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G R E G O R I U S Introduction Like the Arthurian epics Erec and Iwein, and possibly also Poor Heinrich, Gregorius is modeled after a French prototype. But whereas the literary ancestry of the Arthurian epics is fairly, though not indisputably, clear—Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec and Yvain ou Chevalier au Lion—Gregorius can be likened to a child whose resemblance to its parents is clear, but where because of dissimilarities one suspects that it bears a closer likeness to a vanished generation. The Old French archetype La Vie du Pape Saint Grégoire—if we judge from its numerous versions and rich manuscript tradition—obviously enjoyed great popularity . While Hartmann’s Gregorius shares the basic plot of the French work, no single version can be shown to have served as the direct model. In fact, Gregorius shows similarities with varying versions, leading to the conjecture that an UrGregorius existed at some point. Bearing in mind the popularity of the tale, however , one cannot dismiss the possibility that Hartmann based his story on an oral version, one narrated in either Old French or Middle High German. But considering Hartmann’s apparent ability to read or understand Old French, the likelihood exists that he came into contact with a French source, probably at court. Whatever the exemplar of Gregorius, we can rest assured that Hartmann’s use of it, as with Erec and Iwein, amounts more to a reworking or adaptation than to a strict translation. Compared to the extant Old French versions, Gregorius is between one-third and one-half again as long, showing once more that for Hartmann the French original served only as a foundation on which he could use his poetic skill to erect a vastly different structure. Regarding the genre of Gregorius, perhaps one can best define it as neither fish nor fowl. Although the title of the French version, La Vie du Pape Saint Grégoire, reads like a typical medieval vita that details the exemplary life of a holy man or woman, the saint’s life thus depicted is fictitious—there was no such Saint H A R T M A N N V O N A U E 166 Gregory—and most of the usual hagiographic trappings are missing, even though the typically edifying, didactic tone rings through quite clearly. Some contemporaries obviously viewed Gregorius as a religious legend, hence its fairly quick translation into Latin and its inclusion into collections of saints’ lives. Coming from a secular author, however, and hardly intended originally for an ecclesiastical or monastic audience, and with its depiction of the knightly life, Gregorius can scarcely be claimed as a typical legenda. Perhaps we have in Gregorius a further step on the road to the prose tale. While the dating and chronology of Hartmann’s work are not without controversy , one can fairly securely posit that Gregorius follows the Lament and Erec, perhaps toward the end of the 1180s, and this positioning of the work has led to one aspect of its interpretation, that Gregorius is “anti-Erec,” or anti-chivalry, a rejection by a maturer author of his earlier work, namely Erec, but also, by implication, a repudiation of some ideas expressed in The Lament and his early lyric poetry. Older literary criticism of Gregorius dealt frequently with Gregorius’s guilt or lack thereof. More recent investigations have generally left this question aside, focusing instead on other aspects of the work, although the matter of guilt does resurface and in the end cannot go unanswered. The thread of individual self-realization, a kind of rite de passage, ties Hartmann’s major works together. Gregorius, moving as he does from infancy through boyhood to manhood and finally to a precocious “middle age” of insight and wisdom, comes closest among Hartmann’s characters to the Bildungsfigur of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. Perhaps the interpretive focus should not rest so heavily on the incest of Gregorius’s parents or on his own incest with his mother—for these acts, given their mitigating circumstances, seem “pardonable” to both medieval and modern thinking—or even on his own superbia at leaving the monastic world, but rather on the journey that Gregorius undertakes, both physically and spiritually, on the path that is mentioned both in the prologue and toward the end of the tale, when Gregorius seeks to do penance in the “wilderness.” This path may be seen as the path we all take in life, or can...

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