree, meaning that it is reproducible and hence seemingly authoritative or scientific. But although the procedure of objectifying only means “reproducible by another,” readers often tacitly give the communicated product the value of “Truth.” Obviously, the degree of objectivity (and subjectivity) informing these re-creations differs from case to case. But the truth value that the re-creation of contexts implicitly claims engenders, over time, traditions that multiply the degree of perceived objective authority. The form in which findings are expressed intensifies the weight placed on these traditions. René Wellek and Austin Warren write, for example, that the critic

… must translate his experience of literature into intellectual terms, assimilate it to a coherent scheme which must be rational if it is to be knowledge.⁸

Or, more recently and in a more qualified manner, in the Introduction to the English translation of Hans Robert Jauss' critical essays collected in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Paul de Man writes, “Poetics … is a metalinguistic, descriptive, or prescriptive discipline that lays claim to scientific consistency.”⁹

The authority given a reproducible analysis of data is enhanced by style. Usually, the literary scholar's academic rhetoric implicitly claims a high degree of objectivity. Literary scholarship often appears in univalent prose that minimalizes the use of rhetorical figures of speech. Further, the material discussed is framed in an analytical mode that generalizes principles (the enthymeme) which are then supported by examples. Not surprisingly, I think, the enthymeme and the example are what Aristotle calls the two distinguishing modes of rhetoric.¹⁰ In The Art of Rhetoric, he writes of the enthymeme,

[P]roof … is a kind of demonstration; for we entertain the strongest conviction of a thing if we believe that it has been “demonstrated.” Rhetorical proof, however, takes the form of an enthymeme … [which] … is a kind of syllogism; now every kind of syllogism falls within the province of Dialectic. … Consequently the person with the clearest insight into the nature of syllogism … will also be the most expert in regard to enthymemes.¹¹

As will be seen in discussing Walther criticism, the logical, scientific characteristics thought to define literary critical style may have prevented previous studies from identifying an important source of medieval literary theory, vernacular literature itself.¹² In addition, these criteria for literary-critical style may account for literary critics' preference for sources like the elementary textbooks on poetry and rhetoric, the philosophical treatises on language, and the glossae as the major sources of medieval literary theory.¹³ It is important to note that these types of texts do form valuable indices for re-creating contexts that allow insights into medieval literary theory, but analytically styled prose is not—in any period—the only viable source of literary theory.

The logical framing of data is not only persuasive, it also tests and furthers creative and perceptive responses to literature. Wilhelm Dilthey has suggested that the value of the humanities rests in its analytical confrontation with the subjective, which is an important determinant in any process of acquiring knowledge.¹⁴ The logical framing of subjectively perceived (and formed) data is, however, rhetorically presented. A common language, a common set of tools and measurements informed by tradition, and a common forum promote uniformity, which, in turn, allows rhetorically shaped communication and hence furthers the process of inquiry. Furthermore, as an instance of specialized communication, literary theory can parallel, structurally, some poets' encounters with the conventional. That is, simply stated, critical readers depend on literary texts and data to re-create contexts within their own perspectives, while poets depend on conventions and experiences.

The poet's conventions are embodied in the literary texts shaped by both (critical) readers and poet, while the critic's apparently objective data are informed by subjective experiences, of the type the poet may also use. Further, the relations between texts and data and between conventions and experiences overlap. Not only, then, do critics and poets (obviously) have literary texts as objects of concern in common, they also are both involved in structurally similar and overlapping imaginative, (re-)creative processes. This becomes clear in Walther's poetry in which the narrators' confrontations with conventions of Minne (loosely translated as “courtly love”) focus on the literary theoretical concerns of the uniformly perceived common language, common tools (in the form of figures of speech), and a common forum. Because of interest in mainly literary historical matters, Walther's critical focus on these matters has been fairly consistently ignored.¹⁵

Subjectively informed insights, rhetorical style, and imaginative re-creations of contexts become apparent particularly when surveying Wather criticism. The sureness with which each generation of Walther critics approaches the poet is based on biographical data, sparse as that might be. In 1956, Helmut de Boor tells of the difficulties in early Walther scholarship due to the uncertainties regarding Walther's circumstances that hindered scholars for more than a century, only to conclude:

Und bei aller Unsicherheit im einzelnen dürfen wir heute sagen, daß wir in unseren kritischen Ausgaben den wirklichen Walther lesen und uns ein zuverlässiges Bild von seinem Wesen und seinem Dichten machen können.

And despite all the uncertainties in details, we may say that today in our critical editions we read the real Walther, and we can make a dependable picture of his being and his poetry.¹⁶

This literary historical perspective has so formulated the field of Walther inquiry that it continues to permeate criticism. Indeed, the establishment of biographical data seems to have acquired the status of a prefatory topos.¹⁷ Literary historical speculation is, of course, necessary in medieval criticism. But from the very beginning, Walther criticism has been dominated by slanted literary historical perspectives. For example, the question of Walther's birthplace is also linked to nationalistic impulses during the end of the past century and in the early decades of this century. Walter Alison Phillips writes of patriotic resurgence in 1896:

In Germany … the name of the greatest of the Minnesingers has, after an oblivion of many centuries, once again become almost a household word; and this not only because the awakened national consciousness of the German people has been glad to gather up the threads of connection with its brighter past, but because the new enthusiasm aroused by the patriotic movement which culminated in the events of 1870 produced a demand for a patriotic poetry, of which Walter was so admirable a master.¹⁸

Although the language is more flowery and the perspective is more nationalistic than that of contemporary criticism, such evaluations reveal a consistent focus on the part of Walther's readers.

A similar trend is revealed still earlier, in 1867, by Karl Lucae, who demonstrates interest in Walther's nobility, spurred by some manuscripts' use of the title “Herr” (lord) for Walther, a title, however, which may simply signal respect for his poetic mastery.¹⁹ Others, like Rudolf Wustmann in 1913, show interest in Walther's birthplace (for which there are over fourteen claims), arguing from mentions of places in his travels and his apparent preference for the Viennese court or, just as keenly, in his personal circumstances:

Walthers Lieder aus diesen frühen österreichischen Jahren, so sehr sie den lernenden Neuling verraten, haben doch auch einen deutlichen persönlichen Einschlag. Nicht nur darin, daß er ganz eigene Einfälle zur Aussprache seiner wirklich empfundenen Liebe hat; es steckt überhaupt eine tiefe Wahrheit des Erlebens in seinem Minnesang.²⁰

Walther's songs from his early Austrian years, as much as they reveal the novice, have nevertheless a clear personal quality. Not only in that he expressed his truly felt love very individually; there is also something of the deep truth of experience in his Minnesang.

More measured attempts to make Walther concrete were achieved by the philological and literary historical work of his editors, beginning with the first critical edition by Karl Lachmann in 1827.

