Laurin (poem)

Laurin or Der kleine Rosengarten (The Small Rose Garden) is an anonymous Middle High German poem about the legendary hero Dietrich von Bern, the counterpart of the historical Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great in Germanic heroic legend. It is one of the so-called fantastical (aventiurehaft) Dietrich poems, so called because it more closely resembles a courtly romance than a heroic epic. It likely originates from the region of South Tyrol, possibly as early as 1230, though all manuscripts are later.^[1]

The poem has five extant versions. In each, it concerns Dietrich's fight against the dwarf King Laurin, which takes place when Dietrich and Witege destroy Laurin's magical rose garden. The heroes are subsequently invited into Laurin's kingdom inside a mountain when it is discovered that Laurin has kidnapped and married the sister of Dietleib, one of Dietrich's heroes. Laurin betrays the heroes and imprisons them, but they are able to defeat him and save Dietleib's sister. The different versions depict Laurin's fate differently: in some, he becomes a jester at Dietrich's court, in others the two are reconciled and become friends.

The Laurin was one of the most popular legends about Dietrich. Beginning in the fifteenth century, it was printed both as part of the compendium of heroic poems known as the Heldenbuch and independently, and continued to be printed until around 1600. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a variant of the poem was reimagined as a folk saga and became part of South Tyrolean popular folklore.