1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Wolfram von Eschenbach's "Parzival: A Knightly Epic (Vol. 1&2)" is a seminal work of medieval literature that weaves an intricate tale of chivalry, self-discovery, and the quest for the Holy Grail. Written in the early 13th century, this epic poem stands as a pinnacle of the German courtly romance genre, distinguished by its rich allegories and intricate characterizations. Eschenbach employs a lyrical style that harmonizes lofty ideals with profound human emotions, reflecting the tensions between personal longing and societal expectations in a feudal context. The text serves not only as entertainment but also as a didactic exploration of the virtues and failings of knighthood, embedded within the broader tapestry of Arthurian legends and emerging Christian mysticism. Wolfram von Eschenbach, a knight and poet of the early 13th century, draws on his own experiences and the cultural milieu of the time to craft this masterpiece. His identity as a member of the nobility, coupled with a profound respect for courtly values, shaped his representation of heroism, love, and the spiritual dimensions of the knightly quest. Eschenbach was influenced by diverse sources, including the works of Chrétien de Troyes, which undoubtedly informed his narrative choices, allowing him to create a unique Germanic reimagining of the Grail story. For readers interested in the intersection of mythology, morality, and the human condition, "Parzival: A Knightly Epic (Vol. 1&2)" is an indispensable exploration. Its themes resonate across time, inviting contemporary audiences to reflect on their own quests for meaning and identity. This profound narrative not only enriches the reader's understanding of medieval culture but also speaks to universal human experiences, making it a timeless addition to the literary canon. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Ähnliche
Parzival: A Knightly Epic (Vol. 1&2)
Table of Contents
Introduction
A young knight’s pursuit of fame becomes a search for wisdom and mercy. Parzival: A Knightly Epic invites readers into a world where dazzling feats of arms intersect with questions of conscience, community, and spiritual calling. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s narrative presents knighthood not merely as a code of prowess but as a demanding discipline of empathy. The hero’s journey unfolds across courts and wilderness, testing the boundaries between innocence and responsibility. Rather than celebrating victory for its own sake, the poem probes what it means to deserve honor, to recognize suffering, and to mature from gifted ambition into ethical resolve.
Composed in the early thirteenth century in Middle High German, Parzival is a major work of the Arthurian and Grail tradition and a cornerstone of medieval European literature. It is a chivalric romance in verse, set within the orbit of King Arthur’s court yet ranging widely across imagined European and Near Eastern spaces. Wolfram adapts and extends material associated with French romance while giving it a distinctive German voice. The poem’s scale and intricacy often see it presented in two volumes in modern editions, reflecting its expansive cast, layered episodes, and sustained meditation on faith, love, and reputation.
At its outset, the narrative traces the hero’s lineage and sheltered upbringing before following his first steps into the tournament-bright world of Arthur’s court. Parzival’s desire to become a knight propels him into encounters that challenge his assumptions about valor and courtesy. The story balances spectacle—battles, courts, and quests—with a steady undercurrent of ethical testing. Hints of a mysterious Grail world emerge as part of a larger inquiry into right action and right speech, setting a tone of expectation rather than disclosure. The result is an adventure that invites readers to watch a novice grow into the weight of his vows.
Wolfram’s narrative voice is distinctive—authorial, playful, earnest, and intermittently ironic. He comments on motives and manners, pauses to weigh competing values, and entertains while instructing. The poem’s verse form creates momentum and poise, yet its digressions allow characters and themes to breathe. Courtly splendor stands beside stark solitude; humor breaks into solemn reflection. The pacing alternates between kinetic episodes and moments of moral scrutiny, asking readers to notice not only what happens but how it is judged. This interplay of movement and meditation helps the poem feel both richly theatrical and deeply introspective, fusing romance energy with ethical inquiry.
Central themes include the education of the heart, the tension between reputation and compassion, and the struggle to reconcile personal ambition with communal duty. The poem explores how innocence can wound and how knowledge must be tempered by humility. It examines when silence protects and when speech heals, without reducing such questions to easy formulas. Kinship and legacy complicate choice, while love—courtly, familial, and divine—presses characters toward self-scrutiny. Fate and providence hover over events, yet the narrative insists on responsibility, suggesting that true knighthood is measured not by victory alone but by the capacity to perceive and answer another’s need.
