One day, wandering in search of his mother and finding himself in need of a place to stay, Perceval encounters two men in a boat. One of these, a fisherman, directs the knight to his castle, and that evening in the castle hall the fisherman, who is a king, presents him with a sword that will fail only on one unspecified occasion. Perceval watches a procession pass through the hall, consisting of a young man carrying a lance with a bleeding tip, two others carrying candelabra, a maiden bearing a luminous golden grail (a dish on which one might serve a fish at table) set with precious stones, and a second maiden with a silver cutting-platter. But because of his tutor’s advice Perceval declines to ask any questions about the grail or whom it serves, or about the bleeding lance. The next morning Perceval finds the castle deserted and just manages to cross the moat as the drawbridge rises. Returning to Arthur’s court, he vows not to cease wandering until he has found the lance and learned whom the grail serves. Later Perceval is informed that his mother had died as he was leaving home and that because of his failure to turn back at the sight of her falling he was prevented from asking questions about the grail and the lance. If he had asked them, the Fisher King, who had been wounded between the thighs, would have been cured. Five years pass, during which Perceval does not give a thought to his Christian religion. Then, on a Good Friday, he encounters a hermit who turns out to be his mother’s brother and who reveals to him that the Fisher King’s father is also his maternal uncle, who has lived in the same room for the past twelve years, kept alive by what is served to him in the grail, namely a single communion wafer.
The romance of Perceval continues with adventures that Gawain undertakes, and it is thought that the hero himself might have been led back to the grail and lance had Chrétien finished the poem. Its unfinished state gave several other romancers the opportunity to furnish continuations, and two prologues were also added to explain the circumstances that led to the situation Perceval was in at the beginning of the romance. An impressive body of literature arose from Chrétien’s Perceval. The grail quickly became the Holy Grail (although Chrétien said once that the grail was “a holy thing,” he never applied that term to it as an epithet) and was interpreted as the vessel that Christ used at the Last Supper; the lance was represented as the weapon which pierced Christ’s side while he was on the cross. Figures such as Wagner, Tennyson, and T. S. Eliot continued to exploit the Grail legend, and it has given rise to numerous interpretations, some farfetched, others plausible.
A progression in the ideals that Chrétien celebrates sets Perceval off from the rest of his works. In Erec and Enid the hero and heroine marry with a minimum of amatory preliminaries and only gain confidence in each other through a series of tests. Chrétien depicts in Cligés not one but two protracted courtships, and explores the complications posed by chastity with constant depreciatory references to the adultery of Tristan and Isolt. Lancelot, probably under the influence of Marie of Champagne, appears to extol adulterous love. The love between Yvain and Laudine evolves with due attention to the analysis of feelings, then is subjected to severe pressure in marriage, but prevails over formidable obstacles. Throughout his career, then, Chrétien is preoccupied with the relationship between knighthood and love. In Perceval, however, love between a man and woman, while it is treated as a theme, is secondary to the love of one’s kin and the love of God.
The Arthurian romance flourished in France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, both in verse and in prose. These works undoubtedly responded to a need for examining the subtleties of motivation in human conduct, nuances that could not be explored in the other great narrative genres of the period. These were the epic, in which characters' motives are represented through their actions or their words but not through the analysis of their thoughts and feelings, and the saint’s life, plainly limited as a vehicle for delving into worldly complexities. In the romance the heroes and heroines tend to act for themselves rather than being emblematic of their societies. They are tested in adventures that they often encounter in unexpected places, by creatures who seem to live according to a set of ethical norms different from those of the ordinary mortal and who share a knowledge that gives them a limited but threatening power over anyone wandering within their reach. The qualities upon which success depends are not so much physical agility and strength (although these do play an important role) as moral and spiritual strengths. The geography of the Otherworld is ineffable, often impermanent, and the creatures who inhabit it are elusive. Against this landscape the destinies of exemplary knights and ladies were played out for the entertainment and edification of noble audiences.
Chrétien’s contemporaries speak of him in ways that make it obvious they took delight in his talents as a storyteller. We can imagine them listening to his works being read aloud— much as he depicts the scene in which Yvain comes upon a family in the Castle of Infinite Misfortune:
And he saw a gentleman,
Propped up on his elbow, lying
On a silken cloth, and a girl
Was reading him from some romance,
I have no idea about whom.
And in order to hear this romance
A lady had come to lie there
With them. She was the girl’s
Mother, and the gentleman her father.
[11. 5362-70]
While private reading was a normal practice in the twelfth century, communal scenes such as this must also have been a regular feature of castle life for sophisticated noble families. It is a scene whose pleasures are perhaps not entirely foreign to us today, in an age in which electronic media have made the collective aesthetic experience once again common. To enable us to share in the pleasure of Yvain, we now have the lively and colloquial rendering of Burton Raffel. It is an effective intermediary between Chrétien and us, one that is faithful to the tenor of the romance but embodied in unaffected contemporary English, free of all traces of stiltedness and archaicism. To him one can extend the ultimate accolade: a reader coming upon his translation unawares might well think that Yvain had been written in English.
J. J. D.
University of California, Berkeley
July 1986
1. Rachel Bromwich, “Celtic Elements in Arthurian Romance: A General Survey,” The Legend of Arthur in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to A. H. Diverres by Colleagues, Pupils and Friends, ed. P. B. Grout, R. A. Lodge, C. E. Pickford and E. K. C. Varty (London: D. W. Brewer, 1983), p. 43.
2. Rachel Bromwich, ed. and trans., Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Welsh Triads (Cardiff: The University of Wales Press, 1978), p. 7.
3. For a discussion of these and other Celtic elements, see Roger Sherman Loomis, Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949).
4. Alexander Penrose Forbes, ed., The Lives of S. Ninian and S. Kentigern, Compiled in the Twelfth Century (The Historians of Scotland Series, 5; Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1874), pp. 123—33, 243—52. See also Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, “The Sources for the Life of St. Kentigern,” in Studies in the Early British Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 273-357.
5. The conventional features of Welsh storytelling are discussed in Brynley F. Roberts, “From Traditional Tale to Literary Story: Middle Welsh Prose Narratives,” in The Craft of Fiction: Essays in Medieval Poetics, ed. Leigh A. Arrathoon (Rochester, Michigan: Solaris Press, 1984), 211-30.
Recommended for Further Reading
The following short list includes books particularly suitable for the student reader.
Medieval Texts
Andrew the Chaplain. The Art of Courtly Love. Translated by John Jay Parry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941.
Chrétien de Troyes. Perceval or the Story of the Grail. Translated by Ruth Harwood Cline. New York: Pergamon Press, 1983.
Early Irish Myths and Sagas. Translated by Jeffrey Gantz. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1981.
Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Translated by Lewis
Thorpe. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1966.
The Mabinogion. Translated by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones. Everyman’s Library. Revised edition. New York: Dutton; London: Dent, 1974.
Trioedd Ynys Prydein. The Welsh Triads. Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary by Rachel Bromwich. Cardiff: The University of Wales Press, 1978.
Wilhelm, James J., and Laila Zamuelis Gross, eds. The Romance of Arthur. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1984. (Includes William W. Kibler’s translation of Chrétien’s Lancelot).
Critical Studies
Frappier, Jean. Etude sur “Yvain ou le Chevalier au lion.” Paris: Société d'Edition d'Enseignement Supérieur, 1969.
——. Chrétien de Troyes: The Man and His Work. Translated by
Raymond J. Cormier. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1982.
Kelly, Douglas. Chrétien de Troyes: An Analytic Bibliography. Research Bibliographies and Checklists, 17. London: Grant and Cutler, 1976.
Kelly, Douglas, ed. The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, a Symposium. The Edward C. Armstrong Monographs on Medieval Literature, 3. Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum Publishers, 1985.
Lacy, Norris J. The Craft of Chrétien de Troyes: An Essay on Narrative Art. Davis Medieval Texts and Studies, 3. Leiden: Brill, 1980.
Loomis, Roger Sherman. Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes. New York: Columbia University Pres, 1949.
Topsfield, Leslie T. Chrétien de Troyes: A Study of the Arthurian Romances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
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