Broken and Remade: Honor, Emotion, and the sippe at Munleun in Wolfram's Willehalm

Clad in the hauberk of a fallen foe, unwashed and unwelcome, the margrave Willehalm arrives at the royal court in Munleun to seek the aid of his lord and family. His lands have been ravaged, his kinsmen slain, and his beloved wife besieged, yet before Willehalm receives the assistance he so fervently desires, he will break with all decorum, cast aspersions upon the honor of his lord, and attempt the murder of his own sister. In a tale rife with death and bloodshed, featuring a grand siege, an impossible flight, disguised and forgotten relatives, star-crossed lovers, and not one but two great battles between masses of Christian and heathen chivalry, it may come as a surprise to find that a family squabble turning on social precedence and decorum occupies so prominent a position. Yet even in comparison with the battlefield heroics and tragic deaths that both precede and follow closely upon the hero's visit to Munleun, the events that there transpire fascinate and occasionally confound the reader through the powerful emotions on display and the masterful increase and release of tension.

The centrality of emotion and of emotion display within Willehalm's scenes at Munleun is undeniable: grief and anger saturate the narrative and color nearly every action described. Here, a multistage negotiation of honor and status is initiated by powerful displays of emotion, each marshaled against the other in turn. Once Willehalm's initial plea for aid and its attendant status claim have been rejected, all of the social ties that bind the honor group together become vulnerable, and must be both renegotiated and reaffirmed. This negotiation is not separable from the larger conflict of which it is a part, and the events within it must be understood against the necessity of consolidating the honor group in the face of external threat, even as the rapidly escalating internecine conflict continues to expose fault lines in the royal court's unstable hierarchy of esteem.

In order to understand the communicative content of the emotions that so dominate the scene at Munleun, we must learn how to read them as components of a customary process of context-dependent social interaction. Here, two aspects are crucial: First, the relationship between the expression of emotion and the economy of honor as symbolic capital so fundamental to the formation of identity and status within the world of the medieval court, and second, the position of these expressions within the conventionalized practice (or at least the conventionalized narrative of practice) governing dispute. The overarching drive and principle behind such semiformalized dispute, and the unceasing imperative of the honor economy, is the preservation of honor integrity, the integrity of the noncorporeal but eminently fragile social self. It is this that brings Willehalm to Munleun, and that lies at the heart of the secondary dispute that subsequently arises within the royal court. As this second conflict plays out, the honor group itself is shattered and reformed through the performance of emotions, laying bare the shifting bonds and processes of interaction that constitute group and individual identity within the honor group and the sippe, the kinship group, that constitutes its core.¹

I

The emotions that suffuse Willehalm reach extreme heights of intensity during the margrave's appearance at Munleun, where the warrior pivots wildly from murderous rage to tearful sorrow, occasioning equally extreme reactions from his assembled audience. These representations of emotion in Willehalm as in medieval literature more generally are best understood as symbolic communication. More specifically, these displays of emotion are social mechanisms functioning as components of a complex traditional system of status negotiation.

Here, I intend the display of emotion to be understood broadly, incorporating gesture, verbal expression, and somatic manifestation. While some scholars of medieval German literature have, like Ann Marie Rasmussen, been careful to distinguish between different forms of emotional expression and its staging,² or, like C. Stephen Jaeger, have argued for a division between inward "feelings" and public "sensibilities,"³ I here follow Katharina Philipowski in treating all emotion in medieval literature as the signa...