Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach
‘Oriental’ elements are lacking in Wolfram’s source. Their prominence in Parzival can be safely ascribed to the known exotic tastes of Wolfram’s great patron, the Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia, which Wolfram evidently shared with him, a true marriage of minds. Given the chronological order of composition of Chapters 3–6; 1–2; 7–16, it is easy to see how Wolfram dangles his newly conceived Feirefiz before his audience towards the end of Chapter 6 to lead in to the begetting of him in Chapter 1 in the land of the Moors, his own free composition and first offering to Hermann.
Like some other masterpieces of literature, Parzival affords an example of the piling of Pelion on Ossa, of the work of one genius reared upon that of another, the Perceval of the great Chrétien de Troyes. Chrétien was the creator of Arthurian romance for the courts and with some support from his immediate predecessors and from his contemporary, Thomas of Britain,* can be regarded as the father of European narrative. Comparison of Parzival with the unfinished Perceval affords the rare opportunity of looking over the shoulder of genius at work, as Wolfram goes about the task of recreating and completing the story. Comparison of Chaucer’s Troilus with the Philostrato, once attributed to Boccaccio, provides a similar opportunity in our own medieval literary history. A thorough study of the case in hand would run to several volumes. My aim here is to draw attention to the bare fact that readers of French can share in this pleasure to an acceptable degree by comparing my translation with L. Foulet’s modern French rendering of the Perceval.* At the present time, when negligible and even expendable authors claim absolute originality and independence for their productions it is salutary to dwell on the fact that poets of the order of Wolfram and Chaucer saw nothing amiss in adapting existing works to their purposes. Helped by the traditionalist outlook of their audiences, though not infrequently also at odds with it, such poets correctly assessed the role of tradition in the art of communication and would have consigned aspirants to absolute originality to Bedlam, which is where they in fact are.
Chrétien’s unfinished Perceval, with its rather sudden changes of attention from Perceval to Gauvain (Wolfram’s Gawan), has often struck critics as formless. Some of Chrétien’s and Wolfram’s contemporaries, obviously lacking in empathy and in insight into basic plot-structure, thought that Gauvain, not Perceval, should win the Graal. Reading between the lines of Parzival one senses that Wolfram had to deal with a pro-Gawan faction in his audience. He knew that the royal boy who was isolated from chivalric contacts by his mother must reveal his inborn nature in the face of all obstacles. Wolfram may also have thought that the sequence of Chrétien’s episodes, here given the numeration of Wolfram’s,† could be arranged thus, with the thirteenth episode barely begun:
Wolfram’s completed pattern is in any event thus:
In other words, perhaps following the general pattern of Thomas’s Tristran with its opening episode on its hero’s parents, Wolfram has added Chapters 1 and 2, which are devoted to Gahmuret, who begets Feirefiz to carry the Infidel strand of the story (1), and Parzival, exemplar of deeper Christian chivalry (2); has completed Chapter 13, at whose end he knots the Gawan – and Parzival-actions by bringing the two heroes on to a collision course incognito – a device already familiar from Chrétien’s Yvain and Hartmann’s Iwein; in Chapter 14 Wolfram narrates the actual duel and merciful recognition of the combatants; in Chapter 15 he similarly knots together the Feirefiz- and Parzival-actions, with a second duel incognito explicitly ended by divine intervention after Parzival’s first taste of defeat in battle; finally, in Chapter 16 Parzival enters at last into his own as King of the Gral, taking Feirefiz with him to inevitable conversion and then return to the East to beget Prester John on the maiden who had carried the Gral. Over and above this, Wolfram greatly expands what Chrétien gave him for Chapter 9 to make it his central doctrinal chapter on salvation and the Gral.
At the beginning of Chapter 13, where the Perceval breaks off, Wolfram is of course not an entirely free man, since he has to observe the narrative logic of what has gone before, derived from Chrétien’s major incidents. Yet it is significant that as soon as his source dries up, Wolfram embarks on a festivity and spins out the new marvels of Clinschor. As a result, he only just manages to knot the Parzival- and Gawan-actions at the very end of Chapter 13 to preserve the vital Parzival-sequence – the vertical central column in the cruciform pattern above: 3 (young Parzival), 5 (First Visit to the Gral), 9 (Parzival with Trevrizent), 13 (as just discussed), 15 (Parzival and Feirefiz), 16 (Parzival Gral King). 9, which deals with the turning-point in Parzival’s life and the nature of the Gral, is at the absolute centre of the pattern.
