Ruodlieb

Ruodlieb

In 1807, Germanist and librarian Bernhard Joseph Docen (1782–1828) was working in the Bavarian Royal Court and State Library in Munich (the modern Bavarian State Library) when he discovered the fragment of an unfinished chivalric poem written in leonine hexameters by an unknown author. He spent the following years finding 15 double leaves from the erstwhile manuscript. More leaves continued to be discovered up to the year 1981 and appear to be from an 11th century manuscript that was dismembered in the 15th century to be used as bindings for other works. This has provided about 2,320 verses or roughly 60% of the original text for researchers to study.

Chivalry, Fantasy, Reality, and Morality

Ruodlieb is the story of a young knight exiled from his home who enters the service a just king and is paid in wise sayings or proverbs, each of which serve as the starting point of an episode wherein the knight comes to appreciate its significance. He then returns home to reunite with his mother and seek a wife, which he is only able to accomplish by capturing a dwarf. This dwarf then tells the knight where he can find a large treasure and prophesizes that he will marry Heriburg after slaying her father and brother. The story is filled with motifs from fairytales and heroic sagas, which are combined with realistic depictions of daily life for noble and commoner alike in the Upper Bavarian village where it is set. Similarly, the narrative switches between playful and colorful to sober and moralizing. The characters either learn from life lessons or suffer the consequences for failing to do so.

Defining the Ruodlieb

No traces of the story can be found in other works and it found no successor in Latin. The anonymous author, likely a cleric, was influenced by various classical works, the Aeneid and Alexander romance in particular, but only explicitly mentions Pliny the Elder. It is difficult to place the fascinating work in terms of genre because it exhibits the characteristics of a fairytale, heroic saga, saint’s life, chanson de geste, and adventure novel. Despite this, the fictional tale of virtue and fortune is considered to be the “first chivalric mirror” of the Middle Ages. The almost complete lack of proper names and place names is an unusual feature of the work, as is the lack of any concrete political allusions. Nevertheless, the manuscript is evidence of an extremely creative mind, even if the work appears to not have been a success in its own time.