In Search of the Arthurian Third MAT THIA S MEY ER Univ ersity of Vien na In this essay, I will start with some preliminary remarks, followed by an interpretation of Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein and Heinrich von dem Türlin’s Diu Crône; by way of transition between these two main parts I will add some general remarks on grail romances. But let me begin with some truths (or truisms) more or less universally acknowledged: for medieval Arthurian verse romances, especially German ones, scholars have agreed that their basic construction, their world-view, is grounded in a dichotomy between the Arthurian (courtly) world and the non-Arthurian world. Basically, the trajectory of an Arthurian romance normally follows the protagonist, an Arthurian knight, through different stations in the non-Arthurian world; his task is either to vanquish what he finds or integrate it into the Arthurian world. Which route is taken depends on a further, dichotomist construction of the non-Arthurian world, which is either courtly, or connected to some kind of otherworld. 1 In Hartmann’s Erec, for example, the eponymous hero befriends the dwarf Guivreiz; in Diu Crône by Heinrich von dem Türlin, Gawein ultimately turns Gasozein into a knight of the Arthurian court; Hartmann’s Iwein and Stricker’s Daniel become rulers of countries with otherworldly characteristics and dispose of their predecessors; dwarves and giants are regularly chastened and/ or killed. There hardly seems to be room for a different possibility, and if one is presented, as with the father of the giants in Stricker’s Daniel, it is marginalized. The father of the giants becomes the ruler of a country that cannot be entered from the outside and hence plays no further role. There is, at first glance, no room for a Third figure (or a figure of the Third) in this construction, especially since the one character that is able to move between the two worlds, the protagonist, is deeply rooted in Arthurian society. A locus classicus of a figure of the Third is, of course, the love triangle. But again, in the German Arthurian verse romances (and most of the verse romances in other vernaculars) this figure of a Third is mostly absent, since their narrative trajectory leads their protagonists from love to a marriage that stands at the end of the text and is in itself not narrated. The two archetypal romances of adultery, the Tristan story and the Lancelot-Ginevra romances, are either not really Arthurian and follow, even if Arthur makes an 296 Matthias Meyer appearance, a different narrative scheme, or they are related to the Arthurian prose tradition which, again, follows a completely different set of rules. The one exception is the Charrette by Chretien de Troyes, which, left unfinished by its original author, was furnished with a rather pedestrian ending by a continuator who negated all of the possibilities opened up by the love triangle. Tellingly, this text was not translated into German. Applying to Arthurian romances the instruments of interpretation offered by theories of the Third is nonetheless intriguing. I am particularly interested in cases where a Third is part of the Arthurian society or evolves from it and thus calls into question the basic tenets of this society, or at least opens possibilities for thinking about its exclusions. I will now look at some aspects of triangulation that are relevant for my questions and then follow my general remarks with a discussion of two examples. My main focus is on the German tradition, but I will also keep other vernaculars in mind. Central to my analysis is one of the stock figures of Arthurian romances, Gawein (Meyer, «Walewein/ Gawan as Hero» 70-74; Schmitz 138-43, 323-25; Zudrell), who is usually considered an archetypal embodiment of everything Arthurian (and also, in the grail romances, of Arthurian limitations). However, in my readings I will argue that Gawein, while fulfilling all these roles, is also, at least in pivotal moments, a figure that transgresses these limitations. The limitations arise either from the social code of the Arthurian courtly society which prohibits certain actions or through the strictures of the genre, e.g., the negation of death for the core figures of each romance. It has been noted - and I agree - that a figure of the Third does not have to be a literary character (Koschorke 18). 2 Although in literary texts it is very tempting to restrict the Third to such a personalized figure, I will also bear in mind the concept of a Third space (cf. Roth), a spatial metaphor for hybridity, but which must have a meaning different from its established use in postcolonial theory when applied to medieval literature, though it retains its characteristic of openness. In general, the figure of the Third is, for the purpose of this paper, something that is not solely related to the Arthurian or anti-Arthurian world, but also something that transgresses either side of this utterly stable boundary - stable, because the genre is fixed on this boundary. The mere act of transgressing this boundary is not enough to characterize something as a figure of the Third, since these transgressions actually often only enforce the boundary. One of the requirements for a figure of the Third should be that s/ he (if it is a literary character) actually transfers (or thematizes) elements of another world within the boundaries of the world s/ he comes from. In Search of the Arthurian Third 297 Finally, there is one precaution to add. By starting from the consensus of a dichotomous conception of the Arthurian world, I am nevertheless imposing a modern interpretation on the medieval text - an interpretation governed by a structuralist, dualistic perspective. Theories of the Third are poststructuralist and/ or postmodern because they try to break down structuralist binaries. However, I am not so sure that these binaries adequately reflect medieval positions, as the communis opinio will have it. The medieval world was, to be sure, governed by Christian binaries like Heaven and Hell, civitas dei and civitas diaboli. On the other hand, such binary thinking could be seen as Manichean and thus as heretical. Furthermore, the Trinity and other triads always lurk beyond medieval binaries. 