Hero and Leander

Hero and Leander enters the available evidence through a song rather than a narrated episode: the novel’s source notes identify the seventeenth-century folk song Es waren zwei Königskinder as based on their legend. This connection establishes the legend as a source behind the song, but the evidence does not detail the legend’s events or its place in the novel’s plot.

Identity and Source

Es waren zwei Königskinder is described as a seventeenth-century folk song based on the legend of Hero and Leander. The note thus links the pair to a specific piece of traditional song while distinguishing the legend itself from the song derived from it.

Place in the Novel

The connection is documented in a source note, not presented here as a developed scene or relationship in the novel’s narration. Its supported significance is therefore intertextual: the note identifies the legendary basis of a folk-song reference, without supplying further details about the legend or explaining how the song functions in context.