For contemporary readers, Parzival resonates as a study in ethical leadership and the labor of empathy amid public performance. It asks how institutions, traditions, and personal aspirations can be aligned without surrendering conscience. Its treatment of spiritual longing avoids dogmatic closure, instead staging a lived, trial-and-error search for meaning. As a foundational Grail narrative and a culmination of high medieval courtly culture, it has shaped later literature and art while retaining its own singular blend of candor and complexity. To read it now is to encounter a mirror for modern dilemmas: ambition without listening, certainty without understanding, action without attentive care.
This two-volume epic offers an immersive experience: a sequence of journeys, courts, and tests that build an arc from raw promise toward considered virtue. Expect an episodic structure, recurring motifs, and a narrator who invites reflection as much as suspense. Names and place-terms may vary by translation, but the emotional clarity of the hero’s education endures. Parzival rewards unhurried reading, where the glitter of chivalry gives way to a more demanding bravery, measured in compassion and accountability. Above all, it offers a romance of conscience—an adventure of becoming—set within the splendor and strain of a world learning what honor should mean.
Synopsis (Selection)
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival: A Knightly Epic, commonly presented in two volumes, recounts the coming-of-age and quest of a young knight within the wider Arthurian world. Composed in Middle High German, the poem interlaces courtly adventure with spiritual inquiry, tracing how personal conduct affects public welfare. The narrative follows Parzival’s path from sheltered innocence to tested maturity, while running a significant parallel line through the exploits of Gawan. Across battles, love vows, and mysterious ceremonies, Wolfram arranges episodes that examine courage, loyalty, courtesy, and grace. The story’s sequence steadily advances from family origins to courtly initiation, failure, penance, and renewed seeking.
The poem opens with Parzival’s lineage. His father, Gahmuret, a distinguished adventurer, seeks honor across distant courts and battlefields. He serves foreign rulers, marries into royalty, and becomes entangled in competing loyalties that leave lasting consequences. His early death ends a career of bold enterprise but sets the stage for the son’s story. Parzival’s mother, Herzeloyde, withdraws into rural seclusion to protect the child from the perils of knighthood. She fashions a life of simplicity, hoping ignorance will shield him from ambition. This protective strategy shapes Parzival’s early character, ensuring both his guileless demeanor and the striking contrast with the world he will enter.
As a boy, Parzival accidentally encounters Arthurian knights and mistakes their armor for divine beings. Awakened to the allure of knighthood, he leaves his mother and rides to King Arthur’s court in crude attire. A reckless encounter leads to the downfall of a feared Red Knight, after which Parzival is guided by the experienced Gurnemanz. Under this mentor he learns manners, restraint, and the discipline of not speaking rashly. Soon he aids a besieged young queen, Condwiramurs, winning her cause and her hand. These episodes introduce the poem’s interplay of prowess and courtesy while preparing Parzival for deeper trials beyond conventional chivalric success.
On his travels, Parzival is welcomed by a suffering ruler known as the Fisher King and witnesses a solemn procession whose central object—revered by a hidden brotherhood—promises relief for the afflicted. Remembering advice to curb questions, he remains silent at a crucial moment. By morning the castle is deserted, and the meaning of what he saw is withheld from him. Returning to Arthur’s court, he is publicly reproached by a fearsome messenger for failing a duty he did not understand. The rebuke shatters his self-assurance and recasts his earlier victories as incomplete, sending him away from festive knighthood into searching solitude.
Parzival’s renewed journey turns inward as much as outward. Tested by hardship, he wrestles with disappointment, guilt, and religious doubt. On a penitential day he meets a hermit bound to him by blood, who offers instruction on divine grace, rightful contrition, and the tangled history linking Parzival’s family to the hidden community he once glimpsed. This encounter reframes knighthood as service oriented by compassion rather than display. From here, the narrative follows his disciplined pursuit of worthiness, now informed by patience and prayer. Without disclosing later outcomes, the poem marks this phase as a deliberate preparation for future understanding.
Running alongside Parzival’s path is the extensive cycle of Gawan (Gawain), Arthur’s celebrated nephew. Gawan faces lawsuits, rescues beleaguered nobles, and endures intricate ordeals in enchanted strongholds whose marvels test courage and tact as much as strength. He negotiates rivalry, suspicion, and the delicacies of love, notably in his wary courtship of the proud Orgeluse. Through him, the poem explores pragmatic statecraft, measured courtesy, and the hazards of reputation. These chapters balance Parzival’s spiritual concerns with worldly responsibilities, illustrating how chivalric virtues operate in complex social webs. Gawan’s successes and setbacks keep Arthur’s realm cohesive while other quests unfold.
Parzival’s later wanderings bring him back into contact with past acquaintances and unresolved obligations. He meets a grieving cousin who repeats a stark lesson about fidelity and loss, deepening his sense of accountability. He duels formidable opponents whose identities complicate simple enmity, including a dazzling foreign champion whose connection to Parzival reshapes both men’s aims. Trials grow more exacting, but Parzival now measures victory not only by triumph in arms but by discernment, mercy, and right intention. The poem aligns his development with a growing readiness to face the mystery he once misread, while carefully preserving the particulars of its fulfillment.
Meanwhile, tensions converge around Arthur’s court as private vendettas and regional wars threaten to unravel tenuous peace. Gawan’s entanglement with rival lords approaches a decisive duel, staged under strict custom but freighted with broader consequences. Diplomacy, pledges, and the claims of love work alongside prowess to redirect violence toward reconciliation. At the same time, signs from the hidden brotherhood suggest that an old wound and a wasted land still await remedy, contingent on a test of insight as much as valor. The narrative positions its protagonists for resolution, balancing spectacle with a steadily tightening focus on responsibility.
In drawing its strands together, Parzival presents the maturation of a knight whose worth rests on compassion guided by faith, joined to prowess governed by measure. The poem’s central message treats worldly honor and spiritual calling as mutually informing, not opposed: true victory restores communities and heals what suffering has disordered. Without revealing the final turns of plot, Wolfram allows reckonings, kinship discoveries, and formal tests to close the circles opened at the start. The result affirms that courtesy, truthfulness, and grace convert raw courage into just rule, setting a model for chivalry accountable to both earth and heaven.
Historical Context
Parzival is set in a trans-European Arthurian landscape that blends Britain, Gaul, Iberia, and the wider Mediterranean with imagined realms of Africa and the Near East. Arthur’s court appears in locales familiar to 12th-century romance, such as Carduel in Wales and Nantes in Brittany, while the Grail kingdom of Munsalvaesche is placed vaguely in rugged Iberian or Pyrenean mountains. Wolfram stages episodes in Wales, Brittany, and along continental routes of travel, but he also sends characters to “Baldac” (Baghdad), to North Africa (the kingdom of Zazamanc), and as far as “India.” Although legendary in chronology, the social landscape mirrors the High Middle Ages, roughly 1180–1220, with feudal courts, knightly service, and crusading horizons.
The crusading movement provides the clearest historical backdrop. Launched by Pope Urban II at Clermont in 1095, the First Crusade seized Jerusalem in 1099 and established Latin states at Antioch, Edessa, Tripoli, and Jerusalem. Edessa’s fall in 1144 prompted the failed Second Crusade (1147–1149). Saladin’s victory at Hattin (1187) led to the loss of Jerusalem; the Third Crusade (1189–1192) followed, with Frederick I Barbarossa drowning in the Saleph (1190), Richard I defeating Saladin at Arsuf (1191), and the Treaty of Jaffa (1192) securing coastal holdings. A German crusade in 1197 briefly captured Sidon and Beirut before Henry VI’s death. Alongside these expeditions rose the military orders: the Templars (founded c. 1119, endorsed at Troyes 1129), Hospitallers (from c. 1099), and the Teutonic Order (begun at Acre, 1190). Wolfram mirrors this world by naming the Grail’s guardians “Templeisen,” transparently recalling the Templars’ monastic-knightly ideal and disciplined secrecy. He aligns chivalric prowess with penitential pilgrimage, as Parzival’s quest becomes a form of crusade of the self. The poem’s global itineraries—Gahmuret fighting for the “Baruc of Baldac,” marriage to the African queen Belacane, and the mixed-heritage knight Feirefiz—reflect the era’s real contact zones between Latin Christendom and Islamic polities from al-Andalus to the Abbasid sphere. Even as crusading rhetoric sharpened confessional boundaries, Wolfram’s courteous depictions of Muslim rulers echo contemporary Western reports that admired Saladin’s chivalry, suggesting an awareness that knightly honor could cross religious frontiers. The Grail’s Good Friday ritual and the Templeisen’s service also transpose the crusading synthesis of arms and devotion into a sacralized, interiorized campaign.
