E 326K // Literature of the Middle Ages in Translation: Mysteries of the Grail

Diu Crone

Diu Crone, or The Crown, is a Middle High German Poem written be Heinrich von dem Turlin and was probably produced around 1220. The poem consists of about 30,000 lines. In this version of the grail story, Gawain rather than Perceval, achieves the Grail. This is the only Arthurian work in which Gawain is the hero. By doing so, it followed possibilities left open by Chretien de Troyes’s depiction of Gawain as a grail-quester in his unfinished Perceval. Turlin’s Gawain, according to J.W. Thomas, is thoroughly Arthurian and much more thoroughly human in his fallibility than Galahad or Parzival, yet just as courageous. Gawain is groomed in such a way that he can ultimately serve as the knight who completes the Grail quest, as opposed to how he appears as a womanizer and suspected as a ruthless killer in other romances. In Neil Thomas’ Review of Diu Crone, he states that “people tended to view Heinrich von dem Turlin’s Diu Crone as a compilation of early Arthurian narrative by an epigone poet of middling talent at best, a narrative with no coherent artistic conception of its own.” This poem is often criticized as overly wordy and ill-written.


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