3 Therefore, a search for figures of the Third in medieval texts will certainly lead to results, even if these are not identical to modern realizations. One easily recognizable Figure of the Third within the Arthurian world is the seneschal Keie. He is the opposite of what Arthurian knights should be, yet nevertheless an integral part of the Arthurian court (Haupt; Baisch 159-65, 172-73). Keie can best be (and has been) described as a rudimentary trickster figure. Tricksters are part of nearly all mythologies; they are either messengers of gods or semi-divine figures that are able to transgress boundaries between gods and the world, between gods and the underworld, etc. They are also prone to committing mischievous acts both as petty revenge and on a large scale. As a trickster, Keie is the embodiment of the Other (albeit on a small scale) within Arthur’s court. He is therefore especially suited to identify and negotiate with the Other. This is the reason behind a strange narrative convention: it is always Keie who first tries an adventure that comes to Arthur’s court, although he usually is not able to succeed and the hero has to step in. (This is logical, since Keie as a trickster is part of the Other as well and therefore cannot vanquish it, whereas the protagonist, who is no trickster, can). 4 Keie seems to adhere to an archetype of a figure of the Third. Another archetype of modern literature is the rival lover in a love triangle. But I have already ruled out the romances of adultery as a topic for my essay, as Arthurian verse romances (at least the German ones) tend to end in marriage. It is one of the staple claims in the scholarship that on his way through the adventures, the Arthurian protagonist negotiates between the claims of an absolute, personal love and the claims of society. In an earlier article I argued that Arthurian romances lack the vocabulary to represent love and hence ultimately ignore it in favor of marriage (Meyer, «Versuch über die Schwierigkeiten des Artusromans, über Liebe zu erzählen» 168-69). 5 While I still subscribe to the view that Arthurian romances have a certain difficulty with 298 Matthias Meyer love, I would now concede that they do start with something resembling romantic love before ending up in - unnarrated, or only briefly summarized - marriage (even if love is jettisoned on the way). Arthurian verse romances leave no room for the classic love triangle, but they still use triangular constellations in their discussion of personal relations, as I will discuss using Iwein as an example. At the same time, I wish to make explicit that I read Arthurian romances as romances of adolescence (cf. Erdheim 191-94; Wyss). These narratives use the Arthurian court as an institution of society (thus, related to marriage) where the knight passes from his youth, during which he is defined by membership in a family structure, through a final liminal stage into adulthood and marriage. This transition is made abundantly clear in the texts: In Hartmann’s Erec, the hero is described as an inexperienced knight still very close to his father’s court at the beginning of the story; he is only able to act as his father’s successor for a very brief period before he has to leave the court again; he returns to the Arthurian world only after he has learned to forego love for society and marriage. In Hartmann’s Iwein, the main protagonist is portrayed as his father’s son and has to gain his own identity as «Knight of the Lion» before being able to function as territorial lord and husband. In these processes, as I will discuss, triangular relations play a pivotal role. My last preliminary remark concerns the question: Why Gawein? Gawein’s classic role is that of the best knight at Arthur’s court and the standard against which every other knight is measured, including the protagonist, whom he usually befriends. When fighting, Gawein always wins, with the exception of fights against the protagonist, where there is usually a draw or the fight is ended before a conclusion is reached. Gawein is the extension of Arthur and a symbol of everything the Arthurian world stands for. It is this symbolic function that makes rifts in the surface of this literary character the more interesting to watch out for. The first of such rifts occurs in Hartmann’s Erec and also (if a little less pronounced) in its French source. In both romances, it is Gawein who tricks the hero back to Arthur’s court against Erec’s professed intention to avoid courtly society until further notice. But since this deception is practiced with Arthurian good intentions, it is just the method, not the aim that is unusual for