For a century and a half, though in diminishing numbers, there have been critics who have denied at least part of these innovations to Wolfram, and for little other discoverable reason than that as from half-way through his Parzival, Wolfram claims to be following one ‘Kyot the Provençal’, sender of the ‘true version’. Ideally and for the most part in practice, scholarship is conducted according to the convention that all other scholars are of the highest possible intelligence and perspicacity. Thus if any wish to take Wolfram’s statements on Kyot at their face value they are free to do so, even if these statements are utterly lacking in external support and even if they ironize, not to say mock themselves. I myself respect this convention for its optimism and courtesy, and because most scholars out of touch with reality are innocuous and self-supporting. Nevertheless, it is my hope that one day a far more learned, formidable, and above all blunt scholar than I will arise to bury the ‘Kyot controversy’ for ever. Let it suffice to say here that although a writer Guiot de Provins is known, none of his writings deals with any aspect of the Gral story, nor is one attributed to him by inference; that Guiot de Provins was no Provençal but of course a North Frenchman from a town between Troyes and Paris (though very probably Wolfram used his name); that appeal to pseudo-sources to authenticate one’s own fabulations in a traditionalist age was far from unknown; that there is no single romance of the Graal in French or in any other language which narrates a number of Wolfram’s innovations in sequence; that Wolfram drags in Kyot towards the end of Chapter 8 in order to validate a very minor figure because he is going to splash Kyot big in Chapter 9 (just as he had used his ‘trailer’ technique in Chapter 6 in order to focus expectation on Feirefiz, who was to be engendered in his next Chapter, 1).*
In Chapter 9, when Wolfram is about to reveal the nature of the Gral through Trevrizent, he refers to wranglings with his listeners over the Gral ‘earlier on’, that is when Chapter 5 was being recited: but now he is ready for them. For if from their knowledge of French or by hearsay his audience had resented the discrepancies between his version in Chapter 5 and the corresponding episode of Perceval, then ‘Kyot’s’ version would confute and rout them. The cock-and-bull concomitants of Wolfram’s full-scale counter-attack with ‘Kyot’ in Chapter 9 would charm the quick-witted with its reckless humour and fob off the dull.
A very fair reviewer of the whole field of Wolfram studies named in the Bibliography below, recently cited as surviving obstacles to interpreting ‘Kyot’ as a narrative device: i) Wolfram’s surprising reverence for the House of Anjou (Gahmuret, Parzival and Feirefiz are ‘Anschevin’); ii) Wolfram’s allusions to – more accurate would be ‘analogy with’ – the Knights Templar, who were hostile towards the Germans; iii) Wolfram’s astonishing knowledge of French literature; and iv) the many points of agreement with French Graal tradition after Chrétien.
Concerning the last item, this same critic admits that these points of contact occur not in a single coherent narrative but widely scattered in different monuments. With regard to the Knights Templar, Wolfram can have disliked their politics whilst admiring their statutes and their task of guarding nothing less than the Holy Sepulchre; similarly Wolfram must have been greatly impressed by the brilliance and far-flung connections of the House of Anjou – by its inheritance of ‘Arthurian’ panache from the Normans on whom Geoff
It seems, then, that there are no cogent reasons why the fairest and most tolerant of critics should not regard Wolfram’s ‘Kyot’ as an entertaining fiction and a narrative device.
The question of Wolfram’s literacy was discussed above.* Those who think he could read will not mind him reading French. Close comparison of Parzival with Perceval, however, strongly suggests that unlike Gottfried’s command of French, Wolfram’s was far from perfect. One typical misunderstanding of his seems to have been of a word for a ‘carving-dish’ – of silver – which he interpreted as ‘carving-knife’ in the plural. But what matter? To a man of Wolfram’s temperament and imagination such minor irritations to narrative logic produced pearls. With two silver knives on his hands, Wolfram invents a function for them. They are made to remove the ice-like ‘glass’ deposited on the Lance from Anfortas’s wound, a deposit nothing else would master. Of silver though they were, they would have cut through steel! To assess the full effect of this sally on the knights of Wolfram’s audience one has only to recall that in battle their lives depended on nuances in the temper of steel.
As a narrator, Chrétien composed vivid and memorable scenes involving few persons and strung them together in almost dreamlike succession. Two things which contributed to this effect were the clarity and intensity of the foreground against an elusive and often mysterious background. In his re-creation of what Chrétien gave him, Wolfram on the other hand constructed a very highly organized background. Whereas Chrétien was sparing with names in Perceval in the manner of the folktales from which he ultimately derived his romances, Wolfram revels in names and allots to their owners precise places in geography (whether real or fanciful), feudal rank, and membership of great ramifying families within the three or four generations of the living. In this aspect of his style Wolfram is much nearer to epic than romance, and indeed in Willehalm, which re-creates a French feudal epic, he comes as near to classic epic as the rather unepical courtly measure and his resolve not to shock the ladies will let him.
