(fl. 1165–91). Although Chrétien wrote lyric poetry in the troubadour and trouvère traditions, he is known principally for his Arthurian romances, where he appears to have treated for the first time, in French at least, the chivalric quest, the love of Lancelot and Guenevere, and the Grail as a sacred object. He also emphasized the problematic side of the love of Tristan and Iseut and may have contributed to the spread of this legend in French in an early work that is lost today.
Although the chronology of his writings is uncertain, the order of composition of his major romances seems to be as follows: Erec et Enide, Cligés, Le chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot), Yvain (Le chevalier au lion), and Le conte du graal (Perceval). He may also have written Philomena, an adaptation of the Ovidian story of Philomela (Metamorphoses 6.426–74), and Guillaume d’Angleterre, a saint’s life told like an adventure romance. The prologue to Cligés refers to works Chrétien wrote in his early years: Philomena (“de la hupe et de l’aronde”) and another, lost, on the tale of Pelops (“de la mors de l’espaule”), as well as French versions of Ovid’s Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris, and a Tristan story, concerning which, curiously, Chrétien does not mention Tristan himself: “del roi Marc et d’Iseut la blonde.” He is also the author of two courtly chansons in the trouvère tradition.
Chrétien names as patrons Marie de Champagne, the first daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII of France, who, he writes, gave him the matiere and san for the Charrette, and Philippe d’Alsace, count of Flanders, who gave him “the book” for the Conte du graal. Philippe died in the Holy Land in 1191, which may explain why the romance is incomplete. But there is also evidence that Chrétien died before completing it. The last 1,000 lines of the Charrette were written by the otherwise unknown Godefroi de Leigni, who names himself in the epilogue and says that he is following Chrétien’s plan for the romance. The Charrette plot is referred to three times in Yvain, and it is likely that Chrétien worked on the two romances at about the same time; this may explain why he left the completion of the Charrette to another, whose work he supervised while himself completing Yvain.
Erec treats the love of Erec and Enide. In the first part, Erec successfully completes the combat for the sparrowhawk and brings Enide to Arthur’s court, where they marry. A dispute between husband and wife breaks out in the second part because Erec abandons deeds of prowess, notably in tournaments, to dally with his wife. Erec and Enide set out in quest of reconciliation, after which they return to Arthur’s court and are crowned king and queen there upon the death of Erec’s father.
Cligés also has two parts. The first relates how Alixandre, the first son of the Emperor of Constantinople, goes to Arthur’s court to test his mettle, falls in love with Gauvain’s sister, Soredamors, and helps put down an insurrection by one of Arthur’s vassals. Alixandre and Soredamors then marry. The second part recounts the career of their son, Cligés. Alixandre’s younger brother, Alis, had been crowned emperor during his older brother’s absence. The latter relinquished the throne after Alis had promised not to marry so as to allow Cligés to succeed him. But Alis breaks his word by marrying Fenice. Fenice and Cligés fall in love. At the end of a complicated plot, including a magic potion, a false death, and a secret hideaway, Alis dies and Cligés and Fenice are united in matrimony.
The Charrette tells the first known version of the love of Lancelot and Guenevere. The queen is abducted by Meleagant to the land of Gorre. Lancelot, known as the Knight of the Cart after riding in that infamous conveyance, succeeds in saving her from her captors while liberating Arthur’s subjects held captive with her.
Yvain tells how the hero knight wins the hand of Laudine, the lady of the magic fountain, by defeating and mortally wounding her husband. After this courtly variant of the Widow of Ephesus tale, Yvain neglects to return to her after more than a year of following tournaments, then goes mad when she repudiates his love. A quest ends with their reconciliation. During the quest, Yvain aids, befriends, and is accompanied by a lion—whence his sobriquet: the Knight with the Lion. Yvain offers interesting parallels and contrasts in plot, structure, and theme with Erec.
Chrétien’s last major work, the incomplete Conte du graal, or Perceval, relates how a young, naive squire rises to prominence through combat and love, then fails in the adventure at the Grail Castle because an earlier wrong or “sin” committed against his mother ties his tongue, preventing him from asking the questions he should. The Grail Castle is closed to him, and, as he later learns, great misfortune spreads through the land because of his fault, affecting orphans, widows, and others whom the knight should protect. Perceval sets out to right the wrong. After five years of wandering, during which time he forgets God, Perceval finds himself and God again at his uncle’s hermitage, where he also learns of his fault. Interlaced with Perceval’s quest are the adventures of Gauvain, accused of murder, and later obliged to seek the Bleeding Lance, which was also found in the Grail Castle during Perceval’s visit there. The romance breaks off while relating his remarkable adventures.
Chrétien’s romances each average about 7,000 lines and comprise two parts, with the exception of the Conte du graal, which extends to somewhat more than 10,000 lines, an apparently more complex variant of the two-part narrative structure. All are written in octosyllabic rhymed couplets, but without the regular alternation between masculine and feminine rhymes that came to characterize classical Alexandrine couplets. Of more importance for the evolution of French romance from verse to prose was Chrétien’s extensive use of the “broken” couplet. Before Chrétien, rhymed couplets in French tended to be taken as wholes, so that no sense or breath arrest took place other than on the even-numbered line. Chrétien favored “breaking,” whereby the arrest occurred on the odd-numbered line. This reduced the formality of verse enunciation and, besides the freedom it allowed the writer, was a step toward the transition to prose romance in the 13th century.
Chrétien is remarkable for his self-conscious artistry. He seems to have been proud of his achievement, judging by the evidence of the prologues written to almost all his works, as well as by interventions wherein the narrator comments on his art, ideas, and narratives. He knew that his works contributed to fostering French civilization, especially its chivalric and intellectual features. The Cligés prologue in particular stresses and conjoins aristocratic chevalerie and learned clergie. Whatever he may have understood specifically by these ideals, it is clear that they vouchsafed a civilization that came to France from Greece and Rome. However, the prologues to Erec and the Charrette are most explicit regarding the art of romance, which Chrétien helped define and illustrate. They identify three major features of Chrétien’s art: matiere, san, and conjointure.
The question of Chrétien’s putative sources is complex. He refers to written sources in the prologues to Cligés and the Conte du graal; his Ovidian tales also illustrate his use of traditional written sources. However, the Arthurian matiere is explained by its origins in Celtic legend. Chrétien mined oral traditions for his tales. The prologue to Erec mentions the jongleurs who had related the story before him, and other sources refer to itinerant storytellers who told marvelous stories about Arthur, Tristan and Iseut, and other Celtic heroes and heroines. We know little about these stories. None has survived in its original state. It is generally believed that they provided the Round Table, as well as most of the names of knights and ladies; the motif of the quest as a passage into the otherworld—the world of the dead, of adventure, of marvelous love between a man and a woman who is not mortal—was probably drawn from Celtic traditions circulating in Chrétien’s time. Earlier versions probably had a mythological basis, but Chrétien most likely knew or understood little about it. One clear example of the “Celticity” of Chrétien’s sources is the quest in Erec. Erec and his wife have a misunderstanding about his love for her. They both set out on a quest and encounter many adventures that test Erec’s prowess and Enide’s love. The final adventure in the quest is with the count Limors, readily understandable to French ears as “the Dead.” During the couple’s return, they encounter the adventure known as the Joy of the Court. A huge knight does battle in a magic garden of eternal spring. Whenever he defeats an opponent, the latter loses his head, which is then fixed on a stake in the garden. Erec’s victory ends the custom and releases joy in the garden and the outside world. Rituals of combat and death, following prescribed custom, were known in Celtic tradition as geis. In Chrétien’s romances, they become the more or less euhemerized adventures of questing knights. The inexplicability of such adventures accounts for their marvelous quality.
The san that Chrétien says he received for the Charrette from Marie de Champagne seems to imply context, significance, an informing idea that is drawn out of the matiere to explain it in a manner comprehensible to Chrétien’s audiences. In the Charrette, for example, the bringing together of Lancelot and Guenevere as lovers has generally been taken to imply that Marie’s san was what is today called courtly love—an ennobling love shared by the queen and her lover. That Chrétien makes a mystery of Lancelot’s name until near the midpoint of the romance suggests that his audiences did not know who Lancelot was until Guenevere names him for the first time while he is fighting for her liberation.
The Charrette begins with a quest for Guenevere after her abduction. The knight who liberates her and others entrapped in the kingdom of Gorre makes it obvious early in the narrative that he loves the queen in a most extraordinary way. He is willing to compromise his honor in the eyes of all if it serves her liberation by mounting the shameful cart in order to find her again. Although Lancelot is subject to fits of despair and self-forgetfulness, nothing prevents him from carrying out his service and liberating the queen. In fact, his love seems rather to make it possible for him alone to accomplish the quest. He meets numerous adventures along the way, including a damsel who offers her love if he will protect her from a would-be rapist; the lifting of a mysterious tomb that only the knight able to liberate the queen can open; and the crossing of a sword-bridge on bare hands and knees. Lancelot’s return to Arthur involves his own abduction and a great tournament that demonstrates anew his service for the queen.
Much ink has flowed in efforts to determine whether Chrétien approved or disapproved of the adulterous liaison between Lancelot and Guenevere. Basic to the dispute is the presumed adulterous character of courtly love. Courtly love, as a term, is a modern invention. In the Middle Ages, writers spoke of fin’amors, stressing the adaptability of love to different contexts, environments, and social circumstances. The basic features seem to have been the joy it produced and the resulting good that accrued to the lovers and the world in which they lived. Chrétien affirms Lancelot’s joy, as well as his accomplishments, despite the difficulties the love causes him.
A striking feature of Chrétien’s romances is the close relation obtaining between love and prowess. Prowess is not only prowess in arms but the sum of those qualities that represent worth in the knight or lady—the chevalerie of the Cligés prologue. Arms may demonstrate worth, but so may the quality of love the knight and lady share. Chrétien’s courtly chansons evince an effort to overcome the constraints of human passion and make it enhance individual worth and serve noble ends, most notably by the rejection of the irrational features of Tristan and Iseut’s love. The rejection also occurs in the romances, especially Cligés, It is important to note that, in both the broader medieval context and in Chrétien’s own romances, adultery is not predominant, despite the example of Lancelot and Guenevere. More striking, in a medieval context, is the emphasis on conjugal love. The notion must have seemed much more original in the 12th century than it may appear today, after centuries of love stories. That marriage could be more than a social or family obligation is obvious in Chrétien. Erec chooses his bride without consulting his family, and so does Yvain. And there is no sense of forced marriage except for Fenice in Cligés, and that marriage does not succeed precisely because it is forced and because the husband, Alis, in marrying, violates an oath made to his brother and thus threatens the succession of his brother’s son, Cligés, to the throne.
Marital problems do arise, but they are also solved. Chrétien insists on a certain equality between the spouses. Not that he meant a contractual equality in any modern legal sense but rather a natural, noble equality that was tried and tested in conflict with the outside world and in the resolution of disputes that occur in the marriage.
The word conjointure occurs only once, at least in the sense used to describe romance narrative—in the prologue to Erec. Chrétien distinguishes his “very beautiful” conjointure from the stories about Erec told by storytellers, who were wont, he says, to take apart and leave out material (depecier et corronpre) that belonged in the tale. This seems to mean that Chrétien’s romance puts the story together as it should be, omitting nothing essential. That “putting together” would include both matiere and san. This appears to be the case in Erec, whose first part combines two stories, the sparrowhawk episode and the hunt for the white stag, to each of which Enide, because of the qualities that make her desirable as a spouse, provides a denouement. In the sparrowhawk contest, Erec proves that Enide is the most beautiful woman, and Arthur bestows the “kiss of the white stag” on her for the same reason.
Enide’s beauty comprehends qualities of body, vestment, and, most importantly, mind and mentality that make her exemplary of perfect womanhood. In the aristocratic world of medieval romance, where everyone of worth is “naturally” on a pedestal, Erec and Enide come together out of admiration and a kind of noble affinity. By the identification of the qualities of persons—the invention of those qualities in source material and their elucidation in romance narrative—Chrétien brings together the disparate elements of the storytellers’ versions and fills out the missing features in his new romance. The molt bele conjointure depends on the disparate elements of romance marvels, reveals the ideal truth perceived in them by 12th-century civilization, and articulates a new, marvelous narrative. Once the exceptional quality of that narrative was recognized—apparently as early as Cligés—a new genre had emerged. The word roman, which first meant “in the French language,” came to mean “romance” as a narrative recounting marvelous adventures that express an aristocratic ethos. That achievement was Chrétien’s.
Chrétien’s popularity in his own day is attested both by the unusually large number of surviving manuscripts of his romances—an average of seven for the first four, and as many as fifteen for the Conte du Graal—and the enduring influence he had on the romancers who succeeded him. While such writers as Jean Renart and Gautier d’Arras deliberately set out to rival him, others more wisely welcomed his influence in their work. His most influential romances were the two he left unfinished: the Chevalier de la charrette and the Conte du Graal. The latter spawned a series of verse continuations in the early 13th century, while both provided inspiration for the immensely successful Lancelot-Grail or Vulgate Cycle of the second quarter of the same century. The Grail story was also reworked independently by the anonymous author of the Perlesvaus.
——. The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, trans. David Staines. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
——. Arthurian Romances, trans. William W.Kibler. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.
Busby, Keith, Terry Nixon, Alison Stones, Lori Walters, eds. Les manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes/The Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993.
Kelly, F.Douglas. Chrétien de Troyes:An Analytic Bibliography. London: Grant and Cutler, 1976.
Reiss, Edmund, Louise Horner Reiss, and Beverly Taylor. Arthurian Legend and Literature: An Annotated Bibliography. Vol. 1: The Middle Ages, New York, London: Garland, 1984.
Frappier, Jean, Chrétien de Troyes: l’homme et l’œuvre. Paris: Hatier, 1968 (English trans. by Raymond J.Cormier, Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1982).
Lacy, Norris J. The Craft of Chrétien de Troyes: An Essay on Narrative Art. Leiden: Brill, 1980.
Topsfield, Leslie T. Chrétien de Troyes: A Study of the Arthurian Romances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Kelly, Douglas, ed. The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes: A Symposium. Lexington: French Forum, 1985.
Lacy, Norris J., Douglas Kelly, and Keith Busby, eds. The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987–88.
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