Besides these two long poems (the greater of which, the _Nibelungenlied_, connects itself indirectly with others through the personage of Dietrich[111]) there is a group of shorter and rather older pieces, attributed in their present forms to the twelfth century, and not much later than the German translation of the _Chanson de Roland_ by a priest named Conrad, which is sometimes put as early as 1130, and the German translation (see chapter iv.) of the _Alixandre_ by Lamprecht, which may be even older. Among these smaller epics, poems on the favourite mediaeval subjects of Solomon and Marcolf, St Brandan, &c., are often classed, but somewhat wrongly, as they belong to a different school. Properly of the group are _Koenig Rother_, _Herzog Ernst_, and _Orendel_. All these suggest distinct imitation of the _chansons_, _Orendel_ inclining rather to the legendary and travelling kind of _Jourdains de Blaivies_ or _Huon_, _Herzog Ernst_ to the more feudal variety. _Koenig Rother_,[112] the most important of the batch, is a poem of a little more than five thousand lines, of rather irregular length and rhythm, but mostly very short, rhymed, but with a leaning towards assonance. The strong connection of these poems with the _chansons_ is also shown by the fact that Rother is made grandfather of Charlemagne and King of Rome. Whether he had anything to do with the actual Lombard King Rother of the seventh century is only a speculative question; the poem itself seems to be Bavarian, and to date from about 1150. The story is one of wooing under considerable difficulties, and thus in some respects at least nearer to a _roman d'aventures_ than a _chanson_. [Footnote 111: The very name of this remarkable personage seems to have exercised a fascination over the early German mind, and appears as given to others (Wolfdietrich, Hugdietrich) who have nothing to do with him of Verona.] [Footnote 112: Ed. Von Bahder. Halle, 1884.] [Sidenote: _Literary poetry._] It will depend on individual taste whether the reader prefers the so-called "art-poetry" which broke out in Germany, almost wholly on a French impulse, but with astonishing individuality and colour of national and personal character, towards the end of the twelfth century, to the folk-poetry, of which the greater examples have been mentioned hitherto, whether he reverses the preference, or whether, in the mood of the literary student proper, he declines to regard either with preference, but admires and delights in both.[113] On either side there are compensations for whatever loss may be urged by the partisans of the other. It may or may not be an accident that the sons of adoption are more numerous than the sons of the house: it is not so certain that the one group is to be on any true reckoning preferred to the other. [Footnote 113: The subjects of the last paragraph form, it will be seen, a link between the two, being at least probably based on German traditions, but influenced in form by French.]