Parzival

There is the story, and what you see is the tension of the two apart.

Now the solution of this, and this is what I came really to talk about, and I'll do it very briefly, is in the really great romance of Parsifal, the Grail story, as rendered by Wolfram von Eschenbach.

This is one of the greatest works of Western literature.

and, in my thinking, the greatest of the Middle Ages.

theology.

From the castle, we begin to have the nobility of life expressed.

Well, very briefly, the young man who is going to heal the wound is Parsifal.

Parsifal's father, Gahwaret, was a great champion.

Which was?

Wolfram von Eschenbach's 13th century epic poem, Parzival.

Wow.

So right out of the gate, you have this astonishing multilayered cultural lineage.

In, uh, the Arthurian lore, it's the lost Grail for which they search.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Wolfram von Eschenbach elaborated further on the importance of the Grail guardians in his account of Parzival.

He talks of Grail knights who were bred to the pure life and who had the special task of keeping the Grail.

They were summoned to serve the Grail after they had passed a test of worthiness.

The Grail myth took shape in the time of the Crusades, when two religious faiths found themselves locked in holy war in Palestine for about two hundred years.

The Templars, or Knights of the Temple, who played a leading part in the Crusades, seemed to manifestly play this role as Grail guardians, as implied or stated in the accounts of three writers on the Grail myth.

The anonymous author of the Perlesvaus and Wolfram in his Parzival were chiefly responsible for identifying the Grail knights with the Order of the Temple.

Founded in AD 1118, the order started from a group of nine men who took the sword to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land.

Other famous connections follow the same pattern, although not all begin from nothing.

Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, composed around the 1200 and 1210, calls the Guardians of the Grail templisen.

I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right, but you can see this here, templisen.

And there is a genuine medieval literary point of contact between Grail guardianship and temple knighthood.

It is fascinating and it deserves to be taken seriously as literature.

But Parzival is not an administrative record of the order and no Templar religious source states that the brothers possessed the Holy Grail.

The Cathar connection is similarly built from proximity and later synthesis.

Templar families and houses existed in Southern France, where dissident Christian movements also existed.

And this is a novel written by Wolfram of Eschenbach, a famous author of the 13th century.

And he writes a novel called Parsifal.

Parsifal does not know much about his family during his childhood.

He learns details about his family and his ancestry throughout the novel from step to step.

And it is interesting that despite of the fact that we are in a fictional text here, the author explicitly returns to the story of Cain and Abel.

In the ninth book of the Parsifal, Parsifal meets his uncle.

His name is Trefritin.

He lives as a hermit.