Chivalric romance

thumb|upright=1.2|[[Yvain fighting Gawain in order to regain the love of his lady Laudine. Medieval illumination from Chrétien de Troyes's romance, Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion]]

As a literary genre, the chivalric romance is a type of prose and verse narrative that was popular in the noble courts of high medieval and early modern Europe. These were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often featuring a chivalric knight-errant portrayed as having heroic qualities, who goes on a quest. It developed further from the epics over time; in particular, "the emphasis on love and courtly manners distinguishes it from the chanson de geste and other kinds of epic, in which masculine military heroism predominates."

Popular literature also drew on themes of romance, but with ironic, satiric, or burlesque intent. Romances reworked legends, fairy tales, and history to suit the readers' and listeners' tastes, but by they were out of fashion, and Miguel de Cervantes famously burlesqued them in his novel Don Quixote. Still, the modern image of "medieval" is more influenced by the romance than by any other medieval genre, and the word medieval evokes knights, damsels in distress, dragons, and other romantic tropes.

Originally, romance literature was written in Old French (including Anglo-Norman), Old Occitan, and Early Franco-Provençal, and later in Old Portuguese, Old Spanish, Middle English, Old Italian (Sicilian poetry), and Middle High German. During the early 13th century, romances were increasingly written as prose. In later romances, particularly those of French origin, there is a marked tendency to emphasize themes of courtly love, such as faithfulness in adversity.

Form

Like the chansons de geste and unlike the later form of the novel, the genre of romance dealt with traditional themes. These were distinguished from earlier epics by heavy use of marvelous events, the elements of love, and the frequent use of a web of interwoven stories, rather than a simple plot centered on a single main character. The earliest forms were invariably in verse, but the 15th century saw many in prose, often retelling the older rhymed versions.

The romantic form pursued the wish-fulfillment dream where the heroes and heroines were considered representations of the ideals of the age while the villains embodied threats to their ascendancy. There is also a persistent archetype, which involved a hero's quest. This quest or journey served as the structural framework that held the narrative together. With regards to the structure, scholars recognize the similarity of the romance to folk tales. Vladimir Propp identified a basic form for this genre, which involved an order that began with initial situation, followed by departure, complication, first move, second move, and resolution. This structure is also applicable to romance narratives.

Cycles

upright|thumb|Holger Danske, or Ogier the Dane, from the Matter of France

Overwhelmingly, these were linked in some way, perhaps only in an opening frame story, with three thematic cycles of tales: these were assembled in imagination at a late date as the "Matter of Rome" (actually centered on the life and deeds of Alexander the Great conflated with the Trojan War), the "Matter of France" (Charlemagne and Roland, his principal paladin) and the "Matter of Britain" (the lives and deeds of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, within which was incorporated the quest for the Holy Grail); medieval authors explicitly described these as comprising all romances.

The three "matters" were first described in the 12th century by French poet Jean Bodel, whose epic ' ("Song of the Saxons") contains the lines:

In reality, a number of "non-cyclical" romances were written without any such connection; these include such romances as King Horn, Robert the Devil, Ipomadon, Emaré, Havelok the Dane,Roswall and Lillian, Le Bone Florence of Rome, and Amadas.

Indeed, some tales are found so often that scholars group them together as the "Constance cycle" or the "Crescentia cycle"—referring not to a continuity of character and setting, but to the recognizable plot.

Sources

Many influences are clear in the forms of chivalric romance.

Folklore and folktales

The earliest medieval romances dealt heavily with themes from folklore, which diminished over time, though remaining a presence. Many early tales had the knight, such as Sir Launfal, meet with fairy ladies, and Huon of Bordeaux is aided by King Oberon, but these fairy characters were transformed, more and more often, into wizards and enchantresses.

Morgan le Fay never loses her name, but in Le Morte d'Arthur, she studies magic rather than being inherently magical. Similarly, knights lose magical abilities. Still, fairies never completely vanished from the tradition. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late tale, but the Green Knight himself is an otherworldly being.

Despite the position, both advocated and depicted in fiction, of fairies as demons and working with witches in the Reformation and post-Reformation era, romances continued to portray positive depictions of fairies.

Early persecuted heroines were often driven from their husbands' homes by the persecutions of their mothers-in-law, whose motives are seldom delineated, and whose accusations are of the heroines' having borne monstrous children, committed infanticide, or practiced witchcraft — all of which appear in such fairy tales as The Girl Without Hands and many others. As time progressed, a new persecutor appeared: a courtier who was rejected by the woman or whose ambition requires her removal, and who accuses her of adultery or high treason, motifs not duplicated in fairy tales.

The motif of a heroine forced to flee her father's kingdom because of his attempt to marry her is common in fairy tales. The commonest variants are found in such tales as Allerleirauh, The She-Bear, Donkeyskin, and The King who Wished to Marry His Daughter,, which end, Cinderella style, with three balls and the heroine's marriage. It also appears in variants of "The Girl Without Hands" with the Calumniated Wife occurring after her marriage. Only this second form appears in chivalric romance: Nicholas Trivet's Chronique Anglo-Normane, the source of both Chaucer's The Man of Law's Tale and John Gower's variant in Confessio Amantis, and in Emaré.

Religious practices

The Arthurian cycle as a medieval work has also been noted to contains many magical or supernatural references. Drawing from many different sources, some notable allusions include elements of Christianity as well as elements of Celtic legends (an example being the multiple references to the Holy Grail).

Less directly, the folkloric connections between fairies and the dead drew on classical myths. Sir Orfeo retells the tale of Orpheus as King Orfeo rescuing his queen from the king of Fairy.

