By Thomas Kerth
King Rother, a twelfth-century bridal-quest epic, occupies an enormous position within the background of German literature. The earliest surviving and structurally so much refined of the so-called minstrel epics, verse narratives as soon as assumed to were recited by way of itinerant minstrels prior to a courtly viewers, it has its roots in German folklore and records the transition from orality to the tradition of the e-book. The textual content belongs to the subgenre of the perilous bridal quest, within which the disguised wooer deceives the bride's father and abducts her along with her consent. this easy quest constitution is doubled, if the wooer needs to win his bride a moment time from her father, who has rescued her. The bride is nearly continually a passive determine in those occasions, the most clash being the disparity in prestige among the wooer and his potential spouse's father. King Rother is structurally advanced, because the current learn is the 1st to acknowledge: the hunt constitution is doubled not just within the wooer's moment quest, but additionally within the bride's personal activities -- together with her use of deception in a parallel quest for her wooer. This underscores her equality in prestige, that's her crucial qualification to be his spouse. The learn comprises an enormous English-language precis of scholarship on King Rother, at the minstrel epics, and at the bridal quest. Thomas Kerth is affiliate Professor of German at Stony Brook collage.
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Additional info for King Rother and His Bride: Quest and Counter-Quests (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)
Example text
Köppe-Benath, “Vergleichende Studien zu den ‘Spielmannsepen’ König Rother, Orendel und Salman und Morolf,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Ernst-MoritzArndt-Universität Greifswald: Gesellschafts- und sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe 15 (1966): 558. 21 For an examination of the stylistic characteristics of König Rother and Orendel, see Karl zur Nieden, Über die Verfasser der mhd. Heldenepen (Bonn: L. Leopold, 1930), 10–31; on the same in the Munich version of Oswald, see Bräuer, “Die drei Fassungen des Legendenromans,” 552.
Gellinek (1968, 85–87) prefers as patron Henry Jasomirgott (1107–77), duke of Bavaria and margrave, later duke of Austria, whose court moved from Bamberg to Regensburg in 1143, which then served as his capital. A member of the house of Babenberg, who saw the duchy of Bavaria lost to his stepson, the 36 SOURCES AND HISTORY Welf prince, Henry the Lion, he took an active anti-Welf position in the conflict between the Welfs and their archenemies, the Swabian house of Hohenstaufen. In 1148 Henry Jasomirgott married Theodora Komnena, a niece of the Byzantine emperor Manuel I, hence the putative connection to König Rother.
In 1130 Anti-pope Anacletus II declared him King of Sicily. Thus was Roger able to unite all the Norman conquests in southern Italy into one kingdom. It should here be noted that Bari, the location of King Rother’s chief residence, had been conquered by the Normans in 1071 and lay in Roger’s Duchy of Apulia. The Byzantines were the Normans’ traditional enemy to the east, and Roger II took advantage of the Second Crusade in order get revenge upon Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenos for 30 SOURCES AND HISTORY having allied himself with Roger’s great enemy, German Emperor Konrad III.