The name of Wolfram von Eschenbach, certainly outside academic circles, is known primarily for his Parzival, a remarkable adaptation of the unfinished Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes. In it, Wolfram moves the Arthurian romance into a new dimension and demonstrates his power as narrator and thinker. For a long time his other great poem, Willehalm, remained in the shadow of its predecessor, despite some early work by German scholars of the status of Samuel Singer (1918), Ludwig Wolff (1934) and Bodo Mergell (1936), but a ground-breaking study by Joachim Bumke (1959) brought it more to the fore. Even if many of Bumke's arguments have been questioned, not least by himself, in the light of subsequent scholarship, this …
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Citation: Gibbs, Marion E.. "Willehalm". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 January 2004 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=14452, accessed 21 November 2024.]
