The Mozarabic Lyric and Theodor Frings' Theories

Abstract

N HIS lecture Minnesinger und Troubadours' Theodor Frings, the famous linguistic geographer turned literary historian of no less intuition, attempts a daring return to what might be called supergeographic Herderian ideas about Naturpoesie, as he had done once before, in 1939, for europdische Heldendichtung. In this lecture he revives more specifically Herder's and the romantics' idea of the popular origin of Minnesang and troubadour poetry. After having taken into account all that has been suggested concerning the development of these mediaeval poetic schools and having pondered the various theories (the classical Latin, the middle Latin [the Vagantes!], the liturgical, the Arabic), Frings asserts that no one reading with a fresh mind a Middle High German poem such as Walther von der Vogelweide's Unter der linden (ca. 1200) or the ProvenCal poem of Marcabrun, A la fontana del vergier (ca. 1150), can fail to be struck by the fact that the learned sources hitherto suggested by comparative literary scholarship do not fully account for the living poetic products. Uns ist, als habe man iiber der Ahnenforschung das lebende und lebendige Kind vergessen. To Frings these specimens of courtly poetry are only learned re-elaborations of original Frauenlieder which spring from timeless, universal, lyrical folk themes. In the poem of Walther, he points out, we hear a primeval Gliickslaut ... im Munde des plaudernden sich erinnernden Madchens, aber von