Wirnt von Grafenberg

Wirnt von Grafenberg was a Middle High German poet of the thirteenth century.

Biography

Grafenberg was a Bavarian nobleman who between 1202 and 1205 wrote an epic, entitled Wigalois, which describes the adventures of Gawain's son, the name being a corruption of Guinglain le Galois. Wirnt took his material from the French romance Le bel inconnu of Renaud de Beaujeu, and used it with great freedom. Though extravagant and didactic, the poem is one of the best romances of the Arthurian cycle written in Germany, apart from the work of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Hartmann von Aue.

The Wigalois manuscript produced in 1372 (MS LTK 537) is held at Leiden University Libraries and a digital version is available on its Digital Collections.

A prose version was made toward the close of the fifteenth century and printed at Augsburg in 1493. Wigalois was edited by F. Pfeiffer (Leipzig, 1847).

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Wirnt von Grafenberg" . New International Encyclopedia. 1905. This work in turn cites:
  • F. Saran, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Litteratur, vol. xxi. (Halle, 1896).