The nationalistic trend has diminished for obvious reasons, but the propagandistic element is still apparent in some criticism written in the German Democratic Republic.²¹ And furthermore, the basic tendency to fill in the facts of Walther's life remains one basis for decisions on manuscript-editing, even while studies like Trude Ehlert's point to the arbitrariness of such judgments.²² Even Peter Wapnewski's selection of poems by Walther is dependent upon such speculations, as he divides Walther's Minne lyrics into accepted, chronologically defined sections: Frühe Minnelieder, Lieder der Reinmarfehde, Lieder der Minne-Auseinandersetzung, Mädchenlieder, Lieder der Neuen Hohen Minne (early Minne lyrics, Reinmar feud lyrics, lyrics confronting Minne, lyrics of [country] girls, new high Minne lyrics).²³

Walther's reception by his critics is particularly intriguing; he seems to be one of those poets whose admittedly imagined biographical circumstances appear to promise a window into a historical period. Phillips provides a spirited example of this view:

For he, in a manner far more vivid than any of his contemporaries, reflects the character and thought, the ideals and aims, of a period of singular interest in the history of the world.²⁴

The justification for such a biographical bent, however, is questionable—at least if the authoritative, rhetorically formed process is to be substantiated by objectified data. As de Boor relates it, we have only the following biographical information to go on: (1) on November 12, 1203, Walther received a sum of money from Bishop Wolfger of Passau to buy a fur coat; (2) in the 1220's, Walther was granted a ion from Emperor Friedrich II; and (3) his dates are probably 1170 through 1230.²⁵

Further, the manuscripts we have are similarly meager in providing objective measurements. Authoritative editors use the annotation system begun by Lachmann, which numbers the poems according to folio and lines of the Manesse manuscript, upon which their editions are based. Without this manuscript, however, we would only have a fraction of Walther's poems. In addition, this and the other surviving manuscripts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (the oldest) are all song collections that bind together the lyrics of various Minnesänger. The attribution, selection, and accuracy in transmission of these lyrics are matters of speculation. As Hugo Kuhn points out, “Dieses Buch ist stumm” (“This book is silent”).²⁶

The speculative nature of some editorial decisions becomes clear, for example, in Walther's treatment of the descriptio in his “Si wunderwol gemachet wîp” (“She, wondrously created woman”).²⁷ Here, the rhetorical form of the descriptio has influenced his editors to re-arrange the poem's stanzas. Deviating from the Manesse manuscript's authority, editors prefer to authorize the convention dictating that a beautiful lady be described from head to foot. Further, they argue, the point of the poem would be lost if the Manesse manuscript's penultimate stanza were not placed last. Of course, medieval scribes were just as susceptible to error as anyone else, and it is possible that Walther's critics have placed the stanzas as he originally intended. The point nonetheless remains that the criteria used suppose standards that cannot be justified objectively. Such decisions reveal the tenuousness of ascribing textual authority to one manuscript, basically because it has the most texts ascribed to one author in an impressively made document.

Nevertheless, in most critical confrontations with Walther, certain topoi are given authoritative status through literary historical research, biographically framed readings of his poetry, and constant repetition. Thus, the presumption that Walther lived from ca. 1170 to 1230 is based on a reference in a poem (66,21) to his forty years of singing Minnelieder, the same poem that stands behind the supposition that Walther's teacher was Reinmar der Alte. The dating of that poem is approximated by cross-reference to the song mentioning the death of Walther's patron, Duke Frederick of Austria (19,29). In another poem (28,31), the narrator is grateful for his recently granted fief. Around these far from absolutely verifiable sources, Walther's songs are ordered chronologically according to a conventional preconception of his life as one of a talented but rebellious professional singer who turned to religion in his old age.

That vision of Walther even predates Melchior Goldast's publication of about a dozen of the poet's stanzas based on the Manesse manuscript at the beginning of the seventeenth century and Jakob Bodmer's sketch of the singer's life in the mid-eighteenth century. Walther is already mentioned in the works of his contemporaries, in Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan (4751-4820) and Thomasin von Zerklaere's Wälscher Gast (11091-11268), as well as being mythologized in the mid-thirteenth century as the final judge of a Minnesang contest among twelve singers in the Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg. Further, at about the same time, Michael de Leone, who had a manuscript recording some of Walther and Reinmar's lyrics (E), records that Walther was buried in Würzburg.

The allure of contemporary attestation is powerful, but its use should nevertheless not have an all-determining effect. If only Dan Quayle's yearbook were to survive as a source of data concerning the vice-president, might not future historians interpret his life far differently than we do? Sparse data and Walther's poetry are intertwined in firmly entrenched readings that are difficult to modify. Arranged as it is, the poetry attributed to Walther evokes a concrete (but not necessarily “reliable”) picture of what appears to be his life and circumstances—both historically and spiritually. Recently, for example, Jürgen Schneider writes regarding the Minnesänger,

Gattungsgrenzen durften nicht überschritten, geschweige denn gesprengt werden, wenn wir von dem oben genannten singulären Fall bei Walther absehen.

One was not allowed to cross genre borders, let alone burst them, except for the one above-named exceptional case of Walther.²⁸

Herein lies a clue. Arranging his poems so as to depict a rebellious poet has concrete appeal. If one reacts against something, then surely both the “something” and the reaction must be true. The enthymematic response, however, rests upon the unnecessary assumption that all these lyrics' narrators are suposed to be one person, Walther, and not different narrating personae. It might be more instructive, considering the paucity and nature of our data, to activate John Keats' principle of negative capability—that is, a scholar might attempt being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable searching after fact and reason.²⁹

The narrating personae who appear in Walther's poetry do seem to be consistently conveyed. As Wapnewski's categories for Walther's love poetry implies, there is a consistency in themes, motifs, images, and voices that encourages the conflation of these personae into one lyric poet. The appearance of these lyrics in song collections, I believe, creates their biographical allure. In his highly perceptive essay on the ambivalence in Walther's language, W. T. H. Jackson, for example, acknowledges that the persona of the poem is the narrator, not the historical man who wrote it; nevertheless, the poems' biographical allure is so strong that at one point he slips and calls this fictional character “Walther.”³⁰ Reading a series of poems collected under the name of a single poet in a collection of what appears to be the great poetry of a period must affect the specialized reader's responses. The simple repetition of themes, motifs, images, and voices creates coherence, and these elements become part of the indices that go into the re-creation of context. Biographical ordering becomes an attractive option since the poetry can be creatively interpreted around the image of a single persona who seems to pronounce on the themes, motifs, and images. This single persona can be equated, of course, with Wayne Booth's dramatized narrator-agent, whose presence has rhetorical and unifying impact.³¹

The problem with this persona, however, is twofold: there is not just one persona, and the traits which the personae display are conventional. Critics, for example, tend to divide Walther's poetry into three categories (love, politics, and religion), a division based on the assumption that the personae in these poems are different manifestations of the same poet. But perhaps the personae are intended to be different. What would have formed critical foci, for example, had the poems not appeared in song collections or been identified as belonging to one author? This problem is accompanied by the question of conventions. Had some of Ovid's poetry been translated into Middle High German lyrics and inserted in the Manesse manuscript, it would probably appear as if he too belonged to the Minne culture; the conventions of love poetry are rarely original, in the modern sense of the term.³² As Michael Riffaterre states, “This image of an author is … a rationalization, … a way of symbolizing the text's characteristics.”³³

Though, as the above examples suggest, it is a convention of Walther criticism to consider the poet's response to the conventions of Minne, such considerations can prevent readers from seeing other possible interpretations. If Minne is conventional even from its first appearance in Middle High German literature, then the biographical ordering of Walther lyrics according to stages of his life becomes highly speculative.³⁴ According to Lexer, Minne is a word that has a large range of application. Its meanings hover around the concepts of “love” and “remembrance”; when referring to love, meanings range from the physical to the spiritual.³⁵ The word, then, does not have to refer only to a Middle High German parallel to courtly love. The conventions of Minne and Provençal lyrics, more importantly, are not isolated factors of the Middle Ages either. Love's conventions are probably not time-dependent at all. As Plato's Phaedrus makes clear, for example, it does not take a great individual, culture-dependent act of originality to attempt to persuade the beloved through the allure of poetry. It is, rather, inevitable.

Love's dynamics are, for all practical purposes, universal, thereby creating the ironic situation that a highly personal relationship generates conventions. One need only compare Walther's personae with some of Ovid's personae in his books on the art of love and even in his Metamorphoses. Even skeptical narrators are shared by these authors. Operating in the arena of love and expressing that love, both sets of narrators also have the ability to look beyond conventions—the conventions which identify typical lovers as moon-struck, starved, and sickened. By recognizing the conventions as such, these narrators impart a greater sense of reality to the world of the text, but its apparent realism is actually the narrowing of distance between readers and writer, the tilting of the perspective away from the characters and more towards the readers. Just like experienced readers, that is, the narrators recognize these conventions as belonging to literary tradition and articulate this recognition through various literary means (irony, rebellious stance, parody, etc.). Thus, they evoke (fictionalize) a shared perspective, drawing readers into their critical circle, rather than simply presenting a tale.³⁶

Such recognitions of literary conventions are communicable because conventions have the value of fixed signs. That is, certain symptoms, attitudes, and words have specific, general meanings in love's literary system.³⁷ The universal value of these signs communicates the essential commonness of an experience that, ironically, defines itself as private. The irony of the situation permits the ironic portrayal of narrators and a self-conscious awareness of the public declaration. But, further and more important for this study, it also permits the poetic treatment of literary theoretical concerns. Concerning metafiction (by which I mean self-reflexive levels within narratives), Robert Scholes writes:

Metafiction assimilates all the perspectives of criticism into the fictional process itself. It may emphasize structural, formal, behavioral, or philosophical qualities, but most writers of metafiction are thoroughly aware of all these possibilities and are likely to have experimented with all of them.³⁸

He goes on to discuss four authors' experiments with metafiction in a way that suggests that metafictional activity occurs parallel to the narrative. In discussing John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, for example, Scholes describes the “fearful symmetry” in the story of a boy lost in a funhouse and the difficulty of a writer writing that story. This self-reflexivity is also present in Walther's poetry, as his lyrics portraying poets having difficulty with obtaining their ladies' greetings and with achieving praise for their poetry obviously demonstrate. But Walther's poetry, and other medieval texts, go beyond this type of activity. They also create subterranean levels within that self-reflexive, metafictional dimension. That is, like a narrative that has other than literal levels, a medieval text's self-reflexive dimension may also have multiple levels.

Walther's particularly effective creation of a sense of reality lies in his deft choice of details, details which are embedded in convention, but which also turn away from it. In “Si wunderwol gemachet wîp,” for example, Walther focuses on one of the most conventional devices of medieval literature, the descriptio. By making the poet-lover into a love-struck voyeur who evokes the myth of Actaeon, however, Walther dramatizes on both narrative and self-reflexive levels what the descriptio implies. On the narrative level, he notes that the narrator could only describe the woman unveiled if he once saw her nude, while on the self-reflexive level he calls into question the status of the poet in relation to his art by bringing in the classical allusion.

Walther's preoccupation with conventions may be interpreted in various ways. It is my contention that many of those poems which deal with the conventional or the traditional have self-reflexive levels. It would appear that Walther asks the same types of questions that a literary critic might ask concerning the literary art. By using conventional narrators, themes, and images, Walther is able to increase his ability to communicate difficult and ambiguous messages. That is, if conventional messages and traditional images or allusions are universal, if they, in effect, are univalent, then multivalency can be created through modification of details, whether that modification entails repetition, polarization, or irony.

For the remainder of this essay, I will focus on a single theoretical issue—the limits of conventions. Walther's ruminations on this subject are various. He overlaps with his critics and other scholars when he presents, on the simple self-reflexive level, the poet-lover who addresses his art and his lady, and portrays the sorrow this narrator feels because of both these loves. In creating such a scenario, Walther relies on traditions that allow him to portray the relationships concretely. Like his critics and other scholars, Walther brings together pieces of his literary heritage to communicate a familiar message. Walther, however, goes beyond this level. The problem of the limits of conventions which Walther addresses in a number of his poems, for example, is sometimes linked to the ambiguities and limits of language. From this perspective, language becomes an important focus in the long poem normally referred to as “Der Leich” (3,1-8,3) through Walther's repetition of conventional motifs. The narrator begins with praise of the Trinity, and then moves into the following prayer (3,9-3,12):

nu sende uns dîne lêre.
uns hât verleitet sêre
die sinne ûf mange sünde
der fürste ûz helle abgründe.
Now send us your teaching.
He has harmed us terribly,
leading to the turning of the senses to sin—
he, Hell's prince.

The idea is traditional—asking God for help against the enemy. However, Walther couches this idea in the language of learning (lêre, sinne), and also sets up the traditional antithesis in language-oriented terms, as the poem, initiated in the context of the Trinity, turns to focus on the Virgin. She is praised in typical fashion for her purity (3,25-4,3), praise which is followed by a series of apostrophes to her. Immediately following these apostrophes, Mary becomes a metaphor for creativity, for language, and for the paradox of creativity within the confines of language; indeed, she becomes a sign:

Ein bosch der bran,
dâ nie niht an
besenget noch verbrennet wart:
breit unde ganz
beleip sîn glanz
vor fiures flamme unverschart.
daz was diu reine
magt alleine,
diu mit megetlîcher art
Kindes muoter worden ist
ân aller manne mitewist …

4,13-4,23

A bush that burned
although it never
was singed or burned
broad and whole
her shine remained
unharmed by the fire's flame.
That was the pure
maiden alone,
who as a maid
became a child's mother
without knowledge of man …

Mary is the sign, the metaphor, the unit of God's language who gave birth to God's word, and the referent around which the logocentric framework of this poem is constructed. Those who should be lumped with the heathen, according to the poem, are those who do not make their works match their words (7,12-7,13).³⁹ The litany of different names for Mary reveals the limits of earthly language, as it creates new possibilities through the dynamics of metaphor—the clustering of associations about an image or evocative element. As such, the narrator has Mary foreshadow Christ's own linguistically defined status (he is God's Word) in that she too is a paradox—divine meaning in earthly form. This association is evoked through the narrator's close attention to concepts of language informing this portrait and that of the Annunciation, which led to the birth of Christ.

ein wort ob allen worten
entslôz dînr ôren porten,
des süeze an allen orten
dich hât gesüezet, süeze himelfrouwe.
Swaz üz dem wort erwahsen sî,
daz ist von kindes sinnen frî:
ez wuohs ze gote, und wart ein man.

