Laurin (poem)
Laurin or Der kleine Rosengarten (The Small Rose Garden) is an anonymous Middle High German poem about the legendary hero Dietrich von Bern, the counterpart of the historical Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great in Germanic heroic legend.
It is one of the so-called fantastical (aventiurehaft) Dietrich poems, so called because it more closely resembles a courtly romance than a heroic epic.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a variant of the poem was reimagined as a folk saga and became part of South Tyrolean popular folklore.
Hildebrand tells Dietrich where he can find such an adventure: the dwarf king Laurin has a rose-garden in the Tyrolian forest.
Dietrich and Witige immediately set off to challenge Laurin; Hildebrand and Dietleib follow secretly behind.
Witige, however, says that Laurin's pride must be punished, and not only breaks the thread, but tramples the entire rose garden.
[12] In the "younger Vulgate version", the story of how Laurin kidnapped Dietleib's sister is told: he used a cloak of invisibility.
[17] The manner in which Dietrich sets out to fight Laurin is also very reminiscent of that genre, while the destruction of the garden has parallels to Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain and Hartmann von Aue's Iwein.
[33] Laurin himself indicates that he considers the destruction of his rose garden a breech of law, by which Witege especially is placed in a bad light.
[36] The various reworkings try to solve some of these ambiguities: in the Dresdner version, Laurin appears evil from the beginning; in the Walberan version, the humanity and dignity of the dwarf is instead placed in the foreground, causing Dietrich to spare him and suggesting that Dietrich was wrong to attack the rose garden.
The "Dresdner Laurin" is composed in a variation of the "Hildebrandston" known as the "Heunenweise" or "Hunnenweise" (the Hunnish melody), in which there are rhymes at a mid-line caesura.
[38] Due to the survival of late medieval melodies among the Meistersingers, it is possible to sing these stanzas in the traditional manner of German heroic poetry.
Heinzle prints the following example from the Dresdner Laurin:[39] Laurein der sweig stille; a || do sprach die kongein gemait: b 'vil edler konick, ich wille a || gewynen euch ein gelait, b so komen wir hin ausse.
[40] A connection exists between this story and a Tyrolian Ladino folk-story in which the rose garden is the source of the morning-glow on the Alps, localized at the Rosengarten group.
[41] Heinzle, however, while not dismissing this theory entirely, believes that, since this story is only attested from the 17th century onward, it is more likely to have been influenced by the text than the other way around.
[43] A rose garden also plays an important role in another Dietrich poem, the Rosengarten zu Worms, which may have been inspired by Laurin.
[44] The first element of Laurin's name (Laur) may be derived from Middle High German lûren, meaning to deceive.
In the continuation to the Wartburgkrieg known as "Zebulons Buch," Wolfram von Eschenbach sings that Laurin told Dietrich that he only had fifty years to live.
[47] An unnamed dwarf is also responsible for taking Dietrich away after the final battle at Bern in the Heldenbuch-Prosa, telling him "his kingdom is no longer in this world.
The parallels to Walberan in Zebulons Buch discussed above also show an earlier reception of the poem in the thirteenth century.
[29] Through the rediscovery of the Laurin in the nineteenth century, the story of Dietrich and the dwarf king came to have a special meaning in the then Austrian region of South Tyrol, especially due to the works of travel journalist and saga-researcher Karl Felix Wolff.