Power politics in the German lands under the Hohenstaufen shaped Wolfram’s milieu. Frederick I Barbarossa (r. 1152–1190) consolidated imperial authority; Henry VI (crowned 1191, d. 1197) added Sicily in 1194. His death triggered a double election in 1198, pitting Philip of Swabia against Otto IV and plunging the empire into civil conflict until Philip’s murder (1208) and the rise of Frederick II (elected 1212). Regional princes, including the Landgraves of Thuringia, asserted wide autonomy. Wolfram, active c. 1200–1210 and associated with courts like Hermann I of Thuringia (r. 1190–1217), writes a world preoccupied with lordship, vassalage, and negotiated fealty—themes central to Parzival’s maturation and his obligation to legitimate authority.
The campaign against heresy in Languedoc and papal reform under Innocent III form a second axis. The Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229) saw brutal actions at Béziers and Carcassonne in 1209 and the ascendancy of Simon de Montfort until his death in 1218, culminating in Capetian consolidation by the Treaty of Paris (1229). The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) codified orthodoxy, defining transubstantiation and mandating annual confession and communion. Wolfram’s Grail, a life-giving stone (lapsit exillis) that receives a host-bearing dove on Good Friday, resonates with Eucharistic theology crystallized at Lateran IV. Parzival’s penitential instruction under the hermit Trevrizent, and his eventual absolution, mirror the era’s intensified emphasis on sacramental discipline and right belief.
The Iberian Reconquista created a prominent frontier culture that informs Wolfram’s placement of the Grail realm near Spain. Christian coalitions under Castile, Aragon, and Navarre broke Almohad power at Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), a decisive victory that shifted the balance on the peninsula. Military orders such as Calatrava (1158) and Santiago (1170) institutionalized crusading warfare in Spain. The poem’s vague location of Munsalvaesche in mountainous Iberia, together with its interfaith encounters, aligns with the social reality of fortified borderlands, truces, and sieges. The frontier setting heightens the themes of trial and liminality: knights pass between courts, customs, and faiths in ways the Reconquista made familiar.
Cross-cultural exchange with the Islamic world provides essential context. The 12th-century translation movement at Toledo (e.g., Gerard of Cremona, d. 1187) transmitted Arabic science and philosophy, while Norman and Hohenstaufen Sicily (Roger II, 1130–1154; Frederick II, 1194–1250) showcased multilingual courts and shared material culture. European chronicles expressed respect for capable Muslim rulers, especially Saladin (d. 1193). Wolfram’s inclusion of Baghdad, North Africa, and India, and his dignified portrayal of Belacane and Feirefiz, register this fascination. He even links Feirefiz, baptized to behold the Grail, with Repanse de Schoye and the legend of Prester John, imagining a Christianized chivalry radiating eastward—a literary echo of real intellectual and diplomatic contacts.
The social order that trained knights was being Christianized and regulated. The Peace and Truce of God movements (10th–12th centuries) sought to curb private war; Lateran II (1139) condemned tournaments that imperiled souls, even as aristocratic circuits normalized them. Dubbing rituals, oaths of fealty, and inheritance customs structured noble life. Widow regencies and marriage alliances distributed power across lineages. Parzival, raised in seclusion by Herzeloyde after Gahmuret’s death, blunders into this order, slaying the Red Knight Ither and learning, through service at Arthur’s court and ordeals in lists and forests, how prowess must be yoked to mercy and counsel. The poem dramatizes the conversion of raw violence into disciplined, socially sanctioned knighthood.
As social and political critique, the work exposes the limits of formalist chivalry, court display, and crusading bravado. Parzival’s initial failure at the Grail—his silence imposed by etiquette—condemns a code that prizes decorum over compassion. By granting dignity to Muslim rulers and crafting kinship across faiths, Wolfram challenges stark crusader binaries and suggests the moral insufficiency of confessional triumphalism. The Templeisen’s austere service critiques worldly knighthood’s vanity, while the Eucharistic Grail signals that justice flows from grace, not lineage. Through widows, queens, and intercessors, the poem also illuminates gendered vulnerabilities and the violence of feudal feud, urging a politics of conscience, mercy, and responsibility.
Parzival: A Knightly Epic (Vol. 1&2)
Volume 1
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
In presenting, for the first time, to English readers the greatest work of Germany's greatest mediæval poet, a few words of introduction, alike for poem and writer, may not be out of place. The lapse of nearly seven hundred years, and the changes which the centuries have worked, alike in language and in thought, would have naturally operated to render any work unfamiliar, still more so when that work was composed in a foreign tongue; but, indeed, it is only within the present century that the original text of the Parzival has been collated from the MSS. and made accessible, even in its own land, to the general reader. But the interest which is now felt by many in the Arthurian romances, quickened into life doubtless by the genius of the late Poet Laureate, and the fact that the greatest composer of our time, Richard Wagner, has selected this poem as the groundwork of that wonderful drama, which a growing consensus of opinion has hailed as the grandest artistic achievement of this century, seem to indicate that the time has come when the work of Wolfram von Eschenbach may hope to receive, from a wider public than that of his own day, the recognition which it so well deserves.
Of the poet himself we know but little, save from the personal allusions scattered throughout his works; the dates of his birth and death are alike unrecorded, but the frequent notices of contemporary events to be found in his poems enable us to fix with tolerable certainty the period of his literary activity, and to judge approximately the outline of his life. Wolfram's greatest work, the Parzival, was apparently written within the early years of the thirteenth century; he makes constant allusions to events happening, and to works produced, within the first decade of that period; and as his latest work, the Willehalm, left unfinished, mentions as recent the death of the Landgrave Herman of Thuringia, which occurred in 1216, the probability seems to be that the Parzival was written within the first fifteen years of the thirteenth century. Inasmuch, too, as this work bears no traces of immaturity in thought or style, it is probable that the date of the poet's birth cannot be placed much later than 1170.
The name, Wolfram von Eschenbach, points to Eschenbach in Bavaria as in all probability the place of his birth, as it certainly was of his burial. So late as the end of the seventeenth century his tomb, with inscription, was to be seen in the Frauen-kirche of Ober-Eschenbach, and the fact that within a short distance of the town are to be found localities mentioned in his poems, such as Wildberg, Abenberg, Trühending, Wertheim, etc., seems to show that there, too, the life of the poet-knight was spent.
By birth, as Wolfram himself tells us, he belonged to the knightly order (Zum Schildesamt bin Ich geboren), though whether his family was noble or not is a disputed point, in any case Wolfram was a poor man, as the humorous allusions which he makes to his poverty abundantly testify. Yet he does not seem to have led the life of a wandering singer, as did his famous contemporary, Walther von der Vogelweide; if Wolfram journeyed, as he probably did, it was rather in search of knightly adventures, he tells us: 'Durchstreifen muss Der Lande viel, Wer Schildesamt verwalten will[1q],' and though fully conscious of his gift of song, yet he systematically exalts his office of knight above that of poet. The period when Wolfram lived and sang, we cannot say wrote, for by his own confession he could neither read nor write ('I'ne kan decheinen buochstap,' he says in Parzival; and in Willehalm, 'Waz an den buochen steht geschrieben, Des bin Ich kunstelos geblieben'), and his poems must, therefore, have been orally dictated, was one peculiarly fitted to develop his special genius. Under the rule of the Hohenstaufen the institution of knighthood had reached its highest point of glory, and had not yet lapsed into the extravagant absurdities and unrealities which characterised its period of decadence; and the Arthurian romances which first found shape in Northern France had just passed into Germany, there to be gladly welcomed, and to receive at the hands of German poets the impress of an ethical and philosophical interpretation foreign to their original form.
