UHLAND, LUDWIG. — German writer, born on 26 April 1787 in Tübingen, died there on 13 November 1862. Alongside Justinus Kerner and others, he represents the so-called Swabian School of poetry.
Having gone young to Paris to study the Neapolitan Code (U. graduated in law and also practiced as a lawyer in Stuttgart), he discovered there the medieval French literature, which was to leave a lasting impression on his spirit both as a poet and as a historian. Indeed, devoting himself to the study of ancient and medieval German literature, in 1822 he published a volume on Walther von der Vogelweide, a work that is alive and evocative, perhaps more that of a poet than of a historian, and which, in 1829, earned him the chair of German Language and Literature at the University of Tübingen. To this followed, in addition to various studies on the history of medieval German poetry and on Nordic sagas, the volumes *Der Mythos von Thor* (1836) and *Alte hoch- und niederdeutsche Volkslieder* (1844–45), which reflect, with a new and rich command of sources, the doctrines and aesthetic attitudes of the Romantics, from Herder to the Schlegels, down to his contemporaries Arnim and Brentano. Taking an active part from 1816 in political life and especially in the struggle for the Württemberg constitution (he had been elected deputy to the Chamber of States), U. was forced, due to disagreements with his government, to leave the University in 1832; but in 1848 he was a member of the Frankfurt National Assembly, to which he belonged until its dissolution.
As a poetic personality, U. possesses, compared to Kerner and even to the Heidelberg Romantics, a lesser originality, but one compensated not only by a broader culture and literary skill, but also by the discovery of a new tone that characterizes his lyric poetry: a tone drawn indeed from the example of medieval German poetry, but recast in a key of singular objectivity, that is, of deliberate and achieved impersonality. Hence the realistic and narrative character of U.’s poetry, especially expressed in his famous ballads and romances. In them there is almost no trace of the mannerisms of the previous practitioners of the genre, who include Bürger, Schiller, and Goethe (the latter certainly more present to his spirit than the others): U.’s ballads, peopled with kings and queens, knights, monks, and shepherds, represent the new outcome of an abandoned contact with the medieval German and European world (alongside the French troubadours, Spanish romances also crossed it in particular) as well as with contemporary life. The first edition of his *Gedichte* appeared in 1815. He also attempted drama, writing, in addition to various fragments, two plays: *Ernst Herzog von Schwaben* (1818) and *Ludwig von Bayern* (1819).