Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• CLASSEN, Albrecht

Titel

Kulturelle und religiöse Kontakte zwischen dem christlichen Europa und dem buddhistischen Indien im Mittelalter: Rudolfs von Ems Barlaam und Josaphat im europäischen Kontext

Ist Teil von

• Fabula, 2000, Vol.41 (3-4), p.203-228

Ort / Verlag

Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York

Erscheinungsjahr

2000

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• One of the most impressive frescoes in the castle chapel of Rodenegg Castle in South Tyrol, which is entirely dedicated to Hartmann von Aue's Iwettt, shows us the figure of a wild man who shows Iwein the way to the magic fountain where his adventure will begin1. There is no doubt that the artist went to great lengths to achieve expressiveness and physical reality with this figure, whereby the wild man still corresponds to the stereotype 'wild', but at the same time conveys an astonishingly haunting impression from an aesthetic point of view. Both in this pictorial representation and in Hartmann's literary text, where, of course, not Iwein, but Kälogrenant encounters the wild man, on closer inspection we come across a remarkable break in the cultural paradigm typical of the Middle Ages, namely the idealization of the monstrous stranger, the in contrast to the raw, uncontrolled and as yet uncultivated knight represents a natural idyll of a paradisiacal kind. Although he is surrounded by the wildest animals in the literary version, they have all submitted to him without exception and do not harm each other. Although the frightening man knows nothing about chivalry and, aventiurenc, belongs entirely to the alien area of ​​nature, he haunted Kâlogrenant with a mirror in which he could perceive his own shortcomings and thus the mistakes of his society if he understood this picture correctly or would be willing to accept it. Even if the wild man appears to be an outgrowth of ancient mythology and can be easily reconciled with one of the many concepts of monsters owed in teratology, on closer inspection he turns out to be a sage who rules over all creatures, without having to do them any violence: "min tongue and min hant, / min pray and min drô, / die hânt mirs made sô. Kalogrenant is then asked to describe his life's work, which gives the narrator an opportunity to To analyze the essence of chivalry and "aventiure" (v. 525). All this seems to the wild man to be very dubious, he even describes Kalogrenant's undertaking as 'unmatched' (545), but then shows him the way to the well, where the real - action will begin.