[2.] A famous wood in Bretagne—la forêt de Bréchéliant. Wolfram’s spelling is Prizljan, Hartmann’s Brezilian.
[3.] The blundering Parzival has now been instructed in the ways of knighthood by the gray-haired Prince Gurnemanz, who has told him to avoid asking questions about what he sees. With this caution in mind Parzival fails to inquire into the malady of the mysterious sick man in the Grail castle—a fateful error which involves him in long wanderings during which he despairs of God. The sick man is his uncle Anfortas, whom he is destined after a lapse of years, to heal by a simple question and to succeed as king of the Grail.
[4.] Green silk from Arabia.
[5.] The speaker is the wise old hermit Trevrizent, who has cleared up for Parzival the mystery of the Grail and led him to inward peace.
[6.] In Book 6 it is related that Parzival, riding away from the castle of the Grail, comes upon three drops of blood in the snow—the blood of a wild goose that had been attacked by a falcon. The red and white remind him of Kondwiramur and he sinks into a moody trance.
[ XXV. GOTTFRIED VON STRASSBURG]
Pre-eminent as a graceful and cunning psychologist of sensual passion. His great work—all that we have from him except some lyric poems—is the love-intoxicated romance of Tristan and Isold, which he began early in the 13th century and did not live to complete. For this his principal source was the French trouvère, Thomas of Brittany, who composed his Tristan in England about 1180. Of this French poem only a few fragments are extant. The original Tristan-saga contained elements of revolting savagery, but in Gottfried’s poem, as in the fragments of Thomas, it is transformed into a courtly romance of love—an illicit love that defies conscience and the world and remains faithful unto death. The selections are from the translation by W. Hertz, 4th edition, Stuttgart, 1904.
From ‘Tristan,’ Book I, lines 119-242: The goodness of love and love-stories.
Ich weiss es sicher wie den Tod
Und hab’s erkannt in eigner Not: