Originally, romance literature was written in Old French, Anglo-Norman, Occitan, and Provençal, and later in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian (Sicilian poetry), and 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
Unlike the later form of the novel and like the chansons de geste, 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 unfolding about a main character.[3] The earliest forms were invariably in verse, but the 15th century saw many in prose, often retelling the old, rhymed versions.[4]
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 the threat to their ascendancy.[5] There is also a persistent archetype, which involved a hero's quest. This quest or journey served as the structure 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 and it involved an order that began with initial situation, then followed by departure, complication, first move, second move, and resolution.[6] This structure is also applicable to romance narratives.
Cycles
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[who?] explicitly described these as comprising all romances.[7]
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.[7]
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,[16] but these fairy characters were transformed, more and more often, into wizards and enchantresses.[17]Morgan le Fay never loses her name, but in Le Morte d'Arthur, she studies magic rather than being inherently magical.[18] Similarly, knights lose magical abilities.[17] 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.[17]
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.[19] While he never eliminates the mother-in-law, many romances such as Valentine and Orson have later variants that change from the mother-in-law to the courtier, whereas a more recent version never goes back.[19]
In Italy there is the story called Il Bel Gherardino. It is the most ancient prototype of an Italian singing fairy tale by an anonymous Tuscan author. It tells the story of a young Italian knight, depleted for its "magnanimitas", who wins the love of a fairy. When he loses this love because he does not comply with her conditions, Gherardino reconquers his lady after a series of labours, including the prison where he is rescued by another woman and a tournament that he wins. Other examples of Italian (Tuscan) poetry tales are Antonio Pucci's literature: Gismirante, Il Brutto di Bretagna or Brito di Bretagna ("The ugly knight of Britain") and Madonna Lionessa ("Lioness Lady"). Another work of a second anonymous Italian author that is worth mentioning is Istoria di Tre Giovani Disperati e di Tre Fate ("Story of three desperate boys and three fairies").
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 (an example being the multiple references to the Holy Grail) as well as elements of Celtic legends.[20]
Medieval epic
The Medieval romance developed out of the medieval epic, in particular the Matter of France developing out of such tales as the Chanson de Geste, with intermediate forms where the feudal bonds of loyalty had giants, or a magical horn, added to the plot.[21] The epics of Charlemagne, unlike such ones as Beowulf, already had feudalism rather than the tribal loyalties; this was to continue in romances.[22]
Contemporary society
The romance form is distinguished from the earlier epics of the Middle Ages by the changes of the 12th century, which introduced courtly and chivalrous themes into the works.[23] This occurred regardless of congruity to the source material; Alexander the Great featured as a fully feudal king.[24] Chivalry was treated as continuous from Roman times.[25] This extended even to such details as clothing; when in the Seven Sages of Rome, the son of an (unnamed) emperor of Rome wears the clothing of a sober Italian citizen, and when his stepmother attempts to seduce him, her clothing is described in medieval terminology.[26] When Priam sends Paris to Greece in a 14th-century work, Priam is dressed in the mold of Charlemagne, and Paris is dressed demurely, but in Greece, he adopts the flashier style, with multicolored clothing and fashionable shoes, cut in lattice-work—signs of a seducer in the era.[27]
Historical figures reappeared, reworked, in romance. The entire Matter of France derived from known figures, and suffered somewhat because their descendants had an interest in the tales that were told of their ancestors, unlike the Matter of Britain. Richard Coeur de Lion reappeared in romance, endowed with a fairy mother who arrived in a ship with silk sails and departed when forced to behold the sacrament, bare-handed combat with a lion, magical rings, and prophetic dreams.[28]Hereward the Wake's early life appeared in chronicles as the embellished, romantic adventures of an exile, complete with rescuing princesses and wrestling with bears.[29]Fulk Fitzwarin, an outlaw in King John's day, has his historical background a minor thread in the episodic stream of romantic adventures.[30]
Classical origins
Some romances, such as Apollonius of Tyre, show classical pagan origins.[31] Tales of the Matter of Rome in particular may be derived from such works as the Alexander Romance. Ovid was used as a source for tales of Jason and Medea, which were cast in romance in a more fairy-tale like form, probably closer to the older forms than Ovid's rhetoric.[32] It also drew upon the traditions of magic that were attributed to such figures as Virgil.[20]
Courtly love
The new courtly love was not one of the original elements of the genre, but quickly became very important when introduced.
It was introduced to the romance by Chretien de Troyes, combining it with the Matter of Britain, new to French poets.[33] In Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart (unlike his earlier Erec and Enide), the behavior of Lancelot conforms to the courtly love ideal;[34] it also, though still full of adventure, devotes an unprecedented amount of time to dealing with the psychological aspects of the love.[35] By the end of the 14th century, counter to the earliest formulations, many French and English romances combined courtly love, with love sickness and devotion on the man's part, with the couple's subsequent marriage; this featured in Sir Degrevant, Sir Torrent of Portyngale, Sir Eglamour, and William of Palerne.[36]Ipomadon even explicitly describes the married couple as lovers, and the plot of Sir Otuel was altered, to allow him to marry Belyssant.[37] Similarly, Iberian romances of the 14th century praised monogamy and marriage in such tales as Tirant lo Blanc and Amadís de Gaula.[38]
Early forms
A knight rescues a lady from a dragon.
Many medieval romances recount the marvellous adventures of a chivalrous, heroicknight, 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.[39] 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.[40] 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.[41] 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.[42]
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 c.1230, 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 (c.1408– c.1471), 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.[43] Queen Elizabeth I's Accession Day tilts, for instance, drew freely on the multiplicity of incident from romances for the knights' disguises.[44] 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.[45]
From the high Middle Ages, in works of piety, clerical critics often deemed romances to be harmful worldly distractions from more substantive or moral works, and by 1600 many secular readers would agree; in the judgement of many learned readers in the shifting intellectual atmosphere of the 17th century, the romance was trite and childish literature, inspiring only broken-down ageing and provincial persons such as Don Quixote, knight of the culturally isolated province of La Mancha. (Don Quixote [1605, 1615], by Miguel de Cervantes [1547–1616], is a satirical story of an elderly country gentleman, living in La Mancha province, who is so obsessed by chivalric romances that he seeks to emulate their various heroes.) Hudibras also lampoons the faded conventions of chivalrous romance, from an ironic, consciously realistic viewpoint. Some of the magical and exotic atmosphere of Romance informed tragedies for the stage, such as John Dryden's collaborative The Indian Queen (1664) as well as Restoration spectaculars and opera seria, such as Handel's Rinaldo (1711), based on a magical interlude in Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata.
In the Renaissance, also, the romance genre was bitterly attacked as barbarous and silly by the humanists, who exalted Greek and Latin classics and classical forms, an attack that was not in that century very effective among the common readers.[46] In England, romances continued; heavily rhetorical, they often had complex plots and high sentiment,[47] such as in Robert Greene's Pandosto (the source for William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale)[48] and Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde (based on the medieval romance Gamelyn and the source for As You Like It), Robert Duke of Normandy (based on Robert the Devil) and A Margarite of America.[49]
Related forms
The Acritic songs (dealing with Digenis Acritas and his fellow frontiersmen) resemble much the chanson de geste, though they developed simultaneously but separately. These songs dealt with the hardships and adventures of the border guards of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) – including their love affairs – and where a predominantly oral tradition which survived in the Balkans and Anatolia until modern times. This genre may have intermingled with its Western counterparts during the long occupation of Byzantine territories by French and Italian knights after the 4th crusade. This is suggested by later works in the Greek language which show influences from both traditions.
In later romances, particularly those of French origin, there is a marked tendency to emphasize themes of courtly love, such as faithfulness in adversity. From c.1760 – usually cited as 1764 at the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto – the connotations of "romance" moved from fantastic and eerie, somewhat Gothic adventure narratives of novelists like Ann Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance (1790) or The Romance of the Forest (1791) with erotic content to novels centered on the episodic development of a courtship that ends in marriage. With a female protagonist, during the rise of Romanticism the depiction of the course of such a courtship within contemporary conventions of realism, the female equivalent of the "novel of education", informs much Romantic fiction. In gothic novels such as Bram Stoker's Dracula, the elements of romantic seduction and desire were mingled with fear and dread. Nathaniel Hawthorne used the term to distinguish his works as romances rather than novels,[50] and literary criticism of the 19th century often accepted the contrast between the romance and the novel, in such works as H. G. Wells's "scientific romances" in the beginning of science fiction.[51]
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.
