3 - Saint and Sinner

Summary

In all cultures there is the story of the person who passes beyond the portal of death and returns with a message for the living, to rescue its shadowy captives or to learn its secrets […] As to Dante's Divine Comedy, so many precursors were found and championed over the years that one might imagine that Dante needed little besides scissors and paste to construct his poetic journey.

From the beginning the poetic imagination has inhabited a middle earth. Above it is the sky with whatever it reveals or conceals: below it is a mysterious place of birth and death from whence animals and plants proceed, and to which they return. There are therefore four primary narrative movements in literature. There are, first, the descent from a higher world; second, the descent to a lower world; third, the ascent from a lower world; and, fourth, the ascent to a higher world. All stories in literature are complications of, or metaphorical derivations from, these four narrative radicals.

The Hero's descensus

‘Saelde’ in the reduced sense of ‘knightly good fortune’ established in the usage of Wirnt, Heinrich von dem Türlin and Ulrich von Zatzikhoven plays a symbolic role (albeit a somewhat circular, tautologous one) whilst the protagonist is establishing parity with his father, but for his spiritual challenges he requires greater resources than the habitual skills of a man-at-arms. In the infernal realms awaiting him lurk adversaries different in kind from the bizarre creations we encounter in the works of Der Stricker, Der Pleier and other ‘post-classical’ authors (a factor not widely acknowledged in discussions of Wigalois). These monsters are taken not from the routine personnel of the matière de Bretagne sequences but from Christian apocalyptic and that large corpus of traditions which has been termed ‘The Divine Comedy before Dante’. Amongst numerous grotesque adversaries surrounded by a particularly sulphurous aura (who would have counted in contemporary terms as descendants of the race of Cain) are a devilish dragon, Pfetan (the eternal representative of existential evil), a centaur, the heathen necromancer, Roaz – a proto-Faustian character in league with the devil, the amazonian Ruel, dubbed ‘the devil's consort’, a figure which later centuries would have termed a ‘witch’, and Karrioz , whose mother is said to have been a wild woman – historically identifiable with Ruel herself in the manner of Beowulf and his dam.