It was in these romances that Wolfram, in common with other of his contemporaries, found his chief inspiration; in the Parzival, his master-work, he has told again the story of the Quest for, and winning of, the Grail; told it in connection with the Perceval legend, through the medium of which, it must be remembered, the spiritualising influence of the Grail myth first came into contact with the brilliant chivalry and low morality of the original Arthurian romances; and told it in a manner that is as truly mediæval in form as it is modern in interpretation. The whole poem is instinct with the true knightly spirit; it has been well called Das Hohelied von Rittertum, the knightly song of songs, for Wolfram has seized not merely the external but the very soul of knighthood, even as described in our own day by another German poet; Wolfram's ideal knight, in his fidelity to his plighted word, his noble charity towards his fellow-man, lord of the Grail, with Its civilising, humanising influence, is a veritable 'true knight of the Holy Ghost.' In a short introduction such as this it is impossible to discuss with any fulness the fascinating problems connected with this poem, one can do no more than indicate where the principal difficulties lie. These may be briefly said to be chiefly connected with the source from which Wolfram derived his poem, and with the interpretation of its ethical meaning. That Wolfram drew from a French source we know from his own statement, he quotes as his authority a certain 'Kiot the Provençal,' who, in his turn, found his information in an Arabian MS. at Toledo. Unfortunately no such poet, and no such poem, are known to us, while we do possess a French version of the story, Li Conte del Graal, by Chrêtien de Troyes, which, so far as the greater part of the poem (i.e. Books III. to XIII.) is concerned, shows a remarkable agreement not only in sequence of incidents, but even in verbal correspondence, with Wolfram's work. Chrêtien, however, does not give either the first two or the last three books as we find them in Wolfram. The account of Perceval's father, and of his death, is by another hand than Chrêtien's, and does not agree with Wolfram's account; and the poem, left unfinished by Chrêtien, has been continued and concluded at great length by at least three other writers, who have evidently drawn from differing sources; whereas Wolfram's conclusion agrees closely with his introduction, and his whole poem forms the most harmonious and complete version of the story we possess. Wolfram knew Chrêtien's poem, but refers to it with contempt as being the wrong version of the tale, whereas 'Kiot' had told the venture aright. The question then is, where did Wolfram really find those portions of his poems which he could not have drawn from Chrêtien? Is 'Kiot' a real, or a feigned, source?
Some German critics have opined that Wolfram really knew no other poem than Chrêtien's, and that he boldly invented all that he did not find there, feigning another source in order to conceal the fact. Others have maintained that whether 'Kiot' be the name of the writer or not, Wolfram certainly had before him a French poem other than Li Conte del Graal.
It certainly seems in the highest degree improbable that a German poet should have introduced the Angevin element, lacking in Chrêtien; Wolfram's presentment of the Grail, too, differs in toto from any we find elsewhere, with him it is not the cup of the Last Supper, but a precious stone endowed with magical qualities. It is true that Chrêtien does not say what the Grail was, but simply that 'du fin or esmereeestoit, pieres pressieuses avoit el graal de maintes manieres,' yet it seems scarcely likely that Wolfram should have interpreted this as a precious stone, to say nothing of sundry Oriental features peculiar to his description. But whence Wolfram derived his idea of the Grail is a problem which it is to be feared will never now be completely solved.
The discussion as to the ethical meaning Wolfram attached to the story seems more hopeful of results, as here we do possess the requisite data, and can study the poem for ourselves. The question between critics is whether Wolfram intended to teach a purely religious lesson or not; whether the poem is an allegory of life, and Parzival a symbol of the Soul of man, hovering between Faith and Doubt, perplexed by the apparent injustice of God's dealings with men, and finally fighting its way through the darkness of despair to the clear light of renewed faith in God; or have we here a glorification of the knightly ideal? a declaration of the poet-knight's belief that in loyal acceptance of, and obedience to, the dictates of the knightly order, salvation is to be won? Can the true knight, even though he lack faith in God, yet by keeping intact his faith with man, by very loyalty and steadfastness of purpose, win back the spiritual blessing forfeited by his youthful folly? Is Parzival one of those at whose hands 'the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence'? It may well be that both these interpretations are, in a measure, true, that Wolfram found the germ of the religious idea already existing in his French source, but that to the genius of the German poet we owe that humanising of the ideal which has brought the Parzival into harmony with the best aspirations of men in all ages. This, at least, may be said with truth, that of all the romances of the Grail cycle, there is but one which can be presented, in its entirety, to the world of to-day with the conviction that its morality is as true, its human interest as real, its lesson as much needed now as it was seven hundred years ago, and that romance is the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach.
