CHRÉTIEN (CHRESTIEN) de TROYES. – Little biographical information is available concerning this famous courtly poet, who lived at the court of Champagne and whose greatest literary activity must have taken place between 1160 and 1175. He knew and developed classical material (especially Ovidian material), as various titles of his lost works demonstrate; but he was more strongly attracted by the adventurous world of Arthurian tales, to which he, drawing inspiration from the Historia regum Britanniae versified in Wacen’s Roman de Brut, gave new life and new fame.
He is thus credited with an Erec et Enide, a Lancelot, an Yvain, and a Perceval, inspired by the Arturi regis amboges pulcerrimae, and with a Cligés of Greek-Byzantine inspiration, although set in the Arthurian world. Of these poems (all in octosyllabic couplets), which are simply erotic and adventurous, some have spoken as “thesis romances,” while others have discerned concealed and complex allegorical meanings;
certainly C. is not content merely to recount beautiful tales, but also wishes to pose and discuss delicate psychological problems (the emergence of amorous passion, the relationship between love and chivalry, the nature and demands of conjugal fidelity). In any case, he writes as a great artist, with a rich, fluent, varied language and a sure mastery of his complicated plots.
Although left unfinished at 7,000 verses, the romance Perceval merits special attention, in which the adventurous element is mingled with the religious, in a form destined for a long and varied afterlife in later literatures. It concerns a young man who, forcibly kept away from the chivalric world, is finally admitted into it and is led, from adventure to adventure, to find the Grail, that is, the sacred vessel in which the blood from Christ’s side was said to have been collected.
Ruggero Maria Ruggieri