Meier Helmbrecht

Meier Helmbrecht, a didactic and satirical Middle High German poem, written probably between 1250 and 1280 (roughly the period of the Interregnum), by Wernher der Gartenaere, who names himself in the last line. He is not otherwise known and is thought to have been either a strolling poet (Fahrender) or, less probably, a cleric. The poem has 1, 934 lines and is in rhyming couplets.

Helmbrecht is a farmer's son, who apes courtly dress and is determined to become a knight who robs and oppresses his neighbours. With nine companions he commits a series of violent and atrocious crimes. He returns home and, like the Prodigal Son, is made welcome. But his object is not to repent, but to persuade his sister Gotelind to become the bride of one of the robbers. She flees with him, but at the wedding feast the members of the gang are surprised and taken by the officers of the law. The nine are hanged, and Helmbrecht is blinded and mutilated. He returns home again, and this time is sternly rejected by his father. A year later he is recognized by peasants as their former oppressor, and hanged. The forceful tale is followed by a moral application, revealing Helmbrecht's fate as a consequence of his desertion of the ‘estate of the plough’ and of his failure to observe his father's sound advice. The poem may be seen as a document reflecting changing forces and a shifting balance in society, in which the poet sides with the threatened feudal order.

Neither of the existing MSS. is the original. In the older one (see Ambraser Handschrift) the location is the Innviertel. The former Berlin MS. (now in Tübingen) sites the events in Upper Austria between Kremsmünster and Wels. Neither location is necessarily that of the original. Editions of Helmbrecht, with translation into High German, were published by H. Brackert et al. in 1972; by F. Tschirch in 1974.