In an earlier post on this blog I wrote about Althochdeutsch, Old High German, written from around AD 750 to 1050. High German written from around 1050 to 1350 is called Mittelhochdeutsch, Middle High German. As with Old High German, the adjective "High" in Middle High German refers to the higher elevations of the hilly and mountainous regions of southern Germany where it is spoken, as opposed to the Plattdeutsch, Low German, spoken in the geographically flatter northern regions bordering on Belgium and the Netherlands.
With Mittelhochdeutsch, German became somewhat more sophisticated and assured, less of a mere exercise in translating from Latin and more of a legitimate literary language of its own. Much has been said about the relative literary merits of Old and Middle High German. I don't wish to take part in this debate. It seems only natural that those who specialize in Old High German would have a higher opinion of the best artistic efforts in that language, than those who don't. I will say, and this is, I believe, entirely uncontroversial, that the earliest works in German which are still widely read today are from the Mittelhochdeutsch era.
Above all, the work of four Middle High German authors remains very popular: the anonymous author of the Nibelungenlied; Hartmann von Aue; Gottfried von Strassburg; and Wolfram von Eschenbach. In the extraordinarily fruitful period from 1170 to 1250, these four writers published book-length epic poems which a reader fluent in German can read untranslated, although she will probably wish to make frequent use of a Middle-German-to-New-German dictionary.
The Nibelungenlied is a story of pre-Christian Germanic heroes, mixed with historic elements from the time of Attila the Hun (the character Etzel in the poem is based on Attila). Richard Wagner based his four-part operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen partly on the Nibelungenlied, and partly on the earlier Germanic versions.
The Nibelungenlied is known as a Heldenepos or heroic epic. The works of Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg and Wolfram von Eschenbach, on the other hand are called hoefische Epen, or courtly epics. They were written by knights, members of the courts of monarchs, for other members of those courts.
Hartmann von Aue wrote a number of hoefische Epen which survive whole or nearly whole to our time, including Erec, Der arme Heinrich, and Gregorius, all well-known and highly regarded, but he is probably best known for Iwein, his retelling of the story of King Arthur's knight Gawain.
Gottfried von Strassburg's poem Tristan is no doubt best known today from Wagner's operatic version of it, Tristan und Isolde.
Like Iwein and Tristan, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival is the tale of a knight of King Arthur's court, and like them it was adapted from a popular French version. Once again, Wagner made an opera based on it, Parsifal. Did Wagner change the v in Wolfram's title to an f in order to help people tell the medieval poem and the 19th century opera apart? Could be, I don't know. This story's hero is known to English Arthurians as Percival, the childlike, simple and innocent knight who catches a glimpse of the Grail. Eschnenbach telling of the tale is quite long, and includes many asides to the reader in which he muses about the meaning of life, or its senselessness, depending on the particular aside. Both Wolfram's skill as a storyteller, and the depth of his frequent asides, are quite remarkable.
These four authors stand rather far above others of the Middle High German era in popularity, perhaps in critical regard as well, but many others are still published and read today, including other epic poets such as Konrad Wuerzburg and Werner der Gaertner as well as some more anonymous authors; lyric poets, some anonymous, some known by name, as far example, Walther von der Vogelweide and Reinmar der Alte; as well as authors of didactic poetry, plays, and theological, legal and historical prose.
