Four Arthurian Romances

FOUR ARTHURIAN ROMANCES:

"EREC ET ENIDE", "CLIGÉS", "YVAIN", AND "LANCELOT"

by Chrétien de Troyes

Fl. 12th Century A.D.

Originally written in Old French, sometime in the second half of the 12th Century A.D., by the court poet Chrétien de Troyes.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:

ORIGINAL TEXT--

Carroll, Carleton W. (Ed.): "Chrétien DeTroyes: Erec and Enide" (Garland Library of Medieval Literature, New York & London, 1987). Edited with a translation (see Penguin Classics edition below).

Kibler, William W. (Ed.): "Chrétien DeTroyes: The Knight with the Lion, or Yvain (Garland Library of Medieval Literature 48A, New York & London, 1985). Original text with English translation (See Penguin Classics edition below).

Kibler, William W. (Ed.): "Chrétien DeTroyes: Lancelot, or The Knight of the Cart (Garland Library of Medieval Literature 1A, New York & London, 1981). Original text with English translation (See Penguin Classics edition below).

Micha, Alexandre (Ed.): "Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes, Vol. II: Cligés" (Champion, Paris, 1957).

OTHER TRANSLATIONS--

Cline, Ruth Harwood (Trans.): "Chrétien DeTroyes: Yvain, or the Knight with the Lion" (University of Georgia Press, Athens GA, 1975).

Kibler, William W. & Carleton W. Carroll (Trans.): "Chrétien DeTroyes: Arthurian Romances" (Penguin Classics, London, 1991). Contains translations of "Erec et Enide" (by Carroll), "Cligés", "Yvain", "Lancelot", and DeTroyes' incomplete "Perceval" (by Kibler). Highly recommended.

Owen, D.D.R (Trans.): "Chrétien DeTroyes: Arthurian Romances" (Everyman Library, London, 1987). Contains translations of "Erec et Enide", "Cligés", "Yvain", "Lancelot", and DeTroyes' incomplete "Perceval". NOTE: This edition replaced W.W. Comfort's in the Everyman Library catalogue. Highly recommended.

RECOMMENDED READING--

Anonymous: "Lancelot of the Lake" (Trans: Corin Corely; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989). English translation of one of the earliest prose romances concerning Lancelot.

Anonymous: "The Mabinogion" (Ed: Jeffrey Gantz; Penguin Classics, London, 1976). Contains a translation of "Geraint and Enid", an earlier Welsh version of "Erec et Enide".

Anonymous: "Yvain and Gawain", "Sir Percyvell of Gales", and "The Anturs of Arther" (Ed: Maldwyn Mills; Everyman, London, 1992). NOTE: Texts are in Middle-English; "Yvain and Gawain" is a Middle-English work based almost exclusively on Chrétien DeTroyes' "Yvain".

Malory, Sir Thomas: "Le Morte D'Arthur" (Ed: Janet Cowen; Penguin Classics, London, 1969).

INTRODUCTION

Chrétien De Troyes has had the peculiar fortune of becoming the best known of the old French poets to students of mediaeval literature, and of remaining practically unknown to any one else. The acquaintance of students with the work of Chrétien has been made possible in academic circles by the admirable critical editions of his romances undertaken and carried to completion during the past thirty years by Professor Wendelin Foerster of Bonn. At the same time the want of public familiarity with Chrétien's work is due to the almost complete lack of translations of his romances into the modern tongues. The man who, so far as we know, first recounted the romantic adventures of Arthur's knights, Gawain. Yvain, Erec, Lancelot, and Perceval, has been forgotten; whereas posterity has been kinder to his debtors, Wolfram yon Eschenbach, Malory, Lord Tennyson, and Richard Wagner. The present volume has grown out of the desire to place these romances of adventure before the reader of English in a prose version based directly upon the oldest form in which they exist.

Such extravagant claims for Chrétien's art have been made in some quarters that one feels disinclined to give them even an echo here. The modem reader may form his own estimate of the poet's art, and that estimate will probably not be high. Monotony, lack of proportion, vain repetitions, insufficient motivation, wearisome subtleties, and threatened, if not actual, indelicacy are among the most salient defects which will arrest, and mayhap confound, the reader unfamiliar with mediaeval literary craft. No greater service can be performed by an editor in such a case than to prepare the reader to overlook these common faults, and to set before him the literary significance of this twelfth-century poet.

Chrétien de Troyes wrote in Champagne during the third quarter of the twelfth century. Of his life we know neither the beginning nor the end, but we know that between 1160 and 1172 he lived, perhaps as herald-at-arms (according to Gaston Paris, based on "Lancelot" 5591-94) at Troyes, where was the court of his patroness, the Countess Marie de Champagne. She was the daughter of Louis VII, and of that famous Eleanor of Aquitaine, as she is called in English histories, who, coming from the South of France in 1137, first to Paris and later to England, may have had some share in the introduction of those ideals of courtesy and woman service which were soon to become the cult of European society. The Countess Marie, possessing her royal mother's tastes and gifts, made of her court a social experiment station, where these Provencal ideals of a perfect society were planted afresh in congenial soil. It appears from contemporary testimony that the authority of this celebrated feudal dame was weighty, and widely felt. The old city of Troyes, where she held her court, must be set down large in any map of literary history.

For it was there that Chrétien was led to write four romances which together form the most complete expression we possess from a single author of the ideals of French chivalry. These romances, written in eight-syllable rhyming couplets, treat respectively of Erec and Enide, Cligés, Yvain, and Lancelot. Another poem, "Perceval le Gallois", was composed about 1175 for Philip, Count of Flanders, to whom Chrétien 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 Chrétien wrote only the first 9000 verses, and because Miss Jessie L. Weston has given us an English version of Wolfram's well-known "Parzival", which tells substantially the same story, though in a different spirit. To have included this poem, of which he wrote less than one-third, in the works of Chrétien would have been unjust to him. It is true the romance of "Lancelot" was not completed by Chrétien, we are told, but the poem is his in such large part that one would be over-scrupulous not to call it his. The other three poems mentioned are his entire.

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" (vi., 426-674) called "Philomena" by its recent editor (C. de Boer, Paris, 1909). All these are extant and accessible. But since "Guillaume d'Angleterre" and "Philomena" are not universally attributed to Chrétien, and since they have nothing to do with the Arthurian material, it seems reasonable to limit the present enterprise to "Erec and Enide", "Cligés", "Yvain", and "Lancelot".

Professor Foerster, basing his remark upon the best knowledge we possess of an obscure matter, has called "Erec and Enide" the oldest Arthurian romance extant. It is not possible to dispute this significant claim, but let us make it a little more intelligible. Scholarship has shown that from the early Middle Ages popular tradition was rife 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 ("Gesta regum Anglorum") and Geoffrey of Monmouth ("Historia regum Britanniae") 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. Documents are lacking for the dark ages of popular tradition before the Norman Conquest, and the theorists may work their will.

But 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. Chrétien belonged to a generation of French poets who rook over a great mass of Celtic folk-lore they imperfectly understood, and made of what, of course, it had never been before: 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, but it was the religion of the aristocracy and of the twelfth-century "honnete homme". Never was literature in any age closer to the ideals of a social class. So true is this 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. Be that as it may, it is proper to observe that the French romances of adventure portray late mediaeval aristocracy as it fain would be.

For the glaring inconsistencies between the reality and the ideal, one may turn to the chronicles of the period. Yet, even history tells of many an ugly sin 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 perfectly manifest.