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The Nibelung story possesses, both in the Norse and in the Middle High German version, a tragic fascination; and a quaint fairy-tale interest, every now and then rising to the charm of a Decameronian novella, is possessed by many of the Keltic tales, whether briefly told in the Mabinogion or lengthily detailed by Chrestien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach.
No job is too small, no order too insignificant for their prompt attention. They have agents all over the country, who pull strings in wolfram and the ruby mines, and have a finger in every mortal thing. I'll say this for them, they're most awfully keen and industrious, and stick at nothing to earn the nimble rupee, underselling when they can, and grabbing contracts and trade secrets.
Exhausted he drops on a projection of rock, but when Wolfram would seat himself beside him he waives him violently off. "Do not come near me! The place where I rest is accursed!... Hear, then, Wolfram, hear!" He had started, he relates, on his pilgrimage to Rome with such passion of repentance in his heart as never penitent felt before. An angel had shattered in him the pride of sin.
The singers in turn take their harps and pour forth their improvisations; Wolfram sings of the chaste ideal which he worships from afar, Walther of the pure fount of virtue from which he draws his inspiration, and the warrior Biterolf praises the chivalrous passion of the soldier.
Forbid his insolence!" cry the incensed nobles, who had suffered Biterolf's personal attack, but find insufferable this of the over-splendid, over-bearing, over-confident youth. Biterolf's sword has leaped from its scabbard. The Landgrave orders it back. "Preserve peace, you singers!" A hush falls as Wolfram takes the floor again.
Besides this, my wife interfered in the matter, and the singers who played Tannhauser and Wolfram at once put themselves under her wing. She really succeeded, too, in working on my humanitarian feelings with regard to one of her proteges, a poor tenor who had been badly bullied by the conductor till then.
Famished and footsore, Tannhauser staggers after the band of pilgrims who have returned to their homes with sins forgiven. His greeting of Wolfram is harsh, but the good minstrel's sympathy constrains him to tell the story of his vain pilgrimage. Salvation forfeited, naught is left for him but to seek surcease of suffering in the arms of Venus.
The Morien is for me a welcome piece of evidence in support of the theory that sees in the poem of Wolfram von Eschenbach the survival of a genuine variant of the Perceval story, differing in important particulars from that preserved by Chretien de Troyes, and based upon a French original, now, unfortunately, lost.
With the failure of her hopes she feels that the last link which binds her to earth is broken. Committing her soul to the Virgin, she takes her way slowly back to the castle, the hand of death already heavy upon her, after bidding farewell to Wolfram in a passage which, though not a word is spoken, is perhaps more poignantly pathetic than anything Wagner ever wrote.
In literature we have many allusions: the mulatto king, Feirifis, was one of Wolfram von Eschenbach's heroes; Prester John furnished endless lore; Othello, the warrior, and the black king represented by medieval art as among the three wise men, and the various black Virgin Marys' all show legendary knowledge of what African civilization was at that time doing.
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