THIRD PERIOD ( 1100-1300). The effect of the Crusades was twofold. They revived epic mem ories of Charlemagne and Roland and of the triumphs of Alexander. The response was im mediate. Before 1130 there was a Rolandslied and an Alexanderlied. Tales of German adven ture soon followed (Rother, Herzog, Ernst, Oren del). Political, intellectual, and literary hori zons widened together under the rule of Frederick IL, and German literature blossomed into its first classical period. Growing ever more self conscious, more national, during the closing years of the twelfth century, it greets us on the thresh old of the thirteenth with its Iliad, the Nibe lungenlied, and its Odyssey, the Gudrun. Here the people speak; meantime the Court circle is giving us the philosophic epics of Wolfram von Eschen bach, the popular poetic tales of Gottfried of Strassburg and Hartmann von Aue, the stirring political songs of Walther von der Vogelwcide, and the melodious chorus of the Minnesingers. The forerunners of these Court poets were Lambrecht, Conrad, and Heinrich von Veldeke. Their suc cessors show a rapid decline due to over-produc tion and artificiality. Literature begins to yield in interest to history, form to matter, and lyric poetry follows close in the wake of the epic de cline, so that by 1300 chivalrous love poetry is dead in Germany. There is in the treatment of the chivalric epics the same confusion of persons and their dates that is indicated in the remains of the earlier period. Rother is made grandfather of Charles the Great, but much that is told of him belongs to Roger of Sicily; the historic Duke Ernst is fused with the historic Ludolf, son of the Emperor Otto, who was also a rebel, and the resultant creation becomes a romantic Crusader, a medieval rival of Ulysses in his wanderings and of Sindbad in his adventures among pygmies, giants, cyclops, and magnetic mountains. Oren del becomes also a sort of Ulysses, and German romantic fancy is found playing also with the Irish argonaut Saint Brendan, while it makes of the English martyr-King Oswald a half comic amorous Crusader. This free treatment of Chris tian saints implies a less serious view of the great issues of life, as though the Crusaders had made men more tolerant as they saw their Emperor Frederic IL contending with Saladin for the palm of magnanimity. Walther von der Vogel weide is bold in his teaching of a philosophic toleration, and a crusading poet says that at Acre you could hardly tell Christians from Jews or heathens. It was an age of awakening that found its first strong national voice in Heinrich von Veldeke, and it is not by chance that the recognition of his poetic primacy is associated with the Whitsuntide of 1284, when 70,000 Ger man knights gathered at Mayence as guests of Barbarossa at the knighting of his sons. That
event was an epoch in the national life, and the place that Veldeke won there by his Encide marked no less an epoch in German heroic verse. But from this time Latin sources of inspiration proved less congenial than the Franco-Celtic, and from that time the Court epic deals prevailingly with legends of Arthur, of the Grail, and of Charles the Great.
The masterpieces of this period are embraced within thirty years. from 1190 to 1220. Here is found the work of Hartmann von Aue (q.v.), Gottfried von Strassburg (q.v.), Wolfram von Esehenbach (q.v.). and Walther von der Vogel weide (q.v.). Here, too, the popular epics Gu Brun (q.v.) and the Nibelungenlied (q.v.). The outburst was natural and spontaneous; all classes shared in it. The Heldenbuch, compiled and in part written in the fifteenth century by Kaspar von der Rhon, is but a working over of the em barrassment of the epic wealth of this earlier period. And among the Minnesingers the great Walther had worthy though unequal compeers in Heinrich von Morungen, Reinmar der Alte, and Gottfried von Neifen. Beginning in imitation of the Troubadours, they attain soon to a genuine expression of lyric emotion, and to originality of form which is sometimes artificial, but seldom without witness to a sense of beauty and a keen appreciation of melody, which is as surprising in the suddenness of its diffused manifestation as it is in the speed of its decline.
With the second quarter of the thirteenth cen tury artificiality gains the upper hand in Ulrich von Liechtenstein (d.1255), and vulgarity in Neidhard von Redenthal .(d.1240), and in Tann hauser (d.1270) the dignity of lyric poetry is sacrificed wholly to a rather coarse spirit of com edy. The seriously minded express themselves didactically. Here again the best are first. Freidank's Bescheidenheit, Thomasin von Zerk laere's Wdlsche Gast, show a lofty ideal of mo rality not without a touch of enthusiasm. Their successors Reimar von Zweter, Heinrich Frauen lob, Hugo von Trimberg, the anonymous collection Der Winsbecke, and the didactic Krieg auf der Wartburg, a supposed tournament of poets of an earlier age, all tend to the commonplaces of `proverbial philosophy.' This change marks a shifting in social ideals. Knighthood had be come less important; knights less able, perhaps less willing, to be patrons of song. The Minne singers (q.v.) are becoming Meistersingers (q.v.). Nuremberg, a trading city, is to become the lit irary centre, and to apply to poetry the commer cial and economic spirit by which it had won political recognition. Prose begins to claim a place in the sermons of Brother Berthold (d.1272), of Regensburg, the greatest orator of the century, and codes of local law, Sachsen spiegel and Schwabenspiegel, are formulated in the mother tongue.