If this is a difficult book to read my plea must be that it deals with a difficult text. Wolfram was quite conscious of the difficulties he created for many of his listeners, for he said of those he dismissed as tumbe liute that sine mugens niht erdenken (1,17). If we accept the implied flattery that we belong with the wîser man rather than the tumbe liute, then we cannot avoid the obligation of erdenken, of thinking through Wolfram's Parzival to its ultimate conclusions. In doing this we may rightly ask, as did Wayne Booth of the search for irony, just how far we can take this process. Certainly not as far as did the late Mergell, for whom not one detail in the whole work was out of place in a fine mesh which connected it with everything else, for this would mythologise Wolfram as much as in the Wartburgkrieg, where even the magician Klingsor attributes super-natural assistance to the poet: Ich wil gelouben, daz den list / ein engel vinde, oder daz der tiufel in dir ist. Yet the danger of such an extreme, as long as we are aware of it, need not stop us following the poet's invitation, seeing how far he provides us with the means to erdenken his work, how far his clues take us in this intellectual quest.