The work which Wagner accomplished in behalf of the legend of Tannhäuser is fairly comparable with the tales which have been woven around the figure of King Arthur. The stories of the Knights of the Round Table are in the mouths of all English-speaking peoples because of the "Idylls of the King"; the legend of Tannhäuser was saved from becoming the exclusive property of German literary students by Wagner's opera. Like many folk-tales, the story touches historical circumstance in part, and for the rest reaches far into the shadowy realm of legendary lore. The historical element is compassed by the fact that the principal human characters involved in it once had existence. There was a Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia whose court was held in the Wartburg--that noble castle which in a later century gave shelter to Martin Luther while he endowed the German people with a reformed religion, their version of the Bible and a literary language. The minstrel knights, which in the opera meet in a contest of song, also belong to history. Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote the version of the Quest of the Holy Grail which inspired Wagner's "Parsifal" and which is morally the most exalted epical form which that legend ever received. His companions also existed. Tannhäuser is not an invention, though it is to Wagner alone that we owe his association with the famous contest of minstrelsy which is the middle picture in Wagner's drama. Of the veritable Tannhäuser, we know extremely little. He was a knight and minstrel at the court of Duke Frederick II of Austria in the first decades of the thirteenth century, who, it is said, led a dissolute life, squandered his fortune, and wrecked his health, but did timely penance at the end and failed not of the consolations of Holy Church. After he had lost his estate near Vienna he found protection with Otto II of Bavaria, who was Stadtholder of Austria from A.D. 1246 till his death in 1253. He sang the praises of Otto's son-in-law, Conrad IV, who was father of Conradin, the last heir of the Hohenstaufens. Tannhäuser was therefore a Ghibelline, as was plainly the folk-poet who made him the hero of the ballad which tells of his adventure with Venus. Tannhäuser's extant poems, when not in praise of princes, are gay in character, with the exception of a penitential hymn--a circumstance which may have had some weight with the ballad-makers. There is a picture labelled with his name in a famous collection of minnesongs called the Manessian Manuscript, which shows him with the Crusaders' cross upon his cloak. This may be looked upon as evidence that he took part in one of the crusades, probably that of A.D. 1228. There is no evidence that the contest of minstrelsy at the Wartburg ever took place. It seems to have been an invention of mediaeval poets. The Manessian Manuscript is embellished with a picture of the principal personages connected with the story. They are Landgrave Hermann, the Landgravine Sophia,