DOHSS

The Arthurian Romance

Aju Basil James
15/4/2013




This paper traces to a limited extent the history of the Arthurian romance. It attempts to understand
the historical and political climate prevailing in twelfth century France, where the Arthurian romance
was born. Further, it traces the metamorphosis of this genre at the hands of Malory in the fifteenth
century and Tennyson in the Victorian age.
The legend of King Arthur was conceived out of his truculent defence of the British Isles
against the invading Saxons. This warrior hero, celebrated for disdaining fortune with his
brandished steel, underwent a change in perception in the twelfth century, whereby his
avatar as a champion of pre-modern Britain was recast due to myriad social and historical
causes.
The metamorphosis from an epic to a courtly romance was the result of transplanting the
legend of Arthur from England to France. By shifting the place of writing to the royal courts
of France, the legend was divested of its national temper, which was characterised by
heroism and war. Rather, Arthur became a conduit for more fashionable social and courtly
concerns of the time and thus imbibed the ethos of the French aristocracy in its stories.
These values had to do with love and chivalry, the defining qualities of courtly romance.
France, where courtly romance grew up, was characterised by a more leisured aristocracy,
with more freedom, time and money freed up to be spent on ideals and codes of conduct.
Women were given a more prominent place in the courts and this was reflected in the
romances that were produced in France at the time. This was in marked contrast to the
British society where the legend of Arthur originated, a society still at threat from foreign
invaders and thus valuing the hardened fighter rather than sophisticated lover.
A lot of Arthurian romance can be summed up in the term chivalry, so much so that we no
longer can say whether the romance created the idea of chivalry or whether the idea
spawned this and many other epics. In the English tradition, King Arthur had little or no love
interests. He had no romantic aspirations before or after his early marriage and none were
invented for him in the Isles. The idea of Arthur which reached France was thus of a stern
and icy king, distant but fierce, and with little interest in anything besides the protection of
his land. Thus, the romantic tradition of France relegated Arthur to the role of a great king
who stays at home while his knights go off on romantic adventures (Pearsall). No mention is
made of Arthurs valiant struggles against the Saxons or the Romans. Thus the term
Arthurian romance is in some ways a misnomer; though it has Arthurs court as its
background or point of reference, it simply is not about Arthur.
Romance is the literature of chivalry and exists to reflect, celebrate and confirm the chivalric
values by which its primary consumers, the noble and knightly class, lived or purported to
live. Any survey of medieval history will make it clear that, more often than not, the
romances do not record their way of life so much as how they would like to think of
themselves and be thought of as living. The frustrations and expediencies of real daily life
could be at odds with the idea of medieval knights on horse backs in search of damsels to
rescue from distress and spontaneous jaunts ending in noble duels. Romance purges life of
any impurities and presents chivalry in heightened and idealised form.
The whimsical nature of the romance can brought out fully when compared to the epics
popular in Europe. The epic was the literature of the more war like and male centred society
that dominated Europe and especially Britain till the twelfth century. Stories such as those
of King Arthur are a celebration of the values of this society, most of which had to do with
fighting. Epics are often set in historical or quasi-historical backgrounds and are often
exaggerated narrations of real people and real events. The epic brings to the fore qualities
that are most often expressed through the display of power, qualities such as loyalty to
ones king or leader, revenge and the assertion of self as a metonym for a kingdom or a
nation. Women in epics are often catalysts to the action in the sense that they urge men
towards displays of power (Pearsall). They are inspired by the fact that if they fail in war, the
women might become the property of the conquerors and any sense of honour and pride of
the nation usually attached upon the chastity and exclusivity of their women will be dashed
to smithereens. Men fight for women because if they do not, the women may be raped,
kidnapped or forced into other forms of subjection.
In contrast, the defining characteristics of the romance are honour and love. The women are
objects of adoration and worship. Men fight for them or go to great lengths of trouble for
them because if they do not, the woman in question might be upset. It is not a world where
the fittest survive, but a more decadent and leisurely world, where knights opt to go out on
adventure and seek the unattainable. In the romantic universe, lure of adventure gets
precedence over the gore of bloody battles of survival. The knight is not forced to defend his
homeland; he chooses to go out from his secure bastion of wealth and comfort to seek
adventuress in which his qualities of chivalry and service to ladies will be tested and proved.
