Snowflake Challenge #1: Introduce Yourself

[ermingarden]

In your own space, introduce yourself!

I keep my profile up to date, but it's pretty basic, so I'll say a bit more here.

Hi! I'm Ermingarde (she/her pronouns, please). I'm in my early twenties and in my first year of law school. I studied Classics in undergrad and my research focused mainly on medieval Latin literature; I'm always happy to talk about any of those topics. I love to read, mostly sci-fi and fantasy (although I've been on a nonfiction/sociology kick recently). I enjoy baking and am learning to crochet. I've sung in choirs since I was nine and have been desperately missing it this year!

I read a lot more fic than I write, but one of my goals for 2021 is to post more - we'll see how that goes. My main fandoms are Star Wars and Tolkien's Legendarium. Star Wars was my first fannish obsession, and you never forget your first love...I've been captivated by the Galaxy Far, Far Away since I read Showdown at Centerpoint almost fifteen years ago. The Lord of the Rings stole my heart when I was in high school, and the Silmarillion made its way in a couple of years later. I read (and very occasionally write) in other fandoms as well, including Earthsea, Rosemary and Thyme, Narnia, and, most recently, Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb Trilogy, but my interest and involvement in these waxes and wanes. I keep all my fics on AO3 here.

I'm always looking for new friends, so please say hello, especially if we have any interests in common! <3

Comments

[eller]

If you find that paper... I'm very interested. :D

(I never did anything like that... I did a manga version of Inanna's descent, which was, I'm afraid, a much less intellectual endeavour.)

Also, Parzival and the grail... When we're at the meaning of "lapsit exillis", what do you think, what fell? The thing or the seeker? :D Speculating about this stuff is fun!

[ermingarden]

Oh man, that sounds awesome!

I originally posted some of this a few comments back, but immediately edited it out because it was A Lot, so idk if you saw it already (if so, sorry!). I tend to think the thing fell, but that's an interesting possibility!

Taken at face value, lapsit exillis conveys no coherent meaning. Scholars have proposed lapis coelis, lapsit exiliis, lapsit ex illis, and lapsit exsulis as emendations, among others. All of these rely on the supposition that the form lapsit exillis is the result of error. But lapsit exillis appears in all major manuscript groups, and none of the few other attested variants is any more comprehensible in Latin. If the ambiguity of lapsit exillis arose simply from error, it is difficult to believe that no scribe in any of the Parzival’s many transmission chains would have corrected that error, especially since lapsit exillis is orthographically close to multiple easily comprehensible Latin phrases. Conversely, if lapsit exillis were interpreted simply as nonsensical, it would hardly have survived intact.

I think the answer is not an emendation that will give a single decisive meaning to the phrase. Instead, we should turn our attention to the potential significance of the ambiguity itself. lapsit exillis is orthographically situated between two Latin phrases: lapsit ex illis, “it fell from those places”, and lapsit exiliis, “it fell into places of exile”. Neither reading is intuitively superior to the other. lapsit exillis thus represents in speech and written text the ambiguous status of Wolfram’s Grail, which came down from Heaven (“ex illis”) to postlapsarian Earth (“exiliis”), is tied to both earthly and heavenly things, and is closely connected to the exiled Neutral Angels, whose own place in salvation history remains uncertain.

tl;dr: The problem is, if lapsit exillis is a result of scribal error, why didn't subsequent scribes try to emend it? And if it's just nonsense and meant to be nonsense, why is it transmitted so consistently, when you would expect scribal error to creep easily into unintelligible phrases?

If you're interested in reading more about lapsit exillis, I have a list of a few sources - though for such an intriguing topic, there's relatively little scholarship (especially, alas, in English! If only I spoke German!):

Dahlberg, Charles and Peter Salus. “Wolfram’s Lapsit Exillis (Parzival IX, 469),” Mediaeval Studies vol. 30 (1968), pp. 354-357.
Dahlberg and Salus propose lapsit exiliis as an emendation for lapsit exillis, attributing the spelling variation to a possible i-l confusion on the part of a scribe, while decisively rejecting lapis ex caelis. They translate lapsit exiliis as “It fell among conditions of exile” and connect this reading to the common medieval use of exilium to refer to humanity’s expulsion from Eden and thus to earthly life in general, as in Augustine and Boethius’ depictions of life on Earth as exile from or pilgrimage toward Heaven. They read the name lapsit exiliis as an echo of the Parzival’s broader narratives of failure and redemption and the Adamic felix culpa.

