Chretien de Troyes:

French medieval romances and Arthurian legends

Romance to realism and beyond

By Modelsis wighnes

Chretien de Troyes wrote in Champagne, France during the third quarter of the twelfth century. He lived between 1160 and 1172 in the court of his patroness, the Countess Marie de Champagne. She was the daughter of Louis VII and of Eleanor of Aquitaine, (who moved from the South of France in 1137 to Paris and then to England). She possessed her royal mother's tastes and made her court a social experiment. The old city of Troyes, where she held her court, often appears in a map of literary history.

Arthurian Legend

It was there that Chretien wrote four romances which together form the most complete expression of the ideals of French chivalry from a single author. These romances are written in eight-syllable rhyming couplets. Another poem, "Perceval le Gallois", was composed about 1175 for Philip, Count of Flanders, to whom Chretien was attached during his last years. This last poem is not included in the present translation because of its extraordinary length of 32,000 verses, because Chretien wrote only the first 9000 verses, and there is an English version of Wolfram's wellknown "Parzival", which tells the same story, though in a different spirit. The romance of "Lancelot" was not completed by Chretien but the poem is his in such large part that one would be over-scrupulous not to call it his.

Pious romance

In addition, there are quite generally assigned to the poet two insignificant lyrics, the pious romance of "Guillaume d'Angleterre", and the elaboration of an episode from Ovid's "Metamorphoses" called "Philomena" by its most recent editor (Paris 1909). All these are extant and accessible.

However, since "Guillaume d'Angleterre" and "Philomena" are not universally attributed to Chretien, and since they have nothing to do with the Arthurian material, it seems reasonable to limit the present enterprise to "Erec and Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot".

Some critics, basing their remarks upon the best knowledge we have, have called "Erec and Enide" the oldest Arthurian romance extant. Scholarship has shown that from the early Middle Ages popular tradition was alive in Britain and Brittany. The existence of these traditions common to the Brythonic peoples was called to the attention of the literary world by William of Malmesbury and Geoffrey of Monmouth in their Latin histories about 1125 and 1137 respectively, and by the Anglo-Norman poet Wace immediately afterward. Scholars have waged war over the theories of transmission of the so-called Arthurian material during the centuries which elapsed between the time of the fabled chieftain's activity in 500 A.D. and his appearance as a great literary personage in the twelfth century.

There are not many documents available for the dark ages of popular tradition before the Norman Conquest. However, Arthur and his knights, as we see them in the earliest French romances, have little in common with their Celtic prototypes, as we dimly catch sight of them in Irish, Welsh, and Breton legend. Chretien belonged to a generation of French poets who took over a large portion of the Celtic folk-lore they imperfectly understood and produced what had never been before. This then became the vehicle to carry a rich freight of chivalric customs and ideals.

As an ideal of social conduct, the code of chivalry never touched the middle and lower classes, yet it was the religion of the 12th Century aristocracy. Never was literature in any age closer to the ideals of a social class. This is so much the case that it is difficult to determine whether social practices called forth the literature, or whether, as in the case of the seventeenth-century pastoral romance in France, it is truer to say that literature suggested to society its ideals. For the glaring inconsistencies between the reality and the ideal, we may turn to the chronicles of the period. Yet, even history tells of many an ugly act rebuked and of many a gallant deed performed because of the courteous ideals of chivalry. The debt of our own social code to this literature of courtesy and frequent self-sacrifice is manifest.

Source

What Chretien's immediate and specific source was for his romances is of great interest. Unfortunately, he has left us in doubt because he speaks in the vaguest way of the materials he used.

There is no evidence that he had any Celtic written source. We are thrown back upon Latin or French literary originals which are lost, or upon current continental lore going back to a Celtic source.

This very difficult problem is as yet unsolved in the case of Chretien, as it is in the case of the Anglo-Norman Beroul, who wrote of Tristan about 1150. The material evidently was at hand and Chretien appropriated it, without much understanding of its primitive spirit, but appreciating it as a setting for the ideal society dreamed of but not realised in his own day.

