Spiel, Minne, Schwur und Markt

Hartmann von Aue’s ›Ereck‹ and ›Iwein‹, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s ›Parzival‹ and Heinrich von dem Türlin’s ›Crône‹ all include fighting scenes that link mutual physical exhaustion and elaborate metaphors to a spectrum of outcomes between winning and losing. The metaphors derive from quotidian social contexts of a courtly audience: games, love, oaths and markets connote constellations of equality or superiority. While the metaphors illuminate the hierarchy of the two fighters, I argue, they also mirror the cause of the fight on the discursive level. The scenes thus form an intertextual group featuring a poetological connection between exhaustion and the metaphorical visibility of the cause of the fight.