Four Arthurian Romances, by Chretien DeTroyes

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Four Arthurian Romances
("Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot")

by Chretien DeTroyes
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 Chretien DeTroyes.

This electronic edition was edited, proofed, and prepared by
Douglas B. Killings (DeTroyes@EnterAct.COM), November 1996.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:

ORIGINAL TEXT --

Carroll, Carleton W. (Ed.): "Chretien 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.): "Chretien 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.): "Chretien 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 Chretien de Troyes, Vol.
II: Cliges" (Champion, Paris, 1957).

OTHER TRANSLATIONS --

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

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

Owen, D.D.R (Trans.): "Chretien DeTroyes: Arthurian Romances"
(Everyman Library, London, 1987). Contains translations of "Erec
et Enide", "Cliges", "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 Chretien
DeTroyes' "Yvain".

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

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INTRODUCTION

Chretien 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 Chretien 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
Chretien'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 Chretien'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.

Chretien 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 Chretien 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, Cliges, Yvain, and Lancelot. 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 because Miss Jessie L. Weston has
given us an English version of Wolfram's wellknown "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 Chretien would have been unjust to
him. It is true the romance of "Lancelot" was not completed by
Chretien, 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 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".

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. Chretien
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.

What Chretien's immediate and specific source was for his
romances is of deep interest to the student. Unfortunately, he
has left us in doubt. He speaks in the vaguest way of the
materials he used. There is no evidence that he had any Celtic
written source. We are thus 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. Add to this literary perspicacity,
a good foundation in classic fable, a modicum of ecclesiastical
doctrine, a remarkable facility in phrase, figure, and rhyme and
we have the foundations for Chretien's art as we shall find it
upon closer examination.

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: the "Metamorphoses",
the "Ars Amatoria", and perhaps the "Remedia Amoris". But 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 rationalised to suit the
taste of French readers; his is further the credit of having
given to somewhat crude folk-lore that polish and elegance which
is peculiarly French, and which is inseparably associated with
the Arthurtan legends in all modern literature. Though Beroul,
and perhaps other poets, had previously based romantic poems upon
individual Celtic heroes like Tristan, nevertheless to Chretien,
so far as we can see, 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 unqualifiedly attribute to Chretien this important
literary convention, one 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.

And now let us consider the faults which a modern reader will not
be slow to detect in Chretien's style. Most of his salient
faults are common to all mediaeval narrative literature. They
may be ascribed to the extraordinary leisure of the class for
whom it was composed--a class which was always ready to read an
old story told again, and which would tolerate any description,
however detailed. The pastimes of this class of readers were
jousting, hunting, and making love. Hence the preponderance of
these matters in the literature of its leisure hours. No detail
of the joust or hunt was unfamiliar or unwelcome to these
readers; no subtle arguments concerning the art of love were too
abstruse to delight a generation steeped in amorous casuistry and
allegories. And if some scenes seem to us indelicate, yet after
comparison with other authors of his times, Chretien must be let
off with a light sentence. It is certain he 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 mediaeval literature, such as
the fabliaux, farces, and morality plays, in which courtesy
imposed no restraint. For our poet's lack of sense of
proportion, and for his carelessness in the proper motivation of
many episodes, no apology can be made. He is not always guilty;
some episodes betoken poetic mastery. But a poet acquainted, as
he was, with some first-class Latin poetry, and who had made a
business of his art, ought to have handled his material more
intelligently, even in the twelfth century. The emphasis is not
always laid with discrimination, nor is his yarn always kept free
of tangles in the spinning.

Reference has been made to Chretien's use of his sources. The
tendency of some critics has been to minimise the French poet's
originality by pointing out striking analogies in classic and
Celtic fable. Attention has been especially directed to the
defence of the fountain and the service of a fairy mistress in
"Yvain", to the captivity of Arthur's subjects in the kingdom of
Gorre, as narrated in "Lancelot", reminding one so insistently of
the treatment of the kingdom of Death from which some god or hero
finally delivers those in durance, and to the reigned death of
Fenice in "Cliges", with its many variants. These episodes are
but examples of parallels which will occur to the observant
reader. The difficult point to determine, in speaking of
conceptions so widespread in classic and mediaeval literature, is
the immediate source whence these conceptions reached Chretien.
The list of works of reference appended to this volume will
enable the student to go deeper into this much debated question,
and will permit us to dispense with an examination of the
arguments in this place. However, such convincing parallels for
many of Chretien's fairy and romantic episodes have been adduced
by students of Irish and Welsh legend that one cannot fail to be
impressed by the fact that Chretien was in touch, either by oral
or literary tradition, with the populations of Britain and of
Brittany, and that we have here his most immediate inspiration.
Professor Foerster, stoutly opposing the 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 will to-day 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. Any poet should be judged not as a "finder" but as
a "user" of the common stock of ideas. The study of sources of
mediaeval poetry, which is being so doggedly carried on by
scholars, may well throw light upon the main currents of literary
tradition, but it casts no reflection, favourable or otherwise,
upon the personal art of the poet in handling his stuff. On that
count he may plead his own cause before the jury.

