Epic
Parzival
Wolfram von Eschenbach · 1210
Opening lines
Ist zwîvel herzen nâhgebûr,
daz muoz der sêle werden sûr.
gesmæhet unde gezieret
ist, swâ sich parrieret
unverzaget mannes muot,
als agelstern varwe tuot.
If doubt is neighbour to the heart,
the soul must find it bitter.
Shamed and adorned at once
is, wherever it turns pied,
a dauntless man's spirit,
just as the magpie's plumage is.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
His father, a knight-errant, has died in the East; the boy is raised by his mother in the depths of a forest, in ignorance of chivalry. The meeting with three knights makes him leave the woods for Arthur's court. Received one evening in the Grail castle, he sees there a sick king and a mysterious procession, but keeps silent instead of asking the question that would have delivered his host. He will have to bear the consequences of this fault for a long time; in counterpoint, the narrative follows the adventures of Gawain, a knight of the Round Table.
Context
The poem takes up the Conte du Graal that Chrétien de Troyes had left unfinished; it adds a beginning, the story of the hero's father, and an ending of its author's own invention. Its author nevertheless rejects Chrétien and claims a certain Kyot the Provençal as his source, whom no one has found and whom critics regard as a fiction. The Grail becomes a precious stone. About twenty-five thousand lines in rhyming couplets, arranged in sixteen books. No poet of the German Middle Ages left as many manuscripts as its author, and in the thirteenth century the poem was the most copied and most quoted. Wagner drew his Parsifal from it, first performed in 1882.
Who it is for
A very long narrative, to be read in translation; it is worth knowing the Arthurian material, which the poem takes for granted.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the greatest German epic of its time, and the first text in German whose subject is the Grail.
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