[Notes:
5: Kriemhild has at Worms a rose-garden which is guarded by twelve
famous champions. She challenges Dietrich and his Amelungs to
invade her garden if they dare, promising to each victor a kiss
and a wreath. Eleven duels, in which Kriemhild’s man is either
slain or barely holds his own, precede the encounter between the
two invincibles.
6: In the preceding adventure we hear that Dietrich was at first
unwilling to face Siegfried on account of his horny skin, his
magic sword and his impenetrable armor. To provoke his master’s
wrath--Dietrich can only fight when enraged--the faithful
Hildebrand takes him aside and calls him a coward; whereat
Dietrich knocks him down--to the old man’s private satisfaction.]
+XXIX. MEYER HELMBRECHT+
A metrical novelette written about 1250 by a man who calls himself
Wernher the Gardner. The locus of the story, which is interesting as a
picture of the times, is the region about the junction of the Inn and
the Salzach. Its hero is a depraved young peasant, who gets the idea
that the life of a robber knight would be preferable to hard work upon
his father’s farm. So he dresses himself in fine clothes to ape the
gentry, becomes a robber and commits all manner of outrages until one
day he is caught and hanged by a party of his victims. In the course of
his career he revisits his former home and compares notes with his
father. The selection is from Bötticher’s translation in Part II of
Bötticher and Kinzel’s _Denkmäler_.
_Lines 844-986: The old knighthood and the new._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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