Konrad von Würzburg was the chief German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 of the second half of the 13th century.

As little is known of his life as that of any other epic poet of the age. By birth probably a native of Würzburg

Würzburg

Würzburg is a city in the region of Franconia which lies in the northern tip of Bavaria, Germany. Located at the Main River, it is the capital of the Regierungsbezirk Lower Franconia. The regional dialect is Franconian....

, he seems to have spent part of his life in Strassburg and his later years in Basel

Basel

Basel or Basle In the national languages of Switzerland the city is also known as Bâle , Basilea and Basilea is Switzerland's third most populous city with about 166,000 inhabitants. Located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany...

, where he died. Like his master, Gottfried von Strassburg

Gottfried von Strassburg

Gottfried von Strassburg is the author of the Middle High German courtly romance Tristan and Isolt, an adaptation of the 12th-century Tristan and Iseult legend. Gottfried's work is regarded, alongside Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and the Nibelungenlied, as one of the great narrative...

, Konrad did not belong to the nobility, from which most of the poets of the time sprang. His varied and voluminous literary work is comparatively free from the degeneration which set in so rapidly in Middle High German

Middle High German

Middle High German , abbreviated MHG , is the term used for the period in the history of the German language between 1050 and 1350. It is preceded by Old High German and followed by Early New High German...

 poetry during the 13th century.

His style, although occasionally diffuse, is dignified in tone; his metre is clearly influenced by Gottfried's tendency to relieve the monotony of the epic-metre with ingenious variations, but it is always correct; his narratives--if we except Die halbe Birn, of which the authorship is doubtful--are free from coarseness, to which the popular poets at this time were prone, and, although mysticism

Mysticism

Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...

 and allegory

Allegory

Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...

 bulk largely in his works, they were not allowed, as in so many of his contemporaries, to usurp the place of poetry.

Konrad wrote a number of legends (Alexius, Silvester, Pantaleon) illustrating Christian

Christian

A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

 virtues and dogma

Dogma

Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization. It is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from, by the practitioners or believers...

; Der Welt Lohn, a didactic allegory on the familiar theme of Frau Welt, the woman beautiful in front, unsightly and loathsome behind. Die goldene Schmiede is a panegyric

Panegyric

A panegyric is a formal public speech, or written verse, delivered in high praise of a person or thing, a generally highly studied and discriminating eulogy, not expected to be critical. It is derived from the Greek πανηγυρικός meaning "a speech fit for a general assembly"...

 of the Virgin Mary; the Klage der Kunst, an allegorical defence of poetry.

His most ambitious works are two enormously long epics, Der trojanische Krieg (of more than 40,000 verses and unfinished at that!) and Partenopier und Meliur, both of which are based on French originals. Konrad's powers are to be seen to best advantage in his shorter verse romances, such as Engelhart und Engeltrut, Kaiser Otto and Das Herzemaere; the last mentioned, the theme of which has been made familiar to modern readers by Uhland

Ludwig Uhland

Johann Ludwig Uhland , was a German poet, philologist and literary historian.-Biography:He was born in Tübingen, then Duchy of Württemberg, and studied jurisprudence at the university there, but also took an interest in medieval literature, especially old German and French poetry...

 in his Kastellan von Coucy, is one of the best poems of its kind in Middle High German literature.

There is no uniform edition of Konrad's works. Some examples are:

• Der trojanische Krieg was edited by A von Keller for the Stuttgart Literarische Verein (1858)
• Partenopier und Meliur, by K Bartsch (1871)
• Die goldene Schniede and Silvester, by W Grimm (1840 and 1841)
• Alexius, by HF Massmann (1843) and R Haczynski (1898)
• Der Welt Lohn, by F Roth (1843)
• Engelhart und Engeltrut, by Moritz Haupt
  Moritz Haupt
  Moritz Haupt , was a German philologist.He was born at Zittau, in Lusatia. His early education was mainly conducted by his father, Ernst Friedrich Haupt, burgomaster of Zittau, a man of learning who took pleasure in translating German hymns or Goethe's poems into Latin, and whose memoranda were...
  
   (1844, 2nd ed., 1890)
• Klage der Kunst, by E Joseph (1885).

The shorter poems, Otto and Herzemaere, will be found most conveniently in Erzählungen und Schwänke des Mittelalters, edited by H Lambel (2nd ed., 1883). Modern German translations of Konrad's most popular poems have been published by K Pannier and H Kruger in Reclams Universalbibliothek (1879-1891).

On Konrad see F Pfeiffer in Germania, iii (1867), and W Goither in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, vol. 44 (1898), s.v. Würzburg, Konrad von.

External links

• A German translation of his text "Der Welt Lohn"