The Medieval German Lohengrin: Narrative Poetics in the Story of the Swan Knight by Alastair Matthews (review)

The anonymous romance Lohengrin, dated to the late thirteenth century, is a stanzaic work extending to 7,670 lines. This longest medieval German version of the Swan-Knight tale is a narrative hybrid combining romance, legend, and historiography. The story of the eponymous protagonist is embedded in that of the Ottonian emperor Henry I as known from medieval German chronicles. It is the tale of a Grail knight who arrives on a swan, defends the heroine in a judicial combat, marries her on condition that she not inquire concerning his identity, and, when she does, leaves her to return to the Grail kingdom.

In his study, Alastair Matthews assesses and questions the current scholarly consensus that Lohengrinis a "post-classical" medieval work characterized by hybridity of form and content, by a narrative blending of historicity and fiction as revealed in the complementary ruler figures, the historical emperor Henry I, and the fictional protagonist of the romance. The aim of his book, thus the author, "is to show that Lohengrinhas a unity of narrative and textual form that is obscured when hybridity is assumed and overlooked when historical reference is foregrounded" (p. 4). He argues that despite the derivative elements of the narrative, chiefly the incorporation of material from the Wartburgkriegat the beginning and the Sächsische Weltchroniktoward the end of the romance, "there is a characteristic concept of narrativity and textuality behind them" (p. 11).

Lohengrinopens by positioning Wolfram von Eschenbach, the author of Parzival, as the narrator of the Swan Knight romance during the legendary "Sängerkrieg," the Minnesängercompetition at the court of Landgrave Hermann I of Thuringia. The initial stanzas of Lohengrinderive from the anonymous Wartburgkrieg, in which Wolfram von Eschenbach and the sorcerer Clinschor engage in a poetic duel. As Matthews notes, the Wartburgkrieg"is the primary point of intertextual reference for understanding the beginning of Lohengrin" (p. 40). Subsequently, the Sächsische Weltchronikis appropriated to place the plot of the romance in the context of the Ottonian emperors. Far from revealing the derivative nature of Lohengrin, both the Wartburgkriegand the Sächsische Weltchronik, thus Matthews, are fully integrated into the fabric of the romance.

To buttress his argument here, and also subsequently in the nonderivative sections of Lohengrin, Mattews engages in close reading throughout. As evidence of the integration of the borrowed passages from the Wartburgkriegin Lohengrin, the author adduces, for example, the image of water expressing religious insight in the competition between Wolfram and Clinschor, which he links to Lohengrin's traversal of the sea on a swan, believed to be an angel, to rescue Elsam of Brabant and to defend the empire against the enemies of Christendom (pp. 37-38). Despite the fact that the verbal links of these and other Wartburgkriegpassages to the subsequent story of Lohengrin are separated by many strophes, Matthews nevertheless claims that "they most certainly are drawn together … by the verbal and associated thematic contexts they share" (p. 38). Unlike the Wartburgkriegmaterial, which establishes Wolfram von Eschenbach as the narrator of Lohengrin's story, the Sächsische Weltchronikprovides the setting in which the Lohengrin tale is embedded. Here, Wolfram's voice is explicit as he takes on "the testimonial and commentative functions of the narrator" (p. 49). Matthews concludes that the foregrounded speaking voice of the narrator supports the link between the appropriated matter from the chronicle tradition toward the end of the romance and the Wartburgkriegat the beginning, indeed the entirety of the Lohengrin story.

In the chapters devoted to "Lohengrin's Journey," "Lohengrin's Battles," and "Lohengrin's Farewell" (pp. 63-135), Matthews continues the close textual analysis. As in the two chapters dealing with the Wartburgkriegmaterial and chronicle...