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Neophilologus (2007) 91:101115 Springer 2007 DOI 10.1007/s11061-006-9007-y
POLYGLOTS IN MEDIEVAL GERMAN LITERATURE: OUTSIDERS, CRITICS, OR REVOLUTIONARIES?
GOTTFRIED VON STRABURGS TRISTAN,
WERNHER THE GARDENERS MEIER HELMBRECHT, AND OSWALD VON WOLKENSTEIN
ALBRECHT CLASSEN
Department of German Studies, University of Arizona, 301 Learning Services Building, Tucson, AZ, 85721, USAE-mail: [email protected]
Abstract
Whereas the ability to speak dierent languages has always been regarded as a amajor intellectual accomplishment and a key tool in building bridges between cultures, the polyglot might also be in a dangerous position of belonging to no language group and being left outside of all communities. Medieval German poets were quite aware of this phenomenon, as illustrated by Gottfried of Strasbourgs Tristan, Wernher the Gardeners Helmbrecht, and Oswald of Wolkensteins maccaronic poems. Tristan knows many languages, but he does not acquire friends with his miraculous linguistic skill, and soon enough the entire court seems to hate him and makes every eort to betray this god-like but adulterous protagonist to the king. Young Helmbrecht tries to assume the posture of a polyglot, but the more he employs foreign language phrases in the exchange with his family, the more he becomes isolated and is in danger of being excluded from his old community. Oswald, on the other hand, playfully included many dierent language phrases in his poetry, but met with little interest among posterity. Languages are extremely important, but those who are uent in many might nd themselves without an identity and hence without a community.
After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fth century, the political world of latinitas disappeared, and quickly individual vernacular languages emerged that distinctly dierentiated one area in Europe from the other. In 842, for instance, when two of Emperor Louis the Piouss sons, Louis the German and Charles the Bald, joined their military forces to defeat their elder brother Lothar I, both their troops had to be given the oath in their respective languages the rst written evidence of the existence of Old French and Old High German.1 As early as in the ninth century various authors created early forms of dictionaries that allow us to comprehend how dicult it had become for Frenchmen or Germans to understand each other. In the so-called Kasseler Glossen the reader nds words in