5,23-5,29

A word above all words
opened the doors to your ears;
of the sweetest of all places
it sweetened you, sweet Lady of heaven.
          What grew from the word
was free from childish understanding:
and it grew well, and became a man.

In this poem, the limits of language are exonerated through the creative effect of metaphor, which conjoins ambiguities in formulations that evoke various associations. But, language can also be a stumbling block to understanding and creation, as illustrated most obviously in another of Walther's poems, the critical “Ich saz ûf eime steine” (“I sat on a stone”; 8,4-8,27), in which the narrator's sitting position is described meticulously. Here, the separation of language from meaningful communication results from the attempt to analyze, to break down, while the narrator at the same time bemoans the impossibility of synthesizing philosophically incompatible goals (wealth, honor, and Christianity). Although in these two examples it would appear that the symbolic mode promotes understanding, while the analytical mode hinders it, other poems attributed to Walther present the self-reflexive view that, regardless of mode, convention is the key, or hinderance, to understanding.

Walther explores conventions in relation to meaning, for example, in the sign. Signs may be difficult to interpret because all that is available to the senses are the “surfaces.” The poet-lover's bedraggled appearance, his plaintive poetry, and his self-enforced solitude that overflows in poetic expression may all be indicators of the powerful love that has taken control of his inner life. In Walther's poetry, the sign becomes an object of literary theoretical inquiry when it is related to metaphor. Metaphor was defined in several ways in medieval textbooks.⁴⁰ One of the more popular, the Rhetorica ad Herennium defines it as follows:

Translatio est cum verbum in quandam rem transferetur ex alia re, quod propter similitudinem recte videbitur posse transferri.⁴¹

Metaphor occurs when a word applying to one thing is transferred to another, because the similarity seems to justify the transference.

Some of Walther's poetry seems to posit the view that when conventions of poetry no longer function, as expressed in metaphors, they lose their ability to transfer concepts. When a metaphor stops creating meanings, when a comparison or a use of a sign system does not generate different frameworks of perception, then it is no longer a metaphor. We say it becomes conventional, and what we mean by that is that it has “the same old meaning.” In other words, the formerly multi-leveled metaphor has become a simple “word” in the sense that there is a conventional meaning or set of meanings attributed to the sign. It does not generate meanings. In the poems discussed below, Walther seems to apply these concepts to Minne; as a word, as a social mode of interchange, and as a form of poetry, “Minne” loses meaning. Minne is no longer a living sign system. Through his narrators' juggling of conventions, Walther explores the limits of poetic language once it becomes codified.⁴²

In his poem, “Ich minne, sinne, lange zît,” Walther's narrator explores the limits of language, as in “Der Leich,” but here he poses the question in the context of Minne.⁴³ Like his “Ich saz ûf eime steine,” this poem slows down its readers' encounter with language to force them into observing how meanings evolve. Here, the first pause occurs through the poem's use of rhyme, which couples words whose only necessary link occurs on the surface or ornamental level of sound.

Ich minne, sinne, lange zît:          (47,16)
versinne Minne sich,
wie si schône lône mîner tage.
nû lône schône: dêst mîn strît:
vil kleine meine mich,          (47,20)
niene meine kleine mîne klage,
unde rihte
grôz unbilde
daz ein ledic wîp
mich verderbet          (47,25)
gar âne schulde.
zir gesihte
wird ich wilde.
mich enhabe ir lîp
der enterbet,          (47,30)
noch ger ich hulde.
wære mære stæter man,
sô solte, wolte si, mich an
eteswenne denne ouch sehen,
sô ich gnuoge fuoge kunde          (47,35)
          spehen.
I love, feel/mean for a long
          time:
should Love come to her senses,
how she would reward my days.
Now to reward well, that is my
          point:
however little she thinks of me,
she should not think little of my
          plaint,
and she should correct
the great misformation/miscrea-
          tion
that a single woman
could ruin me
who am without guilt.
To her glance
I've become foreign/unaccept-
          able.
Her body from mine
is parted,
still I try for grace.
Were truth/poetry constant,
so should she, if she wished
sometimes, then, look at me,
so I'd discover enough fuoge (artistry).

The rhyme scheme is complex: in the first stanza, Walther rhymes “abcabc” to move to ten lines whose shorter metrical pattern duplicates the rhyme scheme of “defgh.” Finally, the poem ends with a stanza containing two couplets, “ii” and “jj.” In the first and last stanzas, the end rhyme is counterpoised with internal rhyme schemes that move from one rhyme pair to another pair. The first stanza's inner rhyme pairs repeat the same pair twice, but in reverse order. Beginning immediately with conventional ambiguities, the first rhyme pair links the words minne and (ver)sinne in the context of the poet-lover's past and potential future. Although the meaning may seem harmonious on first reading, the use of rhyme functions here not to couple words, but to create disjunction. Minne, of course, may refer to some “experienced” or written condition of love, but it may also refer to the act of remembrance—an act often associated in medieval poetical and rhetorical textbooks with the act of linguistic creation. Sinne is similarly ambiguous, oscillating between the same poles of love as an emotion and the act of poetry, as the word may mean “sensuality” or “meaning.”

The next inner rhyme pairs the words schône and lône. Anyone who has read the Minne lyrics attributed to Walther recognizes in this pair a recurrent, apparently realistic concern—the proper reward for the lover-poet's efforts. Again, however, the reward requested may be the lover's or the poet's, and, further, the reward each seeks can be physical/earthly or spiritual. Ending the stanza is the pair kleine and meine, which echoes the first rhyme pair in the aspect of meaning (meine) and the second rhyme pair in terms of evaluation (kleine). The coupling of the last two rhyme pairs is intensified in the alliteration and assonance of the last line, which ends with the word klage, a word that not only indicates the lover's plaint, but also can be associated with that genre of poetry created by lover-poets, in which the narrator complains of his lady's lack of interest.

The first stanza, then, draws attention to itself through the complex use of rhyme, intended to be disjunctive rather than harmonious. The disjunctive effect of these rhymes yokes together love as an experienced emotion or set of events and the art of poetry. Through the prism of rhyme, Walther evokes the conventions of Minne, in which love and poetry are linked without critical question. Yet, in this stanza, that very coupling attracts attention. The set of shorter lines immediately following this first stanza contains no internal rhyme, and its single end-line rhymed pairs, separated each by four lines, seem to diminish now any urgency or effect that rhyme might otherwise have. The literal level reveals a poet-lover who complains of his beloved's lack of attention. But its language is again punctuated with literariness. The word unbilde evokes the lack of skill in the creation of an image.⁴⁴ This literary terminology is immediately followed by literary traditions: the evocation of Eve and her linguistically related ruining of creation. In this context, the separation of the lady's body from the lover-poet cannot help but evoke separation of another kind, separation that recalls the disjunctive rhyming of a traditional pair (love and literature) in the first stanza.

