Comprehend this miracle we cannot, but gratefully accept it we can – and are indeed compelled so to do, as under Wolfram’s virile and gentle guidance we read how God loved knights and ladies as well as He loved peasants and clergy, and perhaps all the more indulgently because in many ways they were morally more exposed.

Wolfram von Eschenbach was a ministerialis or technically ‘unfree’ knight bound to the service of a lord, though qua knight he was free to defend his honour anywhere and evidently also able to change his patron, finding his main bene factor in this respect not in the neighbourhood of his native Eschenbach but in Thuringia with its famous maecenas, the Landgrave Hermann. Although Eschenbach is in Franconia, Wolfram alludes to himself as a Bavarian, and it is permissible to see Eschenbach as the mid-point of a series of concentric circles linking localities at ever-increasing distances -with a proportionate increase in vagueness and fantastic charm – from the tourneying-ground of Klein-Amberg, only a few miles east of Eschenbach, to furthermost Asia where the sky comes down. Such knights ministerial as Wolfram were the main bearers of the great efflorescence of secular poetry in Germany in the first half of the Hohenstauffen period, when poetry became emancipated from clerical domination. Bright boys of the subservient nobility were picked out and sent to monastery schools to learn the Three R’s so that their lords could administer at least their territories for themselves while their consciences remained in clerical hands.

Like Wolfram’s statement that he was following a Grail romance not by Chrétien but by the otherwise unknown ‘Kyot the Provençal’,* his claim not to know his A B C must be discounted as one of his many tactical jokes. In his Apology, inserted between the second and third chapters, Wolfram takes his stand not as a poet but as a knight, and in such bold and definite terms that he would have been howled down by the roughnecks of Thuringia had he not been a crack-jouster. In this proud stance he roundly disclaims that his story can be a book. This is clearly mockery of his senior, the poet Hartmann von Aue, who introduced and excused his masterpieces Der arme Heinrich and Iwein as the fruits of a scholar’s leisure. With his Erec and Iwein, Hartmann was the unassailable Arthurian narrator – until Wolfram von Eschenbach flung down his gauntlet (p. 83), a challenge which the great Gottfried von Strassburg rebutted with much parody and persiflage in the Literary Excursus of his Tristan (Penguin Classics, p. 105). All that we can safely glean from these exchanges to the present purpose is that Wolfram neither was nor claimed to be learned (notably in Latin), as both Hartmann and Gottfried clearly were. Some who take Wolfram’s assertion of analphabetism seriously point to strange transmogrifications in his riot of exotic names, and infer oral transmission. Yet this born bard-improvisator, only half-submerged by his conventional ‘literary’ persona, absorbed information about the world vastly from any available source, and at least one scholar who cites the transmogrifications goes on to speak of Wolfram’s unbounded delight in manipulating language somewhat in the manner of J. R. R. Tolkien, though of course with less real freedom. The view of the present writer is that Wolfram had a practical grasp of letters and numbers adequate to supervising, say, his lord’s falconers, his general stores, gold plate, cavalry horses, uniforms, munitions of war and other logistical affairs for the field of battle, under the Marshal – all matters with which he betrays an uncommon technical familiarity.

Some scattered topical references, as well as polemical exchanges embedded in the text, enable us to date Wolfram’s Parzival between the years approaching 1200 and those following 1210, the richest years in the history of medieval German poetry; for they also saw the appearance of the Nibelungenlied, Iwein, Tristan, and the superlative political poetry of Walther von der Vogelweide, not to mention his love-lyrics and those of several other fine poets.

There is evidence that after finishing Parzival, which he assembled according to a loose-leaf system – some pages sent flying round Germany never caught up with the main sheaf -Wolfram returned to it to patch and touch it up. One minor strand of narrative in Parzival, derived from a single short scene of Chrétien’s, that of the tragic young lovers Sigune and Schionatulander, so obsessed him and his audience that after the four scenes given them in Parzival he told the prior history of the pair in elegiac strophes of his own devising in the miscalled Titurel. Whether before, during or after the making of Titurel, Wolfram retold almost to the end the Old French La bataille d’Aliscans in his epic Willehalm, soon to be published in English from other hands in this same series. Willehalm was based upon a chanson de geste and deals with the double clash of two great armies, the Frankish and the Saracenic, who seek a, crucial decision amid vast carnage undreamt of in the sporting Parzival. In Willehalm, Wolfram again rose superbly to the challenge, which of its nature took him to greater heights.

Writing in a dense, sententious and at times consciously gnomic style, Wolfram makes heavy demands on his audiences. As a faithful translator I have in the main passed his demands on to my readers. Many passages of the original have virtually no syntactical structure – Parzival is definitely no book – and so the bare act of translation has inevitably tidied them up. Thus the reader must imagine Wolfram to be in one sense rougher and less tidy than he appears in these pages. In another sense he is tidier than I could possibly render him, in that his compelling thought derives much structure from his sappy and vigorous use of medieval German courtly couplets. Most characteristic of his style is a succession of verse-sprung statements in which he leaves it to his audience to supply the logical nexus, as we often do in living speech. In my translation I have left to the reader as much of this work required of him by Wolfram as I safely could, chiefly by means of innumerable dashes and colons. If my pages tend to look a little odd, then so does my original. I offer no apology, since otherwise I should have had to apologize to Wolfram for watering him down more than was absolutely necessary. For to translate this extraordinary poet, more than any other I know, is to risk watering him down unbearably.