Romance

The word ‘romance’ is derived from Latin (romanice) and means ‘in the Romanic (romance) language”. Originally it was a fictitious tale in verse, based on legend, chivalric love, adventure and the supernatural. Later there appeared prose romances.

Thus, the term ‘romance’ is used to describe a literary work of an epic character, a narrative of adventure, following a hero through the successive episodes of a quest toward his chosen goal. They usually had a complicated plot, very often several parallel or intertwining plots, an abundance of characters, and a strong fantastic or supernatural element. Medieval romances were usually centered on the idea of young selfless love in a more or less elevated sense, told of incredible adventures and military exploits. They were also quite long – some over 30 or even 40 thousand lines; their authors seldom possessed the sense of proportion or artistic intuition, but were definitely verbose.

The medieval romance was extremely far from reality in any sense. The characters were flat and principally served to illustrate a moral point or personify a quality. Their aim was to propagate high chivalric ideals, to teach a moral lesson, but also to entertain the reader; they had an interesting story to tell.

Most romances were written in France. English romances are heavily dependent on their French models. The English look to French for instructions in good manners and the kind of literature that belong properly to a court.

The Sources :

1) The Latin Christian tradition constituted the moral basis of the genre. Also a rich source of motifs, both biblical and purely literary.

2) Folk legends, especially Celtic.

3) Byzantine culture.

4) Antique Greco-Roman heritage

The Breton cycle.Romances of the Breton cycle derived their subject matter from Celtic folk legends, many of which were connected with the figure of the legendary king Arthur. The Arthurian cycle comes from the Celtic oral tradition. King Arthur emerged as the type and mirror of all Christian kings. His fabled court became the centre of chivalric enterprise.

Those legends could have reached France by two major ways: oral – through Celtic singers and minstrels; and written – by way of legendary chronicles (Geoffrey of Monmouth Historia Regum Britanniae). The romances of this cycle were very numerous, different in their style and subject matter, and can be classified as:

1) Breton Lays (lais)

2) The group of stories about Tristram and Isoud

3) Arthurian romances proper

4) The group of stories about the Holy Grail.

Breton Lays (lais) an important genre of English medieval literature, short stories in rhyme. English examples include Sir Orfeo, Emare. Chaucer used a popular lay for Franklin’s tale.

Marie De France (1160-90) was an influential French poet who made a particularly impressive literary capital out of courtly love. She wrote 12 lays, most dealing with encounters of knights and ladies in a world formed by both chivalrous action and supernatural influence. She borrowed her plots from folk songs and legends and adapted them to the ideas of contemporary reality – chivalric in the first place. Marie is not interested in the courtly life, heroic exploits, but in genuine human emotion. Her poetry is rather melancholy.

Sir Gawain and the Green Kight.

One of the most famous and important English romances. Written in the 14^th cent.

Sir Gawain ingeniously combines two plots, common in folklore and romance, though not found together elsewhere: the beheading contest, in which two parties agree to an exchange of blows, and the temptation, an attempted seduction of the hero by a lady.

The motif of green man’s decapitation originates in very ancient folklore, probably in a vegetation myth in which the beheading would have been a ritual death that insure the return of spring and the regrowth of the crops. But this ancient theme has been entirely rationalized by the late medieval poet, who sees in his inherited plot an opportunity to study how successfully Gawain, as a man wholly dedicated to Christian ideals, maintains those ideals when he is subjected to unusual pressures. The poem is a rare combination: at once a comedy – even a satire – of manners and a profoundly Christian view of character and its destiny.

The court of King Arthur is presented in a most grandiose language, as a place where the ideal of chivalry has reached its zenith, where all is courtesy and prowess in defense of the right. The praise bestowed by the poet on the court might seem excessive, but probably the author made it so intentionally.

Sir Gawain belongs to the so-called Alliterative Revival, a sudden emergence of a body of poems in the alliterative meter of Old English tradition. Sir Gawain is written in a unique stanza combining alliteration and rhyme.

The final decay of feudalism was paradoxically but understandably accompanied by the revival of interest in knightly ideals. This revival produced the prose of Thomas Malory.

Sir Thomas Malory.

Knight, member of Parliament, Lancastrian. Died in 1471. Morte d’Arthur

Represented himself as translating a French book. In fact, Morte d’Arthur is a compilation. He has brought together many romances and co-ordinated them, without eliminating traces of disparity.

Malory reduced his material to a coherent group of separate but related stories with the emphasis on action and motif rather than sentiment and doctrine.

1) the first book begins with the death of Uther Pendragon and Arthur’s accession. It tells of Arthur’s victorious wars against rebels and hostile neighbours.

2) Arthur’s struggle against the claims of Rome, his triumph and coronation

3) The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot du Lake. Lancelot is an active and gallant knight who proceeds from adventure to adventure before returning to Arthur’s court

4) The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney – from an unknown French source – a characteristic story of a questing knight

5) The book of Sir Tristram de Lyoness – a simplified and reduced version of the French prose romance of Tristan. The love of Tristram and Isode is treated with emotional gust and with no sense of doom. Tristram’s adventures and achievements as a Knight of the Round Table are emphasized. It is the longest of Malory’s seven books, divided into 17 parts.

6) The Tale of the Holy Grail – translated from a French romance, but emphasizes what might be called chivalric humanism as the underlying ethical pattern at the expense of the religious.

7) The book of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere. The most Piteous Tale of the Morte Arthur.

In 1485 the work was published by William Caxton, who gave it a false unity by applying the title of the last group of stories (The Morte Arthure) to the whole collection. Some scholars believe that each was written separately as an independent work.

The narrator of these fanciful tales found a style which fits them well – simple, even childish, monotonous, but harmonious and having poetic cadences. A clear, transparent and smooth style with no fixed date, thou it breathes a soft archaic odor. The charm of this prose is that it is made up of poetic reminiscences inherited from a long line of earlier poems. The style is that of fairy-tales which are told to little children. It is delicious prose of a particular kind; though unfit for other than its own purpose, as is apparent when the author attempts to reason. The author repeats his tale like a marveling child trying to tell faithfully what it has heard and not entirely understood. He gives a wide field to the imagination and does not trouble himself about the intelligence.

The literary importance and influence of this collection cannot be exaggerated. It is England’s first book in poetic prose, and also the storehouse of those legends of the past which have most haunted English imaginations. It is the work which kept the chivalrous spirit alive among the literate, the poets and the gentry, while the people were fed by the chap-books.

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