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Willehalm

Wolfram von Eschenbach

()

Marion E. Gibbs (University of London)

Genre: Epic, Poetry, Romance. Country: Germany.

The name of Wolfram von Eschenbach, certainly outside academic circles, is known primarily

for his Parzival, a remarkable adaptation of the unfinished Perceval of Chrtien de Troyes. In it,

Wolfram moves the Arthurian romance into a new dimension and demonstrates his power as

narrator and thinker. For a long time his other great poem, Willehalm, remained in the shadow of

its predecessor, despite some early work by German scholars of the status of Samuel Singer

(1918), Ludwig Wolff (1934) and Bodo Mergell (1936), but a ground-breaking study by Joachim

Bumke (1959) brought it more to the fore. Even if many of Bumkes arguments have been

questioned, not least by himself, in the light of subsequent scholarship, this book probably more

than any other drew attention to the poem and precipitated a steady flow of scholarly studies

which has continued to the present day. Comparisons of two such different works are pointless,

but what is apparent is that Willehalm is no less significant than Parzival and that together they

demonstrate the variety and extraordinary power of Wolframs work.

For Willehalm, as for Parzival, Wolfram used the rhyming couplets established as the

conventional form of the courtly romance in German, and the division into books and 30-line

sections, established by Lachmann for Parzival, is evident here too. With this formal similarity,

however, the two poems are very different in substance and tone. Both are based on Old French

sources, but whereas Parzival is, at heart, a courtly romance, Willehalm is based on the Old

FrenchAliscans (ca. 1180), a chanson de geste belonging to the cycle which tells the story of

Guillaume dOrange from his early life at the court of Charlemagne to his withdrawal into a

monastery and his death. The specific events ofAliscans are two great battles fought between the

Christian army under Guillaume and the Saracens. The location, the battlefield of Alischanz, is

the site of a Roman cemetery near Arles in the south of France.

Wolfram uses the parallel structure of the two battles, but, composing some thirty years after the

compilation of the chansons de geste, with a reputation as the author ofParzival and at the height

of the Middle High German classical period, he has produced a totally different work of almost

twice the length of his basic source, though incorporating material from the other chansons; and

one which defies categorization in any accepted genre. It is not a courtly romance, like Hartmann

von AuesErec orIwein, or Wolframs own Parzival, nor is it an heroic epic like the

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Nibelungenliedwhich would have been current among Wolframs audiences, but it shares

qualities of both. It stands alone; it has been described as a tragic romance (Werner Schrder)

which is an attractive notion but misses the point to some extent; Kurt Ruh quaintly describes it

as belonging to a genus mixtum. Its genre does not really matter, for Willehalm exists in its own

right, without models and without imitations, though, significantly, it prompted severalcontinuations in the generation immediately following. For Willehalm is, to all appearance, a

fragment: it breaks off after Willehalms victory in the second battle, with the fate of a major

figure, the attractive if wayward Rennewart, unknown, and several issues unresolved. This lack

of a neat conclusion was probably not acceptable to the medieval audience, nor indeed to most

modern critics, yet Wolfram has already, in this unique poem, rejected moulds and defied

conventions.

As in Parzival, there is more than one narrative strand in Willehalm, but here the stories of the

love of Willehalm and Giburc, the woman doubly named Arabel-Giburc in recognition of her

birth as the child of the heathen King Terramer and her marriage to another heathen, King Tibalt,

before her conversion to Christianity and her marriage to Willehalm himself, and of the antics ofthe young heathen Rennewart, brother to Giburc and likewise a child of Terramer, are

inextricable from the conflict between Christians and Saracens. Although Wolfram looks back to

the meeting between Arabel and Willehalm when he was taken captive in the course of a much

earlier expedition in heathen lands, and although the great prayer to Giburc at the beginning of

Book IX seems to be anticipating a life beyond the temporal, the events actually related are

confined to a matter of days which are clearly defined. Locations are named, too: Orange and

Orleans, the court at Laon, and of course, the battlefield. Yet the awareness of distant lands is

very much there too, for the vast army of Terramer comes from far away and brings with it all the

colour and exotic properties which so excite Wolfram.

Willehalm is full of contrasts. Its very essence is conflict, and Wolfram spares nothing in his

account of intense and bitter fighting unto death, yet the other side of conflict is reconciliation,

expressed in the humane treatment by Willehalm of the heathen captives after the second battle,

and in the tender love-making of the man and woman, who, with the irony so characteristic of the

poem, are the very impetus to this present conflict. To think ofWillehalm only in terms of the

depiction of the two battles is to disregard these other equally important dimensions. Much of the

poem is devoted to descriptions of fighting and the deaths of combatants on both sides, but much

of it, too, is devoted to periods of contemplation and to the central spiritual discussions of the

poem. Willehalm is seen, first and foremost, as the active knight, the leader of his men, but his

wife Giburc is the mouthpiece of Wolfram in his advocacy of humane treatment of the defeated

heathens. The religious debates between Terramer and, as he sees her, his errant daughter, andthe magnificent address by Giburc to the assembled Christian troops before the second battle,

belong to the greatest of Wolframs additions and contribute some of the most profound

reflection in medieval German literature.

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Few can doubt the deeply serious tone ofWillehalm or the earnestness of Wolframs message,

but, in the manner of Shakespeare centuries after him, he alleviates the darkness with flashes of

humour and the sustained comedy of Rennewart. Although he derives this burlesque character

from his source, Wolfram, as is his wont, imbues him with a deeper significance, showing him

torn between his heathen origins and his new commitment to the service of Willehalm;congenitally incapable of accepting the baptism which would transform his life at the French

court, yet gauchely in love with the Princess Alyze. Having developed this character way beyond

his source, Wolfram allows him to disappear without trace in the later stages of the second battle,

but not until he has been instrumental in securing the Christian victory. Instead, he concentrates

his attention on Willehalm himself, left to survey the battlefield strewn with the heathen slain,

and on Terramer who, in the melancholy last line of the work as we have it left the land of

Provence.

The question of Rennewarts fate is not the only one that hangs in the air, then, but also bigger,

more impersonal issues: is this the end of Terramers attempt to regain his daughter? Will he

return with renewed forces? What hope is there of lasting reconciliation of the opposing forces ofChristianity and heathendom? The lengthy continuation by Ulrich von Trheim, clumsy though it

may be, may have offered some satisfaction to the medieval audience. A work which is

inherently so puzzling must continue to tax the minds of the modern reader, both in its own right,

and within the vast uvre of Wolfram von Eschenbach. The previously unchallenged edition by

Lachmann now exists alongside two new critical editions, by Werner Schrder (1978) and

Joachim Heinzle (1991): without replacing the much valued earlier edition, these offer significant

new insights and contribute much to our understanding of the poem, while not necessarily

resolving some of its inherent difficulties.

Marion E. Gibbs (University of London)

First published 09 January 2004

Citation: Gibbs, Marion E.. "Willehalm". The Literary Encyclopedia. 9 January 2004.

[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=14452, accessed 21 December 2010.]

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