"Hortus Temporum": Beginning the Middle High German "Rolandslied"

Abstract

Referring to classical legends which present the prelogical experience of a people who had just risen out of the Neolithic R. R. Bolgar remarks that the last analysis these overtly expressed conceptions are of less importance than the information we derive incidentally from the manner in which they are presented. The obvious content of literature is less significant than the of thought and language employed by its authors.l This observation applies equally well to an epic like the Middle High German Rolandslied. Sparked by the fascination of the German lay nobility for its own heroic legends, the cleric-poet Konrad's version of Roland's death and Charlemagne's victory over the pagans (written ca. 1170) reflects in its mechanism the shift from oral (prelogical) to literate incorporation of that history.2 Edward Said comments that there are two primitive states. One is the stability of preliterate society, the other the moment at which writing begins to be learned-in fine, the and the beginning.3 If not at a zero-point Origin still shrouded in Neolithic mist, the Rolandslied may be said, with qualification, to stand at the inception of a cultural transformation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in