WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH BELONGS TO the great quartet (along with Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, and the anonymous author of the Nibelungenlied) of medieval German narrative poets at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but he is as distinct from them as they are from one another. It is the nature of that distinctiveness that will concern us here, together with the enduring regard in which he is held. The number of manuscripts of his two major works attests to his popularity in the Middle Ages (87 MSS and fragments of Parzival, 76 of Willehalm). In the late thirteenth century he became a literary figure himself in the Wartburgkrieg, the literary evocation of an imagined contest of singers at the court of Hermann von Thüringen. The Meistersinger of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries honored him as one of the founders of their art. His Parzival was printed, in early New High German form, in verse, as late as 1477, but shortly thereafter his works disappeared from view for over two hundred years, until interest in them arose again and some were republished from the original Middle High German manuscripts. Serious scholarly interest in them began around the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the now enormous mass of critical writing on Wolfram has grown steadily since that time.

A small town in Middle Franconia claims to be the birthplace of Wolfram von Eschenbach and, despite the lack of documentary evidence and rival claims of other places in southern Germany, since 1917 it has borne the official designation “Wolframs Eschenbach.”