Parzival

In presenting, for the first time, to English readers the greatest work of Germany’s greatest medi?val poet, a few words of introduction, alike for poem and writer, may not be out of place. The lapse of nearly seven hundred years, and the changes which the centuries have worked, alike in language and in thought, would have naturally operated to render any work unfamiliar, still more so when that work was composed in a foreign tongue; but, indeed, it is only within the present century that the original text of the Parzival has been collated from the MSS. and made accessible, even in its own land, to the general reader.