Chretien de Troyes and Arthurian romance

Chretien de Troyes was a French poet who worked at the court of Marie de Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, in the last decades of the 12th century. He wrote five Arthurian romances in rhymed octosyllabic couplets: Erec and Enide, Cliges, Yvain (the Knight of the Lion), Lancelot (the Knight of the Cart), and Perceval (the Story of the Grail), the last left unfinished at his death. Each follows a knight through adventures that test honor, love and loyalty at Arthur's court.¹²

Where Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote a chronicle of kings and wars, Chretien focused on individual knights and inner life. In Lancelot he is the first to tell of Lancelot's adulterous love for Queen Guinevere and the first to name Camelot. In Perceval he introduces the Grail, a mysterious serving dish carried in a procession, though the poem breaks off before explaining it. This gap was filled by continuators and by others, including Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, who made the Grail a sacred object, and Robert de Boron, who tied it to the Last Supper. Chretien's romances were translated into German, Norse, Welsh and English, and the Arthurian cycle that Malory gathered in Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) is built largely on later developments of his themes.¹²