Gawein. This begins to change in Hartmann’s Iwein. This romance tells the story of its eponymous hero who in a fight at a magical fountain kills the ruler of a land and, after being imprisoned in this land, is finally able to marry the beautiful widow Laudine with the help of her confidante Lunete. King Arthur’s court arrives, and Gawein gives Iwein the fateful advice to come with him on a tour of tournaments. Laudine grudgingly allows Iwein to be away for a year, but Iwein In Search of the Arthurian Third 299 overstays his leave of absence and his marriage is terminated in front of King Arthur’s court. This leads to a period of madness and, following that, a chain of adventures as «Knight of the Lion,» which leads to a re-entry into Arthurian society and, finally, to a resumption of his marriage to Laudine before the romance’s very open, highly qualified happy ending. 6 There is a famous passage - after the first meetings between Laudine and Iwein, after the actual marriage, after Iwein’s victory over Keie, and after the Arthurian court has entered Laudine’s realm as her guests - in which Laudine addresses Iwein for the first time with a term of endearment, calling him geselle (2665), and the narrator tells us here that alrêst liebet ir der man (2674, «only now she was happy about her husband»). Even this late in the supposed love story, the semantics of the MHG term lieben are very broad and do not necessarily refer to a kind of personal love. The narrator is still arguing about the public and political value of Iwein when Laudine’s conclusion (as a quote of her thoughts) is again related to reason: «ich hân wol gewelt» (2682, «I made a good choice»). Shortly after this scene, Gawein gives Iwein what will prove to be catastrophic (and blatantly bad) advice to go on a knightly tour. The breaking of his condition of leave temporarily ends the marriage to Laudine. There are two characters that immediately come to mind while thinking about triangles in Hartmann’s Iwein: Lunete, lady in waiting to Laudine, the hero’s love interest, and Gawein, introduced as Iwein’s friend. They both seem to embody typical figures of the Third: the scheming confidante and the best friend who might also be a rival. This has been argued especially in the case of Lunete: Lunete has a much wider range of possibilities of action than either Iwein or Laudine (Zutt). She is the one who brings about the seemingly impossible marriage between the mourning widow and the knight who murdered her husband. Behind this brutal but inescapable logic lies the incontestable superiority of the victor over the vanquished (Mertens 34-40). This logic is twofold: Laudine is the ruler of an imperiled land, but one she cannot herself defend; this can only be done by a male champion. But this motif - politically exploited in the text - has an older layer to it: Laudine’s situation, a female ruler who has lost her husband, is related to an older story type: at an earlier stage she was a fairy, and her champion, who also was her lover, is always replaced by the next champion/ lover. This motif is extant in its original form in other medieval texts (where it is usually used to test the faithfulness of the protagonist who has to find a way out of an unsought-for love prison). 7 In the German Iwein - again, more pronounced than in the French source - Laudine is not at all depicted as a Lady in (or of) 300 Matthias Meyer love (Ruh 418-20). Or, to be more precise, the love Laudine shows is clearly not a modern kind of absolute personal love (which is usually connected to the fairy motif), but a rational, matter-of-fact kind of love, connected to the grudgingly conceded fact of Iwein’s victory over her husband, as well as to Iwein’s lineage (he is known to Laudine as King Urien’s son) and his connection to the Arthurian court. Of course, Iwein is blissfully unaware of the political dimension of his marriage. As the central female character, Laudine is accompanied throughout by her lady in waiting, Lunete. She is clearly an extension of Laudine; even her name, related to the moon, makes her a satellite. Lunete does what Laudine, due to the limitations of the genre, cannot do (but could do as a fairy, like changing lovers at will). 8 And she must also bear the blame. If the figure of Laudine were to preserve more reminiscences of her fairy prototype, she could lose some magic power through Iwein’s breaking of the taboo (as Meliur does in the Partonopeus romances). But since she is a courtly lady in Chretien’s and Hartmann’s versions, her lady in waiting, as her extension, has to bear the blame and punishment. At the end - at least in some manuscripts - Lunete is married off to complete the lieto fine. However, although she is a messenger, Lunete is no real figure of the Third, but more an extension, a mobile arm, of the main female character. On the male side of the quadrangle of main and supporting roles, Gawein is assigned to the hero as his friend. However, as a permanent member of Arthur’s court, he is also Arthur’s extension. He seems to fulfil this role especially in his unfortunate advice to Iwein, since he lures Iwein away from Laudine and back to the world of Arthur’s court - away from the adult responsibilities of life as lord of a territory, and back into the transitory world of knight errantry. If Gawein is a figure of the Third during this episode at all, he is a figure of an external Third, namely the author, because he generates