Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/314

300 Ages, and then make our way back quickly to the eighteenth century.

Down to the middle of the twelfth century the Literature of Germany is mainly a Literature of appropriation: appropriation of the Christian rehgion, with its Bible stories, its legendary lore, and its spirit of other-worldliness; of that fabulous ancient history which we find everywhere in medieval writings; of tales of fighting and adventure which had already been molded into poetic form in France. But the old indigenous German poetry had never died out. After the incoming of Christianity it was kept alive by illiterate gleemen whose work did not get written down, because the churchmen, who alone could write, looked on it with disfavor. In the latter part of the twelfth century, however, the art of writing began to be more generally practised by the knights, and then came a notable flowering of lyric and narrative poetry.

Let us pass by all that part of it which has any resemblance to the work of the ProvenQal and French poets. In so doing, to be sure, we shall be passing by the most winsome lyrist of medieval Europe, a poet equally eminent for the perfection of his artistry and the rugged virility of his thought, and we shall also be passing by the profoundest interpreter of Arthurian and Grail romance. But the songs of Walther von der Vogel- weide, while essentially original, as much so as the work of Chaucer, belong after all to a type that had first been developed in France. So also the work of Wolfram von Eschenbach and the other German romancers, while it contains much that is truly their own, follows the line of an imported fashion. This is not the case, however, with that ancient conglomerate tale of the fair maid of Burgundy, which a nameless Austrian poet, about the year 1200, put into the form which we know as the "Lay of the Nibelungs."

There is no time here for any comparison of the " Nibelung Lay" with the other famous folk-epics, such as the Homeric poems, the "Mahabharata," the "Shanama" or the "Chan-