SOURCE: "Some Observations on the Status of the Narrator in Hartmann von Aue's Erec and Iwein," in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. VI, No. 1, January, 1970, pp. 65-82.

Jackson was an English-born scholar of Germanic and comparative literature and the author of The Literature of the Middle Ages (1960) and The Anatomy of Love: The Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg (1971). In the following essay, he compares the narrative strategies of Erec and Iwein and concludes that Iwein represents a more mature narrative technique.

In both his romances, Hartmann the poet dramatises the process of telling in the figure of Hartmann the narrator, a speaker at times poring over the internal situation of the poem, at times turning away to present himself to the audience. There are, however, significant differences between Erec and Iwein in the narrator's attitude toward his tale and his audience.

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