Soccer Diplomacy, Meet Jousting Diplomacy

The U.S. Men's National Team plays a World Cup qualifier in Havana, the first time the U.S. team has been to Cuba since 1947. Today's game is special to me for two reasons. First, I need the U.S. MNT to qualify so I can buy a discounted follow-your-team ticket at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and, second, my parents are from Cuba and I'm Cuban American. The broader reason why the game is special is that both countries are baseball countries, yet they'll be meeting today at a soccer match. Soccer is a sport both general populations know little about.

Despite sharing baseball as a national pastime, a national U.S. baseball team hasn't been to Cuba since the revolution. “Baseball diplomacy” never happened, though the potential has been there. (For non-American readers: The United States has had a trade and tourism embargo against Cuba since Castro's alignment with Krushchev forty-six years ago. But you, dear non-American reader, get to go as you please, drink Havana Club rum, and smoke a Cohiba without reproach. Vale entonce, as we say in the diaspora.)

In the Middle Ages a form of sports diplomacy punctuated the politics and intrigue of daily life. It was a great festival, known in Middle High German as hôchgezíte. Notice the word's resemblance to the New High German word for wedding, Hochzeit. Knights from different territories and families accepted invitations to compete against each other in games, sports, and poetry competitions.

In the Nibelungenlied, a collection of 39 books from the 12th century about the sword-wielding Lady Kriemhild, a sports festival honors the dubbing of Siegfried as knight. It's the first festival scene in the Nibelungenlied and the last in which all participants are at peace with one another. Happiness-to-grief is a running motif.

“mit leide was verendet | des Küniges hôchgezíte”

Here's hoping today's soccer diplomacy doesn't foreshadow more grief between the two countries. There are some tough times ahead for Cuban and American relations, if past examples are any indication. The activist in me would love to see the embargo lifted and relations normalized. The philosopher in me doesn't mind the embargo, because lifting it will mean a Starbucks on every corner, hordes of tourists, and aggressive neocolonial business dealings. Therefore, here's to the Nibelungenlied – with its mix of emotional sensitivity and martial brutality – it makes for propaedeutic reading in uncertain times.

Of Titillating Team Titles

The Merseburg Incantations were written sometime around AD 900 on a type of medium that all medievalists today are grateful for: a spare page within a Latin religious codex. Every now and then, in a busy scriptorium, an overworked monk would get bored of copying the sixty-six books of the Bible, flip the page, then start scrabbling something probably sung by a minstrel the night before in front of an exalted audience. Today we call that Old High German literature.

The Merseburg Incantations comprise two charms, one to liberate prisoners and a longer one to cure a horse. The god “uuodan” (Wodan or Odin) and the goddess “friia” (Frija) make an appearance. Rusty with your Teutonic/Norse mythology? It’s hard to keep the pantheons straight. But Wodan and Frija should look familiar, especially on a Wednesday or Friday.

One noticeable difference between verses in Old High German and verses in the later Middle High German is the change from alliteration (begin-rhyme) to rhyme (end-rhyme). The Merseburg Incantations exhibit a little of both kinds of rhyme, but are much more alliterative than the modern reader is comfortable with. I recently griped to poet Paul Spinger that alliteration had all but disappeared in Western literature, perhaps too hastily. He replied with an alliterative poem he wrote twenty years ago. Lucky for us, he’s allowed me to share it. Students of German philosophy will especially appreciate Paul's inclusion of "Das dämmernde Dasein":

Das Glas

Weil Wein mit Wasser
Sanft säuselnd
Kühl die Kehle kitzelt
Schlaf Sanfte, schlaf
Sinne singen süß
Sonnen sengen schwer
Schwere säumt Süße
Sinne sengen sanft
Schlafe Selbst, schlafe
Kühl kitzelt die Kehle
Das dämmernde Dasein
Ist immer

(Paul Spinger)

Soccer fans might guess that my tie-in to the Merseburg Incantations would be the rampant cases of juju at stadiums worldwide. Instead I'm sticking with the alliteration. Its very memorable effect can best be seen in the alliterative names of these soccer clubs:

Wolverhampton Wanderers (England)
Alemannia Aachen (Germany)
Figueirense Florianopolis (Brazil)
Seattle Sounders (USA)
Cracovia Krakow (Poland)
Kemi Kings (Finland)

Duplicitous Hats

In AD 1280 Wernher der Gärtner penned Meier Helmbrecht and gave the world a medieval (late medieval for us hairsplitters) update of the prodigal son. A peasant farmer’s son named Helmbrecht is given a hat that signifies nobility to the public. This wakes desires in him for the easy and comfortable life of a noble knight, and a new name, because who would want to have the name Helmbrecht. The one he chooses for himself is even worse: Slintezgeu – go ahead, say it out loud. Right? Slintezgeu-née-Helmbrecht runs away, puts together a band of thieves, plunders and marauds as a noble knight is wont to do, and all the while mimics noble greetings and sayings.

Werder Bremen’s star player Diego is also a runaway. He’s gone to the Olympics in Beijing to play for Brazil’s national junior squad. Diego was banned by his club from leaving his job for the Olympics. At first he agreed to stay, but then he absconded and Bremen are now taking legal action against him.

Like Helmbrecht, Diego has run off to play something he’s not. Helmbrecht’s hat signified nobility; Diego’s Olympic hat signifies amateur youth sport and up-and-comer status. But he’s already a multimillionaire in the Bundesliga, the league with the most fans per game on average in Europe. It appears that Diego is a noble who has run away to play the humble peasant.

Hopefully the outcome of Diego’s getaway will also be the inverse of the outcome for Helmbrecht. Helmbrecht was easily caught, had an eye gouged out, returned to his parents for scorn and derision, then hung by a mob of other peasants. By inverse logic Diego will return to the good life in Bremen.

A Cure for Arrogance

In Hartmann von Aue’s most famous non-Arthurian work, Der arme Heinrich (AD 1195), nobleman Heinrich is struck with leprosy at the height of his prosperity. His life was too indulging, too focused on the here-and-now, and not directed at all on the hereafter. At the peak of his arrogance an incurable disease sends the party-boy in a frenzy to find a cure. He visits a specialist doctor in distant Salerno who claims to have a remedy for leprosy: Find a child who’s willing to die for your cure.

Today the current greatest soccer player in the world, Cristiano Ronaldo, undergoes surgery on his ankle at a specialist in Amsterdam, not at his home in Manchester. The party-boy plays beautiful soccer with a noticeably stiff and upright posture, contrary to the crouched athletic pose we’re usually told to use to prevent injury. Ronaldo is at the height of his fame and spoils the tabloids with his arrogance and exploits. Maybe they’ll insert a modicum of modesty during the operation and hopefully he’ll be back to playing awesome soccer again soon.

In Hartmann’s work, Heinrich finds a peasant’s daughter willing to sacrifice herself for him. They travel to Salerno together; while the girl lies naked on the doctor’s table, Heinrich peeks through the operation room door’s keyhole and gazes upon her. He suddenly changes his mind. The girl protests because she wanted to see what heaven was like, but Heinrich can’t allow her to be killed for his sake. On their way home, Heinrich is unexpectedly cured. He experiences a new way of being good (in Middle High German, “eine niǔwe güete”), and lives a more modest and still prosperous life as the peasant girl’s husband. The story contains one of the common instances in the Middle Ages of marriage between different familial ranks, which has probably become more uncommon today.

Competing for the Grail

In Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, AD 1190, the grail makes its second appearance in world literature. Wolfram tells the tales in sixteen books of the world-traveling knight Gahmuret, the despondent queen Herzeloyde, the vainglorious Gawain, the tactless Arthur and his flawed court, the beautiful Condwiramurs, the hermit Trevrizent, and of course Parzival the bumbling bubele who was never taught his own name, much less how to be a good Christian knight. Parzival sets out on aventiǔre and along the way learns his name, his heritage, and how to live in the courtly world. He makes it from a secluded childhood in the forest to finding the grail at last. He achieves this by reconciling the Arthurian earth-based society with the spiritual grail society or, more to the point, by asking the wounded grail keeper Anfortas a magical question: "Uncle, what ails you?"

In the lecture series Where There Was No Way comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell calls Wolfram's romance the greatest work of Western civilization because it perfectly demonstrates the monomyth. The monomyth is found in almost every popular European and American epic from The Odyssey to Star Wars. But what is the grail? You can believe the Holy Blood, Holy Grail hoax of 1982, one of the coolest pranks in the twentieth century and the story bootlegged by Dan Brown in 2003. In fact, there are countless "Parzival Scholars," and each has a different explanation for what the grail symbolizes.

But what is it, as in, what is the actual thing, the object? In Parzival the grail is simply a stone. It gives those gathered around it plenty to eat and assures its protector of the highest title on Earth - along with a nifty castle that no one can find unless they chat it up with the Fisher King or let their horse wander off the path… Keep in mind we are talking about the grail, or graal in Middle High German, not the holy grail. It's called holy much later in gratuitous nineteenth century European works. It first became a cup of sorts in the thirteenth century. That shape is how the legacy of the grail continues today; just look at the trophies from some soccer competitions:



Perhaps the best grail-like trophy is for the winner of the German Bundesliga, because in the grail's first-ever appearance in any romance, Chretien de Troyes's Perçeval (AD 1180), the grail is simply a dish:



If you happen to know of a trophy that is in the shape of a stone, please let me know!