Some words as to the form of the original poem, and the method followed in translation, may be of interest to the reader. The original Parzival is a poem of some 25,000 lines, written in an irregular metre, every two lines rhyming, reim-paar. Among modern German translators considerable difference of opinion as to the best method of rendering the original appears to exist. Simrock has retained the original form, and adheres very closely to the text; his version certainly gives the most accurate idea of Wolfram's style; San Marte has allowed himself considerable freedom in versification, and, unfortunately, also in translation; in fact, he too often gives a paraphrase rather than a reproduction of the text. Dr. Bötticher's translation omits the Gawain episodes, and, though close to the original, has discarded rhyme. It must be admitted that Wolfram is by no means easy to translate, his style is obscure and crabbed, and it is often difficult to interpret his meanings with any certainty. The translator felt that the two points chiefly to be aimed at in an English version were, that it should be faithful to the original text, and easy to read. The metre selected was chosen for several reasons, principally on account of the length of the poem, which seemed to render desirable a more flowing measure than the short lines of the original; and because by selecting this metre it was possible to retain the original form of reim-paar. As a general rule one line of the English version represents two of the German poem, but the difference of language has occasionally demanded expansion in order to do full justice to the poet's meaning. Throughout, the translator's aim has been to be as literal as possible, and where the differing conventionalities of the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries have made a change in the form of expression necessary, the meaning of the poet has been reproduced, and in no instance has a different idea been consciously suggested. That there must of necessity be many faults and defects in the work the writer is fully conscious, but in the absence of any previous English translation she can only hope that the present may be accepted as a not altogether inadequate rendering of a great original; if it should encourage others to study that original for themselves, and learn to know Wolfram von Eschenbach, while at the same time they learn better to understand Richard Wagner, she will feel herself fully repaid.
* * * * *
The translator feels that it may be well to mention here the works which have been principally relied on in preparing the English translation and the writers to whom she is mostly indebted.
For the Text Bartsch's edition of the original Parzival, published in Deutsche Classiker des Mittelalters, has been used throughout, in connection with the modern German translation by Simrock.
In preparing the Notes use has been made of Dr. Bötticher's Introduction to his translation of the Parzival, and the same writer'sDas Hohelied von Rittertum; San Marte's translation has also been occasionally referred to.
The Appendix on proper names has been mainly drawn up from Bartsch's article on the subject in Germanistische Studien; and that on the Angevin allusions from Miss Norgate's England under theAngevin Kings, though the statements have been verified by reference to the original chronicles.
For all questions connected with the Perceval legend in its varying forms the authority consulted has been Studies on the Legend of theHoly Grail, by Mr. Alfred Nutt, to whom, personally, the translator is indebted for much valuable advice and assistance in preparing this book for publication.
BOOK I GAMURET
ARGUMENT
In the Introduction the poet tells of the evil of doubt and unsteadfastness—against which he would warn both men and women; he will tell them a tale which shall speak of truth and steadfastness, and in which many strange marvels shall befall.
Book I. tells how Gamuret of Anjou at the death of his father, King Gandein, refused to become his brother's vassal, and went forth to seek fame and love-guerdon for himself. How he fought under the Baruch before Alexandria, and came to Patelamunt. How Queen Belakané was accused of having caused the death of her lover Eisenhart, and was besieged by two armies, which Friedebrand, King of Scotland, Eisenhart's uncle, had brought against her. How Gamuret defeated her foemen, and married the Queen, and became King of Assagog and Zassamank. How he grew weary for lack of knightly deeds, and sailed away in secret from Queen Belakané, and left her a letter telling of his name and race. How Feirifis was born, and how Gamuret came to Seville.
BOOK I
GAMURET
