Parzival

by Wolfram von Eschenbach

  Wolfram excludes the clergy, as he also excludes the peasantry, purely for the purpose in hand. Apart from his demand for tactful confession for the knighthood, he has no intention of criticizing, let alone challenging the institutions of the Church. It is significant that immediately before confessing Parzival out in the wilds where there is no cleric to discharge this office, Trevrizent enjoins reverence for the priesthood in an extended passage in the clearest possible terms.* Before, during and after Wolfram’s time there is historical evidence of a deep desire in lay circles to be more closely associated with clerical institutions in piety somewhat short of the taking of monastic vows. Various solutions were found to meet this longing, both for men and women. Sigune’s life in the forest as an inclusa is a case in point. Wolfram’s solution, that of a Gral community, is of course purely poetic and symbolic, yet the way which he points out to his imagined Gral was one of great immediacy to his courtly listeners.

  Because Chrétien drew a causal connection between Perceval’s sins of riding out in search of Arthur and leaving his to mother die of grief, and his failure at the Gral Castle, there has been discussion as to whether Parzival’s failure was not of the same nature. In the course of his long exchange with Parzival in the German poem, Trevrizent, it is true, specifies three past sins on the part of the hero: the slaying of his kinsman Ither, whose blood-red armour despoiled from the corpse he is still wearing; his failure to show the sympathy he felt by asking Anfortas what ailed him; and his heartless abandonment of his mother. These shortcomings are named in that order, and there is no attempt by Trevrizent to establish causal connections. In fact, Trev-rizent’s estimate of their nature is hinted at in his charitable allusion to the Failure at a time when he is still unaware that he is conversing with the guilty party: he says that the man was ’tump’, that is, ‘young and inexperienced’. Further light is thrown on how Wolfram would wish us to view the matter by his observation that in taking her son into the wilds to keep him from the chivalric life, Herzeloyde was ‘cheating him of his royal style of life’, an excess of motherly solicitude over which the virile Wolfram shakes his head. The boy’s nature was bound to assert itself at the first contact with knighthood. And so it proved. Similarly, when Parzival slew Ither it was under the provocation of a very hard blow and against vastly superior armament – and a jolly good javelin-shot it was through the one chink in Ither’s armour I Young Parzival’s sins, then, including his Failure at Munsalvaesche, were not of a nature to overtax either his confessor’s or God’s powers of forgiveness. What did place Parzival’s soul in eternal jeopardy was his general state of mind. Trevrizent has some deep words on family feeling and on homicide, but it is to Parzival’s state of mind that he addresses himself chiefly. And with what marvellous gentle tact! For whereas Parzival’s first tutor showed a fine forbearance in adjusting the green young man’s weaponry with an ‘Allow me 1’, the second has a raw and rebellious soul to guide and save.

  For Wolfram it was the way to Kingship of the Gral community that mattered, not tenure of the office or the life there. Apart from the two moments of high festive ritual coinciding with Parzival’s first and second visits, the concerns of Munsalvæsche are dealt with sketchily, leaving many blanks to be filled in. I have suggested above that one of the symbolic aspects of the Gral milieu was that of the Second Paradise. On the other hand it is no Utopia, no blue-print for a recombination of human proclivities that will miraculously convert antisocial into social leanings to make a stable harmony. Without some powerful moral influence emanating from the Gral which Wolfram fails to mention, Gral Society even in his bare description would not last a week. It would be an amusing literary exercise for an able pen to portray the inevitable disintegration, and Wolfram himself could have done the job as well as any. As it stands in his text, the function of Gral Society, beside its symbolic connotations, is to inculcate an image of self-discipline in young men and women in joint service to God – coupled with and despite high living. The Templars’ duty of defending the mysterious boundaries of the Gral Realm against often formidable intruders was of course congenial in part: but it meant fights to the death if need be, perhaps tournaments and dancing, but no flirtations. The food and conditions on the other hand were good, as were the horses, despite their lack of oats – there were no peasants at Munsalvæsche to raise them – or was there a Gral Manger? There was always the chance of sudden preferment to a distant throne and a full normal life as a sovereign whilst discharging the higher function of spreading the faith. Gral maidens, too, would find fulfilment in the same way. That we are to see the Templars as men of flesh and blood requiring self-control with regard to the exquisite girls produced on festive occasions is shown by the fateful lapse of no other than the Gral King with a lady beyond the walls.

