Gattungsinterferenzen in der späten Heldendichtung (review)

"Kein Text ist verständlich ohne das Universum der Texte, die man Kultur nennt" (p. 17): Sonja Kerth's Habilitationsschrift on generic interferences (Gattungsinterferenzen) in late medieval German heroic epic strongly attests the validity of this statement. Following in the footsteps of Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Gérard Genette, and Renate Lachmann, Kerth explores the workings of intertextuality in premodern works, particularly those that seem to push the boundaries of their genre.

Undertaking any comprehensive analysis of the late heroic epic is no feeble deed. The German Middle Ages are known for not only their incredible amount of courtly romances, but also tales inspired by a distant Germanic past—the time of the great migrations and of the fifth-century rulers Theodoric the Great (MHG Dietrich von Bern), Odoacer (MHG Ermanarich), Attila (MHG Etzel), and their retainers. Even without Kudrun, the most studied representative of this type, Kerth had to face an enormous corpus of the post-Nibelungenlied, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century texts, many of which exist in multiple manuscript witnesses. The result is a 377 page-long study of both historical and mythical (or legendary) epics, followed by indices and a truly extensive bibliography.

The later heroic epics are known to present a mixture of influences, sharing with their predecessors, the Hildebrandslied and the Nibelungenlied, their content, their ethos, and oftentimes their strophic form. Yet as a product of high-medieval courtly society, they also reflect the thirteenth-century literary tastes and the contemporaneous fascination with love service, knightly adventures, and the fantastic. Kerth's work brings to light the scope and nature of this hybridization. Besides the sheer number of available texts, the difficulty of her undertaking lies in the diversity of the late heroic epics and in the lack of an ideal model for what could be seen as the "archetypal heroic" (p. 11). The Nibelungenlied, the major referent text for her later poems, already displays the uneasy coexistence of the heroic and the courtly. It is no wonder then that the later epics would reveal what Kerth calls "an epic hero on Arthurian tracks" (ein heldenepischer Recke auf arthurischen Pfaden, p. 1). One may thus wonder how to approach such hybrid texts: as mere variants of Arthurian romance or as successors to the heroic poetry of old. Kerth's work questions the usefulness and absoluteness of the dichotomy "the heroic" vs. "the romance" for late heroic literature and casts doubt on attempts to confine these texts to strict generic boundaries. A more productive approach, she claims, would be to study the interplay of different elements, to approach the heroic epic as a dialogue between texts, i.e., as intertext.

Impressive in its scope, the study falls into two halves, theoretical and methodological foundations (chs. 1–2) and their practical applications (chs. 3–6). The introduction (or ch. 1) contains two thoroughgoing surveys of scholarship on intertextuality and Middle High German heroic epic. Chapter 2 presents Kerth's methodology, the three types of intertextual references that she traces across the whole corpus of Dietrich-epics in subsequent chapters: Einzelreferenzen (references to specific, individual texts in the form of quotations, borrowings, and motifs); Systemreferenzen (architextuality, more general or transcendent categories such as types of discourse and literary genres); and finally, Wissensreferenzen (preexisting common cultural knowledge, on the recognition of which the compilers or redactors of the individual texts rely, such as, for example, Siegfried's impenetrable skin or Dietrich's fire breath). Having set out her categories, Kerth methodically applies them to her texts, moving from the historical Dietrich-epic (Dietrichs Flucht, Alpharts Tod, and Rabenschlacht in chapter 3) towards more and more romance-like mythical poems (aventiurehafte Epen), such as Virginal, three manuscript witnesses of the Eckenlied, four versions of Laurin, Goldemar, and Wunderer in chapter 4; Biterolf und Dietleib in chapter 5; and concluding with the Ortnit/Wolfdietrich-complex in chapter 6. As Kerth painstakingly demonstrates, the boundaries of this genre are indeed highly permeable: in addition to the oral tradition and the Nibelungenlied, one...