|
|
|
||
This web-page will look much better in a browser that supports worldwide web standards although it is accessible to any browser. You appear to be using an older browser that does not support current standards. Please consider upgrading your browser. We suggest the latest version of any one of the following: MS Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla or Firefox.
 |
Sir Percival and two other knights with the Holy Grail, from a manuscript of 1286. ©Bettmann Archive Chrétien's Poem
|
he old city of Troyes must be set
down large in any map of literary history. For it was there that
Chrétien was inspired to write four romances which together form
the most complete expression we possess from a single author of
the ideals of French chivalry. These romances, written in
eight-syllable rhyming couplets, treat respectively of Erec and
Enide, Cliges, Yvain, and Lancelot. Another poem, Le Roman de Perceval ou le Conte du
Graal, was composed about 1175 for Philip, Count of
Flanders, to whom Chrétien was attached during his last years. It
was left unfinished at his death after he had written more than
9000 lines.
t is commonly accepted that
Chrétien based his story on Celtic
sources, one such candidate being the story of Peredur, a version of which would be
incorporated into the collection of Welsh legends known as the
Mabinogion. This
would explain Chrétien's Perceval the Welshman
. The tales known as the
Matter of Britain might have arrived in Brittany with
refugees from the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England. That there was
migration during the fifth century, beginning perhaps as early as
380, is mentioned by writers such as Nennius (c.800). Procopius,
the Byzantine chronicler, recorded that both Britons and other
peoples, in need of land for an expanding population, migrated
from England to western Gaul and to north- western Spain, where
they were allowed to settle on depopulated land. Continued
contact with kin in England can be assumed and so it is likely
that songs and stories circulated on both sides of the Channel.
The surviving but fragmentary Welsh literature suggests a rich
tradition from which Chrétien and other writers shaped the Matter
of Britain.
   |
Links |
hrétien de
Troyes (died c. 1185) was probably the greatest medieval
writer of Arthurian romances. Of his life we know neither
the beginning nor the end, but we know that between 1160
and 1172 he lived, perhaps as herald-at-arms (according to
Gaston Paris, based on Lancelot lines 5591-94) at
Troyes, where was the court of his patroness, the Countess
Marie de Champagne. She was the daughter of Louis VII and
of Eleanor of Aquitaine. It appears from contemporary
testimony that the authority of this celebrated feudal dame
was weighty and widely felt.