Snag Four Arthurian Romances -Lancelot- Composed By Chrétien De Troyes Accessible In Publication

aburrido aburrido. Dos estrellas porque de repente tiene algunas virtudes, Te odio Edad Media. Un récit en vieux français qui n'est pas facilement abordable pour tous, On va nous relater l'histoire des débuts de la vie de Lancelot et des ses aventures,
Le recit est intéressant pour en connaître plus sur la légende du roi Arthur et de ses chevaliers de la table ronde.
sitelinkChrétien de Troyes may have been the first Medieval writer to introduce the character of Lancelot of the Lake in his sitelinkLancelot: The Knight of the Cart.
Writing in theth century when the whole Matter of Britain Arthurian material was still fresh before the monks and the Victorians hijacked the subject.


Chretien's Lancelot and Gawain were more lusty and less Christian than later writers were to present them, His Guinevere has a mutually satisfactory affair with Lancelot, and he hardly brings Arthur into it:

Now Lancelot possesses all he wants, when the Queen voluntarily seeks his company and love, and when he holds her in his arms, and she holds him in hers.
Their sport is so agreeable and sweet, as they kiss and fondle each other, that in truth such a marvellous joy comes over them as was never heard or known.
But their joy will not be revealed by me, for in a story it has no place,

The bit about "The Knight of the Cart" is interesting, as it was considered shameful for a knight to ride in a vehicle meant for condemned felons, which Lancelot does in the beginning to pursue Guinevere when she is kidnapped by Meleagant.
Ah l'amour courtois comme c'est bizarre Ainsi donc, le brave Lancelot, meilleur chevalier d'entre tous les chevaliers, se ridiculise au nom de son amour pour la reine, Reine qui, soit dit en passant, trompe allègrement le roi Arthur sans l'ombre d'un remord, . .

Le personnage de Lancelot dans cette version de l'histoire est particulièrement fade, Il ne vit que pour la reine, pour faire ce qu'elle lui demande, peu importe si cela le ridiculise auprès de tous, Peu importe même qu'il risque sa vie pour un caprice puérile, Pas beaucoup de caractère donc, . . Et puis surtout, il est quand même particulièrement stupide cf le traquenard du nain, . .
Du coup, l'histoire est plutôt fade, Les personnages ne sont pas très construits, le récit reste très superficiel du début à la fin,

Après bien sûr, il faut remettre le livre dans son contexte, soit le moyenâge, et son "amour courtois", Je ne regrette donc pas d'avoir lu ce livre, pour son intérêt historique : Mais au final, je pense que ce roman a assez mal vieilli.
. I unapologetically love Arthurian romance and it was great to read the "origin" story of Lancelot, Lecture intéressante d'un point de vue historique, mais pas des plus passionnantes, L'absence de chapitres rend la lecture difficile, selon moi, Lorigine des légendes autour du roi Arthur, de Merlin lEnchanteur, de la Table Ronde et du Saint Graal se perdent dans les temps embrouillés du Haut MoyenÂge, sous le nom générique de matière de Bretagne.
Cest Chrétien de Troyes, un clerc champenois qui vécut au milieu du XIIe siècle et qui, mêlant les traditions classiques sitelinkLIliade, sitelinkLEnéide, celtiques et chrétiennes, a contribué à établir les figures principales du cycle arthurien.
sitelinkErec et Enide, sitelinkCligès, sitelinkYvain, sitelinkLancelot et sitelinkPerceval forment ainsi un cycle en cinq romans qui, à la fois, racontent les aventures courtoises et chevaleresques de ces cinq héros, et constituent un des premiers corpus romanesques en ancien français.


