Ebook Peasant Life in Old German Epics

Medieval writings which depict the life of humble folk are rare. The two thirteenth-century poems which are offered here in translation afford a glimpse of some of the more intimate aspects of life during that period. The one follows the career of a peasant boy who would play the knight; the other, employing the age-old theme of vicarious sacrifice, paints a picture, somewhat idealized, of the relations existing between a noble landowner and his dependent peasantry.

Although Der arme Heinrich was written earlier by some half century than Meier Helmbrecht, the latter poem is given first place in the following pages. This is not only because of its greater dramatic interest, but because it is, far more than Der arme Heinrich a narrative of medieval German peasant life, and is thus more particularly the poem which justifies our title. It is, furthermore, of much greater value in its description of social conditions and in its cultural content in general.

The translations are based upon the texts as published in Panzer's fourth edition of Meier Helmhrecht and Gierach's edition of Der arme Heinrich. A long line of great poets and prose writers - Cowper, Ruskin, Newman, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Goethe - tell us that translation from one language to another, and particularly of verse, with full fidelity to both form and content, is impossible; that shipwreck must inevitably be suffered either on Scylla or in Charybdis. Both of these epics were written in the rhymed couplets that prevailed at the time, with four stresses to the line - a form which impresses us today as trying and monotonous; our ear is accustomed to an entirely different and freer flow of verse. We value these epics today for their content rather than for their formal beauty. And so I have made it my first endeavor to render faithfully the content of the poems.