Chrétien de Troyes

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Chrétien de Troyes was a French poet and trouvère who flourished in the late 12th century. Little is known of his life, but he seems to have been from Troyes, or at least intimately connected with it, and between 1160 and 1172 he served at the court of his patroness Countess Marie de Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, perhaps as herald-at-arms (as Gaston Paris speculated).[1] His work on Arthurian subjects represents some of the best of medieval literature.

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Works

Chrétien's works include five major poems in rhyming eight-syllable couplets. Four of these are complete; Erec and Enide (c. 1170); Cligès (c. 1176), and Yvain, the Knight of the Lion and Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, both written simultaneously between 1177 and 1181. Chrétien's final romance was Perceval, the Story of the Grail, written between 1181 and 1190, but left unfinished. It was composed for Philip, Count of Flanders, to whom Chrétien was attached in his last years. He finished only 9,000 lines of the work, but four successors of varying talents added 54,000 additional lines in what are known as the Four Continuations. Similarly, the last thousand lines of Lancelot were written by Godefroi de Leigni, apparently by arrangement with Chrétien. In the case of Perceval, one continuer says the poet's death prevented him from completing the work, in the case of Lancelot, no reason is given. This has not stopped speculation that Chrétien, medieval literature's greatest treater of matrimonial love, did not approve of Lancelot's adulterous subject.

To him are also attributed two lesser works: the pious romance Guillaume d'Angleterre (an attribution that is no longer believed), and Philomela, the only one of his four poems based on Ovid's Metamorphoses that has survived. Chrétien names his treatments of Ovid in the introduction to Cligès, where he also mentions his work about King Mark and Iseult. The latter is presumably related to the Tristan and Iseult legend, though it is interesting that Tristan is not named.

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Sources

The immediate and specific source for his romances is of deep interest to the student; unfortunately, he has left us in the dark as to what these were. He speaks in the vaguest way of the materials he used, and though Celtic influence is easily detectable in the stories, there is no direct evidence that he had Celtic written sources. Geoffrey of Monmouth or Wace might have supplied some of the names, but neither author mentioned Erec, Lancelot, Gornemant and many others who play an important role in Chrétien's narratives. One is forced to guess about Latin or French literary originals which are now lost, or upon continental lore that goes back to a Celtic source. It is the same problem that faces the student in the case of Béroul, an Anglo-Norman who wrote about 1150. However, Chrétien found his sources immediately at hand, without much understanding of its primitive spirit, but appreciating it as a setting for the ideal society dreamed of, although not realized, in his own day. And Chrétien's five romances together form the most complete expression from a single author of the ideals of French chivalry

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Influence

Chrétien's writing was very popular, as evidenced by the high number of surviving copies of his romances and their many adaptations into other languages. Three of Middle High German literature's finest examples, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and Hartmann von Aue's Erec and Iwein, were based on Perceval, Erec, and Yvain; the Three Welsh Romances associated with the Mabinogion, Peredur, son of Efrawg, Geraint and Enid, and Owain, or the Lady of the Fountain are derived from the same trio. Especially in the case of Peredur, however, the connection between the Welsh romances and their source is probably not direct, and has never been satisfactorily delineated. Chrétien also has the distinction of being the first writer to mention the Holy Grail (Perceval) and the love affair between Queen Guinevere and Lancelot (Lancelot), subjects of household recognition even today.

There is a specific Latin influence in Chrétien’s romances the likes of which (The Iliad, The Aeneid, Metamorphoses) were “translated into the Old French vernacular during the 1150s”. Foster Gayer argues that specifically Yvain, the Knight of the Lion contains definite Ovidian influence:

Yvain was filled with grief and showed the Ovidian love symptoms of weeping and sighing so bitterly that he could scarcely speak. He declared that he would never stay away a full year. Using words like those of Leander in the seventeenth of Ovid’s Epistles he said: 'If only I had the wings of a dove/to fly back to you at will/Manyand many a time I would come'.

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Creator of the modern novel

Chrétien has been termed “the inventor of the modern novel” and Karl Uitti argues:

With [Chrétien’s work] a new era opens in the history of European story telling…this poem reinvents the genre we call narrative romance; in some important respects it also initiates the vernacular novel.

The main quality of the above-mentioned Celtic influences was that of a sort of incompleteness. A “story” could be anything from a single battle scene, to a prologue, to a minimally cohesive tale with little to no chronological layout. Uitti argues that Yvain is Chrétien’s “most carefully contrived romance… It has a beginning, a middle, and an end: we are in no doubt that Yvain’s story is over”. This very method of having a three definite parts including the build in the middle leading to the climax of the story is in large part why Chrétien is seen to be a writer of novels six centuries before novels existed.

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Love without fear and trepidation is fire without flame and heat.

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•   Amors sanz crieme et sans peor
Est feus sanz flame et sanz chalor,
Jorz sanz soloil, bresche sanz miel,
Estez sans flor, iverz sanz giel,
Ciaus sanz lune, livres sanz letre.
o   Love without fear and trepidation is fire without flame and heat, day without sun, comb without honey, summer without flowers, winter without frost, sky without moon, a book without letters.
o   Cligès, line 3893.
Yvain or Le Chevalier au Lion
•   Bien pert que c'est aprés mangier,
Fet Kex, qui teire ne se pot
Plus a paroles an plain pot
De vin qu'an un mui de cervoise.
o   "It's obvious that it's after dinner," says Kay, unable to hold his tongue. "There are more words in a potful of wine than in a barrel of beer".
o   Line 590.
•   Joie d'amors qui vient a tart
Sanble la vert busche qui art,
Qui dedanz rant plus grant chalor
Et plus se tient en sa valor,
Quant plus demore a alumer.
o   The joy of love when it comes late is like the burning of a green log, which gives out all the more heat and keeps its ability to do so all the longer, the slower it is to kindle.
o   Line 2521

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For hunger is a sauce, well blended and prepared, for any food.

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Perceval or Le Conte du Graal
Par le sornon connoist on l'ome.
One knows the man by the name he has.
Line 562
Nus ne puet estre trop parliers
Qui sovent tel chose ne die
Qui torné li est affolie,
Car li sages dit et retrait:
Qui trop parole, il se mesfait.
No one can be too talkative without often saying something that makes him look foolish, for the wise man's saying goes: "Whoever talks too much does himself a bad turn."
Line 1650.
 
Que molt est malvais qui oblie
S'on li fait honte ne laidure.
Only a very base person forgets when he is done some shame or mischief.
Line 2902.
Qui baise feme et plus n'i fait,
Des qu'il sont sol a sol andui,
Dont quit je qu'il remaint en lui.
Feme qui se bouche abandone
Le sorplus molt de legier done.
If someone kisses a woman and goes no further once they are alone together, then in my opinion it's his own fault. A woman who freely surrenders her lips gives the rest very readily.
Line 3860.

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Only a very base person forgets when he is done some shame or mischief.

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About Chrétien de Troyes

•   He was one of the first explorers of the human heart, and is therefore rightly to be numbered among the fathers of the novel of sentiment.
o   C. S. Lewis The Allegory of Love (Oxford, [1936] 1975), ch. 1, p. 29.
•   Chrétien is nothing if not versatile: popular, recherché, allusive, insistent, arch, naïve, racy and demure...He has a dramatist's flair for the handling of dialogue, a deft and economic way with characterization, the sharp confidence of the logician in his handling of rhetorical figures and the self-assurance of the entertainer in the deployment of humour (he is master of the verbal nudge). It is his essential vivacity that one misses most in his imitators.
o   Tony Hunt "Chrétien de Troyes' Arthurian Romance, Yvain", in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 128.