Weigand, Hermann. “Wolfram’s Grail and the Neutral Angels: A Discussion and a Dialogue,” Wolfram’s Parzival: Five Essays with an Introduction. Cornell, 1969.
Weigand devotes much of this essay to a discussion and refutation of ideas put forth by Bodo Mergell in 1943. While Mergell considers the name lapsit exillis to include a myriad of hidden meanings, some of them extremely esoteric, Weigand rejects the whole project of extracting meanings from the enigmatic words, especially the idea that Wolfram might have intended a deliberate ambiguity between two Latin phrases. On the subject of the Neutral Angels, Weigand again sets himself up in opposition to Mergell. Weigand argues that the status of the Neutral Angels, and the question of whether or not it was indeed the Neutral Angels who guarded the Grail, is not decisively resolved within the Parzival.

Murphy, G. R. Gemstone of Paradise: The Holy Grail in Wolfram’s Parzival. Oxford, 2006.
Murphy argues that Wolfram’s description of the Grail was inspired by an actual object: the Bamberg “Paradise Altar”. Dated to the second half of the twelfth century, this portable altar is topped with a green stone and decorated with images of the rivers of Paradise. The prominence of water in the imagery of the Paradise Altar is unique among surviving portable altars, and Murphy connects this to the images of literal and emotional overflow associated with the Grail in the Parzival, especially the miraculous water that fills the font for Feirefiz’ baptism in book 16. Murphy generally favors the reading lapis exilis, “thin stone”, for lapsit exillis and theorizes that transmission errors arose from the Latin name not being immediately accessible to scribes copying the Parzival. He also raises the possibility that Wolfram used a Latin name to suggest that the Grail itself, as something both spiritual and concrete, was not readily intelligible.

Poag, J. F. “Wolfram von Eschenbach: Lapsi’t Exillis,” Monatshefte Vol. 60, No. 3 (Fall 1968), pp. 243-244.
In this short paper, Poag puts forth the hypothesis that many of the names in Parzival that are Wolfram’s own inventions, including lapsit exillis, are puns. He proposes that lapsit exillis is a scribal contraction of lapsi ita exillis, itself a variation on the distinctly ungrammatical lapsi id exillis, which Poag translates loosely as “I made a gaffe” and literally as “I, worthless fellow, lapsed it”. The contraction, he claims, may have come about in imitation of entries in lapidaries, though he does not give specific evidence for this. He argues that this irreverent second name is part of a larger project in which Wolfram interweaves “low” humor with “high” discourse around theology and chivalric ethics.

As you can tell, I agree most with Dahlberg and Salus, although I think an i-l confusion is too simple an explanation, because it's a common enough error that it would surely be corrected by some if not most of the subsequent scribes. The same would be true of Murphy's proposed lapsit exilis. Poag's Latin is a little...questionable, but you might find his broader point on puns in the Parzival interesting - and since you understand MHG, you'll probably have much more insight into it than I do!

[eller]

OHHHHHH, thank you - and with a compilation of sources, too! :D That's how I like my literature. No worries about long texts! :D :D :D (I haven't read any of those papers because, uh, I didn't study the thing. Ahahaha.)

I also think we can pretty much exclude scribal error. When something like this stayed the same in several manuscripts, it must have made sense to the scholars of the time.

Those are all interesting interpretations. I've never really thought about it, but when I read Parzival, I intuitively read "lapsit exillis" as "lapsit ex illis".

The thing I was unsure about is whether this is supposed to be a "thing that fell from heaven" or if the phrase refers to the fall of man, which is entirely possible, considering Parzival can only find it after gaining self-knowledge and learning humility. Or it could indeed also refer to exile... My guess was that Wolfram left it deliberately unclear. I'm not qualified to have an opinion. :D

[ermingarden]

See, I think you've hit on it exactly - the Grail, in having fallen from heaven itself, parallels the fall of man, but in being a thing of heaven falling to the exiled, i.e., humans on earth, it mirrors the idea of God sending Jesus(/himself) to Earth in, itself, a reversal of the fall of man - Jesus as a second Adam, etc. See the Exsultet ("O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, That gained for us so great a Redeemer"). This is a favorite motif of a lot of medieval authors; I personally adore the pun (only possible in Latin!) of noting that "Ave" (as in "Ave, Maria") is literally the reversal of "Eva". Jesus as the second Adam, Mary as the anti-Eve.

You're just as (un)qualified as I am - I can't even read the original text!

And you are so welcome <3

[eller]

Yep. I think that's basically it - Parzival's journey, in itself, is a fall re-enaction (what with him starting in a state of literal innocence), but in the grail, it's paralleled and simultaneously reversed. (Because, obviously, "lapsit" can mean both "it fell" and "he fell".) And the thing comes with its own instructions on how to find it. ;) ...and the rest of it comes down to very complicated theology, I guess.

(I have to go offline now, real life is calling - but thank you for this fascinating conversation! I hope we'll continue that!)

[ermingarden]

Thank you - it's been a blast! It's so nice to meet you!

[ermingarden]

Apologies also for my own scribal error in the last paragraph above: Murphy's emendation is properly lapis exilis, not lapsit. And we see how easily these things creep in!