At the beginning of the Eckenlied, one of the most popular of a series of high and late medieval epics about the hero Dietrich von bern, the giant Ebenrot accuses the absent Dietrich of killing the giant Grin and his wife Hilde in order to plunder their corpses, a crime known as rêroup. Ebenrot’s accusation is made plausible by a lack of witnesses to the event: Dietrich has slain Hilde and Grin and afterwards taken Grin’s armor. the open question that the Eckenlied attempts to address is: how and why did Dietrich take the armor? Ebenrot himself does not know, he can only surmise based on Dietrich’s possession of the object. Dietrich’s defender, the giant Fasolt, is similarly forced to rely on secondhand information: Fasolt appeals to Dietrich’s reputation, known in contemporary law as fama or liumunt (modern German Leumund), which can also be translated as fame or rumor.1 In cases such as the deaths of Hilde and Grin, for which there are no witnesses, contemporary German law frequently judged based on the personal integrity of the accused—a category determined through liumunt.2 While Fasolt can use Dietrich’s reputation to make the case that Dietrich killed Hilde and Grin in self-defense, the Eckenlied shows itself to be dissatisfied with this strategy. Following the debate, the giant Ecke sets

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jenglgermphil.116.2.0195

Criminal Intent in the Eckenlied: Rêroup, Fama, and Narration

In recent years, analyses of medieval literary works by literary scholars have set in motion a wide variety of research on orality and literacy in the period between late antiquity and the modern era.1 New findings have emerged particularly within the context of the medieval culture of writing studies on the long-neglected genre of the Latin figural poem, for example, have moved previously neglected artistic scriptographic practices into medieval scholarship’s field of vision, causing scholars to regard medieval scriptography in a different light.2 In a recent study on the forms of writing in the vernacular epic, I attempted to adjust the dominant view that medieval texts are principally unstable by pointing out examples of systems of textual stabilization, such as that represented by acrostics identifying the author. This study also critically questioned the deep-rooted conception of the supposedly illiterate author by examining an image of Wolfram that is characterized by references to literacy and also cited numerous examples of reading and writing knights and noble ladies in the courtly epic, thereby calling into question the established view of an illiterate laity. Similarly, the study reexamined the idea that people in the Middle Ages never read silently but rather always aloud or in a low voice and that the works of the epic poets were conveyed to the public only through performance at court.3

Written Communication in the Illustrated Epic Poem

Heinrich von Veldeke, Eneasroman. Die Berliner Bilderhandschrift mit Ubersetzung und Kommentar

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Heinrich von Veldeke, Eneasroman. Die Berliner Bilderhandschrift mit Ubersetzung und Kommentar