5 - Lohengrin’s Farewell: Knowing Identity

Summary

Introduction: Lohengrin and Genealogy

FOLLOWING THE SUCCESSFUL CONCLISION of Lohengrin’s exploits on the European historical scene, the Swan Knight material becomes the template for the action once again when Elsam’s doubts compel her to ask her husband who he is. Existing perspectives on this final stage in Lohengrin’s story have tended to focus on it as part of a fixed narrative schema in which his departure from Elsam is the necessary consequence of breaking a taboo—in the form of the forbidden question about who he is—that reflects contemporary concerns about genealogical identity. In positing a clear structural division between parts of the text and turning to historical contexts as a guide to interpretation, such approaches extend the problematic reductiveness that has proved to be characteristic of Lohengrin research in the course of this book. This chapter, by contrast, develops a new reading of how Lohengrin’s marriage unravels— one that not only accounts for the prominence of the question that triggers his departure but also brings to light the way in which the need for information is expressed and addressed by characters in the narrated world. The chapter begins by examining the presentation of genealogy with the help of comparison with other texts from the Swan Knight and Melusine traditions, before identifying in more detail what is distinctive about Lohengrin: the final scene of grief and despair in which Lohengrin takes leave of his wife has, it will be argued, the quality of an enactment or performance involving bodies in a spatial setting.

What is at stake is the way in which the possibilities of literary form are exploited to make Lohengrin more than just a response to the challenges posed by tracing genealogies and identifying origins in medieval society. On the one hand, the Swan Knight story had an obvious affinity with these themes, as witnessed, for instance, by the French tradition in which it is used to explain the ancestry of Godfrey of Bouillon, or the debates about the lineage of the house of Brabant in the historiography of the Low Countries. The end of Lohengrin is likewise to be understood in this context: misgivings about her husband’s lineage are what prompt Elsam to insist that he disclose his identity.