Erec greatly prized his mount, and would not mount another.]
Perhaps Chrétien’s most spectacular use of vocalic harmonies, repetition and chiasmus is in the following lines from The Knight with the Lion, where the repetition of the ui and oi diphthongs and the high vowels u and i underscores the mental anguish of the girl caught in a storm in the forest:
… tant que vint a la nuit oscure.
Si li enuia molt la nuiz,
et de ce dobla li enuiz
qu’il plovoit a si grant desroi
com Damedex avoit de coi,
et fu el bois molt au parfont.
Et la nuiz et li bois li font
grant enui, et plus li enuie
que la nuis ne li bois, la pluie. [ll. 4840–48]
[… until the shadows of night fell. She was frightened by the night, but her fright was doubled because it was raining as heavily as God could make it pour and she was in the depths of the forest. The night and the forest frightened her, but she was more upset by the rain than either the night or the forest.]
Certainly no translation can hope to capture all the subtlety and magic of Chrétien’s art. But one can hope to convey some measure of his humour, his irony and the breadth of his vision. He was one of the great artists and creators of his day, and nearly every romancer after him had to come to terms with his legacy. Some translated or frankly imitated (today we might even say plagiarized) his work; others repeated or developed motifs, themes, structures and stylistic mannerisms introduced by him; still others continued his stories in ever more vast compilations. Already in the last decade of the twelfth century his Erec and Enide had been translated into German as Erek by Hartmann von Aue, who in the first years of the thirteenth century also translated The Knight with the Lion (Iwein). At about the same time Ulrich von Zatzikhoven translated The Knight of the Cart, also into German (Lanzelet). But his greatest German emulator was Wolfram von Eschenbach, who adapted Chrétien’s The Story of the Grail as Parzival, one of the finest of all medieval romances, in the first decade of the thirteenth century. There were also direct adaptations of this romance into Middle Dutch and Old Welsh.
In the fifty years from 1190 to 1240 Arthurian romance was the prevailing vogue in France, and no writer could escape Chrétien’s influence. Some, like Gautier d’Arras and Jean Renart, deliberately set out to rival him, fruitlessly attempting to surpass the master. Others – the majority – flattered his memory by their imitations of his work. Among the motifs first introduced by Chrétien that are found in more than one romance after him are the tournament in which the hero fights incognito (Cligés), the sparrow–hawk contest (Erec), the abduction (The Knight of the Cart), Sir Kay’s disagreeable temperament (Erec, The Knight of the Cart, The Story of the Grail), and the heads of knights impaled on stakes (Erec).
His incompleted The Story of the Grail sparked by far the greatest interest. In the last decade of the twelfth century two anonymous continuators sought to complete the poem. The first took it up where Chrétien left off, continuing the adventures of Sir Gawain for as many as 19,600 lines in the lengthiest redaction, but never reaching a conclusion. The second continuator returned to the adventures of Perceval for an additional 13,000 lines. In the early thirteenth century the romance was given two independent terminations, one by Manessier in some 10,000 additional lines, and the other by Gerbert de Montreuil in 17,000 lines. (See Appendix).
Meanwhile, also in the late twelfth century, Robert de Boron composed a derivative verse account of the history of the Grail in three related poems – Joseph d’Arimathie, Merlin, Perceval – of which only the first survives intact. It tells of the origin of the Grail, associating it for the first time with the cup of the Last Supper, and announces that it will be carried to the West and found there by a knight of the lineage of Joseph of Arimathea. Robert’s Perceval (now totally lost) would have recounted how this knight found the Grail and thereby put an end to the ‘marvels of Britain’. The second poem, now fragmentary, links the others by changing the scene to Britain, introducing Arthur and having Merlin recall the action of the first and predict that of the second. Robert’s poems were soon replaced by prose versions, notably the so-called Didot-Perceval. In the early thirteenth century there was a second prose reworking of Chrétien’s Grail story, known as the Perlesvaus, by an anonymous author who also knew the work of Robert de Boron and both the First and Second Continuations.
Chrétien’s influence can still be felt in the vast prose compendium of the mid-thirteenth century known as the Lancelot-Graal or the Vulgate Cycle (1225–50), which combined his story of Lancelot’s love for the queen (The Knight of the Cart) with the Grail quest (The Story of the Grail), and was the source of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, the fountainhead of Arthurian material in modern English literature. However, the success of the Lancelot-Graal ironically marked the decline of Chrétien’s direct influence. As prose came to replace verse as the preferred medium for romance and the French language continued to evolve from Chrétien’s Old French to a more modern idiom, his poems were forgotten until the rediscovery of their manuscripts in the nineteenth century.
Thanks to Malory, the Arthurian materials were never lost sight of so completely in England, and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King reflect the vogue for Arthuriana in the Romantic period. Today in both England and America there is a renewed and lively interest in the Arthurian legends that Chrétien was the first to exploit as the subject matter for romance. All those who have celebrated and still celebrate King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table – from the anonymous authors of the Lancelot-Graal through Malory and Tennyson to Steinbeck, Boorman and Bradley today – are forever in his debt.
William W. Kibler
June 1989
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATIONS
It is acknowledged as fact that there exists no adequate edition of Chrétien’s romances on which to base a translation.
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