SOURCE: Ashcroft, Jeffrey. “The Sinner, Not the Song: On Walther von der Vogelweide's Self-Reflexions, L. 62,6 and 66,21.” In Blütezeit: Festschrift für L. Peter Johnson zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by Mark Chinca, Joachim Heinzle, and Christopher Young, pp. 67-86. Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000.

In the following essay, Ashcroft studies two of Walther's songs in which the poet, after reflecting on his life and legacy, judges his work as ultimately corrupt.

Walther's lyric presents an extraordinary variety of first-person subjects. In part these are genre-determined, like the male and female voices in his versions of pastourelle, messenger-song, dawn-song or tensone. In male-voice songs of courtly love, the I-subject may come across sometimes as exemplary lover, sometimes as critic of society's values and constraints, while the role of lover is often coextensive with that of the poet-performer of love-song. In the political and ethical lyric, Walther's personas and self-stylisations...