Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes

*contains spoilers*


Once again entering the world of knights errant intent on feats of nobility and chivalry, I was immediately reminded of Cervantes’s satirical take on just such texts in his extensive masterpiece ‘El Hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha’, as the pathetic titular hero surged at his more-often-than-not-undeserving foes atop his withered steed, Rocinante. To begin with I would have to stifle the need to chuckle as Chrétien spoke so painfully of the passions of these knights errant on their quests, but firmly conquered this impulse by the time I reached the most majestic of these tales, ‘The Knight with the Lion’, a tale of one of Arthur’s most highly-esteemed knights, Yvain.


You see, Chrétien de Troyes has earned the right to have his tales, originally written in the vernacular French of the late twelfth century, read with the light of the satirical works that follow dimmed to a respectable if unavoidable hum – I am talking mostly about the very worthy ‘Don Quixote’, as already mentioned, and the more contemporary but no less astonishingly smart and funny ‘Monty Python’s The Holy Grail’, of course – because he got there first. Whatever we know of knights errant and the tales of romantic chivalry, we have Chrétien de Troyes to thank, though I simply have to add that it must not go unmentioned that Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘Historia Regum Brittaniae’, as it has done with many texts that flowered afterwards, sowed the seeds of tales to come in the minds of Britain’s greatest writers – think King Lear, for starters.


King Arthur himself very rarely features in these tales, and his role is more of an anchoring power around which our knights invariably gravitate. He is the epitome of nobility and chivalry, and his knights are the apostles to his Jesus, who are out on their missions to seek to add to the honour of Arthur’s court. As soon as I completed the unfinished fifth tale of Perceval and the Holy Grail, I dove straight into Guido Waldman’s translation of Ariosto’s ‘Orlando Furioso’. This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship with Medieval romance tales, methinks.

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