Parzival, Peredur, Black Sheep, and Spiritual Balance

Inspired by Katlyn's post a little while ago comparing the "discovering the knights" scenes in Parzival and Chretien de Troyes' Perceval, I went back to the Welsh story "Peredur Son of Evrawg," which, as best as anybody can determine, stands in about the same relationship to Chretien's poem as Wolfram's does, with the added twists that a) it may draw upon other French works than Chretien's specifically and b) it probably also directly preserves much of the Celtic material that formed Chretien's source. In any event, compared to the sprawling but controlled and unified Parzival, "Peredur" tends to disappoint, wandering disjointedly until it hurriedly resolves its Gral-elements (the Bloody Lance and, standing in for the Gral itself, a severed head) in a rushed and unsatisfying conclusion. (They are relics of a slain cousin - as in Wolfram's version, Peredur runs into family all over the place - whom Peredur must avenge.) En route, however, we get a great many enigmatic, beautiful, and thoroughly Celtic scenes. I want to bring up one in particular, occuring while Peredur is on his way to kill a monster (in the middle of a larger quest to kill another "serpent"):

"Peredur rode on towards a river valley whose edges were forested, with level meadows on both sides of the river; on one bank there was a flock of white sheep, and on the other a flock of black sheep. When a white sheep bleated a black sheep would cross the river and turn white, and when a black sheep bleated a white sheep would cross the river and turn black. On the bank of the river he saw a tall tree: from roots to crown one half was aflame and the other green with leaves" (243).

It would be almost sinful to subject something this weird and wonderful to "interpretation." Instead, I merely want to note, more or less in passing, the striking congruence between the imagery of this scene and not only the specific imagery but also the broader thematics of Wolfram's work. (Wolfram bizarrely echoes the final image here during Trevrizent's description of the exotic locales he visited during his chivalric days: "I have...ridden many fine jousts at Agremontin, below its mountain, where if you issue your challenge on one side fiery men sally forth, whereas on the other the jousters you see are not on fire" [252].)

The black and white Welsh sheep ceaselessly transforming into one another, and the hybrid, half-burning tree, could serve as a reification of Wolfram's vast and complex concern with blackness and whiteness, their interplay and mutual transitions, and the hybridity which can be created by these interactions. Established in the poem's opening paragraph, this thematic network obviously surfaces in its physical descriptions of race and religion (themselves not equivalent or synonymous: Belacane has "seen many a fair-skinned heathen" [27]) and surfaces again in its spiritual dynamics: "Light and Darkness and how different they are" (72). We have talked a little bit in class about these corresponding spiritual and physical oppositions, and about the degree to which the one maps onto the other - the extent to which racial or external religious difference concretizes inferiority, "perfidy," "infidelity," or even greater degrees of inner "blackness" or evil.

The answer seems to be, "Not a great deal," if indeed at all, but by using the terms and images that he does Wolfram makes it an unavoidable and recurrent question. Very interestingly, the defeated parties in a tournament "had had their hides tanned for them with kicks and cudgels, their skins were black with bruises" (48). This seems to encode defeat or inferiority in black skin but at the same time diminishes its exotic inflection and its essentialism: Christian Europeans can, through misdeeds or failures, become black in spirit and, effectively, in hue. Against this evidentiary molehill must be set the mountains dealing with Belacane and other "heathens," which, again as we've discussed, almost approach an idea of natural piety and non- (or extra-) Christian salvation. Cundrie and her emphatic, "You think me monstrous, yet I am less monstrous, far, than you!" (164), is of course relevant here, and generally Wolfram takes pains to affirm and describe how external appearance and internal virtues or qualities do not correlate: "When a woman [and a man too, it seems] acts to the best of her nature you will not find me surveying her complexion or probing what shields her heart: if she be proofed within her breast her good name is safe from harm" (16). Yet both Belacane and Cundrie (who, we learn, does come from a "heathen" realm, "the land of Tribalibot beside the River Ganges," where her people "grow...from dire mischance" [263]) have their complexions surveyed at great length, nor does Wolfram allow us to forget their details. (For its part, "Peredur" is sprinkled with "black men" of generally hostile or antisocial tendencies, although its monstrous Cundrie-analogue transforms at the end into "a yellow-haired lad" [256] - in fact, another cousin of Peredur's.)

The spiritual trajectory of the poem, centered on the fall and redemption of Parzival, gradually overshadows these racial and religious aspects, and although the physical and spiritual still do not come anywhere close to an equation, physical and external differences do seem to become inflected, more and more, along spiritual lines. Anfortas' devastating wound is dealt by "a heathen born of Ethnise," who, tellingly, provides a parallel to Parzival's fallen state, seeking the Gral while alienated from God: "This pagan was convinced that his valour would earn him the Gral....He sought chivalric encounters in different countries, crossing seas and lands with no other thought than to win the Gral" (244). On the other hand, Trevrizent chalks up Anfortas' suffering equally to his own sin and error, and the pagan who wounded him models Parzival's current spiritual condition. Once again, heathendom and blackness are not essential qualities and do not lie beyond the potential range of Christian Europeans. Yet on the other hand again, that pagan does not get Parzival's opportunity for penitence and redemption: "let us not waste our tears on him" (244).

I won't try to pursue this immensely complex topic much further, but I want to touch on one more thing. In her post on Parzival's spiritual otherness, Ines talks about Parzival's journey towards a state "that contains a fine balance between a feminine and masculine principle, light and dark, heaven and hell, the polarities Wolfram is constantly invoking." The importance of this state of balance and hybridity in the poem can hardly be overemphasized: it is the state described in the opening paragraph ("such a man may yet make merry, for Heaven and Hell have equal part in him" [15]), it is Feirefiz's state, and, insofar as the spiritual and physical form another polarity which the poem has yet to reconcile or resolve, it is the state of the poem itself. Trevrizent's discourses establish the Incarnation as still another example of such hybridity: "God Himself took on a countenance like that of the first virgin's son, a condescension from His sublimity" (237); "[God] is a light that shines through all things....Thoughts are darkness unlit by any beam. But of its nature, the Godhead is translucent, it shines through the wall of darkness" (238). Finally, it seems to be the condition of or represented by the Gral itself, "left...on earth" (232) by the Neutral Angels, "those who did not take sides" (240).

However, Wolfram makes equally clear that this balance is not an end state. It prevails within the world, but the spiritual trajectory charted by the poem ultimately seems to lead out of it, into unambiguous light and salvation or into their opposites. As Trevrizent notes of the Neutral Angels, "I do not know whether God forgave them or damned them in the end" (240). Apparently, though, He did one or the other. That divided tree will either burn down or flourish into complete greenery; those sheep can't keep crossing back and forth forever. Their complex hybridities and transmogrifications prevail only during the time of Peredur's transit past.

As one final wrinkle, in Wolfram's conceit his poem itself has been translated from "the tale in heathenish script" discovered by "Master Kyot....It helped him that he was a baptized Christian - otherwise this tale would still be unknown. No infidel art would avail us to reveal the nature of the Gral and how one came to know its secrets" (232). Wolfram represents his own poem as itself a black sheep in the act of crossing the river to become white.

Quotations from "Peredur Son of Evrawg" from The Mabinogion. Trans. Jeffrey Gantz. London: Penguin Books, 1976. 217-257.