Parzival
Page 49
* Dragon-standards in the form of wind-socks were being revived from Roman times.
*It was Michaelmas, see p. 433.
* Since Cunneware’s behaviour in Wolfram’s poem is the opposite of flighty, it seems that he is playing on a bawdy etymology of her name.
* A double pun on ‘eyes’ = ‘pips’ and ‘edges’ = ‘dice’ is lost here.
† In his Eneide (an adaptation of the Roman d’Eneas, itself a medievalizing adaptation of Virgil’s Aeneid), the Limburger Heinrich von Veldeke tells of Eneas’s masterly wooing of Dido beneatha tree, not in a cave as in Virgil.
*A sly dig, through quotation, at Wolfram’s great contemporary the poet Walther von der Vogelweidc, who had been a recent visitor at die court of Thuringia.
*Seneschals were responsible for the security of castles.
† Compare the assessment of Walther von der Vogelweide: ‘Whoever suffers from ear-ache, take my advice and avoid the court of Thuringia.’
‡ The song of which this must be the opening line has not survived.
* An otherwise unknown contemporary of Wolfram’s.
* Father and mother were not reckoned as relations, cf. p. 420.
† The episode alluded to has not survived in Arthurian romance.
* The best MS. and some others lack ‘old’. If ‘old’ is Wolfram’s own, it goes with his lack of warmth towards Ginover because of her infidelities in other Arthurian romances.
* Ekuba, dragged in as a trailer for Feirefiz, who was begotten in the next chapter in order of composition, that is, Chapter I.
*Probably the first reference, and a disapproving one, to fly-fishing in a European vernacular. Medieval German gentlemen did not fish.
* A symbolic gesture implying that his mission has to do with the execution of justice.
* Florant of Itolac.
* Gawan’s sister. Not Cundrie the Sorceress.
* See p. 68.
† Wolfram’s Lady Patroness. See also the last words of the poem.
*See pp. 51 and 56.
*The incident is narrated in Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein.
* Or possibly : playing at morra.
* Wolfram’s patron, the Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia, with his Bohemian allies besieged the Emperor Philip in Erfurt in the summer of 1203.
*The Inners have been forced to deploy archers, abominated by the Knighthood and prohibited by the Church, to meet the ruthless use of horse- and other archers by the Outers.
* An incident in the Lancelot of Chrétien de Troyes and an amanuensis.
* Or possibly : it was too precious to him (to tear). Gawan was to gain the ‘greater glory’ of reconciling Obie and Meljanz through Obilot.
* Wolfram here gives the bare bones of the opening sequence of Erec, tee p. 412.
* Elizabeth, sister to Duke Ludwig I of Bavaria and since 1204 widow of Berthold of Vohburg.
† A castle near Cham on the Bavarian frontier towards Bohemia.
‡ See p. 153, second footnote.
* A village in the Altmühl.
* Flurdamurs, see p. 215.
* It is here, as a lead-in to the revelations of the following chapter, that Wolfram springs his surprise on his audience of an alleged source for his story other than Chrétien’s Perceval. See p. 427.
* Arabic is undoubtedly intended, see p. 232, third footnote.
* Ultimately Virgil’s Drances, of the Eneid, XI, 11. 122S.; cf. page 153,second footnote.
† Identified with Pontevedra on the coast of Galicia.
‡ A young berserker-type in the Nibelungenlied (see Penguin Classics, Chap. 38).
*Lord of the Royal Kitchen in Worms in the Nibelungenlied.
†Cf. Nibelungenlied, pages 185ft. Wolfram is either elaborating or quoting a different version.
* The treacherous counsellor of King Ermenrich in heroic poems of the Dietrich (Theoderic) Cycle.
* Balsam burned with a steady glow in vessels of glass. Compare those at the Gral Ceremony, p. 125.
*See p. 99, footnote.
* On this hastily improvised ‘burial’ of Anfortas’s gift-sword, see p. 127, footnote.
† See p. 134, second footnote.
* Sigune may be wearing a widow’s head-dress.
* In an obscure image Wolfram may be thinking of a stronghold moated on one or both flanks by a torrent.
* Trespassers on the harvest-field were bound with straw and released only on payment of a ransom, see p. 185.
* See p. 438.
* This must have been on the occasion of the performance of Chapter 5.
† See p. 213 and footnote.
‡ Doubtless Arabic.
* Muslim.
† The Neutral Angels, see pp. 240, 396 and 436.
* See p. 432.
† As though children from the font.
* After the Harrowing of Hell, Christ took the souls of the Patriarchs with him, so that it could be assumed that Adam, representing Man, already sits in the choir above the angels.
* Wolfram here seems to merge the just pagans of the pre-Christian era with good Christians of the new age.
* Or some such Latin or pseudo-Latin name, see p. 431ff
* See p. 232 and last footnote.
* Because of Parzival’s immaturity, Providence had announced, but not assigned him.
* See the Glossary of Personal Names, under ‘Ither‘.
* The translator must not deny the reader the pleasure of hunting these reptiles.
† The Monocerus or Unicorn.
* A dragon-wort.
† In view of its position so near to the Pole Star, the constellation Draco can scarcely be intended. It has been suggested that Wolfram rather has in mind the progression through the zodiac of the ‘Dragon’s Head’ and ‘Dragon’s Tail’ (points where the lunar orbit intersects the plane of the ecliptic or the terrestrial orbit). Chaucer, Astrolabe, ii, 4, lumps the ‘Tail of the Dragoun’ together with Saturn and Mars as ‘wykkid’ when in the house of the ascendant. Wolfram was in any event drawing on die magic of etymology. The Head and Tail of the Dragon are said to be a Muslim, not a Classical conception.
* For not winning the Gral.
* See p. 165, footnote.
* The Rohitscher Berg in the Saangau, Styria.
* This relationship is not substantiated elsewhere in the text. Either term used is an error or intended vaguely; or (more likely) it is thrown in impromptu to support the idea soon to be voiced that Parzival killed a near kinsman in Ither, with whom he is otherwise related only through his great-great-great-grandfather Mazadan.
† Candin, now Haidin.
‡ Both Haidin and the confluence of Grajena and Drau ‘(Drava) are near Pettau (Ptuj).
* See p. 429.
* The Volscian battle-maiden of the eleventh book of the Æneid, known to Wolfram either from the Roman d’Énéas or Heinrich von Veldeke’s German adaptation of it, or from both. The Roman speaks of the ‘city of Laurente’, but classical scholars are not satified that there ever was a city of ‘Laurentum’, for Æneid VIII, I, can be otherwise interpreted.
* There is a double entendre in the original. The concealed meaning, on which Orgeluse picks and which Gawan bandies back, is: ‘after you have freed me from my desire’.
* Conventional love-service for a high-born lady, with an often frustrating inequality between the lovers, was called ‘high love’.
* A soft flock-silk used in mattresses, Lat. palmatium, palmacium, apparently more widely known in Germany, both north and south, than in England in those days.
* The Amīru ‘l-mu’minīn, ’Commander of the Faithful’.
† That is, until 1204, when the knights of the Fourth ‘Crusade’ looted it.
* Or : discs.
* An allusion to a recension of Tristan more archaic than that of Thomas (see Penguin Classics), possibly the French rather than the German Tristrant of Eilhart von Oberge of c. 1175. Here, Gymele slips a magic pillow beneath Kahenis’s head that will send him i
nstantly to sleep, so that she can meet Isold’s command that she sleep with him, yet preserve her honour.
* See p. 322, second footnote.
* The story alluded to has not survived. A Garel is featured elsewhere in Parzival as a minor figure of the Table Round.
† Where Gawan himself is to face a severe test in this same chapter of Parzival.
‡ Narrated in Chrétien’s Erec and in Hartmann’s adaptation.
* Narrated in Chrétien’s Yvain and Hartmann’s adaptation Iwein.
* This reference has not been traced.
* Gauvain’s sister Soredamur and Emperor Alexander of Bysance were the parents of Cligés in Chrétien’s romance of that name.
* Wolfram here alludes to a fanciful extension of Æneid, XI, 845 ff., by the poet of the Roman d’Eneas, in which Heinrich von Veldeke (Hcnrik van Veldeken) followed him in Eneide.
* Not to be confused with Cundrie la surziere, whose name is pronounced differently in the original.
* China.
† The true etymology is from Byzantine Greek hexarantismos, a tissue with six-fold ornamentation.
* It has been very plausibly suggested that these two names arise by scribal error from Thebit benchore (T?ābit ibn Qurra).
† Wild dittany. Harts were believed to cure themselves from arrowfire with the aid of this herb : and Gawan is bruised by bolts, and, it has been suggested, Cupid’s darts.
* See p. 432.
* Qalcat-al-ball?ūt ‘Castle of the Oak’, Caltabellotta, near Sciacca. Wolfram can count on knowledge of Sicily and Apulia in his audience because the Holy Roman Emperors of his day ruled as kings there with in the first place a powerful Hohenstauffen administration.
* Because of Arthur’s losses. Or: ‘You could be kind to a widow’, that is, to Orgeluse, Cidegast’s widow.
* Or: Another would have taken him to task for it.
* His Liege-Lady Misfortune’s coat-of-arms.
† Parzival’s paternal great-great-great-grandfather Mazadan was Gawan’s maternal great-great-grandfather.
* Wolfram is at pains to placate the pro-Gawan faction in his audience as he leads Parzival back into the limelight.
* The only brother of Gawan named in Parzival is Beacurs.
* Chapter 9.
* The text has: polus artanticus. The later Willehalm, however, refers to polus antar(c)ticus, though some MSS. read artanticus.
* Text: his.
* Parzival addresses Feirefiz with the familiar ‘thou’ only when he has become King of the Gral.
* Parzival addresses Feirefiz with the familiar ‘thou’ only when he has become King of the Gral.
* When Feirefiz comes to be baptized he will clearly make no bones over the Trinity.
† Traditionally, as against canonical notions, the first degree of relation’ ship was between grandfather and grandchildren, cf.p. 420.
* Wolfram, author of some very fine dawn love-songs, is indulging in self-irony.
† Cf. ‘saranthasme’, p. 316.
* Zuhal (Saturn), Al-mushtaiï (Jupiter), Al-himh (Mars : Al-ahmar is less likely), Ash-shams (Sun), Az-zuhara (Venus: not so remote through Hispano-Latin transmission), Al-5tib (Mercury), Al-qamar (Moon).
* See p. 436.
† Balagius, or a doublet of balas, below.
‡ Probably a doublet of asbestos, below.
* Cf. Rev. 3, 15 ‘I would that thou wert cold or hot, so then because thou art lukewarm… I will spue thee out of my mouth.’
* Schoysiane had died giving birth to Sigune, who was taken to Schoysiane’s sister Herzeloyde (p. 243). Since Schoysiane had been Bearer of the Gral until she was given in marriage to Kyot of Katelangen, the only time during which she could have reared Condwiramurs was between her change of state and her death. An implication, no more, is that Condwiramurs had lost her mother, whom Wolfram does not name and also otherwise leaves as a complete blank. Wolfram’s Titurel fragments further complicate the issue. They narrate that the babe Sigune had been given as companion to Condwiramurs, who at first was a suckling like her, but that later Sigune came to Herzeloyde. Rather than imagine a whole shuttle-service of sucklings and Kindergarten, it is safer to assume that Wolfram nods. This note, supported by a scholarly apparatus that would have prompted Homeric laughter in the poet who denied that his Parzival was a ‘book’, is for the comfort of readers with retentive memories.
* As Mistress of Brabant, historically a Duchy as here, this lady was a Fürstin (’Princess of the Holy Roman Empire’).
† After his barefaced preparations, Wolfram here assimilates the Lohengrin legend to that of his Gral, see pp. 418ft.
* The original is equally ambiguous, see p. 419.
† In Erec, the hero roughly rebukes his wife for speaking after he has forbidden her to do so, deliberately overlooking the fact that she does so to save his life.
‡ See pp. 428ff.
* Wolfram thus seems finally to shed the disguise of ‘Kyot’ and claims for himself the credit for having completed the story of the Gral.
* See p. 83.
† See p. 78.
‡ It cannot have been given to many writers both to launch a new literary vogue and to point to the seeds of its decline.
* See my translation of Gottfried’s Tristan, Penguin Classics (i960 etc.), p. 105.
* See p. 255.
* See p. 80.
† Wolfram takes Loherangrin’s name from the hero of the unconnected story Garin le Loherain.
* In 1214, Otto, now Emperor, in order to seal a rapprochement with Brabant, married the 22-year-old Maria. Henry’s throw was a bad one, since Otto’s fortunes were soon to be shattered at the Battle of Bouvines. The last we see of Maria does not surprise us: it is within the strong walls of Cologne, piling up huge debts for Otto at hazard.
† See p. 8, and pp. 423 and 435.
‡ See p. 157.
* See p. 374.
† See pp. 316ff.
* See p. 232.
* Wolfram took this pseudo-title from Hebrew b?āruk ‘blessed’.
† See p. 20.
‡ Wolfram could not add ‘in heathen lands’ since this would have frustrated his incorporation of the Lohengrin legend, see pp. 419ff.
* La Bataille d’Aliscans.
* See The Penguin Classics (Tristan), already cited, in which I have translated the surviving fragments of Thomas’s Tristran.
* Chrétien de Troyes. Perceval le Gallois ou le conte du Graal. Cent Romans Français, Paris, 1947.
† Normally called ‘books’, they are called ‘chapters’ here.
* See p. 164 and footnote.
* See p. 10.
* See ‘A List of Works in English for Further Reading’, p. 448.
* See p. 419.
* See p. 246, second footnote.
* See pp. 232, 240 and 396.
† In other circumstances ‘Mars and Jupiter…’ would have the appearance of a lectio facitior as against ‘Mars or Jupiter…’
* This seems sufficient reason to make Brickus ancestor of the British and Arthurian line, leaving Lazaliez as ancestor of the Angevins. The text does not allocate Brickus and Lazaliez thus specifically.