The Origins of German Minnesang

Abstract

Thomas Carlyle was no believer in the Theory of Continuity as applied literary expression. He did not believe that the mediaeval lyric grew by a series of pendulum swings from a lower stage of verse, less native and less lyric. He denounced the Cabanis doctrine that poetry was a product of the smaller intestines to be medically cultivated by the exhibition of castor-oil. Flat-footed he stood for the Theory of Inspiration and, after characterizing the Swabian period in a paragraph of singular beauty, he surprises us with the climactic phrase: Suddenly, as at sunrise, the whole earth had grown vocal.' Now, perhaps it were wise accept Carlyle's dictum-and so bed. But unhappily the choice does not rest with us, for we have been beset round about with theories of extraneous origin for the Swabian efflorescence-the waste places of the earth have been searched that none might suspect minnesang be a German matter. Jakob Grimm asked all but one hundred years ago: Why must German poetry be made sprout from a foreign seed, when it is so robust that it can have been fathered only by an indigenous unit? And this apparently rhetorical question much answer has been made.