Reflexionen des Geschichtlichen. Zur literarischen Konstituierung mittelhochdeutscher Heldenepik (review)

This engaging and intricate book on the interplay of history, historical narration, and literary fashioning in medieval German heroic epic states its point of departure in a brief opening sentence of only three words: "Heldensage ist Geschichtsüberlieferung" (p. 7). Cordula Kropik's statement of first principles is well chosen, in that it represents the communis opinio of the field; but in a real sense the agreement stops there. There has been a great deal of debate about exactly how Germanic heroic legend is thought to function as a transmitter of historical events, about what transformations (political? structural? poetic?) the reportage typically undergoes before it becomes fixed as folk memory, or how the few written accounts are to be reconciled (if at all) with the oral tradition that preceded them. With Reflexionen des Geschichtlichen Kropik argues that uncertainties about the nature of historical narration were as much a medieval concern as a modern one. The project focuses on the turn of the thirteenth century, when "Heldensage" began to appear as "Heldenepik"—written works of heroic legend that were highly self-aware of their explicitly literary status while at the same time beholden to the conventions of oral narrative that served as markers of the tradition. The book provides a series of models for evaluating what consequences this process of "crossing over" from oral tale to written epic ("das Überschreiten der Schwelle zur Schriftlichkeit" [p. 35]) held for the representation of the past in heroic narration. By the end of her introduction Kropik has signaled her intentions—among them, to examine "Heldendichtung als (mündliche) Geschichtsüberlieferung" (p. 35)—and in this statement the parentheses are significant. Even though the heroic tales have become "literarisiert," Kropik argues that the advances in narrative style never completely elide the power of "Mündlichkeit" as an authenticating and historicizing signal, even if its role is variable in each of the eight epics discussed here.

The book, a revised and expanded version of Kropik's dissertation (Jena, 2006), is structured in three parts. Part 1 examines representations of historical narration in the Nibelungenlied and the Klage. Under this broad heading Kropik gathers a number of subchapters on the diegetic relevance of eyewitness accounts for the establishment of the "Sage," on the rhetorical staging of the past through reference to alte mæren, and on the different ways in which the epics valorize oral narration. Part 2 focuses on Dietrichs Flucht and Rabenschlacht, two texts from the "historische Dietrichepik," and here Kropik discusses the influence of orality and written conventions on their representations of the past, focusing on their contrasting attitudes toward written sources (i.e., the buoch) as guarantors of the truthfulness of the narrative. Part 3 looks at the "aventiurehafte Dietrichepik" and similar tales as exemplified in Ortnit and Wolfdietrich D, Biterolf und Dietleip, and the Eckenlied. Here the analysis targets the problematic issue of "Quellenfiktionen" in these ostensibly nonhistorical epics, and Kropik explores the ways in which fama in the sense of "reputation" is put to productive use as a surrogate for the historical underpinnings of these tales. A generous introduction and conclusion serve as bookends for the inquiry.

The argumentation is driven by metaphors of vision, sight, and mirroring, which appear in various permutations as reflection ("Spiegelung"), refraction ("Brechung"), transparency ("Transparenz"), double vision ("der doppelte Blick"), external view ("Außensicht"), eyewitness account ("Augenzeugenbericht"), and so on. Kropik doesn't break any radical new ground in taking visuality as an interpretive impulse, but her achievement lies in explicating how these tropes of visuality, and especially "Reflexion," a term which can mean reflection as well as self-awareness, were put to use by the narrators of heroic epic in order to facilitate an engagement with the past. In demonstrating how the epics "look" backwards—toward history, toward the general contours of "Sage," and toward the mechanics of heroic narration—Kropik highlights a number of issues about the poetics of narrative innovation in the Middle...