  Unbelievably, it was possible to fall from this Paradise, even for one who was born within and for it, like Anfortas, though excusably, since it was his First. Yet this had to be. Like the Question, it belonged to the mechanics of the story, since with-out the Gral King’s fall, how could an outsider (albeit of the same Family), a pattern for us others, battle his way through to the Kingship of the Gral ? We are left to believe that in the whole history of the Gral Family there was and was to be this one exception. But one was enough. It gave Parzival, the exemplar of a full-blooded Christian knight, his chance to come in from the world after mastering his religious problem.

  A brief examination of how Wolfram contrives this vital exception, for which he owes nothing to Chrétien beyond the bare narrative datum, will illuminate his barefaced style of fabulation, whereby he relies on the sense of humour of the quick-witted to twig what he is up to and leaves the others – including, alas, many scholars – to be duped. First, Parzival’s mother Herzeloyde, sister to the reigning King of the Gral, has to be got outside Munsalvæsche. This is done according to the rule that Gral maidens are sent out openly to marry. Second, Herzeloyde’s husband Castis thes before the marriage is consummated: one would hope that Gahmuret, the father of a future Gral King, would marry a virgin, even if he himself were already married and me sort of man whose ‘tilting would have been more on the mark’ than Parzival’s on finding an unprotected beauty asleep in her pavilion.* Third, Herzeloyde’s first husband left her two kingdoms, Waleis and Norgals. Don’t cudgel your brains wondering what sort of law of inheritance they had in Waleis and Norgals: focus on the name of the man – ‘Castis’. A man whose name is so near to Latin ’castus’ ’chaste’ is not. likely to breed, indeed the likeliest diagnosis of the unnamed cause of his death was his fear of doing so. Gahmuret was otherwise, and so we have a son out in the world who combines in his heredity the virility of his father’s line with the spirituality of his mother’s, though we note in the men of the Gral Family that they too were no mean fighting-men, such being Wolfram’s bias.

  Another sign of how little it was to Wolfram’s purpose to present a viable Gral régime is seen in his reckless incorporation of the Lohengrin legend, or radier the legend of the Knight with the Swan,† into his Gral narrative. Whereas the legend of Préster John, the Christian Priest-King spreading the faith somewhere in Asia or Africa, was highly compatible with Parzival through the hero’s oriental half-brother Feirefiz, what came to be known in Germany as the Lohengrin legend was not. In wiring this legend on to Parzival, Wolfram’s first move as far back as Chapter 9 (unless he tinkered it in later) was to have another rule at Munsalvésche that men are sent out in secret to rule lordless lands. His second move, in Chapter 16, is’ to have the Gral receive a signal ‘to the effect that any Templar whom God should bestow on a foreign people for their lord must forbid them to ask his name or lineage but must help them to gain their rights. When such a question is put to him, the people there cannot keep him any longer.’ This veto was of course a vital element of the already existent story of The Knight with the Swan, and Wolfram has generalized it to cover the case in hand. He further pegs it down by stating that because Anfortas had suffered fo
r so long owing to the Question having been withheld ‘the members of the Gral Company are now forever averse to questioning, they do not wish to be asked about themselves’! Furthermore, contrary to one’s legitimate expectation that a future or regnant Gral King, if released from Munsalvaesche, would be employed by Heaven to confer marked religious benefits on his new people, all that Wolfram can do for the Christian Brabanters is to make Lohengrin – his Loherangrin – a just judge. When Loherangrin leaves the Gral Community on this mission we are left guessing who would rule at Munsalvaesche and whether Condwiramurs had borne other sons. Another subject on which Wolfram leaves us uninformed as he rapidly tapers off his great romance is the relationship between Loherangrin’s high-minded Duchess and the comically named Duke Lambekin of Brabant, who accepted King Kaylet of Castile’s cast-off mistress Alize as wife and whom Kaylet unhorsed at Kanvoleiz only two generations back in Chapter 2. The historical Duke Henry I of Brabant at the time when Wolfram was composing Parzival, however, was of a power and calibre to be chosen leader by the German Princes on Crusade in 1197. What motive can Wolfram have had first to belittle then to elevate the House of Brabant in his story? Did these changes of mood reflect the ever-changing political alliances of Wolfram’s poetry-loving, yet macchiavellian patron Hermann? Recourse to standard history-books gives no clear answer to this question, but it does show that Wolfram seized an opportunity here too, since for the greater part of the time during which Parzival was in the making, Henry of Brabant had no son. In 1198, when she was seven years old, Henry’s daughter Maria was betrothed to Otto of Poitou, rival claimant with Philip of Swabia to the Imperial Crown. In 1204, however, Pope Innocent III felt’forced to intervene in support of his protégé Otto to forbid the proposed marriage of Philip’s nephew, the future Emperor Frederick II, with this same Maria. In this year, too, the sonless Henry received authority from Emperor Philip to name a daughter as heiress in Brabant. At last, in 1207, a son was born to Henry, but Philip’s concession will not have been easily revoked.* A date of AD 1207 for Wolfram’s decision to incorporate his Loherangrin plot, in Parzival accords well with what is known of the latter’s general chronology.†

