Wolfram's 'Willehalm': Fifteen Essays by Martin H. Jones , Timothy McFarland (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.2, 2004 527 reference to lament as involving speech as distinct from, say, wringing hands, crying, or tearing hair. This should have pointed to the need to include body-talk in this survey of communication. My second general criticism concerns the repeated suggestion that it is a character? istic of Wolfram's narrative art to keep his audience on the same level of (restricted) understanding as the protagonist. This is too simplistic: it ignores the many occasions where the audience is partially informed of details ahead of Parzival. In many cases the audience may learn with Parzival, but in other cases they learn before him, so that a double point of view is offered them. At one point (p. 213) Urscheler makes his categorical claim that they learn only at the same time as Parzival, but at another (p. 222) this is qualified by the wording that they know 'kaum mehr' than he. We are leftuninformed as to what is meant by 'kaum', which suggests that the author has not fully thought through the implications of this central feature of Wolfram's artistry. Trinity College, Cambridge D. H. Green Wolfram's 'Willehalm': Fifteen Essays. Ed. by Martin H. Jones and Timothy McFarland . Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2002. xxii + 344 pp. ?55; $79. ISBN 1-57113-211-2 (hbk). Wolfram's incomplete Willehalm, presumed to have been written about 1217, has never received the same sort of critical attention as his Parzival, although good edi? tions and translations into both modern German and English have appeared in the last three decades or so. The essays in this collection attempt to define the literary and historical interest of a richly complex but still somewhat neglected work. After a very clear editorial introduction, Philip Bennett traces the relationship of Willehalm to its source material (probably some version of the Chanson d'Aliscans) with particular at? tention to the blend of sanctity and military heroism discernible in the central charac? ter.Jeffrey Ashcroft discusses links with the Rolandslied, while Annette Volfing traces continuities in narrative mood between Parzival and Willehalm which have important repercussions for the contemporary debate about the open-endedness of Wolfram's more famous work and the unresol ved moral tensions which linger aftera reading ofit. In his influential Hybride Helden: Gwigalois und Willehalm (Heidelberg: Winter, 1997), Stefan Fuchs demonstrated that both were enigmatically 'hybrid' works, a finding confirmed here by John Greenfield in his study of the epic's ethical vocabulary, which ends with the reflectionthat it is 'difficultto imagine what the conclusion of this work [sc. Willehalm] would have been' (p. 76). In a similar spirit Almut Suerbaum writes of the (Bakhtinian) 'polyphony' present in dialogue structures and Sidney Johnson analyses 'heteroglossia'; mean while Marc Chinca concludes that even the wealth of dramaturgical devices deployed by Wolfram to throw light on Willehalm's 'character' are still such as to ieave us guessing' (all the more so since Willehalm, like Gottfried's Tristan, remains a torso). David Yeandle too writes of 'Wolfram's ambivalent hero' (p. 167). The central heroine, Giburc, forms the focus of attention in the essay by Martin H. Jones (against the background of medieval women as leaders of siege warfare), while Timothy McFarland and David Wells engage with the emotional and theological aspects of Giburc's Toleranzrede. There are detailed essays by Marianne Gibbs on narrative style, by Nigel Harris on descriptions of natural phenomena in Willehalm and Aliscans, and by Christopher Young on gender roles, while Frank Shaw's study of Willehalm material in Heinrich von Munchen's Weltchronik'shows that Willehalm was still alive into the fifteenthcentury' (p. 306). In sum, this many-faceted volume assembles a distinguished collection of cutting-edge Forschungsliteratur and can be 528 Reviews thoroughly recommended to anglophone graduate students who have already mastered the clear exposition by Gibbs and Johnson in the extensive Afterword of their 1984 translation in the Penguin Classics series. More seasoned scholars will also find the volume indispensable as a bracing contribution to the issues and cruxes thrown up by this idiosyncratic text in the last three decades. University of Durham Neil Thomas Broader Horizons: A Study of Johannes Witte de Hese's...