The quality of being in love and the performance of being a lover was as much a social grace
as a private emotion. The series of adventures, as Auerbach writes, is thus raised to the
status of a fixed and graduated test of election; it becomes the basis of a doctrine of
personal perfection (Auerbach).
The Arthurian epic was based on the real deeds of an English king and his knights. However,
the action in the Arthurian romance minted in France took liberties with verisimilitude and
never had pretensions to being real or historical. The stories are interspersed with the
elements of the marvellous, the geography is vague at best and time is unreal. The identity
of a knight is firmly fixed upon the adventurous deeds he performs and the romantic
excursions he sets out on. The deeds have no intrinsic or teleological purpose to them, but
are exercises in the creation of a romantic reality and feats of self-realisation. There is no
external motivation for Arthur to ravage a country if it is left unprotected or for Laudines
husband to guard the spring in Yvain, the Knight of Lyon, but these deeds are done to
validate the existence of the establishment of knighthood and also to self-reflexively adhere
to the tenets of this manufactured reality. This introspective hero is not just a man of
glorious action, but he also thinks and feels; there is an inner consciousness to be explored.
He is in love.
The emphasis on love in Arthurian romance was a vital addition made possible by the
transplanting of the myth to French courts in the twelfth century. New audiences and newly
civilised courts brought along with them a revolution in the attitude to and the
representation of sensibility. The idea that human emotion is not a disease of the mind nor
an enemy of reason quickly gathered power and it was recognised as an attribute to be
valued for its potential to inspire nobility of behaviour. This change in attitude contributed
to the notion that sexual love could be a high form of service and even got rechristened as
courtly love. Though medieval romances, of which the Arthurian is only one, vary widely by
region, period, class, cultural inheritance and in the works of individual writers, it is fair to
say that this attachment of an exquisite refinement of ideal sentiment to the love between a
man and a woman is the distinctive characteristic feature of the medieval chivalric romance.
Courtly love believes in the value of sexual love as an ennobling experience, where the main
objective is not the satisfaction of desire, but a refinement of character to be achieved
through progress and growth in virtue, merit and worth (Pearsall). The main subject of
courtly love and the one upon which the burden of this progress is placed is of course the
male lover. Femininity is already constituted as the very essence of these qualities and it is
to the standards and expectations of the female partner that the male lover has to aspire.
The courtly setting accounts for the ever present idealising tone of the medieval Arthurian
romance. In these accounts, all the ladies are beautiful and all knights valiant. The actual
events of the plot often undercut this idealising fervour and one may often find a sharp and
subtle reflection on the society. The political centrality of the court- legal, financial and
social- invests the action that occurs in the court with ideological conflicts that characterised
the period. Although romance is frequently described as an escapist genre that erases or
whitewashes social conflict, it presents a dialectical relation to the court ideology. It often
questions and examines in detail the compatibility between erotic and military pursuits and
the tension between eros and adventure. Even though these stories often deal with
individual protagonists and their conflicting quests, they also are acutely concerned with
their status as cultural fantasies. The heroic identity that the knights achieve through their
individual adventures, motivated by the ladies of the court, often lead to an actual position
at the kings court. This in turn reinforces the feudal system and the foibles and feats of the
hero often reflect on the court.
The narrator of these stories clearly fails to identify with the knights and ladies he narrates,
thus building a double valence in the narrative structure of the romance (Fuchs). The writers
of these romances were clerks, men in the lower orders of the Church who also performed
administrative tasks for the court. They were one of the few who were educated in Latin
and could write with some semblance of literariness. Their scholarly values or clerkly nature
was markedly different from the aristocratic, heroic chivalry of the romance heroes. This
ideological distance between the narrator and the protagonist thus often leads to
pronounced ironies in many of the romances, especially when the romance hero engages in
frivolous and risky adventures for the favour of the lady. This narrative tension is also
echoed in the plot as the hero struggles to reconcile the competing demands of eros and
adventure. The great invention of the medieval romancers was to link love to glorious
deeds so as to make love he direct cause and heroic personal identity and social position the
indirect consequences, writes the Italian critic Cesare Segre. The uneasy relationship
between these two offices produces the conflict necessary for the romance. The serial
adventures the knights engage in, sometimes described with a tongue in cheek irony, is thus
cloaked in the garb of some meaning or purpose, a meaningful unity in the face of the
threatening centrifugal force of the fantastic (Segre).
Chretien de Troyes
Chretien de Troyes (1135-1183), perhaps the greatest of French romance writers, practically
invented the Arthurian romance, developing an idealised sexual love with a high toned
sensibility, psychological acuteness, wit, irony and delicacy that were never seen in the
legend of Arthur before. Chretien appealed to knowledge and sophistication of the twelfth
century French courtly audience, their understanding of the fine strains of amorous
argumentation and tests the conventionally gendered expectations of behaviour. Chretiens
poems deal with the problems of conduct for the knight-lover who has to reconcile his
chivalric obligations with the imperative of Love. In Chretiens Lancelot, the Knights of the
Cart, perhaps his best work, our hero Lancelot has to debate in his mind whether he should
grant the defeated knight mercy, as chivalrous knighthood would dictate, or kill him as he
has promised his maiden. His solution to this problem is to fight the knight again, this time
at the disadvantage of not moving from the spot where he stands. It is the kind of solution
to the problem that would have stirred a shower of applause from the listening audience,
who would be put to many fine debates on love-morality in which the women could score
as many points as the men.
Chretien has four love-romances attributed to him- Erec et Enide, Cliges, Lancelot and Yvain.
Of these, Lancelot is perhaps his most famous work and most central to the development of
the new genre and form. This is the first time that the gallant knight Lancelot appears in
Arthurian romance as a significant figure, cast in the new role of Gueneveres lover. In the
courtly culture where these romances were born and written, it was the convention to
accept that a married woman could never really love her husband in the style of an ideal
romantic love and therefore must have an admiring, devoted, passionate lover who asked
for nothing but to worship his beloved. Thus, Arthur gets pushed to the background and
Lancelot the paramour comes to the foreground. He has to sacrifice a lot- his loyalty to his
king, Arthur, his honour, his reputation as an excellent swordsman- all for the love of
Guenevere. Much of Lancelots story has to do with needlessly rash promises that he makes
to his lady love and ridiculously difficult tasks he is put through in order to keep his word.
The most famous of these would be Lancelots crossing of the sword bridge across a moat,
the most favoured episode for illustration in manuscripts of the romance. He lacerates his
bare hands and feet, but the pain to him is of a saintly martyrdom. Love guides him and
comforts him and turns his suffering into pleasure (Pearsall). The romances often feature
this kind of quasi-religious experience, where the pure emotion is often of a spiritual nature,
though no theistic entity is invoked. In Chretiens stories, Lancelot often slips into trance-like
meditation in the middle of action, the narration taking a break to dwell into Lancelots
psyche as the events unfold. In such moments where Lancelot rationalises the
ridiculousness of his acts in the name of all consuming love, one can perceive a hit of ironic
mockery with which Chretien the clerk describes events. It also indicates the appreciation
the aristocratic audience had towards the rhetoric of casuistry, wit and ingenuity, even
when the targets were only exaggerations of cherished ideals. This irony also helps to
represent adultery, often a vital ingredient in these stories, without much wistful
embarrassment and as the manifestation of all-consuming passion and an almost religious
love.
Lancelot is special among Chretiens romances. The others deal primarily with the progress
of true love, which culminates painfully in marriage and the further problems that marriage
creates in opposition to the duties of chivalry. The narratives clearly have an intelligent
design behind them and unambiguous conclusion. There is little of the enigma and
bewildering mystery we see in Lancelot, which would have a strong influence on later
versions of the Arthurian romance.
Thomas Malory and Morte DArthur
Sir Thomas Malorys Morte DArthur marks a new age in English writing. Printed by William
Caxton in 1485, it is a deliberate return to and glorification of the past. Malory and Caxton
and many other affluent gentlemen of those times shared an idealising admiration for the
golden age of chivalry, which had never existed, except as an imagined goal, or an escape
from reality. Malory possessed a desire to find in Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table
the lineaments of a great and noble society. Malory wrote his Morte DArthur after the War
of Roses, a conflict in which he played a minor part. Disillusioned by war and fighting and
especially by the conduct of the knights and other warriors who strayed far away from the
ideals of chivalry and honour, Malory harks back to a golden period where the fighting men
of Britain would put honour and prestige before the gory realities of victory at war. This
aspiration to the Arthurian world was not limited to Malory alone. In the same year that
Morte DArthur was published, Henry VII seized the throne, claiming Arthurian ancestry for
the new Tudor dynasty and in the following year, named his first born son Arthur.
