Reading the Story of the Swan Knight in Lohengrin

THE TALE OF THE MYSTERIOUS KNIGHT who is carried across the water by a swan to the woman he saves and marries is one of the great German-language narrative complexes. The operatic refashioning in Wagner's Lohengrin is probably the best-known version of the material, but it has left its mark in a far wider range of contexts. They extend, for instance, from literary and epistolary responses to life in West Germany following the Second World War (Heinrich Böll) to the inclusion of the story of the Swan Children, which explains the origins of the knight and bird as siblings, in the fairy-tale collections of the nineteenth century (Ludwig Bechstein). Behind these modern examples there lies a rich and complex medieval tradition, and it is to this that the work introduced in this book belongs: the Middle High German Lohengrin, by no means the only medieval German version of the story of the Swan Knight, but arguably the most striking. It was written, in all likelihood in the latter part of the thirteenth century, by an otherwise unknown Bavarian author by the name of Nouhuwius or Nouhusius; at its heart is the tale of the hero who defends Elsam of Brabant in a judicial combat, marries her on condition that she does not ask him to identify himself, and returns to the Grail when she breaks this commandment.

Lohengrin captures the imagination because of the text and narrative it constructs around this core consisting of the forbidden question about the hero's identity. It stands out, for example, because of the appearance of Wolfram von Eschenbach as narrator at the court of Landgrave Hermann I of Thuringia; the swan that accompanies Lohengrin as animal, angel, and object of representation; and Lohengrin's defense of Christianity in the battles of Riade and the Garigliano, where he is joined by Saints Peter and Paul, after he saves Elsam. The distinctiveness of these features becomes clear when Lohengrin is set alongside the other versions of the Swan Knight story in the German vernacular. It had previously been introduced to a German literary public in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, Konrad von Würzburg's Schwanritter, and Albrecht's Jüngerer Titurel.