This tale contains the episodes of the stag hunt, the joust for the sparrow-hawk, Enide’s tears, the quest with Enide’s repeated warnings for Gereint (Erec), the lecherous count, the ‘little king’ Gwiffred Petit (Guivret le Petit), and even a small-scale Joy of the Court. This relatively late Welsh prose tale, dating probably from the thirteenth century, could not have influenced Chrétien, and marked differences in details, tone and artistry suggest that it was not directly influenced by Chrétien’s work either. Together, however, they attest to an earlier common source, which most critics now assume to have been Celtic in origin and oral, rather than written.

In the prologue to Cligés, Chrétien states that his source was a written story in a book from the library of St Peter’s church in Beauvais. Again, Chrétien’s precise source is unknown, though he drew heavily on Ovid, Thomas’s Tristan, and the Old French Roman d’Eneas for his depictions of the nature and effects of love in this romance. The motif of feigned death occurs in other medieval works, notably in the thirteenth-century Old French romance Marques de Rome, in which the hero is likewise named Cligés. Much of the first part of this romance is surely of Chrétien’s own invention, whereas analogies with the Tristan story seem to structure the second half.

Chrétien claims in his prologue to The Knight of the Cart that he was given the source material by the Countess Marie. If that is true, then she probably conveyed to him a popular Celtic abduction story, or aithed. In these mythological tales a mysterious stranger typically claims a married woman, makes off with her through a ruse or by force, and carries her to his other worldly home. Her husband pursues the abductor and, after triumphing over seemingly impossible odds, penetrates the mysterious kingdom and rescues his wife. Guinevere is the subject of such an abduction story in the Latin Vita sancti Gildæ (Life of St Gildas) by Caradoc of Llancarvan (c. 1150), which contains much Celtic mythology. She is carried off by Melwas or Maheloas, lord of the œstiva regio (land of summer), to the Urbs Vitrea (City of Glass, alleged to be Glastonbury in Somerset). From there she is rescued by King Arthur with the aid of the Abbot of Glastonbury. However, this story is far removed from that by Chrétien and has no role for Lancelot. It is intriguing to speculate – but impossible to prove – that the Countess suggested the love relationship between Guinevere and Lancelot.

For The Knight with the Lion, which does not have a prologue, Chrétien claims in his epilogue to have given a faithful rendering of the story just as he had ‘heard it told’. Like Erec, The Knight with the Lion has an analogue in the Welsh Mabinogion in a story known as Owein, or The Lady of the Fountain, which reproduces the plot of Chrétien’s romance very closely up to the episode in which Lunete is saved from the stake, then diverges radically to the end. Like Gereint Son of Erbin, this tale dates from the thirteenth century and could not have influenced Chrétien. Nor does it appear to have been influenced by The Knight with the Lion, but attests rather to an earlier common source, probably oral, that Chrétien may have known from bilingual Breton storytellers he may have encountered in England, or later in France. In addition to the general parallel furnished by The Lady of the Fountain, there are many individual motifs that can be traced to Celtic influence. Foremost among these are the episodes of the spring and of the town of Dire Adventure, which are closely analogous to a Celtic otherworld myth in which a hero follows a previous adventurer into a mysterious fairy kingdom defended by a hideous giant; he leaves again for his own land, breaks his faith with the fairy and loses her, then goes mad. With the legend of the spring Chrétien has skilfully blended another fairy motif that is also most likely to be of Celtic origin: the fairy enchants a mortal who must remain at her side to preserve some fearful custom until he is replaced by another who in turn continues it. This motif is found in its purest form in Erec’s ‘Joy of the Court’.

As was the case with Cligés, Chrétien cites a specific written source for his Perceval: ‘the Story of the Grail, whose book was given him by the count’ (Philip of Flanders). No one knows what this book contained, nor indeed whether it ever actually existed. At any event, it was not the Peredur story from the Mabinogion which, like the analogues for Erec and The Knight with the Lion cited earlier, was too late to hasbeen known by Chrétien. Numerous theories have been proposed to explain the origins of this, Chrétien’s most mystifying romance, but none has met with widespread acceptance. The stories of Perceval and of the Grail seem originally to have been independent, and were perhaps amalgamated by Chrétien for the first time. Many motifs can be traced back to Celtic and Classical sources, but here and in his other romances Chrétien adapts his source materials in accord with the artistic needs of his own composition and the accepted mores of his time. He combines mysterious and magical elements from his sources with keenly observed contemporary social behaviour to create an atmosphere of mystery and wonder that is none the less securely anchored in a recognizable twelfth-century ‘present’.

To fully appreciate Chrétien’s achievement, it is important to place his romances in the broader context of twelfth-century literary creativity and sensitivity. Although Latin was still the predominant language for literary production well into the twelfth century, by Chrétien’s day it was slowly being supplanted in France by the vernacular language known today as Old French. This ‘translation’ of learning from Classical lands and languages to France and the vernacular is mentioned by Chrétien in the same Cligés prologue from which we quoted earlier:

Par les livres que nos avons
Les feiz des anciiens savons
Et del siecle qui fu jadis.
Ce nos ont nostre livre apris,
Que Grece ot de chevalerie
Le premier los et de clergie.
Puis vint chevalerie a Rome
Et de la clergie la some,
Qui or est an France venue.
Deus doint qu’ele i soit retenue… [27–36]

[Through the books we have, we learn of the deeds of ancient peoples and of bygone days.