Konrad von Würzburg

His varied and voluminous literary work is comparatively free from the degeneration which set in so rapidly in Middle High German poetry during the 13th century.

[4] According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, "[h]is style, although occasionally diffuse, is dignified in tone; his metre is clearly influenced by Gottfried's tendency to relieve the monotony of the epic-metre with ingenious variations, but it is always correct; his narratives—if we except Die halbe Birn, of which the authorship is doubtful—are free from coarseness, to which the popular poets at this time were prone, and, although mysticism and allegory bulk largely in his works, they were not allowed, as in so many of his contemporaries, to usurp the place of poetry.

[5] His most ambitious works are two enormously long epics, Der trojanische Krieg[6] (consisting of more than 40,000 verses, and unfinished) and Partenopier und Meliur, both of which are based on French originals.

Konrad's talents are best showcased however in his shorter verse romances, such as Engelhart und Engeltrut, Kaiser Otto and Das Herzemaere; the latter, the theme of which has been made familiar to modern readers by Uhland in his Kastellan von Coucy, is one of the best poems of its kind in Middle High German literature.

Some examples are: The shorter poems, Otto and Herzemaere, can be found in Erzählungen und Schwänke des Mittelalters, edited by H Lambel (2nd ed., 1883).