In Malorys attempt to recapture the glory days of the Round Table, he referred to the
French Vulgate cycle for material and adapts them to the contemporary times. The
borrowed narrative had, by the time Malory found it, taken a life of its own and become so
complex and fraught with digressive local significances, that it no longer had a single
unifying theme. The biggest task Malory faced was to ascribe a specific unifying theme of
the value and glory of chivalry. Thus, the different accounts of the various knights are caught
up in a larger hidden narrative of an unknowable future, in which the knight does not seem
to have much agency. He is simply required to go on adventure; his not question why.
Malorys Morte DArthur is thus a unhistorical or even unreal and is filled to the brim with
duelling and fighting, for no apparent purpose other than the propagation of the institution
of knighthood. However, perhaps the greatest achievement of Malory and what makes his
Morte DArthur a landmark work in the history of the Arthurian romance is the development
of a theme that gave some ontological sense to the apparent pointlessness of much of the
action. Malory was the first to present the knights in a framework of secular chivalry. Until
then, and especially in the French Vulgate from which Malory drew his stories, the knights
always had a teleological purpose in the recovery of the Holy Grail and the other adventures
were but steps towards this or digressions from this ultimate mission. Malory accepts the
validity if a religious experience, but he sees secular chivalry as the life of the great society
of the fifteenth century and he refuses to see it nullified by the Grail. The Knights of
Malorys Round Table are also fallible and as frivolous, noble and chivalrous as those of
Chretien or of the French Vulgate. But Malory is unique in the sense that he tries to
articulate a humanly intelligible narrative of the fall of the Round Table (Pearsall). Lancelot is
the focus of Malorys Morte DArthur, in keeping with the trend that Chretien sparked off.
The tragic division of loyalties, between chivalry and love, is manifested best in him, and
ultimately brings the world of Arthur to disaster.
Several episodes in the Morte DArthur can be associated with or traced back to historical
events of the fifteenth century and the War of Roses in particular. However, the work is for
the most part unhistorical and references to real events or places are often incidental. In
political terms, the institution of knighthood may be seen as a kind of chivalric policing or
chivalric peacekeeping. The dominant impression of the work is not of an attempt at an
allegory or critique of contemporary historical and political realities but of the creation of a
world which will act by its remoteness as a criticism of the modern world. The world of
chivalric adventure in Malory is a world of remote and unreal in place and time.
Most obvious of all is the remoteness from reality as more generally defined in terms of the
removal of the story from the usual constraints ordinary people live under. The people, or
the proletariat if you will, are seldom mentioned and are invisible. The story is about the
aristocracy, written for the aristocracy. The sense of class is omnipresent and any concerns
or demands of the knights that tends towards the diurnal or mundane is taken as a lack of
sophistication or the chivalric spirit. When Priamus is defeated by Gawain in disguise, his
main worry is not painfully bleeding to death but that his vanquisher should be of birth
adequate to allow him to die happy. When Sir Gareth requests twelve months of lodging
and food when granted a boon by Lady Lynette, it is taken as a sure sign of his lowly origin.
Such plebeian considerations should not be the concern of a true knight, for whom food and
drink are only ceremonial matters. For the most part, the chivalric adventures are ascribed
intrinsic value and are ends in themselves. Duels are not fought for territorial or dynastical
ambitions, as they would be in real life, but are treated as displays and tests of the chivalric
virtues of prowess and courtesy. The characteristic scene in Malorys stories has the knight
riding forth to seek adventure, for no particular reason. When Sir Lancelot asks his nephew,
Sir Lionel to come with him, for we must go seek adventures he says. They just mount
their horses, armed to hilt and ride into the forest. Sir Lionel does not pause even for a
moment to ask where they are going or how long they will be away. The forests are full of
adventure. There are maidens who demand to be slept with, knights who demand to be
fought with and tingling mysteries such as gravestones for knights who are not dead yet.
Beyond simple prowess lies another quality, more complex in nature. It is that nobility which
prompts the knight to devote himself to service of women, never to take mean advantage of
another knight, to duel only with matching weaponry and other rules of chivalry. It is the
quality displayed by Tristram and Lamorak and epitomised by Lancelot. The fineness of this
courtesy, this voluntary rejection of what might profitably serve the self and its appetite for
survival is a specifically medieval contribution to the idea of the hero. It is a conception that
King Alfred would not have understood and quite different from the cool, laconic
nonchalance of the Icelandic saga-heroes. It is the heroism of a Gary Cooper or a James
Stewart rather than a Clint Eastwood.
