the _chansons_ is also shown by the
fact that Rother is made grandfather of Charlemagne and King of Rome.
Whether he had anything to do with the actual Lombard King Rother of
the seventh century is only a speculative question; the poem itself
seems to be Bavarian, and to date from about 1150. The story is one of
wooing under considerable difficulties, and thus in some respects at
least nearer to a _roman d'aventures_ than a _chanson_.

[Footnote 111: The very name of this remarkable personage seems to
have exercised a fascination over the early German mind, and appears
as given to others (Wolfdietrich, Hugdietrich) who have nothing to do
with him of Verona.]

[Footnote 112: Ed. Von Bahder. Halle, 1884.]

[Sidenote: _Literary poetry._]

It will depend on individual taste whether the reader prefers the
so-called "art-poetry" which broke out in Germany, almost wholly on a
French impulse, but with astonishing individuality and colour of
national and personal character, towards the end of the twelfth
century, to the folk-poetry, of which the greater examples have been
mentioned hitherto, whether he reverses the preference, or whether, in
the mood of the literary student proper, he declines to regard either
with preference, but admires and delights in both.[113] On either side
there are compensations for whatever loss may be urged by the
partisans of the other. It may or may not be an accident that the sons
of adoption are more numerous than the sons of the house: it is not so
certain that the one group is to be on any true reckoning preferred to
the other.

[Footnote 113: The subjects of the last paragraph form, it will be
seen, a link between the two, being at least probably based on German
traditions, but influenced in form by French.]

[Sidenote: _Its four chief masters._]

In any case the German literary poetry (a much better phrase than
_kunst-poesie_, for there is plenty of art on both sides) forms a
part, and, next to its French originals, perhaps the greatest part, of
that extraordinary and almost unparalleled blossoming of literature
which, starting from France, overspread the whole of Europe at one
time, the last half or quarter of the twelfth century, and the first
quarter of the thirteenth. Four names, great and all but of the
greatest--Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried of Strasburg, Wolfram von
Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide--illustrate it as far as
Germany is concerned. Another, somewhat earlier