The Saracen Nurreddin, who had been a companion of her youth, and to whose help she had chiefly owed her success in rescuing Manfred, is to be the sole partner of her flight.  To this man, who loves her with passionate ardour, she had been promised in her childhood.  Before her secret departure she pays a last visit to the slumbering king.  This rouses her lover’s furious jealousy, as he construes her act into a proof of unfaithfulness on the part of his betrothed.  The last look of farewell which Fatima casts from a distance at the young monarch, on his return from his coronation, inflames the jealous lover to wreak instant vengeance for the supposed outrage upon his honour.  He strikes the prophetess to the earth, whereupon she thanks him with a smile for having delivered her from an unbearable existence.  At the sight of her body Manfred realises that henceforth happiness has deserted him for ever.

This theme I had adorned with many gorgeous scenes and complicated situations, so that when I had worked it out I could regard it as a fairly suitable, interesting, and effective whole, especially when compared with other well-known subjects of a similar nature.  Yet I could never rouse myself to sufficient enthusiasm over it to give my serious attention to its elaboration, especially as another theme now laid its grip upon me.  This was suggested to me by a pamphlet on the ‘Venusberg,’ which accidentally fell into my hands.

If all that I regarded as essentially German had hitherto drawn me with ever-increasing force, and compelled me to its eager pursuit, I here found it suddenly presented to me in the simple outlines of a legend, based upon the old and well-known ballad of ‘Tannhauser.’  True, its elements were already familiar to me from Tieck’s version in his Phantasus.  But his conception of the subject had flung me back into the fantastic regions created in my mind at an earlier period by Hoffmann, and I should certainly never have been tempted to extract the framework of a dramatic work from his elaborate story.  The point in this popular pamphlet which had so much weight with me was that it brought ‘Tannhauser,’ if only by a passing hint, into touch with ’The Minstrel’s War on the Wartburg.’  I had some knowledge of this also from Hoffmann’s account in his Serapionsbrudern.  But I felt that the writer had only grasped the old legend in a distorted form, and therefore endeavoured to gain a closer acquaintance with the true aspect of this attractive story.  At this juncture Lehrs brought me the annual report of the proceedings of the Konigsberg German Society, in which the ‘Wartburg contest’ was criticised with a fair amount of detail by Lukas.  Here I also found the original text.  Although I could utilise but little of the real setting for my own purpose, yet the picture it gave me of Germany in the Middle Ages was so suggestive that I found I had not previously had the smallest conception of what it was like.