Unity

HOW DO WE READ NARRATIVE across temporal and cultural distance? That, fundamentally, is the question this book has explored with reference to Lohengrin. Behind the work there lies a story that is at once some eight centuries distant yet part of the present, where it has both left physical traces in material culture and been repeatedly used and reused in allusions and creative reinventions. The preceding chapters, therefore, have not only developed a new reading of a medieval German text that has in the past been treated in reductive and derivative terms: they have also engaged with problems of narrative and textual unity that are so pressing precisely because the story is not one that can be conveniently abandoned in an isolated niche of medieval literary history. Unless one wishes to deal with the modern legacy of material such as this in an intellectual and cultural vacuum, or chooses to ignore it entirely, it is necessary to see it in terms of where it has come from and how it has evolved—and to do that one needs to be aware of how one is reading, of how narrative expectations and the compositional practices with which they are intertwined differ from and relate to modern ones. In that spirit, this Conclusion draws together the findings about Lohengrin that have taken shape in the course of the book before considering their implications for the concepts of coherence and cohesion that were set up as a framework in the Introduction.

The book began by describing the challenges that Lohengrin poses to the reader and how they have been reflected in critical responses to the text stretching from Jacob Grimm's remarks in the early nineteenth century to the present day. These views of Lohengrin are closely linked to the various points of reference in relation to which the text can be situated: an earlier author figure (Wolfram von Eschenbach), prior textual material (the Sächsische Weltchronik and the Wartburgkrieg), and historical reference of various kinds (contemporary interests in rulership and genealogy, expressed by situating events in the reign of Henry I).