The true knight must of course be a true lover. Love as a psychological phenomenon is given
little due, rather it is a device to unite the knight with a woman. Love is almost always at
first sight, instantaneous and everlasting. The force of love is an inertial guidance system
that directs the knight in his apparently motiveless and random adventures. Malory is
slightly reticent and shy when it comes to talking about sexual love, as can be seen in the
earlier parts of his work, where the Lancelots prowess as a warrior takes centre stage over
his sophistication as a lover. There is almost a suspicion that Malory tries to postpone the
recognition of Lancelots adultery, perhaps because it did not fit in with Malorys ideal of the
golden age of knighthood. A similar uneasiness can be observed in the case of Tristram and
Isoude when Malory tries to rationalise Tristrams love for his uncles wife as sinless,
because she is called one of the fairest ladies of the world
1
.
Tennysons Idylls of the King
Idylls of the King were twelve narrative poems, written by Tennyson between 1856 and
1885. It coincided with and help push on a renewed interest in the Arthurian legend in
Britain during the time. Uneasy about the languorous seductiveness of the Arthurian dying
fall, Idylls of the King is a reworking of the legend of Arthur in tune with the emerging
Victorian public morality. Tennysons work reflects the zeitgeist in more ways than one- in
his eschewing of the fantastic, an act motivated by the dominant scientific spirit as
promoted by the writings of Francis Bacon and others and a completely new take on
adultery and sexual liaisons in the legend, keeping with the ethos of Victorian morality. In
order to develop a new legend in tune with Victorian public taste and his own revised poetic
persona, Tennyson concentrates on Galahad and converts the whole story into a fable of
good and evil, soul and sense.

1
Vinaver, Eugene: Malory, Works Oxford University Press, 1971, p. 51.
Tennysons urge to explain things in rational and psychologically plausible terms led to the
chopping off of many previously acclaimed parts, like those of the sword in the stone and
the naked babe being delivered to Merlins feet by waves as a dragon winged ship appears
in the heavens. Further, Tennysons prudish, squeamish and puritan attitude, in sync with
Victorian thought, seeks to purge Arthur of any interaction with other women and even the
act of falling in love with Guenevere is described in such terms as to exclude sexual
attraction. It is obvious that Tennyson associated such attraction with illicit or adulterous or
merely sensual love (Pearsall).
The real business of Arthur in Idylls of the King is one of cleansing the land, mostly targeted
against sexual pollution. Towards this end, Arthur is portrayed as a Christ like figure, who
guards his kingdom from the wilderness and chaos that lies outside. The fall of the Round
Table is attributed to the eventual if inevitable victory of the evil of sexual pollution over all
that is good and pristine as represented by Arthur. But how is it that the gallant and stellar
knights of the Round Table are led to ruin and destruction? The wily charms of vile women,
seductresses and enchantresses of the kingdom are the answer, or so Tennyson will have
you believe. It is the Gueneveres guilty love for Lancelot that leads to his downfall. Lancelot,
in previous accounts of the Arthurian tale had as much initiative and agency in the
adulterous affair, but Tennyson is content to lay it all at the feet of Guenevere and draw a
pattern of love killing chivalry. In Idylls of the King, men have an intrinsic moral being while
any intrinsic worth women may have is reflected from men and should be proved in them
by men. There are echoes and shadows of the medieval idea of wife-testing and seems to
have been acceptable to Victorian men as well. It is hard to believe that Tennyson took it
over without being aware of what he was doing. Clearly, the Victorian fear and mistrust of
female sexuality and sexual prowess is on display in the works of the poet laureate.

Works Cited

Auerbach, Eric. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton University
Press, 1957.
Fuchs, Barbara. Romance. Routledge, 2004.
Pearsall, Derek Albert. Arthurian Romance: A Short Introduction. Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
Segre, Cesare. "What Bakhtin Left Unsaid: The Case of the Medieval Romance." Brownlee, Kevin and
Marina Scordilis Brownlee. Romance: Generic Transformation from Chretien de Troyes to
Cervantes. University Press of New England, 1985.