Everything about Chretien De Troyes totally explained
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). His work on
Arthurian subjects represents some of the best of
medieval literature.
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 hasn't stopped speculation that Chrétien, medieval literature's greatest treater of matrimonial love, didn't approve of Lancelot's adulterous subject.
To him are also attributed two lesser works: the pious romance
Guillaume d'Angleterre (an attribution that's 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's interesting that
Tristan isn't named.
Sources
The immediate and specific source for his romances is of deep interest to the student; unfortunately, he's 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's no direct evidence that he'd
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.
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 Guyer 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'd never stay away a full year. Using words like those of Leander in the seventeenth of Ovid’s Epistles he said: 'If only I'd the wings of a dove/to fly back to you at will/Manyand many a time I'd come'.
Creator of the modern novel
Chrétien has been termed “the inventor of the modern novel” and Karl Uitti argues:
» With [Chrétien’swork] 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're 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.
Further Information
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