narration. If you start from the logic of medieval rulership, neither of the internal major courts can have an actual interest in Iwein leaving Laudine, since Laudine needs him as her champion, and since Iwein’s lordship extends by proxy the reach of Arthur’s rule. Therefore, Iwein’s highly unusual request for leave of absence is not really motivated - Gawein acts for the good of the story, not for the good of any party within the narrative. But a closer look at the exact wording of the MHG text reveals another figure of the Third, again connected to Gawein, lurking in these scenes. As I have pointed out, the first term of endearment between Laudine and Iwein appears rather late in the story. Before this moment, their relationship is described along the lines of (existing) hierarchies and in politi- In Search of the Arthurian Third 301 cal terms. The only instance in which Hartmann makes clear that we are to think about their relationship in terms of love is when they separate and Hartmann - rather laboriously, even clumsily - uses the metaphor of the exchange of hearts, which he introduces into the text independently of his source. Chretien mentions only that Yvain leaves his heart behind; he says nothing about an exchange. But what I find interesting is that the only intimate term in this passage, geselle, is used quite frequently in other textual surroundings, including in the emotionally intensive compound trûtgeselle. This word is used to describe the relationship of Laudine and Lunete, Iwein and Lunete, Iwein and Gawein, and in the last case not only as direct speech, but also through the narrator’s voice. The etymology of the term geselle refers to someone living and sleeping in the same sal, the same quarters (Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch 5, col. 4025- 40). In a homosocial medieval society, the sleeping area is, of course, a samesex environment. Thus, on one level, the text’s use of the term geselle is correct - and only unexpected in the pairing of Iwein and Lunete, where it can best be explained by the extra-textual prehistory between the two hinted at in their first dialogue. But on another level it is significant that the usage of the term geselle between Iwein and Laudine is preceded by a scene where it is used regarding Iwein and Gawein. The male-male intimacy precedes the heterosexual one. And it is not random, I would argue, that after Laudine’s use of the term geselle, Gawein’s advice leads Iwein away from her. Gawein then goes on a tournament spree with Iwein, and he treats him especially well, as Hartmann notes. Depending on how you translate the passage, you could also interpret this treatment as a kind of wooing. (Chretien is far more direct, telling us only that Yvain will break his promise to return within a year since Gauvain will not let him go). Gawein is depicted as someone ensnaring Iwein with guoter handelunge (3053, «good deeds»). I don’t want to suggest an explicitly sexual context to these scenes of male bonding, but I want to emphasize that Gawein is an agent of a Third, if you set the heterosexual dyad in the center. Thus Iwein is not only a romance about love and society or love and politics, but also about the uneasy relations between, on the one hand, heterosexual exclusive marriage and, on the other, the basic homosocial structure of medieval society and forms of heterosexuality that lie beneath the official surface. Further examples could be discussed here. The pre-existing relationship between Iwein and Lunete, for one, both enables and destabilizes the relation between Iwein and Laudine. A relation between Gawein and Lunete is also hinted at as a possibility, but since Gawein has to remain unmarried, Lunete is, at least in some manuscripts, married off to an anonymous count. 302 Matthias Meyer Within the genre of Arthurian romance, the grail romances occupy a special branch (if one does not want to argue that they represent a different genre altogether). This is made clear by the fact that in the historical development of the grail romances, Arthur is reduced to second place. Although the king always plays a minor role in a genre whose narrative centers around the individual protagonists, his value is never really questioned. 9 Nonetheless, the development of the grail romances does lead away from the Arthurian court. This is made clear by the final removal of the grail hero from the Arthurian world. Perceval/ Parzival, the first grail heroes, have strong connections to the Arthurian genealogy, but unlike the typical Arthurian hero, they do not come from courtly society; they arrive as outsiders, reduced by the calamities of their parental generation to an upbringing in the woods, in non-courtly surroundings. In fact, they arrive not merely as outsiders, but as uneducated fools. The reduced circumstances of Perceval in Chretien’s romance are explained as a result of societal upheaval. Wolfram reframes this: it is the death of Parzival’s father (and, thus, the Arthurian part of his genealogy) that drives his mother into the woods, away from a society that caused her inconsolable grief. Although Parzival finds himself in an outsider position, this does not give him - in my opinion - the status of a figure of a Third, since he bears a genealogical duality that he cannot transcend (and which is again split into two lines at the end of Wolfram’s romance through his twin sons). This inherent duality is made explicit in the