The best known of the minnesingers were Walther von der Vogelweide, Heinrich Frauenlob, Tannhaeuser, Nithart, Toggenburg, etc.  We first hear of Walther von der Vogelweide in 1200, as a poet attached to the court of Philip of Hohenstaufen, the German Kaiser, and shortly after to that of his successors Otto and Friedrich.  He accompanied Kaiser Friedrich to the Crusade of 1228, and saw him crowned in Jerusalem.  He died in Wuerzburg, Bavaria.  In accordance with his dying request, food and drink for the birds were placed on his tomb every day; the four holes carved for that purpose being still visible.  The pictures in Hagen’s work on the mastersingers were collected in the fifteenth century by Manasses of Zorich, and have served as the basis for all subsequent works on the subject.  The picture of Von der Vogelweide (page 21) shows him sitting in an attitude of meditation, on a green hillock, beside him his sword and his coat of arms (a caged bird on one side and his helmet on the other), and in his hand a roll of manuscript.  One of his shorter poems begins: 

    Neath the lindens
    In the meadow
    Seek I flowers sweet;
    Clover fragrant,
    Tender grasses,
    Bend beneath my feet.

    See, the gloaming,
    Softly sinking,
    Covers hill and dale. 
    Hush! my lover—­
    Tandaradei! 
    Sweet sings the nightingale.

We all are familiar with Tannhaeuser (plate 35), through Wagner’s opera; therefore it is unnecessary to say more than that he was a real person, a minnesinger, and that the singing tournament at the Wartburg (the castle of the Thueringen family) really took place in 1206-07.  This tournament, which Wagner introduces into his “Tannhaeuser,” was a trial of knightly strength, poetry, and music, between the courts of Babenhausen and Thueringen, and was held in Erfurt.  Among the knights who competed were Klingsor of Hungary, a descendant of the Klingsor who figures in the “Parzival” legend, Tannhaeuser, Walther von Eschenbach, Walther von der Vogelweide, and many others.  Tannhaeuser was a follower, or perhaps better, the successor of Walther von der Vogelweide, like him, a crusader, and lived in the first half of the thirteenth century.  Toggenburg and Frauenlob were both celebrated minnesingers, the former (plate 7) being the subject of many strange legends.  The simplicity and melodious charm of his verses seem to contradict the savage brutality ascribed to him in the stories of his life.

Frauenlob (plate 44), as Heinrich von Meissen was called, represents the minnesingers at the height of their development.  He died about 1320, and his works, as his nickname suggests, were imbued with das ewig weibliche in its best sense.  He was called the Magister of the seven free arts, and was given the position of Canon of the Cathedral of Mayence, with the title of Doctor of Divinity.  He also wrote a paraphrase on the “Song of Solomon,”