opposes the wedded love of Parzival and Conduiramur. The hero's recollection of the mother of his children is the one saving influence throughout the years of doubt and discouragement which follow Kundrie's reproaches. Whilst still staggering under this blow, so cruelly undeserved as it seems to him, he can wish his friend and comrade, Gawain, a woman chaste and good, whom he may love and who shall be his guardian angel. The thought of Conduiramur holds him aloof from the offered love of Orgeluse. In his last and bitterest fight, with his unknown brother, when it had nigh gone with him to his death, he recalls her and renews the combat with fresh strength. She it is for whom he wins the highest earthly crown, of which her pure, womanly heart makes her worthy. Reunion with her and with his children is Parzival's first taste of the joy that is henceforth to be his.
Passages may easily be multiplied that tally ill with the ideas of the poem as here briefly set forth. But the existence of these ideas is patent to the unprejudiced reader. Despite its many shortcomings, the poem which contains them is the noblest and most human outcome of that mingled strain of Celtic fancy and Christian symbolism whose history we have traced.[1]
In Wolfram, equally with the majority of the French romance writers, there is little consistency in the formal use of the mystic talismans. Be the reason what it may, Wolfram certainly never thought of associating the Grail with the Last Supper. But its religious character is, at times, as marked with him as with Robert de Borron or the author of the Queste. It is the actual vehicle of the Deity's commands; it restrains from sin; it suffers no unchaste servant; it may be seen of no heathen; the
- ↑ Some readers may be anxious to read Wolfram's work to whom twelfth-century German would offer great difficulties. A few words on the translation into modern German may, therefore, not be out of place. San-Marte's original translation (1839-41) is full of gross blunders and mistranslations, and, what is worse, of passages foisted into the text to support the translator's own interpretation of the poem as a whole. Simrock's, which followed, is extremely close, but difficult and unpleasing. San Marte's second edition, corrected from Simrock, is a great advance upon the first; but even here the translator has too often allowed his own gloss to replace Wolfram's statement. A thoroughly faithful yet pleasing rendering is a desideratum.
