Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/536

Rh 518 “ Sanctus pauluskehiez tien die in sinén ziten uuﬁndon des sﬁonetagen, taz er C-r nechfune ér romanum imperimn zegienge unde antichristus richeson begondi. Uuér zuiuelot romanos iu uuésen allero richo hérren unde iro geuualt kﬁn ze énde dero uuérlte '1” “ St Paul assured those who in his time expected the day of judgment that it would not come before the lloman Empire was dissolved, and Antichrist began to reign. Who doubts that the Romans are the masters of all kingdoms, and that their power reaches to the end of the world 2" It will be clear from what has been said above that the main feature of the Old High German period is the total absence of a common literary language. No voluntary modiﬁcations of the form of speech are to be found, but such as are naturally involved in any attempt to adapt a spoken idiom to literary use. Nevertheless it has been suggested by K. Biiillenhoffl and others that idioms of a more reﬁned character than the ordinary popular dialects were spoken at the principal courts of the empire, and especially at the imperial court itself, and that the autho- rity of these Hofsprachen was great enough to exer- cise a modifying inﬂuence on the literary productions throughout the empire, or in those parts at least where High German was the vernacular speech. But how these suppositions can be proved does not appear, or how they can be reconciled with the fact that all literary documents of the period are dialectal. Jlidtlle G'erman.—The transition to Middle High and Low German is conspicuously marked by a decided im- provement in the poetic faculties of the nation.2 While the 10th century has left only a very few specimens of poetry, and these of poor quality, the number of poems (mainly of a theological bearing) dating from the 11tl1 century is not inconsiderable, and the 12th century shows a rapidity of literary development almost unparalleled. At ﬁrst indeed religious and legendary poetry is still prevalent, but soon literature begins to take a 1nore historical or epic turn. This tendency is clearly visible in the I(ru'sercln'on.z'/r, or Emperor’s Chronicle, in which the ﬁrst attempt is made to give a survey of universal and German history in apoetical form. The romantic tales of Alexander the Great and of the battle of Roncesvalles were translated from the French,- the Alexanderliecl by the Pfalfe Lamprecht, the Ifolcmclsliecl by the Pfaffe Konrad ; while old national traditions contri- buted ﬁtting subjects for such epic poems as that concern- ing the adventures of the Lombard King Rother. Lyric poetry, hitherto altogether neglected, sprang suddenly into vigour in the remote east of Austria about the middle of the century, and soon found its way to other countries. But the most decided advance was not made till about 1180, when the new forms of social life that had crept in among the 1nore cultivated classes, in imitation of the laws and customs of French chivalry, began to exercise a powerful reforming influence on all branches of poetry. The example set by the Netherlands poet, Heinrich von Veldeke (who for some time lived, and partly wrote, in Germany), in his Eneit, or ,E'uei¢I, was soon followed by the three great epic masters of the period, Ilartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strasburg, and Wolfram von Esehenbach. About the same time the .'ibelznz,r/enlierl and other compositions of a more national character were composed, while lyric poetry was raised to a height of excellence never attained at any other period of the Middle Ages, and best represented in the songs of 'a1ther von der Vogelweide. It is true enough that this new chivalrous poetry was not always very original in thought; indeed, most epic poems of this class, and many lyric stanzas, have been directly copied from French models ; ‘ See his l)»nkm¢'ilr'r, Introduction. ’-’ Sec V. Scherer, l.:'rsclu'I.Itte der :1: Ill-5-. In :1 Liter rtur in; X]. mid XII. Jah-rlmnc/ert, Stra.sbu:'g, 1375. GEl{llANY [LANG-UAGE. but its influence on the culture of the language was immense. It was then for the ﬁrst time that Germany possessed a real literary language, undoubtedly homogeneous as far as style and metre are concerned. Whether a similar unity of the outer form of speech had already been reached at that period is a point very diflicult to decide. The question was raised for the ﬁrst time as early as 1820, by Karl Lachmann, in his Auszlxa/zl ans Jen. Izocluleutsc/zen ])z'clztern des XII 1. Ja/zrlz. Lachmann’s opinion was that the poets of the 13th century spoke a deﬁnite, unchange- able sort of High German, a few minor dialectal peculiari- ties being excepted, and that uneducated scribes had been guilty of introducing older or corrupt forms of the common speech into our manuscripts. These views were at the time unanimously accepted, and are still held (though in a somewhat modiﬁed form, admitting two literary idioms, one in the south, the other in the midland) by a majority of the German philologists of the present day. As a consequence of this, most of the “critical” editions of .[iddle High German poetry that have appeared since Lachmann’s time do not reproduce the original readings of the manuscripts, but give the texts in a “ corrected” form, co:n1nonl_y called “ correct Middle High German,” which is assumed to appear in its purest form in the works of Hartmann von Aue. It is chiefly Alemannian, or Swabian, with some Fraukish peculiarities of spelling in the use of the consonants, in order to produce a greater resemblance to ordinary Modern High German orthography. No manu- script, however, is known to be written in exactly the same language or orthography ; 11or are there any poets, except those of Swabia, who do 11ot clearly show by their rhymes the existence of dialectal forms in their speech. All incon- grnities in the rhymes disappear when they are transferred to the forms peculiar to the local dialects of their anthors.3 It was therefore but natural that a reaction against Lach1nann’s views should ultimately have set in;4 a11d this reaction appears to have been right in denying that dialectal forms were purposely and stndiously avoided, even by the classic authors of the period, with a view to the approximation of their language to a certain universal idiom never existing anywhere but in the fancy of certain modern writers. How injurious to the study of lliddle High German dialects the views of Lachmann, had they prevailed, must have been, it is easy to see; but on the other hand it 1nnst not be forgotten that the only method of investigating the dialects of the single authors was that followed by Lachmann, viz., to reconstruct them by a care- ful study of the rhymes, for the dialects of the manuscripts are often, nay in most cases, clearly different from those of the writers themselves, as shown by the rhymes. It is therefore not so much the principle of reconstruction that has been resisted by Lachmann’s opponents as the way in which this reconstruction has been practically carried out. For prose writings of course no such reconstruction is pos- sible ; still, prose documents, especially such as were destined for local use only (charters, &c.), and therefore less liable to adulterations of the original, are often the main sources for lerman dialectology. The prominent feature of German (Low German in- eluded) in this period is the levelling of the unaceented vowels of the inflexionaland some of the derivative syl- 3This has been exemplified in a most masterly manner by V. Braune, in his Untersm'h1In_r/en iibcr ll:-1'm'Lch run. l'cl¢lcke; see Zeit- sclmﬂ féir deutsche I’/L-ilologiv, iv. p. 279 sqq. Braune has conclu- sively shown that lleinrich von Veldeke never tried to write German (althoue;h he wrote for German re:ulers), as had generally been sup- posed bel'nre_. but simply wrote in his familiar Netherlands dialect. " See espea-iullv 11. Paul, (lab es cine miltcﬂcoclulz'm'sclu- .'chr1ft- sprcuthe? llalle, 1373. Paul seems, however, to go too far in denying the existence of <. mic peculiarities of style pointed out by L1l.('lllIlIlI1ll
 * u.:l his followers.