When Willehalm’s rather, mother, and brothers, who are
present at court, hear what has happened at Aliscans and
Oransche, they immediately pledge help. Eventually,
Willehalm’s anger is appeased by the intervention of his
niece, Alyze; Louis, whose life had also been threatened
by Willehalm, is mollifi ed so that he, too, offers to send
imperial forces under Willehalm’s command to raise the
siege at Oransche.
Before setting out for Oransche with the French
troops, Willehalm obtains from Louis the services of
Rennewart, a huge young heathen who had been work-
ing as a kitchen boy, having rejected baptism. Rennewart
is eager to fi ght, believing that his relatives had refused
to ransom him after he was abducted by merchants.
He asks for a gigantic club, bound with iron bands,
as his weapon, but he forgets it repeatedly on the way
to Oransche. (In Aliscans, Rainouras is a burlesque
fi gure who eventually dominates the fi ghting in the
second battle. Wolfram’s Rennewart, however, despite
some boorish acts, is portrayed as a young nobleman
in undeserved circumstances. He is actually Gyburg’s
long-lost brother!)
Willehalm hastens back to Oransche with the French
troops, only to discover that Terramer’s forces had
withdrawn to the coast where the air was better without
having stormed the fortress successfully. Gyburg and
her meager forces had been able to hold them off. One
by one, Willehalm’s father and his brothers arrive with
their armies, and the stage is set for the second battle.
However, before it begins, a meeting of all the leaders
takes place, at which all voice their resolve and sup-
port for the battle. Gyburg alone adds a temporizing
voice. Tearfully she expresses her sorrow that she is the
cause for the huge loss of life on both sides and makes
a moving plea for the Christians to spare the heathens,
if possible.
In the ensuing battle the Christians are victorious, but
the loss of life on both sides is immense. Rennewart,
who had forcibly “persuaded” the wavering French not
to desert, plays a leading role in the victory. Terramer
manages to escape to his ships, and the expected con-
frontation between Rennewart and his father does not
take place. Indeed, when the battle is over Rennewart is
missing. Willehalm grieves at the apparent loss of Ren-
newart and about the terrible slaughter that has occurred.
In a gesture of respect for the noble heathens, he gives
orders to have their fallen kings embalmed and buried
according to their own rites. At this point the narrative
breaks off.
Most scholars believe that Willehalm is a fragment,
basing their argument on the fact that too many narra-
tive strands are left untied. Others feel that, for whatever
reasons, Wolfram may have been unable to fi nish it and
devised an emergency conclusion (the Notdach theory).
Still others maintain that Willehalm is complete as it
stands, that with the tragic quality of the poem Wolfram
has put an entirely new meaning into the substance
of his source and that for him any continuation of the
Rennewart story had become irrelevant. One further,
more recent position is that Wolfram intended it to be
a fragment. No matter how one looks at the ending, or
lack thereof, Willehalm is still a powerfully moving
work, dealing with problems that have been with us, as
Wolfram says: “since Jesus was plunged into the Jordan
to be baptized” (Willehalm 4, 28f). Wolfram seems to
have been deeply affected himself by the tragedy of
it all, if one can judge by his numerous self-refl ective
remarks throughout the poem.
The two fragments usually called Titurel from the
name of the old Grail King in the fi rst line of the fi rst
fragment deal with the two young lovers, Schionatu-
lander and Sigune, from Wolfram’s Parzival. It is as if
Wolfram attempted to fl esh out the briefl y mentioned
story of their tragic love. Written in four long-line
strophes that resemble the Nibelungenlied strophes
to a limited degree, the fi rst fragment deals with the
discovery of the mutual love of the two young people,
and the second fragment describes an idyll in the woods
that is interrupted by the catching of a hunting dog who
had been running through the woods trailing a fantasti-
cally elaborate leash with a story depicted on it. Sigune
wishes to read the story to its end, but the dog escapes as
she loosens the leash to read more and carries the leash
away. She promises Schionatulander her love as a reward
for retrieving the leash. We know from Parzival that
Schionatulander gets killed in the attempt, and Sigune
is left mourning over his dead body when Parzival meets
her. A later poet named Albrecht (von Scharfenberg?)
took on the task of completing Titurel, and he did so
with a vengeance. There are over 6,000 strophes in his
so-called Jüngerer Titurel, compared with Wolfram’s
170! Although it is poetically inferior, Albrecht’s work
was thought for a long time to be Wolfram’s because
he identifi es himself as Wolfram early on in the work,
disclosing his own name only at almost the very end.
There are many problems in Titurel. These include
the manuscript tradition, the precise text of the poem,
and the relationship of the two fragments to each other.
Even the theme of love is treated strangely, portray-
ing the exuberance and joy of the naive young lovers
trying to act so properly as courtly lovers, yet with a
background of impending tragedy on the basis of family
history. It is a work of changing moods with somberness
predominating.
Wolfram’s lyric poems generally describe the part-
ing of lovers at dawn and follow a tradition found in
Provençal and Old French poetry. For the most part
the lady is the dominant fi gure. She is the one who is
awake as dawn is breaking and must wake her lover so
that he can leave without being seen. But Wolfram alsoWOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH