Читать книгу The Germans: Double History Of A Nation - Emil Grimm Ludwig - Страница 23

THE POETS and minstrels who enlivened the German Middle Ages, in addition to the architects and creative artisans, were of a worldly mind, loving “Vanity Fair.” The Church turned against them; bishops spoke of buffoons and courtesans when they meant poets and singers; and an abbot of St. Gall who wrote love songs was already reckoned half a heretic.

At first it was only the knights in their castles, constituting the society of the time, who kept singers and poets in addition to their pages, falconers and mistresses. How else were they to dispel the tedium of winter? Between one raid and the next they sat in their gloomy castle halls, blackening with the soot from the pine torches and smoky fireplaces, glad at last to be rid of the crushing weight of their armor. For the hundredth time they related their deeds of valor to each other—how many raven-locked maidens they had ravished in the Holy Land. The women sat farther down in their smaller chamber—for not even the mistress of the manor was asked to sit at the table in honor of a new guest, and the men for the most part kept to themselves.

For the strange contradictions of the German character assigned to the women of the age of chivalry a position midway between slave and goddess. In France at this time women were already sitting with the men at meals, even then paired off and in all likelihood at the small tables at which they are still seen in every French bistro—or were until yesterday. They sat and sipped from the same cup with their squires, cutting their meat for them in turn. But in the German castles women were chattels of the knight, handed over—one might even say, sold—by their fathers after prolonged haggling. Often they were of extremely tender age—Kriemhild was but fifteen when she married—yet their welfare depended on whether they bore healthy sons or merely daughters. “In durance vile,” as the law put it, the husband might sell and even kill them. That this is documented down into the fifteenth century throws a significant light on German history, as does the fact that the Frisians offered human sacrifices into the thirteenth century.

Yet at court and at the tournaments these same women, who had neither freedom nor property nor any rights over their children, were placed in the seat of honor. Homage was paid them, and after the French fashion their silk ribands became the champions’ prize; their signal for mercy was the law of the court; above all, their clothes became the center of attraction for the spectators and the poets too; epics and chronicles are full of long descriptions of their cloaks and hats, down to the manner of their smile.

Yet girls were exclusively destined for marriage, and their abduction and even their love almost never became subjects for song. The knight’s desire turned solely to the wives of other knights, yet these seem to have strictly upheld the honor of their homes and the ideal of monogamy. When Minne, as this higher form of love was called, was imported to give a higher content to their crude warrior and robber lives, it soon became the great fashion, with far-reaching effects on the national life. It reached the convents and monasteries too—nuns and monks reading Juvenal and Ovid, forsooth, even in each other’s company, to the dismay of aged bishops. How much more colorfully could castles and palaces dispose of love! It was always the physical possession of the lady to which the knight aspired, and she knew with great guile how to take advantage of her handicap as the wife of another as long as her womanly instinct told her it was possible. Often she spent years accepting the worship due to a remote goddess, all the while sleeping by the side of her husband, who in turn might be worshipping at another altar. There were far fewer examples in Germany in those years of husbands doing away with their wives and their wives’ lovers than in more southerly lands. This was the only form of killing, however, in which the Germans lagged behind other nations.