Le Chevalier de la charrette dont on napprend quassez tard dans le roman quil sagit de Lancelot est à la confluence de deux traditions.
Cest dabord un roman de chevalerie, avec tournois et batailles en tous genres, qui culminent avec le duel entre Lancelot et Méléagant.
En ce sens, Chrétien se situe dans la lignée de sitelinkLa Chanson de Roland, des sitelinkNibelungen et des sagas de sitelinkSnorri Sturluson.
Mais ce Lancelot est aussi, et peutêtre surtout, un roman damour la finamor où se mêlent la dévotion de Lancelot pour la reine Guenièvre, le doute, lhonneur, la honte, lhumiliation et en somme tout ce qui nourrit les contes des sitelinkMilles et Une Nuits, sitelinkTristan, les sitelinkLais de Marie de France, sitelinkRoméo et Juliette, et inspirera, sept siècles plus tard, la littérature romantique.


Cette matière de Bretagne aura en effet une glorieuse descendance, dabord dans le sitelinkParzival de Wolfram von Eschenbach source du dernier opéra de sitelinkRichard Wagner, puis, plus tard, dans la littérature anglaise, depuis sitelinkLe Morte d'Arthur de Thomas Malory, jusquà sitelinkThe Once and Future King de T.
H. White et au sitelinkSeigneur des Anneaux de Tolkien, bref, à labondante littérature de fantasy qui, de nos jours, fait florès,

Le Lancelot de Chrétien de Troyes a donné lieu à une adaptation cinématographique facilement oubliable : sitelinkFirst Knight je préfère de loin sitelinkExcalibur de John Boorman et, avant cela, à quelques œuvres préraphaélites, comme cet Adoubement de Edmund Blair Leighton :

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superbe édition critique, texte original en vers et sa traduction en prose me, holding guinevere and lancelots hands: i, . . i love you guys so much Chrétien de Troyes poem, Lancelot, or, The Knight of the Cart, tells the story of Queen Guineveres abduction by Meleagant, a prince of the kingdom of Gorre, and his liberation of all the prisoners Meleagant has held there.
It is also the first extant poem to give an account of Lancelots adulterous love for Guinevere, In many ways, its an odd poem, The first half seems almost Messianic, with Lancelot unnamed by Chrétien at the time destined to rescue the prisoners in the land of Gorre from their tyrannical captor, Meleagant then it transforms into a tale of adulterous love.


Lancelots mission starts to become messianic with his lifting of the tomb lid, His actions release prisoners, and hes the only person who can do it, One of these prisoners later tells him, “when one person can escape this imprisonment without trickery, all the others, I assure you, will be able to leave unchallenged”.
This comment sets the whole adventure in a Harrowing of Hell mode, where Lancelot stands in for Christ, redeeming those souls ensnared by Satan through no fault of their own.
They simply had the misfortune to be born BC rather than AD, Later, the joy of the released prisoners, and their ability to slay their captors even though it was principally through the efforts of “un seul chevalier”reflects the belief that many are redeemed through the sacrifice of a single individual, i.
e. , Christ.

In some ways, this is a very poor poem, especially when compared with sitelinkYvain, Or, the Knight With the Lion, Arthur is an object almost of derision, Lancelots passion makes him subject to silly trances and has almost unmanned him, and Guinevere is so fickle one wonders why on earth Lancelot is attracted to her.
It is a poem Chrétien does not seem happy with, sitelinkErec and Enide was about a knight reconciling his marriage with his life of chivalry, Yvain about a knight reconciling his life of chivalry with his marriage.
Lancelot is about illicit love, and possibly the disharmonious theme did not appeal to Chrétien, since it could not be expressive of perfect love.
This perhaps according to Gaston Paris and those who followed him is why Chrétien left the poem to Godefroi de Leigny to complete.
It has also been suggested that

the poem is an allegory of Chrétiens relationship with Marie de Champagne, fictionalizing the trials a great man suffers on account of a womans whim.
Arthur is a typical cuckold, weak, ineffectual, and patheticperhaps even comic, Guinevere must become personally unpalatable, submitting her lover to any number of unreasonable trials, and he must put up not only with the trials, but with her whims as well.
There is no hint of any idealistic conflict within Lancelot, as there is in later versions of the story, He feels no guilt at sleeping with his lords wife, simply pleasure at being able to do so, nor is there any investigation into what has initially attracted Lancelot and Guinevere to one another.
Possibly it is this also which so disgusted Chrétien that he could not finish it, However, the poem was tremendously influentialprior to it, Lancelot had had a very meagre biography, but afterwards, he became the major knight of the Round Table.
Chrétiens poem gave the Arthurian legend form, But none of the story is specific to Lancelot, Prior to Chrétiens romance, he had no biography of his own, and all his adventures here have also been credited to other Round Table knights.


