Volume 142, Issue 4

Focusing on the ›Münchner Oswald‹ and ›Orendel‹, this article traces ambiguity and narrative doubling in early Middle High German adventure and bridal-quest legends (formerly also called ›minstrel epics‹). It argues that these ambiguities, which surface in the texts as instances of narrative incoherence, point toward an incommensurability between certain religious and secular narrative »gestures«, as well as between their underlying forms of thought. To the extent that (presumably) later adaptations of ›Oswald‹ and ›Orendel‹ display an effort to smooth out the incoherences in their source materials, they attest to a decreasing tolerance for ambiguity not uncharacteristic of the late medieval and early modern periods more generally.

The echoes of the Song of Songs in Hartmann’s ›Erec‹ culminate in the famous comparison of Enite with a lily among thorns. Against the background of the exegetical tradition, in which the lily stands for an exceptional love competence, it is shown that this comparison is much more important to an appropriate understanding of ›Erec‹ than has been commonly assumed. This example illustrates, moreover, how precisely vernacular-language authors make usage of sacred contents and how autonomously they create processes of literary meaning-making.

This article connects Wolfram’s portrayal of the striking black heathen queen Belakane with contemporary thoughts on the colour black in general and more specifically with concepts of dark skin and race at Wolfram’s time taking their biblical and theological foundations and semantics in regard. Reading Belakanes skin colour as an index and her story as a nod to the biblical Queen of Sheba and her reception history in the commentary tradition on the ›Song of Songs‹, I argue to integrate artistic and courtly, scholarly and theological perspectives to understand and appreciate the idiosyncrasy of Wolfram’s ›Parzival‹ fully.

The article takes the open ending of ›Parzival‹ as its point of departure. It analyses information about the expansion of the grail community: The grail is at the heart of a hidden take-over of world domination. This idea originates in the military orders. In ›Parzival‹, it is associated with an eschatological perspective. However, Wolfram obscures the beginning of the eschaton , just as he obscures the topographical location of Munsalvaesche. The idea of world domination goes back to the Third Crusade and the role of Frederick Barbarossa. It can be assumed that Wolfram had direct contact with men who had taken part in the campaign. His conception of the grail can be traced to the Black Stone of the Kaaba, to which it constitutes a Christian counterpart.