construction of the romance, in the fact that it is the first MHG tale with two parallel (not successive) protagonists, Gawan and Parzival. The more Parzival becomes a figure of the grail, the more Gawan becomes a figure of the Arthurian court. In the beginning he is fighting his own battles, but by the end, both characters perform deeds of redemption. I won’t go into detail, but I cannot really see that the Arthurian court is superseded by the grail kingdom at the end of Wolfram’s Parzival. Both realms co-exist in a newly achieved glory. In fact, it is Gawan’s redemption of Chastel merveille that generates the narrative momentum that brings about the happy end for Parzival. In the later grail prose texts, the removal of the grail hero from the Arthurian society is far more radical. Gawan, who in Wolfram and Chretien plays an integral part in the grail adventure (even if a widely differing one in the two versions), is reduced to insignificance, and, in the final Mort Artu, becomes the prime cause of the downfall of Arthur’s realm. All this happens by accident and because the «historical» Arthur of the prose texts has to die (in contrast to the seemingly eternal fictional Arthur of the verse romances). While one could argue that Gawan in the prose tradition acts as a character that moves the story along to its predestined end (and, thus, becomes a fig- In Search of the Arthurian Third 303 ure of the author), he does not transcend the basic binary construction of the grail romances. In fact, I would argue that the binary «Arthur’s realm - grail realm» seems to reduce the textual possibilities of a figure of the Third. While there are messengers between the worlds, like the interesting character Cundrîe, the potential of these figures is hardly ever exploited. The appearance of the grail thus greatly reduces the potential for disturbance. There is, however, one exception to this observation, Heinrich von dem Türlin’s romance Diu Crône. Diu Crône is either one of the most fascinating German Arthurian romances or a really bad one, depending on your view. One of the text’s recent editors, Fritz Peter Knapp, does not think very highly of the author, of whom we know next to nothing; others are of a different opinion. 10 Diu Crône is the only large-scale Gawein romance in German literature and for this reason I want to take a closer look at it. Furthermore, it is the one (and only) grail romance that represents the grail completely differently than the mainstream version. In this text, I will argue, something like a space beyond the Arthurgrail dichotomy appears for the first time. What is remarkable is that this space is also not the usual anti-Arthurian space, since it cannot be integrated or vanquished. Rather, it is a semantically open space that opens up in the course of the romance; it gives room for a figure of the Third, as will be described in the following reading of Diu Crône. One could call it a third space if one keeps in mind that it is not the Third Space of post-colonial theory. Diu Crône is separated into two parts. In the first part, Gawein and Arthur undergo separate adventures: Gawein follows a chain of adventures that leads him into a campaign against a giant, while Arthur has to deal with a knight who apparently has older claims on Ginover. Gawein is married during his adventures to a landed lady, and he has to lose this position as lord of an independent realm to function again as an Arthurian knight in the second part of the romance. This second part is purely a Gawein-romance; it incorporates all the Gawan-adventures in Wolfram’s Parzival - albeit with different names and in a slightly changed setting - as well as other adventures, some of them strange journeys through even stranger lands for which Alfred Ebenbauer coined the term «Wunderketten,» «chains of adventures.» These «Wunderketten» resemble surrealist movies more than medieval romances and show elements of journeys to purgatory without being such journeys (Ebenbauer, «Fortuna und Artushof»; Keller, Diu Crône 33-158; Keller, «Wunderketten» 235-44). During the second part, it becomes clear that Gawein has to master the test of the grail adventure. While in other romances it is made clear what the 304 Matthias Meyer grail is (at least in most of them; Chretien keeps it astonishingly unclear), in Diu Crône the narrator only states that the grail is gottes taugen (29418, «God’s secret»). 11 But since in an earlier passage the narrator already likened himself to God (28147, So dùht ich mich ein weltgot), the precise meaning of the phrase gotes tougen remains ambivalent (Meyer, «Sô dunke ich mich ein werltgot» 195-97). Since Diu Crône is a uniquely secular grail romance, the reference to God’s secret can be seen as merely an empty reference, thus taking Chretien’s open concept of the grail to the extreme. In fact, in no other text does the grail come so close to being a MacGuffin in the Hitchcockian sense. If the grail loses its connection to God, there is no reason to see it as superior to the Arthurian court. In fact, it is Gawein who is the redeemer of the grail world - a world of the undead. It is interesting that while the secularization of the grail reduces what is seen in the other grail romances as a fundamental dichotomy, the grail world is still set apart from the Arthurian world. It is, as Ulrich Wyss has pointed out, somewhat like an Arthurian world that has fallen under the shadow of death (287). 