by Will Durant
Who, I know, will tell no tale.32
As he grew older his perception matured, and he began to see in woman charms and graces fairer than any budding flesh, and the rewards of unity in marriage seemed richer than the surface titillations of variety. “Happy the man, happy the woman, whose hearts are to each other true; their lives increase in price and worth; blessed their years, and all their days.”33 He deprecated the adulation with which his fellow warblers perfumed the ladies of the court; he proclaimed wip (Weib, woman) a higher title than vrouwe (Frau, lady); good women and good men were the real nobility. He thought “German ladies fair as God’s angels; anyone who defames them lies in his teeth.”34
In 1197 the Emperor Henry VI died, and Germany suffered a generation of chaos until Frederick II came of age. The aristocratic patronage of letters fell away, and Walther wandered from court to court, singing unhappily for his meals in competition with noisy jugglers and prideless clowns. An item in the expense account of Bishop Wolfger of Passau reads: “Five solidi, November 12, 1203, to Walther von der Vogelweide to buy himself a fur coat against the winter cold.”35 It was a doubly Christian act, for Walther was a zealous Ghibelline, tuned his lyre against the popes, denounced the shortcomings of the Church, and raged at the way in which German coins flew over the Alps to replenish Peter’s Pence.36 He was, however, a faithful Christian, and composed a mighty “Crusader’s Hymn.” But at times he could stand above the battle and see all men as brothers:
Mankind arises from one virgin;
We are alike both outward and within;
Our mouths are sated with the selfsame fare;
And when their bones into confusion fall,
Say ye, who knew the living man by sight,
Which is the villein now, and which the knight,
That worms have gnawed their carcasses so bare?
Christians, Jews, and heathens, serve they all,
And God has all creation in His care.37
After a quarter century of wandering and poverty, Walther received from Frederick II an estate and an income (1221), and could spend in peace his remaining seven years. He mourned that he was too old and ill to go on crusade. He begged God to forgive him for not being able to love his enemies.38 In a poetic testament he bequeathed his goods: “to the envious my ill luck; to the liars my sorrows; to false lovers my follies; to the ladies my heart’s pain.”39 He was buried in Würzburg Cathedral, and near by a monument proclaims Germany’s affection for the greatest poet of his age.
After him the minnesinger movement lost itself in extravaganzas, and shared in the disasters that shattered Germany after the fall of Frederick II. Ulrich von Lichtenstein (c. 1200–c. 1276) tells in his poetic autobiography, Frauendienst, how he was reared in all the sentiments of “lady service.” He chose a lady as his goddess, had his harelip sewed up to mitigate her repulsion, and fought for her in tournament. When told of her surprise that he still had a finger which she thought he had lost in her honor, he cut off the offending member and sent it to her as tribute. He almost swooned with delight when fortune permitted him to drink the water in which she had washed her hands.40 He received a letter from her, and carried it for weeks in his pocket before he found someone whom he could trust to read it for him secretly; for Ulrich could not read.41 On promise of her favor he waited two days in beggar’s clothing among the lepers at her gate; she admitted him; and finding him importunate, she had him lowered in a bed sheet from her window. All this time he had a wife and children.
The minnesinger movement ended with some dignity in Henrich von Meissen, whose songs in honor of women earned him the title Frauenlob, “women’s praise.” When he died at Mainz in 1317, the ladies of the city carried his bier with tuneful laments to bury him in the cathedral, and poured upon his coffin such abundance of wine that it flowed the full length of the church.42 After him the art of song fell from the hands of the knights, and was taken up by the middle class; the romantic mood of the lady worshipers passed, and was succeeded in the fourteenth century by the robust joy and art of the meistersinger, announcing to Parnassus the ascent of the bourgeoisie.
VII. THE ROMANCES
But in romance the middle class had already captured the field. As aristocratic troubadours and trovatori wrote delicate lyrics for the ladies of southern France and Italy, so in northern France the poets of humble birth —known to the French as trouvères or inventors—brightened the evenings of the middle and upper classes with poetic tales of love and war.
The typical compositions of the trouvères were the ballade, the lai, the chanson de geste, and the roncan. Some lovely examples of the lai have come down to us from one whom both England and France may claim as their first great poetess. Marie de France came from Brittany to live in England in the reign of Henry II (1154–89); at his suggestion she turned several Breton legends into verse, and with a delicacy of speech and sentiment not excelled by any troubadour. One of her lyrics craves room here, both for an unusual theme—the living beloved to her dead lover—and for an exquisite translation:
Hath any loved you well down there,
Summer or winter through?
Down there have you found any fair
Laid in the grave with you?
Is death’s long kiss a richer kiss
Than mine was wont to be—
Or have you gone to some far bliss
And quite forgotten me?
What soft enamoring of sleep
Hath you in some soft way?
What charméd death holds you with deep
Strange lure by night and day?
A little space below the grass,
Out of the sun and shade,
But worlds away from me, alas,
Down there where you are laid….
There you shall lie as you have lain,
Though, in the world above,
Another live your life again,
Loving again your love.
Is it not sweet beneath the palm?
Is it not warm day, rife
With some long mystic golden calm
Better than love and life?
The broad quaint odorous leaves like hands
Weaving the fair day through,
Weave sleep no burnished bird withstands,
While death weaves sleep for you.
And many a strange rich breathing sound
Ravishes morn and noon;
And in that place you must have found
Death a delicious swoon.
Hold me no longer for a word
I used to say or sing;
Ah, long ago you must have heard
So many a sweeter thing.
For rich earth must have reached your heart
And turned the faith to flowers;
And warm wind stolen, part by part,
Your soul through faithless hours.
And many a soft seed must have won
Soil of some yielding thought,
To bring a bloom up to the sun
That else had ne’er been brought;
And doubtless many a passionate hue
Hath made that place more fair,
Making some passionate part of you
Faithless to me down there.43
The chanson de geste, or song of deeds, probably arose as a concatenation of ballads or lays. Upon a core of history usually offered by the chronicles, the poet laid a web of fancied adventures, running in lines of ten or twelve syllables to such lengths as only Northern winter evenings could sustain. The Chanson de Roland was a lithe forerunner of this genre. The favorite hero of the French chansons de geste was Charlemagne. Great in history, the trouvères raised him to almost supernatural grandeur in their poetry; they converted his failure in Spain into a glorious conquest, and sent him off on triumphant expeditions to Constantinople and Jerusalem, his legendary white beard waving majesty. As Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied echoed the “heroic age” of the migrations, so the chansons reflected the feudal era in subject, morals, a
nd mood; whatever their theme or scene or time, they moved in a feudal atmosphere to feudal motives and in feudal dress. Their constant subject was war, feudal or international or interfaith; and amid their rough alarums woman and love found only a minor place.
As social order improved, and the status of woman rose with the growth of wealth, war yielded to love as the major theme of the trouvères, and in the twelfth century the chansons de geste were succeeded by the romans. Woman mounted the throne of literature, and held it for centuries. The name roman meant at first any work written in that early French which, as a Roman legacy, was called roman. The romances were not called romans because they were romantic; rather certain sentiments came to be called romantic because they were found so abundantly in the French romans. The Roman de la rose, or de Troie, or de Renard merely meant the tale of a rose, or of Troy, or of a fox, in roman or early French. Since no literary form should be born without legitimate parents, we may derive the romances from the chansons de geste crossed with the troubadour sentiment of courtly love. Some of their material may have come from such Greek romances as the Ethiopica of Heliodorus. One Greek book, translated into Latin in the fourth century, had enormous influence—the fictitious biography of Alexander falsely ascribed to his official historian Callisthenes. Alexander stories became the most popular and prolific of all the “cycles” of medieval romance in Europe and the Greek-speaking East. The finest form of the tale in the West was the Roman d’Alixandre composed by the trouvères Lambert li Tors and Alexander of Bernay about 1200, and running to some 20,000 twelve-syllabled “Alexandrine” lines.
Richer in variety, tenderer in sentiment, was the cycle of romances-French, English, and German—stemming from the siege of Troy. Here the chief inspiration was not Homer but Virgil; the story of Dido was already a romance; and had not France and England, as well as Italy, been settled by Trojans fleeing from undeserved defeat? About 1184 a French trouvère, Benoît de Ste.-Maure, retold the Roman de Troie in 30,000 lines; it was translated into a dozen languages and was imitated in a dozen literatures. In Germany Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote his Büche von Troye, of Iliadic size; in Italy Boccaccio took from Benoît the tale of Filostrato; in England Layamon’s Brut (c. 1205) described in 32,000 lines the foundation of London by Brutus, the imaginary great-grandson of Aeneas; and from Benoît came Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and Shakespeare’s play.
The third great cycle of medieval romance was the Arthurian. We have seen reason to believe that Arthur was a British Christian noble who fought against the invading Saxons in the sixth century. Who was it that turned him and his knights into such delectable legends as only lovers of Malory have fully savored? Who created Gawaine, Galahad, Perceval, Merlin, Guinevere, Lancelot, Tristram, the Christian knightliness of the Round Table, and the mystic story of the Holy Grail? After a century of discussion no certain answer remains; inquiry is fatal to certainty. The oldest references to Arthur are in English chroniclers. Some elements of the legend appear in the Chronicle of Nennius (976); it was expanded in the Historia Britonum (1137) of Geoffrey of Monmouth; Geoffrey’s account was put into French verse by Robert Wace, a trouvère of Jersey, in Le Brut d’Angleterre (1155); here first we find the Round Table. The oldest fragments of the legend are probably some Welsh tales now gathered in the Mabinogion; the oldest manuscripts of the developed story are French; Arthur’s court and the Holy Grail are by common consent located in Wales and southwestern Britain. The earliest full presentation of the legend in prose is in an English manuscript doubtfully ascribed to an Oxford archdeacon, Walter Map (1137–96). The oldest verse form of the cycle is in the romans of Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1140–91).
Of Chrétien’s life we know almost as little as of Arthur’s. Early in his literary career he composed a Tristan, now lost. It reached the eyes of the Countess Marie de Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and apparently led her to hope that Chrétien might be the man to phrase “courtly love,” and the highest ideals of chivalry, in the form of the roman. Marie invited him to be, so to speak, trouvère laureate at her court in Troyes. Under her patronage (1160–72) he composed four romances in rhyming couplets of eight-syllabled lines: Erec et Enide, Cligès, Yvain, and Le Chevalier de la charrette (The Knight of the Wagon)—no sublime title for the story of Lancelot the “perfect knight.” In 1175, at the court of Philip, Count of Flanders, he began his Conte del Graal, or Perceval le Gallois, wrote 9000 lines, and left it to be finished to 60,000 lines by another hand. The atmosphere of these stories appears at the outset of Erec:
One Easter Day King Arthur held court at Cardigan. Never was seen so rich a court; for many a good knight was there, hardy, bold, and brave, and rich ladies and damsels, gentle and fair daughters of kings. But before the court disbanded for the day the King told his knights that he wished on the morrow to hunt the White Stag, in order to observe worthily the ancient custom. When my lord Gawain heard this he was sore displeased, and said: “Sire, you will derive neither thanks nor good will from this hunt. We all know long since what this custom of the White Stag is: whoever can kill the White Stag must kiss the fairest maiden of your court…. But of this there might come great ill; for there are here 500 damsels of high birth,… and there is none of them but has a bold and valiant knight who would be ready to contend, whether right or wrong, that she who is his lady is the fairest and gentlest of them all.” “That I know full well,” said the King; “yet will I not desist on that account…. Tomorrow we shall all go gaily to hunt the White Stag.”44
And at the outset, too, the amusing exaggerations of romance: “Nature had used all her skill in forming Enid, and Nature had marveled more than 500 times how on this occasion she had succeeded in making so perfect a creature.” In the Lancelot story we learn that “he who is a perfect lover is always obedient, and quickly and gladly does his mistress’ pleasure…. Suffering is sweet to him; for Love, who guides and leads him on, assuages and relieves his pain.”45 But the Countess Marie had a flexible conception of love:
If a knight found a damsel or lorn maid alone, and if he cared for his fair name, he would no more treat her with dishonor than he would cut his own throat. And if he assaulted her he would be disgraced forever in every court. But if, while she was under his escort, she should be won at arms by another who engaged him in battle, then this other knight might do with her what he pleased, without receiving shame or blame.46
Chrétien’s verses are graceful but feeble, and their dull abundance soon surfeits our modern haste. He has the distinction of having written the first full and extant statement of the chivalric ideal, in his picture of a court where courtesy and honor, bravery and devoted love, seemed of more moment than Church or creed. In his final romance Chrétien proved true to his name, and raised the Arthurian cycle to a nobler pitch by adding to it the story of the Holy Grail.* Joseph of Arimathea, ran the tale, had caught some of the blood falling from the crucified Christ in the bowl from which Christ had drunk at the Last Supper; Joseph or his offspring had brought the bowl and the imperishable blood to Britain, where it was kept in a mysterious castle by an ailing imprisoned king; and only a knight perfectly pure in life and heart could find the Grail and free the king, by asking the cause of his illness. In Chrétien’s story the Grail is sought by Perceval the Gaul; in the English form of the legend, by Galahad, the spotless son of the tarnished Lancelot; in both versions the finder carries it off to heaven. In Germany Wolfram von Eschenbach transformed Perceval into Parzival, and gave the tale its most famous medieval form.
Wolfram (c. 1165–c. 1220) was a Bavarian knight who risked his stomach on his verses, found patronage from the Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia, lived in the Castle Wartburg for twenty years, and wrote the outstanding poem of the thirteenth century. He must have dictated it, for we are assured that he never learned to read. He claimed to have derived his Parzival story not from Chrétien but from a Provençal poet named Kiot. We know of no such poet, nor of any other treatment of the legend between Chrétien’
s (1175) and Wolfram’s (1205). Of the sixteen “books” in Wolfram’s poem eleven seem based on Chrétien’s Conte del Graal. The good Christians and fair knights of the Middle Ages felt no compulsion to acknowledge their literary debts. But the matter of the romances was felt to be common property; any man might forgivably borrow if he could improve. And Wolfram bettered Chrétien’s tutelage.
Parzival is the son of a knight of Anjou by Queen Herzeleide (Sorrowful Heart), who is a granddaughter of Titurel—the first guardian of the Grail—and sister to Amfortas, its present ailing king. Shortly before she bears Parzival she learns that her husband has fallen in knightly combat before Alexandria. Resolved that Parzival shall not die so young, she brings him up in rural solitude, conceals from him his royal lineage, and keeps him ignorant of arms.
Then full sore were her people grieved, for they held it an evil thing,
And a training that ill beseemed the son of a mighty king.
But his mother kept him hidden in the woodland valleys wild,
Nor thought, in her love and sorrow, how she wronged the royal
child.
No knightly weapon she gave him, save such as in childish play
He wrought himself from the bushes that grew on his lonely way.
A bow and arrows he made him, and with these, in thoughtless glee,
He shot at the birds as they caroled o’erhead in the leafy tree.
But when the feathered songster of the woods at his feet lay dead,
In wonder and dumb amazement he bowed down his golden head,
And in childish wrath and sorrow tore the locks of his sunny hair
(For I know full well, of all earth’s children was never a child so
fair)….
Then he thought him well how the music, which his hand had forever
stilled,
Had thrilled his soul with its sweetness, and his heart was with sorrow
filled.47
Parzival grows to manhood healthy and ignorant. One day he sees two knights on the road, admires their gleaming armor, thinks them gods, and falls on his knees before them. Informed that they are not gods but knights, he resolves to be as splendid as they. He leaves home to seek King Arthur, who makes men knights; and his mother dies of grief at his going. On his way Parzival robs a sleeping duchess of a kiss, her girdle, and her ring; and the taint of this deed leaves him unclean for many years. He meets Ither the Red Knight, who sends by him a challenge to King Arthur. Presented to the King, Parzival asks permission to assume the challenge; he returns to Ither, slays him with beginner’s luck, dons his armor, and rides off to seek adventure. At night he asks hospitality of Gurnemanz; the old baron takes a liking to him, teaches him the tricks of feudal combat, and gives him knightly counsel:
