Análisis de mezcla y plan de acción

Wirnt von Gravenberg composed Wigalois in the first half of the thirteenth century, most likely between 1210 and 1215,39 and the tale was well received by contemporary audiences. In fact, Wirnt’s name was already being praised in the thirteenth century by Konrad von Würzburg, who made Wirnt himself the protagonist of his brief poem from around 1267, Der werlt lohn; in Konrad’s poem, the author of Wigalois appears as a knightly servant to “frouw werlt.”40 Furthermore, with the exception of Wolfram’s Parzival, no other Middle High German Arthurian romance has survived in such an abundant number of manuscript and print versions. Although this is never an absolutely accurate measure of a work’s popularity, especially in comparison to other works, the number of extant sources for the Wigalois material attests nonetheless to a broad and long-lived reception throughout the German-speaking lands. Today, there exist thirteen complete Wigalois manuscripts and twenty-eight fragments.41

In spite of the romance’s popularity among medieval audiences, very little definite information exists about Wirnt’s biography, and indeed, much of what we do know is what scholars have been able to glean from Wigalois, his only known work. Wirnt mentions his own name in lines 141, 5755, and 10,576, and scholarly consensus accepts Gravenberg (or Gravenberc, as it appears in some of the manuscripts) as modern Gräfenberg, which lies in

39

See Friedrich Neumann, “Wann verfasste Wirnt den Wigalois?” Kleinere Schriften zur deutschen Philologie des Mittelalters. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969. 165-194.

40_{Konrad von Würzburg. Heinrich von Kempten, Der Welt Lohn, Das Herzmaere. Ed. Heinz Röllecke.}

Stuttgart: Reclam, 1968. 50-65. See alsoWigalois. Der Ritter mit dem Rade. Ed. Georg Friedrich Benecke. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1819. In this first scholarly edition of Wigalois, Benecke includes Konrad’s Der werlt lohn

in its entirety. See pp. LV-LXIV.

41

See Sabine and Ulrich Seelbach, “Wirnt von Grafenberg: Wigalois – Eine Bibliographie.”Perspicuitas. Internet Periodicum für mediävistische Sprach-, Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft.

Bavaria between Nuremberg and Bayreuth.42 The dates of Wirnt’s birth and his death are unknown, and determining the exact dates of his work has also been difficult. The scholarly debate surrounding the exact dates of Wigalois’s composition hinges mainly on whether the narrator’s mention of the death of the “noble prince of Meran” (v. 8062-8064) refers to Baron Berthold IV of Andechs-Meran, who died in 1204, or instead to his son Otto I, whose passing is recorded in 1234.43 Some evidence that tends to support an earlier date of composition is provided by the oldest known recording of the poem, Wigalois fragment E. This is actually a group of three fragments, now kept in Vienna (Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 14612), Freiburg im Breisgau (Freiburg im Breisgau, Universitätsbibliothek, Hs. 445), and New Haven, respectively (New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS 481, no. 113). According to paleographic evidence, the most likely dates for Fragment E are between 1220 and 1230.44

Regardless of whether one agrees with the earlier or the later date, it remains clear that Wirnt was familiar with the works of Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach, both of whom he mentions in laudatory terms several times throughout the narrative. The Meran family residences at Andechs and at Dießen on the Ammersee in southern Bavaria are furthermore consistent with the early manuscript tradition and with what is known about

42 _{See for example Ernst Dick, “Wirnt von Grafenberg.”German Writers and Works of the High Middle Ages:}

1170-1280. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 138. Ed. James Hardin and Will Hasty. Detroit, Washington, D.C., London: Gale Research, 1994. 177-184.

43_{Joachim Bumke, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im hohen Mittelalter. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch}

Verlag, 1990. 218-220.

44

For information about the oldest extant Wigalois manuscript, known as Fragment E, see Christa Bertelsmeier- Kierst, “Zur ältesten Überlieferung des ‘Wigalois’” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 121 (1992). See

Wirnt’s language, namely that they indicate a Bavarian origin.45 One important clue about the author’s identity is in Konrad von Würzburg’s use of the word her in Der werlt lohn

(…von Grâvenberc her Wirent, v. 101); this designation suggests that Wirnt was a free knight and not a ministerial in the service of a higher-ranking lord.46 What we know about Wirnt’s education also comes strictly from Wigalois; Wirnt claims to have heard the story orally from a French squire, a knappe (v. 11,687-11,690), but his obvious familiarity with some of the major works of Middle High German Arthurian romance, such as Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet as well as Hartmann’s Erec and Iwein and Wolfram’s Parzival, indicate that he was literate. Further evidence in support of this claim is, for example, his reference to Dido and Vergil’s Aeneid (v. 2710-2726), and also Wirnt’s obvious familiarity with the literary tradition of the “Fair Unknown.”47 One of the most important works in this tradition is the Old French Le Bel Inconnu; this is in fact the work most closely associated with Wigalois.

Various redactions of Wirnt’s extremely popular tale remained in steady circulation until the end of the eighteenth century. Even without taking ekphrasis into consideration, this in itself sets Wigalois apart from many of the now canonical works of Middle High German literature. Whereas many medieval German works lay in relative obscurity until their rediscovery by philologists such as Johann Jakob Bodmer or August Wilhelm in the late

45 _{Dick, “Wirnt von Grafenberg“ 179. See also Bertelsmeier-Kierst, “Zur ältesten Überlieferung des}

‘Wigalois’” 286-287. This latter article provides by far the most detailed description of the dialect in which this earliest known Wigalois manuscript is written.

46 _{Dick, “Wirnt von Grafenberg” 179.}

47

I examine the relationship between Wirnt’s use of ekphrasis and the Fair Unknown tradition in chapter three, pp. 91-101.

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,48 the story of Wigalois was, in one adaptation or another, a popular and continuous presence in German literature for hundreds of years. Ulrich Füetrer composed a version for his Buch der Abenteuer(ca. 1490); between 1493 and 1664 there appeared at least nine different print versions; one of these, the prose adaptation known as Wigoleis vom Rade, printed in Strassburg in 1519, is in fact the focus of the final chapter of this dissertation. In addition, other prose versions were also translated into Icelandic and Danish; numerous versions of an adaptation called Ein schen maase fun kenig artus hof […] un fun dem berimtin riter Widewilt appeared in Yiddish or Jüdisch-Deutsch

beginning in the fifteenth century, perhaps even earlier; a sixteenth-century Yiddish version was translated (back) into High German toward the end of the seventeenth century; and finally, the year 1786 brought a version of the tale in satirical prose, Vom König Artus und von dem bildschönen Ritter Wieduwilt. Ein Märchen.49

In 1819, Georg Friedrich Benecke’s edition of Wigalois: Der Ritter mit dem Rade

made Wirnt’s poem available in Middle High German to the general reading public. Yet despite an initially enthusiastic reception to this first scholarly edition, not to mention a nearly unbroken line of transmission for almost 600 years, Wigalois was for the greater part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries considered to be a lesser Arthurian romance, a piecemeal and second-rate cousin to the towering works of Hartmann von Aue or Wolfram von Eschenbach. As I demonstrate in the first chapter of my investigation, much of this critical disparagement is based on the clear structural and narrative differences between

48 _{See for example John T. Waterman. A History of the German Language. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland}

Press, 1991. 153-168.

49

See Joachim Bumke, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur 218-220. See also Achim Jaeger. Ein jüdischer Artusritter. Studien zum jüdisch-deutschen “Widuwilt” (“Artushof”) und zum “Wigalois” des Wirnt von

Wigalois and Hartmann’s and Wolfram’s works. Wigalois’s lesser standing within the corpus of Middle High German Arthurian scholarship is furthermore evident, for example, in that until Ulrich and Sabine Seelbach’s new edition and translation of Wigalois appeared in 2005, the most recent scholarly edition of the poem was published in 1926 by J.M.N. Kapteyn.50 It must be noted, however, that even the new Seelbach edition is based solely on the text in Kapteyn’s edition.