Irony in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature: Nibelungenlied, Mauritius von Craûn, Johannes von Tepl’s Ackermann: The Encounter of the Menschlich-Allzumenschlich in a Medieval Context

Despite some previous attempts to identify irony in the Middle Ages, the true extent of its impact and significance especially in Middle High German literature has not yet been sufficiently fathomed. The present article examines irony in the Nibelungenlied, in the verse narrative Mauritius von Craûn, and in the dialogue poem Ackermann by Johannes von Tepl. In each of them, ironic strategies surface at critical junctures and determine subsequent events, mostly in a surprising fashion, initiating a sudden rupture and high degree of irration. The use of irony serves especially to allow the poets to integrate a perspective toward the interior of their protagonists, revealing significant strategies hidden behind the formal exchanges and actions, and exposing motif structures. In a way, irony in those medieval texts indicates how much premodern literature actually shares with modern literature in the interest of exploring human emotions, conflicts, and profound concerns.

I. Irony as a Universal Strategy in Human Communication

Anyone approaching the topic of irony faces many difficulties pertaining to the definition of the term; to the specific analysis of its meaning; and to the question of what individuals, groups of people, or whole cultures actually permitted as or knew of irony in the first place. Irony belongs to the vast storehouse of humor, occupying a specific corner where wit of mind and a bit of ridicule combine to deride an opponent, a situation, a decision, or an action, without resorting to openly aggressive strategies and exhibiting raw hostility. Irony is a soft but also sharp tool in the hand of the rhetorician and the intellectual superior, although the speaker might be in a weaker political position. The smile on the face of the person who resorts to irony can be biting, sarcastic, but not necessarily hurtful, though irony exposes shortcomings, foolishness, cowardice, and other human frailties.¹ The smile on the face of a mighty woman, for instance, can, as Kathryn Starkey has demonstrated, expose traditional gender concepts and reveal their hollowness in face of the real conditions because the smile constitutes a kind of power performance.²

Many times it might be rather difficult to recognize the specific forms of irony, since it often comes across in a rather subtle fashion, operating in an epistemological twilight zone where the unlearned and obtuse person might easily falter or fail to grasp that s/he is actually the butt of the joke. Wendell V. Harris offers the following points to circumscribe irony:

1. 1. The assumption of self-deprecating but inquiring manner in order to lead others into self-contradiction and logical error

2. 2. Saying one thing in order to state the opposite

3. 3. A self-analytic recognition of the distance between aspiration and possibility

4. 4. The occurrence of an event the opposite of what would normally be expected or is desired

5. 5. A balanced tension between concepts or emotions or responses

6. 6. The transformation of a belief in the ultimate absurdity or meaninglessness of existence into an attitude combining fatalism, a relish for absurdity, and dark humor.³

Of course, to do true justice to the topic of irony, we would have to study first Plato’s Republic (Socrates), Anaximenes of Lampsakos’s Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, Quintilian’s Instituto Oratoria, Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercuri, and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, and then we would have to turn to such influential treaties as Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lyceum-Fragment, K. W. F. Solger’s Erwin: Gespräche über das Schöne in der Kunst, or Søren Kierkegaard’s Concept of Irony, among many others in the history of Western philosophy and literature. My goal in this paper, however, is rather modest, since the purpose consists only of introducing a number of relevant passages in a selection of Middle High German texts where irony comes into play, highlighting the unbalanced relationship among protagonists and the power of humor to determine social conditions. Further...