12 But there is also a third world, one that is connected with Gawein and his later wife, her sister, and the strange character of the magician Gansguoter. 13 This world maintains connections to the grail world through Gansguoter, but also, through Gawein, to the Arthurian world. And yet it is a world separate from both. The first time this world is introduced in the romance is when Gawein enters the realm of Amurfina (some kind of fairy character connected to courtly love). 14 This realm is protected by a virtual stream of boulders that cannot be crossed without magic (7964-8023). Magic also plays an important role in holding Gawein in marriage, by means of a magic bed and a love potion. 15 But all this magic leads to nothing in the end, since Gawein, who had lost all memories of his former life after drinking the potion, regains them (including even «memories» of events that will take place later in the romance) after seeing his adventures engraved on a ceremonial serving dish, whereupon he returns to his former campaign against the giant. But the marriage (and his function as lord of a land) still exists. This state of affairs leads to the appearance of his wife’s sister, who traps Gawein into being her champion in a dispute over inherited land. Gawein wins the signs of rulership over these lands (and proves to be an ideal ruler), but he wins them for his sister-in-law. Thereupon he freely chooses to leave his own country and joins the Arthurian court. The means of this transfer of possession is the bridle of a mule, and the sequence of adventures leading up to this episode is an often very close translation of an extant French Arthurian lay (Boll 117-21). Poetologically speaking, Heinrich von dem Türlin shows that In Search of the Arthurian Third 305 his construction of the Arthurian realm (and his construction of an Arthurian romance) can incorporate all existing Arthurian material, thus becoming «the crown» of the medieval title (Meyer, Verfügbarkeit der Fiktion 112-20). But what are the semantics of this world? Upon first encounter, it seems to be connected to love. The sisters’ names (Amurfina and Sgoidamur), the love potion, the magic bed that only lets Gawein close to Amurfina after he has truthfully sworn eternal love - all these elements seem to lead to this conclusion. But in this world, love is also connected to death. When Gawein first sees Amurfina, he immediately falls in love with her, and here there is much rhetoric regarding the work of Vrou Minne, «Lady Love,» how she wounds both of them and how both will die if they are not healed. They will heal each other, of course, but before this happens, there are two obstacles to be overcome. The first is the aforementioned bed, made, as the narrator states, by a cleric and necromancer for the mother of King Arthur (8303-13; this is the first appearance of Gansguoter, though incognito). There is a sword installed over the bed that pins a man down and takes his breath away, thus preventing all sexual acts between a couple until the man has truly sworn eternal faithfulness to the lady. Gawein very nearly dies on this bed, both of love and suffocation (8573-92). Secondly, he is served the potion, which forces him to love Amurfina, die, or lose his senses (8648-57). Since he is already in love, and since genre convention dictates that he cannot die, the latter happens, and from here forward he believes that he has already been married to Amurfina for thirty years. To go into the strange logic of this love potion would lead too far afield. I only want to emphasize the threat of death, avoided by insanity, which is depicted as the death of the self. Gawein is introduced properly to Gansguoter during the bridle quest to which I already alluded. Again, Gansguoter is introduced as a cleric (pfaff, 13025) who has acquired arts (listen, 13027) allowing him to change shape into something monstrous, and he has killed many men. However - and in a way that both enlarges and reduces the threat he represents to Gawain - he is also introduced by the narrator as the pfaff who secretly lead Arthur’s mother from her country and who is the uncle of Amurfina and Sgoidamur (13030-39). 16 Gansguoter is a mediator of death, and he could also be connected in some ways to the grail world, since it is his sister who gives Gawein the final information that enables him to end the grail episode successfully; furthermore, she is the grail-bearer. So, as the grail is also connected to death in Diu Crône, it becomes feasible to link Gansguoter directly to the grail. But I would draw a line here. In scenes connected to the grail, as in the first and last «Wunderketten,» death is always linked to some brutal kind of suffering or torture. 