About borders and weather in the Schneekind tradition

Abstract

This article examines the two Middle High German textual witnesses of the ›Schneekind-tradition‹ (›Schneekind A‹ and ›B‹) with regard to their differentiated narratological organisation of borders and weather. In a first step, the realisation of the two literary motifs in the respective texts was examined separately and supplemented by comparisons with later texts in the chain of reception. Taking these individual analyses into account, the compositional interweaving of narrative borders and weather as a communicative and didactic strategy in the ›Schneekind-texts‹ could be shown: Weather as an attempt to cross borders.