Geoffrey’s story was amazingly popular, surviving in some two hundred Latin manuscripts and translated across the European languages. The crucial transmission was into French verse, in about 1155, by the Channel Islander Robert Wace. The saga he transmitted interacted with orally transmitted Celtic hero stories—Breton as well as Welsh, like those transmitted in the mostly non-Arthurian lais of Marie de France—as Chretien de Troyes created his Arthurian romances by the 1170s, assuming the existence of the saga structure and richly elaborating it by exploring with suggestive genius the genre of single-hero adventure. Unlike the essentially communal and tribal epic lord, the romance hero rides and fights alone, testing his own inner resources and gaining love. Not just any amorous individual, he is the son of a great lord or king, and he will enjoy not only the beauty of the lady he loves but also the kingdom she happens to inherit.
Chretien’s poems are lucid, deeply imaginative, and subtly varied. Yvain— alias “The Knight with the Lion”—is the archetype, as a king’s son gains, loses, and through his suffering (and with the help of a lion) regains his lady— and so his land. Cliges, the first, is a more classically oriented story of love lost and found, while the powerful, enigmatic Lancelot—also de-individualized as “The Knight of the Cart”—both realizes and idealizes the hero’s love for Guinevere. Erec and Enide reverses the hero-alone story, showing a husband becoming too uxorious for honor, but finally he, and indeed she, will regain a contemporary balance of gender and power, in which the male is officially in charge. In the unfinished, and so presumably last of Chretien’s extraordinary repertoire, Perceval, deheroized as “The Story of the Grail,” a naive knight from North Wales learns a deeply moral rather than blandly chivalric lesson in the context of a “grail,” an object that seems clearly, if also obscurely, Christian in its thematic connections.
These potent stories would reverberate for centuries. They symbolically project the concerns of the newly peaceful, newly rich medieval world that also created superb cathedrals and manuscripts. Women like Chretien’s sponsor Marie countess of Champagne now played major cultural roles, and fin amor recognizes their power, if from a male viewpoint, just as Morgan la Fee represents their threat to masculinity. The lonely knight, winning Arthur’s praise and a land outside royal power, seems to represent the dukes and counts of France, powerful vis-a-vis the weak but still glorious central king: even more materially it has been suggested the heroes are also fantasy figures for the landless warriors who were in substantial numbers generated by the new practice of restricting inheritance to the eldest son.
Many writers followed Chretien in the single-hero romance, in many languages, if without his genius, and new story-threads were attracted to this sprawling world of Arthurian narrative. The story of Tristan and Isolde came into French from Celtic (Drwst is quite probably a Pictish prince, and Cornwall has a memorial stone that appears to honor him): their fated tragic love inspired a great German poem by Gottfried von Strassburg and would interweave with the Arthurian story and be the source for the royal adultery of Guinevere and Lancelot. Another major implant was the story of the Holy Grail. Chretien’s tenuous symbol of a knight’s need for charitable morality soon becomes a chalice secreting the blood of Christ, and the intense popularity of this idea appears to respond to the Western loss of the Holy Land after the catastrophic battle of Hattin in 1187: it appears that Chretien’s supple and mysterious narrative, which can hardly post-date that event, provided a matrix to displace the spiritual trauma. The Grail story asserts that something was indeed saved from the ruin. It is here, somewhere in the West, but we can find it only through our own perfection, and by implication our regular attendance at Mass.
Chretien’s continuators of Perceval made the Grail more mainstream Christian, but the key event was when in about 1200 Robert de Boron generated a back story for the Grail, in which the chalice arrives from the Holy Land with the crucifixion witness Joseph of Arimathea. Robert also wrote a Merlin that linked this Christian continuity to the arrival of Arthur and gave his vizier the capacity to foresee Christian teleology. Though Wolfram von Esch-enbach’s German Parzifal (ca. 1205) drew grandly on Robert de Boron, in the French developments both Merlin as the devil’s-son-turned-Grail-prophet and Perceval as the holy-fool-turned-Grail-achiever were to be replaced with the perfect knight Galahad as by about 1220 the story was reshaped in more austerely Christian mode as the Queste del Saint Graal.
World History
