Heldenbuch
Heldenbücher (singular Heldenbuch "book of heroes") is the conventional title under which a group of German manuscripts and prints of the 15th and 16th centuries has come down to us.
[1][2] The large format and luxurious quality of the manuscript indicate the status of the heroic epic in the 14th century.
[24] It is a luxurious codex — almost 500 large-format pages with three columns of text, decorated with Lombardic capitals and many marginal illustrations — and it provides evidence of the continuing interest of this material to an aristocratic readership into the 16th century.
This phrase appears in a 1502 notebook entry by Maximilian I and has long been taken to refer to a lost source of the heroic poems in the Ambraser Heldenbuch.
[29] The first printed Heldenbuch dates to 1479, bearing the title der helden buch/das nennet den wolfdieterich, putting its main focus on Wolfdietrich, whom it makes an ancestor of Dietrich's.
[19] It presents "a brief survey in prose form of the most important figures and events of German medieval heroic poetry".
Now follows a list of famous heroes, briefly characterised, and a long section outlining the stories of Ortnit, Hugdietreich and Wolfdietrich.
It then describes the descent from Wolfdietrich of Dietrich von Bern, telling how the spirit of Mohammed came to his mother when she was pregnant and foretold her son's greatness.
[35]The Heldenbuch-Prosa assembles an enormous amount of material in a somewhat haphazard fashion to explain the world of the heroic poems.
This suggests that he was also drawing on oral traditions, as well as perhaps as on his own invention, in order to make coherent sense of the material.
[38] Diebolt von Hanowe's Strassburg Heldenbuch is discussed in Johann Schilter's Catalogue of German Authors in 1728.
[11][39] Although the above shows knowledge of manuscript Heldenbücher among some before 1800, the majority of discussions of the Heldenbuch focused on the printed version with Ornit, Wolfdietrich, Laurin, and the Rosengarten zu Worms before this point.
[40] In 1796, Friedrich von Adelung published "Sieben Stücke aus dem Heldenbuch" ("Seven pieces from the Heldenbuch") in his Nachrichten von altdeutschen Gedichten, welche aus der heidelbergischen Bibliothek in die vatikanische gekommen sind.
[45] Von der Hagen attempted to expand the boundaries of the Heldenbuch to include all German heroic poetry besides the Nibelungenlied in his various editions.
[46] By the middle of the eighteenth century, most scholars limited the term to include the texts of the printed Heldenbuch and all the various poems in the cycle of Dietrich von Bern.
