The French author Chrestien de Troyes (active 12th century) was one of the greatest medieval poets. His works include the earliest extant Arthurian romances.

Very little is known of the life of Chrestien de Troyes. His productive literary career extends from a little after the middle of the 12th century to about 1190. He was associated with the court of Marie de Champagne in or after 1164 and with that of Philippe d'Alsace, Comte de Flandres, sometime between 1168 and 1190. In 1190 Philippe left on the Third Crusade, and it is generally assumed that Chrestien died about the time of Philippe's departure. Chrestien's name and some traces of the dialect of Champagne in his works show that he was from northeastern France. Various hypotheses about Chrestien's life have been advanced, for example, he was a herald at arms, but they are not well founded.

Two lyric poems can be attributed to Chrestien, and four others have been dubiously ascribed to him. He translated Ovid's Art of Love and Cures of Love and wrote an adaptation of an episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses and a version of Tristan and Isolt; these four works have, however, been lost. Philomena, a short, tragic romance, survives. Another surviving romance, William of England, is partly didactic and partly adventurous, but the authorship of this poem has been disputed.

Arthurian Romances

Erec and Enide, written about 1160, is the first of Chrestien's Arthurian romances which has survived. The hero marries the heroine fairly early in the romance, after which most of the story consists of demonstrations of prowess by which Erec proves himself free of uxoriousness. A tone of aristocratic refinement and of celebration of youthful joys and vigor runs throughout this work.

Cligès, composed about 1175, is at once Arthurian and Byzantine. It tells of Alexander, Prince of Constantinople, who goes to Britain to serve King Arthur. Alexander marries and returns to Constantinople with his wife and their son, Cligès. The second and longer part of this work consists of the dramatic love adventures of Cligès and Fenice.

Lancelot, or The Knight of the Cart, Chrestien's third major romance, was written for Marie de Champagne about 1179. The hero, Lancelot, goes in search of Queen Guenievre, who is being held captive. He meets a dwarf with a cart and is told to get into the cart if he wants to find the Queen. Although Lancelot hesitates to climb into this disgraceful conveyance, he finally does so. He then must overcome numerous obstacles, including the painful crossing of a sword bridge, before he finds the Queen. At last Lancelot kills the captor in combat and frees Guenievre. The theme of Lancelot is courtly love, which commits a knight to unlimited service to his lady. Therefore Lancelot's hesitation in climbing into the cart is a crime against courtly love and his long suffering is deserved. The last 988 lines of this romance were written by Godefroy de Leigny.

Yvain, or The Knight of the Lion, written about 1184, is a superb work. The hero, Yvain, marries Laudine, who grants him leave to engage in knightly activity. But he over-stays his time and is banished by Laudine. During his wanderings he saves a lion from a dragon. The lion then becomes Yvain's companion and saves his life on two occasions. Yvain performs many feats at arms, all of which are directed to the needs of others. Due to the efforts of his benefactress, Lunette, he is reunited with Laudine. In this work the hero becomes aware of his weaknesses and renounces self-interest completely. His acts become deeds of expiatory charity, and his new spirit of compassion redeems him before his wife and his peers.

Perceval, or The Story of the Grail, Chrestien's unfinished masterpiece, was begun for Philippe de Flandres before 1190. The hero, Perceval, is raised by his mother in a remote region, since she fears that, like his father and brothers, he will meet death as a knight. However, he sees knights by chance and, much to his mother's sorrow, determines to become a knight. Although received by King Arthur, he is actually knighted by Gournement de Goort. Later Perceval visits the Grail Castle but fails to ask the significant questions; he soon learns the importance of the questions he did not dare to ask. A number of episodes follow, intermixed with parallel adventures of Gauvain, and then at line 9234 Chrestien's poem abruptly ends.

In the course of over 55,000 additional lines, four continuators put their hands to bringing the story to a conclusion, but their efforts fall far short of the genius, and probably the intention, of Chrestien. Like the composer Richard Wagner, Chrestien undertook this highly spiritual theme for his last work: the character who plays the great fool is to evolve into the Grail hero.

Chrestien's works show courtly tastes, detailed psychological insight, an unusual ease in versification, which at times reaches lyric quality, and a narrative technique that was closely imitated for two generations.

