Arthurian Romances Read online

  ARTHURIAN ROMANCES

  Regarded as the greatest of the writers of courtly romance, CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES wrote in French in the second half of the twelfth century. Very little is known about his life. He was probably a native of Eastern Champagne and most of his active career was spent at Troyes at the court of Marie de Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Circumstantial evidence also suggests that he spent some of his early career in England at the court of King Henry II Plantagenet. His romances are outstanding in medieval European literature for the inner meaning which he unobtrusively wove into them.

  WILLIAM W. KIBLER gained an AB from the University of Notre Dame and MA and Ph.D. degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 1969 to 2003 he taught at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was the Superior Oil-Linward Shivers Centennial Professor of Medieval Studies. He has served twice as president of the North American Branch of the Société Rencesvals, and edited its journal, Olifant, from 1986 to 1991. He is currently vice-president and president-elect of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society. He has published many articles on medieval French literature and is the author of An Introduction to Old French (1984). In 1994 he edited The Lancelot-Grail Cycle: Text and Transformations, and in 1995, with Grover Zinn, published Medieval France: An Encyclopedia. He has also produced editions and translations of Guillaume de Machaut’s Le Jugement du Roy de Behaigńe and Remede de Fortune (with James I. Wimsatt, 1988), Raoul de Cambrai (1996) and Huon de Bordeaux (with François Suard, 2003). He has previously published facing-line translations of Chrétien’s Lancelot (Le Chevalier de la Charette), Yvain (Le Chevalier au Lion) and (Perceval Le Conte du Graal).

  CARLETON W. CARROLL earned his BA degree from Ohio State University and MA and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin. Since 1974 he has taught at Oregon State University, where he holds the rank of Professor of French. Previous publications include editions and translations of Chrétien’s Erec et Enide and Le Chevalier au Lion, translations of two large segments of the prose Lancelot, a critical edition of Olivier de La Marche’s allegorical poem Le Chevalier deliberé, and articles on various aspects of medieval French literature. He is preparing a new critical edition of Erec et Enide.

  CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES

  Arthurian Romances

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  WILLIAM W. KIBLER

  (Erec and Enide translated by

  CARLETON W. CARROLL)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Published in Penguin Books 1991

  Reprinted with revised Bibliography 2004

  26

  These translations copyright © William W. Kibler, 1991, except Erec and Enide

  copyright © Carleton W, Carroll 1991

  Introduction and other editorial matter copyright © William W. Kibler, 1991, 2004

  Erec and Enide, The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot),

  The Knight with the Lion (Yvain) and The Story of the Grail (Perceval)

  originally appeared in the Garland Library of Medieval Literature

  The moral right of the translators has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

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  EISBN: 9781101487808

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  A Note on the Translations

  Select Bibliography

  Erec and Enide

  Cligés

  The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot)

  The Knight with the Lion (Yvain)

  The Story of the Grail (Perceval)

  Appendix: The Story of the Grail Continuations

  Glossary of Medieval Terms

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  WRITING in the second half of the twelfth century, Chrétien de Troyes was the inventor of Arthurian literature as we know it. Drawing from material circulated by itinerant Breton minstrels and legitimized by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s pseudo-historical Historia Regum Britanniœ (History of the Kings of Britain, c. 1136–37), Chrétien fashioned a new form known today as courtly romance. To Geoffrey’s bellicose tales of Arthur’s conquests, Chrétien added multiple love adventures and a courtly veneer of polished manners. He was the first to speak of Queen Guinevere’s affair with Lancelot of the Lake, the first to mention Camelot, and the first to write of the adventures of the Grail – with Perceval, the mysterious procession, and the Fisher King. He may even have been the first to sing of the tragic love of Tristan and Isolde. All of these themes have become staples in the romance of King Arthur, and no treatment of the legend seems complete without some allusion to them.

