WICKRAM, JORG, or GEORG (d. c. 156o)

This article appears in Volume V28, Page 620 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: WAT-WIL

WICKRAM, JORG, or GEORG (d. c. 156o) , German poet and novelist, was a native of

Colmar

COLMAR, or KOLMAR

Alsace

ALSACE (Ger. Elsass)

; the date of his

birth

BIRTH (a word common in various forms to Teutonic languages from the root of the verb " to bear ")

is unknown. He passed the latter part of his life as town clerk of Burgheim on the Rhine, and died before 1562. Wickram was a many-sided writer. He founded a

Meistersinger

MEISTERSINGER (Ger. for " master-
singer
- SINGER, SIMEON (1846-1906)
")

school in

Colmar

COLMAR, or KOLMAR

in 1549, and has left a number of Meistersingerlieder. He edited Albrecht von Halberstadt's Middle High German version of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1545), and in 1555 he published Das Rollwagenbuclzlein, one of the best of the many German collections of tales and anecdotes which appeared in the 16th century. The title of the book implies its object, namely, to

supply

SUPPLY (through Fr. from Lat. supplere, to fill up)

reading for the traveller in the " Rollwagen " or diligences. As a dramatist, Wickram wrote Fastnachtsspiele (Das Narrengiessen, 1537; Der treue Eckart, 1538) and two dramas on biblical subjects, Der verlorene Sohn (1540) and Tobias (1551). A moralizing poem, Der irrereitende Pilger (1556), is half-satiric, half-didactic. It is, however, as a novelist that Wickram has left the deepest mark on his time, his

chief

CHIEF (from Fr. chef, head, Lat. caput)

romances being Ritter Galmy aus Schott/and (1539), Gabriotto and Reinhard (1554), Der Knabenspiegel (1554), Von guten and bosen Nachbarn (1556) and Der Goldfaden (15J7). These may be regarded as the earliest attempts in German literature to create that modern type of middle-class fiction which ultimately took the place of the decadent medieval romance of

chivalry

CHIVALRY (O. Fr. chevalerie, from
Late
- LATE
Lat. caballerius)

.
Wickram's works have been edited by J. Bolte and W. Scheel for the

Stuttgart

STUTTGART

Literarischer Verein (vols., 222, 223, 229, 230, 19001903) ; Der Ritter Galmy was republished by F. de la Motte Fouque in 1806; Der Goldfaden by K. Brentano in 1809; the Rollwagenbuchlein was edited by H. Kurz in 1865, and there is also a reprint of it in Reclam's Universalbibliothek. See A. Stober, J. Wickram (1866); W. Scherer, Die Anfange des deutschen Prosaromans (1897).

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