SOURCE: "Hartmann's Ironic Praise of Erec," in The Modern Language Review, Vol. 70, No. 4, October, 1974, pp. 795-807.

The Schroeder Professor of German at Cambridge University, Green has written several books and articles on medieval German literature, including Irony in the Medi-eval Romance (1979) and The Art of Recognition in Wolfram's "Parzival" (1982). In the following excerpt, Green suggests that irony in the narrator's comments renders Erec a criticism of the courtly ideal.

The merest suggestion of irony in connexion with Hartmann von Aue is likely to invoke immediate rejection on the grounds that he, of all poets of the courtly period, was so idealizing in his style and so serious in his didacticism that to seek for any reservations of criticism in his attitude is mistaken in principle. If anywhere in his work, we may hope to find critical reservations in his legends where … doubts about the absolute claims of the...