The last four lines contain end rhymes as well as deliberate internal rhymes. This stanza's inner rhyme pairs, however, are not repeated twice and reversed as in the first stanza. Here, there is one different rhymed pair for each line. The internally set pairs, solte-wolte and eteswenne-denne, echo each other as they reflect the conditional “if-then” situation, which linguistically epitomizes the classical situation of Minne—if she only would, then I would be happy. The outer pairs, wære-mære and gnuoge-fuoge link the last stanza more closely to the art of poetry, but only on a linguistically associative (rather than context associative) level. According to Lexer, mære not only means “famous” or “worthy,” it may also mean “news,” “narrative,” and “poetic creation.” The latter set of linguistically oriented definitions for the word mære do not really fit into the narrative structure. But the last rhyme pair almost seems to be a commentary on precisely that lack of dispositio, which is, in essence, what the pair gnuoge-fuoge means.

The complex playing with rhyme in this poem within the context of the Minne lyric should, it seems, impede understanding. As in “Ich saz ûf eime steine,” analysis or the breaking down of elements is the major mode here. There are, however, two important differences. First, in the former poem, the analysis occurs on the narrative level; here the analysis occurs on the linguistic level. Second, and of more importance here, the linguistic breakdown does not impede understanding to a high degree. Although the reader may struggle mildly at first with the rhyme, the message of the poem appears straightforward: a lover suffers because his beloved does not pay attention to him. The reason for this communication of one level of the poem in spite of linguistic disjunction is that the words that form the most obvious rhymes (the internal rhymes) are extremely conventional. Their proximity to one another evokes traditional scenarios to which Walther's readers (including critics and other scholars) readily respond.

This poem seems to question the limits of rhyme as a device intended to create harmony. Furthermore, although it generates meaning, this poem also emphasizes the limits of poetic conventions. That is, it comments on the deflation or levelling of erstwhile metaphors into unambiguous signs. Although these now unambiguous signs may have more than one meaning, these meanings are fixed by literary traditions. (Thus, the unambiguous but multiple meanings of Minne as either “physical desire” or “spiritual desire” are conventional and more readily accessible than, for example, concepts like remembrance.) If poets are to craft signs in order to create fictional worlds, then the richness of those worlds depends on the vibrancy of their signs, their metaphors.

The loss of the creative meaning which these once effective metaphors generated is picked up in the words evoking the religious:

… ein ledic wîp
mich verderbet
gar âne schulde
… enhabe ir lîp
der enterbet.

47, 25-47, 30

Evoking, however palely, the language of judgment and the original Fall within the prism of rhyme, these lines generate a level concerned with creativity in language. This theological undercurrent recalls common religious knowledge as well as sophisticated notions of language, as evident in “Der Leich.” In the context of divine language and creation, which is ruined by woman, Minne lyrics can gain a new meaning. They can themselves become a translatio which goes beyond the mere ironic pose of the disenchanted poet-lover. That is, Walther's narrator transforms conventions into commentary on the literary art.

These questions of creation and of the poet's transformation of tradition to create effective metaphors, as the Virgin functions in “Der Leich,” are also examined in Walther's “Maneger frâget waz ich klage.” As W. T. H. Jackson states, “This poem makes it very clear that Walther is very aware of the ossification of the Minnesang vocabulary.”⁴⁵ Using the same conventions as found in “Ich minne, sinne, lange zît,” Walther's narrator here also brings in the concept of true vs. false love.

          Maneger frâget waz ich          (13,33)
          klage,
unde giht des einen daz ez
          iht von herzen gê.
der verliuset sîne tage:          (13,35)
wand im wart von rehter
          liebe weder wol noch wê:          (14,1)
des ist sîn geloube kranc.
swer gedæhte
waz diu minne bræhte,
der vertrüege mînen sanc.          (14,5)
          Minne ist ein gemeinez wort,
und doch ungemeine mit den
          werken: dêst alsô.
minne ist aller tugende ein
          hort:
âne minne wirdet niemer herze
          rehte frô.
sît ich den gelouben hân,          (14,10)
frouwe Minne,
fröit ouch mir die sinne.
mich müet, sol mîn trôst
          zergân.
          Mîn gedinge ist, der ich bin
holt mit rehten triuwen, dazs
          ouch mir daz selbe sî.          (14,15)
triuget dar an mich mîn sin,
sô ist mînem wâne leider
          lützel fröiden bî.
neinâ hêrre! sist sô guot,
swenne ir güete
erkennet mîn gemüete,          (14,20)
daz si mir daz beste tuot.
          Wiste si den willen mîn,
liebes unde guotes des wurd
          ich von ir gewert.
wie möht aber daz nû sîn?
sît man valscher minne mit
          sô süezen worten gert,          (14,25)
daz ein wîp niht wizzen mac
          wer si meine.
disiu nôt alleine
tuot mir manegen swæren tac.
          Der diu wîp alrêrst          (14,30)
          betrouc,
der hât beide an mannen und an
          wîben missevarn.
in weiz waz diu liebe touc,
sît sich friunt gein friunde
          niht vor valsche kan bewarn.
frowe, daz ir sælic sît!
lânt mit hulden          (14,35)
mich den gruoz verschulden,
der an friundes herzen lît.
Some ask what it is I complain
          of,
and claim that it doesn't stem
          from the heart.
Such a person is wasting his
          time:
he never experienced the joy or
          pain of true love:
his belief is sick.
Whoever has thought/experi-
          enced
what Minne could bring,
he would be patient of my song.
Minne is a word common to all,
and yet uncommon with its
          deeds: that's how it is.
Minne is of all virtues the
          guardian/epitome
without Minne no heart would
          ever be happy.
Since I believe this,
Lady Minne,
make me also happy.
It'd bother me, if my comfort
          would melt away.
My hope is that if I am
true, the person to whom I am
          good will be so too.
If I were to be wrong here,
then I have sadly little joy with
          my hope.
No, lord! she is so good,
that when her goodness
recognizes my state,
she will do her best for me.
If she were to know my will,
love and goodness would I have
          from her.
How can this be?
Since they persuade with sweet
          words for false Love
so that a woman might not know
          who means it.
Alone this difficult situation
gives me many heavy days.
He who first betrayed woman,
he has hurt both men and
          women.
I don't know what love is worth
          anymore,
if friends can't protect each oth-
          er from falseness.
Lady, that you may be happy!
Let me with grace
have that owed greeting,
that lies in a friend's heart.

Considered by most of Walther's critics to be a poem written in his earliest encounters with Minne,⁴⁶ it is, I think, more complex than it at first appears to be. The narrative level seems to move smoothly from the first stanza's challenge to detractors, to a reflection on what these detractors do not understand, Minne, in the next stanza, followed by the hope that the narrator's lady recognizes his love in two stanzas, and concluding with the fifth stanza's attack on the first persuader's deception and hope (against hope) for his lady's greeting.

