10 - Wigalois and Parzival: Father and Son Roles in the German Romance of Gawain's Son

Summary

Gawein's legendary son provides a context in which his father may redeem himself from his ambiguous record as a sexual harasser and deserter, a process which leads to the father's contrition and his taking part in the son's quasi-sacral form of kingship, this being an inclusive and assimilative regime which offers an implicit critique of Wolfram's Parzival where the quintessentially Arthurian knight, Gawan, is not permitted to join Parzival in the Grail realm.

Wirnt von Gravenberg's Wigalois differs from the better-known Arthurian romances of Hartmann von Aue in its eclectic use of source material. Where Erec and Iwein largely depend on unitary French sources by Chrétien de Troyes, Wigalois is a syncretic work whose material lies athwart a number of story-types and genres. A tradition of Gawein's liaison with Florie (a fée whose name is attached to a somewhat different tradition in the Old French Merveilles de Rigomer) appears to underlie the introductory story of the hero's parents, which is then succeeded by an account of a young knight's testing sequence similar to that occurring in other European variants of the Fair Unknown cycle and Malory's ‘Tale of Sir Gareth’. This is followed by an account of the redemption of an ailing king and his stricken land, a sequence bearing similarities with Parzival and other medieval Grail stories, whilst the sequel describing a protracted siege is probably an invention – albeit one influenced by aspects of the chanson de geste tradition of collective combat.