comprehended the trifles of etiquette, as well as the
larger matters of character, and laid much stress on
form and show. And when the glamour of social leader-
ship had thus been added to the prestige of a warrior
caste, what wonder was it if the knight thought himself
and made others think him the noblest of created beings?
He became, with his fighting and tourneying and love-
making, the central theme of all literary effort. What-
ever hero was portrayed, no matter where or when the
scene might be laid, was apt to be conceived as a mediæval
knight.

To follow a strictly chronological order in dealing
with the literature of the period would be quite impossible.
It will be most convenient to treat of the genres one after
the other, beginning, in this chapter, with the earliest
extant specimens of the ancient gleeman's art as turned
into literature for the reader, and then passing on to the
great ballad epics, the Nibelungenlied and Gudrun. Those
earliest specimens are King Rother and Duke Ernst.
They have the form which had been brought into vogue
by the clerical poets, that of the short couplet, with vary-
ing number of accents (mostly four) to the line, and with
a rough assonance often taking the place of rhyme. Both
are of unknown authorship and not precisely datable; but
they belong to an earlier and cruder phase of art than that
of the ballad epics.

KING ROTHER is a tale of bride-stealing, and has the
distinction of being the first German poem in which the
passion of love-plays any part whatever. Rother is a
king of Italy who sends twelve good men and true to
plead his suit for the hand of the emperor's daughter at
Constantinople. The emperor shuts them up in a dun-
geon, whereat Rother assembles men and ships and sets

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