GERMANY AND THE LOW COUNTRIES 257

'Thou art indeed the fair sea-maid,
the beautiful, the young sea-maid !'

She takes a kerchief in her hand,
and sails the sea5 and comes to land.

When they were come unto that place,
they began to kiss and to embrace

and there they kissed her, that sea-maid,
that beautiful, that young sea-maid.

It is in this earlier and more authentic form that the ballad crossed
France and became the Don Bueso of the Spanish corpus. Meier's
third ballad, The Wooing, is also, in all probability, a highly
generalized version of an episode in Kudrun.

There are also reminiscences of French narratives of a romantic
or epic sort. The Flemish Flos and Blancflos (Erk-Bohme 81) had
less success as a ballad than had the romance in prose, but in
Brennenberg or Der Bremberger (Erk-Bohme 100) the Germans and
Netherlander found a satisfying equivalent for the French Castel-
lan de Coney and the Provencal legend of Cabestanh, Probably a
modern invention is the Flemish Roland and Godelinde (Erk-
Bohme 91), composed to attract interest to the nuns of Godelinde's
cloister at Ghent. The restlessness of a princess at night, causing
her to go to a hayloft to sleep with an ostler? is the motif of The
Nutmeg-tree (Erk-Bohme 141). Its author had been three times in
France. In Spain the motif is used in a Carolingian setting.

The influence of Minnesang and Meistersang on the ballads pro-
duced some new legends which, though undoubtedly preserved by
oral tradition, have the perfections of written literature also. The
greatest of these are The noble Moringer (Erk-Bohme 28), and
Tannhduser (Erk-Bohme 17, 18). Each opens with the separation
of lovers at dawn, that is, with an caubade'; each uses the name of
a Minnesinger for its hero. In the first, Moringer (Heinrich von
Morungen, who flourished round about 1200), on the morrow of
his wedding, leaves his home; he appoints a tryst of seven years
with his bride, but stays away longer than that. At last he returns
when she is about to be forced to accept a new husband, makes him-
self known by a ring dropped in a cup, and displaces his rival. The
story is older than its hero, and is found in the same complex form
under other names (Duke Heinrich in Germany, Hind Horn In
England, Count Dirlos in Spain, &c.), having a tendency to attach

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