Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/209

Rh More remarkable is Wolfram's ignorance as to the nature of the Grail itself. As already shown, French romances waver between identification with the chalice of the Last Supper and the dish of the Paschal lamb. Wolfram has no idea that the Grail is a vessel of any sort; he takes it to be simply a jewel, apparently flat in form, which derives its power from an oblate deposited on Good Friday by a dove from heaven. This gem, originally in charge of the rebel angels, had been finally committed to kings of Anjou. Had Wolfram known of the Grail as a sacred dish, it would seem unlikely that he should have omitted that feature.

Wolfram identifies the Grail with the precious stone against which the phoenix rubs itself, and by the heat of which it is consumed; the name of the jewel, he says, was lapsit (i. e. lapis) exillis. This heat-producing stone is mentioned in the Grand St. Graal (but the bird is called Serpilion, evidently only a name of the phoenix); the gem is named pirastite (or piratiste). Wolfram must have had in mind some such appellation, and his corruption leaves no longer recognizable the original significance of the name. In the French romance, the introduction of the bird is symbolic, the phoenix being from patristic times the type of Christ; but there is nothing to show that the German poet intended to convey any mystic conception.

The correspondences pointed out allow only one conclusion: Wolfram must have received information, very likely of a piecemeal and inadequate character, concerning contemporary French romances dealing with the history of the Grail; the ideas thus obtained he treated with free imagination, and introduced as much as he saw fit into the framework of Crestien's narrative. In this manner the minnesinger was able to produce a composition as immortal as the story of which it is essentially an interpretation. As I have elsewhere remarked, the difference between the style and spirit of the two works is to be explained, not as a token of the superiority of the German poet, but rather as "the contrast in taste of a generation consciously romantic to that of a more epic predecessor: Crestien describes education in chivalry, of which the essential duties are charity and piety; Wolfram enlarges, but also blurs, the outlines of the action in favor of a presentation typically human."

About 1220, that is to say, somewhat more than a decade after Wolfram, an admirer and imitator of the latter, Heinrich of the Türlin, composed a poem of thirty thousand lines, reciting adventures of Gawein (Gawain). The fantastic character of the work illustrates the tendency of German romance, inclining to greater and greater extravagance. Heinrich was acquainted with the Perceval of