Introduction

Summary

As holds for most medieval poets, most of what we know – or believe we know – of Wolfram derives from what he says in his works. Parzival, in particular, would seem to yield a great deal of information about him, but the problem in constructing even the barest outline of a biography is that Wolfram confronts us with perhaps the earliest example in German of an unreliable narrator, whose many facets contradict one another. He delights in ambiguities, his projection of a narrative persona being just one of many games that Wolfram plays with – and on – his audience. No historical record mentions him, so we may assume he was not of high rank. He claims to be a knight, but knighthood knew many degrees of wealth and poverty, and it is at the lower end of this spectrum that Wolfram, by his own admission, belongs. Poor knights, dependent upon patrons for their livelihood, were the authors of many of the key works of the Middle High German (MHG) ‘classical’ period.

Eschenbach (’ash-brook’) was, and still is, a common name for villages and hamlets over wide stretches of Franconia and Bavaria; we can therefore by no means be certain as to Wolfram’s place of birth. Scholarship has concentrated upon a narrow range of possible sites, and since the nineteenth century a tourist industry has built up around Ober-Eschenbach, south-east of Ansbach, which renamed itself Wolframs-Eschenbach in 1917. Despite the memorial slab dating from the fourteenth century in the church, whose spire is modelled upon the portrait of Wolfram in the Manesse Codex, an undistinguished statue dating from 1861, and an audio-visual museum, Wolframs-Eschenbach’s credentials remain somewhat suspect, charming as the small town is. Wolfram describes himself as a Bavarian (Parzival 121,7), and Wolframs-Eschenbach did not become part of Bavaria until the nineteenth century. The evidence for a dynasty of Eschenbachs there dates from 1268, half a century after Wolfram’s death, and must therefore be viewed with a degree of scepticism.

The Manesse Codex (the ‘GroEe Heidelberger Liederhandschrift’) prefaces the lyrics it attributes to Wolfram with the earliest portrait we possess of him, but this compilation (probably put together in Zurich) dates from the early fourteenth century.