Each stanza, however, can stand on its own, and the rhetorical markers, “dêst alsô” (stanza 2), “neinâ hêrre” (stanza 3), “wie möht aber daz nû sin” (stanza 4), and “frowe, daz ir sælic sît” (stanza 5) not only punctuate the poem, breaking up the narrative flow on the rhetorical level, they also move the poem backwards and forwards. That is, the first marker returns the reader back to the narrator's statement that Minne is a common word, although not common in deeds, while the next marker moves forward to the hope that his lady will recognize him. Similarly, the third marker returns to the problem initiated in the first stanza (the problem of distinguishing true from false), while the last marker moves forward to an apparently more concrete hope, specifically that of the lady's greeting. The back and forth movement of these markers not only rhetorically introduces pauses or disjunctions, it also invites reading in a non-linear fashion.

Each stanza makes sense in and of itself, but the sum of the stanzas must undergo a reader's “critical act.” Through confronting Minne conventions that have, in effect, become univalent, Walther has his narrator invite the reader to (re-)create the poetic process, or rather, the fiction of that process (the story of how a poet creates). The critical act begins by reading back and forth. For example, as is often the case with courtly lyrics, biblical language mingles with the language of Minne in this poem, but it becomes detectable with the last stanza's circumlocution for Satan. If one reads back into the poem through this final stanza's linguistically framed theological reference, it lends a new importance to certain words in the previous stanzas: “verliuset sîne tage,” “rehter liebe,” “geloube,”⁴⁷ “vertrüege” (stanza 1); “tugende,” “gelouben,” “trôst” (stanza 2); “rehten triuwen,” “guot,” “güete” (stanza 3); and “willen,” “süezen worten,” “nôt,” “swæren tac” (stanza 4). Not only do these words become theologically tinged, but they also color the stanzas. For example, in stanza 2, the belief in Minne that “fröit ouch … die sinne” stands in implicit contrast to the happiness in love of God, where words and deeds are the same, do not experience disjunction.

Although spurred by theological conventions, the invitation to read back and forth recalls “Der Leich” insofar as meditation on words seems to be the desired result. From here, however, the lyric also comments on the interaction among belief, hope, and knowledge. On the narrative level, certain knowledge seems to be on the wane, while belief and hope increase with the text's linear progression. At the linguistic level, however, there is a shift from an emphasis on belief and hope to an emphasis on knowledge as evinced in the quantity of word clusters associated with these three human states. The relation, however, is not a simple reversal; through negations, circumlocutions, and implications, what becomes clear is the disjunction between words and inner meaning. Thus, in stanza 1, words emphasizing belief and the thinking process, not knowledge (“geloube,” “gedæhte”) emphasize the unspoken premise that knowledge of true love is grounded in experience. In stanza 2, the narrator affirms his belief in Minne (“sît ich den gelouben hân”), which is his hope or comfort (“trôst”) through the conditional last line and the knowledge (again implied) informing his analysis of Minne.

The third stanza provides an important transition, from belief in self (“Mîn gedinge”) to belief in the lady's ability to perceive, to know—this time expressed (“erkennet”)—which figuratively, in this central stanza, depicts the meeting of her inner self (“güete”) with his inner self (“mîn gemüete”). Further, that transition is marked by a subtle change in terminology. The hope of stanza 2 (“trôst”) is picked up in the third stanza's first line and transformed into “wâne” right before this stanza's rhetorical marker. “Wâne” has connotations of a dream-like hope, a foolish hope, a figment of the imagination, which reverberate back into the melting away of that hope (“trôst zergân”), which is potentially posed in stanza two. At the same time, as emphasized by the rhetorical marker, it is the narrator's imagination that moves him forward in the stanza's last three lines to believe in her ability to perceive, to know.

The fourth stanza concentrates on the problem of knowledge (“Wiste,” “wizzen,” “meine”), expressing the problem negatively through the stanza's rhetorical marker and “niht wizzen mac” while conjuring up the detractors of the first stanza with the circumlocution for rhetorical expertise without “sinne” (“mit sô süezen worten gert”), but also at the same time implying, dimly, a ray of hope in something more happy through the rhetorical marker's being a rhetorical question and the last line's qualifying word “manegen” (that is, not every day). Finally, the last stanza mentions knowledge through negative modification (“in weiz”), but as everyone knows, Eve is the antetype to the Virgin, implying hope through the last four lines, as centered in the word “sælic.”

These far from simple dynamics involving the cluster of hope, belief, and knowledge (also important to the poet) are accompanied by similar dynamics involving self-reflexive terminology. That is, as the poem progresses linearly, the clear references to Minne as the literary art decrease. Thus, in stanza 1, “klage” and “sanc” are the prominent last words of the first and last lines, while stanza 2 looks at Minne as a word, a deed, a virtue, a force capable of creating happiness, and finally culminates in a personification, which is a variation of metaphor. In the crucial third stanza, however, only “sin” clearly reflects literary terminology, while its cluster of words concerning hope, belief, and knowledge conjures up the poetic talent of imagination. In the fourth stanza, the reference “valscher minne” colors the word “nôt” as a possible synonym for the first line's “klage.” Finally, in the last stanza, there are no definitively self-reflexive terms.

Although clear self-reflexive terminology decreases with the poem's linear progression, the degree of ambiguity concerning self-reflexive themes increases. Thus, although the “frowe” of the last stanza may be the lady the narrator loves, she may also be “frowe Minne” of the second stanza, especially since happiness is connected with both references (“fröit ouch mir die sinne, daz ir sælic sît”). Further, doubt begins in the second stanza's last line, while the wish for her greeting ends the poem. Thus, moving from confronting Minne's conventions to reading back and forth in increasingly more focused circles also parallels the movement from the less concretely expressed wish of stanza 3 (“daz beste tuot”) through the less general wish of stanza 4 (“liebes unde guotes”) to arrive at the more concretely expressed wish of the last stanza (“den gruoz”). Finally, the lyric's self-reflexive reading, when put together, seems to point to the back and forth poetic process, parallelling the reader's own process. Struggling with the necessity to distinguish himself from detractors, from rhetoricians, from meaningless words, from meaningless conventions that form his tradition, the poet's meaning becomes flesh as he achieves the creation of a metaphor (the culminating personification of stanza 2). And, with that creation, the central meeting in the imagination of the envisioned object of description (stanza 3), which at the same time fires his imagination, is also fraught with doubts, which lead to his falling back to the problem of rhetoricity that is nevertheless coupled with the hope of gaining the imagined reward (stanzas 4 and 5).

I have focused on limits in these two poems, but each poem also raises other issues of poetic creativity. For example, in the second poem, the movement also shifts from the individual poet to his inspiration (love) to the subject and to her reading of his inspiration. That is, from poet to reader, the same scene is observed, but with different results. The poet-lover notes the lack of communication in the conventional and stresses this lack through the personification—the ultimate codification of a value in a sign system—as viewed from the poet's side as well as from the reader's side. From the poet's view, the miscommunication is a result of ambiguous readings, “in weiz waz diu liebe touc.”

