Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/611

CHAP XXIV thing, that magic dish, which in the course of its retellings became the Holy Grail. Chrétien did not finish his poem, and after him others completed or retold the story. Among them there was one who lacked the smooth facility of the French Trouvère, yet surpassed him and all others in thoughtfulness and dramatic power. This was the Bavarian, Wolfram von Eschenbach. He was a knight, and wandered from castle to castle and from court to court, and saw men. His generous patron was Hermann, Landgraf of Thüringen, who held court on the Wartburg, near Eisenach. There Wolfram may have composed his great poem in the opening years of the thirteenth century. He was no clerk, and had no clerkly education. Probably he could neither read nor write. But he lived during the best period of mediaeval German poetry, and the Wartburg was the centre of gay and literary life. Walther von der Vogelweide was one of Wolfram's familiars in its halls.

Wolfram knew and disapproved of Chrétien's version of the Perceval; and said the story had been far better told by a certain Kyot, a singer of Provence. Nothing is known of the latter beyond Wolfram's praise. Perhaps he was an invention of Wolfram's; not infrequently mediaeval poets referred to fictitious sources. At all events, Wolfram's sources were French or Provençal. In large measure the best German mediaeval poetry was an adaptation of the French; a fact which did not prevent the German adaptations from occasionally surpassing the French works they were drawn from. In the instance of Wolfram's Parzival, as in that of Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan, the German poems were the great renderings of these tales. As our author was a thoughtful German, his style is difficult and involved. Yet he had imagination, and his