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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 Chrétien 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 Bumke’s 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 Wolfram’s 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
French Aliscans (ca. 1180), a chanson de geste belonging to the cycle which tells the story of
Guillaume d’Orange from his early life at the court of Charlemagne to his withdrawal into a
monastery and his death. The specific events of Aliscans 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 of Parzival 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 Aue’s Erec or Iwein, or Wolfram’s own Parzival, nor is it an heroic epic like the

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Nibelungenlied which would have been current among Wolfram’s audiences, but it shares
qualities of both. It stands alone; it has been described as a tragic romance (Werner Schröder)
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 several
continuations in the generation immediately following. For Willehalm is, to all appearance, a
fragment: it breaks off after Willehalm’s 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 of
the 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 of Willehalm 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, and
the magnificent address by Giburc to the assembled Christian troops before the second battle,
belong to the greatest of Wolfram’s additions and contribute some of the most profound
reflection in medieval German literature.

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Few can doubt the deeply serious tone of Willehalm or the earnestness of Wolfram’s 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 Rennewart’s fate is not the only one that hangs in the air, then, but also bigger,
more impersonal issues: is this the end of Terramer’s attempt to regain his daughter? Will he
return with renewed forces? What hope is there of lasting reconciliation of the opposing forces of
Christianity and heathendom? The lengthy continuation by Ulrich von Türheim, 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 Schröder (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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