with the Lion.

Among the Minnesingers of greatest note are Walther von der
Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and later, when their
head-quarters were at Nüremberg, Hans Sachs. Their favorite themes
were court epics, dealing especially with the legends of Arthur, of
the Holy Grail, and of Charles the Great. Many of these epics are
embodied in the Heldenbuch, or Book of Heroes, compiled in the
fifteenth century by Kaspar von der Rhön, while the Abenteuerbuch
contains many of these legends as well as Der Rosengarten and König
Laurin.

In the second part of the thirteenth century artificiality and
vulgarity began to preponderate, provoking as counterweights didactic
works such as Der Krieg auf der Wartburg. The fourteenth century saw
the rise of the free cities, literary guilds, and five universities.
It also marks the cultivation of political satire in such works as
Reinecke Fuchs, and of narrative prose chronicles like the Lüneburger,
Alsatian, and Thuringian Chronicles, which are sometimes termed prose
epics. The Volksbücher also date from this time, and have preserved
for us many tales which would otherwise have been lost, such as the
legends of the Wandering Jew and Dr. Faustus.

The age of Reformation proved too serious for poets to indulge in any
epics save new versions of Reinecke Fuchs and Der Froschmeuseler, and
after the Thirty Years' War the first poem of this class really worthy
of mention is Klopstock's Messias, or epic in twenty books on the life
and mission of Christ and the fulfilment of the task for which he was
foreordained.