The fullness and complexity of background in Parzival, with all their explicitness and cross-coupling, make for a realistic style, often echoed in his choice of images, which do not halt at the smithy or the woodman’s clearing. Yet Wolfram’s realism is a unique graphic style in which ‘reality’ is evoked by poetic means. For example, when Ither reverses his lance and brings it down on Parzival, the lad’s blood ‘sprayed through his pores in a cloud’. Or ‘he rode over rough country where few plantains were to be seen’, where the experienced eye detaches the fact that when traffic has worn away all the herbage the tough plantain remains. Or when Parzival came to Belrepeire he saw the torrent below its walls flying ‘like bolts well feathered and trimmed when the tensed crossbow hurls them with throbbing string’.
This same poetic realism also governs the heroes’ movements through time and space. Study of the errancies of Parzival and Gawan through places real or unreal, but regularly named, has shown that Wolfram had a coherent map of them in his head which the reader could reconstruct for himself, and that he uses locality and scenery symbolically. The reader’s attention is particularly drawn to the environs of the suggestively named Munsalvaesche – ‘Mount Savage’ or ‘Wild Mountain’ – which guards the Gral and whose situation Wolfram hides. The best hint Wolfram drops on the whereabouts of Munsalvæsche is that Parzival rode thither from Belrepeire in a day – though a bird would have been hard put to it to cover the distance! Parzival’s steed is thus momentarily Wolfram’s Pegasus. Belrepeire, in turn, had been reached from Graharz through high mountains. And Graharz had been reached from Nantes in one day, yet such was Parzival’s ignorance on this his first ride on a war-horse that he forced a two days’ march from it. Finally, Nantes had been reached in three days dry-shod via the Forest of Brizlan (Broceliande) from ‘Soltane’ presumably somewhere in Herzeloyde’s land of Waleis (Wales?), as though lands of the Celtic fringe were linking up in folk memory. Munsalvæsche, then, and its whole region of Terre salvæsche somewhere beyond the river Plimizcel and ‘Young Forest’ as viewed from Britain, is mysteriously hidden, as is only fitting for a goal which only the Elect can reach. As such, it again appears as a sort of earthly Paradise, hidden like that of the Alexander story near the sources of the four rivers Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates. It is significant for Parzival that Alexander in medieval legend penetrated to the walls of Paradise, was there given a Stone and told to go away and practise humility by a donnish old saint, on which theme the Stone permanently enshrined a lecture. For, placed in one pan of a scales, it could be raised up by no weight of gold in the other however great, whereas a feather lifted it at once. Wolfram describes the impregnability of the Gral Castle in terms very similar to those used of Paradise in the early German Alexander, which Wolfram knew. Alexander’s need to cast out pride and seek God’s mercy through humility is also parallel to Parzival’s. The spiritually controlled weight of the Stone and the rejuvenating powers ascribed to the Stone in some versions, must have contributed to Wolfram’s notion of his Gral, also a stone, while a phrase used of Alexander’s Stone in one Latin version, lapis exilis ‘small or slight stone’ at least affected some manuscript readings of Parzival, if not Wolfram’s original text itself, since a synonym for the Gral in Chapter 9 adopted by Lachmann and by all editors since is lapsit exillis.
This is far from exhausting the symbolic geographical overtones of Munsalv æsche, not to mention the scenery of Gawan’s quest. Those of chronology are scarcely less suggestive.
Until recently the two cumulative time-references in Parzival had been thought abrupt. In Chapter 9, Parzival and Trevrizent recall the former’s first visit to the hermit’s cell (in Chapter 5) rather in the time-skipping manner of Virginia Woolf through an object – Taurian’s lance, which Parzival had purloined in Trevrizent’s absence. Taking his first date from there, Trevrizent tells his nephew that it was four and a half years and three days past, and he confirms it from his psalter. In Chapter 13, Queen Ginover is found by Gawan’s messenger kneeling in chapel with her psalter. She tells him that Parzival had left the Plimizœl four and a half years and six weeks before, and she too knows this without consulting her psalter. Recent acute scrutiny of these passages and their implications* has shown mat mere is nothing abrupt or esoteric about Trevrizent’s or Ginover’s reckonings. Just as we have forgotten what life was like without piped water, electric lighting and sanitation, so most of us have ‘forgotten’ the liturgical calendar. We know from the text that Trevrizent gave his computation on Good Friday. The Queen gave hers forty days later, which, following the liturgical calendar, brings us to the Vigil of the Ascension – and that is why she is on her knees. But the liturgical calendar is determined by an Easter which can move as much as five weeks. Thus the link between the liturgical and secular calendars was not immediately appa