Chretien's originality, then, consists in his portrayal of the
social ideal of the French aristocracy in the twelfth century.
So far as we know he was the first to create in the vulgar
tongues a vast court, where men and women lived in conformity
with the rules of courtesy, where the truth was told, where
generosity was open-handed, where the weak and the innocent were
protected by men who dedicated themselves to the cult of honour
and to the quest of a spotless reputation. Honour and love
combined to engage the attention of this society; these were its
religion in a far more real sense than was that of the Church.
Perfection was attainable under this code of ethics: Gawain, for
example, was a perfect knight. Though the ideals of this court
and those of Christianity are in accord at many points, vet
courtly love and Christian morality are irreconcilable. This
Arthurian material, as used by Chretien, is fundamentally immoral
as judged by Christian standards. Beyond question, the poets and
the public alike knew this to be the case, and therein lay its
charm for a society in which the actual relations or the sexes
were rigidly prescribed by the Church and by feudal practice,
rather than by the sentiments of the individuals concerned. The
passionate love of Tristan for Iseut, of Lancelot for Guinevere,
of Cliges for Fenice, fascinate the conventional Christian
society of the twelfth century and of the twentieth century
alike, but there-is only one name among men for such relations as
theirs, and neither righteousness nor reason lie that way. Even
Tennyson, in spite of all he has done to spiritualise this
material, was compelled to portray the inevitable dissolution and
ruin of Arthur's court. Chretien well knew the difference
between right and wrong, between reason and passion, as the
reader of "Cliges" may learn for himself. Fenice was not Iseut,
and she would not have her Cliges to be a Tristan. Infidelity,
if you will, but not "menage a trois". Both "Erec" and "Yvain"
present a conventional morality. But "Lancelot" is flagrantly
immoral, and the poet is careful to state that for this
particular romance he is indebted to his patroness Marie de
Champagne. He says it was she who furnished him with both the
"matiere" and the "san", the material of the story and its method
of treatment.

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. Professor Foerster's chronology is
generally accepted, and there is little likelihood of his being
in error when he supposes Chretien's work to have been done as
follows: the lost "Tristan" (the existence of which is denied by
Gaston Paris in "Journal des Savants", 1902, pp. 297 f.), "Erec
and Enide", "Cliges", "Lancelot", "Yvain", "Perceval". The
arguments for this chronology, based upon external as well as
internal criticism, may be found in the Introductions to
Professor Foerster's recent editions. When we speculate upon the
development of Chretien's moral ideas we are not on such sure
ground. As we have seen, 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. "Lancelot" must be the keystone of any theory constructed
concerning the moral evolution of Chretien. The following
supposition is tenable, if the chronology of Foerster is correct.
After the works of his youth, consisting of lyric poems and
translations embodying the ideals of Ovid and of the school of
contemporary troubadour poets, Chretien took up the Arthurinn
material and started upon a new course. "Erec" is the oldest
Arthurinn romance to have survived in any language, but it is
almost certainly not the first to have been written. It is a
perfectly clean 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 episodical 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 (cf. Gaston
Paris in "Journal des Savants", 1902, pp. 641-655). 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. This romance well
illustrates the drawing power of Arthur's court as a literary
centre, and its use as a rallying-point for courteous knights of
whatever extraction. The poem has been termed an "Anti-Tristan",
because of its disparaging reference to the love of Tristan and
Iseut, which, it is generally supposed, had been narrated by
Chretien in his earlier years. Next may come "Lancelot", with
its significant dedication to the Countess of Champagne. Of all
the poet's work, this tale of the rescue of Guinevere by her
lover seems to express most closely the ideals of Marie's court
ideals in which devotion and courtesy but thinly disguise free
love. "Yvain" is a return to the poet's natural bent, in an
episodical romance, while "Perceval" crowns his production with
its pure and exalted note, though without a touch of that
religious mysticism which later marked Wolfram yon Eschenbach's
"Parzival". "Guillaime d'Angleterre" is a pseudo-historical
romance of adventure in which the worldly distresses and the
final reward of piety are conventionally exposed. It is
uninspired, its place is difficult to determine, and its
authorship is questioned by some. It is aside from the Arthurian
material, and there is no clue to its place in the evolution of
Chretien's art, if indeed it be his work.

