2022-07-10
49 分钟This is medieval death trip for Saturday, July 9, 2022.
Episode 92 helmbrecht begins or how to become a robber knighthood hello, and welcome to medieval death Trip, the show where we explore the wit and weirdness of medieval texts.
I'm your host, Patrick Lane.
We've been on our medieval true crime kick for a few episodes now, and today we're going to swap out one of those adjectives.
Instead of true crime, we'll look at criminal activity as rendered in medieval fiction, or at least an event that has been fictionalized.
Taken at face value, our text for today claims to be by an eyewitness reporting true events.
Our text is the narrative poem Meyer Helmbrecht by an author who identifies himself at the end of the poem as Werner de Gartinaire or Werner the gardener.
Precisely who this Werner is has been one of the big questions about this poem since it began receiving serious scholarly attention in the 19th century.
The other main debate is over how much this poem should be considered to relate to true history.
We'll come back to both of these questions later, and when I say later, I don't necessarily mean later.
In this episode.
This poem is a little under 2000 lines long, so we're going to be taking it in parts over the course of three episodes.
Meyer Helmbrecht was written around the year 1250.
It is a rhyming poem in rhyming couplets, and its language is Middle High German, a historical stage of High German, as it was roughly between 1050 and 1350.
And the testimony of a quora thread indicates that Middle High German, which I do not read myself, is about as different from modern German as Middle English is from modern English, though apparently some modern german dialects are closer to it than others.
Also, I'll just mention, because it's something I misunderstood back when I started out in medieval studies, and this might help some of you out there to avoid making the same error I did.
You do have this distinction between High German and Low German.
This distinction is not, as I thought when I first heard these terms, a distinction of quality, like when we talk about low Latin.
Rather, it refers to geography.
Low German describes the language of the lower lying plains areas of the north, and High German comes from the more mountainous regions to the southeast.