A French narrative poet of the twelfth century had three categories of subject-matter from which to choose: legends connected with the history of France ("matiere de France"), legends connected with Arthur and other Celtic heroes ("matiere de Bretagne"), and stories culled from the history or mythology of Greece and Rome, current in Latin and French translations ("matiere de Rome la grant"). Chretien tells us in "Cliges" that his first essays as a poet were the translations into French of certain parts of Ovid's most popular works. Yet he appears early to have chosen as his special field the stories of Celtic origin dealing with Arthur, the Round Table, and other features of Celtic folk-lore. Not only was he alive to the literary interest of this material when adapted to suit the taste of French readers, but he gave to rather crude folk-lore the polish and elegance which is peculiarly French, and which is inseparably associated with the Arthurtan legends in all modern literature.

Romantic poems

Though Beroul, and perhaps other poets, had previously based romantic poems upon individual Celtic heroes like Tristan, to Chretien, is due the considerable honour of having constituted Arthur's court as a literary centre and rallying- point for an innumerable company of knights and ladies engaged in a never-ending series of amorous adventures and dangerous quests. Rather than attribute to Chretien this important literary convention, we should bear in mind that all his poems imply familiarity on the part of his readers with the heroes of the court of which he speaks. One would suppose that other stories, told before his versions, were current. Some critics would go so far as to maintain that Chretien came toward the close, rather than at the beginning, of a school of French writers of Arthurian romances. But, if so, we do not possess these earlier versions, and for lack of rivals Chretien may be hailed as an innovator in the current schools of poetry.

King Arthur

Chretian's style is typical of all medieval narrative literature. The pastimes of this class of readers that it was aimed at were jousting, hunting, and making love. However, it is certain that Chretien intended to avoid what was indecent, as did the writers of narrative poetry in general. To appreciate fully the chaste treatment of Chretien, one must know some other forms of medieval literature, such as the fabliaux, farces, and morality plays, in which courtesy imposed no restraint. These will be examined in later columns.

With regard to Chretien's use of his sources, many critics have minimised the French poet's originality by pointing out striking analogies in classic and Celtic fable.

The difficult point to determine, in speaking of conceptions so widespread in classic and medieval literature, is the immediate source of Chretien's influences. Critics disagree over so-called Anglo-Norman theory which supposes the existence of lost Anglo-Norman romances in French as the sources of Chretien de Troyes, is, nevertheless, well within the truth when he insists upon what is, so far as we are concerned, the essential originality of the French poet. The general reader today will care as little as did the reader of the twelfth century how the poet came upon the motives and episodes of his stories, whether he borrowed them or invented them himself.

Chronology

Scholars have sought to fix the chronology of the poet's works, and have been tempted to speculate upon the evolution of his literary and moral ideas. When we speculate upon the development of Chretien's moral ideas we are not on such sure ground. His standards vary widely in the different romances. How much of this variation is due to chance circumstance imposed by the nature of his subject or by the taste of his public, and how much to changing conviction it is easy to see, when we consider some contemporary novelist, how dangerous it is to judge of moral convictions as reflected in literary work.

"Erec" is the oldest Arthurin romance to have survived in any language, but it is almost certainly not the first to have been written. It is a story of love, estrangement, and reconciliation in the persons of Erec and his charming sweetheart Enide. The psychological analysis of Erec's motives in the rude testing of Enide is worthy of attention, and is more subtle than anything previous in French literature with which we are acquainted. The poem is an episodic romance in the biography of an Arthurinn hero, with the usual amount of space given to his adventures. "Cliges" apparently connects a Byzantine tale of doubtful origin in an arbitrary fashion with the court of Arthur. It is thought that the story embodies the same motive as the widespread tale of the deception practised upon Solomon by his wife, and that Chretien's source, as he himself claims, was literary.

The scene where Fenice feigns death in order to rejoin her lover is a parallel of many others in literary history, and will, of course, suggest the situation in Romeo and Juliet.

Epic poems

In the oldest epic poems we find only God- fearing men and a few self-effacing women; in the Arthurian romances we meet gentlemen and ladies, more elegant and seductive than any one in the epic poems, but less fortified by faith and sense of duty against vice because breathing an enervating atmosphere of leisure and decadent morally.

The student of the history of social and moral ideals will find much to interest him in Chretien's romances.

Medieval references show that he was held by his immediate successors, as he is held to-day when fairly viewed, to have been a master of the art of story-telling. Chretien spreaks through the ages for himself and his generation.

He is to be read as a story-teller rather than as a poet, as a casuist rather than as a philosopher. However his significance as a literary artist and as the founder of a precious literary tradition distinguishes him from all other poets of the Latin races between the close of the Empire and the arrival of Dante.