A few words must be devoted to Chretien's place in the history of
mediaeval narrative poetry. The heroic epic songs of France,
devoted either to the conflict of Christendom under the
leadership of France against the Saracens, or else to the strife
and rivalry of French vassals among themselves, had been current
for perhaps a century before our poet began to write. These
epic poems, of which some three score have survived, portray a
warlike, virile, unsentimental feudal society, whose chief
occupation was fighting, and whose dominant ideals were faith in
God, loyalty to feudal family ties, and bravery in battle.
Woman's place is comparatively obscure, and of love-making there
is little said. It is a poetry of vigorous manhood, of
uncompromising morality, and of hard knocks given and taken for
God, for Christendom, and the King of France. This poetry is
written in ten- or twelve- sylabble verses grouped, at first in
assonanced, later in rhymed, "tirades" of unequal length. It was
intended for a society which was still homogeneous, and to it at
the outset doubtless all classes of the population listened with
equal interest. As poetry it is monotonous, without sense of
proportion, padded to facilitate memorisation by professional
reciters, and unadorned by figure, fancy, or imagination. Its
pretention to historic accuracy begot prosaicness in its approach
to the style of the chronicles. But its inspiration was noble,
its conception of human duties was lofty. It gives a realistic
portrayal of the age which produced it, the age of the first
crusades, and to this day we would choose as our models of
citizenship Roland and Oliver rather than Tristan and Lancelot.
The epic poems, dealing with the pseudo-historical characters who
had fought in civil and foreign wars under Charlemagne, remained
the favourite literary pabulum of the middle classes until the
close of the thirteenth century. Professor Bedier is at present
engaged in explaining the extraordinary hold which these poems
had upon the public, and in proving that they exercised a
distinct function when exploited by the Church throughout the
period of the crusades to celebrate local shrines and to promote
muscular Christianity. But the refinement which began to
penetrate the ideals of the French aristocracy about the middle
of the twelfth century craved a different expression in narrative
literature. Greek and Roman mythology and history were seized
upon with some effect to satisfy the new demand. The "Roman de
Thebes", the "Roman d'Alexandre", the "Roman de Troie", and its
logical continuation, the "Roman d'Eneas", are all twelfth-
century attempts to clothe classic legend in the dress of
mediaeval chivalry. But better fitted to satisfy the new demand
was the discovery by the alert Anglo-Normans perhaps in Brittany,
perhaps in the South of England, of a vast body of legendary
material which, so far as we know, had never before this century
received any elaborate literary treatment. The existence of the
literary demand and this discovery of the material for its prompt
satisfaction is one of the most remarkable coincidences in
iiterary history. It would seem that the pride of the Celtic
populations in a Celtic hero, aided and abetted by Geoffrey of
Monmouth, who first showed the romantic possibilities of the
material, made of the obscure British chieftain Arthur a world
conqueror. Arthur thus became already in Geoffrey's "Historia
regum Britaniae" a conscious protagonist of Charlemagne and his
rival in popularity. This grandiose conception of Arthur
persisted in England, but this conception of the British
chieftain did not interest the French. For Chretien Arthur had
no political significance. He is simply the arbiter of his court
in all affairs of justice and courtesy. Charlemagne's very
realistic entourage of virile and busy barons is replaced by a
court of elegant chevaliers and unemployed ladies. Charlemagne's
setting is historical and geographical; Arthur's setting is ideal
and in the air. 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. Though the Church
made the attempt in "Parzival", it could never lay its hands so
effectively upon this Celtic material, because it contained too
many elements which were root and branch inconsistent with the
essential teachings of Christianity. A fleeting comparison of
the noble end of Charlemagne's Peers fighting for their God and
their King at Ronceval with the futile and dilettante careers of
Arthur's knights in joust and hunt, will show better than mere
words where the difference lies.

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