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As aliterary genre, thechivalric romance is a type ofprose andversenarrative that was popular in thenoble courts ofhigh medieval andearly modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filledadventures, often of achivalricknight-errant portrayed as havingheroic qualities, who goes on aquest. It developed further from the epics as time went on; in particular, "the emphasis on love and courtly manners distinguishes it from thechanson de geste and other kinds ofepic, in which masculine military heroism predominates."[1]
Popular literature also drew on themes of romance, but withironic,satiric, orburlesque intent. Romances reworkedlegends,fairy tales, and history to suit the readers' and hearers' tastes, but byc. 1600 they were out of fashion, andMiguel de Cervantes famouslyburlesqued them in his novelDon Quixote. Still, themodern image of "medieval" is more influenced by the romance than by any other medieval genre, and the wordmedieval evokes knights,damsels in distress,dragons, and other romantictropes.[2]: 9
Originally, romance literature was written inOld French (includingAnglo-Norman),Old Occitan, and EarlyFranco-Provençal, and later inOld Portuguese,Old Spanish,Middle English,Old Italian (Sicilian poetry), andMiddle High 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 ofcourtly love, such as faithfulness in adversity.
Unlike the later form of thenovel and like thechansons de geste, the genre of romance dealt with traditional themes. These were distinguished from earlierepics 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]: 354
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.
Overwhelmingly, these were linked in some way, perhaps only in an openingframe 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 ofAlexander the Great conflated with theTrojan War), the "Matter of France" (Charlemagne andRoland, his principalpaladin) and the "Matter of Britain" (the lives and deeds ofKing Arthur and the Knights of theRound Table, within which was incorporated the quest for theHoly Grail); medieval authors[who?] explicitly described these as comprising all romances.[7]: iii
The three "matters" were first described in the 12th century by French poetJean Bodel, whose epicChanson des Saisnes [fr] ("Song of the Saxons") contains the lines:
Ne sont que III matières à nul homme atandant:
De France et de Bretaigne et de Rome la grant
There are only three subject matters for any discerning man:
That of France, that of Britain, and that of great Rome.[8]
In reality, a number of "non-cyclical" romances were written without any such connection;[7]: iii these include such romances asKing Horn,[7]: 83 Robert the Devil,[7]: 49 Ipomadon,[9]Emaré,[7]: 23 Havelok the Dane,[7]: 103 Roswall and Lillian,[7]: 290 Le Bone Florence of Rome,[10] andAmadas.[7]: 73
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]: iii
Many influences are clear in the forms of chivalric romance.
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 asSir Launfal, meet withfairy ladies, andHuon of Bordeaux is aided byKing Oberon,[2]: 129–130 but these fairy characters were transformed, more and more often, into wizards and enchantresses.[11]: 132 Morgan le Fay never loses her name, but inLe Morte d'Arthur, she studies magic rather than being inherently magical.[11]: 303 Similarly, knights lose magical abilities.[11]: 132 Still, fairies never completely vanished from the tradition.Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late tale, but theGreen Knight himself is an otherworldly being.[11]: 132
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 suchfairy tales asThe 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.[12] While he never eliminates the mother-in-law, many romances such asValentine and Orson have later variants that change from the mother-in-law to the courtier, whereas a more recent version never goes back.[12]
In Italy there is the story calledIl 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 areAntonio Pucci's literature:Gismirante, Il Brutto di Bretagna orBrito di Bretagna ("The ugly knight of Britain") andMadonna Lionessa ("Lioness Lady"). Another work of a second anonymous Italian author that is worth mentioning isIstoria di Tre Giovani Disperati e di Tre Fate ("Story of three desperate boys and three fairies").