Modern usage of term "romance" usually refer 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."[52]
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'Conner, writing of the use of grotesque in fiction, talked of its use in "the modern romance tradition."[53]
Chivalry, or the chivalric language, is an informal and varying code of conduct developed in Europe between 1170 and 1220. It is associated with the medieval Christian institution of knighthood, with knights being members of various chivalric orders; knights' and gentlemen's behaviours were governed by chivalrous social codes. The ideals of chivalry were popularized in medieval literature, particularly the literary cycles known as the Matter of France, relating to the legendary companions of Charlemagne and his men-at-arms, the paladins, and the Matter of Britain, informed by Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, written in the 1130s, which popularized the legend of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table.
Courtly love was a medieval European literary conception of love that emphasized nobility and chivalry. Medieval literature is filled with examples of knights setting out on adventures and performing various deeds or services for ladies because of their "courtly love". This kind of love was originally a literary fiction created for the entertainment of the nobility, but as time passed, these ideas about love spread to popular culture and attracted a larger literate audience. In the high Middle Ages, a "game of love" developed around these ideas as a set of social practices. "Loving nobly" was considered to be an enriching and improving practice.
Gawain, also known in many other forms and spellings, is a character in Arthurian legend, in which he is King Arthur's nephew and one of the premier Knights of the Round Table. The prototype of Gawain is mentioned under the name Gwalchmei in the earliest Welsh sources. He has subsequently appeared in many Arthurian tales in Welsh, Latin, French, English, Scottish, Dutch, German, Spanish, and Italian, notably as the protagonist of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Other works featuring Gawain as their central character include De Ortu Waluuanii, Diu Crône, Ywain and Gawain, Golagros and Gawane, Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, L'âtre périlleux, La Mule sans frein, La Vengeance Raguidel, Le Chevalier à l'épée, Le Livre d'Artus, The Awntyrs off Arthure, The Greene Knight, and The Weddynge of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell.
Lancelot du Lac, also written as Launcelot and other variants, is a character in some versions of Arthurian legend where he is typically depicted as King Arthur's close companion and one of the greatest Knights of the Round Table. In the French-inspired Arthurian chivalric romance tradition, Lancelot is an orphaned son of King Ban of the lost kingdom of Benoic, raised in a fairy realm by the Lady of the Lake. A hero of many battles, quests and tournaments, and famed as a nearly unrivalled swordsman and jouster, Lancelot becomes the lord of the castle Joyous Gard and personal champion of Arthur's wife, Queen Guinevere, despite suffering from frequent and sometimes prolonged fits of madness. But when his adulterous affair with Guinevere is discovered, it causes a civil war that, once exploited by Mordred, brings an end to Arthur's kingdom.
Huon of Bordeaux is the title character of a 13th-century French epic poem with romance elements.
Poetry took numerous forms in medieval Europe, for example, lyric and epic poetry. The troubadours, trouvères, and the minnesänger are known for composing their lyric poetry about courtly love usually accompanied by an instrument.
Medieval literature is a broad subject, encompassing essentially all written works available in Europe and beyond during the Middle Ages. The literature of this time was composed of religious writings as well as secular works. Just as in modern literature, it is a complex and rich field of study, from the utterly sacred to the exuberantly profane, touching all points in-between. Works of literature are often grouped by place of origin, language, and genre.
The chanson de geste is a medieval narrative, a type of epic poem that appears at the dawn of French literature. The earliest known poems of this genre date from the late 11th and early 12th centuries, shortly before the emergence of the lyric poetry of the troubadours and trouvères, and the earliest verse romances. They reached their highest point of acceptance in the period 1150–1250.
According to the medieval poet Jean Bodel, the Matter of Rome is the literary cycle of Greek and Roman mythology, together with episodes from the history of classical antiquity, focusing on military heroes like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Bodel's division of literary cycles also included the Matter of France and the Matter of Britain. The Matter of Rome includes the Matter of Troy, consisting of romances and other texts based on the Trojan War and its legacy, including the adventures of Aeneas.