Further Reading

The vast bibliography on Chrestien de Troyes is made up largely of French and German titles, of which the most concise short study is Jean Frappier, Chréstien de Troyes (1957), in French. The two most valuable studies in English are James Douglas Bruce, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance (2 vols., 1923), and Roger Sherman Loomis, Arthurian Tradition and Chréstien de Troyes (1949). Foster E. Guyer, Chréstien de Troyes: Inventor of the Modern Novel (1957), is useful. William W. Comfort's 1914 translation of Chrestien's romances is still the best in English; it does not, however, include Perceval, which was translated into modern French by Lucien Foulet in 1957.

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Chrétien de Troyes (fl. 1160-85). Author of five Arthurian verse narratives, Chrétien de Troyes set the course for the emerging genre of romance in France and other European countries.

The author who signed his name ‘Crestiens’ left no historical trace other than the names of his patrons, Marie de Champagne and Philip of Alsace. He was evidently a well-educated cleric, for he claims to have translated Ovid's Art of Love and tales from the Metamorphoses; he was also versed in the romans d'antiquité, in the early matière de Bretagne, as well as in folklore and popular proverbs. His authorship of two lyric poems in the style of the troubadours and his association with Marie, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, suggest that he knew the poetry and precepts of fin'amor. The precise dates of his romances remain uncertain.

Chrétien composed elegant octosyllabic couplets that were intended to be read aloud before women and men at court. His poems are voiced by a narrator who comments upon his material and his craft. Deft description and characterization, clever dialogue, rhetorical play, and a gently comic perspective on courtly conventions mark his narrative art, which, while it generally supports chivalric values, is never overbearingly didactic. The master romancer showed particular talent for juxtaposing complementary or contrasting episodes in such a way that their literal events would suggest a deeper significance. His use of ambiguous symbolism and of marvellous events and objects enhanced the mystery and charm of his creations without ever destroying their human scale. The romances' irony and ambiguity must have inspired medieval readers to ponder moral and social questions. Modern critics continue to debate the many possible interpretations of his works.

In Erec et Enide, which is the first surviving full-length Arthurian romance, Chrétien announces his intention to surpass popular story-tellers by making a ‘molt bele conjointure’—a harmonious narrative structure—out of an adventure story. As the romance dramatizes the conflict between love and chivalry, it also examines dominance within marriage. After winning Enide's hand through prowess, Erec abandons chivalry for the amorous delights of his new wife. When he overhears her lament over what others have said about him, the knight sets off to regain his reputation; he commands his wife to accompany him and to remain silent. Enide repeatedly defies his orders and alerts Erec to danger, thereby allowing him to defeat his enemies. The romance ends joyously and with great ceremony, but Chrétien will continue to explore the complex web of psychological and sexual tensions first spun in Erec.

Literary sophistication combines with striking irony in Cligés, a bipartite tale that recasts the Tristan story in a Byzantine frame. Chrétien illustrates the motif of translatio studii, the transference of learning from Greece to Rome and then to England and France, by sending Alexander, son of the emperor of Greece and Constantinople, off to King Arthur's court. The knight experiences Ovidian lovesickness for Soredamours, whom he eventually marries. Their son Cligés, wrongly deprived of the throne by his uncle Alis, falls in love with his usurper's wife, Fenice. By means of magic potions and with the help of her maidservant, Fenice makes her husband believe that he enjoys physical possession of her in marriage, although it is only a dream; later, she feigns death and escapes to a marvellous hideaway, where she lives with Cligés. In contrast to Tristan and Iseut, the lovers manage to live their love exclusively, if not painlessly, until they marry after Alis's death. Throughout Cligés, the narrator's ingenious literary transformations rival his characters' clever ruses.

Chrétien heightens the ambiguity of his hero in Le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot), a romance that portrays the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guenièvre, Arthur's wife. Because Chrétien states in his Prologue that he has derived his matière and sens from Marie, countess of Champagne, and because the romance is completed in the voice of one Godefroy de Leigni, some critics have assumed that Marie ordered Chrétien to write a story about courtly love that he found distasteful and subsequently abandoned. But the romance's alternately mysterious and gently parodic treatment of the hero, who rides ignominiously on a cart in pursuit of his lady, suggests that Chrétien may have sought to leave his readers puzzled and amused. The unresolved issues of this romance inspired in part the 13th-c. prose Lancelot.