The focus on the theme of limits as expressed in Walther's poetry reveals the poet's interest in themes that are analyzed in literary theory. The confrontation with literary conventions is expressed as a self-reflexive theme through Walther's re-creation of traditional motifs, images, themes, and voices. That is, Walther uses the same traditional elements of love poetry, but creates a new informing framework by modifying some of the traditional details. In this poetic act, Walther structurally parallels the specialized reader's critical act, in that both poet and critic re-create contexts and attempt to offer different perspectives on tradition-informed material. The value of studying both critical responses to the poetry attributed to Walther and that poetry lies partly in the insights which they may offer literary theory.

Notes

1. The other extreme entails the acceptance of a text without consideration of historical factors. Literary criticism's appropriation of techniques common to the natural sciences is already a sore point in the late nineteenth century, as witnessed by the writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, for example:

   The problem of the humanities' relationship to their own subjectivity can only be solved when what we perceive to be contradictory—natural transcendental (psychological) knowledge and objective empirical knowledge of nature—is harmonized (my translation, very free).

   See Wilhelm Diltheys Gesammelte Schriften, I: Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte, ed. Bernhard Groethuysen (Leipzig: Teubner, 1922), 20.

2. Maria Corti, An Introduction to Literary Semiotics, trans. Margherita Bogat and Allen Mandelbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 31-33.

3. All citations of Walther's poetry are from the edition of Hugo Kuhn, Die Gedichte Walthers von der Vogelweide (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969). Also see Kuhn's additional, incomplete editorial notes, collected after his death, in Minnelieder Walthers von der Vogelweide: ein Kommentar, ed. Christoph Cormeau (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1982). Translations are mine.

4. See, for example, René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1978), 39.

5. This is, of course, not a new observation, although brought into prominence by varying impulses in literary theory over the past three or four decades and perhaps initiated by the rediscovery of Dilthey's desire to reinstate the humanities. Hermeneutic concepts (topoi) of the horizon of expectations and the hermeneutic circle inspire the investigation of problems such as how the past is to be recovered and how much of it can be recovered, processes which are dependent upon perceptions (measuring devices) that are flawed. For an overview on literary hermeneutics, see NLH [New Literary History] 10 (1978): 1-179. My own critical preferences include close textual (rhetorical) investigation within a context of medieval literary (courtly) society as highly sophisticated and word-oriented, a society that enjoys wordplay and encourages interplay between audience and poet (hence, my use of contemporary literary theory). For that reason, I call the audience “readers,” because it seems to me that these audiences could not have consisted of passive listeners. Literary historical studies that focus on social conditions and manuscript transmission, then, become highly influential in my creation of context.

6. That is, I refer to fictio, stemming from fingere, emphasizing the process rather than the absence of truth content.

7. Geoffrey Green, Literary Criticism and the Structures of History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 2. Examples of the creation of context can be taken from many literatures, as illustrated indirectly by Bergmann's first sentence (of 1931, published 1933) revealing contemporary Italian pride in the past (Conrad Arnold Bergmann, Walther von der Vogelweide: Lehrer und Führer des deutschen Volkes [Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1933], 1): “a few years ago Mussolini called Walther von der Vogelweide a small hill in comparison to the giant mountain Dante …” (my translation). As seen in the following pages, I focus on Walther because he has been a consistent source of interest for centuries. Anchored in the nationalistic spirit of his times and colored with the view of the Middle Ages as a dark period, for example, M. Spanier records the following opinion in 1911 (in “Nemt Frouwe Disen Kranz” Fünfzehn Gedichte Walthers von der Vogelweide: Eine Einführung [Hamburg: Alfred Janssen, 1911], 7):

   But every self-respecting German should at least read the Nibelungenlied and Walther in the original. They have something barbaric in them, these texts of Walther, that again and again attract attention (my translation).

   For a sober and thorough history of the reception of Walther's poetry, see Hugo Kuhn, “Die Voraussetzungen für die Entstehung der Manesseschen Handschrift und ihre Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Bedeutung,” in Der Deutsche Minnesang: Aufsätze zu seiner Erforschung, II, ed. Hans Fromm (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), 35-76.

8. Wellek and Warren, 15.

9. Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), ix.

10. The Rhetoric of Aristotle, ed. and trans. Lane Cooper (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960), 10.

11. The Rhetoric, 5. The enthymeme is also known to the Middle Ages, as witnessed by Julius Victor's Ars rhetorica, in Rhetores Latini Minores, ed. C. Halm (Leipzig: Teubner, 1863), 9.10, 411.

12. Thus, Eugene Vance argues (Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986], xi): “Poetic language in the Middle Ages is always in part a metalanguage.”

13. Textbooks are exemplified by the collection in Les Arts poétiques du XIIe et XIIIe siècle, ed. Edmond Faral (Paris: Champion, 1923), while philosophical (religious) treatises on language are most familiarly represented by patristic readings of texts. Using glossae to interpret literature has yielded the most sophisticated results, in my estimation, in the perceptive book by Alistair J. Minnis, Theory of Medieval Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984).

14. See note 1 above.

15. In its early stages, Walther criticism was necessarily concerned with the establishment of editions and the circumstances surrounding the manuscripts. At the same time, questions of Walther's life and circumstances also direct much of the critics' attention to a weaving together of manuscript and sociological indices that seeks to fill the gaps. As a result, Walther's “inquiries” into conventions have been treated as resulting from his rebellious nature and consequent feud with the “arch-conservative” Minnesänger, Reinmar der Alte. In connection with his unconventional stance to Minne as courtly love, see Konrad Burdach, Reinmar der Alte und Walther von der Vogelweide (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1928); Henry W. Nordmeyer, “Der Ursprung der Reinmar-Walther Fehde,” in Walther von der Vogelweide, ed. Siegfried Beyschlag (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971), 95-108; Silvia Ranawake, “Gab es eine Reinmar-Fehde? Zu der These von Walthers Wendung gegen die Konventionen der hohen Minne,” Oxford German Studies 13: Walther von der Vogelweide, ed. Timothy McFarland (London: Oxford University Press, 1982), 7-35; Olive Sayce, The Medieval German Lyric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 181-83, 199-201. For articles questioning traditional stances, also see From Symbol to Mimesis: The Generation of Walther von der Vogelweide, ed. Franz H. Bäuml (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1984).

16. Helmut de Boor, “Walther von der Vogelweide: etwa 1170-1230,” Die Großen Deutschen, I, ed. Hermann Heimpel, Theodor Heuss, Benno Reifenberg (Berlin: Ullstein, 1956), 115 (my translation). Although interpretation differs from generation to generation, the rhetoric is not much different, as, for example, when Bergmann wrote in 1931 (vii): “Philologically and historically, research has pretty much established Walther von der Vogelweide's lifework” (my translation).

17. As exemplified by two essays in the collection Interpretationen mittelhochdeutscher Lyrik, ed. Günther Jungbluth (Bad Homburg: Verlag Gehlen, 1969): Wolfgang Bachofer, “Walther von der Vogelweide: Aller Werdekeit ein Fügerinne,” 185-203, and Gerhard Hahn, “Walther von der Vogelweide: Nemt, Frowe, Disen Kranz,” 205-6.