  Yet we know virtually nothing about this incomparable genius, the author of the five earliest Arthurian romances: Erec and Enide, Cligés, The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot), The Knight with the Lion (Yvain), and The Story of the Grail (Perceval). The few references to a ‘Crestien’ or ‘Christianus’ unearthed in archival documents cannot with any certainty be related to our author, so we can know him only through his own writings. And even here we are at some remove from Chrétien himself, for the manuscripts that preserve his works all date from at least a generation after the time he composed them.

  The most important manuscripts containing Chrétien’s romances date from the thirteenth century. All five of his Arthurian romances are found in MS Bibliothèque Nationale f. fr. 794, known as the Guiot Manuscript after the scribe who copied it in the mid-thirteenth century. The romances appear there in conjunction with four other works, all set in Classical times: Athis et Profilas, Le Roman de Troie, Wace’s Roman de Brut, and Les Empereurs de Rome. Chrétien’s five poems are also found together in Bibl. Nat. f. fr. 1450, where they are inserted into the middle of Wace’s Roman de Brut – the French adaptation of Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniœ – evidently with the purpose of fleshing out the legend of Arthur recounted therein. Another key manuscript that once probably contained all of Chrétien’s romances, and which would have been the earliest and best copy of them, is the so-called Annonay Manuscript. Unfortunately it was cut apart to be used as filler for book-bindings in the eighteenth century, and only fragments of Erec, Cligés, The Knight with the Lion, and The Story of the Grail have been recovered. Also fragmentary is the MS Garrett 125 (Princeton Library), one of the rare illuminated texts of Chrétien’s poems, which has preserved extensive fragments of The Knight of the Cart and The Knight with the Lion. Three other manuscripts containing two or more of Chrétien’s romances can be found today in the Bibliothèque Nati
onale in Paris: Bibl. Nat. f. fr. 375 (Cligés, Erec), Bibl. Nat. f. fr. 1420 (Erec, Cligés), and Bibl. Nat. f. fr. 12560 (The Knight with the Lion, The Knight of the Cart, Cligés). In addition, Rome Vat. 1725 contains both The Knight with the Lion and The Knight of the Cart, and Chantilly 472 has Erec, The Knight with the Lion and The Knight of the Cart. Both Bibl. Nat. 375 and Chantilly 472 contain many other romances contemporary to and sometimes inspired by those of Chrétien. Twenty-three other manuscripts contain just one of Chrétien’s romances, usually accompanied by one work by some other author. Erec, Cligés, The Knight of the Cart and The Knight with the Lion exist more or less complete in seven manuscripts each, while The Story of the Grail is preserved by no less than fifteen.

  The number of manuscripts of Chrétien’s works that have come down to us from the medieval period is eloquent testimony to his popularity and importance, although from numerous fragments we can suspect that even more manuscripts were destroyed than have been saved. His romances are most often found in manuscript collections, like Bibl. Nat. 794 and 1450, that contain pseudo-historical accounts of ancient history, to which the Arthurian material was purportedly linked, or in manuscripts containing a wide variety of other courtly romances. His unfinished The Story of the Grail is found most frequently with its verse continuations (see Appendix).

  From manuscript evidence we know that both The Story of the Grail and The Knight of the Cart were left unfinished by Chrétien. Many believe that he abandoned The Knight of the Cart because he was dissatisfied with the subject matter, which may have been imposed on him by his patroness, Marie de Champagne; and most critics accept that The Story of the Grail was interrupted by Chrétien’s death, or by that of his patron, Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders. The other romances – Erec and Enide, Cligés, and The Knight with the Lion were completed by Chrétien. Three additional narrative poems have been ascribed to him, with varying degrees of success. Despite the doubts of its most recent editor (A. J. Holden 1988), many believe that the hagiographical romance William of England, whose author names himself Crestéens in its first line, is by our poet; on the other hand, attempted attributions to Chrétien of Le Chevalier à l’épée (The Knight with the Sword) and La Mule sans frein (The Unbridled Mule), two romances found with The Story of the Grail in MS Berne 354, have not met with widespread acceptance. In addition to these narrative works, Chrétien has left us two lyric poems in the courtly manner, which make him the first identifiable practitioner in northern France of the courtly lyric style begun by the troubadours in the South in the early years of the twelfth century.

