dâ mit er sîne tumpheit reget, swer sprichet sô nâch wâne

Zusammenfassung

The starting point for the paper is Sarah Kay’s 2001 monograph on courtly contradictions, in which she has demonstrated the extent to which contradictions play a central – and productive – role in courtly literature. By analysing two examples from Willehalm, the article attempts to show how errors and contradictions have been functionalised by Wolfram. In the first example, the discussion centres on the way in which a mistake in the Old French source material has been used by the German poet in order to reflect on narratological problems. In the second example, the contradiction in Wolfram’s text results from his disagreement with the negative description of the heathens in Bataille d’Aliscans: he responds to this representation by contradicting it, thereby calling into question the generally held Christian view of the other.