An itinerant poet-singer dependent on the favor of many patrons during his career, Der Marner composed an impressively wide variety of songs in Latin and German, combining in an often unique way themes popular in Latin poetry with those of vernacular court literature. His relationship with his literary contemporaries was anything but congenial: he made bitter attacks on Reinmar von Zweter in some of his songs and was himself an object of criticism and ridicule for other poets. Der Meißner and Rumelant von Schwaben, poets of a younger generation in the latter part of the thirteenth century, called him senile and distanced themselves, as German poets, from the Latin component of his didactic program. The dangers linked to a life of wandering may have led sometime before 1287 to a violent death, which was reported by Rumelant: "schentlicher mort der wart noch nie begangen / an eime kranken...