The author of Der Jüngere Titurel described his work as ‘nothing but a sermon’ (‘niht wan eine lere’), an expression which could as well be used in approximate terms to characterise Wirnt's narratorial stance. Against the notion of Wigalois as a romance merely offering light relief (Unterhaltungsroman), I shall in this chapter consider how Wirnt shaped his romance as a sermon for his times by endorsing the historicity of King Arthur, the better to be able to draw on the fabled king's authority as a role model with whom to link his title hero. I go on to suggest reasons why, despite the fact that his material shares many points of contact with the Grail narratives, Wirnt avoided the motif of the Grail, the notorious ambiguities of that polyvalent symbol being ill-adapted to articulate clearly formulated moral views. There being no precise analogy to Wirnt's authorial role as both entertainer and pedagogue in near-contemporary German tradition (excluding the example of the much later Albrecht), I seek to illuminate his hybrid narratorial role by reference to that thirteenth-century romance in the French tradition which most closely parallels Wigalois in its working methods, namely, the anonymous Durmart Le Galois, a work which has been well described as a ‘mirror-for-princes written in the form of an Arthurian romance’.

The Knight of King Arthur

Wirnt's frequent eulogies of the Arthurian ‘era’ he takes as his moral backdrop indicates that he, unlike Wolfram, viewed the fabled king as a primary locus of chivalric value, available to be cited as a remote standard against which his contemporaries might be berated.