Chrétien is one of the first writers to develop the idea of allegory its to be seen in the passage in which Love debates with Reason as to whether Lancelot should mount the cart, in the debate between Generosity and Compassionwhen Lancelot is trying to decide whether to kill the knight who is at his mercy, and when Joy and Reason struggle to decide how the queen will greet the recentlyreleased Lancelot.
Each of these debates sets up a particular duality, The first pits an emotion against an intellectual capacity the debate is essentially one between sense and sensibility, Emotion wins here, but only after a struggle, The second pits a chivalric virtue, generosity or largesse OFr, largece, against a religious virtue, compassion or pity, Lancelots solution is to fight again, a brilliant reconciliation between the two apparently incompatible virtues, This to some extent characterizes Chrétiens work: it repeatedly submits its hero to a series of tests in which two incompatible virtues vie.
Lancelot becomes, to a certain extent, a model for behaviour, Eventually, the queen allows herself to be ruled by Reason, not Joy, so she is capable of suppressing her own desires,

Ruth Harwood Clines translation is masterful, taking Chrétiens octosyllabic couplets in French and transforming them into octosyllabic couplets in English, And where Ive checked it against the French, its remarkably accurate, Of all the translations of Chrétien, this is the most fun to read, And the poem itself is of tremendous importance to the history of Arthurian literature, It just doesnt hang together very well which is why I dont give it a perfect rating

This is not my first time reading this.
The first time was thirty years ago while in college, This time was a lot better, at least in my opinion, I was reading because I enjoy the tale, with all its flaws, I was not reading for construction, deconstruction, or other comparative educational rationales, I read it to my daughter when she was a baby because the words flowed and she would fall asleep, I read it in between then and now because I wanted to do so, So this is probably my fourth read of this twice in prose form, twice in poetic form,

Yes, this is one of the first stories about Lancelot, Yes, it sets him as one of, if not the primary, knights of Arthur, It also sets him up as one of the primary motives of the Fall of Camelot, It is a pretty romance of the time period, It is full of the flaws and beauties of the other romans of the time,

Courtly love was a brand new concept, A woman would fall in love with a knight at first sight, A knight would fall for a lady at first sight, They would sigh and promise to be true to their love, And if you read the majority of the genre of the time, courtly love was a platonic type of romance physical love was for married couples and to procreate true love was of the soul and the eye and the heart.
Venal love was obsessive and destructive and cruel, Yes, I remember my classes!

Queen Guinevere who has been kidnapped, She is being held by King Meleagaunt and his son for love venal of her, King Arthur cannot go rescue her because he is her husband, so he sends Lancelot and other knights to her rescue, There is a year of trials, tribulations, and treachery before everything is said and done,

Lancelot and Guinevere get way too close for a proper courtly love they do more than kiss folks which is a betrayal on both of their parts.
Guinevere betrays her wedding vows to the king, which is also a betrayal of her duty to the kingdom and crown, Lancelot betrays his vows as a knight to God, as a lord to the king, as member of the court to the kingdom, And they both betray the ideal of courtly love by becoming intimate without marriage,

They both lie and give oaths on their honor in regards to their behavior, They imply things they know are untrue, They treat each other poorly because of this love and their attempts to hide their own behavior,

So why do I like it Because it flows I read the poetic version this time, It shows the way things can go wrong even when a person is trying to do good, It is a sad reminder that no one, not even the most heroic ideal, is perfect, It shows that beauty is not always good, That high station is not perfection, That people are just that, . . people, human beings, prone to err, .