Literature: Albrecht von Scharfenberg

fl. 1270's

Author of Der jüngere Titurel. Composed around 1270, the work was inspired by Wolfram von Eschenbach's Titurel fragments, which focus on the love of Sigune and Schionatulander, two characters appearing in Parzival. The Jüngerer Titurel, consisting of some 6,000 stanzas that are imitative of Wolfram's so-called Titurel stanzas, tells in leisurely fashion the entire life history of both Sigune and Schionatulander.

The enormous novel, which has intimidated critics and editors alike, transforms courtly romance into a vehicle of didacticism that instructs by means of example. Throughout the work, the author assumes the identity of Wolfram von Eschenbach; he steps forward as "ich, Wolfram" and is addressed as "her Wolfram" who hails from "Eschenbach". Not until almost the very end, in stanza 5883, does the author reveal that he is one "Albrecht", whom scholars identify with Albrecht von Scharfenberg, a pious, clerically oriented man - to judge by the tenor of his work - whose patron was Ludwig II of Bavaria.

Because Albrecht used the persons of Wolfram throughout most of the Jüngerer Titurel, the work was attributed in the Middle Ages - and even as late as the nineteenth century - to Wolfram. It is plausible that the author's identification of himself in stanza 5883 may have been interpreted as an indication that Wolfram had left the work incomplete and that it was finished by Albrecht. Although the pious tone and extraordinary verbosity of the Jüngerer Titurel strike modern critics as tedious, the compendious narrative was extremely popular in the Middle Ages. Berthold von Regensburg, who died in 1272, already knew the work and quoted from it in his German sermons.

One of Albrecht's Arthurian episodes, in which the knights' virtue or lack thereof is revealed when they cross a magic bridge, inspired Hans Sachs to compose a Meisterlied on the subject.