‘Amor and His Brother Cupid’: The ‘Two Loves’ in Heinrich von Veldeke's ‘Eneit’

Abstract

Most scholars who have studied the medieval adaptations of Virgil's epic masterpiece agree that the principal change introduced to the story by the Roman d'Eneas and Heinrich von Veldeke's Eneit involves the Dido and Lavinia episodes. In general terms, the first four books of the Aeneid have been reduced in scope to the story of Dido, whereas Virgil's brief references to Lavinia in later books have been expanded into an independent love intrigue several thousand lines in length, creating a bipartite epic which anticipates the structure of Arthurian romance. There is considerably less unanimity of opinion concerning the nature and function of these two episodes in Veldeke's Eneit. The argument has circled for the most part around the question whether the loves of Dido and Lavinia for Eneas can be differentiated in terms of ‘unrehte’ and ‘rehte minne’ or in terms of fate and external circumstances. The following study focuses on a basic element of the work which has largely been ignored but could clarify the dispute: the distribution and roles of the gods of love in the two episodes.