Naming and Renaming Texts: Rubrics in Middle High German Miscellany Manuscripts

This article analyses rubrics in Middle High German miscellany manuscripts of short texts in rhyming couplets (Reimpaargedichte). A corpus consisting of 1433 rubrics from 68 manuscripts was created to be able to perform this study. As rubrics in medieval manuscripts were not authorial, but composed by scribes, they offer insights into the reception of the texts. This paper analyses their features and functions as a proxy to interrogate the standing and status of Reimpaargedichte between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The main methodology is distant reading, i.e. the application and interpretation of statistical methods on a textual corpus. The features analyzed include the length of the rubrics, their level of variation, the presence of author names, and vocabulary. Although no general patterns regarding length nor level of variation were detected, some important conclusions can be drawn: 1. there were no clear markers of literary genre in rubrics; 2. authorship was mostly absent, except for some specific cases of famous authors; 3. relatively stable keywords were used to identify particular texts, but they were more common in manuscripts with narrative texts (Erzählungen) and less common in later manuscripts dominated by the genre known as Minnereden. Furthermore, the analysis revealed that rubrics used a series of linguistic procedures to show that they participated in a different speech act than the main text – they embodied an interaction between scribes and readers, in which the former framed the reception of the work.

Globalism before Globalism: the Alexander legend in medievalliterature (Priest Lambrecht’s account as a pathway to early global perspectives)

We certainly live in a world today determined by globalism, however we might want to define it. But it would be erroneous to assume that earlier centuries, and not even pre-modernity, were entirely ignorant about foreign worlds and did not have any interest in reaching out to, or in approaching foreign countries, peoples, and cultures either peacefully or militarily. The first part of this paper examines some of the misconceptions and then outlines many features that justify us in using the term ‘globalism’ already at that early stage, maybe free of much of the modern baggage brought upon by the colonialist attitude pursued by early modern Europeans. To illustrate the claim more specifically, this then leads over to a detailed examination of one of the many versions of the Alexander narratives in the Middle Ages, specifically of Priest Lambrecht’s Middle High German Alexanderlied. Although Alexander is presented as a conqueror of the Persian empire and the Indian kingdom, apart from many other countries, there is still a strong narrative strategy to open the perspective toward the East and to make it to an integrative part of the global worldview of the western European audiences. This and many other Alexander versions contribute in their own intriguing way to the process of “worldmaking,” as Nelson Goodman (1978) had called it. Although historic-fictional in his approach, Lambrecht facilitated in a path-breaking way, drawing on many classical sources, of course, the establishment of a global vision, at least in the mind of his medieval audiences.

New Translation of the First Nibelungenlied Adventure into Russian

This article analyzes the existing translations of the German medieval epic poem Nibelungenlied into Russian. Russian translations, made by M. I. Kudryashev in 1889 and Yu. B. Korneev in 1972, were based on the outdated publication of the Nibelungenlied edited by K. Bartsch. The edition by K. Bartsch is rather a compilation than a critical study. The basis for this edition was the manuscript B, in which K. Bartsch made a great number of amendments. That is why K. Bartsch’s edition cannot be regarded as a suitable source for translation. In contrast, the translation by Yu. B. Korneev contains a number of factual inaccuracies and additions caused by the translator’s aim to keep the original metre. The article shows that it is necessary to make a new Russian translation of the Middle High German masterpiece. The article provides a review of possible problems facing a translator: accuracy of translation; making comments that give missing information or explain unclear places in the text. It argues in favour of overt translation with comments that help readers to understand the text which is a product of both another culture and another time. The article features a new translation of the first chapter of the Nibelungenlied (the manuscript B) with comments.

Areal variation in Middle High German

Using the Corpus der altdeutschen Originalurkunden ‘Corpus of Old German Original Charters’ (Wilhelm et al. 1932–2004), we will show that charters offer valuable information on dialectological differences during the Middle High German period. This text genre is unsurpassed in terms of its geographical resolution even though it faces certain challenges due to its partially formulaic style. With two well-known phenomena, i.e. inflected forms of the infinitive (‘gerunds’) and so-called ‘contracted’ verbs like haben/hân ‘have’, we will show how these materials can be analysed and put into perspective with other sources like the new Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik by Klein, Solms & Wegera (2018).

Towards a broad-coverage graphemic analysis of large historical corpora

This paper presents a method which we are developing to explore graphemic variation in large historical corpora of German. Historical corpora provide an amount of data at the level of graphemics which cannot be handled exhaustively using common methods of manual evaluation. To deal with this challenge, we apply methods from computational linguistics to pave the way for a broad-coverage graph(em)ic analysis of large historical corpora. In this paper, we show how our approach can be applied to the Reference Corpus of Middle High German. Illustrating our method and linguistic analysis, we present findings from our investigations into diatopic and/or diachronic variation as documented in 13th and 14th century charters (Urkunden) from the corpus.

