UHLAND, LUDWIG. - German writer, b. 26 April 1787 in Tübingen, d. there 13 Nov. 1862. Together with Justinus Kerner and others he represents the so-called Swabian poetic school.
Having gone to Paris as a young man to study the Napoleonic Code there (U. took a degree in law and also practiced as a lawyer in Stuttgart), he discovered there medieval French literature, which was destined to leave a lasting influence on his spirit both as poet and as historian. Devoting himself in fact to the study of ancient and medieval German literature, he published in 1822 a volume on Walther von der Vogelweide, which is a lively and evocative work, perhaps more that of a poet than of a historian, and which, in 1830, earned him the chair of German Language and Literature at the University of Tübingen. It was followed, besides various studies on the history of medieval German poetry and on the Norse sagas, by the volumes Der Mythos von Thor (1836) and Alte hochund niederdeutsche Volkslieder (1844-45), which reflect, with a new and rich command of the sources, the doctrines and the attitudes of taste of the Romantics, from Herder to Schlegel, 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 a deputy to the Chamber of Estates), U. had, because of disagreements with his government, to leave the University in 1832; but in 1848 he was a member of the Frankfurt National Assembly, in which he participated until its dissolution.
As a poetic personality U. possesses, in comparison with Kerner and also with the Heidelberg Romantics, a lesser originality, but this is compensated not only by a broader culture and literary expertise, but also by the discovery of a new tone that characterizes his lyric poetry: a tone derived indeed from the example of medieval German poetry, but taken up again in a key of singular objectivity, that is, of deliberate and achieved impersonality. Hence the veristic and narrative character of U.'s poetry, especially expressed in the famous ballads and romances. In them scarcely any movement of the previous cultivators of the genre, who are nonetheless called Bürger, Schiller, Goethe (the latter, certainly, more present to his spirit than the others), comes to life again: U.'s ballads, peopled with kings and queens, knights, monks and shepherds, represent the new result of a renewed contact with the medieval German and European world (along with the French troubadours he was especially attracted by the Spanish romances) as well as with contemporary life. The first edition of his Gedichte is from 1815. He also attempted the theatrical genre, writing, besides various fragments, two dramas: Ernst Herzog von Schwaben (1818) and Ludwig von Bayern (1819).