Parzival

Parzival A Knightly Epic Complete - 16 Books in 1 By Wolfram von Eschenbach Translated by Jessie Laidlay Weston Wolfram von Eschenbach, 1160/80 - 1220, was a German knight and poet, regarded as one of the greatest epic poets of medieval German literature. As a Minnesinger, he also wrote lyric poetry. Wolfram is best known today for his Parzival, sometimes regarded as the greatest of all German epics from that time. Based on Chretien de Troyes' Perceval, le Conte du Graal, it is the first extant work in German to have as its subject the Holy Grail (in Wolfram's interpretation a gemstone). In the poem, Wolfram's narrator expresses disdain for Chretien's (unfinished) version of the tale, and states that his source was a poet from Provence called Kyot. Some scholars believe Wolfram might have meant Guiot de Provins (though none of the latter's surviving works relate to the themes of Parzival), however others believe Kyot was simply a literary device invented by Wolfram to explain his deviations from Chretien's version. In presenting, for the first time, to English readers the greatest work of Germany's greatest mediaeval poet, a few words of introduction, alike for poem and writer, may not be out of place. The lapse of nearly seven hundred years, and the changes which the centuries have worked, alike in language and in thought, would have naturally operated to render any work unfamiliar, still more so when that work was composed in a foreign tongue; but, indeed, it is only within the present century that the original text of the Parzival has been collated from the MSS. and made accessible, even in its own land, to the general reader. But the interest which is now felt by many in the Arthurian romances, quickened into life doubtless by the genius of the late Poet Laureate, and the fact that the greatest composer of our time, Richard Wagner, has selected this poem as the groundwork of that wonderful drama, which a growing consensus of opinion has hailed as the grandest artistic achievement of this century, seem to indicate that the time has come when the work of Wolfram von Eschenbach may hope to receive, from a wider public than that of his own day, the recognition which it so well deserves."