Early forms

thumb|right|A knight rescues a lady from a dragon.

Many medieval romances recount the marvellous adventures of a chivalrous, heroic knight, often of super-human ability, who, abiding chivalry's strict codes of honor and demeanor, goes on a quest, and fights and defeats monsters and giants, thereby winning favor with a lady. The Matter of France, most popular early, did not lend itself to the subject of courtly love, but rather dealt with heroic adventure: in The Song of Roland, Roland, though betrothed to Oliver's sister, does not think of her during the course of events. The themes of love were, however, to soon appear, particularly in the Matter of Britain, leading to even the French regarding King Arthur's court as the exemplar of true and noble love, so much so that even the earliest writers about courtly love would claim it had reached its true excellence there, and love was not what it was in King Arthur's day. A perennial theme was the rescue of a lady from the imperiling monster, a theme that would remain throughout the romances of the medieval era.

Originally, this literature was written in Old French (including Anglo-Norman) and Old Occitan, later, in Old Spanish, Middle English and Middle High German – amongst the important Spanish texts was Book of the Knight Zifar; notable later English works being King Horn (a translation of the Anglo-Norman (AN) Romance of Horn of Mestre Thomas), and Havelok the Dane (a translation of the anonymous AN Lai d'Haveloc); around the same time Gottfried von Strassburg's version of the Tristan of Thomas of Britain (a different Thomas to the author of 'Horn') and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival translated classic French romance narrative into the German tongue.

Forms of the High Middle Ages

During the early 13th century, romances were increasingly written as prose, and extensively amplified through cycles of continuation. These were collated in the vast, polymorphous manuscript witnesses comprising what is now known as the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, with the romance of La Mort le Roi Artu , perhaps its final installment. These texts, together with a wide range of further Arthurian material, such as that found in the anonymous English Brut Chronicle, comprised the bases of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. Prose literature thus increasingly dominated the expression of romance narrative in the later Middle Ages, at least until the resurgence of verse during the high Renaissance in the oeuvres of Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Edmund Spenser.

In Old Norse, they are the prose riddarasögur or chivalric sagas. The genre began in thirteenth-century Norway with translations of French chansons de geste; it soon expanded to similar indigenous creations. The early fourteenth century saw the emergence of Scandinavian verse romance in Sweden under the patronage of Queen Euphemia of Rügen, who commissioned the Eufemiavisorna.

Another trend of the high Middle Ages was the allegorical romance, inspired by the wildly popular Roman de la Rose.

Late Medieval and Renaissance forms

In late medieval and Renaissance high culture, the important European literary trend was to fantastic fictions in the mode of Romance. Exemplary work, such as the English Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (), the Valencian Tirant lo Blanch, and the Castilian or Portuguese Amadís de Gaula (1508), spawned many imitators, and the genre was popularly well-received, producing such masterpiece of Renaissance poetry as Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata and other 16th-century literary works in the romance genre. The romances were freely drawn upon for royal pageantry. Queen Elizabeth I's Accession Day tilts, for instance, drew freely on the multiplicity of incident from romances for the knights' disguises. Knights even assumed the names of romantic figures, such as the Swan Knight, or the coat-of-arms of such figures as Lancelot or Tristan.

Printed versions of the romances, enabled by the printing press, spread their influence even more widely, including such factors as their positive portraits of fairies.

In 1825, the fantasy genre developed when the Swedish literary work Frithjof's saga, which was based on the Friðþjófs saga ins frœkna, became successful in England and Germany. It was translated twenty-two times into English, 20 times into German, and into many other European languages, including modern Icelandic in 1866. Their influence on authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien, William Morris and Poul Anderson and on the subsequent modern fantasy genre is considerable.

The modern usage of the term "romance" usually refers to the romance novel, which is a subgenre that focuses on the relationship and romantic love between two people; these novels must have an "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending."

Despite the popularity of this popular meaning of Romance, other works are still referred to as romances because of their uses of other elements descended from the medieval romance, or from the Romantic movement: larger-than-life heroes and heroines, drama and adventure, marvels that may become fantastic, themes of honor and loyalty, or fairy-tale-like stories and story settings. Shakespeare's later comedies, such as The Tempest or The Winter's Tale are sometimes called his romances. Modern works may differentiate from love-story as romance into different genres, such as planetary romance or Ruritanian romance. Science fiction was, for a time, termed scientific romance, and gaslamp fantasy is sometimes termed gaslight romance. Flannery O'Connor, writing of the use of grotesque in fiction, talked of its use in "the modern romance tradition."

Examples

Ruodlieb
Romances of Chrétien de Troyes
Queste del Saint Graal
Perceforest
The Knight in the Panther's Skin
Valentine and Orson
King Horn
The Squire of Low Degree
Romance of the Rose
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Guilhem de la Barra by Arnaut Vidal
Guillaume de Palerme
Le Morte D'Arthur – Sir Thomas Malory
Amadís de Gaula – Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo
"The Knight's Tale" and "The Wife of Bath's Tale" from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
Chevalere Assigne
Sir Eglamour of Artois
Octavian
Ipomadon
Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle
The Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain
Tirant lo Blanch – Joanot Martorell
Amadas
Sir Cleges
The King of Tars
Sir Isumbras
Erl of Toulouse
Generides
Roswall and Lillian
Hertig Fredrik av Normandie
Orlando Innamorato
Orlando Furioso – Ludovico Ariosto
Le Roman du Comte d'Artois

References

External links

The International Courtly Literature Society