The emergence of light verb constructions

This paper takes a data-driven perspective on the grammaticalization of German light verb constructions (LVCs) with kommen ‘come’. LVCs are complex predicates consisting of a semantically light verb and an eventive noun realized within a phrasal complement, e.g. German zur Vollendung kommen, lit. ‘come into completion’. We assume that (at least) two different processes interact in the emergence of LVCs: the desemanticization of the verb on the one hand and the realization of eventive nouns in the complement-PP of the verb on the other. In order to check whether these processes take place in parallel or if one precedes the other, we conduct a corpus study based on samples from the Reference Corpus of Middle High German (REM) and the Bonn Early New High German Corpus (FnhdC), focusing on the animacy and concreteness of the subject NPs and the PP-internal nouns. Our results indicate that we can first observe an increase in the use of abstract nouns in subject position and that only later – from Middle High German to Early New High German – eventive nouns in PP-internal position become more frequent.

On the habitual verb pflegen in German. Its use, origin, and development

In this article, I examine the distributional properties, emergence conditions, and development of the habitual verbal head pflegen ‘use(d) to’ in the history of German. Synchronically, I argue that Present-day German possesses subject to subject raising verbs and that they can all be brought down to a common denominator: They allow promotion of the embedded subject into the matrix subject position (= A-movement). However, at the same time I argue that German subject to subject raising verbs differ and that their heterogeneity follows from their semantics. What all this boils down to is that German subject to subject raising verbs do not form a uniform class, neither semantically nor syntactically. As for pflegen, I account for its syntactic peculiarities referring to its functional status, i.e., the status of being a habitual head. Diachronically, I show that pflegen grammaticalized into an AspHAB-head in the transition from Old High German (750–1050) to Middle High German (1050–1350) and that this grammaticalization process restricted the way it behaves in Present-day German.

Im Sog des Untergangs

Drawn into Doom. On the Conception of Narrative Suspense in the Nibelungenlied This paper examines the potential and the structure of narrative suspense in the Nibelungenlied, as it specifically evolves in the final part of the Middle High German epic, beginning with Kriemhild’s treacherous invitation. Due to the inevitabi­lity of the catastrophe, the expectations of the reader or listener are directed at those details of the plot which are part of the text’s distinct interpretation of the traditional story, so that possible anticipations reside in the questions of ›how‹ and ›when‹, while not completely disregarding the question of ›what‹. The complex and extensive build-up of suspense towards the end can be regarded as a genuine pro­duct of the literarization of oral lore.

Zweifel, Skeptizismus und das Dilemma der Wahrheitsfindung in der höfischen Epik des Mittelalters

Doubt, Scepticism, and the Dilemma of Establishing the Truth in Middle High German Epic. An Outline of a Research Field The article reflects on the specific uses of doubt as a productive method of ascertaining truth in Middle High German Epic (12th to 14th centuries). Intra-tex­tual debates on the correct interpretation of alternative claims to truth and the presentation of opposing points of view trigger a cognitive and emotional effect of doubt which strongly resonates in metaphors, images and rhetorical figures. Additionally, doubt inspires poetic (and narrative) techniques, motifs and character types which extant research has failed to recognise as interconnected. The purpose of this article is to introduce a research field that is concerned with the analysis of courtly scepticism in secular traditions of literature.

mit vlacheme sverte sluch er uf die cristenheit: Religious Dedifferentiation in 'Graf Rudolf' mit vlacheme sverte sluch er uf die cristenheit: Religiöse Entdifferenzierung im 'Graf Rudolf'

The present paper outlines a narrative programme of religious dedifferentiation for 'Graf Rudolf'. Guiding this understanding is the observation that the concept of tolerance derived from 'Willehalm' does not do justice to 'Graf Rudolf', which has not received much attention until now due to the precarious situation regarding traditional sources. Taking account of the particularities specific to its tradition, the text is at the same time read as a solitary example of the interaction between the religious and the secular in Middle High German literature. Der vorliegende Beitrag konturiert für den 'Graf Rudolf' ein narratives Programm der religiösen Entdifferenzierung. Erkenntnisleitend ist die Beobachtung, dass dem aufgrund seiner prekären Überlieferungslage bisher wenig beachteten 'Graf Rudolf' der am 'Willehalm' gewonnene Toleranzbegriff nicht gerecht wird. Unter Berücksichtigung der überlieferungsspezifischen Besonderheiten wird der Text zugleich als Solitär des Zusammenspiels von Religiösem und Weltlichem in der mittelhochdeutschen Literatur gelesen.