Wolfram von Eschenbach

I can't imagine a greater hell than spending a week with pleasure in Disneyland.

But I love the fact that at the core of Disneyland in Anaheim, opened by Walt Disney in 1955 originally, was a castle it was the Sleeping Beauty castle a kind of reimagination of Neuschwanstein and Bavaria which was itself a kind of reimagining of the mythical castles described by Wolfram von Eschenbach in his versions of the Arthurian stories so I'm just omnivorous when it comes to castles I suppose I don't love them all but I do love a lot of them

So if you were a Disney fan, you could call your book instead of this.

So if you were a Disney fan, it would be called Morton Bailey, Tales All This Time.

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.

Very briefly, we have the Grail Problem.

The Grail Problem is the problem of the wasteland.

Now, you remember T.S. Eliot wrote a poem around 1925 called The Waste Land, and he actually quotes certain brief phrases from Wolfram von Eschenbach's Spohazephal in relation to this.

What is the Waste Land? In the Grail romance, the Waste Land followed from the wounding of the Grail king, and the whole land was laid waste.

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.

So this is where the stories kind of emerge, and then they become really, really super popular in the Middle Ages, 11th, 12th century.

Uh, legends Chrétien de Troyes and then Wolfram von, Wolfram von Eschenbach write these, these kind of re-imaginings of the Arthurian stories.

Um, and after, uh, particularly in that period, lots of castles start becoming associated with Arthur.

People start looking for a real Arthur.

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.

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.

You mentioned how the sort of Grail romances came out, was it Chrétien de Troyes? Chrétien de Troyes.

And Wolfram von Eschenbach.

Von

Eschenbach.