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 as well as elements of Celtic legends (an example being the multiple references to theHoly Grail).[13]
The Medieval romance developed out of the medieval epic, in particular theMatter of France developing out of such tales as theChanson de Geste, with intermediate forms where the feudal bonds of loyalty had giants, or a magical horn, added to the plot.[14]: 53 The epics ofCharlemagne, unlike such ones asBeowulf, already had feudalism rather than the tribal loyalties; this was to continue in romances.[14]: 52
The romance form is distinguished from the earlierepics of the Middle Ages by the changes of the 12th century, which introduced courtly and chivalrous themes into the works.[14]: 3–4 This occurred regardless of congruity to the source material; Alexander the Great featured as a fully feudal king.[14]: 27 Chivalry was treated as continuous from Roman times.[4]: 75 This extended even to such details as clothing; when in theSeven 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.[15]: 137–140 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.[15]: 93
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.[7]: 148–153 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.[16]: 12 Fulk Fitzwarin, an outlaw in King John's day, has his historical background a minor thread in the episodic stream of romantic adventures.[16]: 39
Some romances, such asApollonius of Tyre, show classical pagan origins.[7]: 169 Tales of theMatter of Rome in particular may be derived from such works as theAlexander 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.[14]: 382 It also drew upon the traditions of magic that were attributed to such figures as Virgil.[13]
The newcourtly love was not one of the original elements of the genre, but quickly became very important when introduced.
It was introduced to the romance byChrétien de Troyes, combining it with the Matter of Britain, new to French poets.[17]: 23 InLancelot, the Knight of the Cart (unlike his earlierErec and Enide), the behavior of Lancelot conforms to the courtly love ideal;[17]: 26 it also, though still full of adventure, devotes an unprecedented amount of time to dealing with the psychological aspects of the love.[17]: 29 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 inSir Degrevant,Sir Torrent of Portyngale,Sir Eglamour, andWilliam of Palerne.[18]: 132–133 Ipomadon even explicitly describes the married couple as lovers, and the plot ofSir Otuel was altered, to allow him to marry Belyssant.[18]: 133 Similarly, Iberian romances of the 14th century praised monogamy and marriage in such tales asTirant lo Blanc andAmadís de Gaula.[19]
Many medieval romances recount the marvellousadventures of a chivalrous,heroicknight, often of super-human ability, who, abiding chivalry's strict codes of honor and demeanor, goes on aquest, and fights and defeats monsters and giants, thereby winning favor witha lady.[20] The Matter of France, most popular early, did not lend itself to the subject ofcourtly love, but rather dealt with heroic adventure: inThe Song of Roland, Roland, though betrothed to Oliver's sister, does not think of her during the course of events.[17]: 9 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.[17]: 24 A perennial theme wasthe rescue of a lady from the imperiling monster, a theme that would remain throughout the romances of the medieval era.[4]: 83–84
Originally, this literature was written inOld French (includingAnglo-Norman) andOld Occitan, later, inOld Spanish,Middle English andMiddle High German – amongst the important Spanish texts wasBook of the Knight Zifar; notable later English works beingKing Horn (a translation of theAnglo-Norman (AN)Romance of Horn of Mestre Thomas), andHavelok the Dane (a translation of the anonymous AN Lai d'Haveloc); around the same timeGottfried von Strassburg's version of theTristan ofThomas of Britain (a different Thomas to the author of 'Horn') andWolfram von Eschenbach'sParzival translated classic French romance narrative into the German tongue.
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 theLancelot-Grail Cycle, with the romance ofLa Mort le Roi Artuc. 1230, perhaps its final installment. These texts, together with a wide range of further Arthurian material, such as that found in the anonymous EnglishBrut Chronicle, comprised the bases ofThomas Malory'sLe 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 ofLudovico Ariosto,Torquato Tasso, andEdmund Spenser.
In Old Norse, they are the proseriddarasögur or chivalric sagas. The genre began in thirteenth-century Norway with translations of Frenchchansons 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 QueenEuphemia of Rügen, who commissioned theEufemiavisorna.
Another trend of the high Middle Ages was theallegorical romance, inspired by the wildly popularRoman de la Rose.
