203. He was probably born in Austria, lived at Vienna with Duke
Frederic of Babenberg for some time, and held poetical offices in the
households of several other princes, including the Emperor Frederick
II., who gave him an estate at last. It should be said that there are
those who insist that he also was of knightly position, and was
Vogelweide of that ilk, inasmuch as we find him called "herr," the
supposed mark of distinction of a gentleman at the time. Such
questions are of importance in their general bearing on the question
of literature at given dates, not in respect of individual persons. It
must be evident that no word which, like "herr," is susceptible of
general as well as technical meanings, can be absolutely decisive in
such a case, unless we find it in formal documents. Also, after
Frederick's gift Walther would have been entitled to it, though he was
not before. At any rate, the entirely wandering life, and the constant
relationship to different protectors, which are in fact the only
things we know about him, are more in accordance with the notion of a
professional minstrel than with that of a man who, like Wolfram, even
if he had no estate and was not independent of patronage, yet had a
settled home of his own, and was buried where he was born.

[Sidenote: _The Minnesingers generally._]

The introduction of what may be called a representative system into
literary history has been here rendered necessary by the fact that the
school-resemblance so common in mediaeval writers is nowhere more
common than among the Minnesingers,[122] and that the latter are
extraordinarily numerous, if not also extraordinarily monotonous. One
famous collection contains specimens of 160 poets, and even this is
not likely to include the whole of those who composed poetry of the
kind before Minnesong changed (somewhere in the thirteenth century or
at the beginning of the fourteenth, but at times and in manners which
cannot be very precisely fixed) into Meistersong. The chief lyric
poets before Walther were Heinrich von Veldeke, his contemporary and
namesake Heinrich von Morungen, and Reinmar von Hagenau, whom
Gottfried selects as Walther's immediate predecessor in
"nightingaleship": the chief later ones, Neidhart von Regenthal,
famous for dance-songs; Tannhaeuser, whose actual work, however, is of
a mostly burlesque character, as different as possible from, and
perhaps giving rise by very contrast to, the beautiful and terrible