Hero-knight of medieval Germanic legends.
He was called the knight of the swan because he arrived in a boat drawn by a swan to help a noble lady in distress. He married her but forbade her to ask his origin; when she forgot this promise, he left her, never to return. The first version of his legend appeared 0441; 1210 in Wolfram von Eschenbach 's Parzival , in which the swan knight was the son and heir of Parzival ( Perceval ). The anonymous 15th-century epic Lorengel provided the basis for Richard Wagner 's opera Lohengrin (1850).