306 Matthias Meyer It is also connected to an unidentified dolorous stroke (29494-539), which could relate to some element of the Parzival story, but here the text is deliberately opaque and possibly also distorted in manuscript transmission. In the world of Gansguoter and his artefacts, the connection to death is different, revealing elements of playfulness and even humor: a lustful and breathless lover impaled by a sword in a magical bed seems to be a very Freudian answer to ubiquitous male sexual aggression. A love potion that either kills you or else makes you believe you have been married for thirty years is a love potion with a definite twist. The beheading game takes place in a magic castle made of glass, with a revolving wall that encircles it like a merry-goround. Gawein enters it by valiantly jumping with his mule as the entrance rushes past, and everything is well, except that the mule loses parts of its tail from a nail on the spinning door. All this can be read as a playful take on the duel between the lion and the dragon in Chretien’s Yvain and on the protagonist’s predicament at the entrance to Askalon’s castle, supplemented with a rather whimsical allusion to castration. In short, Gansguoter’s realm is a world where death is omnipresent but not taken too seriously. This pfaff has not only learned to live with death, but to laugh about it. Gawein is the Arthurian knight who gains the most experience with death (and being dead by proxy) during the course of this romance. In the end, he more than once acknowledges the possibility of his own death, something the Arthurian court never learns to cope with. Gawein is introduced to and prepared for this world of death by a character who is neither here nor there, neither a member of the grail nor of the Arthurian world, but who has relations to both worlds (Gansguoter’s sister is even called a göttin (28439). He thus is the classic figure of an intermediary. Related to Gawein by marriage, he also turns Gawein into a figure that can traverse the boundary between death and life. Lastly, I want to point out that the character of Gansguoter is also very close to the poetological core of the romance. Roughly twenty years ago, I argued that, although Heinrich basically follows a poetic of dichotomy, 17 Gansguoter enters as a third element, for he is not only a character within the story but also a figure with poetological dimensions. While good and bad fortune act in the text by either guaranteeing a perfect outcome or by sending messengers with the intent to kill the hero, Gansguoter does something different: he wants to help Gawein, but he introduces him to the beheading game, which is a very oblique kind of help, though it is also playful and fanciful. As the introductory scene makes clear, Gansguoter is so chimerical in his different shapes that he hardly can be narrated (13011-16), but of course the narrator does so anyway. In short, Gansguoter is a poetological chiffre In Search of the Arthurian Third 307 for the adventures of invention, of magic (in a poetic sense), of listen, of the arts learned out of books, which is, in the case of Heinrich, fiction and literature. It is this fascination with literature, with fiction, and the ability to laugh at the central problems of human existence, that makes the text, if at times crude, some of the most enjoyable reading in all of German Arthurian literature. This is made possible through a narrative figure of the Third comprising a character, Gansguoter, a space (the locations associated with him), and a main character, Gawein, all acting together to enable a different kind of narration governed neither by death (such as the realm of the grail in Diu Crône), nor by a victorious hero (as is the Arthurian convention). This Third has two effects: narration becomes more varied and more interesting, and the thematic focus on death becomes more bearable, lighter, and even comic. There is another Gawain who has to endure a beheading game in another medieval romance. For this Gawain, the story has a very different conclusion because his existence ends within the Arthurian framework. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the hero fails the beheading test, at least in his opinion. When, in the brief last sequence of the text, the Arthurian court tries to comfort him and even takes up the sign of his shame, Gawain seems to remain inconsolable and to have lost faith in himself. This text leaves the end comparatively open. We do not know what will happen to Gawain. We only know two points of view: Gawain with his personal shame and the Arthurian society that wishes to re-integrate him. In his journey to the Green Chapel, Gawain turns away from Arthurian society and cannot re-enter it because he has discovered that its virtues cannot be adhered to in a situation of crisis. The Gawein of the German romances always returns to society and is sometimes able to change it, for the Arthurian court at the end of Diu Crône is completely different from the one at the beginning. It has been argued that figures of the Third are a figment of modernity, since the constraints of medieval society do not allow such a traversing, boundary-shattering concept (Koschorke 9). Although scholars like Walter Haug interpret Arthurian romances as pivotal, considering them to be the first deliberately fictional texts in medieval Europe, they are, by and large, nonetheless a conservative body of literature. They usually center on a brief period of the protagonist’s life, beginning with his coming of age and ending with marriage; they end with the more-or-less successful integration of the knight errant into feudal society. As such, they do not seem to allow for a Third. But the Third nevertheless exists, if one cares to look for it. In general, I see the search for triangular constellations and triangular readings as a form of interpretation that might lead us to a textual poten- 308 Matthias Meyer tial that lies beyond the manifest surface structure, be it binary or otherwise formed by rigid boundaries - boundaries that govern Arthurian literature as well as other kinds of medieval fiction. Thus, triangular readings could also lead to