Arthurian Romances Read Free Page A

which most critics now place in the 1170s and 1180s.
    Since Chrétien gave the fuller version of his name in the prologue to
Erec and Enide
we must assume he was away from the region of Troyes at the time of its composition, and it now seems reasonable to speculate that he was in England at the court of Henry II, where he would have had ample opportunity to learn of the new ‘Matter of Britain’ that was then attaining popularity there.
Erec
, a brilliant psychological study, appears to have been the earliest romance composed in the vernacular tongue to incorporate Arthurian themes. This poem posed a question familiar to courtly circles: how can a knight, once married, sustain the valour and glory that first won him a bride? That is, can a knight serve both his honour
(armes
) and his love
(amors
)? Erec, caught up in marital bliss, neglects the pursuit of his glory until reminded of his duties by Enide, who has overheard some knights gossiping maliciously. Accompanied by her, he sets out on a series of adventures in the course of which both he and his bride are tested. The mixture of psychological insight and extraordinary adventures was to become a trademark of Chrétien’s style and of the Arthurian romances written in imitation of his work. And Chrétien would reconsider the question of
armes
and
amors
from a different perspective in
The Knight with the Lion
.
    Chrétien’s second major work,
Cligés
, is in part set at Arthur’s court, but is principally an adventure romance based on Græco-Byzantine material, which was exceedingly popular in the second half of the twelfth century. This romance, which exalts the pure love of Fenice for Cligés, has been seen by many as a foil to the adulterous passion of Isolde for Tristan. Among the numerous textual parallels adduced to support this contention, especially in the second part of the poem, are Fenice’s relationships with her husband (Alis) and sweetheart (Cligés) and her expressed views on love and marriage, the nurse Thessala’s similarity to Brangien, John’s hideaway and the Hall of Images, the love potion, and lover’s lament. However, the poem is even more interesting to us for its use of irony, its balanced structure and its psychological penetration into the hearts of the two lovers. Here, as elsewhere, Chrétien shows the influence of Ovid, the most popular Classical writer throughout the twelfth century. And again Chrétien shows his ability to exploit popular material in a highly original manner.
    It is now generally agreed that
Cligés
dates from about 1176. Although the subject matter is wholly fictional, scholars have found intriguing analogies in several of its situations to contemporary politics between 1170 and 1175. The intrigues that brought the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Comnenus to power over his elder brother, Isaac – who, like Alexander, received only the title – are remarkably akin to the situation by which Alis comes to the throne of Constantinople rather than his older brother Alexander. In the poem, the projected marriage of Alis to the daughter of the German emperor is,
mutatis mutandis
, an echo of the projected marriage between Frederick Barbarossa’s son and Manuel’s only daughter, Maria. As in the poem, Frederick received the Byzantine ambassadors at Cologne. And it was at Regensburg, also evoked in the poem, that Marie de Champagne’s parents met the Byzantine ambassadors during the Second Crusade. Chrétien’s audience would not have failed to identify the fierce Duke of Saxony to whom Fenice was originally promised with Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony since 1142 and a cousin of Frederick Barbarossa, withwhom he was generally at odds. In 1168 Henry the Lion was married to Mathilda of England, a half-sister of Marie de Champagne, but this did not keep Marie’s husband, Henri the Liberal, from supporting Frederick in his struggles against his cousin.