09.05.05
What’s A Cundrie?
Beaudin, Andrea L. “What’s A Cundrie?” MA Thesis. Cundrie.com. 6 Sept. 2005 http ://www.cundrie.com/cundrie.htm.
According this page’s introductory information, “What’s A Cundrie?” was published online in order to answer questions concerning, one supposes, the naming of the author’s website. The page is actually an excerpt from the author’s master’s thesis. A Cundrie, it seems, is not simply a “what” but a “who.” Cundrie is a character in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, a “loathly damsel” from India who can speak many languages (so she can communicate with a lot of different types of people in the text) and appears to offer intelligent guidance to Parzival.
While most of this work is a summary of events in Parzival that relate to Cundrie’s character, this excerpt offers some insight into the theoretic approach Beaudin may have used for her thesis. Her reference to the Cundrie’s “literary repertoires” and depiction of the author Wolfram as both a creator and character mirrors the language used by McCormick, Waller, and Flower in the Introduction to Reading Texts. As this is an excerpt, it is difficult to determine whether Beaudin’s text is geared towards readers of all levels; are terms such as “loathly damsel” explained? Also, the page is footnoted, but no Works Cited page is available, so the reader for this online text cannot locate sources for herself. However, this is one of the few scholarly pages available online concerning this character (Google lists approximately 650 results, many of which are ‘baby names’ sites or fantasy fiction).
On a personal note, I found the notion of this character quite interesting. When I think of characters in medieval lit. (King Arthur and Guenevere, for example), I think of white, powerful men and passive white women. The only times I read about non-whites during that time were the supposedly “bad guys” in the Crusades. I didn’t expect someone writing at that time to createt a “good” character as a non-Western woman… and Cundrie’s SMART, too! I wonder, though, why she is ugly. Did Wolfram ever meet people from other lands? Did he find real-life Cundries ugly because they were not blonde and fair? Our modern culture still has issues with brains vs. beauty. It still seems that a woman that our culture deems beautiful will have a hard time earning respect. How many people know that Cindy Crawford was a chemical engineering major at Northwestern (so much for the dumb model theory)?