r. And that is all we can expect at present.

Where antiquity left off with its attempts at sexual love, there the
middle ages resumed the thread: with adultery. We have already described
the love of the knights that invented the day songs. From this love
endeavoring to break through the bonds of marriage to the love destined
to found marriage, there is a long distance which was never fully
traversed by the knights. Even in passing on from the frivolous Romanic
race to the virtuous Germans, we find in the Nibelungen song Kriemhild,
who secretly is no less in love with Siegfried than he with her, meekly
replying to Gunther's announcement that he has pledged her in troth to a
certain knight whom he does not name: "You need not beg for my consent;
as you will demand, so I shall ever be; whomever you, sir, will select
for my husband, I shall willingly take in troth." It does not enter her
head at all that her love could find any consideration. Gunther asks for
Brunhild, Etzel for Kriemhild without ever having seen one another. The
same is true of the suit of Gutrun Sigebant of Ireland for the Norwegian
Ute and of Hetel of Hegelingen for Hilda of Ireland. When Siegfried of
Morland, Hartmut of Oranien and Herwig of Sealand court Gutrun, then it
happens for the first time that the lady voluntarily decides, favoring
the last named knight. As a rule the bride of the young prince is
selected by his parents. Only when the latter are no longer alive, he
chooses his own bride with the advice of the great feudal lords who in
all cases of this kind have a decisive voice. Nor could it be otherwise.
For the knight and the baron as well as for the ruler of the realm
himself, marriage is a political act, an opportunity for increasing
their power by new federations. The interest of the house must decide,
not the arbitrary inclination of the individual. How could love have a
chance to decide the question of marriage in the last instance under
such conditions?

The same held good for the bourgeois of the medieval towns, the members
of the guilds. Precisely the privileges protecting them, the clauses and
restrictions of the guild charters, the artificial lines of division
separating them legally, here from the other guilds, there from their
journeymen and apprentices, drew a sufficiently narrow circle for the
selection of a fitting bourgeois spouse. Under such a complicated
system, the question of fitness was unconditionally decided, not by