Theorizing German Romance: The Excursus on Enite's Horse and Saddle in Hartmann von Aue's Erec

Abstract

Theorizing German Romance:The Excursus on Enite's Horse and Saddle in Hartmann von Aue's Erec Will Hasty The stories about Arthur that suddenly and rapidly increased in popularity from the middle of the twelfth century onward must have seemed somewhat strange to continental Europeans. The exotic subject matter – la matière de Bretagne – full of place names from Britain and Brittany and marvellous characters and objects, likely posed a quandary for medieval authors and audiences who were so fascinated with this material, given that "literary works recounted what was true, one could not – or should not – invent tales" (Batts 9). Yet precisely such invention is what was happening in the Arthurian romances from the very beginning, and already at the beginning authors were engaged in literary-theoretical reflections aimed at legitimizing their narratives. As we shall see, the prologue was a favoured place for the articulation of such literary theoretical reflections, and in the prologue of the first Arthurian romance, Chrétien de Troyes's Erec and Enide, the author confers legitimacy on the Arthurian material as it existed before him – mangled and corrupted by those who try to live by storytelling – and makes it fit for kings and counts by eliciting "a beautifully ordered composition" ("une molt bele coinjointure"; v.14). By way of the rhetorical mandates "to speak well and to teach well" ("a bien dire et a bien aprandre"; v. 12), Chrétien confers legitimacy on his tale in a manner that is both aesthetically pleasing and morally useful. But more is going on here than this: Chrétien is clearly saying that the story he is telling is of his own design. Arthurian romance with all its formative possibilities has been invented, and Chrétien himself seems to be aware of the significance of his achievement when he ends his prologue with the words, "Des or comancerai l'estoire / qui toz jorz mes iert an mimoire / tant con durra crestïantez; / de ce s'est Crestïens vantez" (Now I shall begin the story that will be in memory for evermore, as long as Christendom lasts – of this does Chrétien boast; vv. 23–26). A kind of narrative has been created in which what one is tempted to call creative interventions in the transmitted material on the part of the author, as well as a metadiscursive level at which these interventions are being reflected and legitimized, are established elements from the outset. German authors such as Hartmann and Wolfram, whose courtly romances were more or less loosely [End Page 253] based on those of Chrétien, follow in this regard in their illustrious predecessor's footsteps. Indeed, "more or less loosely" refers directly to the creativity that the German authors bring to their French source material. Not surprisingly, given the literary-theoretical dimension of the Arthurian romances that was already established by Chrétien, the first lengthy literary-theoretical reflection in Middle High German literature occurs in the very first of the Arthurian romances, Hartmann von Aue's Erec, as this essay will argue. Not far from the end of this romance, Hartmann's narrator embarks on a lengthy excursus describing the horse and saddle that Enite receives as a gift from the dwarf-like king Guivreiz. This excursus, which is more than thirteen times longer than the description of horse and saddle in the source work by Chrétien de Troyes (Strasser 63), has been regarded by previous scholars, albeit in different ways, as a "marker" of the fictional status of Hartmann's narrative. One of the more significant scholarly contributions in recent decades on the manner in which medieval German authors "theorize" or reflect upon the legitimacy of the fictionality of their narratives has been Walter Haug's Literaturtheorie im deutschen Mittelalter. One of Haug's major theses is that authors employ traditional rhetorical elements in novel ways, particularly in the framework of prologues and excursuses (92), to reflect on the fictional status of their narratives. Of special importance in this "theorizing" is what Haug calls the "truth of fiction" or the authoritative meaning that can be claimed by a kind of narrative (e.g. the Arthurian kind) that does not...