“the rude man,” it has been said, “requires only to see something going on; the man of more refinement wishes to feel; the truly refined man must be made to reflect.” Tor the first of these classes our “Hero-book,” as has been apparent enough, provides in abundance; for the other two scantily, indeed for the second not at all. Nevertheless our estimate of this work, which as a series of Antique Traditions may have considerable meaning, is apt to be too low. Let us remember that this is not the original “Heldenbuch” which we now see; but only a version of it into the Knight-errant dialect of the thirteenth, indeed partly of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with all the fantastic monstrosities, now so trivial, pertaining to that style; under which disguises the really antique earnest groundwork, interesting as old Thought, if not as old Poetry, is all but quite obscured from us. But Antiquarian diligence is now busy with the “Heldenbuch” also, from which what light is in it will doubtless be elicited, and here and there a deformity removed. Though the Ethiop cannot change his skin, there is no need that even he should go abroad unwashed.[1]
Casper von Roen, or whoever was the ultimate redactor of the “Heldenbuch,” whom Lessing designates as “a highly ill-informed man,” would have done better had he quite omitted that little King Laurin, “and his little Rose-garden,” which properly is no Rose-garden at all; and instead thereof introduced the “Gehörnte Siegfried” (Behorned Siegfried), whose history lies at the heart of the whole Northern Traditions; and, under a rude prose dress, is to this day a real child’s-book and people’s-book among the
- ↑ Our inconsiderable knowledge of the “Heldenbuch” is derived from various secondary sources; chiefly from Lessing’s “Werke” (b. xiii.), where the reader will find an epitome of the whole Poem, with Extracts by Herr Fülleborn, from which the above are taken. A still more accessible and larger Abstract, with long specimens translated into verse, stands in the “Illustrations of Northern Antiquities” (pp. 45-167). Von der Hagen has since heen employed specially on the “Heldenbuch”; with what result we have not yet learned.