For many readers, Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain) is Chrétien's most accomplished work. Since the romance contains allusions and intertextual references to Lancelot, critics have speculated that the two romances were written simultaneously or in alternation. Yvain further explores the conflict between marital and chivalric duties broached in Erec. It recounts first how Yvain, with the help of a clever intermediary, Lunete, convinces the reluctant widow of a knight he has defeated to marry her husband's conqueror and then how he neglects his new wife, Laudine, by overstaying the leave she has accorded him. Her refusal to pardon and receive him plunges Yvain into madness. In the course of the expiatory adventures he undertakes to regain his reason and her love, he rescues a lion, who becomes his faithful companion and symbolizes, perhaps, his emergent humanity. Yvain happily wins back Laudine, although he does so by means of a verbal ruse set by Lunete; the romance forestalls easy conclusions about the hero's moral progress.

Chrétien's final and longest romance, Le Conte du Graal (Perceval), dedicated to Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, was never completed; it remains his most enigmatic work. Although the narrator claims to have derived the Grail story from a book supplied by his patron, we know neither what the source was nor what Chrétien himself may have invented. Like Erec and Yvain, Perceval makes an initial mistake for which he must atone: when he sets off to Arthur's court to become a knight, he rides away without tending to his mother, who has fallen in a sorrowful faint. Perceval seeks to apply literally the courtly precepts his mother and mentor have imparted to him, but he lacks the deeper moral sense that would allow him to empathize with others. Perceval's comic naïveté has tragic consequences. When the hero fails to enquire about the purpose of the bleeding lance and the Grail, he misses his chance to heal the wounded Fisher King. The romance breaks off in the midst of a section devoted to Gauvain's more worldly adventures; four verse continuations by others provided two distinct endings. Critics speculate that Chrétien wished to contrast profane and spiritual knighthood in the Gauvain-Perceval opposition, but the author never wrote his final word on the subject.

Some critics have attributed to Chrétien Guillaume d'Angleterre, an edifying non-Arthurian tale of a king's tribulations, as well as the account of the rape of Procne's sister by her husband, the Philomena, which survives in the early 14th-c. Ovide moralisé. But it was for his Arthurian romances that Chrétien was most influential throughout the European Middle Ages; his work directly or indirectly inspired continuators, imitators, adapters, and innovators. After the decline of chivalric romance in the early modern period, Chrétien's brilliance remained obscured until the 19th- and 20th-c. revival of medieval studies. By now the romancer has fully regained his prominence as a master of irony and ambiguity and as one of the most important forebears of European fiction.

[Roberta Krueger]

Bibliography

• J. Frappier, Chrétien de Troyes (1957)
• D. Kelly (ed.), Chrétien de Troyes (1985)
• T. Hunt, Chrétien de Troyes: ‘Yvain’ (1986)

Chrétien de Troyes wrote in the second half of the 12th c. a number of Arthurian romances or romans bretons, which provided the sources for some important Middle High German works. These include Hartmann von Aue's Erec and Iwein (Yvain), Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (Perceval or Le Conte del Graal), and the lost Cliges of Ulrich von Türheim (Cligès).

(fl. 1160–82)

Earliest known writer of Arthurian romance, Erec et Enide (c.1170), Lancelot (c.1178), Perceval (c.1182), etc. Probably a native of Champagne, he almost certainly inherited most of his characters and incidents from the oral Celtic Arthurian tradition, but his portrayal of them, especially in matters of love and courtly behaviour, was original to him.

or Chrestien de Troyes (both: krātyăN' də trwä) , fl. 1170, French poet, author of the first great literary treatments of the Arthurian legend. His narrative romances, composed c.1170–c.1185 in octosyllabic rhymed couplets, include Érec et Énide; Cligès; Lancelot, le chevalier de la charette; Yvain, le chevalier au lion; and Perceval, le conte del Graal, unfinished (see Parsifal). Chrétien drew on popular legend and history, and imbued his romances with the ideals of chivalry current at the 12th-century court of Marie de Champagne, to which he was attached. His other surviving works include imitations of Ovid and Guillaume d'Angleterre, a non-Arthurian narrative. Translations of the Arthurian romances are included in W. W. Comfort's edition (1913) and in R. S. and L. H. Loomis, Medieval Romances (1957).

Bibliography

See L. T. Ropsfield, Chrétien de Troyes: A Study of the Arthurian Romances (1981); J. Frappier, Chretién de Troyes: The Man and His Work (1982); N. J. Lacy et al., ed., The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes (2 vol., 1988).