In latemedieval andRenaissance high culture, the important European literary trend was to fantastic fictions in the mode of Romance. Exemplary work, such as the EnglishLe Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (c. 1408 – c. 1471), the ValencianTirant lo Blanch, and the Castilian or PortugueseAmadís de Gaula (1508), spawned many imitators, and the genre was popularly well-received, producing such masterpiece of Renaissance poetry asLudovico Ariosto'sOrlando furioso andTorquato Tasso'sGerusalemme Liberata and other 16th-century literary works in the romance genre. The romances were freely drawn upon for royal pageantry.[21] Queen Elizabeth I's Accession Day tilts, for instance, drew freely on the multiplicity of incident from romances for the knights' disguises.[22] Knights even assumed the names of romantic figures, such as theSwan Knight, or the coat-of-arms of such figures as Lancelot or Tristan.[4]: 90–91
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 asDon Quixote, knight of the culturally isolated province ofLa Mancha. (Don Quixote [1605, 1615], byMiguel 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 asJohn Dryden's collaborativeThe Indian Queen (1664) as well asRestoration spectaculars andopera seria, such asHandel'sRinaldo (1711), based on a magical interlude inTasso'sGerusalemme liberata.
In theRenaissance, also, the romance genre was bitterly attacked as barbarous and silly by thehumanists, who exalted Greek and Latin classics and classical forms, an attack that was not in that century very effective among the common readers.[23]: 29 In England, romances continued; heavily rhetorical, they often had complex plots and high sentiment,[23]: 421 such as inRobert Greene'sPandosto (the source forWilliam Shakespeare'sThe Winter's Tale)[23]: 422 andThomas Lodge'sRosalynde (based on the medieval romanceGamelyn and the source forAs You Like It),Robert Duke of Normandy (based onRobert the Devil) andA Margarite of America.[23]: 423–424
TheAcritic songs (dealing withDigenis Acritas and his fellow frontiersmen) resemble much thechanson de geste, though they developed simultaneously but separately. These songs dealt with the hardships and adventures of the border guards of theEastern 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 ofcourtly love, such as faithfulness in adversity. Fromc. 1760 – usually cited as 1764 at the publication ofHorace Walpole'sThe Castle of Otranto – the connotations of "romance" moved from fantastic and eerie, somewhatGothic adventure narratives of novelists likeAnn Radcliffe'sA Sicilian Romance (1790) orThe Romance of the Forest (1791) with erotic content to novels centered on the episodic development of acourtship that ends in marriage. With a female protagonist, during the rise ofRomanticism the depiction of the course of such a courtship within contemporary conventions ofrealism, the female equivalent of the "novel of education", informs muchRomantic fiction. In gothic novels such asBram Stoker'sDracula, the elements of romantic seduction anddesire were mingled with fear and dread.Nathaniel Hawthorne used the term to distinguish his works as romances rather than novels,[24]: 38 and literary criticism of the 19th century often accepted the contrast between the romance and the novel, in such works asH. G. Wells's "scientific romances" in the beginning ofscience fiction.[25]
In 1825, thefantasy genre developed when the Swedish literary workFrithjof's saga, which was based on theFriðþjófs saga ins frœkna, became successful inEngland andGermany. 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 asJ. R. R. Tolkien,William Morris andPoul Anderson and on the subsequent modern fantasy genre is considerable.
The modern usage of the term "romance" usually refers to theromance novel, which is a subgenre that focuses on the relationship andromantic love between two people; these novels must have an "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending."[26]
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 asThe Tempest orThe Winter's Tale are sometimes called hisromances. Modern works may differentiate from love-story as romance into different genres, such asplanetary romance orRuritanian romance.Science fiction was, for a time, termedscientific romance, andgaslamp fantasy is sometimes termed gaslight romance.Flannery O'Connor, writing of the use of grotesque in fiction, talked of its use in "the modern romance tradition."[24]: 39
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