the texts’ subversive potential, if it exists at all. This is why in this essay I looked at Gawein, the classic embodiment of Arthurian courtly values, in a triangular mode. Even Gawein can become a figure of a Third, a mediator of disturbance, although he seems so deeply rooted in the system. It is through Gawein (and to a lesser degree through Lunete) that in Hartmann’s Iwein the specter of non-normative sexuality and the tension between heterosexual marriage and homosocial society becomes visible. It is through Gawan that the final sequence of redemption is triggered in Wolfram’s Parzival, calling into question the religious utopia of the ending. It is through Gawein in Diu Crône that death loses its sting and can become a laughing matter, and it is through Gansguoter that an apology for fantasy can be created. When Gawain leaves the Arthurian realm, a threat that looms at the end of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we truly come to the end of Arthurian fiction and its narrative possibilities. Notes 1 This perspective informs the classic study by Walter Haug (91-133, 155-78, 259-87). 2 «Wenn von der Figur des Dritten gesprochen wird, dann ist - dies sollte deutlich geworden sein - ‹Figur› nicht vorrangig in einem personalen Sinn zu verstehen. Zwar mögen sich Figuren des Dritten in literarischen Helden inkorporieren, aber noch grundsätzlicher geht es dabei um ein liminales ‹Spiel auf der Schwelle›, eine Dynamik der Indirektheit innerhalb kognitiver, affektiver und sozialer Strukturen.» 3 Koschorke notes the role of the number three, although some examples could be questioned: Is the trinity a symbol for Three or, rather, for One? (13). 4 For Keie as trickster see Ebenbauer, «Der Truchseß Keie» 122-25, 128-31; for the trickster figure in general see Schüttpelz. In Diu Crône, Keie is brought to the fore as he, together with a prophetic damsel, is the only one who is able to warn the Arthurian court against the machinations of its adversary Giramphiel in the glove test episode. 5 Marriage is achieved even if the characters have to be forced into it, like Laudine in Hartmann’s Iwein. 6 The endings of the text are discussed by Hausmann. 7 For example the Pluris-Episode in Ulrich’s von Zatzikhoven Lanzelet, as well as Demantin of Berthold von Holle. 8 This Lunete must bring about as a matchmaking servant. 9 I subscribe to this view despite contrary lines of reasoning in research focusing on criticism on Arthur (e.g. Horst P. Pütz); basically, criticism does not mean a reduction in fundamental value, as Norris Lacy has rightly pointed out. 10 During the last decades, Diu Crône has become a staple of research. Instead of listing the major contributions I point to the excellent commentary by Felder. In Search of the Arthurian Third 309 11 This often quoted phrase actually refers to the wonder of the bleeding lance, but it is repeated several times that the grail is God’s secret and that only what one sees is revealed, nothing of the bezeichenunge, the signification that might (or might not) be attached to it (29600; the passage 29578-604 contains the gottes taugen / götlich taugen two more times). 12 In fact he goes further, because he has argued that since the grail king and Arthur are both Gawein’s uncles, it is possible to read the grail king in the Crône as «Arthur under the shadow of death.» 13 For an overview of interpretations regarding Gansguoter see Felder (335-37); it is telling that most interpretations compare Gansguoter to well-known trickster figures. Yet tricksters are usually connected to the hierarchy they also subvert - as, for instance, the God Loki whom Ebenbauer compares to Keie. Gansguoter’s affiliations to the Arthurian world are much more distanced and, furthermore, they are played down in the text. 14 Amurfina is, of course, fin’amors, the medieval French term for courtly love; the name of her sister is also related to love: Sgoidamor is the joie d’amor, the joy of love. 15 The bed is first introduced in 8302-04; its mechanism is described in 8505-616. The potion is described in detail in 8638-69. 16 This introduction leads to the well-known beheading game, which Gawein wins, though without the consequences that attend his victory in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Meyer, «Feuer- und Wasserwelten» 112-13). But before the happy ending of this episode is reached, Gawein is again threatened by death. In a reading using the figure of the Third, the major difference between Diu Crône and Sir Gawein and the Green Knight is that in the former, Gansguoter is attached to a figure of the Third and Gawein gains entry to this third space and brings it back into the Arthurian realm. In the latter text, Bertilac/ the Green Knight/ Morgane are antagonists and Gawain succumbs to them. 17 Heinrich does this by reflecting in the character of Lady Fortune the problem of narration with a perfect hero (as Gawein has to be); thus, he supplies Lady Fortune with an evil sister who persistently counteracts the guarantees Fortune has given Gawein (Meyer, Verfügbarkeit der Fiktion 65-176, esp. 124-32). Works Cited Baisch, Martin. «Welt ir: er vervellet; / Wellent ir: er ist genesen! Zur Figur Keies in Heinrichs von dem Türlin Diu Crône.» Aventiuren des Geschlechts. Modelle von Männlichkeit in der Literatur des 13. Jahrhunderts. Ed. Martin Baisch, et al. Göttingen: V&R UP, 2003. 149-73. Boll, Lawrence L. 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