Novalis wrote the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Novalis was the pen name of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a central figure of early German Romanticism. He began the fragmentary novel around 1800, but illness, professional duties, and his early death in 1801 prevented its completion.
The story follows Heinrich, a young poet whose intellectual and spiritual development is shaped by dreams, travel, legends, philosophy, and encounters with storytellers. Its most famous image is the blue flower, a symbol of longing and the Romantic search for a deeper unity between imagination, nature, and human life.
Heinrich von Ofterdingen was published posthumously in 1802 by Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, who helped prepare Novalis's papers. This sometimes causes confusion: Schlegel was an editor and close associate, not the novel's author. The title character himself is a legendary medieval minstrel associated with the Sängerkrieg, or song contest, on the Wartburg. The unfinished novel was conceived partly as a poetic counterpoint to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister.