BOOK XIII
TRADITIONAL EVENTS
| Feast at the Château Merveil; Gawain persuades his sister to confide her love-story to him. | Chrêtien, whose poem ends abruptly in the middle of a line. |
| Arrival of Gawain's messenger at the Court of King Arthur. |
(From this point onwards there is no resemblance between Wolfram's poem and any other known Romance of the Grail-cycle.)
Page [74], line 39—'One lived of yore named Sarant.' Cf. note to Book I. 'Silk of Orient.' Bartsch identifies the name of the skilful weaver with that of an Asiatic people, probably the Chinese. Thasmé is named later on as part of Feirefis' kingdom. His battle-cry is 'Tabronit and Thasmé!' 'Akraton,' cf. Book VIII. p. 230.
Page [75], line 66—'Itonjé.' This is the French name 'Idonie.' In Chrêtien the maiden is named Clarissant, and Gawain wins her confidence in the same manner. Chrêtien's share of the Conte ends so abruptly that we cannot tell how he intended to treat her love-story; here, it plays a considerable part in the development of the poem.
Page [77], line 147—'Now the hour it was come.' The account of the feast here given is very interesting from the light it throws on mediæval manners and customs. In those days it was very usual for two to eat from one plate, in fact, this was one of the rules of the Knights Templars; the reason assigned being that one brother might care for the other, and all share alike (cf. Feast at Monsalväsch, Book V. p. 136). On great occasions the principal guests seem to have had ladies assigned to them as their table companions (cf. Book VI. p. 178). One would gather from this passage, and that in Book VI., that the lady of highest rank had the hostess for companion, thus we find Arnivé eating with Orgelusé, and Guinevere having a queen (probably Ekuba) for companion; while Kunnewaare is Arthur's table-mate, as here Itonjé is Gawain's.
Page [78], line 180—'Ne'er was it night in her presence.' Cf. Book II. p. 48.
Page [79], line 194—'Thuringia.' San Marte remarks on this passage that at this period music and song invariably went together, the one was necessary to the complete understanding of the other; separately, they were unintelligible. In many instances the lyrical poems of the day were wedded to dance music, the flowing graceful rhythm of which made it an appropriate vehicle for the illustration of poetry. The Thuringian Court being the centre of the literary life of the time many of these dances would naturally originate there; though it must not be supposed that dances without the accompaniment of song were not also known.
Page [81], line 262—'Kancor, and Thèbit, and Trebuchet.' San Marte says that Thèbit is Thabet Ben Korka, a famous Arabic physician, mathematician, and philosopher of the ninth century. Kancor is probably Kenkeh, an astronomer and physician of the same period. Trebuchet has been mentioned before. Cf. Book V. p. 144 and Note.
Page [81], 279—''Twas yet in the early morning.' Chrêtien gives no account of the delivery of the squire's message, but simply states that he finds Arthur and his knights plunged in grief at the prolonged absence of Gawain, and then breaks off abruptly in the middle of a sentence before they have learnt of his safety. From this point onward Wolfram's version is entirely independent of the Conte del Graal, but his poem shows no dislocation or contradiction, such as one would expect would have been the case had he been following a source that suddenly failed him; on the contrary, there is a far more complete harmony between all the parts of Wolfram's poem than we find in any other Romance of the cycle.
Page [82], lines 301-10—'Meljanz de Lys.' Cf. Book VIII. p. 239, and Introduction to Book X. and Note. If there was no account of Gawain's intermediate adventures Wolfram is evidently anxious to make his hearers believe in the existence of such a record, by means of well-timed and appropriate allusions. The fact that the combat was to be in the presence of Meljanz de Lys is only casually mentioned in Book VIII. For the allusions to Kunnewaare, Jeschuté, and Ekuba cf. closing pages of Book VI. with the account of the dispersal of the company at Plimizöl. The whole passage is a proof of the care with which the poem has been constructed, and the details brought into harmony with each other.
Page [83], line 339—'Brought he news of some gallant venture?' Cf. Book VI. p. 176 and Note.
Page [87]-88, lines 466-506—'His doings, Sir Knight, I to thee will tell.' This history of the magician Klingsor, as noted in Book X., is found in Wolfram only, and the indications seem to point to a French source. Terre de Labûr is undoubtedly a French rendering of Terra di Lavoro, in Calabria. Kalot Enbolot is Kalota-Belota, a fortress on the south-eastern coast of Sicily, well known in the days of the Hohenstauffen. This location of Klingsor's kingdom in Southern Italy may have been introduced in order to lend a colour to his supposed relationship to Virgil, who by the twelfth century was firmly established in popular belief as a magician. The name Iblis, Bartsch refers to the Sicilian town Hybla; Ibert may be a form of the French Guibert. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in the lord of the Château Merveil, wounded as a punishment of unlawful love, we have a parallel to the King of Monsalväsch, whose wound is due to a similar cause. (A reference to the original German will show how close this resemblance is); as mentioned before, it seems to be a parallel, rather than a contrast, which Wolfram intended to draw between his two heroes. It may well be that in the original version of the story from which both Chrêtien's and Wolfram's poems are derived the Gawain episodes were unfinished, and that in their original form Gawain, too, was brought to the Grail Castle, but to regard them as unfinished here seems a clear misunderstanding of the meaning of the poem. We are distinctly given to understand (p. [97], line 780) that Gawain's lot in life is finally settled, the Grail Quest, which was originally in the Gawain story, has been quietly dropped, and this adventure of the Château Merveil has taken its place; an alteration which artistically can only be considered an improvement, as it clearly marks Gawain's position as secondary to Parzival. Whether the story of Klingsor was introduced for the purpose of emphasizing the parallel between Monsalväsch and Château Merveil it is difficult to say. Certainly, the incident of Parzival's missing the adventure of the Magic Castle, as he did that of Monsalväsch, by failing to ask the question must, as noted above, be due to this idea. With the end of this book Gawain's adventures are practically concluded; Wolfram promptly clears the stage for the winding-up of the history of his real hero, Parzival, by bringing the two knights into contact, when Gawain is naturally worsted, and takes the second place. Whether it be due to Wolfram or to his source, it is certain that the Parzival is far simpler in construction than the majority of the Grail Romances, in which the adventures of various heroes succeed each other with such bewildering rapidity and similarity of incident that it is difficult to tell who is the real hero of the tale!
Page [89], line 519—'A child was born of a mother.' A well-known mediæval riddle, which Wolfram might easily have derived from a German source.
Page [90], line 531—'Of joy had I once full measure.' It is somewhat curious that in Chrêtien Gawain eulogizes Guinevere in similar terms. It rather looks as if the original passage had been the same in both instances, though it would be difficult to tell to which queen it originally referred.
Page [91], line 566—'Maurin.' This name occurs in the Lancelot of Ulrich von Zatzikhoven, from which it was probably borrowed.
Page [92], line 601 and seq.—'And either side had suffered.' Garel and Gaherjet: cf. Note to Book XII. Iofreit, son of Idol: cf. Book V. p. 155 and Note. Though this character only plays an unimportant part in the poem, he is yet very frequently mentioned, it may be that in the original French source he was more prominent. Friam is probably the same name as Urian, in Book X. Vermandois and Nevers point to a French origin.
Page [94], line 658—'Save the tent of Eisenhart only.' Cf. Book I. p. 16 and Note. Tents seem to have been favourite love-gifts at this time, note the Booth in Books XI. and XII. given by Anfortas to Orgelusé, and, as we know from Willehalm, sent to that king in the first instance by Sekundillé.
Page [96], line 733—'Meljanz of Lys.' How Meljanz of Lys came to be there is not explained. It is worthy of note that in Book VII. we find the King of Lirivoin fighting against Meljanz, and taken captive by Parzival; here the men of Lirivoin are evidently on the same side.
Page [97], line 763—'The wounds of Kay had been healed.' Cf. Book VI. p. 169 and Note to Book III.
Page [99]. line 819—'A knight his bridle drew.' This knight is, of course, Parzival, though how he came to be there is not explained. In the Conte del Graal Perceval does not appear on the scene for some time, and passes through a variety of wild and fantastic adventures before finally winning the Grail. The poem, as we possess it, is more than twice as long as Wolfram's.
[With reference to the Klingsor and Iblis story, it is noteworthy that Chrêtien's first continuator relates a long story of King Carduel of Nantes and his reputed son Carados. The wife of King Carduel is beloved by a magician, Garahiet, who is in truth the father of Carados. The latter grows to manhood and goes to King Arthur's court to receive knighthood, there a stranger knight appears and offers to allow his head to be cut off provided the knight who accepts the challenge will submit to the same ordeal a year later. Carados accepts, and strikes off the head of the knight who picks it up and walks off. Returning after a year he finds Carados ready to fulfil his part of the bargain, and then acquaints him with the fact that he, and not Carduel, is in truth his father. Carados returns to the court of Carduel and tells him what he has learnt from the magician; the king in anger imprisons his wife in a tower; she is nevertheless still visited by her lover, whom the king eventually surprises and punishes in a manner appropriate to his crime. This story, in its outline, appears to be the basis of the Klingsor and Iblis episode, but it has been very freely handled by the compiler, and, as suggested above, not improbably altered so as to draw out the parallel between Klingsor and Anfortas.
A feature of importance in this connection is that the episode of Carados and his magician father, a most famous story of the Arthurian cycle, is elsewhere invariably associated with Gawain; e.g. in the well-known Middle-English poem of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,' and it is difficult to understand why, in a part of the poem specially devoted to the adventures of this knight, the French poet should have attributed this, one of his greatest and most famous feats, to another hero.
Here again we find a parallel in Irish literature; in the 'Fled Bricrend,' Bricriu's feast, the feat by which Cuchulainn establishes his claim to be regarded as the chief Ulster hero is precisely this one; though the French poem in making the magician the father of the hero seems to have retained an archaic trait which has disappeared from the, in point of redaction, centuries older Irish story. But from other Irish stories we know that Cuchulainn was the son of a god who is sometimes represented as carrying off the mortal mother to his fairy home, sometimes as visiting her in animal shape.
The foregoing facts warrant, I think, the conclusion that Gawain originally occupied in the Brythonic hero-saga of Arthur much the same position as Cuchulainn in the Goidelic hero-saga of Conchobor, both being par excellence the adventurous hero. Both, too, it should be noted, are sister's son to the king of the cycle; the same position being occupied by Diarmaid, the adventurous hero of the Finn or Ossianic cycle.
The nature of the connection between these cycles of romantic legend cannot be dealt with here. It is sufficient to show that in the French Arthurian poems of the twelfth century (which in one form or another undoubtedly form the basis of the Parzival) we have piecings together of originally disconnected narratives about separate heroes, many of which are found in more archaic form in the stories told of the Irish hero Cuchulainn and his compeers. In the process of piecing together, adjusting to the genealogical requirements of the cycle and to the social conceptions and literary modes of the twelfth century, the early Celtic narratives suffered sadly as far as order and significance are concerned, though gaining immensely in other respects. The changes are of course greatest where such far-reaching new ideas as the symbolical representation of Christian doctrine, or the exemplification of lady-service, affect the original narrative.—Alfred Nutt.]