Abstract
Recent works in the field of German medieval literature argue that the category of ›the fantastic‹ needs to be defined in demarcation to the medieval category of ›the marvelous‹, and, thus, the focus of text analyses should lay on forms and functions of ›fear/fright‹. Following up on this concept, the article analyses the motif of the wheel (of fortune) in two Middle High German Arthurian verse novels and asks whether it can be considered to be a fantastic element. It is pointed out that the (evil) marvelous is integrated into a concrete and dualis-tic religious meaning where it is linked to existential fear. By contrast, the fan-tastic keeps unnatural and strange things unexplained and enigmatic. Here, fright is realized in a more congealed, pictorial way and stays in the back-ground whereby the occurrences seem to be left in fantastic ambiguity and in-explicability. Therefore, valid systems of classification are subverted.Publisher's note: This article was originally published as part of issue 8.1. This has been updated to note that this article is part of issue 7.2.
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