King Arthur's Forest

Chretien de Troyes Part 3:  Cligès Hello all and welcome back.  I hope you all have had time to read ahead a little as I am sure you have noticed, the works can be quite lengthy. Let's briefly review the story before diving in.  Before the story even gets to Cliges, we learn the story of how Cliges' parents, Alexander and Soredamors, met.  Alexander, the son of Emperor Alexander of Greece, spent some time in Britain testing his knighthood in the famed court of King Arthur.  During his time there he meets Soredamors, the niece of King Arthur and sister to Sir Gawain.  They both fall in deep love for one another but are both too shy to speak of it.  Guenevere notices this and urges them together and are soon married. Cliges is born soon after. They return to Greece to discover Emperor Alexander has died, and Prince Alexander's brother Alis has usurped the throne.  Alexander, in order to make peace with his brother decides to concede that A...

Chretien de Troyes - Part 2: Erec and Enide In what is claimed to be the very first Arthurian romance ever made, Arthur starts off the story by being an ass.  Yes, you read correctly.  You will see that as much as the French adore the Arthurian tradition it is the knights themselves that will soon get all of the attention.  Arthur as well as his court continue to to be as proud and regal and famous as they have always been, if not more so, but Arthur himself, as a character, becomes an instigator.  Sometimes he is no more than a living stage prop.  He begins adventures; he makes them possible.  He becomes a goal to be reached or a solution to a problem like a rich doting grandfather.  This is not always the case of course, he still gets on a horse from time to time to go adventuring and he has not become a tyrant like he was portrayed in the Saints Lives.  Nothing like that.   He always redeems himself and by the end of the story we...

Chretien and His Works As mentioned in an earlier post, I intend on treating each of Chretien's works in its own article rather than trying to lump them in a single enormous one.  This opening article will be a short overview of Chretien and his works before we get into his individual romances. Very little is known of Chretien himself except for the little information he provides in his stories.  There are no available records from that time that mention him.  What is "known" are actually suppositions or deductions.  He is believed to possibly have been born sometime around 1140 and to have died before 1200.  He names himself "of Troyes" which is the center of the Champagne province and we know that he was associated with the court there because of his dedication to Marie de Champagne found in The Knight of the Cart.  This is backed up by the fact that Troyes was a known center of literary activity with several writers associated with it.  Aside...

Rhonabwy's Dream Rhonabwy's Dream is an interesting but very confusing Welsh short story.  It is found in a single manuscript in the Red Book of Hergest and has been dated to the late 12th to early 13th century.  The story tells of a retainer for Madog, the Prince of Powys, by the name of Rhonabwy.  (note: Madog, Prince of Powys was a real historical person).  In the tale, Madoc sends Rhonaby as part of several contingents to try to find Madog's troublesome brother who is creating havoc in the land.  Rhonabwy, while on his travels, has to stay the night in a filthy home with his companions.  Upon falling asleep on a yellow ox hide, the only clean place in the house, Rhonabwy has a dream.  In this dream Rhonabwy is transported back to the time of King Arthur where he is introduced to a cast of characters.  The principal story however seems to focus around a game of  gwyddbwyll (a chess like game) played between King Arthur and Owain (Yvain)...

Upcoming Works Hello everyone, I hope you all enjoyed your excerpt of Wace's Roman de Brut. Chretien de Troyes   If you purchased the Everyman "The Life of King Arthur,"  I recommend you hang on to it.  The second section by Lawman covers the same story but done much later in English with even more embellishments and we will be getting to it soon enough.  In the meantime we will be taking a break from the Brut tradition and exploring the beginnings of the French romance tradition as well as a small Welsh work described below. As I frequently like to do, we will be covering a small work before tackling a much larger work.  In this case we will be covering a short but very unusual Welsh work called the Dream of Rhonabwy from around  1159 - 1200. It's only about 12 pages long, so it should not be too much to handle. If you purchased the Oxford World Classics version of The Mabinogion, then you should have it already. I will list a link to t...

Wace and the Roman de Brut To understand the progression that Wace ( Wace rhymes with "Boss" ) has made with this book you really need to go back to Geoffrey of Monmouth and his "Historia" (HRB) which we covered early on.  But just as a refresher, Geoffrey took the standard latin historical chronicles of Gildas and Bede as well as other sources and built up a new history of Britain that dates all the way back to the Trojan war and the trojan Brutus from where he claims Britain got its name.  This is mostly fantasy, as is a good portion of his history, but it was devoured by the scholarly elite there and on mainland Europe and single handedly place Britain on the world stage with the rest of the continent.  It was published in Latin which was the language of the scholar and received serious treatment by other literates.  The book received such fame and recognition that it would receive treatments by other authors even during Geoffrey's own lifetime.  One of th...

Here is a small flow chart that I have been working on to display how some of the major works have depended on each other for influence as well as others that have developed independently.  You will (later on) see that after Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chretien de Troyes, the works really begin to explode with a high concentration of works in a short period.  Enjoy!