CMS Convivium: Shami Ghosh, Puzzling over Parzival, or How to be Good in a Bad, Bad World

Contrary to appearances, Wolfram von Eschenbach was not a strange-looking bunny. We don't really know anything about him, and his work is so weird it's plausible a strange-looking bunny produced it. 'Parzival' is the first German Grail Romance—a story of a quest for the Holy Grail!—though it is also many, many more things than that. This talk will focus on one oddity, frequently noted: it is not made very clear how or why Parzival—who seems to be an idiot—manages to get to be Grail King; and on another bug/feature of the text, that Arthurian knighthood, chivalry, courtly values and all that Ivanhoe / Camelot stuff which is so retro these days is presented as being, well, very retro in those days too, in the sense of unreal and people dressing up in a pretend world, with the real world of knighthood shown to be nasty, brutish, sometimes short, filled with the danger of violent death, often vulgar, misogynistic, full of killing, knights abusing ladies, and Parzival himself guilty of being Very Bad. What does it all mean?