  In the prologue to Cligés, his second romance, Chrétien includes a list of works he had previously composed:

  Cil qui fist d’Erec et d’Enide,

  Et les comandemanz d’Ovide

  Et l’art d’amors en romanz mist,

  Et le mors de l’espaule fist,

  Del roi Marc et d’Iseut la blonde,

  Et de la hupe et de l’aronde

  Et del rossignol la muance,

  Un novel conte recomance

  D’un vaslet qui an Grece fu

  Del lignage le roi Artu. [1–10]

  [He who wrote Erec and Enide, who translated Ovid’s Commandments and the Art of Love into French, who wrote The Shoulder Bite, and about King Mark and Isolde the Blonde, and of the metamorphosis of the hoopoe, swallow, and nightingale, begins now a new tale of a youth who, in Greece, was of King Arthur’s line.]

  Since this prologue mentions only Erec among his major romances, it is assumed that The Knight of the Cart, The Knight with the Lion and The Story of the Grail all postdate Cligés. From this listing it seems established that early in his career Chrétien perfected his technique by practising the then popular literary mode of translations and adaptations of tales from Latin into the vernacular. The ‘comandemanz d’Ovide’ is usually identified with Ovid’s Remedia amoris (Remedies for Love); the ‘art d’amors’ is Ovid’s Ars amatoria (Art of Love), and the ‘mors de l’espaule’ is the Pelops story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 6. These works by Chrétien have all been lost. However, the ‘muance de la hupe et de l’aronde et del rossignol’ (the Philomela story in Metamorphoses 6) is preserved in the late thirteenth-century Ovide moralisé, a lengthy allegorical treatment of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in a version that is most probably by our author.

  Chrétien also informs us in this passage that he composed a poem ‘Del roi Marc et d’Iseut la blonde’. As far as we know, this was the first treatment of that famous Breton legend in French. Chrétien does not tell us whether he had written a full account of the tragic loves of Tristan and Isolde, and scholars today generally agree that he treated only an episode of that legend since Mark’s name, and not Tristan’s, is linked with Isolde’s. But we are none the less permitted to believe that he is in some measure responsible for the subsequent success of that story, as he was to be in large measure for that of King Arthur. Indeed, in his earliest romances Chrétien seems obsessed with the Tristan legend, which he mentions several times in Erec and Enide and against which his Cligés (often referred to as an ‘anti-Tristan’) is seen to react.

  In the prologues to his other romances (only The Knight with the Lion has no prologue) Chrétien often speaks in the first person about his poetry and purposes. He gives us the fullest version of his name, Crestïens de Troies, in the prologue to Erec, and this designation is also used by Huon de Mery in the Tornoiement Antecrist, by Gerbert de Montreuil in his Continuation of The Story of the Grail and by the anonymous authors of Hunbaut, Le Chevalier à l’épée, and the Didot-Perceval. In the prologues to Cligés (l. 45), The Knight of the Cart (l. 25), and The Story of the Grail (l. 62), and in the closing lines of The Knight with the Lion (l. 6821), he calls himself simply Crestïens. The fuller version of his name given in Erec suggests that he was born or at least spent his formative years in Troyes, which is located some one hundred miles along the Seine to the south-east of Paris and was one of the leading cities in the region of Champagne. The language in which he composed his works, which is tinted with dialectal traits from the Champagne area, lends further credence to this supposition.

  At Troyes, Chrétien most assuredly was associated with the court of Marie de Champagne, one of the daughters of Eleanor of Aquitaine by her first marriage, to King Louis VII of France. Marie’s marriage in 1159 to Henri the Liberal, Count of Champagne, furnishes us with one of the very few dates that can be determined with any degree of certainty in Chrétien’s biography. In the opening lines of The Knight of the Cart, Chrétien informs us that he is undertaking the composition of his romance at the behest of ‘my lady of Champagne’, and critics today agree unanimously that this can only be the great literary patroness Marie. Since she only became ‘my lady of Champagne’ with her marriage, Chrétien could not have begun a romance for her before 1159.

