Stabreimende Wortpaare in den früheren Werken Hartmanns von Aue: Erec, Klage, Minnesang

Abstract

Abstract Building upon recent phraseological studies on Old High and Middle High German texts, the alliterating word pairs in the early works of Hartmann von Aue are catalogued and analyzed philologically, thus contributing to an emerging complete listing of the paired rhetorical expressions through the Early Middle High German period. The first extant courtly Arthurian romance, Hartmann's Erec, a shorter piece of his known as Diu Klage, and a handful of poems he composed are by all indications from the last decade of the twelfth century, despite later manuscript transmission. Each pair is listed, described in the context in which it appears, and compared with any extant pairs from earlier German works. What emerge are insights into the evolution of these expressions, in some cases through centuries. On the one hand, Hartmann employs alliterating expressions that date to the Old High German period, while on the other hand apparently creating new ones. As in findings in earlier texts, pairs recorded on multiple occasions are likely to have been used by other authors. Typical for medieval German texts – when compared to similar modern expressions – is the insight that there is a fair amount of variation concerning the sequence of the alliterating elements and/or the inclusion of morpho-syntactic modifiers such as pronouns, possessives, adjectives, or adverbs. Modern translations of Hartmann's works into German and English show just how varied these phrases can appear in translation. When known, later examples of the alliterating word-pairs are cited, albeit for obvious reasons only in an incomplete fashion. The long-term project is designed to continue to chart the emergence of the early German alliterating word-pairs chronologically.