and a literary language.  The minstrel knights, which in the opera meet in a contest of song, also belong to history.  Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote the version of the Quest of the Holy Grail which inspired Wagner’s “Parsifal” and which is morally the most exalted epical form which that legend ever received.  His companions also existed.  Tannhauser is not an invention, though it is to Wagner alone that we owe his association with the famous contest of minstrelsy which is the middle picture in Wagner’s drama.  Of the veritable Tannhauser, we know extremely little.  He was a knight and minstrel at the court of Duke Frederick II of Austria in the first decades of the thirteenth century, who, it is said, led a dissolute life, squandered his fortune, and wrecked his health, but did timely penance at the end and failed not of the consolations of Holy Church.  After he had lost his estate near Vienna he found protection with Otto II of Bavaria, who was Stadtholder of Austria from A.D. 1246 till his death in 1253.  He sang the praises of Otto’s son-in-law, Conrad IV, who was father of Conradin, the last heir of the Hohenstaufens.  Tannhauser was therefore a Ghibelline, as was plainly the folk-poet who made him the hero of the ballad which tells of his adventure with Venus.  Tannhauser’s extant poems, when not in praise of princes, are gay in character, with the exception of a penitential hymn—­a circumstance which may have had some weight with the ballad-makers.  There is a picture labelled with his name in a famous collection of minnesongs called the Manessian Manuscript, which shows him with the Crusaders’ cross upon his cloak.  This may be looked upon as evidence that he took part in one of the crusades, probably that of A.D. 1228.  There is no evidence that the contest of minstrelsy at the Wartburg ever took place.  It seems to have been an invention of mediaeval poets.  The Manessian Manuscript is embellished with a picture of the principal personages connected with the story.  They are Landgrave Hermann, the Landgravine Sophia, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Reinmar der Alte, Heinrich von Rispach, Biterolf, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Klingesor.  The subject discussed by the minstrels was scholastic, and Ofterdingen, to save his life, sought help of Klingesor, who was a magician and the reputed nephew of Virgilius of Naples; and the Landgravine threw her cloak around him when he was hardest pressed.  This incident, its ethical significance marvellously enhanced, is the culmination of Wagner’s second act.  Instead of the historical Sophia, however, we have in the opera Hermann’s niece, Elizabeth, a creation of the poet’s, though modelled apparently after the sainted Elizabeth of Hungary, who, however, had scarcely opened her eyes upon the world in the Wartburg at the date ascribed to the contest, i.e.  A.D. 1206.  Wagner has given the role played by Heinrich von Ofterdingen (also Effterdingen) to Tannhauser apparently on the strength of an essay which appeared about the time that he took up the study of the mediaeval legends of Germany, which identified the two men.  Ofterdingen himself is now thought to be a creation of some poet’s fancy; but the large part devoted to his adventure in the old poem which tells of the contest of minstrelsy led the mediaeval poets to attribute many great literary deeds to him, one of them nothing less than the authorship of the “Nibelungenlied.”