  Another relatively certain date in Chrétien’s biography is furnished by the dedication of The Story of the Grail to Philip of Flanders. It appears that, sometime after the death of Henri the Liberal in 1181, Chrétien found a new patron in Philip of Alsace, a cousin to Marie de Champagne, who became Count of Flanders in 1168 and to whom Chrétien dedicated his never-to-be-completed grail romance. This work surely was begun before Philip’s death in 1191 at Acre in the Holy Land, and most likely prior to his departure for the Third Crusade in September of 1190. Chrétien may have abandoned the poem after learning of Philip’s death, or his own death may well have occurred around this time.

  Apart from the dates 1159 and 1191, nothing else concerning Chrétien’s biography can be fixed with certainty. Allusions in Erec to Macrobius and the Liberal Arts, to Alexander, Solomon, Helen of Troy and others, coupled with similar allusions in other romances, suggest that he received the standard preparation of a clerc in the flourishing church schools in Troyes, and therefore must have entered minor orders. The style of his love monologues, particularly in Cligés, shows familiarity with the dialectal method of the schools, in which opposites are juxtapo
sed and analysed, as well as with the rhetorical traditions of Classical and medieval Latin literature. It is possible, however, that he derived his style and knowledge of Classical themes uniquely from works available to him in the vernacular, without having undergone any special training in Latin, since all of the Classical stories to which he alludes had been turned into Old French by 1165. The elaborate descriptions of clothing and ceremonies in several of his romances can likewise be traced to contemporary works composed in French, particularly to Wace’s Roman de Brut and the anonymous Eneas and Floire et Blancheflor.

  Circumstantial evidence also strongly suggests that Chrétien spent some of his early career in England and may well have composed his first romance there. References to English cities and topography, especially in Cligés but indeed in all of his works, show that the Britain of King Arthur was the England of King Henry II Plantagenet. Moreover, there is a close link between Troyes and England in the person of Henry of Blois, abbot of Glastonbury (1126–71) and bishop of Winchester (1129–71). This prelate was the uncle of Henri the Liberal of Champagne, at whose court we have seen Chrétien to have been engaged. Henry of Blois had important contacts with Geoffrey of Monmouth and William of Malmesbury, two medieval Latin writers who, more than any others, popularized the legends of King Arthur that Chrétien was to introduce to the aristocratic public.

  An even closer tie to Henry II’s England has been proposed in the case of Erec and Enide, in which the coronation of Erec at Nantes on Christmas Day may be a reflection of contemporary politics. In 1169 Henry held a Christmas court at Nantes in order to force the engagement of his third son, Geoffrey, to Constance, the daughter of Conan IV of Brittany. This court had significant political ramifications for it assured through marital politics the submission of the major Breton barons, a submission Henry had not been able to attain by successive military campaigns in 1167, 1168 and 1169. The guest list at the coronation of Erec includes barons from all corners of Henry II’s domains but, significantly, none from those of his rival Louis VII of France. Two other details from this coronation scene lend credence to such an identification: the thrones on which Arthur and Erec are seated are described as having leopards sculpted upon their arms, and the donor of these thrones is identified as Bruianz des Illes. Leopards were the heraldic animals on Henry’s royal arms, and Bruianz des liles has been positively identified as Henry’s best friend, Brian of Wallingford, named in contemporary documents as Brian Fitz Count, Brian de ínsula, or Brian de l’lsle. It thus seems plausible that Erec was composed at the behest of Henry II to help legitimize Geoffrey’s claim to the throne of Brittany by underscoring the ‘historical’ link between Geoffrey and Arthur. This would place its composition shortly after 1169 while memories of the Nantes court were still fresh. Such a dating corresponds well with what we know about the composition of Chrétien’s other romances, which most critics now place in the 1170s and 1180s.