18. Selected Poems of Walter von der Vogelweide, ed. and trans. Walter Alison Phillips (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1896), v-vi.

19. Karl Lucae, Leben und Dichten Walthers von der Vogelweide in seinen Grundzügen geschildert (Halle: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1867), 7-8.

20. Rudolf Wustmann, Walther von der Vogelweide (Straβburg: Trübner, 1913), 25. Compare with Constanze Heistelbergk, Walther von der Vogelweide: Eine Gabe für das deutsche Haus (Dresden: E. Pierson's Verlag, 1910), 2, whose foreword was written in 1909: “In addition, German women should become familiar with this singer, who in the noblest sense of the word was a fighter for them” (my translation; her italics).

21. This appears to be the case in, for example, essays like that of Ester Perlová, “Zur Streitfrage um Walthers von der Vogelweide Herkunftsort,” in Walther von der Vogelweide: Kolloquium (Prague: Kultur- und Informationszentrum der DDR, 1980), 79-88, where the author states (87) regarding a recent study concerning Walther's birthplace (namely, Heinz F. Friedrichs, Walther von der Vogelweide: der Mensch in Zeit und Umwelt, Stand-Familie-Heimat [Neustadt/Aisch: Verlag Degener, 1978])—

    Friedrich's findings, as far as I know, are the only studies on Walther von der Vogelweide that found praise in the GDR. With their documentation on familial relationships, they are the most convincing (my translation).

    Compare with Siegfried Obermeier's evaluation of the same study (Walther von der Vogelweide: Der Spielmann des Reiches [München: Albert Langen, 1980]), 30:

    Nevertheless, the thesis that Frankfurt is [Walther's] birthplace is worth discussion, which makes the author's [Friedrich's] decoratively adventuresome speculations even more regrettable (my translation).

    For an overview of German academic studies in the context of societal impulses as indicated by journalistic reviews of literary trends (and that uses a modified application of Jürgen Habermas' theories on public opinion as a forum for the writing of literary history), see Geschichte der deutschen Literaturkritik (1730-1980), ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1985).

22. Trude Ehlert, Konvention-Variation-Innovation: Ein struktureller Vergleich von Liedern aus “Des Minnesangs Frühling” und von Walther von der Vogelweide (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1980), 15-28.

23. Walther von der Vogelweide, ed. and trans. Peter Wapnewski (Frankfurt: Fischer Bücherei, 1962).

24. Phillips, xv.

25. De Boor, 116-17. The first is the only non-literary (non-ambiguous?) fact known regarding any of the Minnesänger-see Kuhn, “Die Voraussetzungen für die Entstehung der Manesseschen Handschrift,” 42.

26. Kuhn, “Die Voraussetzungen für die Entstehung der Manesseschen Handschrift,” 35.

27. For an insightful reading of this Minnelied, see Olive Sayce, “‘Si wunderwol gemachet wîp’ (L53,25ff): A Variation on the Theme of Ideal Beauty,” Oxford German Studies 13 (1982): 104-14.

28. Jürgen Schneider, “Die Lieder Neidharts in ‘wort’ und ‘wise’ im Spätmittelalter,” Lyrik des ausgehenden 14. und des 15. Jahrhunderts, ed. Franz V. Spechtler (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984), 233; his emphasis.

29. Prose of the Romantic Period, ed. Carl R. Woodring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 525.

30. W. T. H. Jackson, “The Ambivalent Image in the Poetry of Walther von der Vogelweide” in Spectrum Medii Aevi: Festschrift George Fenwick Jones (Stuttgart: Kümmerle Verlag, 1983). Compare “The poet-persona is merely expressing the lover-persona's ‘wân’” (162) with Jackson's comment on the poem, “Maneger frâget waz ich klage”: “What is ‘rehte triuwe’ and is Walther's ‘sin’ deceived by the fact or by the word?” (160).

31. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 151-54.

32. For example, direct links between classical and medieval dawn songs are discussed in Ulrich Müller, “Ovid Amores—Alba—Tageliet: Typ und Gegentyp des ‘Tagesliedes’ in der Liebesdichtung der Antike und des Mittelalters,” in Der Deutsche Minnesang, 2:362-400.

33. Michael Riffaterre, Text Production, trans. Terese Lyons (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 5.

34. See Arthur Groos (“‘Last of the Red-Hot Lovers’?”, in From Symbol to Mimesis, 93) concerning the replacement of the biography of the poet with that of the lover, and Antonín Hruby, (“Walthers Liebe auf dem Prokrustesbett der Methode,” in From Symbol to Mimesis, 119-21) regarding the difficult relationship between the production of an edition and interpretation.

35. Matthias von Lexer, Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1872), 3 vols. The term is discussed in Uwe Stamer, Ebene Minne bei Walther von der Vogelweide (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1976).

36. My attribution of unstated narrative dimensions to lyric poetry is not without precedent. The following three essays use Greimas' actantial theory to describe the lyric's latent narrativity in, respectively, fifteenth century French lyrics, a twelfth-century lyric of Chrétien de Troyes, and a twelfth-century lyric of the Châtelain de Coucy: Paul Zumthor, “Les Narrativités latentes dans le discours lyrique médiéval,” The Nature of Medieval Narrative, ed. Minnette Grunmann-Gaudet and Robin F. Jones (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1980), 39-55; Peter Haidu, “Text and History: The Semiosis of Twelfth-Century Lyric as Sociohistorical Phenomenon,” Semiotica 33 (1981): 1-62; Vance, Mervelous Signals, 86-110.

37. For a discussion of the literary system as a whole, see Corti, 7-10.

38. Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 114; the discussion of Lost in the Funhouse occurs at pages 118-19.

39. See Marcia Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 8-81, where Colish discusses Augustine's theory of words as signs in the knowledge of God, leading to his interpretation of both words and deeds as verbal signs that should be ethically directed in remembrance of God.

40. For a provocative discussion of metaphor, in which it is claimed that western tradition has looked at metaphor through a synecdochic filter, see Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (London: Macmillan Press, 1984), 87-129. For medieval references to the metaphor, see Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik: Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft (München: Max Hueber, 1960), §558-64.

41. Harry Caplan, ed. and trans., Rhetorica ad Herennium (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 4.34.45. The translation is Caplan's.

42. On codification within the literary system, see Corti, 124-31.

43. Although this poem is presented as one stanza in Kuhn's edition, I have divided it into three, for expedience in discussing its prosody. Kuhn notes (Minnelieder Walthers von der Vogelweide, 65) that this poem is attributed to Reinmar in MS A and to Walther in MSS BC.

44. See, for example, S. L. Clark, “ein schoenez bilde: Walther von der Vogelweide and the Idea of Image” (in From Symbol to Mimesis, 69-91), in which Clark discusses the use of the term bilde in Walther to denote the literary theoretical use of the term to denote “image.”

45. Jackson, 160.

46. See Kuhn, Minnelieder Walthers von der Vogelweide, 5.

47. In his last set of notes on this poem, Kuhn (Minnelieder Walthers von der Vogelweide, 2, 5) prefers the reading of MS C “gelücke” (happiness) instead of Lachmann's choice of “geloube” (belief).