  There was an Unseen Hand on Parzival’s bridle, yet he also had human helpers in his stubborn efforts to win the Gral. Parzival is helped at vital points in his quest by his own clan in the narrower and wider sense, notably by his maternal cousin Sigune (whose name in Upper German pronunciation is an anagram of ‘cusine’) and by his maternal uncle Trevrizent. We have to unthink such modern institutions as the police force and insurance, and the medical and welfare services to be able to begin to conceive what kinship meant to people living under feudal conditions at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Earlier, in the Germanic languages, there had been one word for ‘father-and-son(s)’, echoes of which occur in Parzival in passages where the bond between father and son is not considered to be a degree of relationship, the first degree being that between grandfather and grandsons.‡ The feeling for kinship is very strong in Parzival, see for example the emphasis on the ‘identity’ of the hero and Feirefiz even though they are only half-brothers.* This rises to a veritable mystique in Wolfram’s Willehalm. Sigune names Parzival at their first meeting, certifies his integrity of heart and guides him away from the formidable Orilus, slayer of the dead suitor in her lap. At their second meeting, Sigune upbraids Parzival for his failure at Munsalvæsche, retracts her earlier assessment of his integrity and formally outclans him, so that soon, after being publicly disgraced by Cundrie and renouncing Arthurian society and then God, he will consider himself all on his own. At their third meeting, matured by suffering like Parzival, Sigune charitably readmits him to the clan, and shows him the way which, under Providence, leads to Trevrizent. It is after Trevrizent’s teaching and confession of the already near-penitent Parzival that outward signs of Parziva’s return to Grace are manifested. Parzival is twice saved from repeating his sin of slaying a kinsman, first his rather distant cousin Gawan and then Feirefiz. Wolfram relates the latter event specifically to the slaying of Ither and to Providence. The sword snatched from Ither’s corpse shatters on Feirefiz’s helmet: ‘It was no longer pleasing to God that Parzival should wield a weapon robbed from a corpse…’ These two crucial duels are Wolfram’s work, since Perceval breaks off before them. Despite the pleasant delays over Itonje’s love-intrigue† they show what a firm grip Wolfram has taken on the story. The importance of blood-relationship and of the action of the Gral Clan, however, does not rest with the already somewhat old-fashioned Germanic feeling for the kindred, for this profound poet in the last resort traces the descent of the entire human race, Christian and heathen alike, back to Father Adam, so that the whole world is kin. In his magnificent introductory prayer in Willehalm, Wolfram finds a sublime extension for Adam’s Family in these terms: ‘I am Thy child and Thy kind expressly, wretched though I be and Thou so mighty. Thy humanity gives me kinship. The Paternoster names me unequivocally the child of Thy Godhead. And the Baptism gives me an assurance which has redeemed me from despair. I believe and know that I am Thy namesake. Wisdom beyond all knowledge, if Thou art Christ then I am Christian.’ It does not surprise us that the Wolfram who is disturbed in Parzival at the Devil’s being permitted to make such mock of so civilized a people as the Saracens,* in Willehalm voices the passionate plea through Lady Giburc that the Infidel should not be slaughtered like cattle if the Christians win a defensive war. For, like all mankind, the Saracens are God’s own handiwork.

  It would have been astonishing if with his insatiable universal curiosity Wolfram had not been fascinated by the Muslim world. As with most of his contemporaries, however, the factual knowledge he was able to acquire of it is pathetic. This need not surprise us, since to the discredit of the then more highly civilized people, the Muslims too showed a lamentable inability to penetrate the curtain dividing them from the Franks, though it is to their eternal credit that they were far more tolerant than Western Christians where religion was concerned, once fighting was over: their tolerance was written into law and a graduated tax-system. Since Christ is an honoured prophet in Islam, it is not conceivable that Muslim poets would attribute Zeus or Wodan to the Christians as gods, yet the very curious Wolfram can do no better than have his Feirefiz pray to Jupiter and Juno, and by the time he is writing Willehalm he can throw in Tervigant (our Termagant), Kahun and – an offence he would have avoided, had he recognized it – Mahumet. This multiplicity of Muslim ‘gods’, taken over from the French chansons de geste, is no doubt a tu quoque reflecting Christian sensitivity in religious polemical exchanges on the subject of the Trinity. In Parzival, really all that Wolfram knows about the Muslims is that they had darker faces, produced marvellous textiles, had easier access to gold and precious stones, were more advanced in medicine and astronomy, used mounted archery and employed Parthian tactics: Wolfram’s ‘wheeling and retreating’ (wenken unde vlichen) is the karr wa farr still to be observed by Col. Lawrence during his desert campaigns. Wolfram’s Baruc* of Baghdad is an inverted Pope of Rome fused with an anti-Emperor, and when Wolfram asserts ‘They get their papal law from Baghdad, and, so far as it is free from crooks and crannies, deem it straight!’† he is mocking not only dubious decretals from the Lateran but also his own ignorance of the East. Wolfram shows no knowledge of the degradation of women in harems or under the veil, nor of the freedom of Andalusian ladies beyond the imaginings of the much-chaperoned noblewomen of Christian Europe. Moreover, to his Saracenic ‘knights’ he attributes the same code of love as to his Christians: service for reward.

  Parzival was begun about the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Only a few years before, Temujin was proclaimed paramount chief of the Mangkhol. Except perhaps for revisions, Parzival was completed before 1210. By this time Temujin had been confirmed in his sacred title of ‘Jinggis-khan’. By 1221 Jinggis had shattered the Shadom of Khwārizm in what is now Western Persia, and by 1223 his Mongols were in the Eastern Caucasus and in
Southern Russia. Tremors of these not too distant events are discernible in Willehalm, in which Wolfram depicts the seething of heathen oriental peoples greatly outnumbering the Christians who, so it was believed, formed but Twelve of the Seventy-two Tongues. How could this be? In the fullness of time, but before the coming of Antichrist, the Gospel must reach the ends of the earth. Wolfram had two dreams of the incorporation of the heathen into the Christian world: in Parzival through the Gral mission of Parzival and his progeny, whereby Templars and Gral maidens were sent to distant thrones,‡ with, as the outstanding examples, the converted Feirefiz and his Gral-bearer wife Repanse de Schoye, parents of Prester John; and in the Willehalm-torso, by extrapolation from itself as much as from its French source,* through the marriage of Emperor Louis’s daughter Alize with Rennewart, the lost son of the mighty Saracenic ‘Emperor’ Terramer. Armed aggression is remote from the throughts of our soldierly poet, and by the time of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, to which Wolfram refers obliquely, the crusading ideal was throughly discredited in the eyes of thoughtful laymen. Indeed, the fiascos of the Second Crusade and of the Battle of Hattin in 1187, for which the clergy had promised victory, were one of the major contributory causes of the emergence, first in France and then in Germany, of a more independent secular literature by knights for knights, of which Chrétien’s Perceval and Wolfram’s Parzival are ornaments.