KURENBERGER, DER

flourished 1160 also called Der Von Krenberg the earliest of the German poet-musicians called minnesingers known by name. All that is known of him is that he was an Austrian nobleman from near Linz. In his proud and imperious love songs there is as yet no evidence of the homage to women expressed by the later minnesingers and their French or Provenal models. His poems are written in stanzas of four lines, rhymed in pairs and divided into half lines by a caesura (pause). Because this is the form of the German heroic epic the Nibelungenlied (the Nibelungenlied strophe) and because Krenberger's style has an epic-dramatic quality, it has been conjectured that he may have written a lost German epic on which the unknown author of the Nibelungenlied based his poem.