 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Konrad von Würzburg" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(January 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Konrad von Würzburg (c.1220-1230 – 31 August 1287)[1] was the chiefGerman poet of the second half of the 13th century.
As his name suggests, Konrad hailed from the Franconian town ofWürzburg.[2][3] By the standards of medieval poets, his life is unusually well documented. He spent part of his life inStrasbourg and his later years inBasel, where he owned a house. The names of his wife and daughters are recorded. He died in Basel in 1287. LikeGottfried von Strassburg, whom he admired, but unlike most other poets from the time, Konrad did not belong to the nobility. His varied and voluminous literary work is comparatively free from the degeneration which set in so rapidly inMiddle High German poetry during the 13th century.[4]
According to theEncyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, "[h]is style, although occasionally diffuse, is dignified in tone; his metre is clearly influenced by Gottfried's tendency to relieve the monotony of the epic-metre with ingenious variations, but it is always correct; his narratives—if we exceptDie halbe Birn, of which the authorship is doubtful—are free from coarseness, to which the popular poets at this time were prone, and, althoughmysticism andallegory bulk largely in his works, they were not allowed, as in so many of his contemporaries, to usurp the place of poetry."[4]
Konrad wrote a number of legends (Alexius,Silvester,Pantaleon) illustratingChristian virtues anddogma;Der Welt Lohn, a didactic allegory on the familiar theme ofFrau Welt, the woman beautiful in front, but unsightly and loathsome from behind.Die goldene Schmiede is apanegyric of theVirgin Mary; theKlage der Kunst, an allegorical defence of poetry.[4]Herzmaere is a story on the eaten heart.[5] It tells of the relationship between a knight and married noblewoman who had a jealous husband.[5] After the knight died during a pilgrimage to theHoly Land his squire attempted to deliver the knight's heart to his lover.[5] The husband saw the squire before, ordered the heart to be prepared in a tasty manner and gave it to his wife, the lover of the knight.[5] When she became aware of the whole story, she died.[5]
His most ambitious works are two enormously long epics,Der trojanische Krieg[6] (consisting of more than 40,000 verses, and unfinished) andPartenopier und Meliur, both of which are based on French originals. Konrad's talents are best showcased however in his shorter verse romances, such asEngelhart und Engeltrut,Kaiser Otto andDas Herzemaere; the latter, the theme of which has been made familiar to modern readers byUhland in hisKastellan von Coucy, is one of the best poems of its kind in Middle High German literature.[4]
There is no complete collection available of Konrad's works. Some examples are:
The shorter poems,Otto andHerzemaere, can be found inErzählungen und Schwänke des Mittelalters, edited by H Lambel (2nd ed., 1883). Later German translations of Konrad's most popular poems were published by K Pannier and H Kruger inReclams Universalbibliothek (1879-1891).[4]
See F Pfeiffer inGermania, iii (1867), and W Goither in theAllgemeine deutsche Biographie, vol. 44 (1898), s.v. Würzburg, Konrad von.[4]
This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Conrad of Würzburg".Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 968.