Robert the Devil is a legend of medieval origin about a Norman knight who discovers he is the son of Satan. His mother, despairing of heaven's aid in order to obtain a son, had asked for help from the devil. Robert's satanic instincts propel him into a violent and sinful life, but he eventually overcomes them to achieve repentance.
A knight-errant is a figure of medieval chivalric romance literature. The adjective errant indicates how the knight-errant would wander the land in search of adventures to prove his chivalric virtues, either in knightly duels or in some other pursuit of courtly love.
Fantasy literature is literature set in an imaginary universe, often but not always without any locations, events, or people from the real world. Magic, the supernatural and magical creatures are common in many of these imaginary worlds. Fantasy literature may be directed at both children and adults.
The story of the Knight of the Swan, or Swan Knight, is a medieval tale about a mysterious rescuer who comes in a swan-drawn boat to defend a damsel, his only condition being that he must never be asked his name.
Elements of the supernatural and the fantastic were an element of literature from its beginning. The modern genre is distinguished from tales and folklore which contain fantastic elements, first by the acknowledged fictitious nature of the work, and second by the naming of an author. Works in which the marvels were not necessarily believed, or only half-believed, such as the European romances of chivalry and the tales of the Arabian Nights, slowly evolved into works with such traits. Authors like George MacDonald (1824–1905) created the first explicitly fantastic works.
Medieval French literature is, for the purpose of this article, Medieval literature written in Oïl languages during the period from the eleventh century to the end of the fifteenth century.
Aucassin et Nicolette is an anonymous medieval French fictional story. It is the unique example of a chantefable, literally, a "sung story", a combination of prose and verse.
The riddarasögur are Norse prose sagas of the romance genre. Starting in the thirteenth century with Norse translations of French chansons de geste and Latin romances and histories, the genre expanded in Iceland to indigenous creations in a similar style.
Ipomadon is a Middle English translation of Hugh of Rhuddlan's Anglo-Norman romance Ipomedon composed in tail-rhyme verse, possibly in the last decade of the fourteenth century. It is one of three Middle English renditions of Hugh's work: the other two are a shorter verse Lyfe of Ipomydon and the prose Ipomedon, both of the fifteenth century. Each version is derived independently from the Anglo-Norman Ipomedon, which Hugh wrote 'not long after 1180', possibly in Herefordshire. It is included in a list of the popular English romances by Richard Hyrde in the 1520s.
The Erl of Toulouse is a Middle English chivalric romance centered on an innocent persecuted wife. It claims to be a translation of a French lai, but the original lai is lost. It is thought to date from the late 14th century, and survives in four manuscripts of the 15th and 16th centuries. The Erl of Toulouse is written in a north-east Midlands dialect of Middle English.
The type of romance considered here is mainly the genre of novel defined by the novelist Walter Scott as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", in contrast to mainstream novels which realistically depict the state of a society. These works frequently, but not exclusively, take the form of the historical novel. Scott's novels are also frequently described as historical romances, and Northrop Frye suggested "the general principle that most 'historical novels' are romances". Scott describes romance as a "kindred term", and many European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo".
1 2 3 Briggs, Katharine M. (1977). "Fairies in medieval romances". An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hoglobins, Brownies, Bogies and Othersupernatural Creatures. New York: Pantheon. p.132. ISBN978-0-394-73467-5.
1 2 Jolly, Karen Louise; Raudvere, Catharina; Peters, Edward; Ankarloo, Bengt; Clark, Stuart (2002). "Medieval Magic: Definitions, Beliefs, Practices". The Middle Ages. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Vol.3. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. p.68. ISBN978-0-8122-1786-5.
↑ Lewis, C. S. (1995). The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p.23. ISBN978-0-19-281220-9.
↑ Mathew, Gervase (1981). "Marriage and Amour Courtois in Late Fourteenth Century England". In Sayers, Dorothy (ed.). Essays Presented to Charles Williams. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans. pp.132–133. ISBN978-0-8028-1117-2.
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