Wolfram's "Willehalm." Fifteen Essays

Abstract

Jones, Martin H., and Timothy McFarland, eds. Wolfram's Willehalm: Fifteen Essays. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002. 352 pp. $79.00 hardcover. Wolfram von Eschenbach is best known for his courtly romance Parzival, though his later Willehalm, narrative based on the Chanson de Geste-tradition (particularly version of the Old French Bataille d'Aliscans), is hardly less original and innovative. Scholars have long appreciated the innovative complexity and tolerance of Wolfram's depiction of the conflict between Christians and Muslims in Willehalm, in which courtly and sometimes essentially human concerns frequently take precedence over confessional differences. The present collection of essays, originally given at conference organized by the editors at the University of London in 1998, will deepen this appreciation and stimulate increased interest in Willehalm. One of the central recurring themes in the fifteen essays in this volume is Willehalm as poetic articulation of history. In his study of Wolfram's employment of quotations from, and allusions to, the Rolandslied as a source of historical truth (40), Jeffrey Ashcroft shows how the basic paradigms of this earlier Chanson de Geste-empire and crusade-have begun to break down, thus demonstrating the degree to which their status has changed by the early thirteenth century of Wolfram. Annette Volfing undertakes comparative study of Parzival and Willehalm based Wolfram's integration of elements of the former text into the latter as pre-history (46), while Frank Shaw shows how the Willehalm material functioned as historical source in the world-chronicles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries attributed to Heinrich von Munchen. Coming to the historical status of Willehalm from different direction, Martin Jones analyzes the relationship of Wolfram's depiction of Giburc at Orange to the reality of siege warfare. An interest in dialogue and the dialogical (in the Bakhtinian sense) constitutes another major thematic complex in this volume. In his analysis of the Willehalm (Guillaume)-material preceding Wolfram, Philip Benet strikes Bakhtinian chord by demonstrating the degree to which the themes of sanctity and heroism were undermined by spirit of the carnival and burlesque (18). Sidney Johnson's systematically Bakhtinian study devotes section to the explication of key Bakhtinian terms and then demonstrates numerous instances of heteroglossia in Wolfram's treatment of the Willehalm-story. Although its focus is more on Wolfram's education, David Wells's contribution has much to do with the influence of religious disputation literature on the key dialogues between Giburg and Terramer. …