Tradition and creativity : narrative elements in Wirnt von Gravenberg's Wigalois and Heinrich von dem Turlin's Diu Crone

Much of the recent literary scholarship concerning the Middle Ages in Germany has focused on the so-called "postclassical" Arthurian romances, i.e., those romances written after the traditional canon of Hartmann, Wolfram, and—to a lesser degree—Gottfried. While most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism, though conceding some high points, is almost unanimous in condemning the postclassical romances as epigonic at best, more recent research has shown that many of the previous critics were too restrictive in their approach to analyzing the later poems, and therefore underestimate, to a considerable degree, the literary skills of the poets involved and the merits of the works themselves.

In order to reassess these later works, copious examples of adventure elements—characters, objects, events, etc.—have been collected from two of the major and best-known postclassical works: Wirnt von Gravenberg's Wigalois, and Heinrich von dem Tarlin's Diu Grône. The examples were catalogued and analyzed according to thematic and structural functions. The data indicate a wider and more varied use of adventure-related topoi and motifs than has been accorded them by most researchers.

Conclusions based on the data confirm the use of traditional elements, but also show that each postclassical poet must have rear ranged them for his own stylistic purposes. The result was a core element, a building block, on which the poet centered his adventures. In this way he produced a narrative technique untried in the German Arthurian genre, since the use of these basic structures led to a great deal more independence and creativity in developing the adventure sequence and establishing specific literary goals in the works. Moreover, these goals dealt with ethical courtly principles. Thus these works represent the whole postclassical genre, and their evidence refutes the contention once held that they were mere portrayals of adventure for its own sake.